"Armstrong's Tours that he won in the same conditions as the others would give them to Armstrong, why take them away from him?" - Eduardo Chozas

Eduardo Chozas is not just anyone. He is one of the best Spanish riders in history, giving a great show in the Tour de France and the Giro d'Italia with a total of 7 stages in both Grand Tours in the eighties and nineties (4 in the Grand Boucle and 3 in the Corsa Rosa).

Since his retirement, he has been a regular commentator on radio and television (the last few years on Eurosport) with a higher level than in his professional days. He has conducted an interview with the colleagues of Jot Down in which he has reviewed his career and, among other things, he has spoken about doping and the time of the nineties when EPO was the great protagonist.

Thus, he has talked about a very controversial topic in which nobody can say anything different from what happened. Chozas thinks that taking away the 7 Tour de France to Lance Armstrong and leaving him all white for a practice that many others at the same time frequented is "hypocritical" to say the least. This is how well he explained it in Jot Down:

"Armstrong's Tours that he won in the same conditions as the others would give them to Armstrong, why take them away from him? There has never been any irrefutable proof of his doping, no more than the rest, and in the end the podiums have been empty. It seems a bit hypocritical to me, but well, it's over, it's been detected..." he said. "Now, there will be other things that are not detected, but maybe they don't influence as much as that time. And it will be a lifelong race. Some will get ahead and others will try to catch up. It happens in all sports."

On the EPO era he explained: "I think that was a horrible time and not only for cycling. Cycling wanted to regulate itself and it was impossible. The same thing happened in all sports. It affected performance a lot. You couldn't detect what it was. It became a doctor's race, after all."

I stopped racing just when all that was starting... which I'm glad about, because I think that that period has been a time for the athletes themselves, especially in cycling. Especially in cycling. Why? Because they started to control the hematocrit, which was a mistake, because if someone has a natural hematocrit of 50, it almost doesn't affect him, but me, who raced almost with anemia, with 40-something, if you let me reach 50, I'm captain general. You give me a brutal advantage," the cyclist commented on EPO.