"We're paying the bill for it" – Angry Mads Pedersen on the doping scandal still hanging over cycling

Mads Pedersen may be absent from this year’s Tour de France, but the Dane isn’t staying quiet. While his Lidl–Trek team has built their Tour campaign around Jonathan Milan’s sprint ambitions, the man who dominated May’s Giro with four stage wins is featured prominently in a new documentary, Shadows of the Past, where he opens up about the still ongoing fallout from cycling’s doping era.

“My opinion on what happened then is that it was absolutely wrong. But what irritates me the most is that we are paying the bill for it,” Pedersen says, referring to the legacy of the Lance Armstrong years. “That is why I have an opinion on what happened. Otherwise, I could basically be completely indifferent to what these crazy people had been up to.”

Pedersen doesn’t mince words when describing the intensity of his preparation. After Paris-Roubaix, he began tracking his food intake to the gram, everything but water, for 136 consecutive days. “I put a lot of fucking hours into this. I spend a lot of time on it,” he says. “Without putting myself at the top, I'm one of the ten in the world who trains the most and hardest.”

The frustration, he says, comes from being constantly questioned about how such performances are possible in a post-Armstrong world. “I've gotten here because of really hard work, and it hurts me and my pride when someone questions that,” he says.

“It’s very sensitive for those of us who are active to be compared to that time. A lot has happened in cycling since then,” Pedersen says. “I don't want to defend myself. I just want to give a better picture of what we do, and then the old boys can give a picture of what they did.”

While Jonas Vingegaard has also faced suspicions in his rise, Pedersen says the two time Tour champion handles it with composure. “Jonas does it in a super professional way, while I go much more with my emotions. When he says it's okay, you ask, my reaction is, why are you asking? I think it's ridiculous.”

He doesn’t claim to have the solution for changing public perception, but he’s honest about how it feels.

“I really don't know what tool I should take from my toolbox to do this in the best possible way and come up with the best possible answer,” he says. “For me, it's just a natural reaction when I'm challenged on something where I feel unfairly treated. I really do in a situation like that because my hard work is being neglected.”

“The damage is done,” he adds. “And so we're all just trying to repair it from here.”