Lance won't throw his ex-wife under bike

Lance won't throw his ex-wife under bike

STEFANO RELLANDINI/REUTERS

Lance Armstrong talks with his then-wife Kristin, whom he spoke of during the interview.

Lance Armstrong stood by his ex-wife Friday night during the second part of his interview with Oprah Winfrey, saying she “wasn’t that curious” about his doping past and implying she was an innocent bystander during his Tour de France dominance.

“Perhaps she didn’t want to know,” Armstrong told Winfrey. “She certainly knew, but didn’t… (it was a) need to know basis. I guess maybe I protected her a little bit from that.”

But according to the United States Anti-Doping Agency’s “reasoned decision” on Armstrong that was released last year, Kristin Armstrong was very much a part of her ex-husband’s doping culture. In several eyewitness accounts, she witnesses Armstrong’s doping and, in at least one instance, even helped administer drugs by “wrapping pills and handing them to riders.

“Later, at the World Championships at Valkenberg in the Netherlands the U.S. riders arrived at their tent near the start of the race to find that Armstrong had asked his wife Kristin to wrap cortisone tablets in tin foil for him and his teammates,” the USADA report reads. “Kristin obliged Armstrong’s request by wrapping the pills and handing them to the riders. One of the riders remarked, ‘Lance’s wife is rolling joints.’?”

The report states how in 1999, Armstrong’s former teammate, Tyler Hamilton, was at the Armstrongs’ villa in Nice, France. “Hamilton was in need of EPO and he testified that he asked Armstrong to borrow a vial of EPO and that Armstrong provided EPO to Hamilton that was stored in Armstrong’s refrigerator,” the report reads. “(Another Armstrong teammate) Jonathan Vaughters testified that Kristin Armstrong told him they kept EPO in their refrigerator in Nice.”

And Betsy Andreu, the wife of Armstrong’s former teammate, Frankie, and a bitter foe of Armstrong’s, said in an affidavit that in March 1999, in Milan, she was “prompted to ask Kristin Armstrong what her feelings were about EPO. Kristin responded along the lines of, ‘It was a necessary evil,’?” according to the USADA report.

The accounts stand in stark contrast to the woman Armstrong referred to in his interview Friday. Armstrong called Kristin “a smart lady, extremely spiritual. She believes that the truth will set you free.” 

At one point during Winfrey’s interview, she asked Armstrong if anyone knew “the whole truth.” 

Armstrong laughed nervously and said, “Yeah,” before Winfrey went back to questioning Armstrong about Kristin.

Armstrong went on to say that his ex-wife â€" whom he was married to from 1997 to 2003 â€" was his inspiration to race clean when he made a comeback in 2009. 

“The thing about her and my doping and this comeback (in 2009 at the Tour de France), she was the one person that I asked if I could do that,” said Armstrong. “It was a big decision. She said, ‘You can do it, under one condition: that you never cross that line (of doping) again.’ I said, ‘You got a deal.’?”