More than two years since Lance Armstrong’s television interview with Oprah Winfrey, the disgraced seven-times Tour de France winner has said that, if he were in the same position as he was 20 years ago, he would again dope to win bike races.

In reply to the BBC sports editor, Dan Roan, Armstrong said: “My answer is not a popular answer. If I was racing in 2015, no, I wouldn’t do it again, because I don’t think you have to. If you take me back to 1995, when it was completely and totally pervasive, I’d probably do it again. People don’t like to hear that. When I made the decision – when my team-mates made that decision, when the whole peloton made that decision – it was a bad decision and an imperfect time. But it happened.”

Interviewed as part of a BBC documentary to be shown later this week, Armstrong did, however, offer something that began to resemble an apology for his misdeeds, although it came with the same defence that he has offered since the end of 2012 – that his doping was a generational phenomenon.

“If I go back to 1995 – and some started earlier, some a little later, but let’s take that as ground zero – I think we’re all sorry. And do you know what we’re sorry for? We’re sorry that we were put in that place. None of us wanted to be in that place. We all would have loved to have competed man on man, bread, water, naturally clean, whatever you want to call it.

“We’re sorry, we’re sorry that we were put in a place and we looked around as desperate kids and thought: ‘God, I’ve got to go back to Plano [his birthplace in Texas] and maybe go back to school, or get a job, or work in a bike shop or work in a factory.’”

Armstrong added that, while he would not row back on his decision to begin doping in 1995, he would change the way he behaved to those who stood up to him, such as the whistleblower Emma O’Reilly, his fellow cyclist Filippo Simeoni and the writer David Walsh. “I would want to change the man that did those things, maybe not the decision but the way he acted, the way he treated other people.”

With the Cycling Independent Reform Commission on the sport’s doping past due to report next month, the Texan confirmed that he has met with its members, on two occasions: “They have asked me not to go into details, but everybody knows I have met with them, so that is not a secret. I think it’s safe for me to say that whatever questions they asked, I told.

“A lot of it is out there. So I don’t know if there’s a whole lot out there left, but I was totally honest, and I was totally transparent.”