[The drug culture was] not on this side of the Atlantic, as far as I can tell, and I think I have a right to say that, because virtually all of my racing [took place in the U.S], aside from a couple of international excursions as part of the national team, and I never ran into it. Never once. Maybe it was there, but it was totally invisible. However, there were people at the time who took it upon themselves to go to Europe and race for some period of time, and they brought back stories, and the stories were without exception about the ubiquity of drugs.

The typical story would go something like this: You're in Belgium, you're riding local races which occur three or four times a week. These are dinky little races in far-flung, rural parts of the country which draw enormous crowds, and are practiced under the most primitive conditions. So the race would start in some little cafe, you'd go to this cafe to change into your race clothes, and you'd be queued up for the public bathroom, which would be this tiny closet. And there'd be a bunch of racers around you, and someone would open up a valise, and there would be row upon row upon row of hypodermics.

And one day there would be some racer that you knew or had raced with or had trained with and you would drop him off the back—he couldn't get out of his own way. And two days later you couldn't hold his wheel—this was just not the same rider, not the same human being. And this was just at the lowest level of amateur riding.

So under those circumstances you're very soon forced to deal with that. You're not going to be competitive with that if all you've got are the legs God gave you. I have no confidence that I would not have started taking that stuff in that situation, no confidence.

What kind of drugs were they in those days?

There was a lot of amphetamine use. That was the drug of choice for many, many years. This was way before EPO [Erythropoietin, the blood-enhancing hormone used by Armstrong], which was originally discovered to diminish one of the pernicious effects of dialysis, which is the diminution of red blood cells. EPO is an indigenous hormone—we all make this hormone, it is in response to this hormone that the body makes red blood cells. That's why it's nearly undetectable.

But it was not around at that point—it was mostly speed-related substances. There's a famous episode in Tour history about a British rider named Tommy Simpson. He was Britain's great hope—no British rider would again figure into the Tour with that prominence for several decades—and he was leading the Tour [in 1967] at the point when the race came to central France, to a famous climb that is often to this day incorporated into the Tour, up a peak which juts out as an aberration from the plains of central France, a peak called Mont Ventoux. It is reviled by all the riders because it's so doggone hot in that part of the country, and the climb is brutal and unrelieved, just going up a cone, no relief, no trees, nothing. Simpson began to get into difficulty at some point along the climb, and at some point he began to wobble, and the story is that he eventually fell over, and when his support crew rushed to his aid, his dying words were, "Put me back on the bike." Afterward, they found amphetamines in his blood.