Sir Bradley Wiggins says he cannot fathom how his fellow British cyclist Lizzie Armitstead missed three doping tests in less than a year, saying there is “no excuse” for the lapses that put her Olympic participation in jeopardy.

Armitstead’s missed tests, which came to light only a week before the Rio games, led to an automatic one-year suspension being imposed by UK Anti-Doping. That was then overturned on appeal at the court of arbitration for sport, allowing Armitstead to compete in the Olympic women’s road race, where she finished out of the medals in fifth.

Wiggins, a five-times Olympic gold medallist and the 2012 Tour de France winner, also says Armitstead’s claim that cycling was not her priority at the time of one of the missed tests due to personal reasons is “ludicrous” and “ridiculous”.

Armitstead’s appeal was successful because the first test, on 20 August 2015, was struck off the record on account of a tester not making sufficient efforts to locate her in a Swedish hotel where the team were based during the UCI Women’s Road World Cup. The tester was understood to have been refused the 27-year-old’s room number at the hotel’s reception, though Armitstead did not answer her phone when a call was subsequently made. Cas “promptly and unanimously cleared Armitstead of the asserted missed test”, with the cyclist accusing Ukad of “not following proper procedure”.

However, in a wide-ranging interview with the Guardian’s Weekend magazine published online tomorrow, Wiggins says there should be no excuse for any athlete to miss three tests. “It’s bloody hard because what happens is you miss one test, they write you a letter, they ask you to explain what happened and you’ve got two weeks to put a case forward,” Wiggins said. “If you ignore that and then you get another one, you end up having crisis meetings.”

Lizzie Armitstead following the women’s road race at the Rio Olympics. Photograph: Mike Egerton/PA

Wiggins said the level of support in such a situation from UK Sport, the national body that funds elite athletes, narrowed the scope for excuses.

“You get a lot of support from UK Sport. They’re brilliant, actually. They’re on the phone daily. They send you emails, reminders, they’ll put plans in place for you in terms of someone helping you with the whereabouts, so you don’t end up … well, it’s very difficult, then, to go from two to three [missed tests]. And to get three within eight or nine months, there’s no excuse.

“When you’re a professional athlete and you’re a world champion, there’s no excuse, because it’s your career. You’re setting the standard for everybody else, and to say: ‘Cycling wasn’t my priority at that time,’ is ludicrous, because you nearly lost your career over it. That’s just ridiculous. So I can’t fathom how that happened.”

After Team GB won 11 medals on the track in Rio, six of them gold, Wiggins accepts that innuendo from other nations towards British cyclists is almost inevitable because of their unprecedented success. The 36-year-old also said he believes blood doping is now “nigh on impossible”, adding: “I don’t think anyone could get away with it.”

He said: “There’s been a lot of innuendo, and people saying: ‘I’m not saying they’re cheating, what I’m saying is it doesn’t make any sense.’ It’s like: ‘Well, what are you saying then?’ When you dominate something to the degree that Team GB dominated, that’s going to cause ill-feeling. But we peak every four years because of British cycling and the lottery funding thing is about winning medals at the Olympic Games. So I think there’s a bit of sore-loser type.”

With retirement on the horizon, Wiggins has also spoken of his desire to not become a “pointless celebrity” known for appearing on game shows and being “that famous cyclist with the sideburns”. “I can’t go and get a normal job,” he added. “I can’t go and work in Sainsbury’s next week stacking shelves, so I might as well use the success I’ve had to do things I feel are positive.”