Betsy Andreu, Others Unload After Lance Armstrong’s Mea Culpa

Betsy Andreu is one of the people affected by Lance Armstrong’s years-long denial of blood doping or use of performance enhancing drugs, and the wife of a fellow cyclist was one of many to rip into the disgraced athlete after his appearance on TV to discuss the coming clean.

Betsy Andreu is the wife of a former associate of the once-Olympian who commented on the strange interview after it happened. Lance Armstrong’s blood doping mea culpa last night on Oprah’s OWN could have gone many different ways, and the very late in coming admission as well as the start of “apologies” to those who were attacked by the disgraced cyclist seemed ready to prime the public forgiving of the Livestrong founder — but it seems that however well the tell-all could have gone, the athlete’s tone and level of personal responsibility confessed did little to quell the backlash against him.

For years, Armstrong denied blood doping or using other forms of performance enhancing substances, taking his cycling fellows like Andreu’s husband down in varying degrees during his doping defense. Now Betsy — to whom Lance personally “apologized” last night in a backhanded manner many felt was insulting — has spoken out, saying the mention didn’t quell her anger at all.

In the Oprah talk, Armstrong mentioned Betsy Andreu and said:

“I called you crazy, I called you a bitch, but I never called you fat.”

Speaking to Anderson Cooper after Armstrong’s interview, Andreu said:

“I’m really disappointed. He owed it to me, you owed it me to Lance, and you dropped the ball. After what you’ve done to me, after what you’ve done to my family, and you couldn’t own up to it. And now we’re supposed to believe you? You have one chance at the truth, this is it. If he’s not going to tell the truth, if he can’t say, ‘Yes the hospital room happened,’ then how are we to believe everything else he’s saying?”

Betsy Andreu wasn’t the only person frustrated with Lance Armstrong after the Oprah sit-down — several journalists took to the web to excoriate the cyclist for years of deception, with one ESPN piece charging:

“Sidelined and hemorrhaging money, Armstrong has finally found himself in the psychological position of weakness where he put so many others … I don’t know when I’ll feel he’s paid enough of a price for his cruel reign, but my instinct is not nearly yet, not for a long, long time.”

The writer adds:

“I find Lance Armstrong reprehensible for having passed off fiction as documentary. Two dear friends of mine had their bodies sliced up and pumped with chemicals and radiated but still wasted away before my eyes and died, the disease feasting on their bones like soft fruit, flooding their lungs, robbing them of their voices and keen intellects, and finally stopping their generous hearts. I am and will always be more moved by the bravery they demonstrated while losing than I would ever be by the amoral celebrity who ‘beat’ cancer … Armstrong purported to be honest about the fear and pain and side effects of the drugs used to treat his disease, and that laid out a course map for millions. But I also believe he had an obligation to be honest about what he proceeded to do with his newly intact body and his presumably grateful mind, and he completely blew it.

Betsy Andreu was one of the first to allege Lance Armstrong had cheated through blood doping or the use of PEDs.