Lance Armstrong confession 'great and sad', says Bradley Wiggins

BRITISH cycling star Bradley Wiggins said Lance Armstrong's anticipated admission of doping would be both a "great" and "sad" day for the sport.

BRITISH cycling star Bradley Wiggins said Lance Armstrong's anticipated admission of doping would be both a "great" and "sad" day for the sport.

Wiggins, last year's Tour de France and Olympic time-trial gold medal winner, added the extent of doping in the 1990s meant it had now become cycling's "lost" decade as a consequence of so many results being corrupted by drugs cheats.

"There's a lot of angry people about," Wiggins told Sky News in an interview conducted at his Team Sky training camp in Madeira. "They need that closure in their life because they've been battling for so long for this.

"It will be a great day for a lot of people and quite a sad day for the sport in some ways," added Wiggins ahead of the broadcast of US television chat show host Oprah Winfrey's pre-recorded interview with Armstrong on Friday AEDT.

"But I think it has been a sad couple of months (for cycling). The 90s are pretty much a write-off now."

Wiggins's compatriot Nicole Cooke meanwhile used the occasion of her retirement on Monday to slam Armstrong, his former teammate Tyler Hamilton and other drug cheats who "robbed" clean riders such as herself of victories and prize money.

Hamilton denied doping before confessing in his award-winning book The Secret Race.

"Tyler Hamilton will make more money from his book describing how he cheated than I will make in all my years of honest labour," said the 29-year-old Cooke, who won road race gold at the 2008 Beijing Olympics.

Armstrong's appearance on Winfrey's program will be his first television interview since he was stripped of his record seven Tour de France titles and banned for life.

"When Lance cries on Oprah later this week and she passes him a tissue, spare a thought for all of those genuine people who walked away with no reward - just shattered dreams. Each one of them is worth 1000 Lances," said Cooke.

"I do despair that the sport will ever clean itself up when rewards of stealing are greater than riding clean. If that remains the case, the temptation for those with no morals will always be too great."

Winfrey said overnight that Armstrong answered "the most important questions... that people around the world have been waiting to hear".

Cycling's world governing body said it would not comment until after the interview was broadcast, although it urged Armstrong to testify at an independent commission it had set up to probe the scandal.

But Austrian cyclist Bernhard Kohl, who was stripped of third place at the 2008 Tour de France after a positive dope test, said the much-anticipated interview was unlikely to change cycling.

"It won't shock anyone anymore if Armstrong admits everything," Kohl told the Austria Press Agency.

"There won't be a loud bang. Everyone knows that he did it. When you think of everything that's come out in the last 10 years, then you know how this sport works... we'll never root it (doping) out."