In an interview with the BBC, Lance Armstrong has said that if he were a rider nowadays, rather than at the time he rode, he would choose not to dope.

"If I was racing in 2015, no I wouldn't [dope] again. 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. I look at everything when I made that decision, when my teammates, and the whole peloton made that decision. It was a bad decision in an imperfect time. But it happened.”

He says that all of the riders who competed in his era are sorry that they had to dope in order to keep up with each other and that not a single one would have preferred to ride dirty than clean.

"I think all of us - if we go back to 1995 - I think we're all sorry," Armstrong said to the BBC's Dan Roan. "You know what we're sorry for? We're sorry we were put in that place. We would have loved to have competed man to man, [on] bread and water. We're sorry we were put in that place."

Armstrong asked fans to forgive all of the riders for what they did, but said that at the time it was a simple decision that they had to make and that no rider in the right mind would turn it down.

"When Lance Armstrong did that, I know what happened because of that. I know what happened in the sport of cycling from 1995 to 2005. I saw its growth, I saw the expansion, I know what happened in the cycling industry. Trek Bicycles went from sales of $100 million to a billion in sales. ... Do all those people want us to make a different decision and take that all away? I don't think anybody says yes."

Armstrong revealed that his biggest regret is that he came back to the sport in 2009, rather than remaining retired.

"It was the bridge to the past. If I don't come back, the bridge isn't there. The view over the water is too far. The comeback was the bridge. But that was my decision. It was one of the biggest mistakes in my life. I don't have a good reason for why I wanted to come back. No reason at all."

Lance Armstrong is currently banned for life from cycling by the UCI and has spent most of the last few years wrapped up in lawsuits from the people he hurt while he was a rider. He was even recently prevented from riding the Gran Fondo Hincapie, run by ex-teammate George Hincapie, by the UCI as a result of his ban.