Lance Armstrong has declared today that he “still feels like a Tour de France winner”. He also has said that it is “disrespectful to the sport” to leave the seven years of the races that he won with empty rolls of honour.

He was banned from competitive sport for life in 2012 after USADA’s Reasoned Decision and had all of his results from 1999 onwards nullified, including his seven Tour wins.

Armstrong was speaking in an interview with Outside magazine when he called his era of cycling an “arms race” in terms of the guy who doped with the best stuff won.

“If you’re asking me – yes, I feel like I won those races. I know that’s not a popular answer but the reality I think that we are learning is that it was just a messy time. It was basically an arms race and we all played ball that way,” Armstrong said.

“It’s not my place to say but I think it would be a mistake and it would be disrespectful to the sport to leave seven years empty. You have them empty for two world wars but you can’t have them empty from 99 to 05. If I didn’t win, then somebody needs to win. I’m not sure who we’d get to.”

He thinks that if the riders he competed against from 1999 to 2005 were asked if Armstrong was the winner of the Tours, he believes their responses would favour a “yes”.

Despite cheating, Armstrong thinks he won on a level playing field.

“Obviously […] myself, Jan, all the guys who have told the truth now about what went on at that time – Basso, Beloki, whoever – more or less played by the same rules. Would that have been different to the lanterne rouge? Of course.”

He puts his Tour success down to training rather than doping and says he thinks that he used the same drugs as everyone else and just trained harder and smarter than the competition. 

“Today it almost seems like that’s ridiculed. It’s, ‘Oh, They told us it was the training, they told us it was the diet.’ But it really was. We didn’t tell about the drugs, but nobody told about the drugs,” Armstrong said. “But all of those things happened, we actually did all of those things: they weren’t bullshit and I think that’s the reason why we won those Tours. We took it to another level.”

When pushed he said that it was not his place to admit if he believed he had been punished too harshly.

“I can’t answer that question because no matter what I say, it’s not going to be acceptable,” he said. “I know how much I’ve gone through. Some might view that as enough, some might view that as nothing. I can’t even get near that one because it’s too sensitive.”

According to the Texan, admitting to doping did not remove any guilt he felt and that he would still have had peace of mind if he had never been brought down.

“I don’t feel like this weight off my shoulders, I would have been fine to never say anything,” he said. “And that’s probably not a popular response either.”

Armstrong lost in a bid to reject a case launched by SCA Promotions last week, who are suing Armstrong for the $12million he earned in bonuses for winning the Tour from 2002-2004.

“Mr. Armstrong engaged in rampant perjury and committed outrageous acts of witness intimidation in his lawsuit with SCA," SCA's attorney, Jeffrey Tillotson, told USA TODAY. "With this opinion from the Court of Appeals, SCA will now proceed to have Mr. Armstrong punished for such conduct."