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Dave Scott on Lance Armstrong Racing in Kona

Lance on Oprah

Multiple Ironman world champion and legend Dave Scott said Lance Armstrong should be allowed to race in Kona, because it would bring more attention and money to the sport of triathlon. Scott won in Kona six times throughout the 1980s and placed second there at the age of 40 when he came out of retirement for the event.

“I have mixed feelings about the whole Lance episode,” he said in an interview on Monday with 220 Triathlon, a UK based publication. “Yeah he was guilty, he said he was guilty and I think he’s been crucified about a thousand times over for it and there have been a lot of other drug addicts in the cycling world that have had minute bans. I get it, Lance has been the king and he was very defiant so they obviously came back on him very hard. He obviously has a passion to race, and he was racing well in triathlon after picking it up pretty quickly.

Dave Scott
Dave Scott

“I think ultimately it would have been a great thing for the sport to have his notoriety, he would have brought in attention that our sport hasn’t garnered, it would have brought in corporations that might have been willing to say, ‘Hey this sport, we need to boost it just a little bit’.

“If you look at prize money in this sport it still pales in comparison to the other ones, and the athletes work darn hard. So I think having Lance in there, people are always going to say, ‘Was he racing clean when he was doing triathlons’. I don’t know, that has not come up, but I’m sure he would be tested and retested if he had that opportunity to race, so I think let him race.”