From Tour de France winner to team manager, Bjarne Riis has attracted his fair share of controversy, success and criticism over the years. and now his autobiography Stages of Light and Dark has been translated from Danish to English, roughly 18 months after it was first published. To coincide with the English edition, Riis travelled to the London for a one-stop pit stop, where he took part in an questions and answers interview with the book's translator and former Procycling deputy editor, Ellis Bacon.
Riis was questioned about everything from his doping past to his current predicament of competing in the Tour de France without his team leader Alberto Contador.
Riis confessed to doping in 2007 but only after years of denial and lies but his life since hasn’t been smooth either, with a number of his riders facing either suspicions and suspensions. Still he remains central to the sport as the manager of Saxo Bank.
In this video Riis talks frankly about his first steps into the world of doping, his first self-inflicted injection, to the moral backdrop behind the peloton of the 1990s.
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