El Paso gives mixed reaction to Armstrong confession

At a Three Legged Monkey viewing party, El Pasoans watched in awe as disgraced cyclist Lance Armstrong admitted to doping.

“In your opinion was it humanly possible to win the Tour de France without doping seven times in a row?” Oprah Winfrey asked Lance Armstrong.

“Not in my opinion,” Armstrong answered.

Sports fans say he’s a liar and deserves to be stripped of his titles.

“Right now I don’t forgive him,” said one fan at the Three Legged Monkey viewing party.

“Seven Tour de France titles — it’s amazing that some could get away with it for so long,” said another fan.

Not according to local cyclists who say Armstrong was only doing what it took to win in a corrupt sport.

“He’s kind of getting jipped when they’re talking about taking his titles, but they got to go back 5-10 places to find a guy that wasn’t dopping,” said a local cyclist at Crazy Cat Cyclery.

“The guys that were second, third, fourth, fifth to him, they all got caught for doping,” said another local cyclist.

“To keep winning it mean you had to keep on using banned substances to do it?” Winfrey asked Armstrong.

“Yes, but I’m not sure this is an acceptable answer but that like saying we have to have air in our tires or we have to have water in our bottles,” Armstrong answered.

“Are you saying that’s how common it was?” Winfey asked.

“In my view, it was,” Armstrong replied.

But that’s not an excuse to cyclist Paul Rudershausen who’s been traveling by bike for 30 years.

“Especially after years and year of Lance denying that he was doping and if he really didn’t feel he could compete at the pen-ultimate level, then he shouldn’t have been competing,” Rudershausen said.

But other cyclists tell me the entire sport is littered with men relying on banned substances for speed, and while Armstrong says he didn’t invent the drug-taking culture, he did nothing to stop it.