Lance Armstrong Cries Victim in Transphobic Podcast Pitch With Caitlyn Jenner

Disgraced competitive cyclist Lance Armstrong posted a teaser for an upcoming podcast where he speaks with fellow former Olympian Caitlyn Jenner about the issues of transgender athletes competing in the sport aligned with their gender.

“All right, so here we are on the PCH headed out to Caitlyn Jenner’s house to have a conversation in and around trans in sport,” Armstrong teased in a short video posted to Twitter.

Armstong was plugging the upcoming edition of his podcast, The Forward, which drops today.

With “sensitive conversations and topics” like the issue of transgender athletes competing in the sport aligning with their true gender “it really comes down to people are afraid to be fired, shamed, or canceled” if they voice their true opinions on the topic, Armstrong said.

“Turns out I’m not that afraid of that. I think it’s an important conversation and, you know, especially I think if it can be handled in this way,” Armstrong continued. “But, and I also think the best way to have these conversations and get to a more, to get to a smarter conclusion, or even have a smarter conversation is just to go in fearless. And I’m sort of fearless on this one.”

In the tweet, Armstrong also wrote that as a person “all too familiar with this phenomenon” of the cancel culture” he felt he was “uniquely positioned to have these conversations.”

He went on to ask if “there is not a world in which one can be supportive of the transgender community and curious about the fairness of Trans athletes in sport yet not be labeled a transphobe or a bigot as we ask questions? Do we yet know the answers? And do we even want to know the answers??

Twitter readers added context, noting that Armstrong was not canceled but was instead stripped of his titles and awards for doping and cheating.

“Armstrong himself later admitted to cheating for over a decade,” the reader’s context concluded.

Twitter users were also quick to attack Armstrong’s choice of words and thoughts.

“In the last 24 hours, we have Lance Armstrong lecturing people about sports fairness,” political pundit and former chief strategist for the 2004 Bush-Cheney presidential campaign posted, concluding “We live in a world where many lack mirrors.”

Armstrong quickly responded, telling Dowd to “climb down from the high horse” and adding he was “actually not lecturing anyone” but was instead “bringing all sides to the table and inviting rational and open dialogue. The former Olympian said it was “a conversation that nobody dares touch” before adding that Dowd should check it out “if they stream podcasts up in your rarified air.”

Armstrong, 51, was the most dominant cyclist of his era and perhaps all time, winning a record seven consecutive Tour de France titles from 1999 to 2005. Armstrong won the gold medal for the Elite Men’s Road Race at the 1993 World Championships in Oslo, Norway.

Armstrong achieved this success despite learning he was diagnosed with stage three testicular cancer that had spread to his abdomen, brain, lymph nodes, and lungs in 1996 at the age of 25.

“We told Lance 20 percent,” Armstrong’s urologist Jim Reeves later told Velo in 2011 even though he believed his chances were actually near zero. “But he wasn’t happy with 20 percent. I don’t think he ever accepted any percentage of cure short of 100 percent — in his mind, that is.”

Armstrong fully recovered.

Jenner, 71, won a gold medal at the 1976 Summer Olympics. She came out publicly as transgender in 2015 in an interview with Diane Sawyer.

“I’m a woman,” Jenner told Sawyer at the time.