Man left with thousands of unsellable Armstrong DVDs

A British man who purchased 10,000 Lance Armstrong DVDs is having trouble finding buyers following the disgraced cyclist's confession to doping last week.

Karl Baxter, 36, faces losing £30,000 ($NZ56,800) in profit after buying a huge batch of unsellable Armstrong DVDs for £10,000 ($NZ18,900). He bought 10,000 of them wholesale for £1 each last September.

Nobody wants to buy the DVD, the Science of Lance Armstrong, from his website wholesaleclearance.co.uk since it emerged the American used drugs to win his seven Tour de France titles.

He has had to cut the asking price from £3 to 30p in a bid to get rid of them, which would leave him with a £7,000 loss.

If he doesn't sell them, his three-year-old boy will play dominoes with them instead, he said.

Armstrong always denied using performance enhancing drugs since he was first accused in 1998.

But last August he effectively admitted to taking drugs by refusing to challenge the US anti-drug agency's decision to strip him of his titles.

Last week he confessed to taking drugs to millions of TV viewers on Oprah Winfrey.

Baxter accepts that buying the DVDs was a huge mistake.

He said: "I bought the DVDs at a good price for about £1 each about four months ago.

"The idea was to sell them in small job lots of 100 for about £3 each, so traders could go on eBay, Amazon, or car boot sales and sell them on.

"There was a slight amount of risk and a gamble because there was a suspicion, but he wasn't admitting to it, so I put them on the website last week.

"I was hoping the problem would die down and I would be able to find a good home for them, now I don't think I will get a tenth of the money back.

"Armstrong has had a good life for the last 20 years, I just wish he had either kept his mouth shut a bit longer or not done it in the first place.

"But, he has done a lot for charity so we can't knock that and I'm sure that's done more good than what loss we have made.

"I don't know what I'm going to do with them now.

"We could run a competition and offer them as booby prizes or I could make a tower or build a big dominoes track for my three-year-old.

"If I put the prices down to 50 or 30p I am sure someone will be interested.

"It is a big loss for a small business but this is one of the few things I've managed to buy that has come back to bite me."

The Science of Lance Armstrong is a 46 minute documentary that was made in 2006 by the Discovery Channel.

It tells how Armstrong's 'winning strategies' were developed and looks at technology a cyclist can use to help them go faster, such as material types.

- THE DAILY MAIL