![]() It’s Not About the Bike, his 2000 autobiography, he tells Zenovich with a completely straight face, was unfairly picked apart, because “everything in that book was true, except for when I address doping”. ![]() Photograph: Laurent Rebours/APĪrmstrong reveals himself, throughout Lance, to be a master at evading the question – at reframing it, redefining it, and stacking it with caveats in order to cast himself in a better light. Lance Armstrong in the yellow jersey during his first Tour de France victory in 1999. This is, of course, an assertion as ludicrous as it is unbelievable – but it offers an insight into the intensity of the delusion that pervaded the sport that Armstrong came to dominate. Derek Bouchard-Hall, the former CEO of USA Cycling and a contemporary of Armstrong, tells Zenovich that “there were no morals and ethics” around doping in the 1990s, that people “were still figuring things out, and we forget that now” – as if the history of drug use at the Olympics, anabolic steroids, Ben Johnson and all the rest had somehow passed the world of cycling by. So that was the decision we had to make.”Ĭheating, in other words, was the work of a collective, which makes it easy to resist personal responsibility – as Armstrong clearly still does. The sport went from low octane doping, which had always existed, to this high octane rocket fuel. Here he is, for instance, on the development of EPO and his own turn to doping, under the tutelage of the notorious drug doctor Michele Ferrari, from the mid-1990s: “The performance benefits were so great. His basic thesis is that he was a blameless naif, thrust into the maw of an evil sport. We all lied.”ĭoping, Armstrong maintains, “was just ingrained in the sport, right up until the time that I got there from Plano, Texas”. “The only way you can dope and be honest is if nobody ever asks you, which is not realistic. Armstrong’s preferred pronouns throughout the documentary are “you” and “we” – “I” does not get much of a workout. What we do not see much of is remorse or self-reflection. In Lance we see Armstrong combative, defensive, distracted and restless, the coiled fury that propelled him – back arched, eyes dead-ahead, through all those time trials and mountain stages – still very much visible. I tried to straddle the good and the bad.” Was it an exercise in image rehabilitation? An attempt, in the cliched language of sporting redemption, to “tell his story”? “I don’t really know,” says Zenovich. Zenovich says Armstrong set no ground rules for their discussions (“Nothing is off limits,” he told her) but she cannot identify, even after two years of work on Lance, exactly what his motivation for participating in the documentary was. Zenovich sat for eight interviews with Armstrong, between March 2018 and August 2019, and it is those conversations that form the core of Lance, which takes in the full sweep of the Armstrong saga, from his childhood and breakthrough world cycling championship at the age of 21, to cancer, his first experiences with cortisone and growth hormones, the seven consecutive Tour de France victories, his belligerence in the face of doping allegations, and the final unravelling of his career, from 2010 to 2013, as the full extent of his drug use finally came to light. ![]() It is certainly one that Armstrong himself appears eager to embrace. This structural explanation for Armstrong’s wrongdoing sounds exculpatory, and to a degree it is. I drove him like an animal.” (“He beat the shit out of me,” Lance recalls.) We hear Armstrong explaining how he forged his birth certificate to pass himself off as a 16-year-old and enter his first triathlon, rationalising the deception with cool command: “Forge the certificate, compete illegally, and beat everybody.” We watch as cycling contemporary Bobby Julich recalls how, at the end of his first head-to-head race against Armstrong, when they were both still teenagers, Armstrong yelled at him: “Come on you fucking pussy, let’s keep going – I’m not done yet.” We see Armstrong’s stepfather, Terry Armstrong, claim: “Lance would not be the champion he is today without me, because I drove him. In the 10 minutes that follow, the director, Marina Zenovich, assembles a tableau of reminiscences that make that shocking admission seem somehow understandable. “It’s a miracle I’m not a mass murderer,” Lance Armstrong, reflecting on his mother Linda’s laissez-faire approach to parenting, muses in the opening scenes of Lance, the new two-part ESPN documentary whose first half screens in the US on Sunday night. ![]()
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