Lance Armstrong: Fame to shame

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Betsy Andreu, the stay-at-home mother of three who for years was among Lance Armstrong’s greatest foes, on Friday finally let the whirlwind of the past 24 hours sink in. She thought this moment would never come.

In an interview with Oprah Winfrey broadcast on Thursday, did Armstrong really admit to using performance-enhancing drugs during his cycling career after denying it for more than a decade? Yes. Did he admit to bullying and trying to destroy people like Andreu and her husband, Frankie, one of Armstrong’s former teammates, because they dared to claim he had doped? Yes. But did Armstrong say everything Andreu had wanted to hear? Absolutely not.

‘’I was hopeful that he would come completely clean,” she said in a telephone interview from her home in Dearborn, Mich. “But when I saw the interview, I couldn’t freakin’ believe it. He was cherry-picking the truth. I really felt like calling him and saying, you are a moron, you had good intentions and you really screwed everything up. You didn’t seem believable at all.”

Her husband was blunter: “The guy’s a professional liar. How are we supposed to believe him?”

Betsy Andreu, a University of Michigan graduate with a quick wit and sharp tongue, has long been considered one of Armstrong’s biggest enemies but over the past week has grown to have mixed emotions toward him. She is one of the few people who refused to remain silent over the years about Armstrong’s dark secrets of doping. And, like the others who questioned his fairy tale story, she was one of those Armstrong tried to crush.

He has called her obsessed and vindictive. He has tried to blackball her husband from working in cycling. He did all that because the Andreus Ð who were once inside Armstrong’s inner circle Ð refused to lie about a doping confession they said they heard Armstrong make in 1996 while he was battling cancer. In 2005, Betsy and Frankie Andreu were required to testify in a civil lawsuit about that confession. They said that they had heard doctors ask Armstrong if he had ever used performance-enhancing drugs and that Armstrong rattled off: testosterone, EPO, growth hormone, cortisone and steroids. When word of their testimony got out, Armstrong began his attack.

He used his power in cycling to convince people not to hire Frankie Andreu, jeopardizing his ability to make money, the Andreus said. He repeatedly called Betsy Andreu crazy and vindictive, and said she was out to get him because she hated him. In his interview with Winfrey, Armstrong addressed Betsy Andreu directly, saying, with a smirk, “I called you crazy, I called you a bitch, I called you all those things, but I never called you fat.”

The seemingly insensitive comment sparked hundreds of negative comments on Twitter about Armstrong, but the Andreus said they knew Armstrong was just trying to add levity to the stressful situation.

Just two weeks before, they never would have given Armstrong that benefit of the doubt. When asked then if they would ever forgive him for what he had done to their family, Betsy Andreu answered quickly: never.

“Would you forgive Bernie Madoff?” she said, adding that if Armstrong went to prison for his transgressions, she would not shed a tear. “I know as a Christian I’m supposed to forgive, but I’m not sure if I could do that,” she said. “Lance tried to decimate this family, and I don’t think I can get past that.”

This week, though, before the two-part Winfrey interview aired, the Andreus received a phone call from Armstrong, who offered an apology. Frankie Andreu spoke to him for 10 minutes and said that Armstrong “sounded sincere,” but that he still did not trust him. Betsy Andreu talked to him for 40 minutes, but wouldn’t divulge the content of their conversation. But she did soften toward him somewhat.

‘’It was a flood of emotions because we’re good friends once, and we used to have so much fun,” she said. “But you know he has done so much bad to us. He put us through so much hell.”