Same old story in doc
“I’M not going to lie to you,” Lance Armstrong says in ESPN’s new documentary LANCE. “I’m going to tell you my truth.”
It will always take a leap of faith for anyone to believe a man guilty of perpetuating one of the biggest lies in sporting history for as long as he did.
Over the course of nearly threeand-a-half hours – screened in two parts with the first to be available via ESPN Player from May 25 – director Marina Zenovich seeks to tell a definitive version of the tale with the help of friends, family, former teammates, officials and journalists – and the man himself.
Armstrong sat down for a series of interviews which took place between March 2018 and the summer of 2019, inviting the film crew into his home and along for the ride as some of the lingering legal cases resulting from his deception rumbled on.
Two decades on from the start of David Walsh’s work exposing Armstrong’s fraud and seven years after the Texan finally admitted to Oprah Winfrey that it was true, this is by now a well-told story: beating cancer, seven Tour ‘wins’ between 1999 and 2005, the huge foundation that Livestrong became, and the unrelenting lies and intimidation that accompanied it all before he was stripped of his titles. Unsurprisingly major revelations are thin on the ground; those there are perhaps highlighted by the discovery that Armstrong has never in his life peeled a potato and, considering the evidence, probably should not try.
But we learn most about Armstrong’s state of mind – both at the time and also now, all these years later. And that mindset has not shifted all that much.
He sticks to his guns. His defence – amounting to little more than ‘everyone else was doing it so why couldn’t we?’ – should attract little sympathy but his former team-mates paint the same picture of cycling’s darkest days.
Former USA Cycling chief executive Derek Bouchard-Hall says he was one of the “clean” riders who missed out due to his refusal to dope, yet later says of Armstrong’s seven Tour ‘wins’ that “all the praise we put upon him was well deserved”.
Ultimately, Armstrong remains obstinate about his actions. Empathy for those he made suffer is in short supply.
“I wouldn’t change a thing,” he says, repeating a line he has parroted before. “All I can do is say I’m sorry and move on,” he says. “And hope that others do too.”