Given just enough Lycra to hang himself

YOU don’t have to be remotely interested in cycling to find this documentary about Lance Armstrong utterly gripping, for it is not so much a portrait of a disgraced cyclist as of an intelligent and eloquent sociopath, who even now seems to regret the monumental deceit on which his sporting career was built only because he was found out.

Alex Gibney set out four years ago to make a very different film, tracking Armstrong’s return to the 2009 Tour de France. It was to be an intimate chronicle of one of sport’s greatest comebacks, with unique access to the man who had overcome cancer and gone on to win the Tour seven times.

Gibney was well aware of the doping allegations already surrounding Armstrong, and indeed his documentary background was in exposing villainy of one sort or another, but he soon found himself seduced by his subject’s charisma.

To the frustration of those who were certain the cyclist had cheated his way to fame and incredible fortune, he wanted to make a feelgood film. He finished it, too, only to be overtaken by events. It is those events and their aftermath that led Gibney to make a new film about one of sport’s most dramatic falls from grace.

So dramatic, indeed, that Armstrong plunged right on to Oprah’s sofa. Where once it was William Shakespeare who recorded epic tales of a man’s rise and fall, now it is Oprah Winfrey.

But The Armstrong Lie is much more interesting than anything the man himself, in an exercise of mock-contrition, said to Oprah.

Sensibly, Gibney hasn’t made a judgmental film, instead giving Armstrong just enough Lycra to hang himself. ‘I didn’t live a lot of lies but I lived one big one,’ says the Texan, and the admission is significant, because it begins with him laying claim to some measure of integrity. In fact, the big lie necessitated hundreds of smaller ones.

Sensibly, too, Gibney is more concerned with the lie itself than with the nuts and bolts, and syringes, of the systematic doping. Time and again, we see Armstrong using his stature to bully and belittle his accusers, and I wonder — the one question the film doesn’t really answer — whether like many efficient liars he had begun to believe his own untruths? Certainly, he appears to have justified them to himself, not least by totting up the millions he raised for cancer charities. In that respect, and the way he brazenly used his very fame to keep his secret, I was reminded of the late Jimmy Savile.