Follow on Twitter
Subscribe by RSS
Lance Armstrong will be seen making his “confession” to Oprah Winfrey later today. Fellow Texan James Moore says he should just ride away.
HOW I’D LOVE to not think about Lance Armstrong. Again. Ever.
But I live in Austin. And have lived here since Willie was singing at the Armadillo World Headquarters and George W. Bush was skipping out on National Guard service. We have a bikeway here named after Lance and he’s got a prominent bike store downtown and a cancer foundation and there is a city full of sycophant Lance lovers and politicians who would forgive him for polluting Hill Country swimming holes. Or dumping rock star girlfriends when they get cancer. Just because he is Lance. And taught us all that it’s okay to put on Spandex and ride skinny tire bicycles and beat our chests about greatness. Just work hard.
And lie. And cheat. And bully people who know you are lying and cheating.
I simply do not understand Lance Armstrong apologists. The arguments they make are absurdist in the extreme. Don’t we need to be concentrating our legal resources elsewhere? Oh, wow, big shock, an athlete doped and cheated. The people who trivialize Armstrong’s cheating would not tolerate similar behavior by their own children. But Lance gets a defense most cheaters and lawbreakers don’t. He is able to raise what one critic calls, “The Magic Cancer Shield”. Because he’s done so much for so many others, can’t we just let it go?
“There ain’t no way to hide them lyin’ eyes.”
Nope. We can’t. Because we shouldn’t.
What really happened?
Lance Armstrong betrayed the mythology of the American dream. All we Americans wanted to believe in him. He was the All-American boy with the All-American name. He overcame cancer. Won the toughest endurance sport ever devised. Whipped the tar out of the cheese-eating surrender monkey Frenchies in their own sport. And then he founded a charity to help those afflicted with cancer so they could write their own comeback tales.
Good stuff. Nice narrative. But mostly a blatant lie.
Anyone who thinks Lance Armstrong’s current apologia is more than self-serving is more naïve than people who think it’s normal to ride a bike up a mountain faster than most athletes can ride one down. The federal whistle-blower lawsuit filed by former teammate Floyd Landis has the potential to financially destroy liar Lance. Landis claims in the suit that the U.S. Postal system was defrauded of more than $30 million dollars by Lance, Landis, and their teammates because they used drugs and blood-doped.
If he wins the case, Landis could get triple damages, which is close to $100 million. That’s the approximate value of Armstrong’s fortune. He’d be wiped out to pay the court claims. And Landis would be comfortable for the rest of his life. Armstrong’s attorneys are reportedly scurrying to reach a negotiated settlement with Landis, who Lance called a liar more times than he called him a teammate or a friend, as well as the U.S. justice department. They need to work out a deal quickly, because today’s the last day the justice department will decide whether to join the lawsuit.
Thursday is also the first day of Oprah Winfrey’s two-day broadcast of Lance’s admission, but not apology. In the pre-recorded broadcast, Armstrong has apparently admitted to doping, but blamed the sport and its culture for his behavior.
It is unlikely to show him expressing true contrition or apologising.
According to reports, when he stopped by the offices of his Livestrong Foundation before taping with Oprah, he apologized for the stress he had caused the organisation’s staff. He did not, however, apologize for being a cheater, liar, or bully.
He’s likely to have taken the same approach with Winfrey. A vague acknowledgment that he got caught up in what cycling was during the 90s and the first part of the past decade. Lance as the victim of a culture. It’s like Roger Clemens and Barry Bonds not knowing what they were taking. It’s just how it was in baseball. Lance won’t talk about how he ran the sophisticated cheating scheme and forced his teammates to get involved or get lost. Because this isn’t about true contrition. It’s about Lance trying to rehab his image for money. And to compete again.
Cycling interests like USADA reportedly want to use Lance to testify against the big dogs in the cheating era. What will he give them if he talks? Team sponsors and coaches and doctors and underwriters were guilty, too. They all loved Lance’s ride to glory because they made money off it. Let him fill his body with chemicals. It’s his dream. And we make bank, baby. Plus, works even better that Lance is arrogant enough to lie and deny and we can support him. Armstrong’s enablers had to know, just as Lance did, that his house of lies could not stand forever. But it was profitable enough to make it worth the effort. And so alluring that Lance seems to have never even considered the possibility that his original cancer might have been caused by the steroids he was using prior to his illness.
What value is anything said by Lance Armstrong?
He has already perjured himself once during a lawsuit when he denied doping. And he has called Floyd Landis, Tyler Hamilton, and everyone he ever rode with discredited liars. Funny that it turned out that Lance was even a better liar than his mates. Always had to be the best, didn’t ya, big guy? There might have been a supplement he took that fell into the category of LEDs, Lying Enhancing Drugs.
Numerous organizations and sponsors will all ask for a return of their money because of Armstrong’s fraud. The State of South Australia is planning to demand Lance return millions in appearance fees. The Sunday Times of London will seek the $500,000 it paid him in a settlement. He’s likely to be sued again by SCA, a Dallas company that Lance took to court to pay him a $5 million dollar bonus. SCA had refused on grounds that Armstrong cheated.
Any apology from Armstrong needs to be made personally to people like Betsy Andreu and her husband Frankie. Or Greg Lemond, the first American to win the Tour de France. Or Emma O’Reilly, the masseuse who reported Armstrong’s use of drugs. Armstrong later implied she was just a woman of disrepute with other men. Or journalist David Walsh who wrote “L.A. Confidentiel” and whose employer was sued by Lance. Lemond had a bike brand with Trek that was doing well for 13 years until he called out Armstrong for cheating. And Trek, an Armstrong sponsor, stopped producing the Lemond series of bikes.
Possibly no one took more grief from bullyboy Lance than Betsy Andreu. Her husband Frankie was one of Lance’s best friends and rode with him until the two of them testified that they heard the troubled Texan admit to a doctor he had used performance-enhancing drugs. The confession came in Indianapolis when Armstrong was being treated for cancer. Lance constantly attacked the Andreu’s publicly, made it all but impossible for Frankie to get sponsors or even work, and suggested that Betsy was simply troubled and jealous of Lance’s success. Instead, she was simply a truth-teller who refused, unlike many people, to get wrapped up in the lie being told by Lance Armstrong. She won. He was defeated by a diminutive, principled woman, who was the first to stand up to him.
And now Lance Armstrong just needs to ride away.
(This story has also been published in the Huffington Post.)
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Australia License
8 Comments
The US – isn’t that the place where a sizeable proportion of the prison population is there (sometimes for life) for drug offences?
Just wondering , was Lance Armstrong paid for this interview?
Dear CATALYST, no he wasn’t.
* And no donation to Live Strong.
Is it a surprise that professional sports are corrupt & full of liars as you say James? That Landis bloke doesn’t sound too good either.
When anything is about the money, then it is bound to be compromised with no level playing field.
What worries me about the Armstrong case is how everyone jumps on the bandwagon. Lance is now public enemy No1, worse than the devil. I suspect like most driven, “successful” & rich people Lance is probably someone you wouldn’t want to know. Ruthless, egocentric & hard.
Not long ago I think before the London games, SBS showed a program about Ben Johnson winning the 100 at the Olympics. By a sports scientist who took blood samples of all the finalists in that 100, including Carl Lewis.
Many years later with current technology the sports scientist analysed those blood samples. ALL OF THE ATHLETES IN THAT FINAL WERE ON THE GEAR, DOPED. JOHNSON HAD USED LESS DOPE THAN ANY OF THE OTHERS, ONLY ONE DRUG IN LOW DOSES. LEWIS FOR EXAMPLE WAS ON AN EXOTIC COCKTAIL IN LARGE DOSES. And US sports authorities had caught Lewis at least twice, doping. They covered it up.
Remember the shit heaped on that poor bastard Johnson? A poor black bloke with a speech impediment. He was crucified & demonised. Carl Lewis & everyone else carried on like pork chops. The only thing Johnson had going for him was he could run faster than anyone else. But his life was destroyed.
When Howard took this country to war killing thousands based on lies, what happened to him? He got re-elected! The “crimes” of Johnson & Howard look very different to me.
Human beings are not honest particularly when the stakes are high & it involves money. In terms of sports if anyone thinks rugby league players, Usain Bolt or Makivy Diva for example have not doped are dreaming.
Yet we expect the unbelievable, particularly from sporting “heroes”. We eulogise those of us that are extraordinary & then we are widely surprised, angry & resentful when we find out they supposedly “cheated” & lied. This is why I find your article unbalanced James.
I just reckon there is much more to the Lance Armstrong story too James. Many more are responsible & culpable. And it does not mean I am not disappointed in Lance, just not surprised.
Hi RASTUS,
Like lots of others, I will be interested to see what comes out of the Oprah interview.
You are probably right that there is more to the whole saga than we know — rumours have been circulating in the cycling community that witnesses were being offered large sums to testify against Lance.
Add that to the Marion Jones saga – she went to prison — and the message is pretty clear — “Tell us what we want to hear, or we can put you in prison!” None of that, even without the media beat-up, makes it likely that the US doping enquiry would paint an accurate picture of what went on.
And, even if he was doped to the eyeballs, and had abandoned ten wives and fifty kids in pursuit of his dream, I don’t know of any “performance enhancing drug” that is supposed to bring someone back from almost dying of cancer to top level aerobic capacity.
When he started his comeback, his legs could not generate the power they used to – so he took his cadence up to 120 to make up for the power lost from the days when he used to operate at a cadence of 90 to 100. For anyone in the know, it was a mind-boggling feat (natural OR “enhanced”), to hold that cadence for hours and to cruise with a peloton where everyone else was spinning their legs 20% slower — and we now know most of those guys WERE drugged to the eyeballs to hold their pace/cadence.
Even if Betsy Andreu is right about the “additives” causing the cancer in the first place, the Lance comeback is amazing, and is more interesting than the sport — how he did it, and if it was mind over matter, or just long hours of aerobic training is INTERESTING – and potentially of great use in the recovery of cancer patients — my best friend at school (we shared a desk together for years) lost his wife to breast cancer.
I know he was devastated at losing her, and that we could multiply his loss by the experience of thousands, many many thousands of others.
So I would rather be jabbing Lance with the sodium pentathol (trutth serum) rather than trying him in court or the media, to find out exactly what his routine / supplements / “boosters” or whatever, program actually was — it is potentially very useful information.
I think it a little bit grotesque and obscene that some of his co riders who were also taking drugs, cheating and generally operating under false pretences and equally guilty for a protracted period of time, now find themselves in a legal position to be able to sue Armstrong and profit from the belated admission that he made. As some of them had earlier made the same admission and tried to shame him into the open, i dont think they should profit from any of this, which no doubt they will. It’s almost like profitting from crime.
The best thing people can do when the inevitable books come out ( funny how people do that) is not buy a copy dont let any of them profit from wrongdoing. they dont write these books to explain, apologise or confess. They write them to make money from a gullible public who they ripped off in the ifrst place.
” cheese-eating surrender monkey Frenchies ” Where did that come from? No wonder America has a global image problem
Terra always enjoy your comments & as usual you have looked at an issue thoughtfully & come up with a different perspective. Exactly mate! Find out what Lance has been up to, it could be very useful.
Oldfart spot on too, it’s bizarre these co-riders can benefit having committed the same “crimes” as Lance.
When you sue someone for defamation, you can cause big damage to that person’s career, credibility and their life.
I saw a snippet of the Oprah interview where Oprah asked about a woman who had pointed the finger at Armstrong as a cheat, saying “You sued her”. Lance responded – “Probably, we sued a lot of people”.
Where’s the remorse, for lives hurt directly by his actions?
Nothing but more bullshit here.
Those who Armstrong’s team sued for libel should be appealing any damages decisions. If Armstrong were truly contrite, he’d apologise to each of them personally and repay any damages claimed. In cases where part of his argument was to descredit the accuser, those accusers might be able to sue Armstrong and his team for defamation.
It’s going to be messy for a while yet.