Jim White watches Alex Gibney’s new documentary on the fall of Lance Armstrong, The Armstrong Lie, which began production before the revelations of the cyclist’s doping. “Armstrong invited Gibney into his life on the assumption that the film-maker would seal his place in history,” he observes. “Gibney has done that”:
At the heart of the complex, sophisticated lie the rider constructed around his systematic cheating was his own ability to fib to camera. Time and again during that 2009 Tour he looks into Gibney’s lens and tells him he has never, will never, and could never embrace performance-enhancing assistance. And boy, is he good at it. Never in this history of dope control has there been a drug cheat who has voluntarily admitted their guilt before they were exposed. Until found out, Marion Jones, Michelle de Bruin, Dwain Chambers, all of them insisted their achievements owed entirely to their brilliance and hard work.
But nobody was as proficient at the fib as Armstrong. Nobody lied as often and as skilfully as he did. In Gibney’s film we see him in those 2009 press conferences taking on his detractors such as journalist David Walsh with a plausibility that, with the benefit of hindsight, beggars belief. We witness his bullying delight in humiliating those who knew the truth. We see him at his contemptible worst, hiding behind his cancer to denigrate those who dared challenge his version of himself.
Relatedly, Ashley Fetters focuses on the new book Wheelmen: Lance Armstrong, the Tour De France, and the Greatest Sports Conspiracy Ever:
Armstrong’s true story—or, at least, Wheelmen’s account of it—contains enough juicy intrigue that it’s worth pondering: In some alternate universe where Lance Armstrong was a fictional character created in a writers’ room (rather than a real person who’s disappointed millions of people), would he be looked upon with contempt or with fascination? With a few clever storytelling touches—a few glimpses of Lance’s unstable childhood in Texas here, some added emphasis on just wanting to win it for the cancer survivors there, some strategically placed flickers of truly agonized soul-searching—it’s not hard to imagine that his story might even elicit some degree of conflicted compassion.
Previous Dish on Armstrong’s public demise here, here and here.
The Dish 