Lance Armstrong: Confessions of a Cheat

It’s now 100% official. After years of speculation, cover ups, ruined careers, manipulation, calculated deception, scare tactics and bullying, we know for certain that Lance Armstrong is a lying, cheating, despicable cheat, of his sport and of his supporters.

We know because, at long, long last, he has admitted to it. Not in a court of law, and not in a suitable journalistic environment, but what is likely to have been a cozy, sympathetic sob-fest with a daytime television presenter who happens to be one of his oldest allies. Make no mistake, Lance Armstrong’s reign of lies may be over, but his control of the situation remains.

He named the place. He called the time. He cherry-picked the presenter. The sickening advertising campaign promoting the interview, which is being broadcast live on Oprah’s website and not on a television network, shows it for what it was designed to be by Armstrong and his people; ninety minutes of soap opera-inspired, emotionally driven nonsense that will take us no further in the quest to uncover the remaining black spots of the EPO dictatorship.

I hope I’m wrong. I hope ‘Queen Oprah of Hollywood’ surprises us all by delivering a harsh, probing and incredibly revealing interview that cuts deep into the depths of cycling’s darkest hours. I hope she asks about the careers and lives Armstrong destroyed, both in the peleton, those around the camps he controlled, and in the media. I hope she demands he return the reported $1.5 million he now owes to the Sunday Times in fraudulent libel claims, and how he felt in misusing the public money his US Postal Team spent on an illegal diet of performance enhancing drugs. I hope she asks if he feels it’s appropriate for her to be conducting one of the most important interviews in the history of sport, and I hope she shows him just a percentage of the hours of television footage of him denying claims of doping and humiliating those who dared to speak the truth.

Obviously, the very fabric of the now defunct Armstrong legend is about much more than sport. It was built on his incredibly admirable battle against the stage three testicular cancer which spread to his lungs and brain in 1996, a battle he felt he could use to his advantage when diverting attention away from his web of lies. His story made him super-human, a heart-warming story we all truly wanted to believe in, and tragically, for some time at least, we fell for it. Armstrong manipulated the cancer disease in order to win titles and to turn himself into a multi-millionaire. His bullying was horrific, his damage to the sport damning, but it is here that his behavior is at its most repulsive.

Of course, Armstrong’s charity work has raised obscene sums of money, but I hope she quizzes him over Livestrong, and questions the motives behind its creation. I hope she asks him how, after undergoing several courses of chemotherapy, he felt able to pump drugs into his body, raping it of the health he had fought so hard to regain, and in doing so, disrespecting the fight millions are enduring as we speak. I hope she looks him in the eye and asks him how he feels about having let down the cancer victims to whom he was once a beacon of hope and inspiration.

And ultimately, I hope that Armstrong is unable to slither out of this episode with any crumb of respectability, a shred of sympathy or a morsel of profitability. One last book deal is more than Lance Armstrong deserves. And it’s that that he’s after.