The Arm­strong Lie

What price should we pay for decep­tion? Should the con­se­quences be pro­por­tion­ate? If lies raise you to the rank of hero then shouldn’t that title be retroac­tive­ly stripped away? That’s cer­tain­ly been the fate of for­mer cham­pi­on cyclist Lance Arm­strong, the sub­ject of the lat­est doc­u­men­tary from one-man doc indus­try Alex Gib­ney. As the title sug­gests, Armstrong’s extra­or­di­nary achieve­ments and super­star sta­tus were found­ed on one enor­mous, ruth­less­ly pro­tect­ed lie — that he was rac­ing clean.

Arm­strong was a tow­er­ing fig­ure whose fame tran­scend­ed the pop­u­lar­i­ty of his sport. He did what (for good rea­son) seemed impos­si­ble; to his fel­low Amer­i­cans he was Super­man made man­i­fest. In 2004’s Dodge­ball, when Vince Vaughn’s Peter La Fleur has a cri­sis of con­fi­dence, who bet­ter than Arm­strong to pop up to inspire him? Arm­strong didn’t just beat brain, lung and tes­tic­u­lar can­cer, he beat them and returned to his pro­fes­sion to win sev­en con­sec­u­tive Tour de France titles. Con­sid­er­ing he had only won stages of the com­pe­ti­tion pri­or to his diag­no­sis in 1996, this was a pow­er­ful mes­sage to can­cer suf­fer­ers — against all odds he’d come back stronger.

Gib­ney attacks his sub­ject mat­ter from an inter­est­ing angle: he was forced to aban­don a doc­u­men­tary chart­ing Armstrong’s ²⁰⁰⁹⁄₁₀ come­back when the dop­ing scan­dal erupt­ed. Hav­ing fol­lowed the cyclist for a year, he had begun to view Arm­strong with a kind of adu­la­tion, but by the time he returned to the film a dif­fer­ent pic­ture had emerged, with the sports­man hav­ing final­ly admit­ted the scale of his deceit. Dur­ing his voiceover Gib­ney admits to feel­ing per­son­al­ly betrayed — he was after all among those Arm­strong had cheated.

Armstrong’s rise-and-fall makes for a ter­rif­i­cal­ly com­pelling nar­ra­tive and Gib­ney skil­ful­ly com­bines race and press con­fer­ence footage with inter­views from an impres­sive array of con­trib­u­tors, includ­ing Arm­strong, his most vocal oppo­nents and sev­er­al of his team­mates. As we watch the archive footage, what’s quick­ly appar­ent is that there’s real val­ue to the film play­ing on a cin­e­mat­ic scale — it was of course a gar­gan­tu­an decep­tion, and you find your­self scru­ti­n­is­ing Armstrong’s every facial flick­er. And what’s most aston­ish­ing — and what most mud­dies the issue of for­give­ness when his char­i­ta­ble endeav­ours and the sheer preva­lence of dop­ing work in his favour — is the vin­dic­tive­ness of Armstrong’s attacks on those who right­ly ques­tioned and attempt­ed to expose him.

Yet, despite Gibney’s access to Arm­strong, The Arm­strong Lie’s most gob­s­mack­ing moments come from the 2013 Oprah Win­frey inter­view, where Armstrong’s affir­ma­tive answers to Winfrey’s quick-fire ques­tions have a bald poten­cy. In addi­tion, Arm­strong is a stub­born­ly cagey char­ac­ter who, to this day, remains enig­mat­ic and defen­sive, and the cur­so­ry look at his upbring­ing hard­ly helps illu­mi­nate mat­ters. So if Gibney’s film doesn’t feel like the whole pic­ture it cer­tain­ly stim­u­lates dis­cus­sion. How­ev­er we judge Arm­strong, one thing sad­ly seems true: his name will for­ev­er be men­tioned in con­junc­tion with disgrace.