Lance Armstrong with Joe Rogan; two hours well spent.

This interview may be three years old, but I've finally discovered Joe Rogan of late and his chat with Armstrong is informative and enjoyable. Note the $100 million lawsuit of which they speak was settled in 2018 for $5 million. 

For those interested in the wider story, this BBC documentary is excellent. Be aware that the YouTube postings of it tend to disappear.

To be honest, all these sports juicing scandals continue to produce an ambiguous reaction in me. Quite a few banks cheated, prompting an international recession, then were caught ... and, well, nothing much happened to them at all, at least here in America. We routinely incarcerate minorities for far less.

Maybe money really does have something to do with it? Bogey man Barry Bonds asked the right question, as referenced by Dave Zirin back in 2012:

'It's Bonds. Barry Bonds': The Return of Baseball's Invisible Man, by Dave Zirin (The Nation)

... There is a delight that the baseball cognoscenti takes in making Barry Bonds their “invisible man.” It’s a way to marginalize him without confronting what he represents. He’s a home-run king in exile. He’s the end product of an era where owners made billions selling a steroid-enhanced product. He’s the person who can no longer tell the press to go to hell, because they won’t acknowledge his voice. The press corps once asked Bonds if he thought steroids was cheating. Bonds responded, “Is steroids cheating? You want to define cheating in America? When they make a shirt in Korea for a $1.50 and sell it here for 500 bucks. And you ask me what cheating means?” Now they don’t have to care what he thinks. Now they can humiliate him forever by denying his existence.

As the Tour begins: "Lance Armstrong cheated death, and then he kept on cheating."

The 2016 Tour de France began today. The documentary film is from 2014.

Storyville: The Lance Armstrong Story - Stop at Nothing (BBC 4)

Documentary telling the intimate but explosive story about the man behind the greatest fraud in recent sporting history, a portrait of a man who stopped at nothing in pursuit of money, fame and success.

It reveals how Lance Armstrong duped the world with his story of a miraculous recovery from cancer to become a sporting icon and a beacon of hope for cancer sufferers around the world. The film maps how Armstrong's cheating and bullying became more extreme and how a few brave souls fought back, until eventually their voices were heard.

Director Alex Holmes tracks down some of his former friends and team members who reveal how his cheating was the centre of a grand conspiracy in which Armstrong and his backers sought to steal the Tour de France. Friends and fellow riders were brought into a dirty pact that no-one could betray, lest the horrifying extent of complicity be revealed. But the former friends whose lives he destroyed would prove to be his nemesis, and help uncover one of the dirtiest scandals in sports history.

The article also is from 2014.

Lance Armstrong in Purgatory: The After-Life, by John H. Richardson (Esquire)

... This we can stipulate: Lance Armstrong cheated death, and then he kept on cheating. And he was no run-of-the-mill cheat. Sublimely American in his ambition, he became the best cheater, greatest cheater of all time, turning a European bicycle race into a gaudy, ruthless, and unprecedented demonstration of American corporate prowess and athletic hegemony. He doped and bullied other bikers to dope and sued or harassed people for telling the truth about him, which is hard to forgive. But he wasn't the evil genius who invented evil. At twenty-three days and twenty-two hundred miles, the Tour is so hard that cyclists have always sought some kind of performance enhancement. In the 1920s, they took cocaine and alcohol, and in the 1940s, amphetamines. In 1962, fourteen of them dropped out because of morphine sickness. Between 1987 and 1992, use of the blood-oxygen booster called EPO may have killed as many as twenty-three riders. But even that didn't stop them. In his testimony to the antidoping agency, testimony that helped ruin Armstrong, a former teammate named Frankie Andreu told investigators that when they first met on the European circuit in 1992, both of them quickly realized that "it was going to be difficult to have professional success as a cyclist without using EPO." This was, in fact, the "general consensus" of the entire team, Andreu added.

And that's how things stayed.