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.

The Armstrong Lie ... official HD trailer.

I drank the Kool-Aid, too, and to this very day, the ambiguity remains ubiquitous. What do I think about it, today? I'm not at all sure. This much is clear: Barry Bonds nailed it by asking his interrogators: Do you really want to define cheating in America? Quite a few banks cheated, prompted an international recession, were caught ... and, well, nothing, at least here in America. We routinely incarcerate for far less. Maybe money really does have something to do with it?

Maybe A-Rod can shed some light on the topic.

The Armstrong Lie – review, by Peter Bradshaw (Guardian)

Alex Gibney was obliged to reshape his portrait of Lance Armstrong in response to the cyclist's drug disgrace. He salvaged a watchable film – but only just

... Gibney was allowed unprecedented access, and appeared to be making a rather sympathetic human-interest film, to the horror of Armstrong's critics. But soon after photography was complete, Armstrong's continued drug abuse was exposed, and Gibney had to re-edit and reshape all his footage to make it fit this new picture. He was allowed just one hurried post-confession interview – a derisory snatch of evasive blather, which makes all of Gibney's intimate pre-confession interviews look creepy and pointless. The awful truth was that Gibney had allowed himself to be taken in, and – had he not been overtaken by events – he might inadvertently have been the liar's most prestigious defender.

Well, it can happen to any journalist. And Gibney does in fact salvage a watchable study of a fanatically arrogant competitor who isn't above all sorts of tricks, gamesmanship, grudgery and macho legal bullying to win at all costs and cover up the truth at all costs. It is quite clear that Armstrong took drugs in the same spirit in which a Hollywood actor has minor cosmetic surgery – sure, it isn't the "truth" about my face, but everyone else is doing it, and my basic talent is what's important.

Jenkins: "Would you want to go before that court?"

Even the most casual of sports fans surely held an opinion about Lance Armstrong, just as they did in baseball with Barry Bonds. I remain firmly within the Armstrong camp in spite of recent developments, primarily because of the hypocrisy surrounding concepts like "cheating" (you mean to tell me that so many individuals and institutions venerated by Americans do NOT lie, cheat and steal?), but that particular discussion can be saved for another day.

For now, one can scour the Web for testimonials for and against Armstrong, and find just the right one to mirror personal points of view.

I merely offer this one by Sally Jenkins in the Washington Post, which asks us to consider the point at which the odiousness of the policing transcends the villainy of the crime.

Lance Armstrong doping campaign exposes USADA’s hypocrisy

... Quite independently of Lance, with whom I wrote two books, for a long, long time I’ve had serious doubts about the motives, efficiency and wisdom of these “doping” investigations. In the Balco affair, all the wrong people were prosecuted. It’s the only so-called drug investigation in which the manufacturers and the distributors were given plea deals in order to throw the book at the users. What that told us was that it was big-game hunting, not justice. It was careerist investigators trying to put athletes’ antlers on their walls. Meanwhile, the Fourth Amendment became a muddy, stomped-on, kicked-aside doormat.