a sixth new reflection...'the continuing armstrong delusion'

‘We wouldn’t be sitting here, if I hadn’t gone back’.

Lance Armstrong to Oprah Winfrey – Oprah had asked why-o-why Armstrong decided to return to cycling and compete the Tour de France in 2009, only to be exposed by erstwhile team mate and (fellow) drugs convict Floyd Landis, when Landis was dumbly refused by Armstrong a place on Armstrong’s ’09 team after having served a two year ban for taking illegal amounts of testosterone.

And shamefully, the subtext underlying (no pun intended) Armstrong’s answer to Oprah runs something like ‘I might otherwise have gotten away with the biggest sports-related fraud in history’. ‘And I would never have owned up to it’.

It took me eighteen months to catch up on the Lance Armstrong story – and all because of a book published this summer by his former masseuse to which we will return; one and a half years to read into the real story, and not the devious and far-too-good-to-be-true version of his life and cycling career that existed before January 2013 – although I did not fail, perhaps could not have failed to be aware of it. Rumours that Armstrong had been living a lie, and shilling a whole lot of rubes for serious money along the way is old news, and was always suggested in certain sections of the media, simultaneously hotly and heavily contested (to the weight and cost of umpteen legal actions) by Armstrong himself.

To hear Armstrong finally admit to taking various band substances in the opening ‘yes’ and ‘no’ section of his interview with Oprah, came neither as a surprise, or, something entirely expected.  However, what could perhaps have been expected was how, in spite of everything, Armstrong, in spite of himself, and also because of himself, still came across as largely unrepentant and patently untrustworthy during much of his supposed ‘confession’. He, in fact, reminded me strongly of former PM Tony Blair when he lied repeatedly, or at least told half-truths, on national television over Iraq and WMDs.  Same steel in their eyes.  Same conscious self-delusion.

Also during the Oprah ‘confession’, Armstrong lamented how he lost a whopping $75 million in one day after sponsors (whom he had conned out of millions over the years) dropped him in lighting quick succession.  Yet, it wasn’t (and isn’t to this day) enough to make you feel sorry one iota for Armstrong, cancer survivor or otherwise.  The money wasn’t rightfully his in the first place.

But whether money was a significant motivating factor behind Armstrong’s competition cheating is surely debatable given the man’s absolute and unrelenting desire to win, and to appear a champion at all (and sometimes disastrous) costs.  Some of these costs were made of flesh and bones: former friends and colleagues including Landis, Tyler Hamilton and Frankie Andreu, Andreu’s wife, Betsy, and masseuse Emma O’Reilly.

O’Reilly, ten years after giving journalist David Walsh a major exclusive interview at the height of Armstrong’s fame that suggested Armstrong was taking performance enhancing drugs (to which Armstrong replied by calling her a whore with a drink problem), has now published her new take on proceedings entitled: The Race to the Truth. And in deeply ironic fashion the foreword is by none other than ... Lance Armstrong.

The two seem to have made up of late which is all well and good, but read the tone of Armstrong’s preamble and once again it is the usual aggressive self-serving spin as performed on Oprah and countless occasions since.  O’Reilly is different from ‘others’ (I wonder who?!) because she has found it in herself to forgive now-humble-ole'-Lance, who, after all, as he said on Oprah, and says again in TRttT, was only one of many drugs cheats in cycling in the nineties and noughties.

Armstrong against all odds remains popular.  He has 3.5 million followers on Twitter.  I can only imagine they are still with him because of the power surviving something as deadly as cancer holds in people’s minds.

I would never ever wish death on Lance Armstrong (let alone any living creature), and he has a new chance at life now, a chance to rehabilitate, start anew and attempt where possible to reconcile the past. However, if Oprah, his foreword to O’Reilly’s book, and all the Blairite rhetoric in the intervening months, not to mention his Twitter blurb (‘Life has become immeasurably better since I have been forced to stop taking it seriously’) are anything to go by, the latter will prove near-impossible for him.