Disgraced star engaged in shameless rearguard action to salvage reputation
It would be nice to think that Armando Iannucci and Peter Capaldi are watching the intense build-up to Lance Armstrong’s “tell-all-I-want-to” interview with Oprah Winfrey with wry smiles on their faces.
As they did during his racing career, the disgraced former Tour de France star and those around him are adopting tactics which could have come straight out of the Malcolm Tucker textbook to salvage what they can from the wreckage.
We’ve endured the denials, amid the diversionary bluster about being the “most tested athlete on the planet” and about being the victim of a witch-hunt. And we’ve seen the bullying. Next up, we are apparently going to encounter the most surreal twist of all: Armstrong the whistleblower: “planning to testify against several powerful people in the sport of cycling who knew about his doping and possibly facilitated it,” indicated reports. If the former great man goes down, he will take some other big men with him, so it seems.
The irony of the prospect of Armstrong turning state’s evidence, with accusations of skullduggery, will be lost on no one who has watched his progress over the years.
This is the man, after all, who spent eight years intimidating and vilifying those who spoke out against him: Emma O’Reilly, Greg and Kathy LeMond, Frankie and Betsy Andreu, Filippo Simeoni, Floyd Landis, Tyler Hamilton. He didn’t like whistleblowers. Indeed, he devoted much time and energy in attempts to shut them up.
The sight of Armstrong bursting out of the peloton to retrieve Simeoni, when he attempted to break away in the 2004 Tour de France, to make sure there was no chance he could win a stage, was one of the defining images of the man for me. One of the rare moments when the carapace cracked a little and you could glimpse the unpleasantness inside.
Ultimately, it was a whistleblower, Landis, who made the key revelations that opened the floodgates.
Past master
So now, floating the prospect of Plucky Ol’ Lance the whistleblower spilling the beans about the guys who may variously have not minded him doping, profited from him doping, let him dope to his heart’s content, is a tactic worthy of the spinmeister dark angel Tucker.
It may happen, but it doesn’t have to happen. The idea that Lance may have been a victim of a kind will be out there in people’s minds. And hell, he can’t be all bad if he wants to reveal who the bad guys really were, can he?
Lest we forget, Armstrong is a past master at putting stories out into the ether that muddy the waters, create an impression but then don’t materialise – the “possible Hour Record attempt”, which was “revealed” to Gazzetta dello Sport in 2001 to spike the Sunday Times story that he was trained by Michele Ferrari; the independent testing by a leading expert that was supposed accompany his comeback in 2009, then eventually dropped.
