Lance Armstrong still singing the same old song

There is nothing more bittersweet than the sound of the ageing voice searching for relevance in what’s left of fading triumphs, lingering regrets and the unbearable lightness of being forgotten.

Now for the first time you’ll hear Bob Dylan, Frank Sinatra, Lance Armstrong and Rage Against the Machine in the same breath.

And for good reason: Dylan is about to release his 36th studio album and is appropriately calling it Shadows in the Night. Because there are no shadows after the sun goes down, only the impressions, false, lasting or otherwise, which is also why Dylan is insisting he's not covering the 10 essential Sinatra tracks which make up Shadows In The Night, but "uncovering them, lifting them out of the grave and into the light of day".

Indeed the truth within these old songs can never be covered up, nor softened by time and certainly not nostalgia.

Dylan also talks about this and more in an interview with AARP magazine – distributed to all 37 million members of the American Association of Retired Persons, thus boasting the largest magazine circulation in the world: "There's nothing contrived in these songs," he says. "There's not one false word in any of them. They're eternal."

Meanwhile, over on the BBC News website, Armstrong was telling sports editor Dan Roan about his growing boredom since August 2012, when the United States Anti-Doping Agency (USADA) stripped him of his seven Tour de France titles and imposed a lifetime ban across all sports – which may or may not explain Armstrong's appearance in the video for Rage Against the Machine bassist Tim Commerford's new song, Mountain Lion.

Forgotten

Either way, Armstrong has clearly reached something of a loose end, and appears desperate to find a way back somewhere into some sport, before the unbearable lightness of being forgotten.

In his first televised interview since the Oprah confessions two years ago (where does the time go?) Armstrong also admits when it came to doping he would “probably do it again”, at least if he was taken back to 1995.

Then, as if this mentality that he hadn’t really done anything wrong wasn’t bad enough, Armstrong also reinforces the feeling that his only lingering regret about doping is getting caught. “If I didn’t come back the view over the water is too far,” he says of his 2009 comeback, which ultimately brought about his downfall. “The comeback was the bridge. But that was my decision, so I have to be responsible for that. It was one of the biggest mistakes of my life.”

In other words if it wasn’t for the comeback, he tells Roan, “we are not sitting here having this conversation” – and that is frightening. Whatever about his claims of riding clean in 2009 (when he finished third behind race winner and then Astana team-mate Alberto Contador), the Armstrong message is still loud and clear: those seven Tour de France titles should still be assigned to me.

And there's more: Armstrong also showed up this week in the video for Mountain Lion – which Commerford performs with his new group, Future User.

Apparently the song is about the US government’s attempts to use the controversy surrounding performance enhancing drugs (PEDs) as a distraction from their own global sins.

"The amount of attention given to PEDs is incredible," Commerford tells Rolling Stone magazine, "especially when you consider the amount of drugs – recreational, illegal and pharmaceutical – that America supports and profits from."

‘Awesome person’

With that in mind, the vegan bassist from Rage Against the Machine gives Armstrong, his “friend, an awesome person”, a cameo role in the

Mountain Lion

video, where, I kid you not, Armstrong delivers a sort of spoken-word interlude as if mimicking a voice message to a steroid-injecting skateboarder: “You better step the f*** off me, mother******. Seven o’clock here in Aspen, Colorado, I’ve been training like a mother******. So fit, so yoked, so technically astute – you could never hang. Step the f*** off. Lance.”

The video finishes with the message “We Should Move the Super Bowl to Afghanistan, #steroidsorheroin” (check it out on YouTube).

Not that everything Armstrong told the BBC is entirely self-serving: his line about the USADA’s description of what went on at the US Postal cycling team as “the most sophisticated, professionalised and successful doping programme that sport has ever seen” being untrue is probably true: “To say that, in light of all you read about the East Germans, the West Germans, the Turks, the Russians, God forbid, all the other major sports leagues in the world. No.”

Indeed the war on drugs is far from over, especially in Russia. This week, Valentin Balakhnichev, president of its athletics federation, said he would fight any attempt to have the London Olympic medals stripped from any of the race walkers now banned for doping offences in or around those Games, including 50km gold medallist Sergei Kirdyapkin. All of which suggests it could be a long time before Rob Heffernan, who finished fourth, gets his hands on that Olympic bronze medal.

There will always be some debate over whether lifetime bans are the only way to deal with doping offenders, although in Armstrong’s case, this is a lifetime ban than cannot be softened by time, and certainly not nostalgia. Because there is nothing bittersweet about the sound of his aging voice searching for relevance in what’s left of his fading triumphs and lingering regrets, only bitterness.