Except we weren’t going to be eating spaghetti and we weren’t going to be watching baseball.
“I brought you here under false pretenses,” I said. “If you want to sue me, John will be here in a moment and I’m sure he’ll be happy to represent you.”
John knew what we were watching and told Don as he closed the door behind him moments later.
“’The Armstrong Lie’,” he said.
I’d noticed…and watched – the fascinating documentary a week ago and called John, the other huge fan and hugely disappointed former supporter of Lance. I explained that we’d be having Amish casserole since it wasn’t a baseball night.
They loved it and after eating and listening to Don tell us how he’d quit his pharmaceutical job after 30 years in the business because of the unrelenting hassling he’d been receiving to get him to do just that, moved into the family room for the show.
“I’m gonna pick something up. I was planning to retire next year anyway – just like you, but the chicken shit was getting to be too much,” he said. I know that feeling.
The documentary had been the creation of Alex Gibney, the man that had started to create a documentary in 2009 based on Lance’s comeback to the Tour d France after a four year layoff following his seven consecutive Tour victories. His goal was to capture a totally clean Lance winning the Tour as an almost forty-year old and thus vindicating his previous Tour accomplishments as supposedly drug-free. But Lance’s comeback sparked something in the people who knew the true story and as he progressed, more and more came out and told their story. When it got to federal prosecutors and a grand jury, no one was practicing ‘Omerta’ any longer and it all came up. His ‘clean’ comeback in 2009 was anything but, as he told us in 2013 to Oprah Winfrey…and the world.
Gibney told Lance that he owed it to him to do a documentary where he told the entire story of his doping, which he turned into the program we were watching.
He is an amazing liar. He is also the best cyclist the world has ever seen. In an era where all the best riders in the sport were also using performance enhancing drugs and methods, he beat the best for seven straight years. I have no doubt that if everyone in the peloton had been clean – including him and his teammates – he’d still have beaten them. He was a physiological anomaly, perfectly designed to endure the demands of the world’s most difficult athletic event. He had the work ethic of a maniacal athlete that would push, and punish, his body to the limits of human endurance to prepare himself for victory. He investigated every aspect of cycling – the equipment, race strategy, team support, and the psychological side of racing, to be sure that he would make ‘every second count’.
“I love to win, but more importantly, I hate to lose,” he stated during one interview. And you could see this in him. There was no doubt. But he also hated to lose his power he had acquired by becoming the iconic, cancer-beating, cycling champion and was willing to use any and all of it to discredit those who came out against him and spoke the truth about his cheating. It is this that disturbs the last of his supporters – like me – the most. It is the part of his legacy that I think will be impossible for him to ever correct, though I hope he tries. As Spiderman’s uncle says to Toby McGuire in the first creation of the Marvel comic story, “with great power comes great responsibility.”
Bonus: 20,000 steps.
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