To the end Lance Armstrong, desperate to remain relevant, somehow is allowed to control his own narrative. So after all the lies from Armstrong from across all the years, lies about himself and about all those who dared to tell the truth about him, there comes one last one:
That he still has something we want. To the end this guy thinks he can play the whole world for suckers.
RELATED: HEY OPRAH, HERE’S WHAT TO ASK LANCE
Unless Armstrong and his team of lawyers and crisis managers have him back out of his interview with Oprah Winfrey at the last moment (meaning they’re still worried about legal exposure), Armstrong will confess to Oprah that he used performance-enhancing drugs. It will be like someone going on Oprah’s network and announcing that he has new information, or breaking news, about the ocean being deep.
Really, the best part of this most recent narrative from Armstrong — originally leaked by him and his people as a way of testing the waters — was that he somehow has information about his own doping that the United States Anti-Doping Agency somehow needs. As if USADA needs more than the 1,000 pages on Armstrong that it already has.
No matter. Armstrong leaks it that he’s thinking of confessing. Then one of his lawyers says no, no, no, that’s not true. And it is just more drama that has helped fuel Armstrong, along with his own competitiveness and all the drugs he was taking to stay ahead of the field, even as he told us for a decade and a half that he was the only clean guy in the race.
As you watch Armstrong panhandle for redemption on Thursday night and dupe everybody all over again, remember something U.S. District Court Judge Kenneth Karas said once in a White Plains courtroom as he sent an Olympic sprinter named Marion Jones to jail for her own lies about performance-enhancing drugs.
“(It’s) a very difficult thing to believe that a top-notch athlete, knowing that a razor-thin margin makes the difference, would not be keenly aware and very careful about what he or she put in her body and the effects,” Karas said that day, and then came with the money quote, that the idea that these athletes don’t know exactly what they are doing is a “worldwide lie.”
Lance Armstrong is a bigger and better worldwide lie.
Surely he has been coached the way Mark McGwire was coached when he made his confession, such as it was, about steroids to Bob Costas. Surely he will tell us that he did what he did because he was a cancer survivor trying to compete at the highest levels of a dirty sport. And that everybody else was doing it.
And then he will tell us that he had to maintain the lie, his own version of the worldwide lie — I’m clean, they’re dirty — to prop up Livestrong, his foundation that raises money for cancer survivors. He needed the yellow jerseys from the Tour de France to sell all those Livestrong yellow bracelets. At the heart of this “confession” from Lance Armstrong will be that he had to do a lot of bad things for the greater good, all the while getting richer and more famous himself and shamefully attacking anyone who dared suggest that he was anything less than an icon and living saint.
Frankie Andreu rode with Armstrong on the U.S. Postal Service team in 1998 and ’99 and 2000, and was once his friend, the way Andreu’s wife Betsy was. But then Frankie and Betsy Andreu testified that Armstrong had told cancer doctors in their presence that he had doped with EPO (Erythropoietin), human growth hormone and steroids.
This was all about a lawsuit from a Texas-based company Armstrong said was withholding a $5 million bonus from him. A company called SCA Promotions ended up paying Armstrong more than $7.5 million as a settlement covering the bonus and interest, and after it this is what Armstrong said:
“It’s over. We won. They lost. I was yet again completely vindicated.”
More of the worldwide lie. Maybe by then Armstrong was deep enough into it, and his own bizarre mythology, to think it was the truth.
This is what Betsy Andreu said on Saturday morning about Armstrong:
“(Armstrong) just kept getting richer. But for us, there was no profit in the truth. The myth was too big. Sure, we’re vindicated now, but that doesn’t pay our bills. At least we’ve kept our integrity, something (Armstrong) doesn’t have.”
Betsy Andreu said: “How do I explain to Oprah Winfrey how Lance tried to destroy us? And guess what? If Lance were still on top, Oprah Winfrey would still think we were crazy.”
Armstrong went after Frankie Andreu and his wife and a masseuse named Emma O’Reilly with everything he had, and if their character and reputation had to be savaged in the name of his own greater good, that was just the cost of doing business. And Armstrong did everything possible to destroy the reputation of a former Tour de France champion from this country named Greg LeMond. He went after LeMond and his wife Kathy and reporters and other cyclists and he sued newspapers for libel and won.
People now want this to be some kind of referendum on what you think about drugs in sports, as if somehow that is the real issue here. No it is not, that is just more cheap enabling for Lance Armstrong. The issue is the lying.
The other cyclists didn’t force him to lie, the media sure didn’t force him to lie, the anti-doping agencies didn’t force him to lie. Armstrong, Big Tex, did that all by himself, with this amazing, elaborate athletic Ponzi scheme.
Understand something about Armstrong: Whatever version of the truth he will give Oprah is nothing more than a last resort for him, even as he will certainly tell us about the lives of all the cancer patients he’s touched because of Livestrong. It will just be another example of Armstrong saying anything to save his own sorry self. This isn’t about somebody else’s life. Just his own.
Once Lance Armstrong, whose legend became so much bigger than the facts, was willing to say anything, hurt anybody, call people bitter or call them whores, who got in his way. Now he is willing to say anything to still make himself the hero of his own drama, the mythology he created and others helped create for him. That doesn’t make you a saint or an icon or a hero. It makes you a cornered rat.
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And then he will tell us that he had to maintain the lie, his own version of the worldwide lie — I’m clean, they’re dirty — to prop up Livestrong
A-ROD’S SPIN DOCTOR, ANOTHER BIG TEX DOPE & HAL’S PAYROLL
— That doctor, Bryan Kelly, from the Hospital for Special Surgery who announced the other day that A-Rod’s hip problems have nothing to do with his steroid use — somebody ought to ask him how many admitted steroid users he has treated have hip problems exactly like Alex Rodriguez’s.
Because unless there have been a lot, the doc really needs to blow these smiley-face theories of his out his ear.
By the way?
The only way a doctor is allowed to be this chatty about a patient is with the patient’s permission.
— Mike Westhoff is just the latest example of a Jet who can talk the way Taylor Swift can sing.
“Justified” is back on FX and better than ever.
Chuck Hagel is the end of the star search for the next Secretary of Defense?
— It is worth getting it on the record that at this point in the season Carmelo Anthony can’t be the MVP because Chris Paul of the Clippers is.
I just assumed that Kevin Garnett was chirping on Melo that he looked fat in that uniform.
It’s probably a good thing that the Nets didn’t decide to cancel the season when the Knicks started to run away from them.
— I love this idea that Roger Clemens was already a Hall of Famer before he is supposed to have gone to the needle in Toronto.
Here were the last four seasons Clemens had with the Red Sox before he began the most statistically ridiculous finishing kick any starting pitcher has ever had:
He was 11-14 in 1993, 9-7 in ’94, 10-5 in ’95, 10-13 in ’96.
He is 33 years old at that point in his career and coming off four seasons when his won-loss record is 40-39.
The Rocket, bless his heart, hasn’t won 200 games and the Red Sox don’t want him anymore and I would like to know on what planet he has punched a surefire ticket to Cooperstown at that point.
Now he wants you to think the media did this to him.
No, he did it to himself.
Another Big Tex living in a world of his very own.
— When you see “Zero Dark Thirty” — and you better see “Zero Dark Thirty” — you will understand that the biggest snub of all the Oscar nominations is Kathryn Bigelow not getting a Best Director nod for her amazing movie about the hunt for bin Laden.
— Hal Steinbrenner is right about his payroll, whether Yankee fans want to hear that or not.
And he is right to point out that only one team has ever needed a payroll bigger than $189 million to win a World Series, and that team happens to be the 2009 Yankees.
Steinbrenner’s probably scratching his head these days and wondering why he has committed more than $90 million next season to six players who will be over the age of 38: A-Rod, Jeter, Kuroda, Ichiro, Pettitte, Mo Rivera.
That’s more than Billy Beane gets to spend on a whole baseball team in Oakland.
You think the Giants have figured out yet why they don’t have a game this weekend?
What number do you think Rex is wearing in Woody’s tattoo?
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The Mike Lupica Show is heard Monday through Friday at noon on ESPN-98.7.
