Lance
In ESPN’s 30 for 30, Zenovich cultivates a forum for Lance Armstrong and company to be something unexpected: If not trustworthy, at least brutally honest.
by Michael Augsberger
Never louder are the protests than from the guilty. That is fore in the mind heading into ESPN’s documentary Lance—the finger-waggling denials of baseball cheats and the defiant, sanctimonious posturing of Lance Armstrong. And yet I left thinking something else, how the most pious of upbringings can offer no defense from the siren-call of vengeance. Whatever you feel it must take for a man to disguise his scandalous doping under the cloak of cancer, it must require something quite similar for Floyd Landis to shatter the peloton at no gain for himself. Some surely applaud his whistle-blowing courage; Armstrong would say some men just want to see the world burn.
In truth, though, cycling’s doping culture of secrecy was a house of cards waiting for enough pressure to build on just one weak spot. The racers never accounted for one of their own’s disillusionment. It is borderline miraculous it took so long. The economic and peculiar team-building forces that give the sport its unique personality were the same forces that combined to ostracize the bitter American champion no one should have crossed. Not Lance—rather, Landis, who rose from humble Amish Country to the podium on the Champs-Élysées and, once blacklisted, brought down the hellfire.
Omertà was a word often used to describe the silence among the cyclists’ boys’ club. Landis sneeringly dismisses it. Mafia hitmen go back to work after prison. The brotherhood cares for their families. Landis feels he took the bullet for an entire system of cheating, served his time, and returned to a career death sentence. There was no brotherhood. In his estimation, the way teams are built and die, there never was.
It is this and the many other honest, searing flares of temper that give Lance a rapturous allure. The anguish, both self-imposed and in response to a corrupt system, has built up over decades and finally finds an outlet. Armstrong has been humbled (though certainly not impoverished), but he finds his rage against Landis righteous, and we can understand that. Perhaps his former teammate (whom Armstrong helped recruit) finds no brotherhood in cycling, but much of Armstrong’s anger is not so much over how he was treated, but only over himself by extension. He knows he deserved his public scourging, but surely not, he says, his great rival Jan Ullrich, shut up in a psychiatric hospital. Or Marco Pantani, whose disgrace led to his death.
Come on—does Armstrong’s anger over their treatment really outpace his anger over getting caught himself? Does it add more fuel? Is it more posturing? We get to see and decide, as director Marina Zenovich gets a stunning, real ‘performance’ from Armstrong. Even in deception, spy film Allied reminds me, it is best to keep the emotions real. Whatever his angle, if one exists, the emotions are definitely real, the arguments understandable. If he’s not trustworthy, he’s at least brutally honest. One of the best decisions ESPN and Zenovich made was to un-censor the film’s language, not easy to do even on cable. From the very first frames, Armstrong is giving himself the finger in recalling his preparation for the onslaught of vitriol his downfall initially earned him. More than that, he is unfiltered in every way. Each interviewee is as well, and we need that when the very basis for the film is our evaluating the veracity of a lifelong liar.
Not only did the openness cultivated by Zenovich persuade me, but so did Armstrong’s seeming desire for catharsis. I sensed a definite Frost/Nixon quality there, in which the weight of the world drops from his shoulders and he can finally help us understand fully. Why would he be lying now? By the time we’ve seen him suing his accusers and discrediting his team’s massage therapist Emma O’Reilly as a “whore,” there is nothing more to protect. It is no excuse. And yet the forces against him were so great.
There have been many outstanding 30 for 30s. This is the most riveting since OJ: Made in America won an Oscar. The Last Dance—thrilling in its own right—packed in 90s nostalgia, athlete mythology, and shared-experience cultural phenomena—both then and now, as the epidemic shuttered us in to watch. It served Michael Jordan’s legend; it built it further. Do you really remember how herculean the mythology surrounding Lance Armstrong was? Jordan performed superhuman feats in a forum we Americans know well, with a ball and on an x-y axis. Sports fans knew what to compare that to. Lance’s mythology, though, was built on life struggle, survival against an enemy whose afflicted we unilaterally venerate. It was life or death. Throughout, brought on by himself and his sport, it was about good and evil in a way Jordan’s faults never truly were. Neither was the Bulls’ gossipy, self-serving infighting tinged with the same gravitas as the ultimate betrayals among the doping cyclists. Lance had held the moral high ground. Now he answers the moral questions, with charisma and reflection, and it is captivating.
4 of 4 maillots jaunes