ARMSTRONG'S BIG TEST: Fallen sports icon Lance Armstrong's "no-holds-barred interview" with Oprah Winfrey is airing Thursday night on her OWN network. AP Sports Columnist John Leicester is watching the broadcast and giving his impressions of the interview as it unfolds: ___ SIGHS OF RELIEF IN SWITZERLAND: The sport's bosses at the International Cycling Union will be breathing a sigh of relief. The big questions have always been not only how did Armstrong get away with doping but also whether he paid cycling's powerbrokers to cover up tests, to look the other way — which they insist he did not. Armstrong says money he donated to the ICU to buy a drug testing machine was "not in exchange for any cover up." The ICU's bosses will also doubtless be pleased to hear Armstrong suggest that the drug testing program it uses now, based around a so-called "biological passport" that monitors riders' blood values, is a deterrent to doping. Believe it or not, Armstrong says he did not dope when he came out of retirement and rode in the Tours of 2009 and 2010. "Absolutely not." ___ CHEATERS ARE DELUDED: Armstrong's words confirm what some of us who cover sports have long suspected: to dope, cheaters have to delude themselves, believe their own lies. Armstrong says that doping didn't feel wrong at the time, that he didn't feel bad about it and that he didn't feel as if he was cheating. He even had to look up the dictionary definition of cheat, he says. "I viewed it as a level playing field," he tells Winfrey. But it wasn't. For starters, not all riders doped like he did. And not all dopers take the same products or get the same performance enhancing boost from them. Basically, Armstrong seems to be telling us that not only did he dope but he also didn't let it prick his conscience. ___ ARMSTRONG THE HUMBLE: Stunning to see Armstrong seemingly so humble and introspective. That was something he used to have no time for. "Introspection doesn't get you anywhere in a race," he had said in his biography, "It's not about the bike." Cynics may think that he has simply been well coached for this interview with Winfrey. But he seems to realize that his stock is at rock bottom and that he can't afford to duck and dive Winfrey with his answers. "I'm not the most believable guy in the world," he says. "I am deeply flawed." ___ SO MUCH FOR ALL THOSE TESTS: Remember all that hot air Armstrong used to spout about being the most tested athlete ever? Well, turns out he never worried that he would get caught. "No," was his simple answer when Winfrey asked him about that. That will come as a shock to his supporters — are there many left? — who bought Armstrong's line that not testing positive actually proved something. The line from sports now is that drug tests are far more reliable than they used to be when Armstrong and his peers were injecting the kitchen sink and getting away with it. Still, it's downright discouraging to think that testing was so ineffective. So what about all the athletes in the all the others sports? This admission that cheating wasn't that difficult should be a wake-up call: testing must improve. ___ THE TRUTH IS OUT: "One big lie," says Armstrong, putting the final nail into his myth. To their credit, Armstrong and Winfrey haven't beaten around the bush. From the get-go, we hear Armstrong say "yes" — he doped for all seven of his Tour de France victories. Blood doping, the blood booster EPO, human growth hormone, testosterone — the panoply of drugs and methods that many riders used when cycling became chemical warfare in the 1990s. Armstrong is being surprisingly candid. Few will dispute that doping was part of the culture in cycling. But his critics say Armstrong perpetuated it. ___ WHO'D HAVE THOUGHT IT: In 2003, when The Associated Press first dispatched me to the Tour de France to cover a guy from Texas who was on his way to becoming the race's most successful champion, I never imagined for one moment that a decade later I'd be waiting to hear him say that we all should have stayed home. Not that there weren't suspicions that Armstrong might be doping. They had been around at least since his first Tour de France victory in 1999, when dope tests found traces of a corticosteroid in his urine. Armstrong blamed a prescription skin cream used to treat saddle sores. But Armstrong's doping appeared to be a such a well-kept secret that he would take it to his grave. To learn now that he was cheating like many other riders would not be stunning. Didn't we know that? But to hear him admit it would be. Do sports stories get any bigger than the rise and fall of Armstrong? One is tempted to say that you couldn't make this stuff up. But I guess that's why people around the world will be tuning in: because it seems that you can. ___ NOT A MOMENT TOO SOON: Nearly 14 years after first winning the bike race that turned him into a global sports megastar, is Lance Armstrong finally going to tell the truth — or his latest version of it — about the role performance-enhancing drugs played in his career and seven Tour de France victories? It's not as though he has much choice. The evidence gathered by the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency of systematic drug use on his U.S. Postal Service cycling team was so overwhelming that Armstrong could look foolish and deluded if he insists to Oprah Winfrey that he rode clean, as he's always done until now. But, at this point, who still believes that? Armstrong hasn't spoken at length and publicly about the thick dossier of evidence USADA published in October. To now admit to doping after years of denial will undoubtedly be painful and embarrassing for Armstrong, a proud and intensely competitive man. But this is also an opportunity for Armstrong to start the long trek back from disgrace and try to seek forgiveness. Will he seize it or make matters worse by being insincere and sparing with the facts and apologies? ___ WHO IS USING WHOM: For Armstrong to speak first to Winfrey and not to a roomful of sports journalists who have followed his rise and fall smacks of a public relations exercise. If Armstrong's purpose was to help his sport rather than himself, he would have come clean not to America's high priestess of televised confessions but to anti-doping officials who wanted to learn firsthand how he and his team pulled off what USADA called "the most sophisticated, professionalized and successful doping program that sport has ever seen." His choice of interviewer will mainline Armstrong into America's living rooms. That's where he needs to start repairing his tattered reputation to become marketable again. Speaking to Winfrey is a play for forgiveness — not from the cycling community but from a far broader audience, including disappointed fans of the cancer fighter and viewers who don't care for cycling but are hungry consumers of celebrity and the modern pantomime of public disgrace and redemption. Landing Armstrong and becoming confessor to the man who for so long looked the least likely candidate in sports to admit to doping is a massive coup for Winfrey. But she could take some heat if she didn't ask the tough questions and if the material proves unworthy of her network's decision to spread it out over two nights, not one as first announced. ___ THE TIMING: Continued... |