How Armstrong took us for a ride

London:

Normally when I leave the cinema what I want is a pizza. Or maybe, if it is a particularly draining comedy involving Robert De Niro and Sylvester Stallone, a stiff drink.

After watching Alex Gibney’s brilliant new documentary The Armstrong Lie, however, I felt in urgent need of something I had never before associated with the movies: a shower. Knowing what we know now, watching Lance Armstrong in all his calculating, self-righteous mendacity up on the big screen is an experience that puts you in urgent search of the soap.

“I’ve never met a better liar. And I’ve met a bunch,” says Gibney, the director who has made acclaimed documentaries about the Roman Catholic Church, Enron and Julian Assange.

“He’s good, he’s real good. The best.” And Gibney knows what he is talking about. He experienced the Armstrong fibbing technique at first hand, witnessed it at close quarters as it poured down his lens. Indeed, the lie came close to undermining his entire credibility as a documentary maker.

Back in 2009, he had been invited by Armstrong to film the inside story of his comeback to the Tour de France. After the most fleeting of retirements, the seven-time winner was remounting his bike, back pounding up Alps, threading through the fields of sunflowers, rattling over the cobbles. And he wanted a record for posterity, to mark his place in the pantheon. So he sought out America’s most renowned, fiercely forensic, independent documentary maker to shoot him in action.

Incredible fall

“I went along for the ride,” says Gibney now of that summer. “I thought I was filming a tale of wholesome redemption.” At the time, there was many a sceptic who could have put him right on that, insisting that the Texan’s incredible achievements were chemically propelled, that this was nothing more than a mobile pharmacy pedalling through Provence.

For most of us, though, including the nine million people around the world who wore one of those yellow Livestrong charity wrist bands that celebrated his incredible victory over testicular cancer, the guy was an unimpeachable hero, a man who had raised hundreds of millions to help alleviate the disease.

Given the subsequent revelations about doping, bullying and lying, that he was the mastermind of systematic drug-cheating in his sport on an industrial scale, Gibney shudders when he thinks of the effect a supportive film would have wrought on his credibility.

“I think I was lucky,” he says, happy in the understatement. “Hey, listen all journalists are lied to every day of the week. But I’m p----- off that I was used as a prop. He’d got this guy Don Catlin, the leading anti-doping campaigner, who was going to test him every day to prove he wasn’t doping. I was like the cinematic equivalent of Don Catlin. It was all part of the Armstrong narrative: how can I be cheating, I’ve got Alex Gibney on board?”

Early last year, when the extent of Armstrong’s fabrications became clear, Gibney contacted the rider and told him he was owed an interview of explanation. And he got one.

Not as emotionally wrought as the one he gave to Oprah. But perhaps more chilling in its cold, hard matter-of-fact tone. With the interview as his film’s centrepiece, Gibney then revisited the footage he had shot in 2009 using it to shed some light on the Armstrong methodology, the way he had used it to keep one step ahead of detection for so long.

Akin to Assange

The result is a film that neatly counterbalances the reality we now know with the fantasy the rider steadfastly maintained. Armstrong is, Gibney reckons, on a par with the Australian with whom he spectacularly fell out during filming of his acclaimed documentary We Steal Secrets: The Story of WikiLeaks. “He’s very like Julian Assange,” he says. “Both are afflicted with this thing I’m obsessed by: noble cause corruption. I used to perceive it as ironic if good people do bad things. I’m now convinced we’re hard-wired for moral mediocrity. The more you see someone with a grand cause the more you can almost expect there’ll be something at the other end of the spectrum.”

While still receiving threats from Assange sympathisers, he says he has yet to receive a single negative communication about Armstrong. “But there is this sense with all these people I’ve filmed that they are undone by their arrogance.”

“Honesty is an elusive concept,” the director smiles. “I think there are times in the film he is telling the truth and times when you can’t depend on what he says. You just can’t trust him anymore. There can be no trust.”

— The Telegraph Group Ltd, London 2014