It was vintage Armstrong, at once belittling his critics, burnishing his own legend and scripting another Hollywood-ready line to a story that spoke only of heroism and sporting immortality.
That golden narrative, weakened and wobbled over the intervening years by a drip-drip of accusation, evidence and testimony, may now have been washed away forever.
The US Anti-Doping Agency’s long-awaited report into the methods used by Armstrong and his team-mates to achieve his sainted status is unequivocal.
The report describes those methods as “the most sophisticated, professionalized and successful doping programmed that sport has ever seen”, run by a “serial cheat” through “the use, administration and trafficking of performance-enhancing drugs and methods”.
Armstrong, a modern-day American icon way beyond the narrow confines of his tainted sport, is accused of not just fixing a race, or a match, or even a season. He has fixed an era. He has duped a nation.
“Say it isn’t so, Joe,” that young Chicago White Sox fan is supposed to have asked of ‘Shoeless’ Joe Jackson as the first great American sporting scandal broke almost a century ago., external
Is there a chance, Lance? Could Armstrong emerge from this storm still clinging to his halo, with any semblance of his reputation still intact?
His lawyers have declared Useda’s report a witch-hunt, a kangaroo court “based largely on axe-grinders, serial perjurers, coerced testimony, sweetheart deals and threat-induced stories”.
The 1,000 pages of forensic evidence would suggest otherwise. Armstrong acolytes might scoff at the testimony of self-confessed dopers Tyler Hamilton and Floyd Landis, even if others would not. But those two are joined by nine other former US Postal team-mates, including such loyal lieutenants as George Hincapie, Frankie Andreu and Levi Leipheimer.
Between them they describe, in rich, grotesque detail, both the broad scope and the daily minutiae of an unprecedented doping regime. Alongside them stand thousands of words of scientific evidence, financial records and email exchanges. It is exhaustive, meticulous and damning.
Leave a Reply