Alex Gibney (2013)

When a sports competitor uses illegal substances to improve their chances, what do they feel in the moment of victory and in the longer term?  It’s a given that champions have a naturally and exceptionally strong will to win:  when they cheat their way to the top, is that will to win fully gratified by the very act of winning or is it frustrated, because the triumph has been engineered in a way that breaks the rules of competition?   Lance Armstrong, who won the Tour de France for seven consecutive years, admitted to Oprah Winfrey on her TV show in January 2013 that he used performance-enhancing drugs in all seven of those years (1999 to 2005 inclusive).  In both Alex Gibney’s documentary The Armstrong Lie and Stephen Frears’s The Program, a dramatised version of the cyclist’s story, Armstrong says, ‘I still feel I won those races’.  He said the same in a BBC television interview, earlier this year.  The Armstrong Lie isn’t as psychologically revealing about its subject as you might hope and The Program even less so.  But Armstrong’s grounds for still seeing himself as the winner of the Tours – even as the moral victor – are clear enough, and twofold.  First, he insists to Alex Gibney (and the evidence suggests this isn’t a lie) that the use of drugs was endemic in big-time road racing in the 1990s, when Armstrong was making his way up the international cycling ladder.  If you didn’t cheat, you wouldn’t win:  to Armstrong, this was tantamount to not doing your best to win.   Second, he wore his Tour yellow jerseys with the pride of a man who’d recovered from advanced testicular cancer (which had spread to his brain, lungs and abdomen); founded Livestrong, a non-profit organisation that helps cancer sufferers; and was continuing, through his sporting achievements, to inspire very many sick people.

Armstrong retired after winning his seventh Tour de France.  He decided to make a comeback in 2009 and Alex Gibney decided to make a documentary about the comeback (working title:  ‘The Road Back’).  Armstrong had been the subject of persistent and increasing accusations of drugs use since his first Tour win in 1999.  This was meant to be the renewal that rehabilitated the Tour de France – the 1998 Tour had been mired in drugs-taking controversy.  Instead, Armstrong ‘hid in plain sight’:  the suddenly improved, dominant form he showed in 1999 seemed, to many, too good to be true.  Ten years later, the allegations around the US Postal Service team and Armstrong in particular had only intensified – not least because Floyd Landis, his co-rider on the team since 2002, finished first in the Tour de France in 2006 (the year after Armstrong’s initial retirement) but was disqualified when he returned a positive dope test.  Alex Gibney, who admired Armstrong, was attracted by the former-champ-returns theme – especially since the former champ was by now thirty-seven and surely vulnerable to younger, stronger riders.  Gibney was evidently fascinated too by Armstrong’s professed determination, after all the rumours, to prove in 2009 that he was clean as well as a winner (though it’s not clear how winning clean in 2009, when drug-testing had presumably become more sophisticated, would have extinguished doubts about the earlier wins).  In the event, Armstrong didn’t win the 2009 Tour (he finished third) and the allegations against him didn’t stop.  In 2012, a year-long United States Anti-Doping Agency (USADA) investigation concluded that he had cheated throughout his glory years.  He was stripped of his seven Tour de France titles and received a lifetime ban from competitive cycling.   Although he didn’t appeal the decision, Armstrong still held back from admitting the charges against him and Gibney shelved plans for releasing his film.  Immediately following the Oprah interview in early 2013, Armstrong went back to Gibney to set the record straight.  The two men recorded another interview; Gibney resurrected his documentary and gave it a different title.  The 2013 interview features extensively, alongside 2009 interview footage, in The Armstrong Lie.

Gibney’s film features plenty of other talking heads.  Early on, one of them says, ‘This story isn’t about doping, it’s about power’.  This is true, even if The Armstrong Lie is very much about doping too – there’s a surfeit of description of the procedures involved in successful cheating.  Gibney does get across strongly, though, that power was in the hands of the cheats in international cycling in the 1990s and 2000s (and that ‘When everyone’s cheating, it becomes about who’s got the best doctors’).  Gibney also includes illustrations of how Armstrong wielded personal power, as the star of the US Postal Service team and with cycling’s governing bodies.  There are cherishable ironies in both sets of relationships. Floyd Landis, originally brought onto the team to protect Armstrong during Tour races, eventually did much to expose him to USADA et al.  Armstrong – said to have had close links to Hein Verbruggen, the then head of the Union Cycliste Internationale (UCI) – was a generous contributor to the organisation’s coffers.  He once gave UCI a $100k donation for state-of-the-art blood-testing equipment.

The Armstrong Lie, although it’s not a great documentary, is enough (and recent enough) to raise the question of whether The Program is surplus to requirements.  It should have helped that I saw Stephen Frears’s film in the cinema a few days before catching up with a recording made from television of The Armstrong Lie.  Even seen first, though, The Program is feeble.  The screenplay, by John Hodge, is based on Seven Deadly Sins: My Pursuit of Lance Armstrong, a 2012 book by David Walsh, a Sunday Times journalist.  Walsh is a significant character in The Program but Armstrong is the protagonist and, for better or worse, the focus of interest.  Since Frears and Hodge don’t even try to get inside Armstrong’s head, the movie seems a pointless exercise – especially when it’s unlikely many people in the audience won’t know what he did or how things turn out.  Stephen Frears shows little feel for the context:  a lot of the cycling sequences are sports-movie boilerplate.  Frears has a deserved reputation as a fine director of actors (even Steve Coogan was tolerable in his previous film, Philomena) – but not here.  Ben Foster wears Armstrong’s wrongdoing on his face in such a way as to suggest the seven-times Tour de France winner was, rather than a drugs cheat, a homicidal maniac (if looks could kill … )  It’s true the real Armstrong is charmless in front of the camera but he’s capable of a plausibility that Foster, with his relentless clenched intensity, lacks.  As the tenacious David Walsh, suspicious of Armstrong from the early stages of his first Tour win, Chris O’Dowd is full of righteous indignation:  he’s so anxious to expose the cyclist’s wrongdoing to the world that he shouts most of the time.  Playing the dodgy team doctor Michele Ferrari, Guillaume Canet wears a ludicrous wig and make-up and gives a performance to match them:  his Ferrari is less a sports medicine iconoclast than an egocentric bore.  The best acting comes from Jesse Plemons as Floyd Landis.   Landis is an extraordinary character, a young man from a devout Mennonite community in Pennsylvania, who becomes a sports celebrity – against the odds:  there’s a short scene in The Program in which young Floyd is sternly reminded by his father that he’s not supposed to enjoy bike-riding.   The film is unsurprisingly sketchy about Landis’s kinfolks’ reaction to his Tour de France disqualification but Jesse Plemons is good at hinting that Landis is always mindful of his heritage and – believably – bored by how long the Tour lasts when your role in the team is strictly a supporting one.

Whether in interviews with Alex Gibney or fielding questions at press conferences or inquiries, Lance Armstrong is always dead-eyed and dead unfunny, even on the rare occasions he means to be humorous.  It’s easy to say with hindsight that he’s not persuasive when insisting, as he does so often, that he’s clean but one of the most striking features of Gibney’s film is that many contemporary observers didn’t need hindsight to know the truth:  the drama comes from the meeting of the irresistible force of mounting evidence against him and the immovable object that is Lance Armstrong.  His position on his 2009 comeback becomes the epitome of his larger cycling career and his motivation in making the comeback more bizarrely compelling.  (It’s a sustained mystery of the story Gibney tells that Armstrong is an uninteresting as well as unappealing interviewee but his lying is fascinating.)  In 2013, he’s still denying that he took banned substances in 2009, even though Gibney lines up plenty of counter-testimony.  The point is also made that, if Armstrong hadn’t come back, his earlier transgressions would never have been proven.   He’s almost analogous to the serial killer, addicted both to murder and to making fools of the police, who eventually returns to the scene of the crime once too often.  (Maybe this explains Ben Foster’s interpretation of Armstrong …)

A crucial element of the Armstrong story is conspicuous by its absence from – or, at least, very limited presence in – The Armstrong Lie and The Program.  This is the matter of Armstrong’s cancer – his survival from the disease, his subsequent fund-raising and his meaning to other cancer sufferers.   While there’s recognition that the media were happy to give him the benefit of the doubt because he was such a great story, aspects of that story are ignored and questions unanswered in these two films.  The Program’s approach to Armstrong’s illness is entirely cursory, except that, like The Armstrong Lie, it gives considerable weight to a 1996 conversation between him and a doctor at the Indiana University Medical Center in Indianapolis.  This exchange took place shortly after the removal of tumours from Armstrong’s brain.  His cycling teammate Frankie Andreu and Frankie’s future wife, Betsy, were present, when the doctor asked Armstrong if he’d ever used performance-enhancing drugs.  The Andreus, years later, gave sworn testimony to the effect that Armstrong answered yes and, when asked which drugs, listed ‘growth hormone, cortisone, EPO, steroids and testosterone’.  (If this was the case, Armstrong was cheating well before he became a world-beating cheat.)  I didn’t understand why it wasn’t possible, once allegations against Armstrong had become a legal matter, to see if his medical records – or the Indianapolis doctor concerned? – could substantiate the Andreus’ claims.  The lack of reference to this possibility is surprising in Gibney’s documentary.  (The weakness of The Program quickly lowers expectations of what it’s going to deliver.)

The omissions in relation to his illness and charitable work are partly the result of anxiety on the part of the film-makers not to dilute their characterisation of Armstrong as an outrageous fraud who consistently abused and eventually destroyed the widespread trust that he enjoyed.  I think it’s also because some of the issues involved here are tough both to address and to decide.  How many patients diagnosed in 1996 with stage-three testicular cancer which had metastasised in lung and brain beat the disease to the extent that they were alive and cancer-free seventeen years later?   Perhaps it’s too dramatically neat to see as two sides of the same coin the tunnel-vision determination that Armstrong showed in combating and recovering from cancer, and then in winning the Tour de France at all costs; but it’s frustrating that Alex Gibney doesn’t at least explore this possibility.  The elephant in the room of Gibney’s film is the silence of cancer patients to whom Armstrong gave hope (and for whom Livestrong, at the time the film was made, had raised $300m).  We see cancer victims, particularly young ones, but we barely hear from them.  Gibney may want to respect their privacy but it’s hard to believe some people wouldn’t have liked to talk to him – and it won’t do to say, in response, that The Armstrong Lie is about Lance Armstrong, not about others.  Armstrong insists that his performance-enhanced victories were life-enhancing, even life-saving, for many.  Do these people agree that they derived psychosomatic benefit from Armstrong while he was riding high?  If they do, does his fall from grace invalidate that benefit – or doesn’t it?

27 October and 1 November 2015