Lance Armstrong has been a remarkable gift to the media in many ways. An unlikely American victor in the Eurocentric sport of pro cycling, he won the Tour de France seven times after being stricken by cancer, which had threatened to end his racing career entirely. He started a cancer foundation, Livestrong, whose name appeared on bracelets worn by many Americans. And then he ran into deep trouble over accusations that he had doped his way to the top of the sport.
He will complete the media arc Monday night when he sits down with Oprah Winfrey, presumably to acknowledge that his critics were right all along. His expected confession will be one of the most ungainly U-turns in the history of sport. With a decade of vehement denials behind him, Mr. Armstrong has a very long distance to travel, and this time there will be no shortcuts. The interview will be shown on the OWN network Thursday night.
It will make for riveting television, something he noted in a telephone interview with my colleague Juliet Macur on Saturday.
“I think Oprah understands the pressure of this interview,” he said. “She’s clever. She’s seen people questioning whether she will go deep. I’ve assured her that I want her to go deep with her questions, and I’m going to answer those questions openly, honestly and with full transparency. And, quite frankly, I’m looking forward to it.”
Remember that Ms. Winfrey served as both a conduit and a scold when James Frey decided to come clean about the literary fraud behind “A Million Little Pieces.” But it’s worth noting that the fraud that Mr. Armstrong is accused of perpetrating is a far more complex one, full of scientific nuance and deeper implications.
Ms. Winfrey will have to work hard to get beyond the generic reflex of public confession – he did wrong, he’s sorry and now everything is new again – and into the specifics of his behavior. A trip to Ms. Winfrey’s naughty corner may help put his athletic transgressions in context, but the tougher issue may be his behavior since then.
Among other issues, an article Monday in The New York Times raised questions about the relationship between his charitable and business interests. Mr. Armstrong’s task is also complicated by the fact that he has relentless and vigorously denied the allegations for a decade, and more darkly, bullied and sometimes ruined those who questioned his version of events. Any admissions he makes will provide little comfort to the legitimate athletes he forced from the sport, the teammates and their spouses whom he ruined, and the journalists who lost their jobs or access because they told the truth.
The Sunday Times, which made a payment to Mr. Armstrong after he sued the newspaper for libel in 2004, is now suing Mr. Armstrong to recover $1.5 million. On Sunday, the newspaper took out an advertisement in The Chicago Tribune, Ms. Winfrey’s hometown newspaper, that was written by David Walsh, one of the many journalists he attacked.
Among the questions in the advertisement were “Did you sue The Sunday Times to shut us up?” and “Why have you chosen Oprah Winfrey for your first interview as a banned athlete?”
No one can predict what Mr. Armstrong will say, or for that matter, what questions Ms. Winfrey will ask, although it is a safe bet he will be well coached. Mr. Armstrong has hired Mark Fabiani, the former White House special counsel who advised Bill Clinton during the Monica Lewinsky affair.
It could also turn out that journalists who believed in him for years could turn on him, as Buzz Bissinger did in a brutal post Monday on the Daily Beast. Mr. Bissinger wrote about a cover story he did for Newsweek in which he defended Mr. Armstrong. He now says, “Don’t believe a word he says, because not a word he says can be believed.”
My cover story about Lance Armstrong, my affirmation of faith, was the worst piece of opinion I have ever written. I did a disservice to myself. More important I did a disservice to readers. I did believe what I wrote at the time. I do believe in staking out strong positions. We all do as columnists today, because of the world we live in, craving to differentiate ourselves from the thousands who populate the Internet every hour.
Other journalists who never had much faith in Mr. Armstrong are now worried that he will escape true consequence. Andy Shen runs the racing blog NYVelocity and was part of a small cadre of journalists who relentlessly pursued the real story behind Mr. Armstrong’s miraculous career.
“My biggest worry is that this gambit is going to work,” Mr. Shen said. “He’ll manage to convince an audience unfamiliar with the sport that all he did was cheat a bunch of cheaters and the best man still won. That’s not the case.”
Confession and forgiveness are fundamental parts of the American media narrative. It is familiar to all of us and, in a way, comforting. But when Mr. Armstrong arrives at some version of the truth in his interview with Ms. Winfrey, one question will linger. Is he sorry for what he did or sorry he got caught?
Article source: http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/01/14/armstrong-and-winfrey-familiar-names-in-a-time-honored-ritual/?partner=rss&emc=rss