Apparently Lance Armstrong is warming up for Monday’s interview with Oprah Winfrey by calling people in the cycling community to apologize.
[AP reported on Monday that Armstrong met face-to-face with the staff as Livestrong (formerly the Lance Armstrong Foundation) and apologized for letting them down and putting the charity at risk. He did not, however, make a direct confession.]
Lance Armstrong
The Washington Post reports that Armstrong “made a series of phone calls to apologize directly to key people in the cycling community with whom he had not been truthful about his part in sports doping.”
No word yet, though, as to who those people are or what exactly he said.
Several newspapers, including the Boston Globe, are reporting that Armstrong will offer a “limited” confession when the interview taped Monday appears on Oprah! on Thursday. It will be streamed on Oprah.com.
I’m not sure what constitutes a “limited” confession.
Does he just admit to doing something bad during his cycling career but refuse to go into the details because he might incriminate himself? He faces a passel of legal actions.
Does he confess to lying to his fans? To lying to his family? To forcing others to dope and possibly ruining their reputations? To making life hell for Greg Lemond, Frankie and Betsy Andreu, British cycling writer David Walsh, masseuse Emma O’Reilly, Tyler Hamilton … ?
Armstrong e-mailed the Associated Press this weekend to share the guidelines for the interview:
‘”I told her to go wherever she wants and I’ll answer the questions directly, honestly, candidly. That’s all I can say.”
Some columnists are spewing more venom than a Texas rattler on the eve of the interview. What a couple are saying:
It’s not likely to be about the truth.
Or about cleansing a guilty conscience.
Or about clearing the air to help cycling’s Sisyphean efforts to rid itself of the anything-goes attitude that prevailed for at least a decade and has yet to disappear, reducing the sport’s credibility to zero.
That was the decade during which Lance Armstrong used plain old chemistry and the alchemy of moral relativism to turn himself into a global idol as false as the golden calf.
—– Philip Hersh, Chicago Tribune
To the end Lance Armstrong, desperate to remain relevant, somehow is allowed to control his own narrative. So after all the lies from Armstrong from across all the years, lies about himself and about all those who dared to tell the truth about him, there comes one last one:
That he still has something we want. To the end this guy thinks he can play the whole world for suckers. …
— Mike Lupica, New York Daily News
Rather than fess up to his clearly documented life of fraudulent behavior, Lance will jump up on Oprah’s sofa and announce that he’s going after Katie Holmes.
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