Yahoo Movies Lance Armstrong states obvious explaining snowball of his '10,000 lies'
ESPN was looking for another splash when it announced “Lance,” its latest 30 for 30 that delves into the “good, bad and ugly” of disgraced cycling star Lance Armstrong, would move up to a May release.
Yet the ratings drop-off from “The Last Dance” to the first part of “Lance” was steep with less than 1 million viewers tuning in for Armstrong’s story. While there are plenty of potential reasons for that, one may be that his already well-covered story is, well, obvious.
“Nobody dopes and is honest. You’re not,” Armstrong said in a clip for Part 2 of the series airing on Sunday (H/T For The Win). “The only way you can dope and be honest is if nobody ever asks you. which is not realistic. The second somebody asks you, you lie.”
Armstrong explained the snowball of that lie, which he said in his case “might be 10,000 lies.” Then he reinforced the lie to media. And finally it really hit a head when he began filing lawsuits against anyone — journalists, friends, colleagues — who said he was doping. All to protect the first lie.
“So that’s why it was 100 times worse,” he said. “Because we all lied.”
The 48-year-old who finished atop the field in seven consecutive Tour de France competitions (1999-2005) was not the only cyclist found to be doping. He was clearly the most well-known and headline-worthy, given his fist-on-the-desk insistence he wasn’t doing anything illegal.
That isn’t to say there’s nothing interesting about the docuseries. In Part I, Armstrong said his doping started at the age of 21, about four years before he revealed he was diagnosed with testicular cancer. He was asked if he thought he got cancer because of doping.
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