There was no better cyclist than Lance Armstrong during his supremacy of the sport from 1999 to 2005, when he won seven successive Tour de France titles.
Detractors claimed he owed his success to performance enhancing drugs, but Armstrong strenuously denied the accusation, reminding critics he had passed a succession of drug tests.
In 2013, he finally came clean, admitting he had lied and broken the rules. “I was prepared to say anything to defend myself,” he said.
The admission cost him dearly.
In The Armstrong Lie, a persuasive documentary screened at the Toronto International Film Festival and now playing in Toronto theatres, Alex Gibney dissects the man and his fraudulent career.
Gibney had originally intended to make a movie about Armstrong’s comeback in 2009. But when Armstrong, a survivor of testicular cancer, fell under suspicion as a drug user, Gibney changed the theme of his film.
Beyond arguing that Armstrong used his fame to discredit critics, conceal his doping and enforce a code of silence on his fellow riders, Gibney claims his fans were implicitly complicit in his elaborate coverup because they preferred a “beautiful lie” to the “ugly truth.”
Quite an indictment, and quite a film.