What really gets me is how he absolutely betrayed his mother, who worked her ass off to help him with his career, and his kids, by lying and cheating his way to fame and fortune. The list of victims of Lance Armstrong is long.
The lowest and most alienating moment came when Armstrong purported not to remember whether he had sued Emma O'Reilly, the team's massage therapist, whom he'd labelled an alcoholic and a prostitute after she blew the whistle. Winfrey had given Armstrong an easy opportunity to apologise to O'Reilly, but his self-absorption made that impossible. "We sued so many people, I don't even … I'm sure we did," he said.
If there was a detectible emotion, it was that Armstrong was enjoying himself – which is a disaster, in crisis-management terms. Not that this should have been shocking. He had already shown an epic disregard for the rules of competitive cycling, so it was hardly surprising that he showed a similar disregard for the rules of the Oprah confessional. Winfrey never once elicited a shred of empathy on Armstrong's part. But the likeliest explanation for that, to judge from his responses on Thursday night, was that there wasn't any there.
His "confession" wasn't a genuine act of contrition, by the way. There was an ulterior motive:
Armstrong’s reason for coming clean was not to unburden himself of the deception he fought to keep secret for so long. It was to take the first step toward mitigating the lifetime ban from Olympic sports that he received from the United States Anti-Doping Agency in the fall, according to people close to him who did not want their names published because they wanted to stay in Armstrong’s good graces.
Antidoping officials need to hear more from Armstrong than just an apology and a rough outline of his doping. They need details. And lots of them.
“Anything he says on TV would have no impact whatsoever under the rules on his lifetime suspension,” Tygart said.
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