THE ARMSTRONG LIE
**1/2
DIRECTED BY Alex Gibney
STARS Lance Armstrong, Michele Ferrari
While the sports and entertainment arenas may be packed with far too many arrogant pricks to count — Michael Jordan, Steve Smith, James Cameron and on and on and on — a key figure among this egotistical elite is Lance Armstrong, the world-famous cyclist who won the Tour de France an amazing seven times. On the surface, Armstrong's story couldn't be more inspiring — a superb athlete, an inspirational human being, a cancer survivor and a great humanitarian (he founded the Livestrong Foundation for cancer patients). It's no wonder he was adored by millions of Americans, and it's no wonder that a documentary celebrating his achievements was being prepped as he returned from his 2005 retirement in order to participate in the 2009 Tour de France. But that was then, this is now, and the documentary that has finally seen the light of day has morphed from a celebration into a condemnation.
Alex Gibney, director of the Oscar-winning Taxi to the Dark Side and the excellent Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, planned to call his Armstrong ode The Road Back. But once the doping allegations that had plagued Armstrong throughout most of his career finally took hold following his 2009 comeback attempt, the project was dropped, resurfacing now as The Armstrong Lie. Much of the footage still charts the cyclist's efforts during the 2009 Tour de France, only now it's sharing room with newer material, much of it taken after Armstrong's January 2013 interview with Oprah Winfrey in which he admitted to taking banned, performance-enhancement drugs throughout his consecutive championship seasons from 1999 to 2005. Gibney gathers interviews with many of the people circling Armstrong at the time, including teammates who were also caught doping (the film's underlying thread is the thorough corruption of the sport of professional cycling, with most of the participants of the day guilty of pedaling under the influence); the journalists who smelled something fishy from the very start and never quit their pursuit of the truth; the sleazy doctor Michele Ferrari, who was responsible for Armstrong's highly sophisticated doping regimen; and the few who were courageous enough to stand up to Armstrong's bullying tactics and thereafter had to deal with lawsuits and slander.
While never dull, The Armstrong Lie is too long at 122 minutes, with much of the material feeling repetitive and far from illuminating. Gibney structures the film in a back-and-forth style that moves (sometimes clumsily) between years and incidents, and charting a more chronological path might have provided the movie with a cumulative punch at the end. And while most of the saga's participants are name-checked, I do wish there would have been more of a salute to Greg LeMond, a fierce anti-doping crusader and the only American to have ever won the Tour de France (thrice, in fact) without the use of any drugs. He's not as famous as Lance Armstrong, of course, but he's the real champion, and maybe one day The Armstrong Lie will be joined on store shelves by The LeMond Legacy.