Again, both answers are correct. How about this one:
A respectable American family man is lauded for his fortitude after he pulls through unspeakably dangerous, almost certain-death circumstances. He becomes a celebrity and national hero. He earns the respect and trust of many of America’s most influential people. He even contemplates running for public office at the national level. This man, however, has a secret: He’s duped the American people. What he’s been so thoroughly lionized for doing is, in fact, the opposite of what he’s actually done.
Was this
- Nicholas Brody on Homeland, or
- Lance Armstrong, allegedly, in real life?
You get the picture.
The “golden age of TV” has offered fans plenty of variations on the story of the seemingly upstanding guy with a disturbing secret life; the one who, it’s revealed as the series unfolds, doesn’t mind lying, and privately doesn’t believe conventional rules apply to him. (Walt, Don, Brody, The Sopranos’ Tony Soprano, House of Cards’s Frank Underwood, and Dexter’s Dexter Morgan.) The shorthand term we’ve often come to use for this frequently fascinating category of duplicitous, morally questionable-to-downright-evil protagonists is “antihero.”
The Lance Armstrong depicted in Reed Albergotti and Vanessa O’Connell’s damning new book, Wheelmen: Lance Armstrong, the Tour De France, and the Greatest Sports Conspiracy Ever, isn’t as bloodthirsty as some of the aforementioned bad-guy protagonists. But he’s nonetheless something like an antihero. Albergotti and O’Connell, two Wall Street Journal reporters who covered the long doping-scandal saga that eventually cost Armstrong his record-breaking seven Tour de France titles, conducted more than 100 interviews with federal investigators, anti-doping agency officials, and the cyclist’s former teammates in the process of writing Wheelmen. Their compiled testimonies, combined with detailed background research, form a portrait of an athlete dangerously obsessed with winning and with protecting his own idea of himself as a winner—both in sports and otherwise. So much so that he presented a benevolent, Superman-like public persona to the sports world, one that emphasized perseverance and integrity, while secretly running (and aggressively protecting) what the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency later called “the most sophisticated, professionalized and successful doping program that sport has ever seen.”
It’s a chilling tale, and many of the anecdotes Albergotti and O’Connell collected sound like they were actually crafted in a TV-drama writers’ room. The 2004 Tour de France, for instance, found Armstrong riding alongside Italian cyclist Filippo Simeoni. Simeoni had testified against Armstrong’s longtime doctor Michele Ferrari, alleging that Ferrari had told Simeoni “how and when to use doping products.” Armstrong then told the press Simeoni was a liar; Simeoni sued Armstrong for defamation. According to the authors,
when he saw Simeoni making for the breakaway, Armstrong was so enraged that he left the peloton and chased him down. As he put his hand on Simeoni’s back, the television announcers couldn’t quite figure out what Armstrong was doing. Speaking in Italian, Lance told Simeoni: “You made a mistake when you testified against Ferrari and you made a mistake when you sued me. I have a lot of time and money and I can destroy you."
It’s not hard to imagine Kevin Spacey’s disturbingly cordial Frank Underwood—who also seizes control of his own media narrative and threatens to ruin others’ reputations in his pursuit of personal glory—delivering a threat like that. And in March 2009,
Armstrong returned from a training ride in the south of France to discover an official from the AFLD, the French anti-doping agency, waiting for him, ready to take a urine sample. … Armstrong, who was with [U.S. Postal Service team boss Johan] Bruyneel, got off his bike and darted inside his house while Bruyneel blocked the drug tester from entering. After twenty minutes—theoretically enough time to manipulate his bodily fluids to avoid testing positive—Armstrong came out and submitted to the test.
Anti-doping regulations state that an athlete must stay within the sample collector’s sight at all times once he or she has shown up to conduct a test—and thus, Armstrong was in violation of protocol. Once news outlets picked up the story, he explained that he hadn’t expected to be subject to testing by the French authorities, and that he’d run inside to make a phone call and check the tester’s credibility. “But that didn’t explain,” Albergotti and O’Connell add, “why Armstrong went inside and took a shower.”