In 2008, back when Armstrong was still more or less a beloved public figure, Gibney set out to make a documentary film about Armstrong’s return to professional cycling after having retired in 2005. He was granted extraordinary access to Armstrong’s life: He interviewed Armstrong frequently, filmed his training and his life at home with his children, and eventually traveled with Armstrong and his team on the 2009 Tour de France—a race Armstrong was sure he could, and would, win. This was going to be the victory that restored good, clean order to the drug-addled sport.
Today, Gibney admits he knew he should have been more skeptical of Armstrong’s all-consuming ambition, given the doping allegations that had quietly begun to pile up. But Gibney, caught up in the emotional momentum of Armstrong’s comeback, went to work making the film anyway. Matt Damon had signed on to provide voiceover narration, and the documentary known as The Road Back was on its way to release. Then, in 2010, Armstrong’s former teammate, the disgraced 2006 Tour de France champion Floyd Landis, told ABC’s Nightline in a prime-time interview that Armstrong had received blood transfusions and used PEDs for much of his career. Gibney immediately put the film on hold; more allegations followed, including the now-infamous report the USADA released in 2012.
At this point, some filmmakers would understandably toss their footage into the garbage and spit on it for good measure. But Gibney instead picked apart his documentary, insisted on one last interview with Armstrong in the spring of 2013, and reassembled all the material with the story of his own imploded documentary at the center. “Lance tried to control my film,” Gibney narrates in what’s now The Armstrong Lie, and adds later, “He’d been lying to me for all of 2009.”
The collapse of the Lance Armstrong cancer-patient-to-superhuman legend, as Gibney presents it, is spellbinding, excruciating, and vindicating to watch. Gibney’s transformation—from embedded Armstrong documentarian to Armstrong fan despite himself to aggrieved Armstrong confidante unsure whether to trust a word he says anymore—lends familiarity, residual fondness, wariness, and sickened scorn to his storytelling. It's a combination instantly recognizable to anyone who’s ever felt deeply, personally betrayed. The entire experience, Gibney recalls in the film, helped him grasp why Armstrong kept doping and why fans and even authorities willfully overlooked the warning signs for so long: “So many people wanted to believe,” he says. The finished product is damning, but it’s also sorrowfully empathetic: You shouldn’t have done this, and I hate that I understand why you did.
But Gibney’s turbulent, up-close experience with Armstrong and the troubled sport of cycling make him perhaps the ideal person to argue that Armstrong shouldn’t be vilified for his cheating if his teammates and competitors alike were cheating too. Rather, it’s Armstrong’s willful mass deception of the American public—the untruthful packaging of himself as a hero, Nicholas Brody-style—that the world should find unacceptable. "Don't be mad that he was doping," The Armstrong Lie seems to say, "because everybody was doping, even the good guys. Be mad that he told (and built a legend and a multimillion-dollar brand on) the lie that he was the exception."