Good Outside Mag Art. Lance Armstrongs Train Wreck

Lance Armstrong has always been a human narrative machine. If you don’t know that by now, you are either too young to under­stand such things or have been in a tent somewhere on a Greenland glacier for the past 20 years. He is a living story, a set of inter­locking, constructed narratives, invented and given life by him, delivered in a series of ascending climaxes. Armstrong lived inside his narratives, and they were terrific: from the one featuring the poor kid, raised by a single mom, who rose to become a world-­champion bicycle racer, to the one about the cancer survivor who won seven consecutive Tours de France and raised money to help millions of other cancer victims. Or the one, finally—this is where he lost control of the script—in which he suffered one of the greatest reversals of fortune of a public figure in American history, in which his legend was instantaneously obliterated.
There is a new narrative now. How could there not be? It emphatically does not feature a broken, friendless man sunk in drugs or alcohol or depression or anger or self-pity. This one is about a man who has rebuilt his family and his friendships, who has attempted to come to terms with how ­deeply his fans felt betrayed and who says he is sincerely sorry for what he did and the pain he caused. Banned from most official sports, he has transformed himself as an athlete, too. He has reengaged with the world. This is the new story: a humbled man who is working to try to deserve the forgiveness of millions of people who once believed in him.

His enemies will tell you that this Tour de Redemption is as phony as Armstrong’s erstwhile claims that he rode clean. It’s just his new way of manipulating a universe in which everyone is seen as his domestique, they say. So, in a world where atonement requires more than simple apologies, is Lance Armstrong really contrite? Is he really sorry? Is he really a new man?