Jan Frodeno Interviews Lance Armstrong. Controversial or Informative?

In June, 2012, I was just on my way to the airport to fly to IRONMAN Nice when race director Yves Cordier called me. As the Editor in Chief at IRONMAN, I’d been on the Lance Armstrong beat since he had returned to triathlon racing at IRONMAN 70.3 Panama that year. I’d followed the American cycling star (remember, this is 2012 I’m talking about, so I won’t put the “disgraced” in there quite yet) from Panama City to Galveston Island (IRONMAN 70.3 Texas) to the Big Island (IRONMAN 70.3 Honu), and was now on my way to cover his full-distance debut in Nice.

“Lance just flew home,” Cordier told me. “Are you still coming to the race?”

I did still cover the race, juggling race coverage while also reporting the news that the United States Anti-Doping Agency (USADA), led by Travis Tygart, had charged Armstrong with systematic doping. Eventually there would be a lifetime ban and all Armstrong’s competitive results from August 1, 1998 were disqualified.

It had been a crazy few months for me. I got a call on a Wednesday night and was told that I needed to be in Panama the next morning to get ready to interview Armstrong. Initially I thought I could jump in on a video interview that Armstrong was doing that Thursday afternoon, but that didn’t work out when Armstrong’s handler walked into the room ahead of time.

“I know you, you, you and you,” Armstrong’s handler said, pointing at various people in the room – I wasn’t one of them. “Everyone else out.”

Eventually I was able to negotiate some pre- and post-race time with Armstrong and, over the next few months, I would go from being kicked out of that room to getting calls from that same handler telling me where to meet Armstrong for an interview. Before Honu we chatted in the basement of the Fairmont Orchid before the press conference – it was the only place we could get away from the crowds of people desperate to be close to him.

(You can read more about my time covering Armstrong here.)

People often ask me what Armstrong was like. I don’t struggle to answer that question – he was charismatic. He was a great interview. He didn’t back away or try to avoid the tough questions about doping and drug accusations – even though I now know that he wasn’t being straight with me. I do struggle, though, with how he should be perceived these days.

Going Mental

In an episode released earlier today, Jan Frodeno interviews Armstrong on his Going Mental podcast. Frodeno made it very clear ahead of time that “the discussion does not seek to glorify or excuse the past. It does not attempt to rewrite history. Instead, it focuses on mindset, consequences, resilience and the difficult process of rebuilding after public collapse.”

It’s an interesting listen, for sure, and the conversation does very much focus on Armstrong’s “survival” through various times of his life – whether it be growing up with a single mom who had him when she was 17 (“I was fighting before I even knew I was fighting”), surviving cancer, or coming back after having being “cancelled.”

“And that’s when I really had to figure out a way how to survive … So I had to say, look, I am done. I am finished … I was, I think time will tell, or show, that I was sort of in this cancel culture that America has gone through. I was one of the first,” he says. “And so then you say, how am I going to feed my family? And so I had to figure that out. And there’s different tools that people can use. And my toolkit has changed over the years, certainly changed. But, early on, I mean, the number one thing in that toolkit, going back to the day after Oprah, the day after I did that interview to the world, said, okay, yesterday you were a hero, and today you’re a zero. The only thing I had in my toolkit was I am not going to let my health slip. I am going to maintain my health. I am not going to get addicted to anything. I’m not going to curl up in the corner and cry. I am going to move. And I’m not going to let my health slip.”

Armstrong is frank about the time winning all those Tour de France titles – the pressure “not to lose” took away much of the enjoyment and satisfaction.

“The racing I did as a job and they wanted me to win,” he says. “So I did. But looking back on it, I don’t think that’s healthy to not accomplish something like that and just stand there and be like, wow, I did this.”

“And so that’s a shame,” he continues. “But hey, life’s messy. And we move on and, as I said, try to unpack and figure these things out.”

“I’m Not Simple”

For those of us who can remember those classic Tour de France races where Armstrong and his Postal Service team were pitted against the top European squads, the sections of the podcast that focus on the various rivalries and how Armstrong fired himself up to take them on will be of great interest.

“I don’t think there’s a lot of nice guys at the top,” he says.

“It can also go to extremes and I’ll be the first to admit that I took it to an extreme,” he continues. “And so I paid for that – it worked on the bike, but it didn’t work off the bike.”

Armstrong, describes Jan Ullrich, one of his greatest rivals during his Tour de France heyday, as a “sweet guy” who is “very simple.” Ullrich has faced legal issues along with struggles with addiction and mental health over the years, and Armstrong has been been extremely supportive of the German.

“I can’t tolerate it when a hero like him is just destroyed in his home country and all over the world,” Armstrong says. “And meanwhile, others get passes. That’s very hard.”

And, while I know that Frodeno’s goal is not to explore more on that issue, that’s exactly what I think needed to be done. Armstrong was himself a “hero” who was “destroyed in his home country and all over the world.” While many appear to be more than happy to move on and listen to his podcasts, follow him on social media, and will no-doubt clamour to watch the upcoming biopic on his life, there are those who aren’t willing to forget what he did. While it would be easy to argue, as Armstrong often did, that everyone was doping at the time, it was the vehemence of his defence that has always stuck with me. I can’t get my head around people doing their job, reporting the truth, and getting pilloried for it.

The last time I saw Armstrong in person was during the opening stages of the 2018 Giro d’Italia taking place in Israel. I was with a bunch of journalists in a bus on the way to the stage three finish line when we stopped at a hotel. Armstrong was sitting in the restaurant with a group of people.

“Did anyone else see Lance having breakfast?” I asked as we got back onto the bus.

The group ran back in to see if they could find him, but he’d disappeared. When we got back on the bus, one of the journalists, David Walsh, told us how stressful it had been when Armstrong sued The Sunday Times in 2004 over the doping allegations he’d reported. In 2006 the paper settled out of court with Armstrong for £300,000. In 2013 Armstrong agreed to repay the newspaper – eventually forking over £1 million (roughly $1.5 million at the time).

Is it time to move on and accept that, at the time, Armstrong was doing everything he could to protect the industry he’d built around him that was dependent on him winning? To keep money pouring into the Livestrong Foundation? That fighting journalists like David Walsh was a necessary part of that process? I don’t know. I would certainly love to follow all that up with an interview.

For now, though, today’s podcast provides lots of other insights into Armstrong’s mental game, the tools he used to become one of the world’s most famous athletes, and the mental approach he used to bounce back from one of the biggest scandals in sports history. It very much achieves what Frodeno set out to. For some it will be informative, for others it will be controversial.

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