On the opening day of this year’s Tour de France, Lance Armstrong was deep into his podcast analysing Stage One when the mobile phone of George Hincapie, his co-host, went off. Mark Cavendish was on the line. All the way from the Astana-Qasaqstan team bus in Italy. The same Cavendish who had just suffered heatstroke and vomited on the road to Rimini. Calling in to explain what had happened, he assured them he had recovered from his ordeal and would go on.
“Call you later,” said Hincapie, finishing up the chat, suggesting he and “The Manx Missile” must be quite good friends.
“It’s incredibly dope,” said Armstrong, with no hint of irony or a smile, expressing pride at the way a main character from the drama contributed live to their show.
One way of putting it. Another might be to wonder why any current cyclist would want to associate with the greatest cheat in the history of the sport. Or be pally with Hincapie, another confessed doper during his “glory” years as Mr LiveStrong’s most trusted domestique, the consiglieri once dispatched to Armstrong’s apartment in Girona to make sure he hadn’t left any steroid paraphernalia lying around. A fixer in and out of the peloton. Surely, it behoves any clean participant in the race not to lend their own credibility and their contemporary celebrity to this pair of sordid con artists from the recent past.
Just four days later, as the dastardly duo recorded their response to Stage Five, Hincapie’s phone went again. This time, Cavendish’s wife Peta was calling from a car near the finish line in St-Vulbas where her husband had earlier sprinted to his record-breaking 35th win. Backgrounded by the couple’s children making noise, she outlined how the family had spent the memorable day and accepted the congratulations of the hosts. After she hung up, Armstrong boasted to his listeners he had pressured Hincapie to text Cav and Peta to get one of them on that episode. Now that she had called, Lance was inordinately proud of himself, flexing, like a man still thrilled to discover he retains some bizarre hypnotic hold over so many in the sport he besmirched.
A fact underlined by Bradley Wiggins popping into the studio to work Stage Nine. The man who won the 2012 Tour for Team Sky, the cleanest, purest, most drug-free, cheating-resistant outfit in all the land of cycling make-believe, flew to Colorado specifically to hang with Armstrong and Hincapie. We know this because the merry japesters posted video of themselves picking him up at the airport with a sign that read, “Sir Wiggo”.
Since the Englishman’s victory was supposedly, no seriously, down to David Brailsford’s marginal gains philosophy (adding pineapple juice to water to make it more drinkable!), and Lance’s triumphs were so much about EPO that he, Hincapie and their team-mates variously called it “Po” and “Edgar Allen”, why then would Wiggins want to come kiss their rings?
And what possessed Matteo Jorgenson, arguably the most promising young American rider in this year’s Tour, to come on the podcast after Stage Seven from the Team Visma-Lease a Bike hotel to merrily josh with the fraudsters of yesteryear?
Cyclists are not the only ones with short memories. This is the first summer that The Move, the official name of Armstrong’s podcast, is being broadcast on Peacock, the streaming service of NBC, network home of the Tour de France on American television. Just over a decade since his not quite mea culpa sit-down with Oprah Winfrey, he’s officially back in the mainstream media fold. Faking his way into the record books, ripping off the US Postal Service (funded by the American taxpayer) for millions, that’s all been forgotten now.
Aside from his blossoming relationship with NBC, the podcast has corporate sponsors of its own. Wahoo, Momentous, Ketone-IQ and Roka are all very happy to have Armstrong, a name synonymous with lying, reading testimonials about the quality of their brands. Supposedly serious companies in the cycling and fitness industries, they are proud to be associated with a production boasting guests such as Johan Bruyneel, team director and cheater de mission at US Postal Service when it “won” eight out of nine Tours, somebody serving a lifetime ban from the sport.
At a push, NBC could argue bringing The Move into their coverage is a smart play. Who better to parse the current Tour, something only the truly naive believe is clean, than two of the dirtiest cyclists ever and one of their confrères?
But the network already has a doper pundit on their live television broadcast crew. Christian Vande Velde, another former Armstrong team-mate, worked with the infamous Dr Michele Ferrari and took EPO, cortisone, human growth hormone and testosterone patches. He lends his expertise daily. Funnily enough, the only subject Vande Velde never touches upon during his commentary is his extensive knowledge of pharmaceuticals and how they could possibly have helped so many competitors shatter Nairo Quintana’s record time up Col du Galibier last week. As if.
In February 2009, Paul Kimmage, eternal scourge of cycling cheats, turned up at a press conference before the Tour of California, and famously asked the then still saintly Armstrong, “What is it about these dopers you seem to admire so much?” The very question that now needs to be posed to Cavendish, Wiggins, NBC, Jorgenson and a whole lot more.