Summary

In 2008, Academy Award® winning filmmaker Alex Gibney set out to make a documentary about Lance Armstrong’s comeback to the world of competitive cycling. Widely regarded as one of the most prominent figures in the history of sports, Armstrong had brought global attention to cycling as the man who had triumphed over cancer and went on to win bicycling’s greatest race, the Tour de France, a record seven consecutive times. Charting Armstrong’s life-story (and given unprecedented access to both the Tour and the man), Gibney began filming what he initially envisioned as the ultimate comeback story – Armstrong’s return from his 2005 retirement and his attempt to win his eighth Tour. Indeed, more than just an athlete, Armstrong, through his inspiring personal narrative and charitable works, had come to embody nothing short of the possibilities of the human spirit itself. An unprecedented scandal, however, would rewrite both the Armstrong legend and Gibney’s film. By early 2013, Lance Armstrong had admitted to using performance enhancing drugs following a federal criminal investigation and an investigation by the US AntiDoping Agency (in 2012 the USADA, in conjunction with the International Cycling Union, effectively stripped Armstrong of all seven of his previous titles and banned him from all sport for life). Setting out to chronicle a comeback, Alex Gibney’s THE ARMSTRONG LIE instead emerges as a riveting insider’s view, chronicling the collapse of one of the greatest legends of our time. As Lance Armstrong tells Gibney’s camera: “I didn’t live a lot of lies, but I lived one big one.”