Two feature-length documentaries telling the story of the man behind the greatest fraud in recent sporting history are to be broadcast by the BBC and Channel 4.
On Sunday, July 6, BBC Four airs a new Storyville documentary about the Lance Armstrong scandal, in which the seven-time Tour de France winner was revealed to be one of the most notorious drug cheats in sporting history.
The Lance Armstrong Story features contributions from some of the cyclist’s former friends, team members and journalists, and reveals how Armstrong’s cheating and bullying became more extreme until colleagues began to speak out against him.
The BBC’s film is followed on Monday, July 7 by the airing of The Armstrong Lie, Alex Gibney’s acclaimed documentary, on Channel 4.
Gibney, an Oscar-winning documentary maker, made this film with the intention of covering Armstrong’s 2009 Tour de France comeback, but his 2013 admission that he had used performance enhancing drugs to achieve his wins.
Both films air on the weekend in which the 2014 edition of the Tour de France starts in Yorkshire for the first time, broadcast live on ITV, Eurosport and S4C.
Full details and trailers for the BBC Four and Channel 4 documentaries can be found below:
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| STORYVILLE: THE LANCE ARMSTRONG STORY – STOP AT NOTHING |
This new BBC Storyville film tells the intimate but explosive story about the man behind the greatest fraud in recent sporting history, a portrait of a man who stopped at nothing in pursuit of money, fame and success.
It reveals how Lance Armstrong duped the world with his story of a miraculous recovery from cancer to become a sporting icon and a beacon of hope for cancer sufferers around the world.
The film maps how Armstrong’s cheating and bullying became more extreme and how a few brave souls fought back, until eventually their voices were heard.
Director Alex Holmes tracks down some of his former friends and team members who reveal how his cheating was the centre of a grand conspiracy in which Armstrong and his backers sought to steal the Tour de France.
Friends and fellow riders were brought into a dirty pact that no-one could betray, lest the horrifying extent of complicity be revealed.
But the former friends whose lives he destroyed would prove to be his nemesis, and help uncover one of the dirtiest scandals in sports history.
Storyville: The Lance Armstrong Story – Stop at Nothing airs on BBC Four and will available to watch on-demand for up to seven days after transmission via BBC iPlayer.
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| THE ARMSTRONG LIE |
Lance Armstrong was a sporting phenomenon, an American who’d not only set his sights on the world’s oldest and most prestigious Grand Tour cycle race, the Tour de France.
He had won it seven consecutive times between 1999 and 2005, and that was after surviving testicular cancer, though there were dark mutterings of doping, but Armstrong consistently, forcefully and litigiously countered such allegations.
So when he announced his intention to return to the fray in 2009, after a four-year retirement, the prolific, Oscar-winning documentary-maker Alex Gibney jumped at the chance to film the maligned Texan’s attempt to win the Tour an eighth time.
Given unprecedented access to Armstrong and his team, Gibney’s documentary The Road Back was about to be released when the truth about Armstrong’s systematic drug-taking broke.
Gibney shelved the project for a couple of years, and then began to transform his film, via the addition of interviews with Armstrong’s detractors and footage of the cyclist’s own admissions of guilt, from an upbeat observational piece into something altogether more critical.
What emerged is an absorbing and fascinating study of a monumentally arrogant sportsman’s determination to do whatever it took to win and his equal willingness to do or say whatever was necessary to cover up his less savoury actions.
The film perhaps also serves as a warning for documentary-makers not to side too strongly with their subject too soon.
The Armstrong Lie airs on Channel 4 and Channel 4 HD and will be made available via catch-up service 40D shortly after broadcast.
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