It is terrible what happened to Lance's adversaries in the grimy tale of his Faustian pact.... Nobody can excuse what he did to others and I imagine nobody will try.
But we are a society who can read Mario Puzo and identify with Vito or Michael. We know the deal they've made with fate and we are somehow quite attracted to its absolute and brutal inflexibility. As long as it is kept to the pages of a novel or a TV screen, there is something noble and animal about the absolute imposition of a code of Omerta or Gjakemarrje.
Then we see that it has crept off the screen and is being practised by Mr Armstrong. "If we are going to cheat, you are in or you are out. There can be no passengers. The rewards are great, but the risks are too. No room for passengers".
I paraphrase terribly, but the parallel with the Corleone family is not completely invalid. For Armstrong's conceit to flourish, obedience, respect and silence had to be absolute. I think him the damaged and slimy product of a twisted relationship with a devoted mother who poured into her son the energy and love she kept failing to receive from the men in her life. There is so much damage in his childhood - and he did the thing men so often do... he turned it on those who stood against him as an adult. Again I simplify a very complex series of issues.
I still hold him in high regard for the racing that he and the clean guys around him produced in those glory years of smashed records and sprinted climbs and just magnificent maulings of guys who were ever-so-nearly just as fast. I was never a fanboy (although I was close to that with Pantani, who never doped).
But I do see a Cosa Nostra granite in the absolute nature of the loyalty (fear) that Lance demanded in his pomp. It should have been a film.
"We have to go now, Tessio. I can't come with you. You go in that car".
"OK Tom. Tell Lance it was only business. I always liked Lance, it was just business."
)
