First take on Lance

First of all, it has been obvious to me for a long time that Lance Armstrong was guilty of doping.  I'm not one to paint people with a black-and-white palette, so I never concluded that makes him an evil person, but there was no question that he did some incredibly hurtful things in his attempts to cover up his actions.  In fact, even before the evidence became overwhelming, the things that he was saying in his desperation to bolster his image revealed important things about his character that undermined his efforts to appear innocent and terribly wronged.  Publicizing Greg LeMond's private revelation to him was probably the tipping point for me.  What could a truly innocent person have hoped to gain from that?  It was the act of someone whose thinking was muddled by their desperation to preserve their carefully crafted but increasingly tenuous illusion.

I haven't seen his interview yet - last night I had more important plans - so maybe I should withhold this opinion.  Still, there was an important lesson in my own therapy that I can't help considering as I read some of what he said: a person who really accepting responsibility for their own actions is doesn't talk about the harm they've done as a circumstance that "just happened."

So when Lance says of Betsy Andreu and her husband that they're not at peace, "because they've been hurt too badly," rather than "Because I hurt them too badly," it indicates that he's made progress, but isn't quite there yet.  Likewise, of Emma O'Reilly: "She's one of these people that got run over, got bullied,"  rather than, "one of those people I ran over and bullied."  Also, he's still justifying his initial decision to dope in the first place.

These may seem like small things, and probably only someone who has done that kind of work would ever notice them.  (Well, maybe not the justification; most people recognize that part.) I'm not being critical of him, though; none of us gets there in one giant leap.  It's good - for him, and in general - that he recognizes his actions as bullying, and that he is beginning to speak the truth.