by Tom Pantera
Columnist

The breakneck 24-hour news cycle being what it is, Lance Armstrong’s Big Reveal had mostly fallen out of the news until Sunday, when “60 Minutes” ran a pretty devastating piece giving the response of the head of the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency to the bicycling god’s interview with Oprah.

I generally couldn’t care less about bicycle racing. But as a communications professional, I’ve been fascinated watching Armstrong’s attempt to do … what? Come clean? Redeem himself? Repair his reputation? Find half a loaf to settle for?

That’s part of the fascination for me. I can’t, for the life of me, figure out what Armstrong had to gain by coming clean at this stage of the game. It’s like Charles Manson making a deathbed confession.

Armstrong attempted what the Nixon Administration during Watergate called a “modified limited hangout.” Basically, it involves making some big admission while keeping other, bigger admissions unmade. That generally seldom works, but if it does, there’s a requirement: The person doing the hanging out can keep secret information only he has. If anybody else knows the secret, it gets out and a “modified limited hangout” is seen for what it actually is, a lie of omission.

That means Armstrong’s entire strategy for his attempted redemption was doomed from the start. His big denial that he never forced anybody else to cheat is ridiculous on its face. This was a guy who was so good, and so high-profile, that even people who didn’t care a bit about his sport knew who he was. Even had he not been a sort of two-wheeled combination of Michael Jordan and Don Corleone, there would have been plenty of people in the sport who watched him closely, followed his lead – and who were ready to take him down at the first opportunity.

The first signal that Armstrong was getting bad media advice was his choice of interrogator. Oprah Winfrey has a background in journalism, but nobody’s ever accused her of being a journalist. She interviews celebrities. She did a good enough job with the interview, but I suspect Armstrong felt he could control the information better with Oprah than with, say, one of the “60 Minutes” folks. And it was all about controlling which information he wanted to get out.

(In fact, I wonder if Sunday’s interview with the USADA guy, which basically blew Armstrong out of the water, wasn’t a bit of a middle finger aimed at the champ. “60 Minutes” seemed to be saying, “Here, if you’re going to tell your story to Oprah instead of us, we’re going to show you what happens.” It would be a little unseemly, but given Armstrong’s conduct it would not be undeserved.)

But the big mystery is why Armstrong would tell on himself about doping but refused to say he bullied other people into joining in the doping ring. I’ve heard some speculation that that’s a legal issue, but as Jeffrey Toobin pointed out on CNN, he admitted to things that were at least as damaging, if not more, to his legal position. But whatever the reason, the evidence is so widespread – and the amount of it so huge – that any denial from a guy who’s already admitting to lying rings pretty hollow.

Some of the most interesting speculation has come from people who know him well. They say that Lance’s opinion of himself and what he did is so skewed that he simply can’t come completely clean. He just can’t bring himself to do it. Or he’s simply not capable of it. It would be like a paraplegic trying to ride a unicycle.

That probably has a lot to do with it. If you think of the huge falls from grace that we’ve seen over the last few years, they all have one thing in common. At some point, during the big televised interview, you can see in a fallen idol’s eyes a certain sense of disbelief, a look that can’t be covered up. My God, they seem to be saying, this is happening to me, of all people. They know that they’re doing an apology tour, and that they’ll eventually come out the other side – Armstrong is never going to be reduced to Dumpster diving – but there’s always that slight whiff of disbelief emanating from the interview subject. You can smell it on Armstrong, even at his most arrogant.

I wish I could believe that Armstrong will really pay for what he’s done. It would be kinda fun to actually see him pull a half-eaten burger out of a Hardee’s Dumpster. But we all know what won’t happen. He’s spent too many years around money and power to be left destitute. There are enough people who can still make money off the Armstrong name for him to disappear completely. He’ll be with us until his dying day, although every obituary will start with mention of his “fall from grace.”

The best we can hope for is that when he’s alone and crawling into bed, it will occur to him what a complete jerk he’d been. In the dark nights of his soul, he will have to realize that his considerable personal flaws destroyed what could have been an amazing legacy.

But he’ll never admit to that, at least not in public.

So what should he have done? He should have ditched the modified limited hangout. He should have told the whole truth. He should have done it to an interviewer who would have been taken seriously. He should have worried less about damage control and more about rebuilding the entire ship. He should have told the whole truth.

Too late for that now. Armstrong now will be lucky if his reputation is only heavily tarnished. He’ll never be the Lance he was. And nobody, aside from him, will really miss that guy.