Crash Craddock: Lance Armstrong opens up on brutal early life in telling new ESPN documentary

Why was Lance Armstrong the cold, calculating, manipulating beast that he was? Over seven years after he became the world’s most famous sport cheat, a new ESPN documentary gives us some invaluable insight.

Lance Armstrong was exposed as a drug cheat in 2013.

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Every sporting parent should watch the latest Lance Armstrong special, a definitive guide of how not to raise your boy.

What you get when ruthless, selfish parental ambition overrides any sense of concern for the emotional damage inflicted on the youngster driven through the hoops.

But first, the disclaimer. Armstrong, the world’s most famous sporting cheat who doped his way to seven Tour de France cycling titles, is a hard man to like and deserves no sympathy.

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Lance Armstrong was exposed as a drug cheat in 2013.

The two-part ESPN produced 30 for 30 series shown on Fox Sports confirms what we already knew about Armstrong was true – that he is a hard-arsed bully with a huge ego.

He cheated and only fessed up when the evidence around him was so overwhelming he had nowhere to turn.

In fact he became so comfortable with his rorting that one of the most insightful quotes on him in the documentary comes right near the end when former teammate Floyd Landis said that Armstrong was very comfortable lying and telling the truth is what makes him squirm in his seat.

And so it seemed. Armstrong tells us he did not have a solitary problem lying his way through years of media interrogation about doping with square-jawed self-righteousness and barely a mumble or stumble, ridiculing anyone who was trying to ridicule him.

Yet, in this special, simple questions like “are you still relevant?” drive him to temporary, awkward silence.

There is no sense he has deep regrets about what he did, more a shoulder-shrugging lament that he was part of a sick system and he had to be sick to win. There are times when he seems to move to the brink of regret but he never quite gets there.

Armstrong was the centre of attention in an unprecedented run of Tour de France success.

Some viewers ignored the special on the grounds the story had been so well told and the still-confident though slightly more mellow Armstrong was not worth their time.

But it’s worth a look, if only for the telling insights into why Armstrong was the cold, calculating, manipulating beast that he was.

It starts almost from the day he was born into a world lacking stability and role models.

“It’s a miracle I’m not a mass murderer,” Armstrong said in a pointed throwaway line about his early life.

Lance’s stepfather Terry admitted he drove Lance “like an animal” and Lance admitted he would “beat the shit out of me” for such major issues as leaving his top drawer open in his bedroom.

Stone-faced Terry has few regrets but he does concede one mistake. He forgot to love his stepson. Or even pretend to love him. There were no cuddles. No consoling arms over the shoulder. Lance was driven like a greyhound or a racehorse.

Lance Armstrong opens up about his brutal upbringing in a new documentary.

He became a product of the glacially cold world in which he was raised as the son of a mother who had him when she was 17.

The rorts started early. Armstrong raises his eyes at the brazen rule-breaking he and his family initiated when he forged his birth certificate to say he was 16 and eligible for his first triathlon.

“Forge the certificate, compete illegally and beat everybody,” he said, shaking his head at the shamelessness of it all.

One female masseuse raises the interesting point that she was yet to reconcile whether cancer survivor Armstrong, whose story once inspired the masses, was a bad man who occasionally did good things or a good man who turned bad.

But one thing is sure.

Armstrong was born into a bad system and became a product of it.

The documentary on Armstrong is well worth a look.

“Nobody dopes and is honest about it,’’ he said of his cool, coherent years of denying his drug use.

“The only way you can dope and be honest about it is that if no one ever asks you and that is not realistic. The second somebody asks you, you lie.’’

And he did. Often.

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