The American ritual of celebrity confession and redemption is an exercise in having your cake and eating it too. You get to commit the career-ending crime – to fabricate the memoir, to have the affair with the intern – without actually having to end your career. But Lance Armstrong's much-hyped encounter with Oprah Winfrey, the first part of which aired on Thursday night, was something even more cynical and calculating: an attempt to confess without confessing. It was an effort to meet the minimum standards required for a celebrity confession while avoiding further legal liabilities, and leaving Armstrong's weapons-grade sanctimony intact. He wanted to have his cake and eat it too, but also not to eat it, and in any case, everyone was eating cakes, and it depends what you mean by "cake", and…
This made for compelling television, but not for any of the reasons Armstrong or his handlers might have wanted. Bursting into tears during a conversation with Oprah may be corny, but appearing to be almost totally without emotion, as Armstrong did, is far worse. It draws the audience's attention to the fundamental falsity of the whole operation. You're supposed to leave the viewer feeling moved, and perhaps a little morally superior - not soiled for having tuned in at all.
He admitted to doping, of course, and did so within the opening seconds of the show, under Winfrey's calmly precise questioning. (Because of her history of giving away free cars, and sometimes bestowing too much credibility on dubious guests, it's often overlooked how good an interviewer Oprah can be when she chooses.) But almost the whole of the rest of his 90-minute performance consisted of lawyerly quibbling. Had he pressured teammates to take performance-enhancing drugs? "I don't want to split hairs here," Armstrong replied, before going on to explain that he hadn't pressured them, but had allowed a situation to exist in which they'd felt pressured. At one point, he claimed, he'd even looked up the word "cheating" in a dictionary, and concluded, astonishingly enough, that it didn't apply to him.