The Program (2015)
3.5/5. Wikipedia entry for the film. · Rotten Tomatoes: 62% critics / 44% audience.
Stephen Frears’ dramatization of the Lance Armstrong story, adapted from Irish sportswriter David Walsh’s book Seven Deadly Sins, with Ben Foster as Armstrong and Chris O’Dowd as Walsh. It’s a dramatization, so everything below is about the movie’s version of events. I don’t know any of these people or any of these facts firsthand. The public record I lean on is USADA’s 2012 reasoned decision, the UCI stripping his seven Tour titles, and Armstrong’s own January 2013 admission to Oprah Winfrey that he doped through all seven wins.
This one was a little heartbreaking for me. I loved watching Armstrong win. Those Tours were part of how I learned to enjoy exercising as an adult. It was fun to see an American compete, and win, in a sport the rest of the world cares about more than we do. The comeback from cancer was a compelling story, and I wore the yellow band on my wrist. Then it turned out the wins weren’t clean, by his own account.
Part of what still annoys me is what it did to sports in general for me. Watching sports is a simple joy in a complicated world, and it was a joy I came to late. Football was spoiled for me as a kid by watching it next to a toxic stepfather. I’d finally started enjoying sports on TV as an adult, and then the guy I’d been cheering for put a wedge between me and sports, and between me and the people who enjoy sports. (For the record, the NFL deliberately scattering games across a pile of streaming services, so each viewer pays more, isn’t helping my enjoyment of football right now either.)
As a film, I liked it. It’s well paced: 103 minutes that never drag. The scene I found most interesting is an early conversation with Michele Ferrari (played by Guillaume Canet), the Italian sports doctor, about Armstrong’s body type and what it would take for a body like his to win the Tour. I’ve had versions of that conversation about my own body, and it’s something I accept. But there’s a whole industry, practically a faith, built on the idea that anyone can do anything if they want it enough, and it has a lot of deluded followers. It was refreshing to see people in a movie talk plainly about bodies and performance. (Ferrari is a real person. According to the same Wikipedia summary, he declined to contest USADA’s charges in 2012 and received a lifetime ban from Olympic sport.)
The film builds a real sense of dread as the walls close in. The best thing about it is how it shows Armstrong using his power directly: calling people, leaning on them, controlling them one conversation at a time. Foster plays him as a man who completely buys his own story, which may be something champions at that level need. The smirks during his testimony scenes are cheeky. No, they’re arrogant.
The last third turns into a journalism story, and I tend to love those. Walsh’s reporting finally starts to catch up with Armstrong. It was nice to see O’Dowd outside comedy. I loved him in The IT Crowd, and it’s always good to watch an actor widen his range. The angle I’d never heard of before was the insurance one. In the film, Dustin Hoffman plays Bob Hamman of SCA Promotions, the Texas company that insured Armstrong’s Tour win bonuses and balked at paying out. That part is real: per news coverage, SCA paid him in 2006 after he testified under oath that he hadn’t doped, went after the money again after his 2013 admission, and in 2015 an arbitration panel ordered Armstrong and Tailwind Sports to pay SCA $10 million. It was fun to learn about.
A side question the movie sent me down: the film mentions Tailwind as the company behind the U.S. Postal team’s sponsorship. Is that the same Tailwind that makes the endurance drink mix? As far as I can tell, no. Tailwind Sports was the cycling management company that ran the team. Tailwind Nutrition was founded in 2012 in Durango, Colorado, by an amateur endurance racer after a rough Leadville 100. I found nothing connecting the two beyond the name.
Two craft notes. Radiohead’s “No Surprises” sets exactly the right tone as the film inches toward its ending. And the makeup does a good job of aging Foster gradually over the years the story covers. You can feel time passing on his face.
3.5/5. I liked it. It also made me sad, but I had the space to sit with that today, and that’s the point of art. Ben Foster is the reason to watch it, and it’s better than its reputation as a dramatized recap suggests. It doesn’t dig much deeper than the headlines, but it’s paced well enough to carry you through. If you were a yellow-band person, expect it to sting.
Research and drafting assistance for this piece, including source verification, was provided by Claude (Anthropic). Cast, reception, and case details are sourced from the Wikipedia, Rotten Tomatoes, news, and company pages linked inline; the analysis and opinions are my own.