It’s been a tough week in America for sports cheats

So, there it is: Lance Armstrong has admitted to Oprah Winfrey that his dominance of cycling from the late 1990s to the mid-2000s was tainted — to put it mildly — by performance-enhancing drugs.

At a Four Seasons Hotel in Austin, Texas on Monday afternoon, the pair sat down for a two-and-a-half hour interview that will air Thursday and Friday in the US on her OWN Network, a TV channel that has been little more than a rumour since it launched two years ago. (If you can stomach staying up to watch the heightened melodrama, the Discovery Channel will simulcast in Ireland and the UK and it will be streamed online too.) Oprah is on first name terms with the length and breadth of America, similar to Ireland’s own chat show supremo and fellow everyone-in-the-audience merchant, Gaybo. She is probably the only one who could have pulled this off.

Now she has 150 minutes of tape that she personally carried on her flight back to Chicago with her dog food and she is refusing to cut any of it. Upon landing in her hometown, she discovered that the major nugget of the “biggest interview” of her career had been leaked. But while she said she was “satisfied”, “mesmerised and riveted”, the well-rehearsed Armstrong came ready, well prepared and “met the moment”.