JOHN RIORDAN: Te’o hoax blows Lance’s lies out of the water

Lance Armstrong lied his whole career, made millions out of his deceit and deprived countless competitors of the precious little sunlight that cycling basks in every summer.

Meanwhile, Manti Te’o, a young footballer about to graduate from Notre Dame into a lucrative NFL career, either made up the fact that he had a girlfriend who died tragically or someone conned him into thinking that she existed, that she loved him and that she told him to play a crucial game for her just before she passed away.

Either way, the New York-based sports website Deadspin enjoyed the greatest scoop of the year so far, unearthing by way of good old fashioned digging around that one of the most Hollywood stories of the last 12 months of American sport was a complete and utter hoax.