BRIAN CANTY: Chance lost as Oprah lets arrogant, disengaging, distant and unrepentant Armstrong off the hook

More questions than answers — and Lance Armstrong is still the only one who can repair the damage he caused

If it was forgiveness he was after, he went a funny way about it, and he certainly didn’t come anywhere near achieving it.

Arrogant, smug, flippant, disengaging, distant and unrepentant describe Lance Armstrong’s demeanour in ‘take one’ of the disgraced Texan’s interview with Oprah Winfrey.

Too many questions went unanswered, more weren’t followed up on, and for large sections of the 90-minute broadcast, Armstrong, as he’s used to being, was in total control.

It left many of the ‘big players’ who led to Armstrong coming out and confessing, seething with anger.

Take Betsy Andreu, the wife of former teammate Frankie, who testified that while lying in a hospital bed in 1996 Armstrong told his doctor that he had doped.

When asked by Oprah whether this was the case, Lance replied — “I’m laying down on that one”.

And with that the topic quickly changed...

Over the years Lance and his cohorts continued to intimidate and attack Andreu. Though they derailed her husband’s career, she kept standing up and speaking out. There was even a voicemail from an Armstrong associate to her expressing the hope that “somebody breaks a baseball bat over your head.”

Lance knows he treated Betsy like shit — he once called her “crazy” — so in an effort to make up he said he called her last weekend. So he decided to tell Oprah about it.

“I did call her crazy,” he said. “I did. I did … I think she’d be OK with me saying this, I said, ‘Listen, I called you crazy; I called you a bitch; I called you all of these things, but I never called you fat’.”

Amazingly, he then grinned.

Andreu did not attempt to hide her anger when interviewed on CNN.

“I guess we know why I was [a bitch] all these years, putting up with that. How was I supposed to act? Sweet as apple pie? … That exchange right there, it has me furious.”

Oprah Winfrey was the wrong person to interview Armstrong, because she hasn’t the intimate knowledge of cycling required to tackle a man of his standing.

When the name of disgraced Italian doctor Michele Ferrari was brought up, Lance was shown a clip of himself lying under oath in the SCA case in 2005. The clip showed him saying ‘Michele Ferrari is an honest man, he never doped me, he would never dope anybody.’ Then Oprah turned and said ‘Now Lance, what would you say about Ferrari?’, and he said, ‘Well I would say something very different.’

And that was it. No ‘Okay Lance, tell us what you would say’. He got off the hook.

Only Armstrong knows the exact truth of what he done in the past. Only he, therefore, can provide exact details of the why and how and what exactly others in his team (management included) did to facilitate it.

Lance wasn’t giving much away, however – and Oprah didn’t go after him either. This will be a huge regret if answers aren’t sought.

When USADA produced their reasoned document in October, 11 of his former team-mates testified against him with the most detailed evidence imaginable. Tyler Hamilton recalled a time where they put used syringes in coke cans, crushed them, and binned them to hide any trace of evidence.

Lance? He couldn’t remember.

The Armstrong camp sued so many people, one of whom was believed to be former masseuse Emma O’Reilly. When asked if he did sue her or not, Lance replied, “To be honest Oprah, we sued so many people...we probably did.”

The American has more potential to change cycling than any other person currently operating in or outside the sport. If he told everything, instead of being squeezed for monosyllabic replies, there could come a day when the yellow jersey wearer of the Tour de France isn’t saddled with suspicion.

Only Lance can decide if that day will become a reality.