Christine Brennan and Howard Kurtz look ahead to the disgraced cyclist’s interview with Oprah, when he’s expected to admit to doping.
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Does Lance Armstrong really have a 9-gallon per minute heart that delivers twice the oxygen of our 5-gallon hearts as Sanjay Gupta told CNN's viewers during a 2009 interview? Or does the blood manipulation Lance denied during that interview effectively transform unexceptional cardiac capacity into the EQUIVALENT of a 9-gallon heart by doubling the oxygen transported by the blood itself. Lance duped Sanjay Gupta, a board member of Armstrong's own Livestrong foundation, into peddling the myth LA's Tour victories were clean wins attributable not to enhanced, enriched, manipulated blood but rather to superior cardiac capacity that of course enabled him to beat all those feckless losers cursed with 8-gallon and 7-gallon hearts. If in that 2009 CNN interview Lance Armstrong was the unreliable source we now know he was, I should think it would behoove Dr. Gupta to set the record straight regarding exactly how Lance was actually able to dominate the competition rather than remain journalistically silent about his erroneous original report that Armstrong possesses a heart roughly as big as all Texas.
As a journalist, Sanjay is supposed to uncover the truth but as a Livestrong board member he now finds himself having unwittingly covered it up. With post-Oprah hindsight it seems obvious that such a journalistically ill-advised interview would be fraught with potential for conflict of interest. So the 2009 interview was a mistake to begin with. Worse, should Dr. Gupta fail to set the record straight, he allows the nine gallon lie Lance cynically put into his own board member's mouth to stand.