JJ Abrams To Take On The Life Of Bike Cheat Lance Armstrong For The Big Screen

As the final minutes of Lance Armstrong's much publicized interview with Oprah Winfrey was playing out late last week, news emerged via Deadline that J.J. Abrams will be coming back down to Earth some time in the future to shepherd an adaptation of Cycle of Lies: The Fall of Lance Armstrong to the big screen. Sports writer Juliet Macur's book about the rise and fall of the most famous and successful cyclist on the planet is yet to be published (or written) but the broad strokes of the story are already pretty well known: mediocre cyclist comes back from treatment for a near fatal case of the cancers with a new found vigour for competition and becomes the greatest cyclist of his generation. However his unprecedented seven Tour de France wins are dogged by accusations of doping, claims he vociferously denied until last week when he finally confessed to being a liar, a cheat and a generally immoral oaf. From the outside this seems quite a way from JJ's wheelhouse but it's nonetheless a fascinating, high-profile story of human ambition and treachoury that'll make for a great movie if Abrams and gang manage to avoid all the obvious structural pitfalls of biopic... of course this won't be the only cycling film in development right now with Shane Meadows working on a film about a drugs cheat: the legendary British cyclist Tom Simpson, who died on the slopes of Mont Ventoux in 1967 after stuffing himself to the gills with amphetamines.