After spending years denying it, seven-time Tour de France winner (although those titles have been stripped) Lance Armstrong has admitted to Oprah Winrey that he used performance-enhancing drugs.
Hollywood is wasting no time trying to turn the tale into a film – something that’s legally a bit easier now that he’s admitted doping. Deadline reports that Paramount Pictures and JJ Abrams’ Bad Robot production company have acquired the screen rights to Cycle of Lies: The Fall of Lance Armstrong, the title of Juliet Macur’s book proposal that was just acquired by publisher HarperCollins.
J.J. Abrams and Bryan Burk are producing for Bad Robot. No screenwriter has been set to adapt the material as of yet.
Juliet Macur is a sports journalist for The New York Times who has covered Armstrong for more than a decade following his recovery from testicular cancer and return to cycling to capture a record seven Tour de France titles.
Back in June 2009 Columbia Pictures signed up to develop an Armstong biopic with Gary Ross writing the screenplay, based on Lance Armstrong’s 2000 book It’s Not About the Bike. Perhaps luckily for them it didn’t go forward, seeing a much of the movie would have been based on lies.