Lance Armstrong on Oprah: “I’m a flawed character.”

What a spectacle. Millions tuned in. Chat rooms filled with opinions while news services rushed to get the latest online. On Twitter, it topped the trending topics as #Doprah. It was, of course, Lance Armstrong’s very public confessional on Oprah Winfrey’s Next Chapter.

Leading up to the show Thursday night, everyone cynically predicted they knew how the heavily hyped interview would go. After all, news of the show taped Monday night had been leaking out over the wire services all week and Armstrong had been apologizing to everyone who came within a three-foot radius of the former seven-time Tour de France winner.

The script was foretold. Lance would say he was sorry. He would martyr himself before millions and then, after a scorching in the flames of public scorn, would be reborn, clean, race-ready (especially for triathlons, where his current focus seems to be moving to again) and palatable if not to his former sponsors, then at least to the foundation he helped create.

Except that’s not how it went. In the first five minutes of the Oprah interview, Lance bared his soul, shocking everyone. No one expected Armstrong to say right off the top, “I’m a flawed character,” and admit that the “story is so bad, so toxic.” After all that, how would Oprah fill the remaining 85 minutes of the show?

Easily, as it turned out. Yes, Armstrong confessed, but that wasn’t the focus of the cameras or Oprah; rather, it became a disquieting encounter with an individual who flagrantly broke the rules, covered it up,  and then – yes – confessed – but not in a way people found palatable.

The admissions came thick and fast. “My cocktail, so to speak, was EPO, blood transfusions and testosterone,” Armstrong said. “I was a bully in that I tried to control the narrative,” he later added.

Asked Oprah wonderingly: “You were suing people and you knew they were telling the truth, what is that?” Replied Armstrong: “It’s a major flaw.”

Yes, a major flaw, like when he also admitted to calling bike racer Frankie Andreu’s wife Betsy (who was one of the first people to call Armstrong out in public about doping) a lying bitch…but not fat.

“You abused your power,” Oprah stated. “Yeh,” Armstrong quickly chimed in.

By the interview’s end, Armstrong lost whatever credibility he had with a once adoring public. Shocked at his callousness, his casual admissions of abuse without any remorse, people on social media declared themselves repulsed by the former bike racer and champion of disease prevention.

“I stand on no moral platform here,” Armstrong told Oprah at the end of the first of two nights of interviews. “If there was a truth and reconciliation commission, I’d be the first man in the door.”

Fine words with one problem: after Oprah,  not many are likely to be interested in Armstrong’s truth.