The Program (2015) – Review

Some people are willing to do anything to reach the top of their game and stay there. This is also the case within sports and through the years there have been controversial moments in various sports relating to performance enhancing drugs. Whether it is track and field, baseball or football, there are always a couple of athletes who thinks it is necessary to use something to beat the rest.

But one of the sports which has been hit hardest was cycling. Year after year the cyclists were caught using doping, slowly resulting in a decreasing number of viewers and huge sponsors have decided to stop giving money to the sport. The most notorious cyclists of course is Lance Armstrong, who thanks to uising drugs succeeded in winning the Tour de France seven times. He was someone who kept insisting that he wasn’t using anything and when the truth finally became known had to go through hell.

At the start of his career Armstrong (Ben Foster) finds out that no matter how well he has trained, he won’t be able to win any races. An expert tells him that his body simply wasn’t built to become really good. When he hears others are using performance enhancing drugs he decides to gain knowledge about it and gets his whole team to join him. He becomes an expert who, together with the boss of the team, is willing to do anything to beat the checkups and the media. In The Program that story is told, the events that were happening within the team, but also how journalist David Walsh (Chris O’Dowd) started to doubt Armstrong’s abilities.

 When watching this movie one thing really stands out: Ben Foster. First the resemblance is so convincing that there are moments that you are sure you are watching the real Armstrong, but the way he moves and expresses himself add a lot to it. He’s been so dedicated to the role that he also took the same drugs Armstrong took to understand what it does to your body. I think it’s a shame it’s a role nobody seems to be talking about. The rest of the cast is solid too. O’Dowd is good as a journalist and both Dustin Hoffman (as an investor) and Jesse Plemons (as Floyd Landis) in supporting roles are a joy to watch.

This isn’t a film about cycling. Even though it ocassionally will show some racing shots the focus really is on what happened behind the scenes and how that information became public knowledge. Despite all that publicity there are still people trying to gain an edge. Only two weeks ago a bike was found which had a hidden electrical motor in its frame. Armstrong once was the face of the sport, a man who survived cancer and was able to use that to raise a lot of money for research, but who also used it as a shield whenever he was attacked. Someone who was willing to do anything to win and in the end lost it all because of it. The Program tries to show his reasoning and succeeds in doing that.