I assumed the author took the statement "we are really, really close" and then replaced "close"with its opposite, "far". This is the sort of thing a non-native speaker would do, and I suspect he was unaware of the ambiguity caused by this. The implied idiomatic continuation '... far from the goal' or '... far along the path' is what throws native speakers, however non-native speakers simply parse the sentence the way the author intended in a much simpler way.