Seven Deadly Sins: My Pursuit of Lance Armstrong by Walsh David

Author:Walsh, David [Walsh, David]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9781471127564
Publisher: Simon & Schuster UK
Published: 2012-12-12T16:00:00+00:00

13

‘For most of my life I had operated under a simple schematic of winning and losing, but cancer was teaching me a tolerance for ambiguities.’

Lance Armstrong

I can still remember that one of the satisfactions of sitting talking to Emma O’Reilly on that July day in 2003 was a small, spiteful pleasure. The sort of thing I would never confess to Sandro Donati. Somewhere off in France Lance Armstrong was busting his gut chasing after another Tour. He might have noted, perhaps with sorrow, my absence from press conferences. He may have thought that I’d given up, been pulled from the case, finally been admitted to a home for the bewildered.

As I sat with Emma I hoped he’d noticed that I was missing and I hoped he’d wondered for a second: ‘What’s the little troll up to now?’ Because now, right now, as he sweated through the French countryside bossing the peloton, I was sitting with one of the people who had been spat out from the US Postal machine. I was looking at this smart, bright young woman and wondering what was wrong with Lance Armstrong that he couldn’t have seen the sense of retaining her loyalty. Did he not know she was from Tallaght?

By the time I spoke to Emma, the business of writing the book which would be called L.A. Confidentiel was a significant part of my life. After Ferrari in 2001, I realised that if all this really mattered to me I couldn’t continue on the basis of going to the Tour every year and sending the Sunday Times my annual three dissenting pieces. It wasn’t enough.

Pierre and I conceived the book and then like proper journalists took a long time to do anything serious about it. It had become evident early on that English publishing houses weren’t going to risk their lives in a scrum for the publishing rights, so it would be a French book, and we were determined that it would be a good book. Years on and I’m glad to say that there is very little which appeared in the USADA report of 2012 which didn’t appear eight years previously in L.A. Confidentiel. Admittedly, the report had more detail but the stories were the same.37

Setting to work, we divided up the tasks and somehow I ended up with the glamour and Pierre ended up with the grit. If you’re from County Kilkenny and dealing with a charismatic Frenchman, this is as good a deal as life has to offer.

While I stacked up the air miles, Pierre did the dog work. Pierre has a talent for the forensics of doping, an understanding of the scientific implications of numbers and figures and graphs. I went around sticking my tape recorder under people’s noses and asking questions. Pierre went to laboratories and offices and doctors, and pored over figures and then went back again looking for explanations. At the end of it, he could have passed himself off as an oncologist.

I put some batteries in the recorder and headed off.

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