The Program: Seven Deadly Sins - My Pursuit of Lance Armstrong

Prologue

‘Finally, the last thing, I’ll say to the people who don’t believe in cycling, the cynics and the sceptics: I’m sorry for you. I’m sorry that you can’t dream big. I’m sorry you don’t believe in miracles.’

Lance Armstrong, 2005 Tour de France victory speech

Le grand depart.

My first conversation with Lance Armstrong was in the garden of the Chateau de la Commanderie hotel about ten miles south of Grenoble. This was late afternoon on Tuesday 13 July 1993, a rest day on the Tour de France, and with its trees and shrubs, its wrought-iron chairs and tables overlooking the swimming pool, the setting couldn’t have been much better.

At a nearby table, Armstrong’s teammate Andy Hampsten sat with some friends. A little further away, another journalist interviewed the team’s Colombian climber, Álvaro Mejía. Armstrong and I sat in the shade and spoke for more than three hours. He did most of the talking, but then he had much to say and I had a book to write.

It was the force of his personality that struck you the most: like a wave crashing forward and carrying you with him. Twenty-one years old but he wasn’t like most young men of that age. If he had been, he would have talked about the thrill of riding his first Tour de France. Most young sportsmen know the clichés that we like to see recycled. He didn’t mention the thrill or the honour, nothing even close. He’d been told by the team bosses he was at this Tour to learn for the future, but he didn’t see the good in that. He wanted to win right now. I am Lance Armstrong, you’re gonna remember my name. As he machine-gunned his way through his past and speeded into the future, he had me at his side, and on his side.

‘You’ve got to see this kid,’ I said over dinner to my friend, fellow journalist and former Tour rider Paul Kimmage, that evening.

‘Why?’

‘He is different. He’s got this desire. He’s going to win a lot of races, and he’s so open. Wait ’til you meet him.’

‘You always get too enthusiastic,’ Kimmage said.

Eleven years earlier, I’d turned up at the Tour de France for the first time and fallen in love. The man-crush is a hazard of life for the sportswriter. That debut trip covered just the last two race days in 1982; the boat from Rosslare in the south-east of Ireland to Le Havre, a car drive to pick up the penultimate stage and then on into Paris for the race to the Champs-Élysées. I travelled with four people from Carrick-on-Suir, the home town of Sean Kelly, who was then one of the world’s best cyclists. Kelly’s fiancée Linda Grant was part of our group, as was her father Dan, and local shopkeeper Jim O’Keeffe. Professional cycling wasn’t big news in Ireland then, and if Kelly managed to win a stage in the Tour de France, the result just about made it onto a sports page. Down in Carrick-on-Suir, O’Keeffe was ahead of the rest of us because he knew how to tune his radio into some French station that gave regular updates from the Tour, and if the local hero did well, the local shopkeeper knew it first.

One afternoon O’Keeffe caught news of Kelly winning a stage at the Tour, it might have been the leg to Thonon in 1981. Beside himself with joy, he left his shop and just walked down Main Street hoping to meet someone he could tell. Coming in the opposite direction was Kelly’s Uncle Neddy, wheeling his bicycle.

‘Neddy,’ said O’Keeffe, ‘you’re not going to believe this. I’m just after hearing Sean won today’s stage in the Tour de France.’

Taking a second to digest the news, Neddy replied, ‘Why wouldn’t he win, he does nothin’ else except cycle that bike.’

Telling Irish people that they had produced a world-class athlete called Sean Kelly became my first crusade. But in terms of the Irish attitude to Kelly’s prowess, things didn’t change quickly, and the following year I could get to the Tour de France only by taking two weeks’ holiday and the considerable risk of travelling on the back of Tony Kelly’s BMW 1000 motorbike. On a clear road Tony could get that baby up to 130 mph, and whatever happened, I knew it wouldn’t take long. We saw Kelly take the yellow jersey in Pau, found a cheap restaurant and toasted his achievement with a bottle of wine.

Stephen Roche, our other countryman in the race, had the white jersey for the ‘leading young rider’ and that evening in the Basque city we felt proudly Irish, members of a privileged elite. Next day we waited on the Col de Peyresourde and measured the scale of disaster by the minutes Kelly and Roche lost to the new leaders. As hard as it was to see your men wither in the mountains, it was impossible not to be captivated by the great race beyond them. The Tour thrilled me like no other sporting event, and no sooner had Tony returned me to Dublin I was talking to my wife about how good it would be to move to France. So in 1984, Paris became home and I got to follow most of the great races on the cycling calendar.

One experience begot another until, in early 1993, I agreed with the UK publishers Stanley Paul to write a book about the Tour de France, a series of stories from the three-week pilgrimage around France that I envisaged as a Canterbury Tales in lycra. At the beginning would be the story of the rookie, the kid in his first Tour: he’d be starry-eyed and about to have his senses overwhelmed and his body wasted. Armstrong was the obvious choice, the youngest rider in the race but also the newcomer with expectations on his shoulders. Perfect.

I don’t know about Lance but I was pumped and ready. He had agreed to do the piece and arranged for me to come to the Motorola team hotel in Bourgenay on the evening after the opening prologue.

I turned up at Les Jardins de l’Atlantique but was met by Jim Ochowicz, his team manager, who told me that Lance felt down after his disappointing ride in that day’s prologue. The rider wanted to know if we could do the interview some time later, perhaps on the Tour’s scheduled rest day. I agreed but continued to observe him for my background notes. I watched him in the tented village at Avranches on the sixth morning as an Italian journalist tried to interview him. He wasn’t rude, but the moment two attractive French girls passed by in their short skirts it was clear they interested him far more than the questions. Human, I thought.

So here I am in the Chateau de la Commanderie, sitting down with a young man who will be a central part of my life for almost the next twenty years. He doesn’t exude the sense that this will be the start of a beautiful friendship, but that’s okay. Meanwhile I want to know everything about him.

His biological father?

‘I never met him. Ah, I guess I met him but I was a one-year-old at that point. That’s when he left.’

The stepfather he never liked?

‘When I was young I got along with him all right. You don’t know how to dislike somebody at that age, but I tell you, the first day I learned to dislike somebody, I disliked him.’

Phew! Whatever happened to Mom’s apple pie and starry-eyed rookies?

He tells about the impact on him of his mum and stepdad splitting up. ‘When you’re growing up, you’re fourteen, fifteen or sixteen and you’re in high school or whatever, your friends’ parents are getting divorced and the kids are falling apart. They start crying, they get upset, all of this. And my stepfather has left and I had a party, you know, because it’s such a load off my back. I got confused because I thought, Well, man, what is wrong with you? This tears kids up and yet we’re kicking this guy out and you’re ecstatic. For a while I thought maybe something’s wrong with me.’

I wanted to like him. Sportswriters are like this, especially with the young ones, toting pencils through the foothills on their journey to Mount Olympus. We want to say we walked some of the way with them. Knew them before the world knew them. And this Armstrong, you knew he wasn’t going to settle for an ordinary life.

He had something inside that made him unlike any other young sportsman I had met. Radioactivity. How did I know this? Because it was obvious.

‘I mean when I’m in there, physically I’m not any more gifted than anybody else but it’s just this desire, just this rage. I’m on the bike and I go into a rage, when I just shriek for about five seconds. I shake like mad and my eyes kinda bulge out. I swear, I sweat a little more and the heart rate goes like two hundred a minute.’

Then he paused, became more reflective. ‘And it’s funny, every time I do that I think about my mother, I really do, because if she was there . . . she didn’t raise a quitter and I would never, I’d never quit. I’d never, just never. And that’s heart, man, that’s not physical, that’s not legs, that’s not lungs. That’s heart. That’s soul. That’s just guts.’

I left the Chateau de la Commanderie knowing I’d met a kid with a future. He wasn’t going to be another rider in the pack. I couldn’t wait to tell Kimmage. To let him know that I’d just got into the lift on the ground floor with a guy who was going up.

1

‘Yesterday’s rose endures in its name, we hold empty names.’

Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose

Breakfast at 10 rue Kléber in Courbevoie, west of Paris, followed a pattern. An early morning walk to the patisserie, a dawdle at the newsagents on the way home and then the luxury of strong coffee, warm croissants and L’Équipe. It is August 1984 and sitting across the breakfast table is Paul Kimmage, a young Irish amateur cyclist who my wife and I have rescued from a hovel in Vincennes on the east side of Paris. I’ve known Paul for four years, since I was a rookie sports reporter covering the bike races he rode. He was moody and headstrong then and still is, but he is also intelligent and honest. It’s an easy trade-off.

We became friends quickly. When Paul went to Paris to pursue his dream of being a pro bike rider, I followed him soon after. I’d agreed to write a book about my hero, the cyclist Sean Kelly, and I wanted to live in his world. As Paul and I were both in Paris, it was always likely I would bump into him. He had come with his brother Raphael who was also hoping to turn pro and they rode for the best-known Parisian amateur team, ACBB. Raphael fell sick a lot, missed races and then he just got sick of being sick. So he went back to Dublin, leaving his brother alone in Vincennes. It was then Paul came to live with us.

He and I shared a love of cycling; he was born to it while I rode in on the bandwagon fuelled by Kelly’s success. But by this point I’d been at the Tour de France three times, covered all the spring classics, Paris–Nice, the Tour of Switzerland and could read the cycling pages of L’Équipe. I considered myself virtually French. It was however the minor accomplishment of my literacy that brought tension to the breakfast table on that August morning in 1984.

‘Bloody hell! Roche isn’t riding the Worlds, an insect bite or something,’ I say, speaking of the Irish cyclist Stephen Roche and guessing the meaning of les mots that I don’t understand.

‘Look, I’d rather read the paper myself, after you’re done with it,’ Paul says.

‘What’s the difference? I’m telling you, he’s out of the Worlds.’

‘I’m telling you, I’d rather read it myself.’

‘That’s just stupid.’

‘Okay, it’s stupid.’ And we mightn’t then talk for an hour or two. And then we would talk for an hour or four. He told stories of the hardship and indignities that came with riding as an amateur and I brought stories back from Hollywood. What Kelly and Roche were up to, what it was like at the Tour de France, what a talent this young American Greg LeMond was, whether Laurent Fignon was right to taunt his French rival Bernard Hinault, but mostly we talked about Kelly and Roche.

I told Paul about the Saturday afternoon after the Amstel Gold race in Holland when we waited for Roche to finish at drug control so we could get on the road to Paris – they were giving me a ride back home while Kelly’s fiancée Linda would drive his car back to their home near Brussels. As we sat around in the car park waiting for Roche, Linda leaned against Sean’s immaculately clean Citroën and placed an open palm on the bonnet. After she moved away, Sean sidled over to where she had been, then discreetly took a tissue from his pocket and cleaned away the little hand-stain left by his wife-to-be.

Catching this unspoken reprimand, Linda wasn’t impressed. Only half-joking, she said, ‘Sean, that’s so typical of you. In your life it’s the car, the bike and then me.’

Kelly never blinked an eye, nor offered the hint of a smile. ‘You got the order wrong, the bike comes first.’

Where we were from defined our allegiances: Kimmage, like Roche, came from Dublin, and was in his camp. I sprang from the south-east of Ireland, no more than 20 miles from Kelly’s home town. He was my man. But Kelly’s hardness had a universal appeal and there wasn’t a Kelly story that Kimmage didn’t want to hear.

He was interested in journalism as well, would check what I wrote and say whether he thought it was any good. And he railed against my refusal to speak the little French I had. One day in the kitchen he pursued this theme in front of a few visitors.

‘He reads L’Équipe, but won’t speak French,’ he said.

‘I don’t know enough French to speak it,’ I said.

‘You know enough to try. Once you start, it gets easier.’

‘It’s okay for you, you’re in a French environment at ACBB, you have to. I’m mixing with English-speaking journalists.’

‘No, you’ve got to try because you do have enough vocabulary. French people like it when you try to speak their language.’

‘Do they?’

‘Course they do. So look, don’t be afraid to just speak it.’

Paul can be persuasive and suddenly I felt emboldened.

‘Okay,’ I said, ‘I’ll do it. I’m covering the Blois–Chaville classic on Sunday and I need to get a hotel in Blois for Saturday night. I’ll just ring up and book one.’

Picking up the thick Michelin hotel guide in the next room, I rifle through the options and come up with a perfect resting place in Blois: Hotel La Renaissance, 150 francs (£15) for the night. ‘Right,’ I say to the half-full kitchen. ‘I’m ready to go for this.’ A respectful hush falls and I dial the number for La Renaissance.

‘Hello?’ the voice says.

‘Hello,’ I say, triumphantly.

‘Oui?’

‘Oh . . . je m’appelle David Walsh, je suis journaliste irlandais, je voudrais une chambre avec salle de bains pour une nuit, cette samedi.’

‘This is a fucking private house,’ the guy says.

I want to die but I do worse than that.

‘How did you know I spoke English?’

He hangs up. And there it ended, my life as a French speaker. From this moment on I will accept only non-speaking parts in French movies.

I got to Blois and followed the race to Chaville, hoping that Kelly might win his third one-day classic of the year, for he’d been the season’s dominant rider and, as his biographer, I wanted it to finish well. Paul had ridden the Grand Prix de L’Équipe earlier in the day, that race finishing in Chaville, and he waited by the final corner to see the finish to the pros’ race. Kelly came around that last corner in 10th or 12th place and Kimmage thought it would be a miracle for him to get in the top three. He won easily.

In the salle de presse that evening, there was the now customary procession to where I sat. ‘Parlez-vous avec Kellee?’ Everyone knew Kelly spoke to me and because he wasn’t always the most forthcoming interviewee, this gave me status. That evening back at rue Kléber, Paul and I sat up talking, about how good Kelly had been, about whether Paul would get to realise his dream of riding with the pros, and no matter how much we talked there was more to say.

That was how much in love with cycling I was back in those days. The truth is that I thought of little else and dreamed of little else. If I read a paper it was for cycling news. Ditto the television. If I thought of a double entendre it invariably had to do with bikes rather than sex.

The 1984 World Championships were to be held in Barcelona early in September. Sean Kelly was always conflicted about his preparations for the Worlds. He needed some good three- or four-day stage races, but he preferred to pocket the guaranteed appearance fees earned in small-town criteriums. For Kelly getting paid was important. That’s why he did what he did.

So it was that he came to be racing in a small-time midweek criterium in August in the one-horse town of Chaumeil in Limousin, central France. He was the star. The prize money meant nothing. The appearance money meant a lot. To me, as his Boswell, the criterium was an opportunity. I contacted the various Irish media I was working for and sold their bemused sports editors the idea of me travelling to Chaumeil. I guaranteed that I would have unhindered access to Kelly. And as I was writing a biography about Kelly it was good to combine the needs of the newspapers with my need to get material for the book. Better if the newspapers paid for the trip, which they did.

I agreed with Sean that I would travel down, watch him race and meet up afterwards to do the interview. Apart from providing material for the book, our chat would also serve up some preview material for the forthcoming Worlds. Two birds. One stone. All on expenses.

Not surprisingly it was an incredibly hot day. When is central France not hot in early August? I watched the race from a grassy bank out on the course. We Irish have never really learned to handle extreme heat with much grace or dignity. Not being familiar with either performance-enhancing substances or the subsequent work of Bear Grylls, I began to wilt.

I had brought with me the paraphernalia of the Irish survivalist, a packet of Jaffa Cakes and a bottle of Lucozade. I stood in the August sunshine, my skin turning crispy, my mouth turning to sandpaper. All this happened at a time long ago before mankind had invented the screw-off cap. The unreachable contents of the Lucozade bottle were getting warmer the longer I sat there.

Near the end of the race, just as dehydration was bringing me past confusion and towards a coma, I sprang into action. Confusion was fine. A coma would almost certainly impair my interviewing style.

Behind me on a slight hill there was a row of attractive bungalows. The little town of Chaumeil was about a two-mile walk away. So I abandoned my post and walked up the tarmac drive leading towards the first bungalow. The front of the bungalow showed no promise of life. I wandered around the back.

‘Hello?’

A woman emerged from the house. Mid-twenties. Very attractive. Friendly. I hit her with my smooth pidgin French, something along the lines that I was trés desolé for the trespass but I needed an opener for my Lucozade. I showed her the bottle and simulated the act of taking off the top.

She understood. Told me not to worry. She disappeared into the house and re-emerged with the bottle opener. She watched as I sucked the Lucozade from the bottle with the elegance of a man who had spent too many months in the desert.

‘What brings you to Chaumeil?’ she asked.

I explained that I was a cycling journalist from Ireland and that I was here to interview Sean Kelly. She seemed oddly unimpressed by these details. She made some more chat. She asked where I lived.

‘Paris,’ I said.

It always feels good telling somebody that you live in Paris.

Ah, Paris. Her husband worked in Paris. He would leave Chaumeil early on a Monday morning and not return again until Friday.

This was Wednesday.

‘I get very lonely,’ she said.

I nodded sympathetically. I offered some words along the lines of, ‘Oui, oui, c’est tres difficile.’ She said that if I wanted to come in for coffee, I was welcome.

Sacre bleu. She had understood nothing. I was thinking of Kelly and starting to panic. I backed away, offering thanks and wondering how long it would take me to walk back into Chaumeil. Kelly was heading on to Limoges where we’d agreed to do the interview. I needed a lift and the one certainty was that Sean Kelly wouldn’t hang around waiting for a late reporter, not even his Boswell. This was a lot to convey by means of gesture for a man with Jaffa Cakes in one hand and Lucozade in the other. Missing the lift would be a professional and personal disaster.

It was a year, maybe two years later, when I was telling a friend about the bottle of Lucozade and the interview and how nice the woman had been, that I realised the story could have had another dimension.

‘Phew!’ said my friend. ‘That’s like the plot of a porn film. You must have been tempted?’

‘How do you mean?’

‘The heavy hints. Attractive but lonely French woman. Husband away until Friday. Dead summer heat. What do you think I mean?’

‘Oh Jesus, do you really think so?’

Talk about regret: how many nights has that nice woman of Chaumeil lain awake wondering what might have been with the sunburned Irishman and his Jaffa Cakes?

As for me? Just another innocent abroad.

It was a terrific year, 1984.

Mary loved Paris. We went with two children and came home with three, as Simon was born in a small hospital about a half-mile from rue Kléber. That’s another story. On the Saturday night of his arrival, his mum lay on her bed in rue Kléber writing letters and saying there was no need to call the taxi just yet. It would be hours. I did as told until it got close to midnight but then began to worry about getting a taxi so late. Eventually I was given the go-ahead to walk across to the taxi rank outside the Pentahotel in Courbevoie and arrange for one to come round to the house.

When Mary put down her pen and got out of bed to dress for the hospital, she was reminded that things had progressed more than she’d realised. The contractions were serious. From the front door to the cab was perhaps ten metres but my wife had to take the journey in three stages: four metres, contraction; three metres, bigger contraction; three metres, massive contraction. She whispered that it was okay, that her time only seemed closer than it was.

Aghast, the taxi driver watched and then motioned me round to the other side of the car so I could examine the cleanliness of his back seat.

‘Monsieur,’ he said in French I could easily understand, ‘I keep this taxi very clean. Look, see for yourself. It’s not possible for me to take your wife.’

I tried to sound nonchalant. I needed to convince him that I was an expert in this field and that he was just misreading the signs.

‘Don’t be stupid,’ I said. ‘The baby will not come for four or five hours and we have an eight-hundred-metre journey to the hospital.’

While the argument went back and forth, Mary stayed upright with support from an open rear door. ‘Three minutes and we’ll be at the hospital,’ I said. He demurred, I insisted, and, reluctantly, he agreed. Every traffic light was green, the ride took maybe two minutes, and a minute and a half after we got there Simon was born.

In mid-September, Paul and I went to beautiful Senlis, about twenty miles north of the capital for the start of the Paris–Brussels semi-classic. It was a working assignment for me but we both went there as fans, wanting to savour the atmosphere and hoping to catch up with Kelly before the race left town.

We got to him about thirty minutes before the start and as he sat and chatted with us, we could have been speaking to the lowliest rider in the peloton, not the number one. Through those years people continually asked, ‘Kelly, what’s he like?’ My favourite answer was that he was the kind of fellow that if he found a geyser he wouldn’t come back and tell you he’d invented hot water. Paul had grown to love him too.

After shooting the breeze for twenty minutes or so, it was time for Kelly to get himself to the start line. He stood up, hopped on his bike and, as he was wont to do, he bounced the rear wheel off the road a couple of times to check he had the right pressure in his tyre. As he did, there was the unmistakable sound of pills rattling inside a small plastic container in his back pocket. I looked at Paul, silently asking, ‘Did you hear that?’ He had. Then Kelly was gone and we were silent; kids who had got close to Father Christmas and seen the glue that held his beard in place.

‘Could it have been anything else?’

‘No, it was definitely the sound of pills.’

‘Why would he need those in a race?’

‘Don’t know.’

‘Me neither.’

I wondered if they could be supplements but we knew no rider was going to use supplements during a race. It should have been a seminal moment. We had inadvertently seen the realities of professional cycling, but we weren’t ready for that. I had a biography to write, one in which the hero is a farmer’s son from Carrick-on-Suir, a man who as a boy had eaten raw turnips when hungry.

He got to the top because he never lost that hunger and he was loved because he remained true to the modest background whence he had come. Pills rattling against plastic didn’t fit into the story. When you’re a fan, as I was, you don’t ask the hero about the sound that came from his pocket. Still, Paul and I could never forget it.

Kelly finished third that day, went to doping control and failed. The banned drug Stimul was found in his urine. What I remember now is how Sean Kelly looked that evening. A small semi-circle of journalists stood around him at Rhode-Saint-Genèse asking about his third-place finish but it was his deathly white face and the enlarged pupils that struck me. He didn’t look like himself.

When the news of his positive test was made public, he did what all cyclists did: denied using Stimul and said there had to have been a mix-up in the doping control room. One of his arguments was that there were six or seven people in the room when he was giving his sample as opposed to the stipulated two. If Kelly had used Stimul, he had behaved very stupidly because it was an easily detectable drug and by finishing third he had ensured that he would be tested.

Robert Millar, the Scottish rider, was dismissive of the charge, not on any moral grounds but on the basis that Stimul was passé, a seventies drug no one used any more. Karl McCarthy, international secretary for the Irish Cycling Federation, flew into Brussels to plead on Kelly’s behalf, and when the Belgian Federation still insisted he was guilty, the Union Cycliste Internationale (UCI) sent the case back to them and asked them to reconsider.

Sixteen months after the race, the UCI confirmed the original result stood.

Kelly was fined 1000 Swiss francs, which was approximately one sixth of what he earned for showing up at a village race, and given a one-month suspended sentence. When I wrote about the 1984 Paris–Brussels in the biography, I didn’t mention the rattle of pills in the morning and I tried to make the case that it was hard to believe Kelly had used a substance so easily detectable. I chose to see the ridiculous leniency of the authorities as proof that, at worst, it was a minor infraction. It wasn’t how a proper journalist would have reacted. At the time I knew what I was doing.

Things changed over the following fifteen years.

We returned to Ireland in 1985, reluctantly leaving Paris, and I went back to covering the entire range of major sports. Paul stayed for a second year on the amateur circuit in France, achieved better results and earned a pro contract. It was a dream for him, something we had talked about over so many teas and coffees at rue Kléber. I couldn’t wait to see how his career would turn out. It was to be a bitter-sweet experience for him, a four-year collision with the reality of professional cycling. He experienced the joy of finishing the Tour de France but that, in the end, was overwhelmed by the certainty that if you didn’t dope, it was virtually impossible to compete.

In those years we spoke on the telephone a lot and Paul’s despair at cycling’s doping culture was palpable. He rode the Tour in 1986 and on the day at Alpe d’Huez that Bernard Hinault and Greg LeMond held hands as they rode across the finish line, I interviewed him for a piece commissioned by Magill, a current affairs magazine in Dublin.

It was a long interview, almost four hours, as we had so much to talk about. Kimmage wasn’t able to speak about doping because if he did he would have been drummed out of the sport the next day, but he spoke about the race like no one I had ever heard speak about the Tour de France. Honest, human, unromantic, but packed with insight. On the Monday morning that the race ended, the magazine editor Fintan O’Toole rang.

‘Where’s the piece?’

It wouldn’t be the last time I would hear that question.

‘How much do you need and when do you need it by?’

‘Five thousand words and by two-thirty this afternoon.’

It was a little after nine in the morning, and I had yet to listen to the tapes.

‘Fintan,’ I said, trying to sound authoritative, ‘this piece will work as a first-person piece, directly from the mouth of a rookie.’

‘That’s okay. I will send a bike to your house for two-thirty. Okay?’

‘Fine.’

Then the strangest thing happened. I sat down, played the tape and started typing. Every other minute there was something that had to be in the story. Paul had the gift of storytelling; gritty and unromantic but wonderful for that. It was by far the easiest five-thousand-word piece I’ve ever written: the Tour de France as you had never seen it. I can still remember his description of the pain as he struggled up the Col du Granon. So wasted he could barely keep the pedals turning and in danger of being outside the time limit, his slow progress and tortured face were an unspoken plea, ‘Poussez-moi, poussez-moi.’ And the fans did, pushing him forward as they have done for those in difficulty since the Tour began.

Of course it is against cycling’s rules to accept a push and in the team support car directly behind, a man known to Paul only as Robert screamed at the fans to stop. Confused, they stepped back, and after this had happened a few times Paul mustered up the energy to turn his head back to the car: ‘Robert, for fuck’s sake, let them push me.’ And Robert, embarrassed by the mistake, then yelled at the fans to help Paul.

After Kimmage’s first-person account of the race appeared, Fintan O’Toole called to say that in his time as editor it was the best piece he had ever run. I knew from the ease with which I’d extracted five thousand words from the tape that Kimmage could be a journalist and told him so. He didn’t believe me but that would change.

In 1988, two years after that Magill piece, Paul began writing columns about his life as a pro cyclist for the Sunday Tribune, the paper where I was working at the time. Given that he had no sportswriting experience, the columns were absurdly good. Vincent Browne was an outstanding editor at the Tribune and a man who didn’t often doubt his own judgement. He read the Kimmage columns and felt he knew the score: Kimmage told his story to Walsh who dressed it up as journalism.

‘Vincent, Paul is doing these columns entirely on his own.’

‘Yes, David, but you’re editing.’

‘I’m not, and if I was I couldn’t make them as good as they are.’

‘I still don’t believe he’s doing them on his own.’

‘Okay, Vincent, when Paul calls in with his column this week, you go and sit by the copytaker and see what he dictates.’

Vincent stood over Rita Byrne as she tapped out Paul’s words on her electric typewriter, scanning each sentence as it appeared on the page. This little exercise didn’t last long. Next time Paul was back in Dublin, Vincent offered him a full-time job as sportswriter. Paul’s writing was going better than his riding and he was enjoying it far more. We would speak on the phone about pro cycling and I now knew enough about the sport’s doping culture to understand he hadn’t a hope.

He retired in 1989 and then wrote a masterful account of his life in the peloton, Rough Ride. His memoir became the definitive tome on doping in cycling but Paul was vilified for writing it. And the criticism came exclusively from within the cycling family. It was shocking to hear the lies people told, distressing to watch the self-serving assaults on Paul’s character. His one-time teammate and friend Roche was one of those complaining the loudest. The other great Irish hero of the roads, Kelly, studiously avoided passing any critique on the book or on Paul.

‘I’d like to read the book but I just haven’t got round to it yet,’ Kelly would say to enquiring journalists for years afterwards.

And the fan who had followed Kelly from race to race in 1984 was having his eyes opened, slowly and painfully. At the 1988 Tour de France, the raceleader Pedro Delgado tested positive for the drug probenecid which was banned by the International Olympic Committee because it masks the use of steroids. Conveniently probenecid wasn’t due to be banned by cycling’s authorities until ten days after the Tour ended. There was no legitimate reason for any Tour rider to use probenecid and after the news broke the director of the Tour de France Xavier Louy went to Delgado’s hotel and asked him to leave the race.

The Spaniard refused, saying he hadn’t broken any rule. Technically that was the case.

The following morning I wandered through the corporate village at Limoges, still angry that a guy caught using a masking agent was about to win the Tour de France. Standing there alone for a moment was Dutch rider Steven Rooks, second overall and the one who would have won the Tour had Delgado been sanctioned.

‘Do you not feel cheated, that you are the true winner of the Tour de France?’ I asked, wanting him to agree.

He looked at me as if I were an alien with no understanding of anything human.

‘No, not at all. Delgado has been the best rider in the race, he deserves to win. It is okay for me to finish second.’

‘But he has used this masking drug?’

‘He is still the strongest guy in the race.’

Rooks wanted me to know that doping wasn’t any of my business. He resented any line of questioning that suggested he was the legitimate leader of the Tour de France. Effectively, there was an understanding between him and Delgado of what was permissible