DAVID WALSH
Simon & Schuster, 2012, 426 pages, $27 (pb)
Review by Phil Shannon
After four shots at the Tour de France and placing no higher
than 36th, and after life-threatening testicular cancer, Lance Armstrong
returned to the world’s most prestigious and richest bike race in 1999 and won for
each of the next seven years. Magically,
he was a changed man, writes David Walsh in Seven
Deadly Sins – changed, as we now know, because he was “chemically
enhanced”.
Walsh, a British sports journalist and one of the few to
query the heroic, back-from-the-brink Lance myth, notes how, after being
repeatedly beaten by doped-up European teams, Armstrong decided to join the
drugs arms race by taking the performance-enhancing drug, EPO with spectacular results.
His moving, success-against-the-odds, cancer-survival
back-story wooed adoring journalists but Walsh smelled a rat. After French police and customs busted most
of the 1998 Tour’s leading contenders for filling their tanks with EPO, Armstrong
left his death-bed to spearhead the 1999 Tour as the clean-skin poster boy.
Armstrong’s performance, recording the fastest Tour time in
history and effortlessly outpacing the EPO generation, was, however, suspect to
Walsh who got on the case, interviewing cyclists, doctors, masseuses, trainers,
coaches and other Armstrong intimates, unearthing a lengthy history of doping
by Armstrong and its cover-up by team officials.
This history included backdated medical prescriptions, visits
and million dollar payments to the “world’s dirtiest doctor” in Italy about to
go on trial for doping professional riders, the use of makeup concealer to hide
needle marks, brown paper bags full of EPO, syringes emptied of EPO.
What was keeping Armstrong’s secret under wraps, however, were
his formidable intimidatory weapons. Personal
bullying of clean, and drugged but conscience-stricken, riders enforced the
code of silence on drug-taking in cycling whilst a former team doctor interviewed
by Walsh received a call from Armstrong saying ‘I have lots of money, good
lawyers, and, if you continue to talk, I’ll destroy you’.
Armstrong’s pockets were indeed deep, with multi-million
annual income from prize money, merchandise, corporate sponsorship and product
endorsements. This funded many legal
stoushes, ending in settlements in Armstrong’s favour always stopping short,
however, of proceeding to court where perjury almost certainly would await an
under-oath Armstrong.
Strategic donations also bought complicity in the cover-up. Six-figure donations to world cycling’s
governing body took care of any positive drug tests which had slipped through
the net. An affidavit from Indiana University
Hospital testifying that Armstrong was drug-free was secured, courtesy of a
$1.5 million endowment for a chair in oncology at the hospital where Armstrong,
under treatment for cancer, had confessed, for clinically necessary reasons, to
a history of ‘EPO, testosterone, growth hormone, cortisone and steroid’ use.
Restrictive British libel laws also proved friendly to
Armstrong in keeping critical English language books and articles out of
circulation though these were few enough as most journalists were readily co-opted
to the Armstrong cult by the threat of being denied media access to the super-hero’s
magic circle. Any doubters could be
further held at bay by the cynically exploited shield of Armstrong’s support
for cancer charities.
These elaborate defences, however, crumbled when two of
Armstrong’s highest profile, former teammates, Tyler Hamilton and Floyd Landis
(the first, post-Lance Tour winner in 1996), put on record their own drug use
which also implicated Armstrong in damning detail. Their evidence against Armstrong “served as
the thread that, once pulled, unravelled the myth much like a two-dollar
sweater”.
Armstrong chose not to contest the resulting lifetime ban
and retrospective disqualification of all his results following publication of the
2012 report of the United States Anti-Doping Agency (USADA) which confirmed
what the USADA head called the ‘greatest heist sport has ever seen’.
Armstrong, who richly profited as a cheat and a liar,
deserves opprobrium but so does the capitalist culture that sport operates in
with the systemic values that entice individual moral transgression, values involving
unhealthy competition for a success measured by obscene wealth and defined by
the glorification of the elite individual by a passive, spectating many.
Walsh, a self-described media “revolutionary”, only skirts
around this analytical framework, however, in a somewhat self-indulgent book (as
much about the journalist as his quarry) but one which adds journalistic colour
to the destruction of ‘LanceWorld’, a grubby fantasy which should have been buried
long ago were it not for the drug-soaked corruption of sport by money.
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