CYCLING EXCLUSIVE: David Walsh on Lance Armstrong and The Program: “I never thought it would end this way”

“When you write a story and think: 'People are not going to like this; I'm going to become even more unpopular.' Well, that's fine,” says David Walsh.

Walsh had a long time to get used to being the unpopular “pest who kept harping on about Lance Armstrong”. He first started writing stories questioning the Texan in 1999, the gist of which, in his own words, was: “Basically, you can’t believe this guy.” But since Armstrong confessed, in 2013, to having doped in all seven of his Tour de France victories, Walsh has become The Journalist Who Doggedly Pursued the Truth.

But, he explains, he was always more comfortable in the role of pest:

“I remember Dave Brailsford [principle of Team Sky] said to me: 'The thing I could never have lived with, if I was in your position, was the level of unpopularity that became normal for you.' And I said, and I meant this from the bottom of my heart: 'Dave, it never bothered me to any degree that I would regard as significant.'

“There would be days when you would see something in the Tour de France that would be really interesting and I would walk up and down [the press room] looking for just one journalist to share my enthusiasm. And the five or six people that I was talking to, if they weren't in their seats at that moment, I had nobody to turn to. Because the other 495 wouldn't really have welcomed it. And there were days like that when it was a little frustrating.

“But I was comfortable with the lack of popularity. And now it just feels a bit weird. When people start saying: 'I don't know how you did it,' or whatever, I just want to cut them short and say: 'Please, can we discuss something else?'”

AN ACT OF CYNICISM

Something else, then: does Walsh question every big sporting performance now?

"It's not that you consciously decide to question it,” he explains. “It's that you cannot avoid questioning it. If you see something that's brilliant, there's an inner voice that says: 'Well, hold on. Can you believe this?' And I have that attitude in all sports.

“I will always be a skeptic – I definitely don't want to be a cynic. I used to say during the Armstrong years: 'I'm not the cynic, guys. The cynics are the people who suspect Lance but decide that they're not going to give any credence to their own suspicions. They're going to suppress them. That's their way of saying: 'You know what? He probably is doping, but it's too much trouble.'

“Now, to me, that's incredibly cynical because there were people who were riding the race clean who were being absolutely screwed. And you're saying: 'They're not worth a damn. They're not worth supporting; they're not worth defending.' And to me that's an act of cynicism.

A HEROIC JOB

Walsh the skeptic was never supposed to be the star. But he has praised Chris O'Dowd's turn as him on screen (pictured): “He’s good looking, bright, charismatic. Hollywood was growing on me,” he said on his fellow Irishman being cast. 

Joking aside, he says The Program scores highly in terms of authenticity. Working Title, the British company that produced the film, used Walsh on set to verify the accuracy of the way his story was depicted on screen.

"They really wanted to make it in an authentic way,” says Walsh. “Remember The Damned United? In a general sense, I love the movie. Michael Sheen was brilliant as Brian Clough. But every time there was a football training session, it was a cringe moment. Leeds United looked like a pub team. It's difficult [to recreate the action] with any sporting film. The rugby in Invictus was terrible. It's very difficult. Particularly if they're trying to portray elite-level sport. It's elite-level for a reason – very few people can do it. In a general sense, they really tried to be true to the story, true to how cycling looked, and I thought they made a decent fist of reproducing the cycling scenes.

“But I thought they've done an almost heroic job of trying to say: 'This is our honest assessment of what happened in terms of Lance Armstrong's rise and fall.”

Walsh says the film’s makers could have made it easier for people to get into if they had concentrated solely on the ‘Journalist versus Cyclist’ narrative.

“But that wouldn't have been realistic, because [Armstrong's former US Postal teammate] Floyd Landis was a huge part in the fall of Lance Armstrong. And I believe that's totally right. Landis was a huge player in this. And Jesse Plemons [of Breaking Bad fame], who played him, was superb.”

Walsh also says he was fortunate that he was allowed to be the journalist the film shows him to be.

“I hate listening to people say I've been lucky here,” he explains. “But, honestly, I have. I was working for a Sunday newspaper that was prepared to allow me to keep doing it [pursue Armstrong and write the stories about him cheating]… If you are working on a daily newspaper, when Lance Armstrong is winning the Tour de France seven times in a row, you can't write that for 26 days – between the preview and the end of the race.

“But my editor was [okay with it], because he was only getting it three times. So I was blessed in that respect. And I was blessed that the truth did eventually come out.”

AFFLICTING THE COMFORTABLE

The truth coming out is both a theme of the film and of Walsh’s conversation. He uses an expression in his book Seven Deadly Sins, on which The Program is based: a journalist's job is to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.

“There are some comfortable people who need to be even more afflicted than they have been recently,” he says. “And that's what journalists should be doing with some of the stuff going on now with some of the high-profile sports people in the UK.”

Walsh says he has not heard from Armstrong in person, but that he “criticises me every so often on Twitter because I haven't written about [another high-profile sportsperson], which I really would like to do at some point. But I've got to do it in the correct way… I can live with Lance's little criticisms.

“He said he would apologise when he was put under pressure by Oprah. But that was an answer given for the public. When Lance said that, I was watching thinking: 'Lance, you liar. You were never going to apologise to me.' And he hasn't surprised me.”

Walsh’s reputation precedes him now. In the same way that Chris Froome, as holder of the Yellow Jersey, will always be asked about clean sport and doping in cycling, Walsh will always be asked about the same thing: 'Is this rider clean; is that rider clean.'

Even before The Program was completed, he was being asked about Armstrong’s situation by names almost as big as Lance himself: 

"If you said to me: 'Was there was any moment when you felt ‘F**k, this is really a thrill!'? That was with Andy Murray. Because Murray would be by some distance the sportsman I most admire. I like his personality, I like his integrity in the way he behaves in that he is himself, even if he is being pretty objectionable. And he kind of apologises in his way. He's endearing, in his way. But it's always him. He's not putting on a face.

“I shouldn't say this, because it's so self-congratulatory. But I saw an interview with Murray and he was asked: 'Who are the five people you would most like to have dinner with? And he f**king mentioned me! [Laughs] I just bought it home, because everyone in our house loves Murray, and I showed them and said: 'Can you believe this?' So I would like to say, publicly, to Andy Murray: I am available, boy, any time! I will even pay!

But it is a more recent dinner companion who shares Walsh’s feeling of good fortune that The Program has been made at all. He explains:

“I had dinner with Betsy [Andreu, the wife of former US Postal rider Frankie, who, with Walsh, always maintained Armstrong’s guilt] and [some of] my family, and Betsy kept saying: 'I cannot believe what I'm going to see tomorrow. And I said: 'Well, we always knew there would be a Lance movie, but we never thought it would be this one.'

“And I never thought the story would have the ending it had – I never thought he would be caught.”

The Program is in cinemas from October 16

Graham Willgoss is Chief subeditor and cycling editor @Sportmaguk. Follow him on Twitter @GrahamWillgoss