Calling a cheating cyclist to account takes extraordinary courage

Senior Sports Writer

Thursday 18 October 2012

A bad taste was left in my mouth after what had begun as a very pleasant breakfast on the ocean front in the lovely Sydney resort of Manly on the morning of June 20, 2001.

Lance Armstrong was relentlessly pursued for more than 12 years before being finally outed as a drugs cheat. Picture: Ricardo S Savi/Getty

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Kevin Ferrie

The cause was a first meeting with a rather unpleasant-seeming Irish journalist, whose compatriots were the best company I had had in the course of our six-week tour of Australia following the British & Irish Lions.

The morning's main discussion had been about the Lions' ineptitude in losing to Australia A the previous evening, but where the rest of us were recognising mistakes across the pitch the newcomer, to my mind, focused unfairly on one of the Irish players.His comments were to crystallise my views on something about which I had been considering for some time, what I have since referred to as "Uncle Tom" syndrome, where Celtic sportswriters seem to be overly harsh on players from their own country in order to portray themselves as objective in the eyes of the English media.My view of that syndrome has not changed. There have been too many more examples since. However, my view of the individual in question has changed considerably, first grudgingly and then admiringly, to the extent that I'm now inclined to see that first meeting in a different context.David Walsh is still not someone I could pretend to know well, but for a number of years after that first meeting my impression was of a rather arrogant, pompous man, even after I first discovered just how relentlessly he had pursued Tour de France drugs cheat Lance Armstrong. Now seen as heroic by most in this profession, the early years of his battle to make his case caused him to be victimised by Armstrong's team, cycling officialdom and, perhaps most disgustingly but also most predictably, by fellow journalists.This is a business in which the easy option is to go with the majority which, for the most part, means allowing authorities and leading figures to dictate terms while delivering what can be little more than public relations material. It is much harder to challenge those people, particularly when the same governing body, in this case the UCI (Union Cycliste Internationale), is both promoting and policing the sport. Only Walsh will ever know his motivation for his observations the day after the Australia A game, but his persona was surely affected by that experience and should be understood in that perspective.On an admittedly very different scale I have, on a number of occasions, had a flavour of what he encountered in feeling like some-thing of a voice in the wilderness when seeing that wrong-doing has taken place and questioning those involved. It can be a lonely business and tends to stimulate mistrust and suspicion to the point of professional and personal paranoia, in turn sometimes affecting your overall demeanour. Even with support you can be left feeling pretty vulnerable.In Walsh's case, taking on Armstrong brought him to the brink of ruin as the American threw all his resources and influence, which appears to have extended to the very top of the political tree, in trying to intimidate him and his sources.When, then, the wider public quite rightly forms the negative view it does of the majority of the media it should recognise that the very best journalists are actually the world's police. It is when those in authority are unprepared to do their jobs in any walk of life that the importance of a free press is most evident. Admittedly, calling a cheating cyclist to account may not compare to those who put their lives on the line to tell us what is happening on the front-line in the world's war zones, but it still took extraordinary courage to keep chasing this story for 12 or 13 years.Some colleagues now feel Walsh has been less than magnanimous in the way he has reported on the Armstrong case since he was finally vindicated by the 1200-page report recently issued by the US Anti-Doping Agency. If he is coming across as a wee bit self-righteous, though, I for one am more than happy to allow him to do so, just as I have now reassessed that breakfast in Manly 11 years ago in light of knowing what the man who spoiled it had on his own plate at the time.

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Calling a cheating cyclist to account takes extraordinary courage

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