Kimmage and Walsh outstay all the others
For sure it’s a global game now with a number of countries particularly adept at it but any competition would invariably end with the Star Spangled Banner being played at the medal ceremony. Just as it has given the world talents like Bird, Jordan and Bryant to marvel at, so it has produced wordsmiths like Plimpton, Halberstam and Smith to delight us. It is the fatherland of the craft, dwarfing Ireland’s contribution for one in the discipline.
On one major story in particular though, American sportswriting has been found wanting. Thankfully two Irish sports journalists have not.
What Paul Kimmage and David Walsh have done in following the Lance Armstrong story for over 13 years has been heroic, even if that’s a word that Armstrong has devalued during that time.
They were slurred, sued, isolated and bullied, yet they persisted, driven by a core dedication to the principle that if the emperor isn’t wearing any clothes then it’s the function of journalism to declare and prove so.
In America, their counterparts didn’t want to know about Lance’s questionable state of undress. They only saw the seven yellow jerseys in Paris and all those yellow wristbands that the man who beat cancer popularised, never the question marks that were first triggered by Armstrong’s initial failed test in the 1999 Tour, not any crusade of Walsh and Kimmage’s.
No mainstream US media outlet interviewed Walsh when he wrote LA Confidential and From Lance to Landis. Over there, just as you didn’t quiz George W. during those years on whether or not there were really any weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, you didn’t dare to quiz Lance if he was ever taking performance-enhancing drugs to ride the mountains of France.
Sports Illustrated’s premier writer, Rick Reilly, was the leading cheerleader with a laptop, often being embedded with Team Armstrong.
He was particularly fond of peddling the line that “the most tested athlete ever” had never tested positive, conveniently ignoring the 1999 episode.
Last year Mitch Albom, a fine sportswriter before becoming better known for writing bestsellers that are nearly as fuzzy warm as Lance’s It’s Not About The Bike, wondered aloud on ESPN what was the point in the US authorities investigating Armstrong’s past. He’d retired. They weren’t going to catch him red-handed. Everyone was either frustrated or tired by the whole thing. Who cared now? What did it matter now?
Buzz Bissinger, author of the classic Friday Night Lights, has just penned Newsweek’s cover story, entitled ‘I Still Believe in Lance Armstrong’. He takes great pride in being the one writer — journalist is hardly the appropriate word here — to talk extensively to Armstrong since his announcement last Thursday. He says that while he believes Armstrong didn’t dope, it doesn’t matter anyway if he did.
“Professional cycling is a rotten sport like professional sports are rotten (anybody who believes otherwise is a Pollyanna fool),” contends Buzz. “It’s about winning by any means possible and then hoping to figure out a medical way of covering it up. If Armstrong used banned substances, he was levelling the playing field. He was still the one who overcame all odds.”
According to Buzz, it doesn’t matter if Lance might be “a prick”. “I don’t know anyone who is at the top of their profession who isn’t a prick.”
All he cares is that Lance has always been a hero to his cycling-mad son which makes him a hero to Buzz.
You’ve got to question Buzz, what or how much sport Buzz is watching these days. Has he never watched the joy Lionel Messi plays football with as well as the joy he gives in doing so? Does he really think Kevin Durant is a prick? He thinks Travis Tygart, who headed the USADA investigation, is such a sort. Thankfully Travis is at the top of his profession, just as Walsh and Kimmage have been for years at theirs.
Unlike Buzz and Mitch and Reilly, they know the story of Christophe Bassons, the moral guardian of the peloton that Armstrong squeezed out of the sport; of Emma O’Reilly, the physical therapist Lance discredited as “a prostitute and an alcoholic” because of her testimony on what really happened on that 1999 Tour. They knew and loved the sport long before Buzz’s son took it up just because he’d heard about Lance. And unlike Buzz, they care whether their son or anyone else’s should have to resort to doping to compete at the highest level.
“My view is that there were plenty of people who rode those Tours clean who were absolutely screwed by the system,” Walsh once observed. “If we don’t stand up for those people we shouldn’t be in the jobs we’re in.”
Lance was often fond of saying “Pain is temporary; quitting lasts forever.” In the end even he quit. Cycling should be grateful — though it won’t — that Kimmage and Walsh never did.
* kieranshannon@eircom.net
