It’s been a tough week in America for sports cheats

So, there it is: Lance Armstrong has admitted to Oprah Winfrey that his dominance of cycling from the late 1990s to the mid-2000s was tainted — to put it mildly — by performance-enhancing drugs.

At a Four Seasons Hotel in Austin, Texas on Monday afternoon, the pair sat down for a two-and-a-half hour interview that will air Thursday and Friday in the US on her OWN Network, a TV channel that has been little more than a rumour since it launched two years ago. (If you can stomach staying up to watch the heightened melodrama, the Discovery Channel will simulcast in Ireland and the UK and it will be streamed online too.) Oprah is on first name terms with the length and breadth of America, similar to Ireland’s own chat show supremo and fellow everyone-in-the-audience merchant, Gaybo. She is probably the only one who could have pulled this off.

Now she has 150 minutes of tape that she personally carried on her flight back to Chicago with her dog food and she is refusing to cut any of it. Upon landing in her hometown, she discovered that the major nugget of the “biggest interview” of her career had been leaked. But while she said she was “satisfied”, “mesmerised and riveted”, the well-rehearsed Armstrong came ready, well prepared and “met the moment”.

I don’t want to dwell on Armstrong too much. I saw him rush through Marseille on the way to his 2003 Tour but I’m nowhere near an authority on the subject and plenty has been said about the brave journalists who have been vindicated, the team-mates who can sleep a little better and now this week more than ever, the cycling officials he is saying he’ll drag down with him.

They have a tough couple of years ahead of them while the US Federal government has been licking its chops for a couple of months and we’ll find out for sure tomorrow night if he plans to return some of the prize money he gleaned from the sport over the years.

For cycling in America, this is a bit of a setback. It’s a fringe sport but one which is intensely popular among those enthusiasts who never loved Lance quite as much as the casual sports fan. It will survive on the back roads but it’s unlikely a major American company akin to the Postal Service will touch it ever again.

It’s been a tough week in America for sports cheats. Last Wednesday the baseball writers of America couldn’t decide — or rather didn’t want to decide — on a player to send to the Hall of Fame so no living player will be inducted for the first time since 1960. Eligible for the first time were three suspected drug cheats: Roger Clemens, Barry Bonds and Sammy Sosa. None of the three made the required 75% of the vote while another player, who has actually admitted cheating — unlike those other three — Mark McGwire, was falling well short for the seventh time.

In a powerful response to the long-feared debacle, the New York Times sports section led with a blank space that stretched down almost the length of their front page. Beneath baseball-style banners, a four-word headline: “And the Inductees are…”

But back to cycling and with all that’s happened, I’m reminded of one of the many beautifully written books which have emerged out of the sport, Tomorrow We Ride, by Jean Bobet. The younger, less successful brother of three-time Tour de France winner Louison, Jean became a journalist in 1959 after he retired at the age of 28.

He describes the access he had to his former fellow pros in those days and how he and everyone else turned a blind eye to doping. “[Time trial specialist] Roger Riviere, for instance, opening his suitcase to show me his supply of Palfium. Or Tom Simpson, on the morning of his fatal climb on the Ventoux, sticking his tongue out to let me count the little white tablets he had emptied onto it ‘just to keep [him] going’.”

Already intent on retiring, Bobet experimented with doping for his last race, the 1958 Paris-Tours. He was given the “best stuff available”, Metedrine, an amphetamine used by RAF pilots during the Battle of Britain.

It’s difficult not to think of Lance et al when Bobet writes that he “soared through an artificial paradise”, unable to feel the pedals as he approached the finish line, elbow to elbow with the top 15, much to his own surprise. Suddenly he saw a space which he wrongly thought existed between two riders who didn’t appear to be going that fast. A split-second later, he was dazed and on his backside, a “fitting conclusion to my one and only escapade as a willing cheat”.

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