Desperate Armstrong still has not come clean
Reacting to th e first part of the Oprah Winfrey interview, author and ex-Sunday Times journalist Paul Kimmage insisted Armstrong was only sorry because he had been caught and his apology was useless unless he went on to testify under oath about his drug-taking.
“I don’t know whether he wants to leverage that (his admission of guilt) against something else, whether he’s trying to cut a deal that would enable him to compete in triathlons, but if he’s genuine about it, he’ll be knocking on Travis Tygart’s door today and saying: ‘Okay I will testify under oath, I want to do this sport a service, I’ve caused it terrible damage. I know I can do it a service now, I can tell you exactly, what I did, how I did it and who enabled me to do it.’
“That’s the only service he can do the sport now,” argued Kimmage.
The Dubliner was also critical of Winfrey’s interview, insisting she had failed to get to the bottom of some of the most critical issues, including how Armstrong’s sophisticated doping regime had managed to escape detection for so long.
“Armstrong says ‘I never tested positive’. Well he did test positive and she didn’t pull him on that. She should have said ‘you tested positive in 1999, tell us how you got away with that.’
“It is absolutely critically important that is explained.
“I’m not interested in Lance Armstrong. He’s not the problem, the problem is the sport. And unless the lesson is learned from Lance Armstrong, this is going to happen again,” he added.
His former Sunday Times colleague David Walsh echoed Kimmage’s scepticism and suggested Armstrong confessed only because he had exhausted all other avenues of escape.
“He was banned for life, he had his seven Tours taken away, his reputation is in the gutter. He’s in the gutter brand-wise because all the sponsors were like rats jumping off a sinking ship. So he’s in a place that he doesn’t like. He can’t compete, he’s got no respect, he’s damaged his own foundation so he decided he had to do something and that was to confess. Not because he wanted to, but because he felt he had to.”
Walsh also attacked several of Armstrong’s interview answers, alleging some were lies. “To Lance, I’d say, ‘your life worked in the past because people believed in you and they wanted to believe you. Now no one wants to believe you, so you better be telling the truth in the fullest and most complete way.”
But Walsh had little sympathy for corporations looking to recoup sponsorship investment on the back of Armstrong’s deceit.
“The sponsors are looking for their money back but I don’t think they deserve it. They knew what the USPS team were doing. It wouldn’t have been difficult for them to work out that he was doping. The USPS team put money into a team when they knew there were huge doubts.
“I don’t mean to blow my own trumpet but if anybody from that organisation who was willing to put $30million into the team had come to me and said, ‘look let’s have a coffee and talk about this for 20 minutes’, I guarantee you in 20 minutes I could’ve guaranteed them they were sponsoring a doping team.”
Walsh also scoffed at suggestions by Armstrong that it is impossible to ride the Tour clean.
“That’s ridiculous. And that’s one of the areas where journalism has failed the Tour de France because we have been writing about it and we routinely describe the race as being inhumane and once we do that, the riders pick up on that and they say, ‘well if it’s inhumane, I’m surely entitled to take whatever measures I like to make it bearable’.
“Plenty of guys rode it clean. Paul Kimmage did. All you do is your ride it slower — you’re not going to reach the speeds of the dopers but who cares?”
Lance Armstrong may have finally come clean, but his body language during his tell-all interview told a different story, body language expert Judi James claims.
“He was incredibly calm. I don’t think it looked like a confessional in the way he played it. There were no signals of genuine humility at all there. I get the feeling he was very much in control throughout. If you turned the sound down, it was hard to tell who was interviewing who.”
Despite the interview’s “no-holds barred” billing, there were clearly some parameters and moments where he either avoided questions or claimed he could not remember, said James. James said Armstrong raised both hands in fists, like a boxer, when explaining why he lied so vehemently, while claiming he had “fought back” at people pushing him.
And she said his high crossed legs were a sign of status, not defence: “It’s the sort of thing that we keep somebody distant from us because we feel above them.
“He said he has been a bully, and if I was somebody that he had bullied in the past I would be quite scared by what I had seen because it was as though this was a guy who is rebooting his own status.”
It was hard to turn on the radio yesterday without hearing David Walsh’s voice, but one of the most important interviews he gave might possibly have escaped the Irish listenership.
Speaking to the BBC World Service, an emotional Walsh recalled the times his efforts to uncover the truth about Armstrong got personal. Walsh’s son, John, was killed tragically at the age of 12 after being knocked off his bike and Lance believed Walsh was bitter towards him, because of that.
“Lance said the reason I was writing about him the way I was, was because I had a vendetta against cycling because my son was killed. He told his team-mates that and it was written in a book. I thought that was sick,” blasted Walsh.
Brian Canty
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