You continue with the work that you want to do to try and find out the truth about Lance
Armstrong or at least portray that to the general public and for people to realise who
he is, he goes on to win 7 tour de France, he retires, he makes a comeback, he becomes
so powerful and so big, there must have been a point where you started to think is you
know is this person too big, too powerful with too much money to ever be toppled almost.
Yes I have to say I always felt he was too big to be toppled. If you said to me did you
see the end coming as it came, no I didn't, I absolutely didn't because in 2001 I found
out that he was working with Michele Ferrari doping doctor, should that have not made a
big difference, it should, did it, no. Lance said I believe Michele's an honest man and
a lot of the journalists said well that's ok then Lance believes he's honest, David
wrote Lance believes he's honest then what David Walsh said is interesting but not that
relevant. So i come up with Emma O'reilly and she says I was Lances masseuse there was
doping in the team and I put that in a book with Pierre Ballester and people say you know
what Emma Reilly's just one witness may be a bitter ex employee and then I go to Betsy
Andreu she heard him admit using doping Oh shes a bitter wife of a team mate and Lance
had a way of diminishing all the people who spoke against him and I suppose the bit that
really frustrated me was the readiness of so many to accept Armstrongs totally implausible
explanations, to accept the fact that he felt he could carry to assassinate anybody who
spoke against him and I found that depressing it was like If you were a big guy you could
say whatever you like about other people and the journalists who should have been challenging
you didn't challenge you and were prepared to let you get away with it.
13 years obviously is a long time to pursue one person almost or one subject, do you feel
like it's closed now for you?
Yer I think it is pretty much closed and people you know because I was on this case for a
long time I feel I've got exaggerated credit for it really I mean if you want to know how
Lance armstrong was brought down you need to look at Lance Armstrong not David Walsh
because although Lance was a smart guy I think his smartness was more the analytical type
of intelligence, I don't think he was emotionally intelligent. He didn't realise that Floyd
Landis would constitute a very dangerous enemy, so when Floyd Landis got banned after 2006
Tour de France and came back and is looking, is reaching out to Lance for some help and
Lance says basically get lost you're a loser you were caught. Lance made an enemy of a
guy who is incredibly dangerous because Floyd is tough, he's hard and when he takes his
gloves off he's a formidable fighter. So Floyd took the gloves off, wrote about what
life was like in the US postal team and because maybe people like me had created a lot of
doubt about Lance Armstrong then you had people like Travis Tygart, the united states anti
doping agency CEO you had people like Jeff Novitzky who was conducting an investigation
into doping in cycling. They were listening to Floyd because in a way maybe what I had
done had created enough doubt for Floyds allegations to have a huge amount of credibility, but
Floyds allegations were the turning point in this story and from that moment on we had
entered the end game, and it was going to end very good for the truth and very badly
for Lance Armstrong.
Do you think that had he not come out of retirement, back in 2009 that we might not be sat here
talking about the same subject because things might not have come out?
Totally, if he hadn't rid-, if he hadn't made his comeback in 2009 there is no way
in the world that he would have been caught in my eyes, but it's like you know we've
all watched Hollywood movies right, the guy has been the greatest bank thief in the history
of robbing banks and he's accumulated a lot of money and he goes into retirement and
he's living a nice sedate life and somebody comes along and says you know there's one
last job that you should consider doing, and for Lance Armstrong coming back in 2009 was
that one last job, couldn't resist it, I believe he did it for the money, that he felt
he needed some extra money before finally going into retirement, but he was lured by
that one last job, one last adventure, and it's, it's you know the history of Hollywood
is littered with movies that have bored us with guys coming out of retirement for one
last job and Lance was just you know another of that genre.