Seven Deadly Sins: My Pursuit of Lance Armstrong Read Online Free

couldn’t wait to see how his career would turn out. It was to be a bitter-sweet experience for him, a four-year collision with the reality of professional cycling. He experienced the joy of finishing the Tour de France but that, in the end, was overwhelmed by the certainty that if you didn’t dope, it was virtually impossible to compete.
    In those years we spoke on the telephone a lot and Paul’s despair at cycling’s doping culture was palpable. He rode the Tour in 1986 and on the day at Alpe d’Huez that Bernard Hinault and Greg LeMond held hands as they rode across the finish line, I interviewed him for a piece commissioned by Magill , a current affairs magazine in Dublin.
    It was a long interview, almost four hours, as we had so much to talk about. Kimmage wasn’t able to speak about doping because if he did he would have been drummed out of the sport the next day, but he spoke about the race like no one I had ever heard speak about the Tour de France. Honest, human, unromantic, but packed with insight. On the Monday morning that the race ended, the magazine editor Fintan O’Toole rang.
    ‘Where’s the piece?’
    It wouldn’t be the last time I would hear that question.
    ‘How much do you need and when do you need it by?’
    ‘Five thousand words and by two-thirty this afternoon.’
    It was a little after nine in the morning, and I had yet to listen to the tapes.
    ‘Fintan,’ I said, trying to sound authoritative, ‘this piece will work as a first-person piece, directly from the mouth of a rookie.’
    ‘That’s okay. I will send a bike to your house for two-thirty. Okay?’
    ‘Fine.’
    Then the strangest thing happened. I sat down, played the tape and started typing. Every other minute there was something that had to be in the story. Paul had the gift of storytelling; gritty and unromantic but wonderful for that. It was by far the easiest five-thousand-word piece I’ve ever written: the Tour de France as you had never seen it. I can still remember his description of the pain as he struggled up the Col du Granon. So wasted he could barely keep the pedals turning and in danger of being outside the time limit, his slow progress and tortured face were an unspoken plea, ‘ Poussez-moi, poussez-moi. ’ And the fans did, pushing him forward as they have done for those in difficulty since the Tour began.
    Of course it is against cycling’s rules to accept a push and in the team support car directly behind, a man known to Paul only as Robert screamed at the fans to stop. Confused, they stepped back, and after this had happened a few times Paul mustered up the energy to turn his head back to the car: ‘Robert, for fuck’s sake, let them push me.’ And Robert, embarrassed by the mistake, then yelled at the fans to help Paul.
    After Kimmage’s first-person account of the race appeared, Fintan O’Toole called to say that in his time as editor it was the best piece he had ever run. I knew from the ease with which I’d extracted five thousand words from the tape that Kimmage could be a journalist and told him so. He didn’t believe me but that would change.
    In 1988, two years after that Magill piece, Paul began writing columns about his life as a pro cyclist for the Sunday Tribune , the paper where I was working at the time. Given that he had no sports-writing experience, the columns were absurdly good. Vincent Browne was an outstanding editor at the Tribune and a man who didn’t often doubt his own judgement. He read the Kimmage columns and felt he knew the score: Kimmage told his story to Walsh who dressed it up as journalism.
    ‘Vincent, Paul is doing these columns entirely on his own.’
    ‘Yes, David, but you’re editing.’
    ‘I’m not, and if I was I couldn’t make them as good as they are.’
    ‘I still don’t believe he’s doing them on his own.’
    ‘Okay, Vincent, when Paul calls in with his column this week, you go and sit by the copytaker and see what he dictates.’
    Vincent stood