Embrace the anger, Sally, not the liar

Lance Armstrong’s ghost writer was let down by the disgraced cyclist. By siding with him now, however, she is letting herself down

David Walsh Published 16 December 2012SALLY JENKINS is a talented sportswriter who works for the Washington Post, a newspaper revered for Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein’s Watergate investigation that led to the impeachment of US president Richard Nixon. Jenkins, at least to a non-US audience, is now better known as Lance Armstrong’s ghost writer and the muse behind his gripping autobiography, It’s Not About The Bike.

The book was founded on the lie that Armstrong was a hero and telling the truth when he said he never used performance enhancing drugs.

Jenkins didn’t make up the lie, she merely showed herself to be the Queen of Gullibility and, for a journalist, pretty adept at avoiding obvious questions. The scrutiny to which she has subjected so many others was left in the car whenever she met Armstrong.

Of course she asked him about doping because even for the blindest of fans that couldn’t be avoided. In a Q&A on the Washington Post website last year, she recalled a conversation with Armstrong. “He told me point blank, ‘I didn’t use performance enhancers,’ and I accept his answer because he’s my friend and that’s what you do with friends ... I hope for Lance to be clean, I wish for him to be clean, mainly because he told me was.”

Armstrong was lying through his teeth to his friend, giving her the lies that she would use to create a story of heroism and nobility and courage and defiance and all the other qualities that inspire people. I couldn’t recount the number of times I told a friend that Armstrong was a fraud only to be deflated by the news that this person had just given his terminally ill parent or family member or colleague a copy of the cyclist’s inspirational book.

When it became obvious that Armstrong had duped her into writing fiction as fact, sordidness as heroism, Jenkins had a dilemma. She could have apologised for allowing herself to be part of the Armstrong propaganda machine, but she didn’t. As for Armstrong, she was entitled to feel disgust at the cynical way he used her reputation and her talent to fool so many people, especially those afflicted by cancer.

But Sally Jenkins expresses no criticism of Armstrong, no sense of feeling let down by his lies. On August 24 she wrote a column in the Washington Post that began as follows: “First of all, Lance Armstrong is a good man. There is nothing that I can learn about him short of murder that would alter my opinion on that.”

This is patently absurd. And it’s hard to believe an intelligent human being could utter it. Nothing short of murder, Sally? Do you give all your friends this latitude or just the one with whom you had a seriously profitable business relationship?

In today’s Washington Post Sally Jenkins has another column on her relationship with Armstrong and goes to great lengths to explain how she still can’t feel any anger towards her friend. It doesn’t matter that he lied to her, compromised her journalistic integrity, made her newspaper look foolish. More damningly, it doesn’t seem to matter that he duped the cancer community, told them one fairytale while living out another.

As for the poor fools who competed clean and had their careers stolen, forget them. They absolutely don’t matter.

Does Jenkins have any feelings of sympathy for those whose characters were assassinated by Armstrong because they dared to tell the truth about what went on in the Motorola and US Postal teams? Did she ever consider checking on the reports of the news conference given in Maryland in June 2004 by Armstrong and his cohorts when announcing their lucrative sponsorship deal with Discovery Channel and hear what he had to say about Emma O’Reilly?

She told the truth about her five years in the team and her two as Armstrong’s personal masseuse. Her story clearly showed he and his teammates doped. He was asked about it that day in Maryland and after opening remarks about not wanting to speak badly of Emma he talked of she being involved in “inappropriate issues within the team management and within the riders,” after which Emma “left the team.”

The inference was clear as daylight. Emma O’Reilly believed Armstrong was calling her a whore. Surely Jenkins can understand how this might feel to a young and talented masseuse? It was so untrue, so wrong, so despicable, but in Jenkins’ value system, it isn’t murder and therefore nothing to be angry about. Well, eight years after it was uttered, it still makes me angry.

O’Reilly and Betsy Andreu told the truth from the first day and Armstrong tried to take away their good names. Christophe Bassons tried to tell the truth about the 1999 Tour de France and Armstrong bullied him and helped to make it impossible for the French rider to stay in the race. Filippo Simeoni told the truth about Armstrong’s doping doctor, Michele Ferrari, in an Italian court and he too was bullied by Big Tex.

But nothing to be angry about, right?

Okay, Sally, forget all the civilian casualties.

Consider instead what your friend said under oath on 30 November 2005 when testifying in the SCA v Tailwind Sports case in Dallas. He was asked what would happen with his sponsors if ever he was found guilty of doping. Would he lose them?

“All of them,” he replied. “And the faith of all the cancer survivors around the world. So everything I do off the bike would go away too. And don’t think for a second I don’t understand that. It’s not about money for me. Everything. It’s also about the faith that people have put in me over the years. So all of that would be erased. So I don’t need it to say in a contract you’re fired if you test positive. That’s not as important as losing the support of hundreds of millions of people.”

Sally, he used the cancer community as a shield, lined them up in their “hundreds of millions” and took cover behind them. It makes perjury seem like a trivial offence.

And you still don’t see there’s anything to be angry about.