David Walsh (2)Besprekingen

David Walsh is chief sportswriter with The Sunday Times, best known for his previous work on Lance Armstrong. In this latest book, he writes about the young Russian anti-doping official Vitaly Stepanov who tirelessly over many years fed information to WADA on Russian doping despite being married to top 800m runner Yuliya Rusanova who was herself doping. In fact, not only was he married to her, he was also feeding WADA regular information about her specific doping regime.

This is an utterly sad story on a number of levels. First and foremost, the extent of Russian doping across all sports has been utterly horrendous. No doubt many athletes like Rusanova would have preferred to run clean, but when running clean meant not making the cut as all your peers are doping it was (is?) a stark choice between your morals and your sporting career. Walsh uncovers the sordid depths of Russian doping, from the tier system of pharma support and "handling" of dirty samples depending on how promising an athlete was, to the Russian anti-doping agency being complicit in the whole sordid business.

Stepanov is a fairly minor player at the Russian anti-doping agency, but he takes his role seriously and believes vehemently that doping should not be allowed in Russian sport. The second aspect that makes this book such a sorry tale is that despite him feeding WADA (the World Anti-Doping Agency) information for many years, they were so tied up in their own international policies that nothing was done. It was only when Rusanova and Stepanov joined forces in their fight against doping and agreed to whistle-blow through a German TV documentary with secret recordings that the world sat up and took notice.

Any action movie worth its salt has a romantic thread weaved through it, and in The Russian Affair at its core is the strangely cold and seemingly mismatched marriage of Rusanova and Stepanov. Rusanova plays the villain of the stunning ice queen with a Russian business-like approach to her relationship with the dull, sober, serious, idealistic Stepanov.

It's an interesting book, which in retrospect makes me sad when I think of all the amazing Russian performances I've watched in the Olympics which now seem an utter sham. At times Walsh drags the story out a bit, but mostly it was pretty page-turning.

Bizarrely, in his epilogue Walsh focuses on the immediate response of Russia to the Stepanovs' whistle-blowing and their new life in the US, more or less missing the huge domino effect that their actions had on Russian sport. There is no mention of the 2015 indefinite ban for Russia from world athletics, nor the ban for Russia from all major world sporting events given in 2019, which seems like the obvious conclusion for the book.

He also publishes in an appendix a number of the emails Vitaly Stepanov sent to WADA over the years, which perhaps unveil another potential motive for his quest that's not touched on in the book. He (Stepanov) certainly didn't seem to be behind the door in asking for employment help outside of Russia from WADA - was a supported ticket to a better life in the US a potential driver behind his quest? I'm probably being harsh as he and his wife have ultimately been left with a lifetime of looking over their shoulders, but I do wonder how impartial Walsh has been in this book, given that in the introduction he tells us how he wrote the book with the Stepanovs' support as a way for both parties to make money.

3.5 stars - an interesting insight into Mother Russia and its priorities.½

Great detail not only on Armstrong but the drug culture in cycling & sport. How ineffective leadership by the UCI, the controlling body of cycling allowed the proflication of illegal substances which could have caused the demise of cycling as a sport. It could have created an industry which would permanate into other sports.
Armstrong took it to another level of usage, of legal suppression of
coverage & dominance of the peloton were fellow riders took drugs or got out of the system.

I've just finished David Walsh's book - Seven Deadly Sins - on his long pursuit of Lance Armstrong. It's a superb, inspiring read with so many parallels to our own doping story (Rangers FC). This tale, at least, has a happy ending but we may have to be very patient as it took >13 years to nail Lance!

The UCI come over very badly indeed - they were aware of the problems early on, covered up and tried to stick to their discredited script right up until the bitter end. For UCI, read SFA, SFL, SPL, SPFL - our governing body were aware of the (financial doping) problems early on, it was covered up and CO's EBT may well have effectively been a bribe. It certainly ensured that SDM had nothing whatsoever to worry about from that quarter.

For the most part the journalists were too lazy to cover the LA story properly. The cycling journalists were too conflicted, the more generic sports journalists were not interested. The conflicts, as here, were on promises of access - toe the line or your access to Lance, to his team and to the sport will be adversely affected; by implication the journalists' livelihood is at risk.

The cyclists themselves, the whole sport, was and perhaps still is wholly corrupted by the doping. Again, the riders were forced to toe the line (dope), keep to the script (don't grass up), or leave the sport. How difficult must it be for a talented bike rider to have to choose between the sport he loves and having to cheat to survive.

There are, of course, differences. In Scotland unless we stick to the mandated, establishment script we must be anonymous. Any journalist who breaks ranks is vilified and eventually leaves the story or leaves his job.

What I still cannot fathom out about our story is the motivation - of all of those who maintain the lie. It cannot be possible in this day and age that the BBC, the Herald, the Scotsman, the DR are populated & controlled by Sevco sympathisers. It cannot be possible in this day and age that all of these organisations are so afraid of the mob that they perpetrate the corruption and the lie.

I enjoyed this book. Armstrong's history is well known but this is the tale of those few who fought to expose the fraud that they knew existed sometimes at great risk to themselves. I am not a great fan of cycling myself but I found this admirable, entertaining and worth reading.

This was interesting, but I found the arrangement of the book muddled and repetitive. It felt like the author had to stretch the content to present a full-length book.

A rare page turner for me, I just couldn't get enough of the inner workings of cycling's greatest asshole's mind.

Well written account of the years that David Walsh tried to get the world to believe that Lance Armstrong's wins in the Tour de France couldn't be anything other than fraudulent, and that he was a drugs cheat.

This book is really quite eye opening in relation to the lengths that Lance Armstrong went to to hide his cheating ways. I was really pleased for David that Lance finally came out and 'admitted' (let's face it - he had little choice!) that he had taken performance enhancing drugs on each of his seven Tour de France wins.

This book would have benefited from some serious editing. It is very poorly written and would have been a better long journal/magazine article than a book. David Walsh may be a good sports writer but his prose is not well done. He jumps around between characters with abandon and others pop up without any context. I was really frustrated with this by the mid way mark but finished it. All to say that cycling is a very corrupt sport and unless serious measures are taken to ensure that riders are clean, it will remain corrupt. Lance Armstrong is a fraud and so are most cyclists.

Lance to Landis
Midway through the third stage of the 1924 Tour de France, Henri Pélissier (winner of the 1923 Tour) abandoned. Journalist Albert Londres found him drinking hot chocolate at a train station restaurant. The interview Pélissier gave is still important. After explaining what the suffering racers endured he showed Londres the various pills and potions he took to both improve his performance and mitigate his misery. “We run on dynamite,” he said.

Over the years the types of dynamite have changed. In the 1930s chemists synthesized amphetamines and racers soon learned how they could help and harm. Tom Simpson died in 1967 from the effects of dehydration, diarrhea and amphetamine overdose.

In the 1970s, the overuse of corticoids nearly killed 2-time Tour winner Bernard Thévenet. When he went public with his misdeeds, explaining that his use of steroids was the usual practice in the peloton, he received abuse from his sponsor, the public and his fellow riders.

In the 1990s EPO made doping necessary if a racer wanted to win. Riders like Marco Pantani and Bjarne Riis ran their hematocrits to a nearly lethal 60%. Any racer wishing to compete with these men and their like were forced to either stick the needle in their arms or retire. This is not just my guess. Many racers from that era (Andy Hampsten, for one) have gone public with how the sport was transformed by a drug that could dramatically improve a racer’s power output.

Today, with a reliable test for EPO available, racers have gone on to new strategies, including old-fashioned blood doping. The best racers can spend over $100,000 a year on both the drugs and the technical expertise to avoid detection. Since this technology is so expensive, it is generally only the lower-paid lesser riders who get caught by dope tests.

That brings us to Walsh’s book and the demand that he find a “smoking gun” before he levels any accusations. Smoking guns are almost impossible to find. In 1960, Tour de France doctor Pierre Dumas walked in on Gaston Nencini while he was calmly transfusing his own saved blood in his hotel room. That’s not going to happen today because what Nencini was doing to win the 1960 Tour was not illegal. Yet, Nencini was doing exactly what most doping experts think modern racers are doing, performing autologous (using their own saved blood for later injection) blood doping.

I urge any person concerned with the obvious problem of rampant doping in sports to read this book. Walsh isn’t a sensationalist. He is a man who hates cheaters. This book is the result of his belief that Lance Armstrong, like almost all of the rest of the professional peloton, used banned performance-enhancing modalities. By necessity, he must build a circumstantial case, but that should not be a justification to reject his conclusions out of hand. I finished the book feeling that Walsh had had indeed made his case.

An old, retired Italian pro with close connections to the racers of today once sat me down and explained much about doping. He concluded by saying, “Bill, they are all dirty.”

I would have liked Walsh to organize his information a little better. Still, that didn’t keep this book from curling the hair on the back of my neck. Even those who fervently believe in Armstrong’s innocence will learn much about modern professional cycling from this book.