by David Walsh
Chrobotek was funny, sometimes intentionally, sometimes not. At the suggestion that one of of Ben’s rivals was clean, he threw his head back, then brought it forward: ‘I may be ugly,’ he said, ‘but I’m not stupid.’ Afterwards when doping suspicions arose I tried to apply the Chrobotek principle: it was okay to be ugly, not okay to be stupid.
But there is a choice for the sportswriter and it’s not straightforward. Most of us have chosen journalism because we love sport. We say we love our jobs but it is getting paid for going to big sporting events that we love. Enthusiasm for the game is what drives our work. When doubts about the worth of the performance arise, they drain our enthusiasm.
This is why so many refuse to ask the obvious questions.
I was lucky when it came to Lance Armstrong.
Most things are a question of timing. Perhaps if the right questions were asked during the 1980s and ’90s, it might have emerged that EPO, which was then in widespread use and undetectable, had changed the sport. I saw many of those Tours and never asked a question.
So why, when Lance Armstrong won the first of his seven in the Tour de France, did I have such a different reaction?
I’ve always thought of my enthusiasm for sports-writing as existing in a well; you draw from it, it replenishes but not quite at the level that you have drawn from it. This used to be a worry. What if the well went dry? That thought doesn’t bother me any more because at the 1999 Tour, when the story of Lance Armstrong first announced itself, my enthusiasm for professional cycling was at a very low ebb.
Lance, Tour champion extraordinaire, came into my journalistic life at precisely the right moment.
2
‘The race is everything. It obliterates what isn’t racing. Life is the metaphor for the race.’
Donald Antrim
On 25 June 1995, I returned home to Ireland after five weeks covering the Rugby World Cup in South Africa. It was about ten o’clock when the plane landed in Dublin. Mary drove from our home in County Westmeath to pick me up, and Paul and his wife Ann came from their home not far from the airport to meet us for a coffee. We spent a couple of hours catching up before heading in our separate directions.
At home, turning into our drive, it was obvious something was wrong. Neighbours were standing around – not just neighbours but the schoolmaster, the priest – no one sure where to look. Inside the car you felt the certainty that once you opened the door your life was going to change forever. I can’t remember who it was told me that John, our 12-year-old son, had been in an accident on his bicycle.
‘But is he okay?’ I asked.
‘No, he broke his neck.’
‘Where is he now?’
‘He’s gone in the ambulance.’
‘But how is he? Is he going to be okay?’
‘No, he isn’t.’
That was it. We knew. Then we were thinking of our other children: Kate, Simon, Daniel, Emily and Conor, who all knew before we did. Where were they? How were they?
The accident had happened an hour earlier. John had played a gaelic football match that morning, his team had lost and he’d passed on the sandwiches and soft drinks provided afterwards. Turning into our driveway on the right-hand side of the road, he was struck by an oncoming car and died instantly. There wasn’t a mark on his face or body. It was just the force of the collision and the angle of his fall.
John was the second eldest of our children, a kid with an insatiable appetite for life. He was good at school, fiercely scrupulous about getting his homework done: ‘Dad, can’t talk, I’ve got three hours homework and there’s Champions League on the television.’ You stood to one side and let him get on with it. We played a lot of football on our lawn with the Kilmartin kids from next door and often they ended in fights; John and I, mostly.
‘It’s our throw.’
‘It didn’t cross the line.’
And from there all hell would break loose. His passion was forgivable. I should have had more sense.
We went on a holiday to the west of Ireland before the 1987 Tour de France and did the hike to the statue that stands on a hill 300 metres above Kylemore Abbey. To get to the statue you follow a steeply rising trail with countless switch-backs. At the top we were all tired but John just wanted to start running back down. We warned him it was too steep for running but we might as well have told him it would be a blast and to go for it.
Waiting wasn’t what John did. He just went; I sprinted after him. He was four, I was 31 and a regular runner at the time. Again I was the one who should have had more sense. Some sense. With his 10-metre start, it should have taken about a minute for me to catch him. I never saw him until I got to the bottom of the hill. He scared the life out of me. It exhilarated him and, even at four, he savoured that victory over his dad.
It didn’t matter what the sport was, he loved it. He played gaelic football, loved Liverpool, taped every game that mattered in the 1995 Rugby World Cup knowing I would watch them when I got home. Seeing how he’d indexed them and lined them up on a shelf in my office was heartbreaking.
He could break your heart in others ways too. Once, when Paul came to the house, John ambushed him.
‘Paul,’ he said. ‘You know in your book with Andy Townsend?’ (Paul had ghost-written the autobiography of the ex-footballer.)
‘Yeah, John?’
‘Townsend talks about the night Arsenal beat Liverpool at Anfield to stop them winning the double?’
‘Yeah, I remember that.’
‘Townsend says in the book he can still see David Seaman bowling the ball out to Lee Dixon, a long, long ball to Alan Smith and then the pass to Michael Thomas for the goal?’
‘Yeah?’
‘It wasn’t Seaman who was in goal for Arsenal that night. It was John Lukic.’
He was 12 and Paul was toast.
In September 1994 I travelled to the All-Ireland gaelic football final with Martin McHugh, who had been a star of the Donegal team that had won the title two years before. McHugh and I were friends and John came with us. Down beat Dublin that day and on the journey home John asked Martin question after question about the game. He never stopped and Martin’s patience never wavered.
Next day back in his native Donegal, Martin bought a pair of Patrick football boots for John and had them couriered to our home.
‘You didn’t need to do that,’ I said.
‘I’ve spoken to a lot of kids about football,’ he said, ‘but never with an eleven-year-old who asked questions like your lad’s.’
You may think it impossible to find any comfort when your son is taken but I did. Soon after his death, the school principal Tim Looney told a story of a day in the classroom when some boy had mischievously written on the blackboard.
‘Okay, who did this?’ Mr Looney asked.
No one owned up.
‘Well, we’re all going to stay here until I find out who did it.’
The silence and the detention continued into the lunchtime break and with the principal showing not the slightest inclination to back down, someone had to do something. John put up his hand.
‘Yes, John?’
Standing up, he turned to his best friend. ‘Andrew,’ he said, ‘you know you did it, we know you did it and you probably won’t be even punished if you admit it.’ Andrew stood up and said, ‘Sir, I did it.’
‘Thank you, Andrew, for being honest. Now you can all go on your break.’
Later another teacher, Mrs Twomey, told of reading the Nativity to John’s class and getting to the point where she related how Mary and Joseph lived a modest life in Nazareth because Joseph was just a carpenter. John’s hand went up.
‘If they were so poor, what did they do with the gold they were given by the three wise men?’
Mrs Twomey had been reading the story of the Nativity to children for more than thirty years.
‘John, that’s the first time anyone’s asked me that. I don’t know the answer.’
I have held onto all th
e stories, especially the two from the classroom. If you can, you’ve got to stand up and be counted. And you have to ask the obvious but sometimes difficult questions. What did Mary and Joseph do with the gold?
Sean Kelly came to John’s funeral and, finding me on my own, he asked how exactly the accident had happened. From which direction had John been coming; which direction the car? We walked down the garden so he could get a better picture of precisely what had happened. Kelly then asked about my trip from Dublin Airport and whether John might have expected us to be already home as he cycled down the road to the house. I said we should have been back but we had a long coffee with Paul at the airport.
‘As John’s coming to the house,’ he said, ‘he’s already looking to see if your car is in the driveway. He’s glancing across while his brain is telling him to turn, but his eyes aren’t on the road in front of him. I’ve done it a few times, turned across a road like that, but was lucky no car was coming against me.’
Though it was hard to have someone talk you through your son’s fatal accident, I appreciated Kelly helping me understand how it happened.
A year after John’s death, on a sticky summer’s night in Atlanta, a small group of us found ourselves in dwindling light in a small garden behind the swimming arena at Georgia Tech University. I was with my old friend Paul, now well into his career as a successful Sunday newspaper journalist and our newer friend Tom Humphries of the Irish Times. Tom’s humour made us laugh, his talent kept us humble.
Irish swimmer Michelle Smith had just stormed the first day of the Olympic Games, and won a gold medal. It was an incredible achievement from a woman who through her career up to then had seemed destined for much lesser things. The obvious but difficult question was whether her improvement was credible? Could she have won this gold without drugs? This was the start of the aftermath.
As we stood under the cicadas and rhododendrons only the lights from the now empty arena illuminated the scene as three of us debated the implications with a group of American journalists and swimming people. We were uneasy. What we had just seen had a bad smell to it.
We didn’t know a lot about swimming but there was the old joke that a good result for Irish swimming was one where no one drowned. Of course, this wasn’t fair but we weren’t a nation that excelled at swimming, au contraire. Jimmy Meagan, my one-time colleague at the Irish Press, who is no longer with us, told a swimming story from the Montreal Games in ’76. One morning Jimmy wrestled with his conscience about going to a morning session to see an Irish swimmer compete in a heat. There was no chance he would qualify but a sense of duty got the better of Jimmy’s common sense. He’d get a quote from the guy for the last edition of the Evening Press.
Off went Jimmy with a colleague from the Irish Independent and, sure enough, the swimmer finished last in his heat, a long way behind the guy in second last place. Disappointment lay not in being last but in a time that was well outside the swimmer’s personal best.
‘What happened?’ Jimmy and his colleague asked.
‘I’m desperately disappointed. I can’t believe I’ve swam that slowly.’
‘What went wrong?’
‘I ate too big a breakfast,’ the freestyler replied.
‘Oh!’
From there to here, from Montreal’s buffet breakfast to a gold medal at the Georgia Tech was a leap, and we knew our newly minted national heroine was the wrong age (26) to have made the improvements she had made. More than that, she was the wrong shape, the wrong height and she was keeping the wrong company. In a sport where the business of coaching had attained the status of science, Michelle was coached by her husband, Erik de Bruin, a shot putter from the Netherlands who was also, inconveniently, serving a four-year doping ban.
An old interview with Erik had resurfaced in which he discussed doping. His stance was, at best, ambivalent.
Patriotically, we tossed the arguments for Michelle into the night air to see how more knowledgeable people would respond. Suppose she had trained ‘smarter’? What if coming up to Atlanta, her third Olympics, she had got more serious about the sport? Maybe Erik’s background in athletics was actually an advantage? What if everybody else is wrong and our girl is right? But those who knew the most believed the least. They swatted our arguments away.
Then the various conversations hushed. Having finished some interviews for his native Dutch television, Erik joined us in the garden. He had detected (or anticipated) some scepticism in the Georgia air and had come to spin. He sat on a low wall and we gathered around him. But spin works best when coming from a charmer, and while you might have accused Erik of many things, you couldn’t have called him one of nature’s charmers.
The exchanges were brief and edgy. First, some soft questions swaddled with compliments about this dream which had just come true. What a romance. Then the conversation moved onto the subject we really wished to speak about.
‘People here have said that when you were competing you tested positive for steroids?’
‘No. That’s not true. There was a problem with a test, but I was reinstated by my own federation and the Dutch courts, but I don’t want to get into that right now.’
‘But just to be factual?’
‘Like I said, this is a happy moment for me, I don’t want to . . .’
‘Are you still competing?’
‘No, I coach. You think I can coach and compete?’ he said, dismissively and as he got up.
‘Always the same,’ Erik shouted as he muscled through us and back into the arena. ‘Always the fucking same.’
Paul, Tom and I drew away from the main group and began walking slowly towards the media buses. It was late on Saturday night, not long before dawn in Ireland, and many of our compatriots were going to wake up with a smile. Our country didn’t often win gold medals, especially not in a sport dominated by the Americans. Tom would have to write a piece for Monday’s Irish Times while Paul and I were glad to have a week to think about what we would write for our Sunday newspapers.
As we walked and talked there wasn’t a chance we would shirk from asking the questions. That wasn’t an option. Anybody in the garden a few minutes before knew that the suspicions of the swimming world would become a big part of the story. There was too much simmering anger. Michelle’s rise was too weird and too wonderful to go unquestioned.
We knew too, though, what would be going on at home. Mass celebrations. Delirium. People who had never before watched a swim race, seeing our redheaded, Gaelic-speaking Michelle destroying the field to take gold in an Olympic final. In terms of Irish sporting celebration this would be as good as it gets. You ring home and you realise your own family has really ‘gotten into the swimming’, and you want to say, ‘Better get out of it.’
Paul, Tom and I parted company with heavy hearts. Michelle would be racing all week long. She would be standing on podiums every other day. The madness at home would increase with every race. We were going to be asking the nation to sit down and have a cup of tea because we had some bad news.
As it happened, the three of us were the only members of the Irish media who opted to ask any questions. Everywhere else it was a whitewash job: big brush, broad strokes. Let’s all drink to Michelle, and none of that old tea, thank you. ‘Michelle, how did you feel when they played the national anthem and you saw the flag go up?’ Hear no hard questions. Speak no hard questions.
There was an almost funny side to this, if you could see it.
Those in Michelle’s corner saw the questioning of her performances as the evil work of jealous Americans trying to steal away Ireland’s sunshine. America, after all, had no more bitter rival in the world of sport than Ireland. No sight churned the American gut more severely than that of a red-haired, freckled Irish girl winning races against the odds. They could accept reds from Russia, communists from China, but not this smiling Irish cailín. So they tried to muddy the waters. And spit in our stew.
A lot of journalists chose to sell that story, and back in
the homeland there were buyers. Others chose to ignore the story completely. We didn’t. Our stories said her victories couldn’t be trusted because the improvement was too great to be natural. A small handful made a cottage industry out of attacking the three of us in print and on the airwaves. We were attention-seeking traitors who would get our comeuppance as soon as Michelle got around to suing us for libel. You are going to sue them Michelle, aren’t you? Take away their houses and their jobs and their reputations? Soon, please Michelle?
Long before we came home from Atlanta, the three of us were isolated and denounced. The debate over Atlanta took place in two different languages. Paul, Tom and I attempting to lay out the basis for asking questions about how an earnest second-rate swimmer should morph into one of the great Olympians. The other story was glorious: a week-long hallelujah, a fairytale written by journalists whose enthusiasm overwhelmed every critical faculty. Perhaps they also sensed what the Irish public wanted.
I have always been a sucker for wanting to win people round to my point of view. On the Wednesday of this ‘special week for Irish sport’, I got talking with Anne Cassin, who was then a television news reporter for Ireland’s national broadcaster, RTE. She was open to persuasion.
‘The thing is, she’s been an international swimmer for ten years, been at two Olympic Games before this and no one ever saw her making a final. Now this.’
‘You really think the suspicion is justified?’
‘Of course it is. Her incredible improvement happens after she falls in love with a discus thrower who later tests positive for a banned drug and gets a four-year ban.’
And on I went. A believer in Smith at the beginning, Anne was pretty convinced of the case against her by the time we finished. She was going to speak with her producer back in Dublin and make the point that they too should be asking questions. It seemed like a little victory. Later that evening, I met Anne at the pool. She had spoken to her producer and he gently dissuaded her. ‘We don’t really want to interfere with the national mood, do we?’ he said. Ireland was en fête.