Pants on fire
It was the internet that did it for me. I’d been watching the Tour de France every year since the early 90s, but I was hardly a cycling devotee. So whilst I didn’t exactly enjoy watching Lance Armstrong dominate the Tour for seven long years, that was because he always won it so easily with very little in the way of competition rather than due to doping-based doubts. I used to read the Sunday Times during that period too, and I remember reading pieces by David Walsh, one of my favourite sports writers, questioning the legitimacy of Armstrong’s accomplishments. But his was a lone voice at that point. The rest of the media and wider world had chosen, wrongly, to believe in miracles. Then a few years later, in the wake of innumerable doping scandals, I began to read a couple of cycling forums, where the equation was put quite simply. Given that all Lance’s rivals were subsequently busted for or implicated in doping, with EPO and blood transfusions pervading the peloton throu