Dear god, David Walsh you are embarrassing yourself. Egregious errors in that interview:
- denying that Brailsford used Gonzales' death as an excuse,
when that information is easily findable;
- using the 'he's not the kind of person who would dope' excuse as if Lance Armstrong was the only person who ever doped (hmm, what if Walsh had been 'embedded' with Tyler Hamilton and Christian Vande Velde and Dave Z on Postal?);
- using asinine examples like the (already classic in the realm of mini-memes on the clinic) 'Lopez didn't know you weren't supposed to eat Nutella on this superior team' to insultingly suggest this is why Sky is the best at a sport as demanding as cycling;
- brushing off the idea that people are suspicious of Sky only 'because they succeed' like US Postal, rather than the fact that their 2 Tour winners each underwent miraculous transformations;
- implying that if they were doping he would know it, seemingly using the same standards by which one would find teams were doping in the early 2000s, when riders still didn't feel like they had to go to great lengths to hide it and it was wide open enough that team-sponsored doping was well known in the peloton;
- using the 'I don't think it's fair to go digging into everyone's past' to brush away the problematic elements of Sky's 'zero tolerance' PR. Good 'investigative journalism' there, fanboy.
Seriously, I want to keep an open mind about Sky, I truly do. But they bury themselves time and again by Brailsford's half-truths and ultra-controlled information release, and then Walsh shoots himself and them in the foot by sounding disingenuous and hypocritical. I liked him because he 'stood up' to Armstrong, but I realize now that his career as an investigative journalist is in pursuit of whatever suits him best at the time. It doesn't take much to say 'there's this blindingly obvious thing that everyone knows! I'm going to write a book about it!' (in fact, it's shocking that others didn't do that either) Investigative journalism, in my understanding, is supposed to involve being skeptical and digging for alternate viewpoints, not hanging out with people who have every interest in appearing great and saying 'they're cool, I know because I hung out with them'.
Did anyone actually read the book and see if there are any passages where he talks to someone that's not on Sky? He talks about disgruntled employees in the interview, but does he say anything about them in the book?