And I should say, when we talk about doping and Lance, and this is the thing I will always remember, maybe as much as anything, on the day that he made ‘brilliant’ ride up Sestriere in the ’99 Tour, the journalists in the press room, the majority of them, were laughing cynically. They thought this was the greatest joke. This guy, riding up this mountain, at this speed? With this apparent effortlessness, in The Tour of Renewal? In the Tour post Festina, when they were all riding clean?
All the journalists laughed, because they saw how ridiculous it was. We knew what EPO had done to the sport, guys riding up mountains at flat-road speed without hardly taking a breath. So pretty much all of the journalists believed Lance was using EPO at that moment. But by the time they came to write at the end of the Tour, they’d all been persuaded by their editors back at their offices, that this was a great story. This was the cancer icon coming back to give everybody hope. And the response that the journalists got when they spoke to their editors was utterly and totally connected to Lance as cancer icon and how this was a story of true heroism. So the cynicism was put to one side, and the belief that this wasn’t true was suspended. And pretty much everybody went with the heroics.