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Whatsapp Lance Armstrong's drug secret was kept hidden by plaintiff friendly UK libel laws

'Fucking Walsh, fucking little troll, casting his spell on people, liar. I've won six Tours. I've done everything I ever could do to prove my innocence. I have done, outside of cycling, way more than anyone in the sport. To be somebody who's spread himself out over a lot of areas, to hopefully be somebody who people in this city, this state, this country, this world can look up to as an example. And you know what? They don't even know who David Walsh is. And they never will. And in 20 years nobody is going to remember him. Nobody.' Lance Armstrong, 2004.

For years Sunday Times sports writer David Walsh pursued Lance Armstrong as a drug cheat, and also a bully and serial litigator capable of destroying his enemies financially to protect his bogus image of sporting success.

Armstrong sued Walsh and his employer, successfully silencing his major critic using UK defamation laws which are so plaintiff-friendly that they have in recent years given rise to the phenomenon of libel tourism.

Last week, in an interview with Oprah Winfrey, Armstrong finally admitted to cheating, and also issued a qualified apology to Walsh after repeated prompting.

‘I would apologise to David,’ the disgraced former cyclist said.

Walsh joined Breakfast this morning to discuss the confession, and said although Winfrey did a good job, Armstrong’s first attempt at truth-telling was something of a dress rehearsal for the revelations to come.

‘Oprah Winfrey hasn’t been on this story for that long, and she had to do a lot of catching up, and honestly, I think she did a really decent job relative to where she was coming from,' Walsh said. ‘But Lance was quite evasive in many of his answers, and I understand that, because it was the first kind of attempt at telling the truth after lying for almost 20 years. So it’s not going to all come out in the first interview but I think as he does more interviews, and the indications are that he will do many more interviews, I think there’ll be more truth, every time he speaks, and I think in the end we will get a pretty complete story from him.’

‘My feeling about Lance Armstrong is that intellectually, he understands that he has to be remorseful. Emotionally, he can’t hack it. If you watched the interview closely, there were times when he was being asked questions that were drawing what should have been quite painful answers from him, when he was having to admit stuff that he did that really was awful, and a little smirk would cross his face. And you’re looking at him, you’re thinking, was that just, was that a bit of a smile I saw there?’

‘When he was talking about Betsy Andreu, one of the witnesses who testified against him, you know, he was making the point that... people had said that Lance had called Betsy... a bitch, he called her crazy, and he called her fat, and Lance was trying to make a joke and say: “I did call you a bitch, I did call you crazy, but I didn’t call you fat.” And he kind of laughed. Lance: not funny.’

Walsh says his paper is now planning to sue Armstrong for the return of the GBP 300,000 settlement paid to Armstrong for libel, as well as a further GBP 600,000 in legal costs (around USD 1.5m in total). He says that without the UK’s libel laws, which notoriously favour plaintiffs against media institutions, Armstrong would have been uncovered and chased out of the sport long ago.

‘At a time when the whole world was going with the Armstrong story, you had one newspaper in Britain repeatedly saying: we think this guy’s a fraud. Now the London, or the UK libel laws, shut us up, and lots of people have used UK libel laws to stop a story coming out because they are draconian, and journalists like me think they’re incredibly unfair. And so we were forced to settle with Armstrong, because we’d been the ones asking questions. Now, how unfair is that, given that history now shows we were the ones doing the right thing. Why should you be penalised for doing what I believe lots of newspapers and lots of TV channels should have been doing at this time?’