I have personal heroes – folks who have lived their lives in ways that give me inspiration and a vocabulary to name my own ambitions. People who are unafraid to say what they believe, regardless of what it will cost them.
Few people outside of professional cycling know who this man is, but he’s the journalist who first suspected Lance Armstrong of cheating, and spent 13 years doing the difficult work of uncovering the evidence and speaking the truth. And he became the target of all Armstrong could throw at him.
Think about the context. In 1999 – the first year of Armstrong’s comeback – Walsh calls this out. And for the next 13 years pretty much everyone else tells him he’s wrong. It costs him his job, professional and personal relationships. How lonely it must have been for him.
I’m not going to re-hash the whole Armstrong crime, but if you want to dig in, look here, and here, and here for a start. David’s books are “Seven Deadly Sins” and “From Lance to Landis”.
I am a huge cycling fan, and my family and I spent five vacations in the French Alps to watch the race in person. In 2006 through a journalist friend, we struck up a dialogue with David to encourage him to write what became “From Lance to Landis” – his first english language book that laid out the evidence Armstrong was cheating.
David flew to France and spent the weekend with us. I was awestruck at the simplicity of his motivation: to expose a lie. It wasn’t personal, it was about values. This was a man of principle outraged at the crime he clearly saw but was incredibly inconvenient and unpopular to expose.
Over dinner long into the night, and then again at breakfast the next morning, the talk centered on the crime that was happening in plain sight. Incredibly we were sitting with him at that dinner when his phone rang – another journalist calling him with the news that Floyd Landis had tested positive at the just completed Tour de France. Talk about being at ground-zero at a pivotal moment.
Looking back I can’t believe that weekend actually happened. What brought us together? I would like to think a sense of shared values.
This is a man whose humility, values, and sense of purpose we can all learn from. A true hero. I’ve got a few other people who serve this kind of inspiration, I’ll write about them later. For now, thank you, David.
I hate leaving something undone, unresolved, and I am sorry to tell all of you that I have done exactly that with this blog.
So, this is the last post of OpenAmbition. I have run out of the space inside me and within my life to keep it alive and vibrant. Which is incredibly sad. Sad given how much enthusiasm and life so many of you sent my way to start it, and more importantly, to keep it going.
I hope and look forward to returning to this. It was fun, exciting, inspiring, exploring why we take risks, why the prospect of failing, and the act of failing, can help motivate us and inform our successes.
Thank you, all of you, for the help and encouragement to breath some life into this idea. This blog brought me together with so many friends, introduced me to new ones, and brought the best out of all of us.