“I don't think I would have ever lived if I had destroyed Willie's car, but what a day we had”

Before David Walsh became the veteran sports writer who would lift the lid on the culture of doping in cycling, skewering some of the sport's most iconic riders, he was a junior reporter in the Leitrim Observer, trying not to be sick in photographer Willie Donnellan’s car.

“I wasn’t a big drinker, but I was introduced to big drinking on that trip,” Walsh recalls with a smile. 

Leitrim had just lost a Connacht championship match against Mayo, Walsh’s first as a reporter, and naturally, the men stopped on the way home for a few drinks. 

The drinking was fine, but not throwing up on the winding road back to Carrick on Shannon would become one of the great challenges of Walsh’s life. 

Nearly half a century on, Walsh is the chief sports writer for The Sunday Times and received the William Hill Sports Book Award earlier this month for his book, with Pippa York, “The Escape”.

EARLY CAREER

But back then, fresh out of college and after spending six months harrying every paper from his native Kilkenny to Scotland, Walsh was working his first job at the Leitrim Observer.

Walsh dove headfirst into work, travelling the county in search of stories, doing the grunt work of council meetings, taking in theatre performances, and applying his flair for writing - and his youthful assuredness - to an opinion column.

“I'm barely out of university, right? I have opinions on nothing. And I mean, it was ridiculous, the kind of stuff that you thought you were able to do,” he laughs.

SPORTS WRITING AMBITION

Despite enjoying the variety of journalism he could do in Leitrim, but ultimately, all he ever wanted to do was become a sports writer.

He recalls, as a child, slipping across the road on early summer mornings to nab his family's copy of the Irish Independent from the pack that was left outside the local shop before it opened.

Taking a seat on the wall, he began devouring the sports section. Even from a young age, Walsh was fascinated by sports writing and had opinions on all the writers of the day.

Before long he would set out to become one himself, and in 1980, after two “glorious” years at the Leitrim Observer, he got his chance when the editor of the Irish Press happened on his match reports in the Observer. 

Impressed, he offered Walsh a full-time role as a sports journalist.

THE ESCAPE

Forty-five years later and Walsh has received worldwide acclaim for a number of influential books about professional cycling.

Last month, he picked up the William Hill Sports Book of the Year award for his book, The Escape, written alongside Pippa York, who raced professionally as Robert Miller, before her transition.

AN ODD PAIR

Robert Miller was an accomplished cyclist in the 1980s into the 1990s. He rode the Tour de France eleven times and finished fourth in 1984, being crowned King of the Mountains that year.

When he rode, Miller climbed with the best, accelerating up the inclines with an alluring style that Walsh loved to watch, but off the bike, he was “a spiky character.”

“I didn't know him because I hadn't got the ability to get past his initial snarl,” Walsh recounts. “I stupidly kind of backed off. And some other people didn't. And they got to know Robert Miller and found him to be a very interesting character.”

Over three decades later, Walsh got to interview Pippa York, now retired from cycling, working as a journalist and no longer identifying as Robert Miller. 

They hit it off, and Walsh invited York to join him on the press tour for the Tour de France in 2020. Before long they were writing a book together. The book stitches together the story of Robert Miller, the cyclist; Pippa York, the person; and life on the Tour de France.

The arcs are bridged together through the conversations Walsh and York shared, entertaining each other as they traveled through the dark, quiet nights between stops on the tour.

The Escape is a departure from the investigative style that have brought Walsh acclaim in the past, notably Seven Deadly Sins: My Pursuit of Lance Armstrong, which details his investigations, alongside the Irish Independent’s Paul Kimmage, that revealed the doping culture that riddled cycling.

But he says the fundamental essence of sports writing is the same. “Ultimately, you're dealing with people and you're writing about people, and you're helping people to tell their stories, and you're interpreting what they do,” he says.

This is what The Escape aims to do, though it comes at a time when the issue of transgender athletes competing in sport has become a cultural flash point internationally, while sporting bodies grapple with how to handle who can compete where. But for Walsh, Pippa’s story is something apart from all that.

“Pippa's story is just kind of innately human,” he says. “And that's how anybody who reads the book, I think, will be sympathetic towards Pippa, but there's such kind of an antagonism towards the whole subject that a lot of the people who need to read it won't read it.”

Writing the book was a wholly positive experience, he says; he is delighted to have done so with Pippa:  “And then for it to get this recognition is like a total bonus,” he says.

LOOKING BACK

Looking back over half a century, Walsh maintains a deep love for Leitrim and its people, and feels that some of his best years were spent in the county. He admits, he might not have left had the opportunity to become a sports journalist not appeared.

When he thinks about it, he is surprised by the arc of his career, which started in Leitrim.

“I certainly wouldn't have thought in 1978 when I joined the Observer that I was going to end up travelling on the Tour de France with a bike rider who had ridden the Tour 11 times and then transitioned to be a woman,” he says, adding: “There are some things that you don't see in your future, and that definitely was one of them.”

“The Escape” by Pippa York and David Walsh is available in all good bookshops and online.