With Armstrong reeling from the Landis accusations, many in the media suddenly find themselves with big brass balls. But it’s easy to kick a bully when he’s down. Here’s a transcript from August 9 1999, when it was sacrilegious to question Armstrong’s integrity. Tom Goldman of NPR was one of the few American journalists who dared doubt the myth. Would we be where we are if the media were as openly skeptical as Goldman, Kimmage, and Walsh?

HOWARD BERKES, host:

This is NPR’s MORNING EDITION. I’m Howard Berkes.

The Lance Armstrong victory tour rolls into Austin, Texas, tonight with a parade and concert honoring the town’s most famous bicycle racer. It’s been a whirlwind two weeks for Armstrong since he won the prestigious Tour de France. His dramatic comeback from cancer to capture one of the world’s toughest sporting events has touched millions from cancer patients to celebrities like CBS talk show host David Letterman.

SOUNDBITE FROM "THE DAVID LETTERMAN SHOW"

MR. DAVID LETTERMAN (HOST, "The David Letterman Show"): Maybe the greatest thing about this is–winning the bicycle race, that’s lovely. Of course, saving your own life, that’s unbelievable. But you now I believe have and will and continue to save the lives of hundreds and thousands of other people around the United States and around the world, too, by your example. And maybe that’s the best of the whole thing, huh?

MR. LANCE ARMSTRONG: I hope so.

END OF SOUNDBITE

BERKES: Armstrong’s victory and the absence of major drug violations helped the Tour de France reclaim an image that was badly damaged by last year’s drug scandal. But some within the cycling world still don’t believe the sport has cleaned itself up. And while they risk tainting Lance Armstrong’s storybook performance, the skeptics believe continued scrutiny is worth that risk. NPR’s Tom Goldman reports.

TOM GOLDMAN REPORTING:

How did he do it anyway? How did Lance Armstrong who’d never come close to winning the Tour de France beat the world’s best in the punishing 2,300-mile race and do it less than three years after being diagnosed with cancer that had spread to his lungs and brain? Was it the training, the new maturity, the lighter body he was left with after his disease? Or was it something more, something illegal? These questions have been a constant irritation for Lance Armstrong. He and an adoring public have rejected the suspicions of performance enhancing drug use as the work of a few heartless French reporters more interested in hunting down a scandal than telling Armstrong’s wonderful story. The indignation still bubbled the week after the race during Armstrong’s network appearance with David Letterman.

SOUNDBITE FROM "THE DAVID LETTERMAN SHOW"

MR. LETTERMAN: And the press over there, those idiots–well, they were. No, but I’m serious. They wouldn’t leave you alone, would they? They suggested that, `Well, you know, maybe there’s something about his disorder that actually makes him a better bicycler.’

MR. ARMSTRONG: Yeah.

MR. LETTERMAN: Well, that’s just crap, isn’t it? I mean, they won’t give you–and why…

MR. ARMSTRONG: That’s a good word.

MR. LETTERMAN: Yeah.

END OF SOUNDBITE

MR. PAUL KIMMAGE: It isn’t crap. The questions are quite justified. And as a champion, it is his duty, I would suggest, to address the crap.

GOLDMAN: Paul Kimmage was a professional bicycle racer from 1986 to 1990. After he retired, Kimmage wrote an award-winning book on the culture of drugs in cycling that also made him a pariah within the sport. Last year’s revelations of widespread systematic doping at the tour vindicated Kimmage. Now he writes for Ireland’s Sunday Independent Newspaper and calls Lance Armstrong’s comeback from illness absolutely fantastic, but Kimmage, as he wrote in one of his stories, also is reserving the right to wonder about Armstrong’s victory.

MR. KIMMAGE: Whenever Lance was asked about the drug problem and was asked about his experiences with it, I just didn’t think that his answers were very convincing. And I want more from the champions. Now I just don’t think it’s good enough for Lance to come along and say, `Well, during my career, I haven’t encountered a drug problem.’ I don’t believe there’s a professional cyclist in the last 40 years who hasn’t encountered it.

GOLDMAN: The evidence certainly favors Armstrong who declined an interview request for this story because of his hectic schedule. His 15 urine tests and three blood tests during the tour were all negative. As he has said repeatedly, his life is an open book and it shows a clean history. David Walsh, a senior sports writer for The Sunday Times of London, says his criticism of this year’s tour is not a crusade against Lance Armstrong. Indeed, he understands that questioning what Armstrong did is certain to enrage the millions Armstrong inspired. But Walsh points out that it was cycling after all with its drug scandal of ’98 that unleashed a worldwide debate on the issue of drugs in sport. And if flushing out drug cheats is truly a goal, it’s important to stay focused on problems in elite cycling that Walsh says haven’t gone away.

MR. DAVID WALSH (THE SUNDAY TIMES OF LONDON): There’s a very easy, kind of, you know, comforting feeling that, `Oh, thank God, Lance has won the race and everything is all right with the world of cycling.’ I know everything is not all right with the world of cycling.

GOLDMAN: Before the tour, there were signs of trouble. The 1998 winner, Marco Pantani, was kicked out of the Tour of Italy after a suspicious blood test. During the Tour of Switzerland, syringes linked to performance enhancing drugs were found in the hotel room of an Italian team.

MR. WALSH: The last thing the sport needs now is people to be presuming that everything is OK because the people who run sport–and this is not just cycling, but this is all the other sports–they thrive in a situation where the sports person and sports journalist are complacent.

GOLDMAN: Most journalists, particularly those from the US, were complacent at the tour, says Walsh, and didn’t pick up on what he says were visible warning signs. For instance, the second and fourth place finishers in this year’s tour were members of the Fastina cycling team that triggered the doping scandal last year. Both admitted to police they used performance enhancing drugs. Both served suspensions. This year, says Walsh, they were ostensibly drug free. Yet neither man nor virtually any other riders in the tour stood up and said, `You don’t need drugs to do well.’

MR. WALSH: And I find their resistance to speak out as just–not only is it bad for the sport, but it’s also suspicious. Why don’t they speak out? If they’re truly clean now, don’t they have a great message to propagate?

GOLDMAN: Alarm bells also went off as Walsh watched these subpar performances by the home country riders from France who, he says, had paid the heaviest price for last year’s scandal.

MR. WALSH: The French riders we know have been more rigorously tested than the riders of many other countries. And the French riders have also been operating under this fear that the police are going to move in. And they did on last year’s tour. So they definitely are using less drugs. But what do we get in this year’s race? For the first time in 73 years, a French rider failed to win a stage.

GOLDMAN: In fact, all riders in this year’s tour were tested more thoroughly than ever before, perhaps more than in any sporting event. There were more than 60 blood tests or health controls as officials call them, and after each of the race’s 20 stages, five riders–the stage winner, the runner-up, overall race leader and two riders picked at random–had their urine tested. At the end, the tour proudly announced there were no positive drug tests. But even the head of cycling’s international federation, Heink Verbruggen, is unable to declare total victory.

Do the results that you announce to the world last week indicate to you beyond a shadow of a doubt that there was no doping in the Tour de France this year?

MR. HEINK VERBRUGGEN: As far as we have methods to detect that directly via urine controls, yes. Indirectly free of these health controls, yes, but you know there are still certain products that are undetectable.

GOLDMAN: Including the drug of choice among cyclists during the 1990s, Erythropoietin. EPO raises the level of oxygen carrying red blood cells, but the closest testers can come to detection is measuring blood and looking for an increase in red cells which could be caused by other factors. Developing better testing technology and instituting random out-of-competition testing are two ways, critics say, cycling could get a hold of the drug problem. Without full-proof testing, the sport remains filled with suspicion and doubt. Doriane Labelet Coleman, a lawyer who lectures on international sports and drugs, says questions of who’s clean and who’s not create a level of cynicism that sports fans and journalists must wrestle with.

MS. DORIANE LABELET COLEMAN (ATTORNEY): Maybe he isn’t; maybe he is. And do I still want to watch cycling despite my not knowing these things? And that’s really the ultimate decision that people have to make is whether in the absence of knowledge as to any particular athlete or any particular event, the event still has some worth for them.

GOLDMAN: Labelet Coleman, a former competitive runner, points out that many still can live with the uncertainty. Millions lined the roads in France and cheered during the tour. The stands still fill up at the Olympics for track and field, another sport hit hard by drugs. But as long as society clings to a belief in drug-free sport, Labelet Coleman says, as long as young athletes are raised with a belief that talent and hard work alone can make a champion, there will continue to be those who search for signs of deception and often enough find them. And for those people, great performances like Lance Armstrong’s, great events like the Tour de France, rightly or wrongly, will always be colored in gray.

This is Tom Goldman, NPR News, Washington.