THE soigneur who blew the whistle on Lance Armstrong is on good terms with the disgraced cyclist again.
Dubliner Emma O’Reilly, who runs a sports injury clinic in Cheshire, was the first to break the silence about the doping culture Armstrong imposed at the US Postal.
After bitter recriminations over much of the past decade – at one stage Armstrong even implied, while under oath, that O’Reilly was “a whore”, the pair have reconciled.
Now, relations have even improved to the point where Armstrong has written the foreword for O’Reilly’s book The Race to Truth: Blowing the whistle on Lance Armstrong and cycling’s doping culture, due out this week.
Emma O'Reilly“My relationship with Lance was and still is a human one,” O’Reilly told the Guardian. “Lance became a friend who happened to be a rider, we both looked out for each other on the road."
We would spend up to 18 hours a day together for up to a few weeks, that creates a deep bond. So throughout the bad times I tried to remember his good side.
“I don’t know if I’d have been able to cope if I focused on the negative attacks. I also tried to remember that the reason I spoke out was bigger than Lance ever was; people were dying and lives were being destroyed. Now it’s nice again between Lance and I, we speak regularly and it’s gone back to how easy it used to be between us.
"The relief when Lance admitted on Oprah that I had been telling the truth was like a physical release. I never knew until then just how much it had affected me.”
O’Reilly gave her original whistle-blowing testimony to Irish journalist David Walsh and, somewhat surprisingly, the famous sports writer comes in for criticism from O’Reilly in the new book.
“He’d hung me out to dry – but worse than that, the publisher had even openly warned him of the impact this would have on my life and had recommended proper support. Something I feel I never got.”
