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Phil Liggett, the cycling commentator, said he "couldn't believe" the remarks Lance Armstrong made to him the first time they spoke after Paul Sherwen’s death.
Liggett and Sherwen
were commentating partners on television for years, working on the world’s
biggest races for broadcasters in Britain, Australia and the US.
They first teamed
up on Channel 4’s Tour de France coverage in the 1980s, when Sherwen was still
racing, and were working for NBC Sports in the US at the time of Sherwen’s
sudden death two years ago aged 62 years.
Liggett is now the subject of a new documentary film, which is due to be launched in cinemas in Australia next month. He has been interviewed by the Sydney Morning Herald in the run up to the film’s release.
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He said the first time he met Armstrong after Sherwen’s death, Armstrong confused him with Sherwen on air – at the Tour de France in 2019 - and even said he thought it was Liggett who had died.
“Lance came up in the break and (I said) ‘Hi Lance’,” Liggett told the Sydney Morning Herald in his interview.
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“He goes, ‘Hi’. You’d think having read
all the press reports on the way I’d been ripped apart just trying to defend
him, he might have said, ‘I’m sorry about all this mess, Phil’. Not a word.
“In fact, all he said was: ‘I really
thought it was the old man who died rather than Paul’. That was Lance talking
to me: ‘the old man’.”
Liggett explained when the two of them
then went on air, Armstrong said to him ‘Well, Paul’, clearly confusing him
with Sherwen.
“I couldn’t believe it,” Liggett said, adding he was glad Armstrong had been caught for doping, even though he defended him so often.
“In fairness, I’m glad they got him,” he said, before adding Armstrong was “probably the most gifted cyclist” of his era.
“Drugs, as I always say, don’t turn a
donkey into a thoroughbred. They just make you 10 per cent better. But the
mentality of Lance, that’s why he beat cancer. He was so much stronger than the
average person.”
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