As Monty Python fans would know, this line came from The Life of Brian, but it applies equally to The Life of Lance.

It is used by journalist David Walsh to describe how he felt covering the seven Tour de France races which Wikipedia now lists with a line through the name, team and nationality of the “winner”.

Walsh resorted to the the words of Brian’s rather manly mother when he found himself in a significant minority among the press corps following the annual cycling circumnavigation of France.

Fed up with how the 1998 Tour had revealed “a fetid counter-culture fueled by unimaginable quantities of banned drugs”, the majority of reporters preferred to write about a victorious cancer survivor back from the dead who would lead the next seven into Paris.

“But from the first answer to the first doping question, I wasn’t sure about him,” Walsh said.

Five years after the long overdue exposure of Lance Armstrong, and the publication of Walsh’s at times almost single-handed pursuit of his methods, I have finally got around to reading it.

Sometimes you read a book, watch a movie or hear a song that is so good you want to share it with people.

This is such a time and Seven Deadly Sins – My Pursuit of Lance Armstrong by David Walsh is such a book.

It is as much about journalism as junkies.

The over-riding theme is the opposition Walsh faced from Armstrong, his team, his lawyers, the sport’s governing body, the general public and particularly rival reporters.

Armstrong was such a good story that many people did not want to hear it wasn’t true.

“There was a time when to doubt Lance Armstrong was to walk among media people wearing a bell which warned that you were unclean,” Walsh writes.

“In my mind the pro-Lance masses were cheerleading a great sport all the way to the hospice.

“I didn’t want to be a fool just because of my love for sport. And I didn’t want to act as an agent in making fools of readers and fans.”

Writing for The Sunday Times, Walsh had suspicions based on Armstrong’s meteoric post-cancer improvement from Tour obscurity to dominant leadership.

In contrast, five-time winners Jacques Anquetil, Eddie Merckx and Bernard Hinault had all won their first Tour, but Armstrong had shown no indication of what was coming.

“I don’t understand how a guy can ride the Tour de France four times and show nothing that indicates he will one day be a contender to suddenly riding like one of the great Tour riders.

“To me, the performance was puzzling at best, downright suspicious at worst.”

Those suspicions were heightened by Armstrong’s prickly responses whenever the subject of press conferences switched from pedals to pills.

When the Texan attempts to lecture journalists on being too suspicious Walsh writes: “I wanted to tell him that the problems of the more recent past were in part down to journalists being too gullible.

“Armstrong wanted us to forget when the imperative was not to forget. In fact the first task of anybody who cared about the sport, let alone dusty abstracts like journalism and truth, was to be standing up and shouting ‘Stop!’

“For others their sense of admiration made any suspicions or questions a trespass. Some of those who knew the most about what we were seeing said the least.”

As Armstrong repeats his mantra about never failing a drug test, Walsh reminds us: “The tests were useless because there was no test for the drug of choice, EPO.”

And as he states, with reference to two fellow journalistic crusaders: “Even in 1999, the year of his first victory, you didn’t need to be Woodward or Bernstein to get it.”

How can you not love a book that describes not being allowed to question what was beginning to look increasingly obvious with the sentence: “He looked like a duck, walked like a duck, sounded like a duck, but until the laboratory actually came out and said that he was a duck, we weren’t supposed to even ask a question about His Duckness.”

Walsh is neither smug nor sensational when, with the help of several whistleblowers culminating in Floyd Landis (another American with a line through his name on Wikipedia), the Armstrong empire begins to crumble and the merde starts hitting the fan.

“There were so many rats shinning up drain pipes looking for the higher ground,” he writes, noting that UCI president Pat McQuaid decrying Armstrong’s destructive impact on cycling was akin to a brothel madam complaining about a decline in sexual morality. “It lacked a certain degree of sincerity.”

The most powerful message from a book full of them comes from Walsh’s son John, who, with tragic irony, died in a cycling accident aged 12.

With his father’s inquisitive mind, he once listened to a teacher read the Nativity story and upon being told how Jesus was born into poverty raised his hand and asked: “But what did they do with the gold they were given by the three wise men?”

This anecdote was destined to inspire David Walsh’s pursuit of the truth.

October 22, 2012, the day Armstrong was officially declared an outcast by the UCI, would have been John Walsh’s 30^th birthday. 

“Question everything,” his father writes. “What did Mary and Joseph do with the gold?”