"WHOEVER WENT BACK to the Tour after 1998 had to decide whether it was the same drug-filled race it had been the previous year, or a lesser drug-filled race," Walsh recalls. "If you didn't ask that, you were just being willfully dishonest." He says his approach to the race was to tell himself, "Never again; I'm not going to believe it's changed unless I have reason to believe." What he saw in 1999, he says, didn't give him reason for hope.

Walsh recalls that he grew suspicious of the peloton's pace, which simply seemed too fast. At an average speed of 25.03 miles per hour, 1999 was the fastest Tour to date, 0.19 miles per hour faster than the record set at the controversial '98 Tour. "How can clean racers ride faster than those known to be on dope?" Walsh remembers thinking.

And as the race wound through France, Walsh says, he decided to keep tabs on Armstrong. During Stage 1, his drug test showed evidence of a banned steroid, triamcinolone. Armstrong subsequently produced a doctor's prescription for a topical steroid cream, Cemalyt, which he said he had used to treat a saddle sore, and the matter was dropped.

Armstrong's cancer comeback and his Tour victory that year were widely celebrated as an inspiring triumph, but Walsh says he remained wary.

"Cycling returned in 1999 with a new champion, and the new champion was heralded as a great savior of the sport, the guy who showed you that cycling was now clean," Walsh recalls. "And I said, Yeah, fine, but we need to look at this, need to investigate it, need to satisfy ourselves that it is what they say it is. You need to make sure that we're no longer glorifying a false god."

In 2000, as Armstrong and the U.S. Postal team notched their second consecutive Tour win, Walsh continued to investigate. On July 8, 2001, the second day of that year's Tour, The Sunday Times published a story by Walsh titled "Saddled with Suspicion." It revealed that Armstrong had been working with a controversial Italian sports physician named Michele Ferrari. Ferrari had been investigated for doping offenses before, but never prosecuted. In 2001, the public prosecutor in Ferrara, Italy, named Ferrari in a recommended trial with others suspected of helping more than 400 athletes dope between 1992 and 1998. But in the end, Ferrari was never put on trial. By the time Walsh began his research, however, Ferrari was again under investigation, this time by the Italian criminal court in Bologna for the newly created charge of sporting fraud and medical malpractice.

Armstrong has always firmly rejected the idea that his relationship with Ferrari established guilt by association. In 2001, when asked about Ferrari, Armstrong issued a press release stating that "[Ferrari's] primary role has always been limited. Since Chris [Carmichael, Armstrong's Colorado Springs–based coach] cannot be in Europe on an ongoing basis, Michele does my physiological testing and provides Chris with that data on a regular basis."

In his 2003 book Every Second Counts, Armstrong further characterizes his dealings with Ferrari: "He was one of the best minds in cycling, and sometimes I consulted him."

In October 2004, Ferrari was convicted in the Bologna case for unlawful distribution of medicines—i.e., writing too many prescriptions—and sporting fraud. After the decision, Armstrong said he had severed his professional relationship with him.

As a result of the Festina bust in 1998, the nature of doping in the cycling world changed. Instead of systematic drug programs set up by teams, it was now up to individual riders to start and manage their own personal programs and maintain their silence.

"I only know about me," said Britain's 2003 time-trial world champion, David Millar, in The Guardian of London in July 2004, before he was officially banned for using EPO. "I didn't ask questions of other guys [on the Cofidis team]."

Even so, anti-doping authorities have had some success since the Festina scandal, but it seems that the majority of busts have been the result of police investigations, not drug testing. Millar was caught when police found traces of EPO in syringes in his Biarritz, France, apartment. He later admitted that, even though he had tested negative, he'd won his world championship while on EPO.

In October 2000, France 3 television aired a report showing a doctor for Armstrong's then U.S. Postal Service team allegedly discarding medical waste—including packaging for Actovegin, a suspected blood-oxygen booster—into a roadside dumpster. In L.A. Confidentiel, Walsh treats the incident as credible.

The French police opened an investigation based on the France 3 allegations but ended it 21 months later for lack of conclusive evidence. In November 2002, after the French investigation closed, Walsh contacted Ballester to discuss collaborating on what would become L.A. Confidentiel. By that time, Ballester says, he had left his job as a sportswriter for L'Équipe, disgusted by what he saw as cycling's unwillingness to change its doping culture. He was working as a freelance editor when he agreed to join Walsh.

"As journalists, we have the mission to say something else," says Ballester. "The objective of L.A. Confidentiel is showing the other part of Armstrong. Not only the clear side, but the dark side, because it's part of the truth. It's about honesty."