A questionable 'Sports Book of the Year' in Britain
A memoir by a Tour de France luminary is amazingly dubious about gender issues
Dec 21, 2025
As one of the best-known cycling journalists in the world, David Walsh has honed a distinctive reputation for going full-throttle on the sport’s most notorious doping figures.
In his many dispatches for The Sunday Times in Britain and in several books, Walsh doggedly exposed the exploits of Armstrong and others in systematic doping activities that brought cycling into international disrepute.
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Walsh was honored by the British Press Awards four times from 2000-13, as well as in his native Ireland, in large part due to his cycling exposes. He has been unapologetic about his pursuit of Armstrong, saying that “it’s been a good journey because the truth was never hard to find in this story.”
More recently, Walsh blasted doping authorities when Italian tennis star Jannik Sinner, the No. 1 player on the ATP tour, received only a three-month suspension for inconsistently applying punishments for elite players.
The moral indignation of the doping issue has barely relented since the Armstrong saga. For good reason, it’s still considered such a cardinal infraction of the most basic sporting ethos—honoring the rules that establish boundaries for fair competition.
But those notions haven’t transferred all that much to another area where an unfair competitive terrain persists. A small but feisty band of female athletes, particularly in the U.K. and the United States, are starting to stand up, speak out and fight back against the “inclusion” of males in their sports.
In February, the International Olympic Committee is expected to announce new qualification criteria for female competitions, following the debacle in the Paris Games in 2024 which two boxers who previously failed sex screenings won women’s gold medals.
Yet those concerns are largely ignored in the legacy media and publishing worlds. Earlier this month, the William Hill Sports Book Awards, the longest-running of its kind in the world, announced its 2025 ‘Book of the Year’ was “The Escape: The Tour, the Cyclist and Me,” a memoir by Pippa York and David Walsh.
York is a 66-year-old Scottish cyclist who was born Robert Millar, and who in the 1983 Tour de France earned the title of “King of the Mountain” for his prowess during race stages in the Alps.
That’s the first year Walsh covered the Tour de France, and his impressions of Millar weren’t kind. In fact, it was many years before the two gravitated toward anything resembling a friendship.
Millar retired in 1995 and changed in a myriad of ways. He “transitioned” to present as a female, renamed himself Philippa York and has lived quietly for almost three decades with a new persona, name and apparently some body alterations.
That is, until “The Escape” was published earlier this year. It’s a coming-out of sorts for York, although the book largely focuses on the cyclist’s career on the bike, including 11 Tour appearances.
But such an august and competitive sports book awards program doesn’t hand out plaudits for something so ordinary as that, even among elite athletes.
York’s observations about the transgender controversy are like catnip for such novelty-seekers as book judges, especially his claims that concerns by female athletes are a “distraction.”
A distraction from what, we’re not told, but the William Hill judges were swayed not only by the narrative drama and arc of York’s tale, but also the way in which Walsh, the ghost writer, humanized an individual who clearly has thought of himself very differently for much of his life:
“David will prompt Pippa to explain what it was like growing up, knowing that he—at that point, ‘he’—was in the wrong body, saving up his pocket money to be able to buy girls clothes, the fear of being seen in those clothes by his classmates, and how awkward it was being discovered by his father in those clothes.”
That comment is from Alyson Rudd, the chair of the judges and the author of an acclaimed memoir about a woman competing with the guys in park football in Britain.
Did Rudd or any of the judges at any time question the sheer madness of what’s become an all-too-common statement— that someone ”was in the wrong body?”
We don’t know, because Rudd was not asked about that, nor about any of the many statements York made about gender issues that smack of biological ignorance. Here’s how William Hill announced the winner:
“Pippa and David ultimately collected this year’s prize thanks to the engaging narrative of The Escape, a tour de force that explored both the troubled past of cycling and Pippa’s own personal journey, told through the lens of a travelogue style, which emphasised the beauty and history of one of sport’s greatest spectacles.”
Since the book’s publication, reviews and praise have been ample, in a similarly uncritical manner.
Cycling News published this excerpt, a Q & A between York and Walsh in which the cyclist admitted he would be fine as his male self, and:
“Then it hits you, unexpectedly. You see a woman somewhere, and you think, Shit, that could be me. Why isn’t that me? Then I’d have to go back to being Robert Millar, the guy in the bike race.”
This is a good illustration of the roller-coaster ride of gender dysphoria, and it’s hard not to feel compassion for anyone going through this. I’ve met or known people who’ve struggled mightily this way (including the late Los Angeles Times sportswriter Mike Penner, who took his own life as a result) and wouldn’t wish this kind of distress upon anyone.
But in October, in an interview with the Scottish television outlet STV News, York acknowledged that “if puberty blockers were available, you wouldn't have had Robert Millar.”
None of this has raised any ethical or moral questions about who women’s sports should be for, most notably in the mainstream press. In a 2022 interview, York falsely claimed that Laurel Hubbard, a 40-something male weightlifter from New Zealand allowed to compete in the women’s category in the Tokyo Olympics, didn’t maintain his male advantages.
York also said that “anyone who’s transitioned isn’t going to be an elite woman” in the realm of sports.
Well, that’s not true either, as was the case with Lia Thomas, the U.S. collegiate swimmer who reduced testosterone levels to meet NCAA requirements to compete against women, and in 2022 won the national women’s 50-yard freestyle race.
That set off a pushback that resulted in a political firestorm resulting in a Trump executive order and the famously anti-Trump Martina Navratilova agreeing with him.
Here’s another doozy in that same 2022 interview with York, now a book of the year winner:
“The argument against trans athletes is that they’re basically men pretending to be women.”
Well, they are, but York further states that he doesn’t “know of anyone who transitioned to win a medal.”
That’s beside the point. It doesn’t matter how many males like him think “inclusion” is something they’re entitled to, even to the disadvantage of women who do mind.
While USA Cycling will be restricting female cycling to actual females, most of the rest of the sport is stubbornly resistant to that.
That those outraged by Lance Armstrong’s antics don’t consider this cheating is rather incredible, and apparently Walsh hasn’t had much to say about it either. His collaboration with York was one between friends, and those bonds remain as firm as ever:
“The book was a labour of love in a way, because we had such a good time together. For the book to be awarded the greatest prize in the world of sports writing, it’s overwhelming.”
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