Copyright 2004, Roadracing World Publishing, Inc.

FIRST PERSON/OPINION

By John Ulrich

I was minding my own business, editing a magazine story in my office when Associate Editor David Swarts walked in.

Swarts told me that he was working on a nice little website update on Ben Spies’ preparations for the 2005 season, and had gotten quotes from Spies. During the phone interview, Spies had said that he was working with a trainer who had been the first American to compete in the Tour de France.

Hey, we’re motorcycle guys, and all I personally know about the Tour de France is that it’s really, really hard and that Lance Armstrong wins it a lot. So I wasn’t surprised that, in the course of his routine fact checking, Swarts looked up the name of the trainer, Jonathan Boyer, on the Internet.

What did surprise me was the news that the routine background search didn’t just bring up verification that Boyer was the first American competitor in the bicycle classic, but also that he is a convicted child molester who pleaded guilty to 10 felony counts, including three counts of “penetration with a foreign object,” in a case that involved a girl who was 11 years old when the illegal conduct began. Boyer has since served time in jail and is currently on probation.

My first reaction was, we need to contact Ben Spies, and since I’m in charge of this operation, I need to do it myself. I called Ben Spies’ cell phone, and he didn’t answer. So I called his mother and manager, Mary Spies, and she answered her cell phone.

I told her that Swarts was working on a story, had done a background check on Boyer to make sure he had his facts straight about Boyer’s bicycle racing career, and that, to our surprise, found…

“I know about it,” Mary Spies told me, without even waiting for me to finish the sentence. “It’s out there. It’s hanging over his head.”

The short version of what Mary Spies then told me was, Boyer wasn’t really guilty as charged, and that he had his reasons for pleading the case to a conclusion instead of going to trial. She did not sound concerned on any level, and did not ask me to do anything.

What followed next in my office was a brief discussion of what we should do.

Based on my 32 years of experience in journalism, I believed that if we ran the story about Spies working with Boyer and didn’t mention Boyer’s legal troubles, we would soon receive e-mails from somebody who had read about the case in the Monterey Herald or the Salinas Californian (both published in the Laguna Seca area) accusing us of supressing the information because Swarts has been a personal friend and fan of Ben Spies since Spies showed up at WERA National races when he was about 12 years old. This isn’t a purely hypothetical concern–we’ve seen this kind of reaction in the past and try to avoid it when we can.

Worse, some paddock regular who travels to AMA races with a young daughter might later accuse us of endangering children by not revealing what had already been published in newspapers local to Laguna Seca. Again, this is not a purely hypothetical concern–I have often seen another racer’s young daughter hanging out in the motorhome area of the AMA paddock, and I know that I would have wanted to know about anything like this when my now-grown daughters were young girls accompanying me to races.

So I told Swarts, run the story with the information.

He posted the story.

And all hell broke loose, beginning with an irate phone call from Ben Spies himself, who yelled at and berated Swarts. To his credit, Spies called back his long-time supporter moments later and apologized for the yelling part, but he then added that he would never again answer any race-related question posed by Swarts, who should save both of them embarassment by not asking any questions in future post-race press conferences. And, added Spies, various American Suzuki luminaries are also very mad at us.

Then came the e-mails from Spies friends, fans and associates. They claimed that we purposely posted that Ben Spies was associating with a convicted child molester because we have it out for Spies, (and never mind all the magazine and website coverage of Spies doing great things on the racetrack that his entourage didn’t object to in the slightest). They said that we are irresponsible, and should have known better. They proclaimed that it’s all our fault, we made a bad decision to publish the information on Boyer, we’re arrogant, and we are very, very bad guys.

All in a day’s work, I suppose. But I feel bad for David Swarts, who is the hardest-working, most honest journalist I have had the pleasure of working with in my career. Here’s a guy who takes his work seriously, who does his fact checking, and who knows that his job is to accurately report all the relevent facts, popular and unpopular.

To the Spies contingent bombarding our e-mail inbox with condemnation, I leave you with this: In David Swarts’ profession, reporting what is true is more important that what is convenient, and asking him (on the basis of friendship with Ben Spies) to not report that Ben Spies’ new trainer is a convicted child molester would be like asking Ben Spies (on the basis of friendship with David Swarts) to not pass David Swarts on the racetrack.

As for making it look like Ben Spies is knowingly associating and working with a convicted child molester, the only person who has any control over that is…Ben Spies.