Bad Blood (12 page)

Race radio wasn’t working well either. Madonna occasionally crackled across the short-wave announcements as the signal came and went, filling the team car with doodling beats as we strained for news of what was happening at the front of the race. When the race radio’s signal finally came back, we found out that Erik Zabel, then leader of the Telekom team, had crashed – after an encounter with a rogue pony.

Sciandri meanwhile rode on, but his mood was sombre. Off the pace, off the back, out of contention – Sciandri’s failure spoke volumes about the team’s true place in cycling’s pecking order. Finally, after he’d dropped further behind, Yates pulled alongside his team leader once more.

‘Is that it?’ he bellowed bluntly at Sciandri. Max braked and slowed to a halt, clipping his feet out of the pedals in one motion. He climbed into the team car with barely a word. I was demoted to the back seat. Max sat beside Sean, his defences up, adopting the monosyllabic sulk that characterised other disappointing moments in his career. We drove on to the finish, passing US
Postal’s
Frankie Andreu, Yates’ old Motorola teammate, further along the road. Yates slowed the car, wound down a window and called out a greeting. The American looked across with weary eyes.

‘Oh – hi Sean,’ responded Andreu, disinterestedly, as he pedalled on towards the finish.

Julian Clark’s grand design finally collapsed in January 2001. Crippled by lack of sponsorship, the Linda McCartney team fell apart at its pre-season get-together. The financial insecurities that Julian had battled to stave off came home to roost. There was no deal with Heinz. All the broken promises and missed payments turned team personnel against him. Julian went to ground. In the fallout, he took most of the blame, his defence further undermined by his absence, he says through illness, from the final painful meetings in a hotel in Surrey.

Clark had been undone by his own reckless ambition and by some ill-conceived strategies. The straw that broke the camel’s back may have been his decision to bring retired former Festina rider, Neil Stephens, to the team as a sports director alongside Yates.

Stephens had always maintained his innocence of any wrongdoing, but the Australian’s connections to the Festina Affair in 1998 made his appointment foolhardy. After all the fuss, Stephens only really worked for the McCartneys on one race – the 2001 Tour Down Under. More importantly for Clark’s bank balance and for the future of his team, the negative publicity, both in Britain and Australia, over somebody from
that team
mentoring young riders, appeared to give potential sponsor Jacob’s Creek cold feet.

Not that the winemaker was expected to provide hard cash. As 2001 began, the Heinz deal, with a budget of £1.7 million, was still supposedly about to drop into place, so Julian optimistically offered Jacob’s Creek the chance to sponsor the team – free of charge. ‘I said, “We’ll show you what we can
do
, with a view to 2002.”’ He was also talking to Jaguar and, taking a chance, decided to order team clothing with both brands prominently displayed. All of it turned out to be wishful thinking.

‘I was driving around the
péripherique
in Toulouse with Tracey, and I got a call from the marketing director at Heinz in the States. “Me and the guys have had a meeting and we’re not going to go ahead with the team.”’ Julian exploded. ‘I’d always shown this guy a lot of respect and brown-nosed a bit, but I just said, “What the
fuck
do you mean?! What am I supposed to do now?” And he said, “I suggest you take this up with Sir Paul …”’

In the end, the stress of it all overwhelmed Julian. At the time, it was reported that he had suffered a heart attack, but he says this was not the case. Instead, his mind and body fried by the nervous exhaustion of the previous few months, he became a recluse. He was widely blamed by the Linda McCartney riders and staff, vilified as a chancer and con man in the British cycling press and publicly criticised by both Sean Yates and Neil Stephens. Some of it, he acknowledges, was deserved, but nonetheless all of it hurt. His overdraft, he claims, stood at £180,000 when the team folded. In a matter of weeks, he was declared bankrupt.

In the aftermath, Julian was depressed, but he was angry too. He still hadn’t given up, even if, in his desperation, the situation now became as comic as it was tragic. ‘I thought, well, what if I could come up with a replacement sponsor to support the British riders and me?’

After flying the flag for vegetarianism, his first port of call was, quite naturally, British Meat. Julian must have thought his luck was in when his pitch was well received by the marketing director, Alan Lamb, but events conspired against him. ‘Then came the foot and mouth outbreak,’ he recalls, ‘and that was that.’

It could have been so different. Maybe the team could have carried on racing at home, as a low-key British-based operation.
‘I
could have stayed a big fish in a small pond and earned a fair amount of money out of it,’ he reasons.

But he doesn’t really believe that any major sponsor would have supported a UK-based team. ‘How can you ever take a sponsor to a British race?’ he asks. ‘You can’t – not one race. There’s nobody there. And anyone who is there, is out of the ark.’

Julian maintains that if Jacob’s Creek had taken the team on, if Heinz had committed, and if Neil Stephens had been able to escape the ghosts of his past, then maybe the Linda McCartney team would still be going. ‘I really wanted the team to succeed. We knew that there was a short window of publicity because of the McCartney name and that was only going to last a little while before we were going to need results. It became very quickly apparent that there was
no chance
of getting results in Europe, unless they were doing what the others were doing. No question …’

You mean doping? I say.

Julian nods.

Julian Clark still loves cycling. He spent most of the summer of 2006 racing in the Surrey League series. He ended up winning his age group – ‘clean, of course,’ he points out.

The simplicity and innocence of the British club scene appeals to him. ‘It’s nice. I’ll ride out to local races from home, have a chat in the changing rooms, race hard all day. And they’re all clean.’

Julian couldn’t quite believe, after all the years ducking and diving, trying to get into the Tour de France, that the Tour de France came to him; the first road stage of the 2007 Tour, which started in central London, passed his front door in Kent. Unsurprisingly, the irony tickled him. He fired up his barbecue, invited some friends over and watched the race go past.

And after the Tour had gone, Julian gathered up the empties, packed away the charcoal, went back indoors and got on with his life.

THE ENTOURAGE

MY PHONE BEEPS
. Perhaps not for the first time in his life, Alastair Campbell is feeling rather pleased with himself.

‘Meeting Lance was great. If there’s anything I can ever do, let me know,’ he texted. I gazed out of the window at the north London drizzle and pondered the prospect of Tony Blair’s legendary spin doctor becoming my own personal fixer. No letters ever, ever again from the Inland Revenue? A pledge to desist from his ‘Evening With …’ tours around Britain? Most importantly of all, a promise to steer clear of any future British Lions tours?

In the spring of 2004,
The Times
sports desk called asking if I could finesse an introduction to Lance Armstrong on behalf of Campbell. After exiting Number 10 in wake of the ‘dodgy dossier’ farrago that had polarised opinion on the wisdom of the war in Iraq, Campbell had returned to journalism. He was compiling a list of his greatest athletes. Armstrong was among them.

By the time Lance had won his fifth Tour in 2003, with a display of tenacity and rage that shocked even those who knew him well, he had become a people’s hero. His charitable deeds, his books – the first of which,
It’s Not About the Bike
, had become a global bestseller – had given him a profile which transcended his sport. He was somebody in Hollywood, a regular on Letterman and Leno – able to count Bono, George Bush, Sandra Bullock, Matthew McConaughey, Robin Williams and Sheryl Crow among his best friends.

It’s Not About the Bike
is a powerfully told story, expertly turned by ghostwriter Sally Jenkins. It develops the notion of
Lance
as an avenging angel – and the idea that somehow each Tour win further righted the wrongs and slights committed against the sick and helpless. This had real resonance in the United States, particularly in the post-9/11 era and the build-up to the invasion of Iraq, when America grew more isolated from the rest of the world. When Lance spoke of overcoming cancer and fighting against the odds to audiences at fundraising events, many listening would be moved to tears.

By this time Lance had transcended his sport to become a highly paid motivational guru in a sharp suit. The baseball-cap-wearing, sweatshirted, bullshit-free redneck that I had first met in Leeds was now unrecognisable. On his last couple of Tours, I had struggled to convince myself that it was
actually him
out there in Lycra, pedalling and jostling, cursing and spitting, getting sweaty and tired, sore-arsed and fly-spattered. Didn’t he have somebody else to do this stuff? I’d take a stroll down to the team bus at the start village in the mornings, just to check it was really him. And yes – I can confirm that it genuinely was Lance Armstrong who rode all of those seven triumphant Tours.

The US Postal team bus was the hub of Lancemania. Bodyguards, camera crews, fans and groupies milled around. If you were lucky you might get a word with Sheryl or Robin. There was one band of stateside fans, ‘The Cutters’, who hung out by the bus, whooping things up every morning with ‘
Yewdamaaan!
’-style hollering. ‘The Cutters’ were modelled on the wrong-side-of-the-tracks kids in the movie
Breaking Away
. The first year they showed up on the Tour, I ran into them late one night in a pizzeria in the Pyrenees, sunburnt, exhausted and scraping together enough loose change to pay the bill. Within a couple of years they were transformed into official Lance cheerleaders, with endorsement contracts of their own.

It’s Not About the Bike
won the William Hill Sports Book of the Year award in Britain and had become something of a self-help bible. It had an enormous impact, perhaps even a greater impact than his Tour wins. Around the dinner table, people would
say
that they didn’t really like cycling, but they ‘loved Lance’s amazing book’.

Armstrong and his agent, Bill Stapleton, had realised their dream. In the five years since making his comeback, Lance had become an icon. Stapleton told me after Lance’s second Tour win that the ‘brand was more mature’. By 2004, it was more than mature – it was global.

It was more than a brand to those who were close to Armstrong: it was a gravy train. The longer he maintained his position at the top of the sport, the richer they all became. And the more global the Lance brand became, the more distant he grew. My own relationship with him was virtually non-existent by this time, partly because direct contact with him was blocked by The Entourage, partly because there was no ‘exclusive’ time to be had any more, and partly because he had taken umbrage at my criticism of his ongoing relationship with Michele Ferrari. ‘I can choose who I talk to and I chose not to talk to him,’ Lance told Stapleton in an email that his agent then forwarded to me. It ended: ‘I actually think he’s an OK guy.’ But that didn’t tally with other accounts. The garrulous, sometimes indiscreet, Texan journalist, Suzanne Halliburton had revealed that Lance had described me to her as ‘a snake with arms’.

When I heard that, I was, as they say, pretty pissed, but even then it made me smile and think of him with a flicker of grudging affection. The insult carried a characteristic touch of paranoia as if I had somehow betrayed him, slithering into his inner circle, before turning it to my advantage. The ‘snake with arms’ – maybe it was a mythical backwoods creature from the Texas Hill Country, maybe it was the ultimate Austin insult. Maybe it was a bumper sticker – ‘Don’t Mess With The Snake With Arms.’

I’m not really sure where Lance and I parted company. It was a gradual freezing out, but even at the end of the 1999 Tour, it was clear that things were changing. As the race headed for Paris, I had called him. We chatted about his victory as he sat in the
back
of a team car wending its way down the hairpins from Alpe d’Huez to Bourg d’Oisans. We finished the conversation remembering how frail he had been during the mid-chemo visit to the house on Lake Austin.

‘I feel like I made a part of the journey with you,’ I said.

‘That’s right,’ he responded, ‘you did.’

When I tried to call him a few weeks later, his cellphone was unattainable. I called the office in Austin. Access was denied. I’d have to talk to Stapleton and book a time to speak to Lance. They weren’t giving out his number to anybody –
not anybody
. Now it was my turn to be paranoid: with the big American networks and
Sports Illustrated
beating a path to his door, I wondered if I had served my purpose.

The distance between us grew.

It became a divide during the 2001 Tour, when Armstrong and David Walsh of the
Sunday Times
went head to head in an electrifying press conference at the Palais des Congrès in Pau over the Texan’s relationship with Michele Ferrari. The Italian was facing a trial in Italy on doping charges. Walsh, following a series of vitriolic articles that had pursued Armstrong over his credibility, scented blood. Almost a decade earlier, the pair had struck up a rapport when Walsh had met the American and been impressed, like me, by his brazen charm and youthful directness.

But Armstrong, vintage 2001, was more complex.

On the road his mastery was complete; off the road he sometimes needed a little help from his friends in the press. For most of the Tour, he had deflected the endless questions over his contacts with Ferrari, which climaxed in the head to head with Walsh in Pau, using subtle sledging towards his rivals, and vague accusations of unprofessionalism.