Lanced: The Shaming of Lance Armstrong (20 page)

At the end of a second day in Missoula he drives me back to my hotel and talks of having stayed up late the night before. "Remember I asked you yesterday," he says, "whether we will have clean cycling? You were pessimistic, saying too many ex-dopers were still involved. I thought about that last night and didn't feel like sleeping for a while."

There is something else on his mind. "You know how I've still got every bit of memorabilia from my career, tons of stuff from the Tours and classics; bikes, jerseys, trophies, race numbers, everything. It fills an entire room. I don't want any of it and have been thinking what to do with it. I'm going to auction it online and donate the proceeds to anti-doping. Do you think that would be okay?"

The women who stood up to the bully

David Walsh

October 14, 2012

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Remember this, life is like a wheel: what goes around comes around

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Memories of the first conversations have never dimmed. With Betsy Andreu it was a phone call while driving from Heathrow to Cardiff on a winter's evening in 2002. The tip-off had come from a mutual friend, James Startt, an American photo-journalist in Paris. "Betsy thinks you should call her," he said, passing on her number in Michigan.

Emma O'Reilly turned up almost out of the blue. That was June 2003. "I don't mind telling you what I saw when I worked with the US Postal team. Pantani's dead, Jimenez is dead," she said, referring to two top cyclists who had been involved in doping and had died in their early 30s. "It isn't right."

For two years at Postal she had been Lance Armstrong's personal masseuse but this was hardly mentioned in that first phone call. Before breaking the code of silence, she had to know what she was getting into.

"Let me come to Liverpool [at the time O'Reilly lived with her boyfriend Mike Carlisle] and we'll have dinner. Afterwards you decide if you still want to go ahead." We went for supper to Villa Jazz in Oxton; Emma, Mike and I, and for much of the evening we spoke about Mike's beloved Manchester United. The other stuff could wait.

With Betsy, you didn't get to tip-toe around the subject of Armstrong. Before I was 10 miles down the M4 towards Cardiff she had taken me inside a consulting room at Indiana University Hospital in October 1996. The Dallas Cowboys were on the television and two doctors were alongside Armstrong. "We should leave now," Betsy said as the doctors began to speak.

"It's okay," said Armstrong. "You can stay."

And then Betsy heard the conversation that would change her life. "Have you used performance-enhancing drugs?" asked one doctor.

Matter-of-factly, Armstrong listed them. "EPO, testosterone, growth hormone, cortisone and steroids."

Betsy freaked. The message to Frankie, her husband, was in her eyes: "You and me, we gotta speak outside," and he knew to follow. "If you're f*****g doing that s**t, I'm not marrying you," she said.

That was Betsy in a nutshell. Right was right, wrong was wrong and that three-hour journey to Cardiff passed in a moment. She had much to tell; how she and Lance were once good friends, how he'd loved her risotto and would go with her to the supermarket. They argued about God. She believed; he didn't and maybe if he'd allowed her to leave that hospital room before the question, things would have turned out differently.

Betsy's difficulty was Frankie's job. He had quit riding in 2001 but had remained in the sport. Pro cycling was the only job he'd ever known and Betsy knew that Armstrong could hurt her husband's career. Frankie wanted her to step back and let others lead the race to find out the truth about Armstrong. "Who, Frankie, who will do it?" she would ask before delivering her bottom line: "I'm not lying for him, don't dare ask me to do that."

Three weeks after the dinner in Liverpool, I turned up at Emma O'Reilly's house in Oxton. It was a July afternoon, the 2003 Tour de France was on the television but the race no longer interested us. Emma zapped it and seven hours later she stopped describing her time with US Postal. She told about the day she went to Spain to pick up drugs for Lance; the time at the 1999 Tour de France she bought the concealer to cover the syringe marks on his arm; the night she dumped his used syringes in Belgium; and the time she picked up testosterone for George Hincapie.

There was also the evening during the '99 Tour she heard Armstrong and two team bosses concoct a story to get round a positive test for cortisone.

"Now, Emma," Armstrong said at the end of that night, "you know enough to bring me down." He never thought she would because he sensed she had a vague admiration for his drive and ambition. But she saw beyond that. She was never taken in. "Lance was Lance," she would often say, meaning you had to know the rough and the smooth.

With Emma I never understood how guilty she would feel about betraying people in the Postal team she liked. Tyler Hamilton, Jonathan Vaughters and the head mechanic Julian de Vriese, with whom she became very friendly. Julian was old school; Belgian, once mechanic to Eddy Merckx and later Greg LeMond. He looked after Armstrong. Old enough to be Emma's father but they liked each other.

He wouldn't understand why she would spit in the soup. That's what they called it when someone spoke of cycling's dark sub-culture, cracher le soupe. Betraying Julian bothered her but then she'd think of another Belgian, Johan Bruyneel, her boss at Postal.

Through her last year with the team, he bullied her and made her life miserable. After stealing her diary, he went to her colleagues and lied about her writing nasty things about them. Emma thought Bruyneel manipulative and underhand and indescribably stupid for believing he could treat her as he had and still expect her to carry the team's secrets to her grave. Betsy and Emma had very different personalities but shared one quality. Everything they said, you felt was the truth.

In late June of 2004, LA Confidentiel, les secrets de Lance Armstrong, was published in France. It was a book I had co-authored with Pierre Ballester and its two most important witnesses were Emma O'Reilly and Betsy Andreu. Before the book came out, The Sunday Times wrote about what these two women had seen during their time in Armstrong's world.

All hell broke loose after the book came out. Betsy and Emma weren't ready for it. Neither was I. Armstrong sued The Sunday Times, Emma O'Reilly, the publishers of LA Confidentiel, the magazine that serialised it. All that was entirely predictable but not so was the extent to which Armstrong went after the two women.

During that summer's Tour he summoned Frankie Andreu to his hotel room and politely told him that Betsy had become a problem, but there was a solution and he would get Bill [Stapleton, Armstrong's manager and attorney] to speak with him. They met in a car park a couple of days later. Suspicious of Armstrong's motives, Andreu secretly taped his meeting with Stapleton.

Through Stapleton, Armstrong asked that Betsy put out a statement discrediting me and the work I'd done. "The best results for us all," said Stapleton, "is to pick away at him ... extract an apology, drop the f****** lawsuit and it all just goes away." The lawyer went on to say he wanted to avoid a "full-out war in a French court" because it "could blow the whole sport". Suggesting to Betsy Andreu that she lie wasn't clever and just made her more determined. I marvelled at her strength and she would wonder what I meant. "I just don't like people saying I'm lying when I'm not," she said.

Frankie was never going to put Stapleton's proposal to his wife. His career was adversely affected by Betsy's willingness to say she'd heard Armstrong admit to doping in that Indiana hospital. He lost one job managing a team, then another with a television channel and though nobody said it was because of Betsy, they both knew.

Frankie's parents thought Betsy was wrong to endanger her family's future and she was reminded many times of how her stance could have an impact on their three kids; little Frankie, Marta and Stevie. Betsy's dad thought she was wrong, only her mum supported her. "It's crazy to me," she would say to her parents, "that I have to justify refusing to lie."

Family members would tell her she didn't have to lie, just say nothing. "That's the same as lying," she'd say. Between her and Frankie it wasn't smooth. Though reading from the same book, they weren't on the same page. He hadn't doped as much as Armstrong, Kevin Livingston, Hamilton, Hincapie and others, he had been the only rider who refused Armstrong's request to work with Dr Michele Ferrari and within the sport, he was the bad guy. When he admitted in a New York Times interview that he doped, Bruyneel bizarrely threatened to sue him.

Because of Betsy, few in cycling wanted Frankie and, financially, things weren't good. "Just tell them we're divorced," she said at a particularly low point, one of the few times she'd seen him get really angry. He said he'd never say that, never. As time passed Frankie edged more towards Betsy's position. She never budged, just waited for him.

It bugged her that Armstrong would be interviewed but not questioned. Journalists wanted him in their newspapers, chat show hosts were worse, and when he dismissed people who were "jealous and bitter" she knew he was referring to her. She rolled up her sleeves a little more. There hasn't been one day in the past 10 years that she hasn't thought of how to get the truth out there and few when she didn't do something about it.

Emma O'Reilly had no idea of the lengths to which Armstrong would go to impugn her character. A few days after the publication of LA Confidentiel, he was asked at a press conference in Washington about O'Reilly's allegations. He alluded to issues that led to her leaving the team; alcohol, inappropriate relationships. The insinuations were so scurrilous that the invited journalists didn't have the stomach to report them widely but still they didn't challenge him.

Then the subpoenas began to arrive, so frequently that the local police officer serving them would ring Emma's home and tell Mike to put the kettle on because "he had another". Keith Schilling, a lawyer representing Armstrong, asked to see her and her French lawyer, Thibault di Montbrial, told her to speak to him. Mike said he wanted to be in the room when Schilling came.

She told Schilling that everything she said in The Sunday Times and in LA Confidentiel was the truth. But, at this time, she was in something way over her head. She will never forget what Schilling said during their conversation. "I'm surprised the paparazzi aren't already outside your house." It stayed with her because she and Mike didn't feel he said it out of concern for her wellbeing.

The effect on Mike was what hurt Emma the most. He suffered from multiple sclerosis and they knew stress would worsen his condition. He became agitated by what Armstrong was allowed to do to his girlfriend, causing a noticeable deterioration in his MS. Emma felt responsible. She wasn't pleased with me, feeling I should have known how things would play out.

Sometimes on the phone or in an email I got one barrel, other times I got both. She asked me to contact her former husband Simon Lillistone, who had been in the car with her on that journey to Spain to pick up drugs for Armstrong. "He can verify that story." I called Lillistone, who at first tried to say he didn't know but then admitted he did. On a follow-up phone call he cried and said he didn't want his name used, that it would damage his career to speak out. He now works for British Cycling.

Seeing the effect on Mike broke Emma's heart but she never changed her story and never wanted to back away from it.

Now? "If I had to sum it up I'd say it really made me feel exposed and guilty, too. I'm sad that I put people through so much and sad that it was all right for Lance to try to take everything from me; finances, reputation, self-esteem, because when someone calls you an alcoholic whore it makes you question the impression you give out."

In the end the UK's libel laws quietened Emma. She did an interview with Sports Illustrated and they said it would be fine in the US but if Armstrong sued her in Britain, it would be a problem. "This country's libel laws stopped me from telling the truth."

Nothing could quieten Betsy. I went to stay at her house, went to her church, had coffee at her favourite diner, went with big Frankie to watch little Frankie play ice hockey and marvelled that she couldn't read an unchallenging interview with Armstrong without asking if I had a contact number for another dishonest journalist. She lectured us on the need to pursue the truth.

We laughed, too, and had fun seeing each other as Armstrong saw us. I called her "the crazed bitch" and she called me "the little f****** troll". On those days when I was sick of the story, she would call and ask if I'd heard the latest. She didn't do Armstrong fatigue. There was pain, too. "I'm pleased Frankie began his career clean and ended it clean," she says.

"He doped for a time in the middle and was then sacked because he wouldn't keep doing it. When he admitted his doping in The New York Times in 2006, the journalist Juliet Macur called many of my old cycling friends to see if they would vouch for me. Not one of them would, not even to say I was a good mom or a decent human being, they were that afraid of him."

Betsy never publicly questioned how other wives dealt with their husbands' doping but she noticed from a Spanish investigation, Operation Puerto, that Haven Hamilton played an active role in Tyler's doping and from last week's report from the US Anti-Doping Agency (Usada) she realised Kristin Armstrong distributed banned drugs to US Postal riders. When the divorces happened, Haven and Kristin got good settlements.

Usada vindicated everything Betsy and Emma said for years and many people paid tribute to their courage and honesty. In the end it was the evidence of 11 former teammates that did for Armstrong. They spoke out mostly because US federal officers were asking the questions and talking of jail time for those who perjured themselves.

Later, they would volunteer the same information to Usada. Betsy and Emma spoke out without anybody encouraging them to do so, when all the pressure was to respect Omerta and say nothing.