Lanced: The Shaming of Lance Armstrong (21 page)

I spoke with Emma on Friday, the day Bruyneel was kicked off the Radio Shack team and authorities at the US Olympic Committee headquarters in Colorado Springs had one of their workmen paint over a quote from Armstrong on a wall of the dining hall.

She recalled a story from her days on US Postal. "In one conversation with Julian [de Vriese] he twirled round the front wheel of a bike he was working on. 'See Emma-tje', he said. He liked to call me the effective version of my name in Dutch because we were great friends. 'Look at the valve there, when I spin the wheel it goes round but the valve always comes round too. Remember this, Emma-tje, what goes around comes around'."

Lance, the lies and me

David Walsh

November 4, 2012

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‘One letter touched a nerve. “Cancer of the spirit.” That expression haunted me’

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It is 3.30 on a grey Monday afternoon, at a Starbucks off the M25 and I look at a phone that is going to ring. It hasn’t stopped. It won’t stop. “About Lance Armstrong and today’s news, are you available to do an interview?” Canada, Australia, New Zealand, France, the US, Ireland, Holland, Belgium and so many closer to home. No, no, no, yes, no, no, no, no, yes, no, no, no, yes, no, no, no, no.

Seven requests are from the BBC: Radio 4, Radio 5 live, Radio 2, BBC Radio Foyle, BBC Belfast, Newsnight, World Service. There was a time when the Armstrong Story had black circles on its body from the BBC touching it with a 40ft barge pole. But this is the day, October 22, 2012, that he has been officially declared an outcast, banished from the sport by his own people — cycling’s governing body, Union Cycliste Internationale (UCI). Its president, Pat McQuaid, said the former seven-time Tour de France winner “has no place in cycling”.

Armstrong himself is to change the profile on his Twitter page, removing the five words “7-time Tour de France winner”. He’s history now, another ageing story of cheating and lying and doping and bullying and sport that wasn’t sport. An icon until the mask was taken away. “The greatest heist sport has ever seen,” says Travis Tygart, chief executive of the United States Anti-Doping Agency.

For 13 years, this story has been a central part of my life — from the moment on the road to Saint-Flour in the Auvergne during the 1999 Tour de France that it became clear Armstrong was a fraud.

That morning, the 25-year-old French rider Christophe Bassons, nicknamed “Monsieur Propre” for his anti-doping stance, left the Tour — although it is more true to say the Tour abandoned him. They were dirty, he was clean, but he was the problem. They ground him down, ran him out of town.

At the head of the lynch mob, lacking only a white hood and length of rope, was Armstrong. He enjoyed his enforcer role, chasing Bassons down the day after the finish to Sestriere: “He spoke to me in English,” said Bassons, “but I understood. ‘That’s enough. You are bad for cycling. It would be better if you went home. Give up the sport. You are a small rider, you know. F*** you.’”

In this fight, I knew the side to be on.

On the day Armstrong won his first Tour de France, I wrote a piece for The Sunday Times suggesting the achievement of the cancer survivor should not be applauded: “There are times when it is right to celebrate, but there are other occasions when it is equally correct to keep your hands by your sides and wonder… [and in this case] the need for inquiry is overwhelming.”

Many readers were unimpressed. “I was disappointed by your coverage of the Tour de France… I am mystified why you chose to feed readers a mixture of rumour, suspicion and innuendo,” wrote Ed Tarwinski of Edinburgh. Not one appreciated our sceptical reaction to Armstrong’s victory.

But right now, in this Starbucks, I feel no joy. Today would be the 30th birthday of our son John who was killed on his bicycle 17 years before, on June 25, 1995, just an hour before I reached home after five weeks at the Rugby World Cup in South Africa. He was 12. The day before, he’d watched the Springboks beat the All Blacks in the World Cup final, taped the game for me on a VHS cassette and filed it away with all the others he knew I’d want to watch on my return.

Liverpool was his football team, and he’d lost his life cycling home after playing a Gaelic football match that morning. He should have stayed for soft drinks and sandwiches, but his team lost and he wouldn’t have wanted to hang around. Since then his birthday has always meant more than the anniversary of the day he died, though it is intensely sad to wonder what your 12-year-old would have been like at 30. For 17 years flowers have arrived at our home from a dear friend who understands.

John was a particular kid; bright, hard, questioning, truthful, stubborn. When he was seven, his teacher, Mrs Twomey, read the story of the Nativity to the class. “And when Mary and Joseph and the baby Jesus went back to Nazareth, they lived a simple life, because Joseph was just a carpenter and they had very little.”

Our son couldn’t let that pass. “Miss,” he asked, “you said Mary and Joseph were very poor, but what did they do with the gold they got from the three kings?” The poor teacher had read this story for more than 30 years and nobody had ever asked about the gold. “To be honest, John,” she said,

“I don’t know.”

That story stayed with me; funny, comforting, reassuring even. Something didn’t add up and John asked the question. Though I feel the sadness that always comes on this day and the phone won’t stop ringing, I remember that old story and know I’ve been inspired by it. That the legend of Lance Armstrong should have been officially cremated on this day seems to me anything but coincidental.

The thing about the Armstrong scandal was that, even in 1999, the year of his first victory, you didn’t need to be Woodward or Bernstein to get it. On the afternoon the American delivered his first great performance in the Alps, the stage to Sestriere, many journalists in the salle de presse laughed at the ease with which Armstrong ascended. He climbed with the nonchalance of the well-doped.

I walked through the hedgerows of journalists, stopping to speak with Philippe Bouvet, chief cycling writer of the sports daily L’Equipe, whose father, Albert, had been a pro. “Doping,” said Bouvet, “is an old story in cycling. Over the last few years the manipulation of riders’ blood has changed the nature of competition. What we are getting now is a caricature of sport. It is killing cycling.”

Benoît Hopquin, a journalist with the French newspaper Le Monde, was tipped off that Armstrong had tested positive for cortisone, and that it had been covered up. Cortisone is a banned drug, but can be used by riders with a Therapeutic Use Exemption (TUE). Le Monde had been shown Armstrong’s doping control form, and he didn’t have a TUE.

They ran with the story. UCI denied there had been a positive test, and said Armstrong had a TUE because of a saddle sore. At a news conference Hopquin tried to pin down Armstrong on whether he had this exemption and when it had been issued: perfectly reasonable questions, but dismissed with disdain by Armstrong.

“Mr Le Monde,” he said to Hopquin, referring to him by the name of his newspaper, “are you calling me a liar or a doper?” The truth was he was both, but at that moment he wore the maillot jaune, the famed yellow jersey — and Hopquin was intimidated. He didn’t reply.

Not one person in a room full of journalists had a follow-up question; instead there were smiles and appreciation for the authority with which Armstrong had shot down the journalist.

The bullying of Bassons and Hopquin spoke of arrogance: Armstrong needed to be aggressive because, a year before, French customs and police had targeted the Tour and found stashes of banned drugs almost everywhere they looked. Shamed, Tour de France organisers said the 1999 race would be “The Tour of Renewal”, echoing pledges that the sport has always been too quick to give.

On the eve of the Tour, the organiser, Jean-Marie Leblanc, said the scandal of the drug-addled ’98 race would inspire a better future. With less doping, speeds would be reduced and we would again be able to believe in the Tour de France. Long before Armstrong would ride down the Champs-Elysées in the yellow jersey, it was certain the ’99 race would be the fastest in history.

Through the first two weeks of the race, virtually every French newspaper reflected the scepticism that was everywhere. Each day, L’Equipe found a new way of saying it didn’t believe in Armstrong. It referred to him as “The Extra-Terrestrial” — and not as a compliment. But L’Equipe is owned by ASO, the same company that owns the Tour de France, and after Armstrong had been subjected to a tough Pierre Ballester interview, Leblanc arranged a meeting with Jean-Michel Rouet, L’Equipe’s cycling editor.

Leblanc felt the Ballester interview read like a police interrogation, and made his feelings known to Rouet. From that moment, L’Equipe softened its attitude to Armstrong. Bouvet, Ballester and Rouet, however, wouldn’t change their view that he was doping.

Before the race reached Paris, Leblanc declared that Armstrong “had saved the Tour de France”. In the clamour to acclaim the cancer hero’s journey to victory, a tidal wave rolled over the dissenters. The positive cortisone test was forgotten, the record speed was mostly not mentioned; Christophe Bassons, too, forgotten. But if you listened carefully there were some truthful voices. Vincenzo Santoni, team director of the Italian Cantina Tollo team, shook his head sadly. “I hope we can find a way out of the mess that cycling is in,” he said during that ’99 Tour. “Until that happens, we can forget the joy of the victory.”

You could only believe in this story if you weren’t bothered what Mary and Joseph did with the gold.

Already, my relationship with Armstrong had become personal. Six years earlier, I had interviewed him in the first week of his debut Tour. In a book that I wanted to be a Canterbury Tales of the Tour de France, his story would be The Rookie’s Tale. We talked for three hours in a hotel garden outside Grenoble and got on well. He was a Texan in France, so uncool you warmed to him: if his American gaucheness didn’t win you over, his ambition did. Nothing was going to get in his way. I would follow his results in the next three Tours and it wasn’t hard to tell what kind of rider he was; strong on flat roads, decent on the shorter climbs, but average in solo races against the clock and physiologically unable to climb with the best in the high mountains. In four shots at the Tour — before being diagnosed with testicular cancer in late 1996 — his best finish was 36th.

I hoped he could recover and return to the sport. But when he came back, and rode much better in the mountains than he’d ever done before, I didn’t believe it. At The Sunday Times there was initial excitement at the cancer victim doing so well, but once I’d made the case for scepticism, the newspaper encouraged me in every way. On the day Armstrong won his first Tour de France the headline in this newspaper was “Flawed fairytale”. I was pleased, but not our readers. From the 45 letters received, one offered encouragement.

From the other 44, Keith Miller’s take touched a nerve: “I believe Armstrong’s victory was amazing, a triumph in sport and life. I believe he sets a good example for all of us. I believe in sport, in life, and in humanity… Sometimes we refuse to believe, for whatever reason. Sometimes people get a cancer of the spirit. And maybe that says a lot about them.”

That expression haunted me — “Cancer of the spirit”.

By the time the 2000 Tour de France was ready to roll, the Armstrong camp had identified me as trouble. Bill Stapleton, Armstrong’s attorney, manager and friend, turned up in the press room at the end of the first stage.

“David,” he said, “could I have a word? I’m Bill Stapleton.”

“Yes, Bill?”

“Look, we know what you’ve been writing about Lance, and you’re getting this wrong. If you were to be fairer to Lance, that could work for you in terms of access. On the other hand, if you keep writing what you’re writing, we will take action.”

“Is that a threat, Bill?”

“It is,” he said.

Stapleton made me want to try harder, to prove what I knew to be true. The Sunday Times continued to encourage me: “Pharmacy on wheels becomes a sick joke,” was the headline about the 2000 Tour. Not discouraged by the salle de presse conversation in 2000, Stapleton called me in April the following year: “David, I want to offer you a one-on-one interview with Lance.” Armstrong was gold dust back then; a two-time Tour winner, author of the phenomenally successful autobiography It’s Not about the Bike, cancer icon and beacon of hope to so many.

“Where and when?” I asked.

“If you can get to France this week, it’s on,” he said.

We met at the Hotel La Fauvelaie near the village of St-Sylvain-d’Anjou in eastern France. He came with Stapleton. I asked if he’d ever visited Dr Michele Ferrari, who was due to go on trial for doping that summer.

“Have I been tested by him, gone there and consulted on certain things? Perhaps,” he said.

Two months later an Italian police source would provide chapter and verse on Armstrong’s visits to Ferrari: two days in March, 1999; three days in May, 2000; two days in August, 2000; one day in September, 2000; three days in April, 2001. More than “perhaps”.

Every sense I had of Armstrong being dishonest was confirmed by the interview. In June 2001, The Sunday Times published my investigation into Armstrong and headlined it “Saddled with suspicion”. That investigation included evidence from Stephen Swart, a New Zealand rider and former team-mate, who said that in the Motorola team of 1995-96, Armstrong was the strongest advocate for the team getting on a doping programme.

But leaving Hotel La Fauvelaie on that April afternoon in 2001, it was clear to me that Armstrong would not be caught easily. Already, he had worked out that the world wanted to believe his story of hope and, where possible, they would protect the story. Before the end, my questions had begun to irritate him.

“There will always be sceptics, cynics and zealots,” he said, wanting me to know that, in the end, this sound-bite would be enough. “Saddled with suspicion” ran on the eve of the 2001 Tour, and the last line reflected how I felt about his story: “Those who expect him to falter, either on the murderous road to Alpe d’Huez or under the weight of public scepticism, may be in for a long, long wait.”