Lanced: The Shaming of Lance Armstrong (6 page)

Asked why he did not name the coach at Spokane, Strock says he is not in a position to answer that question, and not in a position to say why he can't. It is believed Carmichael has agreed an out-of-court settlement with Strock's attorney. Carmichael says he cannot recollect the incident in Spokane and declined to comment when asked if he had settled out of court.

Armstrong knows of the case and understands the implications. Has your coach Chris Carmichael made any settlement with Greg Strock?

"Ask Greg or Chris," says Armstrong.

Didn't Chris explain whether he did or didn't?

"No."

Didn't you ask him?

"As far as I am concerned, it was a case between Greg and his coach, Rene Wenzel."

What if Carmichael had made a settlement, would that not be a shock?

"Would I be shocked? I haven't even thought about it."

It wouldn't look good, would it?

"Does it look good that Greg Strock just takes the money? Let's flip it around. Is this about money or is this about principle?" We talk about the professional teams for whom Armstrong has ridden, Motorola and US Postal. He insists neither doped: "There are programmes in this sport and there are athletes that are clean."

A former professional rider who was a contemporary of Armstrong's at Motorola from 1992 to 1996 tells a different story. Now retired from the sport, this former professional agreed to speak on the basis that his name would not be used. Should it become necessary, though, he will come forward and stand up for his account of the Motorola years.

"The team results in 1994 were not impressive and '95 started off the same. We had access to the same training as other teams, the same equipment; we ate the same food, slept the same number of hours but, in races, we were not as competitive. The picture was becoming clear for the upcoming Tour de France: we were going to have to give in and join the EPO race.

"Lance was a key spokesperson when EPO was the topic. From the riders' point of view, we felt the mounting pressure not only from within the team but also from what was being said and written about us as a team. No one starts out wanting to dope but you become a victim of the sport." As well as believing Motorola was clean, Armstrong says he has proof that US Postal runs a clean programme. He points to the team's three weeks of drug-free urine at last year's Tour de France. To the suggestion that the Tour's tests find only detectable drugs, he replies that there will always be "cynics and sceptics and zealots".

We talk about Prentice Steffen, team doctor for US Postal in 1996, the year before Armstrong joined the team. Steffen had been with the team since 1993, when it was Subaru-Montgomery, and continued as team doctor in the first year of US Postal's involvement. With Postal's backing came the ambition to compete against Europe's best. In 1996 they entered the Tour of Switzerland.

"We were wiped out," said Steffen. "Two of my riders approached me saying they wanted to 'talk about the medical programme'. It was said that as a team, we weren't able to get to where we wanted to go with what I was doing for them. I said, 'Well, right now I am doing everything I can.' They might have come back with 'more could be done' and I said, 'Yeah, I understand, but I am not going to be involved in that'."

Steffen is sure he was being asked to help two riders to dope. After that informal discussion, relations cooled between the doctor and his riders. Four months later, a message was left on Steffen's voicemail saying the team no longer needed him.

In November 1996, Steffen received a letter from firm Keesal, Young and Logan, attorneys for the US Postal team. The letter said his suspicions about his departure were incorrect but he would be held responsible for his comments if he made them public. Until now, Steffen has not spoken out in public. Armstrong says he is surprised by the doctor's story. But is it not a serious accusation against the team? "If it's so serious and so sincere, I would think I would have heard that [before now]."

OUR conversation turns to Kevin Livingston, Armstrong's first lieutenant and close friend on the US Postal team during the Tour de France victories. Livingston has been listed as one of 60 riders treated by Ferrari, the Italian doctor awaiting trial on doping charges.

Ferrari is accused of treating riders with EPO, the drug that increases the blood's oxygen-carrying red cells and enhances the rider's endurance. For most humans, red cells account for 43% or 44% of the total blood volume, a measure known as the haematocrit level. To counter the abuse of EPO, the authorities now ban riders whose haematocrit exceeds 50%. The Sunday Times has seen pages from Livingston's file at Ferrari's office. The readings for his blood parameters are unusual. In December 1997 Livingston's haematocrit is recorded at 41.2%. Seven months later, a few days before the start of the 1998 Tour de France, Livingston's haematocrit is 49.9%. Such a variation in a seven-month period is uncommon.

Did you know Kevin was linked with the doping investigation?

"Yes."

Did you talk with him about it?

"No."

Never?

"No. You keep coming up with all these side stories. I can only comment on Lance Armstrong. I don't speak for others."

This was your best friend?

"But I don't meddle in their business."

So we speak of Lance Armstrong and Michele Ferrari. Did you ever visit Dr Ferrari?

"I did know Michele Ferrari."

How did you get to know him?

"When you go to races, you see people. I know every team's doctor. It's a small community."

Did you ever visit Ferrari?

"Have I been tested by him, gone there and consulted on certain things? Perhaps."

Sources close to the investigation of Ferrari are more precise about Armstrong's relationship with the doctor. They tell of a series of visits by the rider to Ferrari's practice at Ferrara in northern Italy: two days in March 1999, three days in May 2000, two days in August 2000, one day in September 2000 and three days in late April/early May of this year. While he was in Ferrara, Armstrong stayed at the five-star Hotel Duchessa Isabella and at the four-star Hotel Annunziata.

Is Ferrari a good trainer?

"Regardless of what goes on," he replies, "these guys that are under a lot of pressure, guys like Conconi, Cecchini, Ferrari; these Italian guys, they are fantastic minds, great trainers. They know about physiology."

Francesco Conconi and Ferrari have been investigated on doping charges and the prosecuting judges have recommended that both be sent for trial. The case against Luigi Cecchini was dropped.

WE speak about the French investigation into the US Postal team. On last year's Tour de France two staff members of the US Postal team were followed by journalists from the TV station, France 3. They were seen to carry rubbish bags from the team hotel and put them in an unmarked car. The journalists followed.

The chase lasted for five days. Thirty miles from Morzine, the US Postal employees dumped the bags in a bin by the side of the road. Tipped off about the discovery of the blood-boosting drug Actovegin in the medical waste, French police opened an investigation.

Seven months later, the inquiry has not been completed. Armstrong says that analyses of blood and urine samples provided by the team to the investigation are clean. The judge leading the inquiry, Sophie-Helene Chateau, says such a conclusion is premature.

Who were the team members who dumped that rubbish?

"One was a team doctor, the other was our chiropractor."

Names?

"That's not important."

US Postal said it carried Actovegin to treat riders' abrasions and to treat a staff member who suffers from diabetes. Who was the staff member?

"That is medical privacy," says Armstrong.

For more than an hour and a half, we traded punches. At times he was generous and charming; at others confrontational. Wearied by my scepticism, he reached for the put-down: "There will always be sceptics, cynics and zealots." But he knows it is not that simple. He knows, too, that for the next three weeks on the Tour de France, the questions will follow him.

Not having the answers won't bother him. What matters is that his urine and his blood are clear.

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.

Paradise lost on Tour

David Walsh

July 29, 2001

"

If Lance is clean, it is the greatest comeback in the history of sport. If he isn't, it would be the greatest fraud

"

It is midday on Wednesday in a cyber bar not far from the Place Royale in the centre of the Pyrenean city of Pau. Nicolas Fouillout washes and cleans glasses and waits for his young clientele to come to have a beer, surf the internet and play computer games.

Two hours earlier, the Tour de France had left town. Down the Boulevard des Pyrenees, the departing ribbon of noise and colour had passed. A man in a white chef's jacket raced from a restaurant and made music with a saucepan and wooden spoon. Riders saluted his enthusiasm; a young woman held her baby and then waved the infant's left hand. Au revoir.

Towards the back of the peloton, Lance Armstrong chatted with the German rider Jens Voigt. The mountain passes have been crossed, the challengers seen off, and from here to Paris it would be a cruise to Armstrong's third consecutive Tour de France. For a man who knows what it is like to wake up after brain surgery to remove cancerous lesions, this should have been a different kind of paradise. But for the past three weeks, and for many years before, the Tour has been Paradise Lost. What we see today is a stranger to the race of our youth. They ride the mountains as they once rode the flat; the speed and the stamina are a vision of the future we dare not imagine. The epic has become the enigma.

Armstrong's difficult moments have been explaining his six-year working relationship with Michele Ferrari, a doctor who has long been suspected of doping. On Monday last week Armstrong defended his right to work with Ferrari, said he found him "an honest man", "a clean man", and insisted he had "never seen anything that would lead me to think otherwise". Two days later, Filippo Simeoni's story was published by the Italian edition of GQ magazine.

Simeoni, a middle-of-the-road Italian rider, worked with Ferrari from October 1996 to July 1997 and kept diaries that were seized by the carabinieri investigating Ferrari. Unable to refute the evidence of his diaries, Simeoni collaborated with the police. He claimed that Ferrari encouraged him to use the powerful blood-boosting drug erythropoietin (EPO) and testosterone and helped him to get around drug controls by advising him on masking drugs. According to Simeoni, Ferrari never spoke about the potential side-effects of performance-enhancing drugs.

Asked about Simeoni's testimony, Armstrong said it was an old story. The statement to the police had been made two years before, but until GQ's story few except the rider himself and the carabinieri knew it existed. The fact that it was evidence against Ferrari changed nothing for Armstrong: he would not be reconsidering his relationship with the doctor.

So while he dominates in the mountains and destroys his rivals, Armstrong cannot obliterate the doubts. Even within the race, where solidarity is normally sacred, there have been murmurings. Rudy Pevenage, team director of the rival Telekom squad, says: "I am somewhat surprised by Armstrong. When others gasp for air with open mouths, he rides with a closed mouth, as if there is nothing to it."

Pevenage's star rider, Jan Ullrich, will finish second to Armstrong when the Tour ends this afternoon. The German has been gracious in defeat and generous to his conqueror. But then neither he nor his teammates can dare to accuse any rival. During last month's police raid on the Giro d'Italia, many products were found in the rooms of the Telekom riders. Various drugs, medical equipment and syringes full of a white substance were taken for analysis.

Seven Telekom riders, including Ullrich, were placed under investigation. Among the products seized from Ullrich's room were theophylline, otobacid, sultanol, ephynal and bonalin. He insisted on his innocence. The substances were, he said, approved asthma treatments.

THE USE of therapeutic corticoids, performance-enhancing but permitted in the treatment of certain conditions, has reached epidemic proportions. After one Pyrenean stage last weekend, seven of the eight obligatory urine tests sent to the French anti-doping laboratory contained banned products. Not one could be declared positive because in each case the rider had permission to use the drug.

Michel Boyon, president of France's anti-doping council (CPLD), believes there is widespread abuse. "I am worried by it," he says. "We have a high percentage of riders using corticoids. Salbutamol and the anti-asthmatic substances are the most common. At the CPLD, we believe that in 95% of the cases where corticoids are permitted, there is an alternative treatment."

Since the scandal of Willy Voet's arrest, the expulsion of the Festina team and the sustained scandal of the 1998 Tour, some things have changed. The sport is now more scrutinised, riders are tested more regularly, but it would be wrong to believe that the culture of doping has disappeared.

In their raid on the Tour of Italy, the carabinieri seized a wide range of doping products. Large quantities of insulin were discovered, many riders had testosterone patches and many teams still carried mobile laboratories that could be used to ensure riders do not fail the obligatory drug tests.

In the cyber bar, still Nicolas Fouillout waits. We talk about the Tour. A few people from the social services office across the road come to watch the race in his bar, but it has never interested him. He has heard of Lance Armstrong? "He's the guy that was very sick, cancer," he says. "Yeah, I like him. Maybe some racers still dope, I don't care about that. He's a tough guy."

The Hotel Roncevaux is on Rue Louis Barthou, and in the early afternoon, checking to see whether television coverage of the day's stage has begun, you hit upon a re-run of the 1989 stage to Alpe d'Huez. There is no suspense because this is a story well remembered, but still you sit there, unable to move.