Lanced: The Shaming of Lance Armstrong (7 page)

The Dutch rider Theunisse has broken away. Behind him the Colombian Rondon and the Spaniard Delgado chase furiously, in their slipstreams the yellow jersey of Greg LeMond and his principal rival, Laurent Fignon. They race with their mouths open, sucking whatever oxygen there is on the upper slopes of the Alpe.

About three miles from the top, Fignon attacks. LeMond tries but cannot follow. Soon Delgado counter-attacks and the exhausted LeMond is left behind. It isn't the ebb and flow of the chase that keeps you sitting on a hotel bed 12 years on, but the inhumanity of the suffering. Delgado's head bobs wearily, Fignon's shoulders lurch from right to left, LeMond's legs can barely turn the pedals.

It would be wrong to portray the Tours of yesterday as paragons of fair play. Theunisse, who won that stage to Alpe d'Huez, would test positive for testosterone on three separate occasions. A year before, Delgado had used the masking drug probenicid in the Tour de France. Still, the 1989 climb of Alpe d'Huez appeared different from Armstrong's tour de force on the same mountain in this year's race.

Even 12 years ago, the race seemed more human, more engaging. Antoine Vayer, once an ethical but unappreciated trainer with the disgraced Festina team, believes the great change came with the introduction of EPO in the early 1990s.

"I did lots of testing with the Festina riders," he says. "Before EPO, we used to say a VO2 max (the measure of an athlete's ability to process oxygen) of 85 was damn good, but all that changed. When I tested the riders in December 1997, the average VO2 max might have been 72 or 73. But when I tested them later, at a time when riders were using EPO, the guys who were doping recorded a VO2 max that was 25-30% greater. That's totally unnatural. Christophe Moreau, who won the prologue to this year's race, had a VO2 max of 70, and three months later it was more than 92. Crazy.

"It was scary, too. As you turn up the power, the VO2 test gets harder and the production of lactate should act as a brake. It should have made them slow down. But with EPO, this didn't happen; they felt no pain in their legs and the lactate acted as a fuel that made them go faster. I looked at what they were doing and thought, 'We're not dealing with human beings any more'."

The tests designed to catch those who cheat have never been good enough. Voet's admission that he helped more than 500 riders to dope but did not have one positive test tells all that we need to know about the efficacy of the controls. And those who believe cycling is lifting itself out of the hell of blood-boosting drugs will find it hard to reconcile that belief with the fact that this year's Tour will be the third-fastest in history. The four fastest have been won by Armstrong (1999), Pantani (1998), Armstrong (2001) and Armstrong (2000).

The irony for the racers is that the ever-rising speeds do not excite the fans. Rather, they distance them. In the French newspaper Liberation on Thursday, the philosopher and cycling fan Robert Redeker wrote of the gulf that now exists between the race and the racers: "The athletic type represented by Lance Armstrong, unlike Fausto Coppi or Jean Robic, is coming closer to Lara Croft, the virtually fabricated cyber heroine. Cycling is becoming a video game, the one-time 'prisoners of the road' have become virtual human beings, an expression that could be applied to Indurain, Virenque, Ullrich and Armstrong. Gino Bartali, Robic, Coppi, Louis Bobet have been substituted by Robocop on wheels, someone with whom no fan can relate oridentify."

LeMond, the three-time winner of the Tour, now watches from afar and admits to not knowing how to react: "When Lance won the prologue to the 1999 Tour, I was close to tears. He had come back from cancer, in the middle of my career I had to come back from being accidentally shot (while on a hunting trip in 1987) - it felt like we had a lot in common.

"But when I heard he was working with Michele Ferrari, I was devastated. One American journalist wrote that the only reason you visit Ferrari is to tell him to get the hell out of your sport. I agree with that. In the light of Lance's relationship with Ferrari, I just don't want to comment on this year's Tour.

"In a general sense, if Lance is clean, it is the greatest comeback in the history of sport. If he isn't, it would be the greatest fraud."

In the performance-enhancing game there is no shortage of fraud. Last Tuesday morning Torben Rask Laursen and Ole Steen left the Tour for a day and travelled an hour south to the Spanish city of Girona. Rask Laursen is a journalist with Ekstra Bladet in Denmark, Steen a photographer. They randomly selected four pharmacies and asked if they could buy four prescription drugs, all performance-enhancing and including EPO. In each they were told it would be possible. At the fourth, in the western suburb of Sangregori, they purchased six ampoules of 0.5 millilitres of Eprex, a brand of EPO, for 60 euros. They were not asked for a prescription and were not quizzed on why they wanted to buy them.

Serge Lansaman is the night manager at the Hotel Roncevaux. It has been a long night, but he has slept a little and as a three-times-a-week swimmer, the long hours don't hurt him. He was 18 when LeMond won his first Tour, beating Bernard Hinault, and he thought it was the best performance he had ever seen.

Lansaman watches the Tour now, but doesn't believe what he is seeing. "The improvement over the past 10 years has been too much," he says. "Doping is a big problem, as it is in my sport, swimming. It is not normal to go as fast as they now go. I still watch, but it's not the same. Armstrong is a champion because of how he recovered from cancer, but LeMond is my favourite cyclist."

I ask Lansaman how best to describe him. "Typical French guy," he says.

Stopwatch brings uncertain time for Tour

David Walsh

August 5, 2001

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Fifteen years ago, Greg LeMond and Bernard Hinault memorably climbed Alpe d'Huez side-by-side, well clear of their rivals. They climbed Alpe d'Huez 10 minutes slower than Armstrong

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The Tour de France has been and gone, leaving us with a better understanding of where it has come from, but with no sense of where it is going. According to the organiser, Jean Marie Leblanc, the signs are good. "This year the Tour rediscovered its smile," he said. The organiser was encouraged, too, about the race's battle with doping: "Things are getting better."

Hardly had Lance Armstrong crossed the line on the Champs Elysees than he was off on the celebrity circuit. He bantered with David Letterman, met mayor Rudolph Guiliani at US Postal's offices in New York and called round to see President Bush at the White House. The parade will be this week.

So all's well then? Let me tell you about a fine piece of journalism in Paris Match. The author was Antoine Vayer, a sports scientist and former trainer with the discredited Festina cycling team. Vayer has long been an opponent of performance-enhancing drugs and when most of the riders and management at Festina were involved in a systematic doping programme, he worked only with those who refused to dope.

Fundamental to Vayer's argument in Paris Match was that the introduction of the blood-boosting hormone erythropoietin (EPO) in the early 1990s changed the nature of performance and competition in professional cycling. There had always been doping in cycling, but no drug had as much impact as EPO. Scientific research and anecdotal evidence suggests it improves performance by up to 20%.

In explaining the increased speed in the Tour over the past decade, Vayer pointed to two factors: the shortening of the route and doping products. Thirteen of the 15 fastest Tours have been achieved in the past 14 years. Over the past three years, it has been harder for the riders to use EPO. Blood controls aimed at curbing the abuse of the hormone were introduced and there is now a urine test that detects EPO taken within three days of the test.

But is the race cleaner?

The Tour organisers insist it is. Before this year's race, they suggested it would be a slower Tour and that the fatigue of the riders would be obvious in the third week. It didn't happen. Armstrong won the race riding at an average speed of more than 40kph, the second fastest in history. More startling was the speed with which he and the other leading riders crossed the mountain passes.

Armstrong raced up Alpe d'Huez in 38min 1sec. Only Marco Pantani ever rode the Alpe faster and on the day of the Italian's spectacular performance in 1998, the route was not nearly so tough. Since his performance in 1998, Pantani has been convicted of sporting fraud (doping) by an Italian court and given a three-month suspended jail sentence.

Fifteen years ago, Greg LeMond and Bernard Hinault memorably climbed Alpe d'Huez side-by-side, well clear of their rivals. Between them, LeMond and Hinault won eight Tours. They climbed Alpe d'Huez 10 minutes slower than Armstrong.

Most riders are diminished by comparison with Armstrong. His 2001 ride was 4min 15sec faster than Laurent Fignon in 1989, 1min 45sec faster than Miguel Indurain in 1991. There are other comparisons: on last year's Tour, Armstrong climbed Courcevel 4min 20sec faster than Richard Virenque when he won the stage in 1997. At that time, Virenque was part of Festina's doping programme.

Equally interesting is the improvement in time-trial performances. In the 1998 Giro d'Italia, Alex Zulle rode the fastest ever time trial when achieving an average speed of 53.771kph. Zulle was then co-leader of Festina and a willing participant in the team's doping programme. On last year's Tour de France, on a course slightly more difficult than Zulle's, Armstrong went even faster, recording an average speed of 53.986kph. In explaining how he is able to beat the times of talented and doped rivals, much is made of his natural talent. During his first four Tours, he was a moderate performer against the clock and there was little indication he would compete in the future.

Much, too, is made of improvements in the design and make of the bike. Vayer claims this is a myth. Because they allowed a more aerodynamic position on the bike, triathlon handlebars made a significant difference, but in 1998 they were banned. Since their disappearance, time-trials have got faster.

Neither is there much to be gained from reducing the weight of the bike. A bike weighing one kilo less gains 21 metres during an hour-long ride at 50kph. At the same speed for the same duration, a rider can gain 864 metres through one ampoule of still-undetectable growth hormone.

It wasn't just Armstrong who produced the extraordinary on this year's Tour. Roberto Laiseka from Spain won the stage to Luz Ardiden and made a murderously steep climb in record time, his 37min 20sec beating Luc Leblanc's 37min 40sec. Leblanc set his mark in 1994, the early years of the EPO era and he, too, was part of the Festina programme.

The questions posed by the figures are straightforward: could clean riders, as Armstrong claims, produce performances superior to the best of the EPO generation? Or has the blood-boosting game moved on to a higher level? You can interpret the times quoted by Vayer any way you chose. But if you're interested in truth, what you cannot do is ignore them.

Chorus of boos sounds like lost innocence

David Walsh

July 28, 2002

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How the champion of this generation conducts himself on the doping question is a matter of enormous significance. Armstrong has been a disappointing ambassador

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At the world athletics championships in Edmonton last year, Russian athlete Olga Yegorova ran a magnificent race to beat the Olympic champion, Gabriele Szabo, in the 5,000m final. It was the peak of Yegorova's career, but as she took control of the race rounding the final bend, there was the faint sound of booing from the packed arena.

Into the straight, Yegorova accelerated impressively. But the booing got louder. By the time she reached the finish line, she was fully aware of her unpopularity with the Canadian crowd.

Yegorova was booed because the fans believed she had doped. After a positive drug test for EPO at a meeting in Paris shortly before the world championships, Yegorova was cleared because the French authorities had not complied with the testing procedures of the IAAF, athletics’ world governing body.

Paula Radcliffe made known her opposition to Yegorova's presence at the world championships, and given Radcliffe's integrity, the public was always going to listen. It was nevertheless the championship's saddest moment, because Yegorova's win meant nothing. What is victory without glory, what is a gold medal without value?

A week ago, another champion on his way to victory was booed. Because Lance Armstrong was climbing the lunar-like landscape of Mont Ventoux and finding a passage through a crowd estimated at 300,000, not many knew of the extent of the derision. It was Armstrong who explained afterwards what he had heard.

"If I got a dollar for every time someone shouted dope, I would be a rich man. The trouble is, if 10 people cheer and one boos, it is the boo that you hear."

Armstrong was shaken by the reaction of those who booed. He reckoned many of them were drunk and most had no class. But he was stunned and hurt. This was not some zealot in the press room; these were ordinary people unsure of what they were watching, and damning in their judgment.

It was easy to see why Armstrong felt it unfair. He has never failed a drug test. And it seemed absurd that Richard Virenque, on his way to winning that race to the summit of the Ventoux last week, should have been cheered all the way.

In his book Breaking The Chain, Virenque's former soigneur, Willi Voet, detailed the extent of Virenque's doping. Even then, the rider lied for two years when it was known he had been part of Festina's doping programme. Last week he was heralded on the Ventoux, Armstrong hassled.

Part of the explanation is that Virenque is French, and in the battle between partisanship and morality, the silver medal will invariably be claimed by morality. But there is more to it than that.