Seven Deadly Sins: My Pursuit of Lance Armstrong (15 page)

With Livingston, Bobby Julich and Frankie Andreu, Armstrong returned to Europe in January 1997 for the annual launch of Cofidis, the French team for which he had signed. He also had a quiet visit with Ferrari, for they were friends now. Lance was declared clear of cancer in February 1997 and soon after began the long and slow climb back towards a career. Michele Ferrari had found the perfect canvas for the expression of his life’s work.

Ferrari grew up in the traditional university town of Ferrara, a place of venerable old buildings and quiet piazzas transfused with the life students bring. Ferrari was a decent runner in his teenage years and won a 1000m national championship while still in school. He was good enough to have to make a choice. Academia or sports? He opted for education and stayed at home to study medicine at the local university.

One of his professors was a man of similar interests. Dr Francesco Conconi and Ferrari would often run together before returning to work shoulder by shoulder in the laboratory. In 1981 Ferrari assisted as Conconi developed a simple field test, now known as the Conconi Test. The test permitted endurance athletes to determine their anaerobic threshold, essentially their maximum cruising speed.

With the athlete on a treadmill, Conconi could measure his or her heart rate at varying rates of stress, recording on a data graph the heart rate on one axis and the speed on the other. The heart rate would increase in a roughly linear fashion until it hit a plateau. This point was called the anabolic threshold. The test would continue while the athlete went well past the threshold.

The Conconi Test was considered a useful tool in better understanding the potential of endurance athletes, but far more exciting developments were afoot. Knowing a man’s capabilities is one thing, but having the means to take him well beyond that is quite another. Blood transfusions and later EPO were the way of the future and a group of doctors at the University of Ferrara were leading the way.

They had to decide which side of the coming war they were going to be on. Ingeniously, Conconi opted to be on one side while pretending to be on the other. Ferrari was a different kettle of fish, with no wish to ever be seen on the side of the Establishment.

By 1984 the sedate pace of university life had begun to pall with Ferrari. He’d enjoyed working with the Italian cyclist Francesco Moser, who set the world hour record in Mexico City in ’84. Everyone knew Moser was a friend and client of Conconi’s but they didn’t appreciate how involved Ferrari had been. It was then through Moser’s influence that he became team doctor for his Gis Tuc Lu.

He continued to work as a team doctor until 1994, by which time he was with the Gewiss-Ballon team and making quite a name for himself. He saw himself more as a ‘
prepatore
’ (sports training coach) than as a medical doctor.
¹⁷
Ferrari has spoken affectionately of those early days and his involvement with riders like Moser and the Swiss star Tony Rominger.
¹⁸

Moser and Rominger were strong characters, Ferrari’s preferred type, and he would recognise even more of this quality in Armstrong.

By the early nineties, Ferrari had established himself as a high priest of performance enhancement. His reputation depended on who you were speaking to. Pro clients flocked to him and passed the word on quietly.
¹⁹
Beyond this circle of riders who happily paid Ferrari a percentage of their salary was a world of whispers and rumours about exactly what type of bang the boys were getting for their buck.
²⁰

Something had to give. And it did. On 12 August 1998, the Carabinieri launched a raid on Ferrari’s villa, seizing mainly computer discs containing files and records. These included the training diaries of his clients. It was Lance Armstrong’s good fortune that what was seized were the records for 1997, the year he spent recuperating in America. He had contact with Ferrari during that year but was not a regular visitor and as he was not racing he would have had no need for doping.

Ferrari later told an interviewer from
Cycling News
that he asked the lead officer on the raid what exactly they were looking for. The policeman said, ‘We want to see what you do.’

Among the riders whose files came to light were Claudio Chiappucci, Axel Merckx, Gianluca Bortolami (whose Festina team were at the centre of the previous month’s scandal storm) and Kevin Livingston.

I was convinced from early on that Armstrong had to be working with Ferrari, and conversations with Sandro Donati hardened the idea in my head. In September 2001, Michele Ferrari was going to stand trial in Bologna. It wouldn’t be his last such experience. Earlier that year Sandro directed me towards contacts of his within the Carabinieri drug squad in Florence. Documents seized from Ferrari’s computer were made available to me solely because I was a friend of Sandro Donati’s. I scanned the pages for Livingston’s numbers.
²¹
The huge fluctuations in his haematrocrit, from very low 40s to very high 40s, were indicative of EPO use.

This was fascinating. Livingston was a good
equipier
, a popular member of the team, but a follower rather than a leader. His involvement with Ferrari had to have followed on from Armstrong, not preceded it. He looked up to Armstrong.
²²
Livingston’s connection to Ferrari raised obvious questions.

8

‘We have to distrust each other, it is our only defence against betrayal.’

Tennessee Williams

In April 2001 Bill Stapleton called me. A grey, dry morning in England, and I had just pulled into my dentist’s car park, so obviously it was all very exciting.

In this life you remember two key things. One: where you were when Kennedy got shot. Two: where you were when Stapleton called. On the previous year’s Tour, it was Bill who had leaned close to me in the press centre and politely offered me a choice in life. If I didn’t get with the programme, well, Lance’s people would be coming after me. But if I chose to let things lie there might be some pretty good access down the line.

Stick or carrot? My call.

Though I tried not to show it, I had been flattered by this sign that the Armstrong camp wasn’t completely indifferent to my existence. We hadn’t spoken since, though, and I was beginning to think that perhaps they didn’t care about me after all. Now, as before, Bill presented himself as an emissary coming in peace. He mentioned that he and Lance were aware of some people whom I’d had been speaking to and some questions that I had been asking.

He paused, drew in a breath and made his pitch. ‘David, I know things have not been good between you and Lance, but Lance would be prepared to do an interview with you.’

‘When?’

‘As soon as you can get to France.’

I wanted to blurt out the word yes. I wanted to say, ‘Bill, you had me at, “Hello”.’ The words wouldn’t come. I realised that I wasn’t keen on Bill reporting back to Lance that, yes, the plan was working: ‘Walsh just gushed and jumped into my arms telephonically at the mention of an interview. What did I tell you, dude?’

I told Bill I would call him back later. And then I went and sat in a dentist’s chair for an hour of contemplation and wholly legal injections.

An audience with Lance. The idea was interesting. The fact that the offer had come from the Lance camp was intriguing. Most newspapers are suckers for access. An interview, no matter how bland, with a big star is cheaper and easier to sell than a long investigation with lawyers circling like vultures in the sky above. This was a major break because there were so many doping-related questions I wanted to put to Armstrong.

‘Alex,’ I said to the
Sunday Times
sports editor in a phone call that afternoon, ‘allow me to make your day.’

‘Go on.’

‘Got an interview lined up for this week.’

‘With whom?’

‘Armstrong.’

‘No?’

‘Yes. His lawyer/agent Bill Stapleton called. They want me to come to France later this week.’

I got a little star to wear on my suit and my picture went up on the employee of the week board. Second place. To Alex.

My thoughts turned to Lance. Or the Frost–Nixon interview, as I was fast coming to see it. Maybe Lance thought this interview would be the first chapter in a friendship renewed for tactical reasons. Maybe all this drug stuff was a misunderstanding. Or maybe he just thought that he could crush me.

If he recalled our conversation in 1993, he would know that I wasn’t a single-issue obsessive. Back then we’d spoken for three hours without one mention of doping. We had talked as two passionate men might: I was passionate about cycling, he was passionate about winning and about seizing the opportunity of his career. Perhaps he wanted to show me that the man I warmed to that evening hadn’t gone away.

Two days later I sat down to interview Lance Armstrong in the Hotel La Fauvelaie near the village of Saint-Sylvain-d’Aanjou in the east of France. We sat in the lobby of the virtually deserted hotel. Lance wore casual team gear and an air of slight indifference. It was the first time we had sat together since that afternoon in Grenoble eight years earlier.

Much had changed. Lance had lost the muscular square shoulders of the swimmer and, although he was thinner, he somehow looked stronger. Hard bodied. And of course he was already a two-time Tour winner. His earnings from being in the saddle were estimated at $8 million a year. It’s not all about the bike, though. Endorsements were bringing in another $5 million. Donald Trump had turned up to listen in on a press conference Lance gave in New York. People mentioned this as if it was a good thing.

The 2001 edition of Lance Armstrong came with pretty much all the things that the 1993 edition had lacked and wanted. He could now ride time trials better than anyone, he was the strongest in the mountains and he enjoyed the backing of the best equipped and most organised team in the peloton. What these things gave him was what he most wanted: the power to control his destiny.

He got cancer.

He got well.

He came back.

He saw.

He kicked ass.

And if he was describing it all in a word he would have said, ‘neat’.

So why doesn’t he seem happy as he sits on the fake leather sofa opposite me?

Perhaps this is because everything in the Garden of Eden isn’t blooming. He knows that at the very least I and many other snakes with arms suspect that he is doping. He brings me here to find out what I know and on the off chance that I might be bought with the illusion of friendship and promises of access.

Travelling from London, I’d told myself the interview would work best if my mind stayed open and he got the fullest chance to answer the questions. But the legacy of the 1998 Tour was that there could no longer be a presumption of innocence. The line from my friend Jean-Michel Rouet had stayed with me: ‘What we discovered [from the Festina Affair] was that everyone in this sport can fuck us.’

It was true. A guy in a yellow jersey had only to say, ‘Chook, chook, chook, chook,’ and we the chickens gathered round to have scraps dropped at our feet.

The first thing Lance asked was if I minded Bill Stapleton sitting in on the interview. As it happened I wasn’t keen on Bill inserting himself into proceedings, but Lance’s body language suggested that he wasn’t actually asking a question. So Bill Stapleton sat down and placed a tape recorder on the table. I put my tape recorder down beside Bill’s.

I then put my cards on the table.
²³

‘Here’s how I am going to approach this, Lance. I am only going to ask you questions about doping because that is all that is relevant to me. If I don’t believe you’re clean there is no point in asking you about your next races. I have no interest. This will give you the opportunity to maybe convince people that you are clean.’

I was quite calm. Surprisingly so in retrospect. I don’t enjoy confrontation and in the years since then anecdotes about Lance’s ability to bully people have given him the reputation of a sociopath. Perhaps I was shielded by a little self-righteousness. Or maybe this confrontation was easier because we had met eight years earlier when we were both different people. I’m not known for being a tough guy, but I didn’t find Lance remotely intimidating. I almost wanted to say, ‘Hey, hold on, I knew you when you were kid and I liked the way you’d closed the door when walking into cycling’s living room, so hard the walls shook.’ Meeting him now, I wondered how he had developed, what had changed. I was convinced he was doping but it wasn’t like he was going to admit it.

What would be interesting was how he dealt with aggressive questioning. And for me the interview was a chance to get some on-the-record answers on issues he didn’t usually have to address.

‘That’s fine,’ he replied. ‘Ask all the doping questions you like.’

My tactic was to begin with broad, general questions which suggested I didn’t know too much. Lance would have comfortable answers to these questions. Later we would move on to the specifics.

I asked about the 1994 Flèche Wallonne classic, famous for being the race that made Michele Ferrari famous. We all knew the story. Riders whom Ferrari prepared, finished first, second and third. Lance Armstrong was strong that day, he chased the three breakaways but he couldn’t latch onto them. Like all the Motorola riders, he was finally blown away. They hadn’t one guy in the top ten. Doping in any sport isn’t always a gradual evolution. There are great leaps forward. This was one. Three riders from the same team breaking away from the pack in a classic – well that’s pretty much unheard of.

Moreno Argentin was first. Giorgio Furlan and Evgeni Berzin came in second and third. Too much. Every journalist had questions. Where better to start but at the court of Dr Michele Ferrari. This was so outrageous, the usual niceties were dispensed with.