Seven Deadly Sins: My Pursuit of Lance Armstrong (43 page)

I asked him how he felt on that Monday:

I lost count of the number of times I celebrated Armstrong’s demise since his miraculous escape from the corticosteroid positive in 1999. There were the TV images of Del Moral dumping his syringes in 2000: That’s it. He’s fucked.

The revelation that he was working with Ferrari in 2001: That’s it. He’s fucked.

The publication of
L.A. Confidentiel
in 2004: That’s it. He’s fucked.

The
L’Équipe
investigation and that brilliant – sorry, I’m biased – front page:
LE MENSONGE ARMSTRONG
in August 2005: That’s it. He’s fucked.

The SCA trial in October 2005: That’s it. He’s fucked.

The Floyd Landis emails in April 2010: That’s it. He’s fucked.

The news, three months later, that he was the subject of a federal investigation being led by Jeff Novitzky: That’s it. He’s fucked.

Thirteen years of false dawns and wasteful swearing.

I’m not sure how I felt when he was finally nailed by USADA. I used the word ‘elated’ a couple of times, but it didn’t feel that good; I was happy but not elated. And I didn’t feel as high as I felt low, in February, when the federal investigation was dropped. That was not a good night
chez nous
, believe me: That’s it. Untouchable!

I was absolutely disconsolate.

It was scant consolation that Travis Tygart picked up the baton. How would he succeed when Novitzky had failed? But succeed he most certainly did. He delivered the truth, turned the fiction into fact and the icon into a pariah.

Touchable! Take a bow, Eliot Ness.

But, Paul, what about my genteel coffee-table book about the last thirteen years? That’s it. Fucked.

I think too of what this day means for Charles Pelkey, with whom I shared a car and a journey through the moral maze at the 1999 Tour. It was more fun than it should have been. When I recall Lance’s endless quotes about how hard he worked, as if he’d invented the concept, I think of Charles and imagine there isn’t a cyclist out there who has worked harder than Charles. Once I got a text message from him at a little after eleven o’clock in the morning, UK time. I called. ‘Charles, you’re up late.’ It was a little after four in the morning in Laramie. ‘Actually, ’ he said. ‘I’ve just got up. The only way for me to combine my job while studying for a law degree is to start my day at four a.m.’

Charles would weigh the facts and come to his own conclusions. He’s a lawyer now and I imagine that limber mind serves him well. Now that Lance was being excised from cycling history, I wanted to know what Charles was thinking. I could be sure that he
was
actually thinking:

I have to admit that back in 1999, getting ready for the first post-Festina Tour, I was convinced that this brash young Texan, who had battled back from stage iv cancer, could well be the vanguard of a new era in cycling. In a way, I was right, but for all the wrong reasons.

How could, one reasoned, anyone who’d faced death and suffered through cancer, surgery and chemotherapy, put his life and health at risk by taking dangerous drugs? It was a point Armstrong himself made in an interview on NPR just days before the Tour. I bought the argument. Not for long, though.

I had the privilege of spending that ‘99 Tour with David Walsh, along with my good friend Rupert Guinness and my boss, John Wilcockson. Four men packed into a small car for three weeks, with the topic of conversation invariably drifting to the question of doping. Walsh had arrived at the Tour with a healthy level of scepticism; scepticism that was bolstered when a sample Armstrong submitted on the day of the prologue tested positive for corticosteroids.

No, I didn’t buy the back-dated prescription (but I did dutifully report Armstrong’s explanation). By the time we reached Paris there were many in the press room openly asking questions about Armstrong’s stellar performance, particularly the French, who’d had their national Tour nearly destroyed by drug scandal just a year earlier.

The questions led to that now infamous response from Mr Armstrong, who was clearly tiring of the ‘wrong’ kind of attention he was receiving: ‘Monsieur Le Monde, are you calling me a liar or a doper?’ Actually, Lance, ‘Monsieur Le Monde’ was calling you both, and the intervening thirteen years proved he had every right to do so.

For me, the Lance story pretty much ended the day USADA released its 200-page ‘Reasoned Decision’, bolstered by nearly 1000 pages of supporting evidence and affidavits. Now no longer a cycling journalist, I nonetheless blew off an entire day’s work in my law office to read as much of that document dump as I could manage.

I’ve said it before and I will say it again: reading USADA’s file struck me as if I was reading the unabridged version of
L.A. Confidentiel: Les Secrets de Lance Armstrong
. For McQuaid to stand there and decry Armstrong’s destructive impact on the sport of cycling was akin to the madam of a bordello waxing indignant about the decline of sexual morality in her community. It lacked a certain degree of sincerity.

So, on 22 October, I didn’t really think much about Lance Armstrong. I thought more about people like Betsy and Frankie Andreu, Emma O’Reilly, Greg LeMond, David Walsh, Pierre Ballester, Paul Kimmage and countless others who were attacked, belittled and even sued by Armstrong’s formidable legal team.

I thought about people like Oakley’s athlete liaison, Stephanie McIlvain, who was clearly the victim of bullying and intimidation and never did talk for fear of losing a job she used to support a disabled child. I thought also of admitted dopers, like Floyd Landis and Tyler Hamilton, whose own testimony served as the thread that, once pulled, unravelled the myth much like a two-dollar sweater.

I also spent a bit of time thinking about the tenacious CEO of USADA, Travis Tygart, who actually spent time listening to those people and used his considerable resources to take down someone who, for years, thought he was somehow immune to scrutiny. He wasn’t.

What’s more, I spent time thinking about the cynical exploitation of a disease suffered by millions around the globe, by a man who used what could otherwise be deemed ‘good works’ as a shield to distract the inquisitive from raising questions about his flawed character. Having recently suffered through three surgeries and five months of chemotherapy myself, I resented the self-aggrandising attitude displayed by the man many of us in the press corps came to call ‘Cancer Jesus’.

No, for me, 22 October’s UCI announcement was not a milestone. It merely served as the final nail in a coffin that should have been six feet under years before.

Strange thing. When Pat McQuaid threw down the card which he hoped might be the final card in the game, it was the champion bridge player Bob Hamman who had most cause to smile. He was the man sitting on the only sworn testimonies in the entire case. Bob read L.A. Confidentiel and decided to withhold a $5 million bonus he owed to Lance Armstrong for winning the 2004 Tour. Everybody went into court and swore to tell the truth. Now we know that some lied.

As a player of cards, Bob is one of the best. Bridge, gin rummy, poker, it doesn’t matter. ‘Please, ’ he says, in that slow Texas drawl of his, ‘don’t mention the poker. I’m tired of saying no to people wanting me to play that game.’ Now, eight years after deciding he shouldn’t have to pay the bonus to a man he believed cheated, the man from the SCA has some good cards in his hand.

How must he have felt on 22 October?

When Pat McQuaid and the UCI cast the final stone at Lance, I was mystified. Was this the same organisation whose Honorary President Emeritus, Hein Verbruggen, had only last year loudly and publicly stated Lance Armstrong had never doped? It seemed to me that very little in USADA’s report was news to the UCI. The UCI has been the fox watching the hen house. I guess it is now time for them to change uniforms.

As I further reflected on McQuaid’s statement – ‘I was sickened by what I read in the USADA report’ – I was amazed that information disseminated by the ‘Witch Hunters of USADA’ would create such an expression of astonishment – such an apparently allergic reaction from the head of an organisation which, for over a decade, appeared to be very derelict in the discharge of the responsibilities to which it had given continued lip service since the Festina affair. Or perhaps McQuaid was simply having withdrawal symptoms because his supply of anti-doping medications purchased with the donations made to ‘Fight Doping’ had been depleted.

But still, McQuaid’s words in no way removed the blight on motherhood or apple pie that was caused by SCA’s unethical decision to question Saint Lance’s conscientious observation of virtually every propriety known to man.

I also marvel that this unmerited criticism of the Saint has caused his previously oblivious sponsors to unjustly come to the jarring realisation that they had been hoodwinked egregiously. This shows how unfair the world can be.

In any event, since all those throwing stones seem to be having such a good time, perhaps it is time for SCA to join the party.

It sort of reminds me of a situation many years ago at a break in a high-stakes game of gin rummy, when one of the participants asked an observer what he thought of the game. The observer replied: ‘Your opponent is cheating every way he can think of, but you can spot him that.’ Even though the truth has been acknowledged by friend and foe alike, we did learn a painful lesson that we cannot always ‘spot him that’, especially if the fix is in. Hopefully, now that the last of the ‘referees’ has left the arena and there is no one left to provide covering fire, we can get back to somewhere within shouting distance of even.

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.’

The paper ran the piece without question, although quietly my colleagues must have wondered what we were getting into. The years that followed were tough on my boss Alex Butler. There were times, too, when they were made tougher by my blind refusal to acknowledge that he had any duties at all except to be my shield and sword. He would say, ‘When the truth comes out, you will be able to write exactly what you want.’ That always seemed too far away for me.

We made several lawyers very unhappy too, but the
Sunday Times
did something that very few newspapers ever do. They ended up putting their money where my mouth had been. Lance did well out of us. But I’m still here and Alex is still there. On the legal business, the fat lady has yet to sing but our people have given her the nod. She’s clearing her throat. The
Sunday Times
felt defrauded at the time and the time has come to reclaim what is justly ours.

Arbiter of the newspaper’s approach to the story in 1999, Alex has seen a lot of water flow under the bridge.

I have only one regret. I didn’t keep the letters. Over the years, there were scores, possibly hundreds. ‘Why are you hounding this man? Can’t you just marvel at his achievements? You should be ashamed.’ I did keep them at first. I promised myself that I would reply to each and every one on the day he was exposed. But as the years passed, that was just another resolution that fell by the wayside. And now that the game is up, how I wish I could be replying to those letters.

When the L.A. empire finally came crashing down in October 2012 I felt glad for David. For Mary. But I can’t say I felt any great emotion or surprise. Why? Easy. I’d made my mind up years ago. Did I always believe he was a doper? Maybe not. I’m a hopeless romantic. I wanted to believe. But I also wanted to believe David Walsh. And that’s not been easy. Because that’s not been my role. My job has been to dispute and argue with David. To doubt his conclusions.

But very early on in this thirteen-year saga, I was convinced that David knew what he was talking about. He loved the Tour de France. He loved the sport of cycling. And he knew the sport. Much more than I did. Patiently, and methodically, he laid out his case against Armstrong in my office and in the pages of the
Sunday Times
. And I became a believer. For despite all the disquiet that David’s stories created, nobody could answer me one simple question: if everyone on the Tour is taking performance-enhancing drugs, how come this American guy is leaving them for dust? I always felt that David’s explanation was more plausible.

And I never warmed to Armstrong. Or his bullying. Or his people. Or his expensive lawyers. Or his chums in the media. The tame, fawning cycling correspondents. The L.A. fan club. Even the countless journalists who told me how great a job they thought the
Sunday Times
was doing while their own newspapers joined in the L.A. adulation made me cringe. And even worse, the journalists who poured scorn on Walsh’s investigations because they were too damned lazy to undertake their own. They know who they are.

Even after we were forced to settle with Armstrong when he sued the
Sunday Times
, I always felt we would win in the end and get our money back. It was only a matter of time. Why? Because sooner or later, someone would talk. Americans were the leading players in this saga. I used to tell David: ‘Someone will become a born-again Christian, have a costly divorce to pay for or just simply want to tell the truth and unburden themselves . . . it’s the American way.’ And one by one, the riders of the US Postal team have told their story. A story that would have been told years earlier but for our stringent libel laws.