Seven Deadly Sins: My Pursuit of Lance Armstrong (47 page)

13. Armstrong’s agent/manager since 1995, Bill Stapleton is a former vice-president of the United States Olympic Committee and was part of the committee that helped bring the United States Anti-Doping Agency into being.

14. Frankie and Betsy Andreu suffered both professionally and personally because of their willingness to tell the truth in the story of Lance Armstrong, but the more stress that came their way the closer they felt as a couple.

15. Emma O’Reilly, massaging Armstrong’s legs during her time with the US Postal team, and twelve years after she left the team. Her 2003 interview was the single–most important contribution to understanding the culture of doping in the US Postal team until Floyd Landis and Tyler Hamilton broke the law of silence in 2010 and 2011.

16.
L.A. Confidentiel
became a bestseller in France but didn’t go down so well in the world of Lance Armstrong and would be the cause of multiple lawsuits.

17. Pierre Ballester, co-author of
L.A. Confidentiel
, has most recently written a book about his sister Anne who has lived with the Yanomami people in the Amazon for the last eighteen years.

18. Sandro Donati, the Italian anti-doping campaigner who has done so much to expose corruption in his own country.

19. Quietly spoken Stephen Swart was the first witness to alert the world to Lance Armstrong’s doping when giving an interview to
New Zealand Herald
journalist Phil Taylor in 1997.

20. Travis Tygart, chief executive officer of USADA, whose investigation into Lance Armstrong would reveal the truth behind the story of the ‘seven-time Tour winner’.

21. The Edenbridge Bonfire Society in Kent, south-east England, burnt a 10-metre effigy of Lance Armstrong on 3 November as part of the community’s traditional Guy Fawkes’ night celebrations.

22. After the decision of the UCI to accept USADA’s report stripping Armstrong of his seven Tour de France titles, the former champion then changed his profile on Twitter, deleting the words ‘7-time Tour de France winner’. A couple of weeks later Armstrong was more defiant, posting a photograph of himself in the company of his seven yellow jerseys at home in Austin.

Endnotes

1
L’Auto
was deemed to have been too close to France’s wartime puppet president Philippe Pétain and was ordered to be closed after the war.
L’Équipe
was permitted as a successor but one condition of its publication was that it be printed on white paper rather than yellow, which was too closely associated with
L’Auto
.

2
The 1999 Tour de France opened with the prologue on 3 July. Armstrong won the prologue, but within days received notice of a positive test for a banned substance for which he did not have medical authorisation. A cover story was concocted backdating a prescription for cortisone cream and suggesting that the prescribed medication was to treat saddle sores. We hailed this as ‘the butt-cream defence’. UCI bought it though.

3
When Vayer made this case for the top cyclists being psychotic he was not thinking of Lance Armstrong, who at this point was just another contender in what seemed a wide-open race. In hindsight, much of what he did say would prove to be applicable to Armstrong.

4
Haematocrit is the amount of red cells in blood expressed as a percentage of total blood volume. Because UCI allowed riders to have a haematocrit up to 51 per cent in 1999, this meant a rider with a naturally low haematocrit like Bassons was deemed to have a natural advantage. Because of his low haematocrit, he could use a lot of EPO to generate extra red cells without pushing beyond the 51 limit. Bassons refused to dope and therefore his ‘natural advantage’ was irrelevant.

5
Armstrong got sick early in the 1996 Tour de France and had pulled out before the first time trial.

6
Coppi is one of the great figures of cycling, but no saint. Gino Bartali, his old rival, watched him like a hawk when they competed together. In their retirement the pair often appeared on television together. Bartali, who as a racer had been in the habit of searching his rival’s room after he left a hotel, looking for traces of what had been consumed, would tease Coppi, crooning at him about ‘the drugs you used to take’. One famous exchange tells us much about the culture of a time when doping had been invented but not yet banned: