Seven Deadly Sins: My Pursuit of Lance Armstrong (7 page)

Speaking about pro cyclists, Antoine’s lack of reverence set him apart from the majority of those who worked in teams, and virtually everyone in the press tent. He saw them as human beings sucked into a doping culture and desperately in need of help. ‘I met Hein Verbruggen [UCI president] the other day and we spoke for an hour. He said he was head of 171 federations and I said, “Stop your shit, your only duty is to stop doping. That’s all you have to do.”’

Antoine’s passion came with empathy; his belief was that doping didn’t just damage health but also had dehumanising effects. ‘Many of the best riders have become psychotic. They want to win money, to screw others because, compared to them, everybody else is small. They want to have a nice house, a nice wife, a nice car and they will do whatever to get these things. They have no more emotion, no more thinking, no more feeling, no internal life. Everything they are is down to their success and they would kill to hold on to that.’
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We talked about Bassons and the trainer said how good he’d been as an amateur and how he’d then made a successful transition to the pros. Word went out that he had ridden clean through his first two seasons in the professional peloton and it was also known he had a naturally low haematocrit which made him more valuable because when he started using EPO, he would be able to use a lot without exceeding the 50 per cent maximum put in place by the UCI.
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Antoine spoke about Bassons as a father might speak about a son. On one occasion Christophe received a cortisone injection for a painful knee and, as his doctor had prescribed the treatment, he was free to race. But feeling the cortisone was enabling him to perform better, he voluntarily withdrew from the competition.

Results were never what they should have been and many advised him to get real and commit to a doping programme; even his parents said they would understand if he felt he had to. He discussed it with Pascale, his fiancée, and she said she would not want to marry a man who used banned drugs. Pascale was more important to him than winning bike races and he never seriously considered doping.

Everything Antoine said about Christophe endeared him to me.

His Festina teammates accepted he wasn’t one of them and made the best of it. He was useful when the testers showed up for he would be sent down first to stall them while his teammates got hooked up to the saline drip that would dilute their blood and keep them safely below 50.

Then the ’98 Tour happened, the Festina team was caught with its hand in the pharmaceutical sack, so too many other teams, and Bassons thought this the ill wind that would blow some good his way. Greater scrutiny would lead to lesser doping, and in this new world his career would be better.

This is not how it worked out. From the early part of the season the average speed in races was such that Bassons knew doping was still rife. By the time he got to the Tour he was despairing, and then to see the peloton riding much faster again was too much. He offered forthright honesty to every journalist who asked, and within the peloton he became a pariah.

In my mind he was being screwed by his own sport. After four days of the race, he was the only rider I was sure about.

Excited by the subversive atmosphere in that back garden and energised by Antoine’s passion for greater fairness in the sport, I left the Gobelen feeling I’d joined an underground movement committed to fighting doping in professional cycling. Slipping back unnoticed into the hotel I shared with John, Rupert and Charles, I thought about the twenty or so journalists who had turned up to the meeting and knew them as some of the finest, most intelligent journalists on the race.

My faith in the Tour of Renewal was diminishing by the day but my evening at the Gobelen was a reminder that you had to keep trying. And if you didn’t support Christophe Bassons, how could you call yourself a journalist?

Most times the Tour de France runs to a plot determined by what happens in the first individual time trial eight or nine days into the three-week race. If one of the contenders for overall victory wins that, he will generally take the yellow jersey, and it is then his to lose. Soon after that time trial the race goes into the mountains, and often that first venture into the Alps or Pyrenees is the favourite’s greatest test.

Over a 56.6km circuit in the eastern city of Metz, Armstrong won the time trial and regained the yellow jersey he had claimed on the first day but then given up on the second. His victory in the race against the clock was emphatic and it gave him a lead of 2 minutes and 20 seconds over second-placed Christophe Moreau. From being a contender, Armstrong became everyone’s idea of the Tour winner.

To me, the time-trial performance was puzzling at best, downright suspicious at worst. He had ridden the Tour de France four times before falling ill with cancer in ’96 and recorded remarkably consistent results the three times he rode it.
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In ’93 he finished 6.03 minutes down on the winner, 6.23 minutes in ’94 and 6.24 minutes in ’95. He wasn’t bad but nowhere near the best. To go from there to being the best was a staggering leap.

But two days later, Armstrong would go into the mountains for the first time and tell us whether he was going to win the Tour or be an adornment. The mountains shouldn’t have been his favoured landscape by any means. The form sheet was there. In his previous Tours Armstrong’s best placing on a mountain stage was 39th on the Saint Etienne to Mende leg of the 1995 Tour. In the other eight mountainous races he’d ridden, his placings were much worse and the deficits far greater.

Yet in the press room in ’99 there is an expectation among his growing number of disciples that this new edition Armstrong will be different as he’d ridden well in the previous year’s Tour of Spain and, post-cancer, he was much stronger. From being a man who might finish 8 or 28 minutes behind, he has become the peloton’s mountain goat. The way is being prepared for Clark Kent’s next deed. No need to wonder, folks, it can all be logically explained.

Me?

My instinct says, ‘Don’t believe it. This is all about as logical as the Tour being led by a lobster on a bike. A lobster complete with helmet and a moving backstory about a last-minute escape from a pot of boiling water.’

The first mountain stage is a brutally tough 213-kilometre race to Sestriere over the border in Italy. Sestriere is an iconic climb of both the Giro d’Italia and the Tour de France. Taken alone it is not an especially long ascent, nor a particularly hard and punishing one, but it is beloved because of its location and its history and because of the style of the men who’ve conquered it.

It was here that the charismatic Fausto Coppi broke clear and stole almost 12 minutes on his eternal rival Gino Bartali on his way to the 1949 Giro. Coppi also won the Tour that year. His first double.

Three years later, Sestriere first appeared on the Tour route. Sestriere was stage eleven but stage ten, two days earlier, was the first stage to finish at the summit of Alpe d’Huez. Coppi, on his way to another Giro–Tour double, took the yellow jersey on Alpe d’Huez and then came out and massacred the field with a heroic solo ride through wind and rain to the summit finish at Sestriere.

For those present on this day, there was a memory for life. Coppi was a character and stories about him were once told around the fireplace or at the foot of a bed and they created a romance that wrapped itself around the Tour and kept it warm.

One of the Coppi stories goes back to when he was a prisoner of war in 1943, having been captured by the British in Tunisia. In captivity he shared his food bowl with another prisoner, an amateur racer called Arduino Chiappucci. Coppi had gone to war as a great hero of Italian sport and such was the affection in which he was held that the Italian army tried to keep him away from danger for as long as possible.

In captivity Chiappucci grew close to his idol Coppi and often gave him his own food in order to keep up the great man’s strength and morale. When the war ended Coppi and Chiappucci went their separate ways. Coppi rode part of the way home on his bike and then hitched a lift with a lorry-load of former detainees.
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Chiappucci went home and raised a son, Claudio, whose head he filled with tales of his time with the great Coppi, whose most wondrous deeds were still to come.

Forty years after Coppi’s lonely ride to Sestriere, Arduino Chiappucci’s son won on the same mountain. I was there on that day in 1992 and this was a classic ride straight out of the book of Coppi mythology. A Saturday afternoon and 254 kilometres worth of attrition, stretching from St Gervais to Sestriere. Just 12 kilometres in, Claudio Chiappucci attacked, which seemed much too early, but we knew not what was about to unfold.
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All we saw was daredevil ambition. No strategy, just attack, attack, attack; scorching off into the land of pain.

First he got rid of his fellow escapees but behind, the monster in the yellow jersey, Miguel Indurain had him in his sights. Chiappucci’s pace was too much for Indurain’s teammates, however, so the leader had to make his own pursuit, which evened things up. I loved the style and recklessness of Chiappucci, his Italian need to win on the day the race crossed into his country. This was bravura. This was the Tour offering us a late-twentieth-century epic. This was sport. This was why we came.

In cycling you cheer for the guy who, in the French expression, ‘makes the race’. But Chiappucci had been out there so damn long that we became fatalistic. These guys always get hauled in. The romance of the Tour is that there is no romance. It’s hard and it’s cruel and it’s crushing. On the climb to Sestrierre, Indurain was close enough to know that he could take Chiappucci. Whenever he wished.

In his pomp Indurain was as relentless and uncharismatic as one of the riders of the apocalypse.

His shadow would catch Chiappucci any second. And we knew that Chiappucci and his dream were dead. Indurain was going faster. Chiappucci had been hanging on for too long and Indurain knew what would happen when he bore down on an opponent. He would devour him like a python coming off a Lenten fast.
Ciao
Claudio.

And then this half-crazy Italian resurrected himself. Strength returned to his legs like a river undammed. The dreamer in you imagined that this was strength leased from his great Italian heart. He went again. There would be a happy ending after all. Chiappucci forged a small gap, increased it and got away from the monster through the last gruelling kilometres.

He won by 1.45 on a day so brutal that eighteen riders who finished outside of the time limit were eliminated. Victory wouldn’t be enough to win Chiappucci the Tour but his breakaway wasn’t about a place high on overall classification but about glory, a thing of beauty in itself. That day he gave us as grand and swashbuckling a race as we could ever hope to see. As sweet as it gets. Romance.

It sounds embarrassing now but I cried in the press room when Chiappucci found the strength to hold off Indurain. I couldn’t help myself as it was the most beautiful, romantic, heroic thing I’d ever covered. Courage beat calculation, as an athlete driven by the need to perform before his own people, transcended himself.

EPO and the weary cynicism it generates weren’t on our radar. I stood there and wept. Not alone either. This was why we loved the Tour. Why July in France could be the best month of your year, any year.

Four years later Chiappucci told an Italian judge Vincenzo Scolastico he had been using EPO since 1993 and, older, wiser, more cynical, I thought, ‘That’s convenient, Chiappa, your greatest ever performance happened just before you started doing EPO. Yeah, right.’ Chiappucci would later retract that admission, but what did it matter, he failed an EPO test before the 1997 Giro d’Italia and later that year was kicked off the Italian team for the World Championships because of an excessively high haematocrit, indicating EPO use.

And I could never see that late surge away from Indurain with the eyes that had originally seen it. That second wind, is that what EPO can do? Was that the first great EPO ride? The circus had turned us into the rubes and the dupes, the suckers and the mooks. And the romance of Fausto and Arduino was chemically shrunk. Happy tears in the
salle de presse
would be no more. Question everything. Ask what Mary and Joseph did with the gold.

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‘A boo is louder than a cheer.’

Lance Armstrong

In 1999 Sestriere became a fork in the road for the press corps. Those who wanted to do journalism went one way; their old comrades took the other route. Things wouldn’t be the same for a long time.

Survey this 213km toil through the Alps. We begin at the ski station in Le Grande Bornand and then hit the climbs through the Col du Télégraphe laurelled already by storm clouds, onto the mighty Galibier (in 1911 when the Galibier was introduced to the Tour only three of the peloton didn’t get off their bike and walk), through the Maurienne Valley and then up the climb of Montgenèvre, before we finish with the 11km ascent to Sestriere.

Early in the day Armstrong’s US Postal teammates hauled the pack after them on the Col du Télégraphe, allowing their leader to focus on nothing but the wheel in front of him as they took care of the rest before hurtling down into the town of Valloire, recovering and going again on the early slopes of the Galibier.
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It is raining now. The peaks are dressed with freezing mist. Few things sap the morale of the pack quite like rain and mist and freezing cold. A shivering peloton rolls on. The lead group is down to ten, pursued by twelve more desperadoes a minute behind. Armstrong is with the front group. Comfortable.

Onto Montgenèvre and now only the strong survive. One from Armstrong, Alex Zulle, Fernando Escartin, Ivan Gotti and Richard Virenque will win. Armstrong still looks comfortable but, with his teammates no longer around him, you guess he will be happy to hang in there. As they descend from Montgènevre, Gotti and Escartin make their move. They get to Sestriere 25 seconds ahead of the rest.