Bad Blood (17 page)

Simeoni escaped into a two-man breakaway on the ninth stage to Gueret: Armstrong and his team drove the pursuit. Simeoni and his breakaway companion, Inigo Landaluze, were overtaken by the main field just sixty metres from the finish line.

‘We rode really strongly, really hard. It was amazing we got caught,’ the Italian said afterwards.

He added that there were ‘strange conversations’ going on among the team cars, hinting that, even though they had no tactical interest in chasing Simeoni, Armstrong’s US Postal team may have asked other team managers to get their riders to assist in the pursuit. Such an alliance would be usual if a contender for overall victory had been in the breakaway, or if Armstrong had suddenly become a top sprinter. Neither was the case.

For the next ten days, there was a truce: Simeoni did his job fetching and carrying for his team in the mountain stages, watching from a distance as Armstrong wrapped up another Tour win.

But when, on the humdrum eighteenth stage that began the journey north from the Alps towards Paris, Simeoni stole into another breakaway with five riders, the unthinkable happened: Armstrong, leading the Tour by a street, set off in lone pursuit. Once again, there was no tactical rationale to the American’s behaviour. At that moment in the 2004 Tour, Lance had the race won and the Italian posed no threat to anyone – or so it seemed.

When he set off alone, in fierce pursuit of Simeoni, Armstrong was assured of final victory in the 2004 Tour. The Italian was languishing in 113th place, two hours and forty-two minutes behind him. But a stage win was up for grabs and like all the other
domestiques
in the race, with the Eiffel Tower looming on the horizon, Simeoni was desperate to bag one.

Armstrong, however, was not having it. He could see the headlines, the Ferrari questions in the press conference, the sudden renewal of interest in Simeoni’s views on doping –
always doping
. So he slammed his feet down on the pedals and gave chase, hell-bent on stopping him.

If the main peloton was stunned by Armstrong’s pursuit of Simeoni, the breakaway sextet were equally bemused when they saw the pair closing in on them. But they quickly realised that their hopes of staying clear to the finish were doomed with the
maillot
jaune
in their number and the peloton obliged to chase. Unfortunately for Filippo, none of them had the courage to tell Lance to back off; instead, realising that the American had joined them seeking only to poison Simeoni’s chances of a stage win, they turned on the Italian.

That afternoon, Filippo found himself shot by both sides; damned if he did, damned if he didn’t. It was a defining moment both for him and for Armstrong. The Italian realised that he was now forever tainted as a professional cyclist, while the darker side of Lance’s personality was revealed for all to see. Another rider might have told the Texan where to go and then ridden on regardless, but like Christophe Bassons before him, Filippo hesitated. Then, as peer pressure mounted, his resolve crumbled. Out of respect to the leading quartet, who after all, were seeking only to snatch some crumbs from the king’s table, the Italian backed off.

Armstrong had achieved his goal. He had made it plain to his peers that Simeoni’s decision to testify against Ferrari had made him
persona non grata
in professional cycling. The Italian could only watch despairingly as the breakaways powered ahead. Alone together in no-man’s-land, as he and Lance freewheeled, waiting to be swallowed up by the chasing peloton, words were exchanged. Television cameras captured the moment, but remained out of earshot. Later, Simeoni alleged that Armstrong had issued threats and told him that it was a mistake to testify against Ferrari. Armstrong, he claimed, had told him, ‘I have lots of time and lots of money. I will destroy you.’

A year later Armstrong expressed some regret. ‘I made a mistake to go after him that day, but I never said the things he said I did.’ But his words came too late to salvage Simeoni’s career. When the main field did catch up to the pair, Simeoni endured a volley of abuse as rider after rider, including his Italian compatriots, taunted him. He slipped to the back of the field, fighting back tears. Armstrong claimed that several riders had congratulated him on his actions.

In a frank interview with journalist Daniel Friebe in 2004, Simeoni claimed that Daniele Nardello, a former Italian national champion, told him, ‘You’re a disgrace – you’re spitting in the bowl you’re eating from.’ He claimed that other Italian riders – Filippo Pozzato, Andrea Peron and Giuseppe Guerini – picked up on that theme and also abused him.

After the stage finish, in Lons-le-Saunier, both Simeoni and Armstrong were interviewed live on French television.

Simeoni was tearful with rage. ‘He showed today in front of the whole world what kind of person he is,’ he said. ‘It’s a sin.’

Lance’s response was enigmatic. ‘I was protecting the interests of the peloton,’ he said. ‘All Simeoni wants to do is to destroy cycling and that’s not correct. When I went back to the group they said
“chapeau”
– that’s because they understand that this is their job and that they absolutely love it and they’re committed to it and don’t want somebody within their sport destroying it.’ Simeoni was not to be allowed the oxygen of publicity that is the stage-winner’s due.

That was not the end of it. On the final day of the race as the riders neared the Parisian suburbs, the feud resumed. Simeoni had been simmering with anger since the first confrontation. So he attacked again, this time deliberately, vengefully, raining on Lance’s victory parade.

The opening kilometres of each Tour’s final stage are a celebratory procession, given over to photo opportunities and mugging for the cameras. Riders swap bikes and parking cones are worn as hats – this kind of weary student jape passes for wit in the final hours of the Tour. In another clichéd tradition, the film crews and photographers mass around the winner as he poses with his teammates, holding aloft brimming champagne flutes.

But in 2004, just as Lance and his US Postal boys manoeuvred into position, fizz in hand, ready to pose for the cameras and toast a sixth successive victory, Filippo Simeoni decided to attack.

‘I was so angry,’ he said. ‘Had I not done it, I couldn’t have lived with myself. I thought: “I’ll show you the victory parade to Paris.” I waited until all of the photographers went to take Armstrong’s photo and then –
boom
!’

Simeoni’s bravado had a spectacular effect. To a chorus of shouting and swearing, half-empty champagne flutes were tossed away, motorbikes careered across the road in panic and shutters clicked manically as Armstrong and his team sprinted into action and gave pursuit. The attack did not last long but even then, perhaps because he realised that he would never get such an opportunity again, Simeoni had still not finished messing with Texas. Maybe he’d never seen the bumper stickers.

There was a lull. Then the Italian attacked again. In the press room, we laughed in disbelief and then cheered as the punch-drunk underdog, Simeoni, refused to stay down. He got back to his feet, ready to take more punishment.

But the final knockout was coming. Incredulous at the Italian’s nerve, Lance and his ‘blue train’ saw red again – faces contorted with rage, they sped after him in muscular pursuit.

Metre by metre, Armstrong’s team reeled Simeoni in as the convoy neared rue de Rivoli. When the peloton drew alongside, a shower of phlegm arched through the air towards him. It ran down his tanned legs as the peloton roared past. Simeoni – brave, naive … stupid,
stupid
, Filippo – was swallowed back into the field, only to be insulted once more by those whose dignity he was trying to defend.

This was cycling’s law of silence – the hateful, oppressive
omerta
– made flesh.

MEETING BY THE RIVER

IT IS RAINING
hard in Laval. In the November dusk, Saturday afternoon shoppers are scurrying home. Daniel Friebe and I cross the bridge over the river Mayenne and head for the main square. Rain runs down our necks. An old carousel stands under an avenue of palm trees, dripping in the downpour. In the gloom, we search for the Foyer Culturel on the allée du Vieux Saint-Louis. Meeting here, in this pretty but anonymous northern French town, are the gurus of doping dissent, the high priests of trolldom. Tonight’s debate is the second in a series of occasional get-togethers in which France’s cycling exiles and cynics talk through their experiences and affirm their solidarity against doping. Clutching a bottle of champagne – the media invitation asked that we arrived early bearing champagne and cake – we climb a rickety staircase to an upstairs annexe, set aside for the media to meet the speakers. We peer through the doorway.

There are perhaps twenty people in the room. I spot some berets, goatees and cravats. Are these people extras from a revival of
’Allo ’Allo
? ‘Erm, you first then,’ I instruct Daniel, a little ungallantly. We walk through the door …
et voila
! We join the French doping Resistance.

Apart from a handful of wives and girlfriends, those in the room are notorious enough to give Hein Verbruggen and Lance Armstrong chronic heartburn. On my right is Willy Voet, the former
soigneur
whose boot-load of drugs kick-started the Festina Affair in 1998. Voet, now a bus driver in the Alps, is chatting to his old boss, dapper Bruno Roussel, once Festina’s team manager
and
architect of their pills-for-prizes wage structure, but now – oh, the irony! – an estate agent.

Orchestrating things and looking slightly baffled to see us, is Antoine Vayer, former trainer to the Festina team. Central to Vayer’s loathing of the modern Tour is his belief that it is ‘inhumane’. Through his constant, bitter critiques, Vayer long ago established himself as one of the leading sceptics of the Tour’s efforts to clean itself up. He has been unfairly depicted as an arch-critic solely of Armstrong, but to give him his due, he in fact rails against cycling as a whole. He targets promoters and sponsors as well as individual riders and believes an amnesty is the only way to start afresh. He nailed his colours to the Troll mast by aligning himself with Walsh and Ballester in their two ‘LA’ books.

Across the room, Christophe Bassons, French cycling’s
Monsieur Propre
(Mr Clean), is deep in conversation with former world mountain-biking champion and self-confessed doper, Jerome Chiotti, who renounced his world title in a very public epiphany. Bassons wears a wry smile, as if permanently amused by a private thought, which may be the realisation that it is now getting on for a decade since he crossed swords with Armstrong at the 1999 Tour; Chiotti, however, just looks bemused, much as he did on the day when, in front of the media, he lifted his gold medal over his head and disowned it.

Further away, Ballester and Walsh, chief architects of the supposed Armstrong ‘witch-hunt’, chat together with lawyer Thibault de Montbrial and French journalists Stephane Mandard and Benoit Hopquin, both of
Le Monde
, consistently the most outspoken anti-doping newspaper within France.

I haven’t seen Ballester for a long time, hardly at all in fact since the 1999 Tour, when he crossed his own bridge to confirmed scepticism. I have always liked him, but he is now a little distant, different from the wry and funny journalist I met when I covered my first Tour. Lance had got on well with him too, giving him time on a regular basis, until he realised that Pierre had crossed to the other side. Ballester, like Walsh, has been through it. He
left
L’Equipe
, not on the best of terms, soon after the 1999 Tour, when he had reported on Lance’s first victory with an icy
froideur
that set him apart from much of the European media. Effectively, he had accused his press-room colleagues of complicity. Perhaps that is what now hangs in the air between us.

At the time, his scepticism was apparently unappreciated by his editors. Ironically, seven years later, he finally got the editorial support he’d deserved, when, in August 2005,
L’Equipe
published the infamous front-page splash, the
Mensonge Armstrong
(the Armstrong Lie), alleging that the Texan had used EPO during the 1999 Tour. Armstrong has repeatedly denied this.

Nearby, seated at a table, his partner by his side, is Laurent Roux, the former Tour ‘King of the Mountains’, once a true and celebrated goodfella, a ‘made’ guy, a rider who was, by his own admission, steeped in doping to the point of addiction. His catharsis, like that of Philippe Gaumont, was enforced by his arrest and trial. Roux has dealt drugs and served time. He is older, embattled, heavier set than the last time I saw him, and seems diminished and defeated by his life. In 2006, Roux was one of the key witnesses in a doping trial in Bordeaux. He was injecting himself with
pot belge
– a heady brew composed of amphetamines, caffeine, cocaine and heroin, that first came to light during the Festina Affair – several times a day. He also sold it to others. Depression and an eight-month prison sentence followed. Once up on the stage, Roux speaks rarely and hesitantly about how miserable his reliance on drugs made him.

‘When you dope and you still don’t win, then you just start taking more and more,’ Roux says. Doping, I realise, is wonderful for those who win and get away with it, but a prison for those who dope and lose.

Walsh is listening but as he speaks little French, he sits focussing on some distant horizon, as around him the naysayers, bad boys and whistle-blowers – trolls one and all – rail against the evils of doping. Only the occasional mention of the heavily accented
A-word
– ‘
Eurmstreuhng
’ – snaps Walsh back to attention. The rest of the time, he is a weary and jet-lagged figure, listening distractedly as the grim testimonies to cycling’s dysfunction continue.

So here they all are, denouncing the pillars of cycling’s establishment, alongside Walsh: Bassons, Voet, Roussel, Ballester, Chiotti, Vayer – the high priests of scepticism – and me.