Seven Deadly Sins: My Pursuit of Lance Armstrong (10 page)

At the centre of our difficulties was the enigma that was Lance Armstrong. There was a curious contradiction in the other riders’ view of Armstrong. Many in the peloton chain gang didn’t appreciate his Texan arrogance or his view of himself as a natural leader among men. Most, though, reckoned Lance to be a good thing for a sport that was still in intensive care after the Festina scandal. Just a year before, as Festina unfolded in all its Technicolor squalor, Armstrong was commentating on the Tour as many of the riders felt hounded by the police and alienated from their public. Now he was among them again, a good news story without the stain of ’98 upon him. The riders enjoyed the warmth from his halo as they rode in his slipstream.

This view of him being good for the sport, a tonic for the Tour, became orthodox and was propagated by Tour organiser Leblanc, the sponsors, the UCI and the majority of the journalists. There was a moratorium on questions as the vested interests of cycling implored Lance to redeem the Tour and cleanse everybody with the sparkling pure waters of his urine samples.

Lance was the saviour with additional feature benefits. He would blaze a trail towards El Dorado, the lucrative US market, and like filings to a magnet the public would be pulled back to cycling. They’d realise how much they loved the sport and how they’d missed it. And they’d want to be part of this era because, well, Lance Armstrong was a damn good story.

All of this was evident and many in the press room, as well as in the steamy world of cycling administration, were relieved that it was business as usual again. Cometh the hour, cometh the man, etc.

Yet Pierre and I in our conversations found that we held the same view, borrowed from Monty Python’s
Life of Brian
. We wanted to tell the world, ‘He’s not the messiah, he’s a very naughty boy.’ Maybe it was a contrarian instinct in the face of so much hype, but I think that your visceral response remains yours, no matter what you are being told. That gut feeling is the only thing left after so much else has been taken. Journalists should always listen to what their gut is saying. Like me, Pierre didn’t believe in Armstrong. He’d had his doubts from way back. He could recall how uneasy he first felt after visiting Lance in Austin, Texas in November 1996, during his recovery from stage four testicular cancer. Now, on the 1999 Tour, Pierre’s gut was aching from too much
déjà vu
.

Pierre is an especially fearless interviewer. He suffers from some sort of deference deficiency. He’s not arrogant but nobody impresses or intimidates him. The question-and-answer session with Armstrong that Tour organiser Jean-Marie Leblanc had depicted as ‘a police interrogation’ was a fine piece of journalism. What Leblanc disliked was what I liked. Pierre didn’t genuflect before the championelect. He didn’t coat the difficult questions with sugary moral cowardice.

‘Your critics claim that . . .’ blah, blah, blah.

‘How do you respond to those who . . .’ blah, blah, blah.

‘Is this experience being diminished for you by . . .’ blah, blah, blah.

Pierre asked Armstrong if he’d used EPO. Straight question: yes or no? Pierre Ballester wanted to know. By virtue of asking that question, Pierre would put himself in Armstrong’s bad books, the library from which there is no escape. By proxy, Leblanc was infuriated. An injury to Lance is an injury to us all was the war cry of those who would protect the soup from journalistic expectorations.

That disapproval wouldn’t have bothered Pierre one whit. It was more like winning an award. His Lance interview was a text-book example of how we should all get up off our knees and approach stars with a level gaze and honest questions. I drank it in and felt better, stronger.

Pierre had asked the questions and because Armstrong wasn’t open and honest in his answers, there was a strong sense that we were looking at a young man whose obituary would one day state that he could ride but he just couldn’t hide. Pierre had merely done his job, but in a press tent crammed to dangerous levels with sycophants and time servers you wanted to hand over the Pulitzer there and then.

We knew that the ’99 Tour de France was ushering in the reign of a great pretender but were powerless to do much about it. It wasn’t just the feeling that Armstrong had doped and won, what most rankled was the confederacy of cheerleaders which protected him: the UCI bosses who knew about the uniformly elevated haematocrit values, especially in the US Postal team, and decided that was a part of the story best kept secret; the journalists who saw poor Bassons being bullied out of the race and thought, ‘That’s okay, he’s only a small rider’; and the Tour de France organiser who decreed that Armstrong had ‘saved’ the Tour.

Poor old Jean-Marie Leblanc. He had gone to Notre-Dame des Cyclistes to say a prayer for a saviour to appear on the 1999 Tour. He’d forgot to ask for the extra miracle he needed to persuade every agnostic in the house. Leblanc would need to do some pretty charismatic preaching to get Pierre and me to buy what he was selling.

Pierre was so tired of the dishonesty that in one of our final conversations at the ’99 Tour he said that he would continue covering cycling but not like before. Every story from then on would in one way or another deal with doping, and if his newspaper didn’t allow him to do this, he would turn his hand to something more fulfilling.

(I was reminded of the possibly apocryphal story of the journalist at the
New York Times
who went to his bosses and argued that he would only continue to cover the Olympic Games if every report bearing his byline concluded with an asterisk and the words, ‘None of the above reflects the beliefs of the writer.’)

If you’d said to Pierre that doing only doping stories in cycling would hurt his career at
L’Équipe
, he would have shrugged and said, ‘Yeah and so what?’

As for Pierre’s stubbornness, I loved him for it and felt a similar desire to do more investigating, to start writing more about doping. I went to a mirror and practised shrugging like a Frenchman.

Linford Christie, the 100m Olympic champion from Barcelona, empathised with my situation. He reached out to me. Six months before, the previous February, he had competed at an indoor meeting in Dortmund, Germany, and had been randomly selected for dope control. His sample contained a level of the banned steroid nandrolone that was almost 100 times over the limit. At the time he was two months short of his 39th birthday. Those in Linford’s corner scoffed at the ludicrousness of it. ‘Do you really think that, with his career virtually over, he would endanger his reputation by taking nandrolone?’

This was another version of the seemingly irrefutable Armstrong defence: ‘Do you really believe that after what he’s been through he would put banned drugs into his body?’ In both cases I thought, ‘Yes, actually, it’s entirely possible.’

Christie was 38 but not running like an old man. Three weeks before the positive test, he’d done 6.57secs for 60m in Karlsruhe, his best start to the indoor season for six years. ‘It was the performance of runner-up Linford Christie which was really sensational,’ said the reporter for
Athletics International
at the meet. Such was his form that Christie struck a bet with a friend that he would run 6.5secs before the end of the season, something only three Europeans had done before, Christie being one of the three.

After suffering through a Tour de France in which most of the leading contenders filled their tanks with undetectable EPO, this was a reminder that testing can sometimes work. Often just by dumb luck. But even when athletes test positive, it is startling to see a little cottage industry spring up manufacturing excuses for the offender. Search parties are sent out to scour the countryside for a loophole through which their man can escape. Doping is the great scourge; more testing is needed. Meanwhile it seems that only the innocent get caught.

There were plenty of people in the UK athletics community who didn’t want to believe Christie had taken nandrolone. He was that most attractive of stars: half man, half media. His colleagues on the BBC’s panel of athletics experts, Roger Black, Steve Cram and Sally Gunnell, all supported him. Perhaps they should have spoken with Professor Wilhelm Schanzer, head of the IOC-accredited laboratory in Cologne, who had dealt with Christie’s sample.

‘I did not have to think too much about this case after I made the analysis,’ he said. ‘It was a very clear finding. If the concentration of the banned substance is low we have to do additional work to make sure what we estimate is correct. In this case there was no need for this. It is nearly correct to say the result was one hundred times greater than the permitted level. It was a clear, clear result.’

It was good to write the Christie story and to ask why it took six months for the story to be made public. The tale only saw the light of day when an IAAF source leaked the information to
L’Équipe
. UK Athletics, who had been informed of Christie’s positive test in March, denied they had covered it up, saying they had to allow their disciplinary process to run its course. Their hand was forced by the leak. UK Athletics banned the former Olympic and World champion for two years.

For the sportswriter determined to be more journalist than fan (and, let’s face it, keen to finish ahead of Sally Gunnell in the Sports Journalist of the Year Awards), the difficulty comes when you measure the toll that doping question takes on your enthusiasm.

Armstrong wins the Tour de France but you’re sure he’s cheated, so that’s not much fun. The world goes all happy clappy and you stand there with a face like a slapped backside, shaking your head slowly. But if you observed closely, you weren’t alone. As the stampede to turn the water of
maillot jaune
into the wine of sporting salvation passed by in a cloud of dust and cheering, the Italian Vincenzo Santini also stood to one side: ‘I hope that the governments and the cycling authorities can find a way out of the mess that cycling is in. Until that happens we can forget the joy of the victory.’

Back in England an ageing Olympic champion sprinter can also forget the joy of victory because he is due to take receipt of a two-year suspension.

As for me I’m off to sunny Spain, to beautiful Seville for the World Athletics Championships. I’m hoping that this will re-energise me. Give me back the old enthusiasm, restore some belief. Lately I’ve found myself sitting morosely in the corner of bars as people celebrate and snog and sing. I have a little sign in front of me, beside my drink. It says Beware. Man With Too Many Questions.

Sadly, when I hit Seville there is only one story in town: Merlene Ottey’s exclusion following a recent drug test, another nandrolone positive, has got there before me. It’s so tiring carrying a head full of questions everywhere. Especially questions about Merlene Ottey, the queen of Jamaica, who will one day become the Queen of Slovenia. She is glamorous, beautifully athletic and at this point in her career, she is a 39-year-old with eight Olympic medals and still competing at the very highest level. She is immensely likeable. And four days before the start of Seville, she has announced that she has tested positive for nandrolone. Oh, say it ain’t so, Merlene, say it ain’t so.

So, in the same month, two 39-year-old sprinters, one an Olympic gold medallist in the 100m and the other an eight-time medallist at the Olympics, are dealing with the fall-out from positive drug tests.

And no matter how many times you tell people that you are a sportswriter the response is the same, ‘Oooh, I would love to do your job.’ And it feels churlish to argue. When everybody is celebrating it feels odd sometimes to be wondering if it’s natural for a sprinter to be so competitive when he or she is crowding forty?
¹³
The easy choice would be to suspend the disbelief and go with the flow. Let this be mere entertainment, not sport. Release sport of all the burdens you place on it just by loving sport and believing in sport and wanting to be inspired by sport. In Seville this means trying not to remember that the new women’s 200m world champion Inger Miller has knocked 0.3secs off her best time in the final. Better to forget too that earlier in the year Miller tested positive for caffeine.

In the midst of the debate over Ottey’s positive, Marion Jones came to her rival’s defence. With friends like Marion . . .

‘I don’t think I’m one hundred per cent sure that it’s the correct testing procedure. Over the last couple of weeks our beautiful and lovely sport has been marred by all of this.’
¹⁴

Thanks Marion. See you at the drive for five.

I watched Michael Johnson run majestically in the 400m, Hicham El Guerrouj’s brilliance in the 1500m and Maurice Greene winning the 100m, but I was no longer the kid enraptured by the Kip Keino–Jim Ryun rivalry or the young man once riveted by Steve Ovett and Seb Coe. After the men’s 1500m final in Seville my poor brain was boiling with questions. I wondered why third, fourth and fifth were all Spaniards and all had run 3.32. Was I dreaming? Were they making drugs now that didn’t just make people run faster but made them all run precisely the same time?

Encountering an IAAF official, I mentioned how unlikely this was.

‘Do you think I believe it?’ he asked.

So I settled for writing about Paula Radcliffe with her bobbing head, her grimacing face, and the plucky red ribbon pinned to her GB vest. The ribbon was a call for more anti-doping action from the authorities, namely the introduction of blood tests, but my attraction to Radcliffe was down to the sense that she could be trusted. She ran her heart out to finish second to the Ethiopian Gete Wami and collapsed a few yards beyond the finish line. Radcliffe’s exhaustion recalled the athletics of our childhood, sport more human and easier to identify with.

I asked her about the decision to wear the ribbon. ‘It was building up inside me,’ she said. ‘I was training my guts out, making all the sacrifices and asking myself, “Do I want to be doing this if I am getting nowhere?” I didn’t accuse anybody but I sensed women were following the men into using drugs. And I hated the idea that people might be asking, “What’s she on?”’