Seven Deadly Sins: My Pursuit of Lance Armstrong (12 page)

Being more confident when he has the scent of a story, Pierre would have handled Roche and Tormey better than I did that night.

Like me, Pierre went back quite a way with Lance Armstrong. They had met in a nightclub in Oslo on the night in 1993 that the Texan had become the youngest ever winner of the World Championships.

The new world road race champion had yet to discover that all us journalists were, as he would later say, snakes with arms. He sipped a beer, talked candidly with a small group of journalists and, according to his media companions, was good company. He laughed easily and never let the conversation slow.

Given the beer, the celebration, the noise and the relaxed atmosphere this was a different Lance to the one we would come to know. Nothing was taboo that evening. No boundaries. He talked a lot. Pierre could see that he enjoyed talking and would have sat trading stories until sunrise if Armstrong’s friends hadn’t hauled him away.

They had an early start the next morning. Four hours after leaving the nightclub they were on the plane to a criterium in Châteaulin, but Pierre and Lance had established a relationship. They spoke again for interview purposes in the spring of 1996. Lance said that he had been acting like a jerk around the time of La Flèche Wallonne and then in Liège. Pierre wrote it as he heard it. The next time he met Armstrong he braced himself for an earful of Texan but Lance just shrugged the shoulders. ‘It’s okay; it’s true. That’s what I said to you.’

Pierre felt there was some mutual respect. When Lance fell ill later that year, his agent Bill Stapleton was snowed under with interview requests. He showed them all to Lance, who picked two: veteran Sam Abt, who for many years has written for the
New York Times
and the
Herald Tribune
, and Pierre.

Flying to Austin in November 1996, Pierre was greeted by a thin and frail-looking Lance. A cap was pulled down tight over his bald head. There was a weak Texan sun in the sky but Armstrong didn’t look like a man feeling its warmth when he greeted Pierre on the doorstep of his Mediterranean-style villa tight by a branch of the Colorado River.

Abt and Pierre arrived at the same time and Lance brought them to his kitchen where they passed the time in small talk as he made himself a vegetable smoothie. The two journalists offered to interview him simultaneously, but Lance said he’d rather do them separately.

Sportswriters always prefer one-on-ones and Ballester and Apt were quietly pleased that Lance decided on two interviews. He also decreed that Abt would go first. At a loose end, Pierre wandered around the huge house. Armstrong has always been a fan of paintings and Pierre studied what was on the walls. In the garage he ran his hands slowly over the five bikes which hung there. He leaned down to peer in at the speedometer of the black Porsche. Things had changed hugely in this young man’s life since that night in Oslo three years earlier.

Rambling on, Pierre arrived in a hallway that led to a bedroom. He sensed somebody behind him. ‘Are you looking for something?’ said Armstrong.

‘Something? No, nothing special. I didn’t want to disturb your interview with Sam so I’m walking around, that’s all. A newspaper article needs a sense of atmosphere, as you well know.’

‘But there’s nothing in my bedroom.’

‘Nothing? How do you mean? Nothing? At all?’

‘If you think you’re going to find a bag of dope . . .’

‘A bag of . . .? What are you talking about? Excuse me, but I don’t understand.’

Armstrong abruptly ended the exchange and grinned. It was a strange episode but now it was closed.

When Pierre sat down for the interview some time later, he encountered the other Lance, the one who could speak movingly about coming face to face with death. Pierre liked this Lance.

Their relationship changed at the 1999 Tour de France. Lance thought
L’Équipe
treated him unfairly but doing a one-on-one interview with Pierre only made a difficult relationship between Tour leader and newspaper worse. Pierre had changed since that nightclub encounter in Oslo, too.

Lance would have preferred the early-model Pierre.

Next time they met was at US Postal’s pre-season camp in 2000 at San Luis Obispo, California. It was January. The team had, for promotional purposes, invited thirty international journalists to their camp. Pierre didn’t think the press conference was much good to a man who had flown 6000 miles to be there. He collared Lance afterwards.

‘Well, what do you want?’

‘Not this.’

‘What do you mean “not this”?’

‘Not this quarter hour devoted to the press. Some people travelled six thousand miles to see you, and I’m one of them.’

‘I know. I saw your name on the list.’

‘As interesting as your press conference was, you can understand that my newspaper and I want to spend a little more time with you.’

Lance turned around. He was playing with the room key in his hands, pretending to think about it. He cracked a little smile.

‘If I didn’t want you to come, you wouldn’t have been allowed. How much time do you want?’

‘Three quarters of an hour would be good. Tomorrow, does that work for you?’

‘Tomorrow. Okay for tomorrow. A half hour.’

‘Thanks, Lance.’

The interview the following day took thirty minutes precisely. Not one minute more. Pierre asked that John Wilcockson be allowed sit in. Lance declined. The answers were short and terse. Nothing he heard allayed Pierre’s suspicions but he came away thinking that Lance Armstrong scarcely cared any more. Pierre had been banished to that world where Lance Armstrong sends people he has no more use for.

A month or so before the 2000 Tour de France, Lance Armstrong’s autobiography,
It’s Not About the Bike: My Journey Back to Life
, was published. Ghost written by the
Washington Post
columnist Sally Jenkins, the story of the cancer survivor who came back from the brink to win the Tour de France was quite brilliantly told. Jenkins’ skill is apparent throughout and the book would become a worldwide bestseller. More than that, it would become a source of inspiration to many stricken with serious illness, especially those with cancer. As well as earning millions of dollars for Armstrong, the book did more than anything to make him a global icon.

I read the book and was carried along by Jenkins’ story-telling which was remarkable, as a source from inside Armstrong’s world had said that Lance had not been as available to Jenkins as both would have liked and that she’d had to rely on interviews with friends and family, especially his close friend John ‘Collidge’ Korioth. What did it matter? The story was gripping, inspiring and hugely entertaining and the public loved it.

There were, though, a couple of contradictions. In the book Armstrong was portrayed as a sympathetic character, one who would never have turned on Christophe Bassons as he did during the 1999 Tour and, naturally, there was no mention of his contretemps with the French rider in the book.

The second element that didn’t stack up was the hostility to drug testing expressed in the book, which he described as ‘demeaning’: ‘Right after I finished a stage I was whisked away to an open tent, where I sat in a chair while a doctor wrapped a piece of rubber tubing around my arm, jabbed me with a needle and drew blood. As I lay there a battery of photographers flashed their cameras at me.’

He went on to add: ‘The drug tests became my best friend, because they proved I was clean. I had been tested and checked and retested.’

This portrayal of the drug-testing operation at the Tour de France was so confused and inaccurate it wasn’t worth bothering about except in that it gave one a sense of Armstrong’s antipathy towards the system. Would it not be more demeaning to ride clean and have to compete against forty or fifty doped-up riders? It was also a bad joke to suggest the tests proved Armstrong rode clean. How could they when the most important drug EPO was undetectable?

The 2000 Tour began at another theme park, Futuroscope, and it was there that Bill Stapleton entered my life. I’d never met him before; he didn’t introduce himself and I didn’t recognise him. But he knew me and perhaps thought I would know him. Halfway through our conversation, it twigged.

‘David, I just want to have a word?’

‘Yeah, fine.’

‘Look, we’re aware of what you wrote about Lance last year, what you’ve been writing this year.’

‘Yeah?’

‘Well, we could have a better relationship, things could be better between you and Lance.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘What I mean is that if you were more balanced in what you wrote, we could help with access.’

‘I believe I’ve been fair.’

‘We are going to be watching what you write very closely and we will not be afraid to take action if that is necessary?’

‘Bill, is that a threat?’

‘It is a threat.’

Bill Stapleton, agent to Lance Armstrong and attorney at law, had delivered his message.

6

‘No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader.’

Robert Frost

A media tale.

After the 1999 Tour de France, Pierre Ballester sat down with his cycling editor and friend Jean-Michel Rouet and spoke softly about hard things. Pierre explained that he no longer had the stomach for writing about the sport. At least he couldn’t write as he had for much of the previous decade. Reporting races, interviewing victors, presenting winners as heroes, he couldn’t do this any more. Jean-Michel empathised with Pierre’s dilemma and was happy for him to concentrate on the doping side of the sport.

‘It wasn’t possible for me to cover cycling in any other way. No longer could I do the touchy feely stories because I didn’t believe in these guys. I wasn’t sure how
L’Équipe
would react and I was aware that covering doping could harm my career and even put my job at risk but, at the time, they thought they needed me and they wanted to keep me happy.’

L’Équipe
is a serious operation. The newspaper has 380 journalists. Pierre was the only one to ask if he could concentrate his work on doping, surely the biggest ongoing sports story of our time. For a while the newspaper saw Pierre as their moral conscience made flesh. And doping was becoming a bigger story, and doping investigations were good for selling newspapers. Perhaps this was the right idea at the right time. In October 1999 doping was a story. The Festina trial was beginning at Lille in the north of the country.

This was the official inquiry into the widespread doping revealed by customs and police at the 1998 Tour de France. Pierre enjoyed every moment of his time in Lille, sifting through the wreckage of the 1998 Tour. For once he felt that he was able to report the realities of professional cycling. Witness after witness came forward, each telling a story more wretched than the previous one. The scandal of the previous summer had left a lingering bad taste and the French people demanded some honesty and contrition from the cycling community.

Pascal Hervé, a rider with the Festina team, said he would have told the truth earlier but for the fact ‘just us nine idiots [Festina’s team at the ‘98 Tour] were caught’. Laurent Brochard, another Festina rider, told how he won the World Championship road race in 1997, subsequently tested positive but an official from the UCI informed his team manager that a backdated medical certificate would get him off. Thomas Davy, who rode alongside five-time Tour winner Miguel Indurain at the Banesto team in Spain, said: ‘There was a systematic doping programme, under medical supervision, at the team.’

Richard Virenque, who had lied incessantly for eighteen months about his doping, was told by Judge Daniel Delegove to tell the truth. And at last he did. ‘Even though I doped,’ Virenque added, ‘I did not have an advantage over my rivals.’

Antoine Vayer, the exercise physiologist who refused to play any part in doping while working at Festina, was called as an expert witness. ‘Armstrong rides at fifty-four kph,’ he said. ‘I find it scandalous. It’s nonsense. Indirectly, it proves he is doping.’ A second expert said Vayer’s analysis made perfect sense. And Pierre Ballester was in his element, writing the pieces that might help cycling to face its problems.

His work from the Festina trial was praised by his bosses at
L’Équipe
but, while there was no shortage of doping stories,
L’Équipe
’s enthusiasm for the subject wasn’t anywhere close to Pierre’s. The newspaper’s bosses would praise him for the work he did in Lille, but his fellow reporters in the cycling department weren’t so impressed.

Each of the major sports at
L’Équipe
has a separate department. Cycling, for example, had its editor, Rouet, his number two (Philippe Bouvet) and then nine reporters. ‘I’d known Jean-Michel and Philippe for a long time and they’re good guys. But when I concentrated on doping, I knew some of the others wouldn’t like it very much. They didn’t think my writing about doping was good for the newspaper, and at least two of them, Philippe Le Gars and Manuel Martinez, believed my writing was making it harder for them to get access to the riders.’

One of the bosses spoke with Pierre about his concerns.

‘He said that he didn’t think I was in harmony with the newspaper and I replied, “Am I the problem or are you the problem?” They wanted me to write some things about doping, but there were just too many doping affairs for their liking.’

While working exclusively on doping, Pierre discovered something unexpected. Always, the message came back to him that riders and everyone else complained about his work but whenever he sat down one to one with a rider and looked him in the eye, the reaction from the other side of the table was positive. ‘The ones who would actually talk had a lot of respect for what I was doing and many of them wanted me to keep doing it.’

Tensions increased on
L’Équipe
’s cycling desk.