Seven Deadly Sins: My Pursuit of Lance Armstrong (16 page)

What about this drug, EPO? ‘EPO is not dangerous,’ the good doctor memorably said, ‘it’s the abuse that is. It’s also dangerous to drink ten litres of orange juice.’

Gewiss sacked him, but Flèche Wallonne and the orange juice quote made Ferrari’s reputation. If he had hung out a shingle announcing his services to the world he couldn’t have been clearer about what he had to offer.

It was one of the landmark moments in doping history. Except to Lance Armstrong.

‘Their doctor, Michele Ferrari, made his famous statement on the evening of that race about r-EPO being no more dangerous than orange juice. Do you remember your reaction to that?’

(Long pause) ‘Ahmm, no.’

‘You didn’t even wonder what r-EPO was?’

‘I think that sometimes quotes can get taken out of context and I think that even at the time I recognised that.’

So it went.

By the mid-nineties it was well known that EPO had become a staple for many Tour riders. How conscious of this phenomenon were Lance and his teammates in Motorola?
²⁴

‘We didn’t think about it. It wasn’t an issue for us. It wasn’t an option . . .’
²⁵

On and on. The Lance version of
omerta
.

‘Did you know that Kevin [Livingston, a fellow US Postal rider] was linked with the [police] investigation into Michele Ferrari in Italy?’

‘Yes.’

‘Did you discuss it with him?’

‘No.’

‘Never?’

(Nods his head.)

‘A guy who is your best friend?’

‘In an indirect way, you are trying to implicate our sport again.’

Classic! Never ask a cyclist a hard question! Never
crache dans le soupe
. You are damaging the sport. Spoiling it for everybody.

As we talked, Michele Ferrari hovered over us like Banquo’s ghost. It was Ferrari’s name that produced the most tortuous circumlocutions from Lance.

‘Did you ever visit Michele Ferrari?’

‘I did know Michele Ferrari.’
²⁶

‘How did you get to know him?’

‘In cycling when you go to races, you see people. There’s trainers, doctors; I know every team’s doctor. It’s a small community.’

‘Did you ever visit him?’

‘Have I been tested by him, gone and been there and consulted on certain things? Perhaps.’

‘You did?’

(Nods in the affirmative.)

‘He’s going to be tried for criminal conspiracy.’

‘I think the prosecutors and judges should pursue everybody regardless of who it is. It is their job to do that.’

Looking back, I attribute the odd nature of these responses (and the Sean Kelly-like gesture of nodding into a tape recorder) to some anxiety on Lance’s part that perhaps I knew more at that time than I actually did. He was aware, certainly, that I had been asking about the Ferrari connection, that I had been to the police station in Florence, the basement of which housed the many, many boxes of files seized by the NAS (Nucleo Antisofisticazioni Sanità) in raids on doctors with alleged links to doping.

Not knowing precisely what I knew, though, Lance chose neither to deny nor to affirm the issue of visits to Ferrari. As it happened, I wouldn’t be able to confirm the pattern of Lance’s visits until just before the Tour in 2001.

In the year since then, as Lance’s status as an icon grew bigger and bigger, people would often say to me how clever he was in terms of dealing with and manipulating the media. I never found that. Saying, for example, that he and Kevin had never ever discussed Ferrari, even though Kevin was involved in the case, was just plain stupid.

One thing for sure, he was different.

In
Breaking Away
, the classic cycling/coming-of-age movie made back in the seventies, four young guys in an Indiana town brought colour to their lives by sucking in the romance of pro cycling. Some part of the writer in me would love it if Lance, with his screwed-up background, had enjoyed the refuge of the same dreams back in Plano, Texas.

But that wasn’t his past. He has no sepia days. He hadn’t time to dream, going from shop to shop looking for a sponsor to fund his teenage triathlon career, and when no one stumped up, he bought a tank top and had
I LOVE MY MOM
printed where the sponsor’s name would have been.

‘I know nothing of the history of the sport,’ he says. I look at him and realise that what he is saying is true. This isn’t Hollywood, dude. This thing, this Tour de France, it is a mountain. Everybody can see it. You need a plan, and you need to see yourself standing at the summit. Lance Armstrong from Plano in Texas. Somebody.

So I thought of another mountain. Ventoux. Threw its legend out there.

‘So you’ve never heard of Tommy Simpson? C’mon, surely you’ve heard of Tommy Simpson?’

He had heard but his answer is bizarre.

‘I did, but Tommy Simpson never tested positive.’

I’ve never met a cycling person who doesn’t automatically shake his head in sadness at the fate of Tommy Simpson and what his death told us about cycling. The sadness isn’t just borne out of the knowledge of what happened that day but from knowing that after the tragedy the peloton decided to carry on doping. And here we were in 2001, post-Simpson, post-Festina, in a world where a champion rider reaches for a response delivered in legalese when a subject related to doping is mentioned. Here was a wall between the peloton and the broader world.

Tommy Simpson’s death on the Tour of 1967 was a tragedy.
²⁷
Amphetamines were in his bloodstream, alcohol too; amphetamines were found in his back pocket. The medical view held that he had contributed to his own death but Simpson was also a victim of cycling’s drug culture.
²⁸

But hey, he never had a positive test.

Lance’s response was true but without meaning. Simpson had drugs in his blood, drugs in his jersey, drugs in his suitcase. Lance’s answer was instructive though, as it was the reflex response of riders and athletes for decades. It tells us nothing. It tells us plenty. Bernard Hinault used to say it every time.

‘Well,
Le Blaireau
, did you take drugs?’

‘I passed every test.’

Lance had learned. The tests he’d taken and the tests he’d passed didn’t prove anything, but there would always be a constituency out there happy to defend him by parroting the old line about being the most tested athlete on the planet and never having failed once.

In 1993 he had been a kid unimpressed or unaware of the romance of the Tour but determined to use the opportunity to make something of himself. Eight years on he was somebody and wanted me to know whatever methods he and his team deployed . . . well, that was insider stuff. Nothing for you to see here.

Journalists were there to sell the myth in return for limited access. The rest was business; theirs not ours. You don’t see the greedy calculations going on behind the walls of mirrors in Las Vegas casinos. Lance felt that what went on behind the walls of mirrors in pro cycling was private business too. The absence of romance, the hardness, the steely arrogance, it all diminished him but he never saw this.

Frankie Andreu or one of the other riders told me he’d heard that Lance was furious when he came back upstairs after the interview. Fuming. The impression the other riders got was that Armstrong was shocked by what I seemed to know. For my part I was amazed by what Lance pretended not to know. The news of his anger made me smile. In our game of huffing and bluffing Lance and I had just played out a draw.

In the spring when I had interviewed Lance in person I put the Livingston situation to him, and in keeping with the tone of the interview he was vague to the point of absurdity. How can best friends not discuss the fact that one of them has been dragged into a criminal investigation? The point that I missed was his sense of not having to answer to anyone. So what if it’s a dumb answer? What are you going to do about it?

There was only one thing I could do. I went back to Sandro Donati and asked if there wasn’t some evidence of Armstrong’s presence in Ferrara. Next time I got an audience with Stapleton or Armstrong, I wanted to have something. I asked Sandro to check if the Carabinieri were absolutely sure Lance hadn’t been to Ferrara. Donati first got back to me and said he couldn’t come up with evidence that Armstrong had been there. But my friend was nothing if not dogged. Soon he came back to me with information from local hotels. The information had come from the Carabinieri, through Sandro to me.

He’d been there.

Lance had been to Ferrara for two days in March 1999, three days in May 2000, two days in August 2000, one day in September 2000 and three days in late April/early May of 2001, the last visit shortly after our interview at La Fauvelaie. The visits came at key points, for Tour preparation and just before the 2000 Olympics, where Armstrong had wanted a medal. In Ferrara he had stayed at the five-star Hotel Duchessa Isabella and at the four-star Hotel Annunziata. During our interview, he feared I knew more than I was letting on. Now I did.
²⁹

I’d travelled to the US, to Rome, to Florence in the previous year. I was getting a better picture of the world I was trying to understand. I’d been disappointed with the outcome of the Lance interview in the spring. I’d travelled with a decent stock of evidence but I hadn’t even rattled his cage.

There was his coach. If Ferrari was the genius behind the story then Chris Carmichael, Lance’s coach and mentor, was the presentable face of things. Carmichael had kept himself out of an odd doping case taken by a former US amateur, Greg Strock, who claimed he had been injected with cortisone against his will and had his career ruined. To extricate himself from the case, Carmichael had made an out-of-court payment to Strock.

I’d asked Armstrong how he felt about his long-time coach paying money to stay out of a doping case. He said it was matter between Chris and Greg.

‘If Chris had paid money to keep his name out of a doping case, it would imply he had something to hide?’

‘It’s a hypothesis.’

‘But it wouldn’t look good, would it?’

‘At the same time, does it look good that Greg Strock just takes the money? Let’s flip it around. Is this about money or is this about principle.’

I had the work of Hugues Huet, a journalist with French TV, who the previous summer had tailed an unmarked US Postal car, filming the two occupants disposing of five plastic bags of rubbish. The bags contained 160 syringe wrappers, bloodied compresses and discarded packaging that indicated the use of a legal but right-on-the-limit product called Actovegin.

Then there was Kevin Livingston, the skinny on what he’d been doing.

A little mountain of evidence was forming. As Lance would say, it didn’t look good. Yet when I’d put it all to Lance he had shrugged it away. In the interview he’d pulled a draw out from the jaws of defeat. Champions only need to draw.

This news from Ferrara was different though. This was a game changer. I felt that we had something concrete. We were talking about sixteen days spent in Ferrara over two years. That excluded any visits made in the other direction by Ferrari, which we now know occurred both when Lance lived in Nice (Ferrari liked to test Armstrong on the Col de la Madone climb just outside town) and in Girona, where Armstrong moved in 2001.

All this time spent in Ferrara and Lance had made a point of not mentioning it. Not in his autobiography, not in his press conferences, not in his interview.

Now I have all this information. It hasn’t involved hacking computer files or breaking into buildings or meeting anonymous sources in underground car parks. It has just been simple journalism. Questions. I can’t believe that Lance has produced his autobiography, it’s come out maybe a year before, and the name Michele Ferrari hasn’t appeared in the pages. Ferrari is being investigated for doping, soon he will be charged and sent to trial.

We had a hard story.

So it came to pass that on the first day of the 2001 Tour de France, we in the
Sunday Times
revealed that Lance Armstrong, winner of the first two Tours in the period of renewal, was working with a doctor about to stand trial for doping. And Armstrong had never mentioned this once. Never mentioned a connection to the man who had once said ‘it doesn’t scandalise me’, when asked if he would mind if his riders went to Switzerland to buy EPO over the counter.

When I look back at that article, it was one of the worst I’ve written: too much information too poorly organised. So much good was spoiled by the end product. And I was so naive in my dealings with the Armstrong camp. Having discovered that Lance was going to Ferrari through my Italian police sources, I had trip-wired the alarms in LanceWorld.

I was in Australia at the time, working on the British and Irish Lions rugby tour, as we prepared the article for press. Wanting to give Lance the opportunity to respond to the Ferrari link, I called Bill Stapleton on the Thursday, three days before publication.

‘Bill, some questions to ask you.’

‘Would you mind sending us what information you’ve got, and we will respond then.’

I banged off an email telling everything that I knew. I may have thought about adding the word checkmate at the end:

‘My information is that Lance was with Ferrari and that these are the dates. These are the names of the hotels. These are the dates on which he was there. This indicates that he has a very serious relationship with Michele Ferrari. Can you or Lance get back to me with a response?’

A reply.

‘David, I’ll put these to Lance and get back.’

Next, I hear nothing. I call again. Bill says that he’s in France for the Tour and having trouble with his email. I feel like I’m getting the run-around, a boy trying to play with bigger boys. So I call again, leave another message. Nothing. Bill Stapleton goes underground, takes his mobile phone with him. I hear nothing more from Bill. Shoot off more emails. Make more calls. No response. Of course Armstrong, combative and spiky as ever, had decided to beat me to my own exclusive.