Seven Deadly Sins: My Pursuit of Lance Armstrong (6 page)

‘It’s been a long year for cycling, and as far as I’m concerned, it’s history. Perhaps there was a problem, but problems exist in every facet of life: sport, cycling, politics. We can only do so much. We test [for drugs] as much as possible and at some point we have to realise enough is enough. Journalists, you come to training camps to assume we are all doped. That’s bullshit. We’re not.

‘We have all got to fall back in love with cycling. I wasn’t here last year – maybe that was a good thing. I hope cycling renews itself, and we should start now.’

As he spoke I was reminded of the kid I’d interviewed in Grenoble six years before and a story he told about a $1m bonus he’d earned for winning three designated races in the US earlier that season. First the insurers offered twenty annual instalments of $50,000 or $600,000 straight up. Armstrong went for the $600k.

Then he left it to the two most senior riders in the team, Australian Phil Anderson and Englishman Sean Yates, to decide how the money should be divvied up among all the riders. Anderson and Yates couldn’t agree and soon Armstrong, 21 years of age and the newest guy on the team, got impatient. ‘Hey, it’s my money. I’m gonna do it. Leave it to me. I’m gonna be the bad guy here. I’ll take care of it.’ He took control.

And at Le Puy du Fou, he took care of the doping questions. Perhaps there was a problem but journalists now needed to stop thinking cyclists were dopers, and if only we could all fall back in love with the sport, things would be better. What I heard in Armstrong’s words was the sport’s old arrogance coming from a new source. Doping is not to be publicly discussed and then only to reassure the public that it’s none of their business.

In victory he wasn’t as likeable as the kid in Grenoble. Perhaps because doping was now on the agenda and he actually wasn’t convincing on the subject. Why would he say something as asinine about the ’98 Tour as: ‘
Perhaps there was a problem?
’ And when it came to him lecturing journalists on being too suspicious, I wanted to follow him back to his hotel room and introduce him to a little history.

I wanted to tell him that the problems of the more recent past were in part down to journalists being too gullible. And to remind him of the role journalists and newspapers had played in the creation of the Tour de France. The race itself came from the imagination of journalists and has been sustained in no small way by the ability of journalists to convey the distinct wonder and madness of the three-week pilgrimage around France. Journalists are sentimental creatures and the success of the Tour is built on emotion and memory.

And if the history of the race meant anything to him, he would appreciate that the Tour (which once in a rare moment of fancy he described as maybe ‘the most gallant athletic endeavour in the world’) came about after another endless and bitter debate over the innocence or guilt of one man. Alfred Dreyfus was accused of selling state secrets to the Germans.
Le Vélo
, then the largest sports paper in France, carried political comment favouring Dreyfus. Some advertisers demurred and formed a rival paper,
L’Auto
, which was a dismal failure until they dreamt up the Tour de France and decided some time later the leader’s jersey would be yellow like the paper they printed on.
L’Auto
metamorphosed into
L’Équipe
¹
and the relationship between the paper and the race has been close to the point of being symbiotic for more than half a century.

But journalists are human too and on that Saturday evening of the prologue, the
salle de presse
buzzed with the excitement of journalists feeling they had a good story to tell. Cancer victim returns to take yellow jersey! But from that first answer to the first doping question, I wasn’t sure about him. How did the race leader’s jersey give him the right to lay down the terms under which he would discuss doping? ‘
I will speak about this now and that is all I will say,
’ as if one ridiculous understatement on the only question that mattered was sufficient.

There were also good reasons too for wondering about his improvement from 1993 to 1999.

Our interview in 1993 was originally scheduled for the evening of the prologue and was rearranged only because he was demoralised after a crushing experience over the same 6.8km course that was now the scene of great triumph.

The numbers took some explaining.

Back in 1993 Miguel Indurain, stoic and unconquerable in the middle of his run of five Tour victories, devoured the prologue in one mouthful, covering the 6.8km in 8 minutes 12 seconds. He was a specialist against the clock. Lance came into that Tour as a strong one-day rider with a definite game plan. Accepting he wouldn’t be fast enough to beat Indurain and other specialists in the prologue, he figured that if he gave it everything, he could finish somewhere in the top 15. From there he could then infiltrate a breakaway group in the first week and be in position to take the yellow jersey.

But he rode a terrible prologue, starting too fast and arriving at the Côte du Fossé 4 kilometres in with nothing left. Eventually, he puttered in at 8.59 putting him 81st in the 189-rider field. He wasn’t in much humour for entertaining a journalist. Eighty-first? No Texan had ever been 81st in anything. ‘Could we do the interview on the rest day?’

Six years later, same course, same conditions, another massacre but this time Armstrong had inflicted it, not endured it. He rode the course in 8.02, more than 8 seconds per kilometre faster than he had recorded in 1993, and the performance catapulted him to a new level. It was also 10 seconds faster than Indurain’s winning time in ’93. Inside the race and around its margins, people wondered how he’d become so good in this short race against the clock.
²

In the press centre, some eyebrows were raised but most of the eyebrows were still receiving physio for the lingering fatigue of the Festina wars. The easy rationalisation was that this was just a prologue, one tiny leg of a three-week marathon: a neat story, for sure, but it wasn’t like Armstrong was going to go on and win it. Reporters at the Tour also found that when they spoke with their sports editors, they realised that the further one’s distance from this story, the more believable it seemed.

‘This is the guy who had cancer, right?’

‘Yeah, testicular, only given a fifty-fifty chance of pulling through.’

‘Yeah, good story. It’s amazing, isn’t it? Cancer survivor with a chance of winning the most gruelling race in sport!’

Any suggestion the prologue victory was a one-off was quickly dismissed. As soon as the race left Le Puy du Fou it was clear Armstrong was very strong, as was his US Postal team, and their strategy was exemplary. They allowed Jaan Kirsipuu from Estonia take the yellow jersey at the end of the first stage, putting the onus on Kirsipuu’s French team Casino to control the race. US Postal then sat back and saved their energy for the mountains, by which point Kirsipuu would be back in the pack.

My travelling companions on the Tour were my old buddy Wilcockson, his colleague from
Velo News
magazine Charles Pelkey and the Australian journalist Rupert Guinness whom I knew from way back.

Our routine at the Tour was to leave our hotel early in the morning so we could mosey around the cordoned-off corporate village to which sponsors brought their guests and journalists mingled in the hope of bumping into a cyclist. Sometimes you got lucky but mostly you picked up a newspaper, had a coffee and gossiped with other journalists.

During that first week a 25-year-old French competitor in the Tour wrote a column for
Le Parisien
which was easily the most arresting written about the race. Christophe Bassons poured cold water all over the Tour of Renewal.

‘We are racing at an average speed of more than 50 kilometres per hour, as if the roads of France are nothing more than one gigantic descent.’

Le Parisien
ran Bassons’ column beneath a strap-line that said, ‘Bassons rides the Tour on pure water, that is to say without doping products.’

Bassons also said he didn’t think it possible for anyone to be in the top ten and ride clean.

In the car, we talked about the race. Charles was our driver, on his third Tour; tall, thin, always ready to laugh but with an enquiring mind. He came with the American’s enthusiasm for a country and a race that had a lot of history, and though he loved bicycle racing he was the one paying most attention when I began expressing scepticism.

Rupert was an experienced cycling writer and an enthusiastic wearer of Hawaiian shirts. Like me he had once moved to France to experience the sport first hand before returning to Australia to settle down, but he never lost his love for the Tour. We would run together in the mornings and he had the grinder’s diesel engine.

Once, 50 minutes into our run, he stopped to help an old lady who needed directions. I didn’t wait. It was the only time I beat him. Cyclists liked Rupert because he was a good bloke and though he didn’t disagree with the questions I was asking, he also didn’t want to become too sceptical.

John, the eternal enthusiast, rarely engaged in any conversation that questioned Armstrong.

In that first week, we discussed Bassons’s view that you couldn’t be in the top ten without doping.

‘I believe this guy. Why would he say it if it wasn’t true?’ I said.

‘I kind of agree,’ said Charles. ‘And I definitely agree that Bassons believes this to be true.’

‘The thing about Bassons is that he’s inside that peloton and he feels how fast everyone is going. And we know from the average speed of the race so far, this Tour’s going to be faster than last year’s, when we know doping was pervasive.’

‘But if it’s a tiny bit faster, how much does that prove?’ Charles would ask.

‘Not a lot but Leblanc said he looked forward to a slower tour, proving that fewer drugs were being used.’

On and on we went, Charles trying to offer counter-arguments but mostly coming down on the side of scepticism. I sensed Rupert thinking we were probably right. Without uttering a word, John emitted sound that expressed displeasure. He didn’t have much time for our debate.

His reluctance to engage irritated me far more than if he’d attacked our arguments. The obvious counter was that I was basing too much on hunch and not coming up with any evidence of Armstrong doing wrong. It would have been better if he said Armstrong was clean but he just didn’t want that debate. His silence meant my taunting went on, like a matador flashing the red cape and the bull just sucking the air in through his nostrils, squeezing it out of his mouth, his hoof scraping the ground.

In the press room, there was widespread indifference to Bassons. Armstrong was a better story and any reporting of Bassons’ complaints would lessen the feel-good effect of the back-from-cancer hero. More attention was paid to the French rider by his fellow professionals.

‘You’ve got to stop your bullshit,’ Pascal Chanteur, a rider with another French team, told Bassons one day. ‘You’re on your own; you’ve turned everybody against you. What you’re doing is wrong. Journalists are idiots.’

Thierry Bourguignon, a veteran French rider, was one of the few riders in the peloton to speak with Bassons and he gently suggested the journalists were using him to further their own agendas. ‘I know that but I am also using them to say what I have to say,’ said Bassons.

Bourguignon was concerned at the consequences of being associated with the young rebel.

‘Why do you always mention me in your columns?’

‘Because you are the only one who continues to speak with me,’ Bassons replied.

Through my friend Pierre Ballester, I’d been introduced to an exercise physiologist/coach called Antoine Vayer, who lived at Laval in the Vendée. Thirty-six years old, Vayer had been a physical trainer with the world’s number one team Festina but refused to be involved with the team’s systematic doping programme. Bassons was one of three Festina riders from a squad of twenty-three who rode clean and he and Vayer became friends.

Their friendship and coach–rider relationship survived the disintegration of the Festina squad.

On the fourth day of the ’99 race, the Tour de France rolled into Laval, and Vayer thought it a good opportunity to bring some like-minded journalists together for an informal gathering at the Gobelen bar. Invitation was by word of mouth and the rendezvous had a clandestine feel to it as only journalists known to be openly anti-doping were going to be present, and the group wasn’t more than twenty strong.

As soon as I walk into the Gobelen, the owner nods discreetly. He knows who I’ve come to see and points his head towards the small garden at the back. Outside, charcoal smoke climbs into the night air and the man standing over the barbecue is a giant with a two-foot fork.

Around the tables are the revolutionaries, the ones who don’t believe the Tour of Renewal is what it’s meant to be and understand the need for a more radical journalism. Pierre Ballester is here, so too Stéphane Mandard from
Le Monde
and there are one or two others whose faces I recognise, but the evening is held together by the balding Vayer around whom everyone loosely sits.

They know more than I do, they have lived in this country, breathed the Tour de France and among them Vayer is the most interesting because he has worked with a doping team, tested their riders and seen for himself the effects of doping. Towards the end of the evening I coral him and we talk in English. What was it like for him being at Festina?

‘Of course I was marginalised. I had no credibility. I was not allowed to go to team meetings and when I was around, the riders would not speak openly. But I came to the team with my integrity and I left with it.’

He could see some improvement from 1998 but not a lot. ‘Before last year, pro cycling was a junkie sport – not because of what people took but because of the mindset of the rider. Things have improved a little but, really, the culture is still the same. For example, the use of corticosteroids: riders take them when they are stressed, they take them when they are down, they take them if they mess up. For them, life must be without stress. It’s a junkie mentality.’