Seven Deadly Sins: My Pursuit of Lance Armstrong (8 page)

Before them, above them, the picturesque ski resort freckled with chalets marks the last great challenge. Armstrong is in that second group but all he has to do is keep his one dangerous rival, Zulle, within his sights. After five and a half hours in the worst conditions, he’s just got to stay there. Hold onto what he’s got.

The final skirmishes that day were breathtaking but not in the manner of Chiappucci. You can’t walk into the same river twice because neither you nor the river is the same. Eight kilometres from the summit, Armstrong rose out of the saddle and let the juice flow. In the space of a kilometre he closed 21 seconds to Gotti and Escartin who were both shattered.
⁹

His rhythm never dropped and Zulle, his rival, was left behind. Armstrong, with a new yellow jersey on his back, had done his post-race interviews and was back in the US Postal team bus while most of the field was still labouring up Sestriere.

I had watched the final climb to Sestriere on a big screen in the
salle de presse
. At the moment of Armstrong’s acceleration there was a collective and audible intake of breath and, as he rode clear, there was ironic laughter and shaking of heads. Not every journalist was overcome with scepticism, not even the majority, but there were enough to form a platoon of sceptics. This wasn’t everyone’s Tour of Renewal.

That evening I called Alex Butler, my sports editor at the
Sunday Times
.

‘Hell of a stage today,’ he said. ‘Armstrong’s got it now, hasn’t he?’

‘He will win the Tour, no doubt about that.’

‘You’re not convinced about him?’

I can hear disappointment in his voice.

‘Afraid not. Actually, I think it stinks. This guy has ridden the Tour de France four times before now, ridden nine mountain stages and not been anywhere near. Suddenly he’s an outstanding climber.’

‘David, if we are going to cast doubt on him, a lot of readers are going to be upset.’

‘I know that but I don’t believe we can applaud. There’s a young guy in the race, Bassons, and I would like to write a shorter piece about him. He’s talking about doping, saying it’s still a big problem. The other riders have turned against him.’

‘But back to Armstrong for a minute, David. Do you believe he’s doping?’

‘Yeah, I do. Of course I can’t prove it. I’m going to talk to people, see what others are saying.’

‘Well, make sure you give it to us in time for the lawyers to see.’

This was the first time Alex said this to me. It wouldn’t be the last. In fairness he didn’t flinch.

Covering the Tour de France means spending considerable time in the company of the journalists with whom you travel. Not quite Brian Keenan and John McCarthy chained together in Beirut, but close. With these guys you co-ordinate hotel accommodation, eat evening meals at the same table, breakfast the next morning and also drive to the start of the stage, before undertaking the five- or six-hour journey to the finish, day after day for twenty-three days.

Rupert, our itinerant Aussie, shared the back seat with me, his ever-dazzling selection of shirts bringing a little piece of Caribbean sunshine with him every day. His dress code reflected an easy and sweet nature. He could cheer up mourners at a funeral just by appearing. In the driver’s seat Charles’ freshness was a joy, as he wanted to know again and again why I couldn’t warm to Armstrong, and why I was so unconvinced about the Tour of Renewal. John would keep his head down, writing down the name of every escapee in the breakaway even though we all knew they would be reeled in in no time.

Day after day in the car, evening after evening over dinner, we spoke about the race and what we were seeing. Frequently we would discuss my refusal to accept it was possible without doping to make the leap Armstrong had made.

‘I don’t understand how a guy can ride the Tour de France four times and show nothing that indicates he will one day be a contender to suddenly riding like one of the great Tour riders.’

‘Was he that bad in those four Tours?’ Charles asked, lobbing the balls up for me to smash home.

‘Well, he was always capable of winning one of the flat stages but he didn’t even enter the race for the final yellow jersey. His usual was six minutes behind in the long trial, anything from seven to thirty in the mountains.’

‘David, he was only twenty-one when he first rode the Tour,’ Charles would say.

‘But Anquetil, Merckx and Hinault, who all won five Tours, won the first one they rode. LeMond was third in his first, second in his second when he should have won, and then he did win his third. Armstrong went into his third Tour in ninety-five on the back of good form and got his best ever placing, thirty-sixth. The bottom line was he couldn’t time trial well enough and couldn’t survive in the mountains.’

Occasionally I would aim a question straight at John.

‘You were here last year, saw how much drugs the police found. And here we are a year later and the average speed is higher. Just doesn’t make sense?’

And once, he engaged: ‘The speed of the race now has a lot to do with the improved road surfaces, the lighter-framed bikes, and this year the meteorological conditions have been favourable.’

But mostly when I said something directly to John, he would turn his head a little to the side so the words could flow in one ear and out the other. Perhaps he was so focused on the race itself that he didn’t want to look underneath it all.

So it was back to Charles.

‘This is mad. Clean guy goes faster than the EPO generation? So what do you think, Charles? Smoother road surfaces? Tail winds every day? Lighter bikes? Or these leaders are doping, as Bassons says?’
¹⁰

‘I can’t argue with your logic,’ Charles said, ‘but I find it really hard to believe that a guy who has had cancer, pretty serious cancer too, would come back and put that shit in his body.’

‘I know, that’s the bit that’s hard to believe. But, on the other hand, what drug do they give you when you’re recovering from cancer? EPO. Side-effects? Seemingly far less than for most drugs. The bottom line is that you can’t go faster without EPO than with it, and we’re being asked to believe you can.’

I had shared a car with John as far back as the Tour of 1984, but Sestriere was the fork in our relationship. He couldn’t live on this race without access to certain riders; namely the top Americans and Lance. He would do the bread-and-butter job of reporting better than most, but for him the cream came in the team hotel in the evening, when you might snatch a fifteen- or twenty-minute interview with one of your favourites.

His enthusiasm for the company of the stars irked me, because it was never balanced by any expression of concern for the lesser-known riders who might be having their careers destroyed by the doping of others. I never heard him wonder about Christophe Bassons and the possibility that he was having his career stolen. Just as I never heard him empathise with the injustice Paul had exposed in his book
Rough Ride
.

And I was tired of the duplicity. The tests were useless because there was no test for the drug of choice, EPO. Instead the UCI tried to control its abuse by withdrawing from races those riders whose haematocrit exceeded 50, which was considered dangerous to a rider’s health but not proof of doping. It wasn’t proof but everyone knew that haematrocrits generally got to 50 because of EPO abuse.

Charles was curious and spoke to Dr Leon Schattenberg, who was on UCI’s medical committee and believed the haematocrit limit ensured those riding clean didn’t have to compete against riders with ridiculously high haematocrits, and that this was better than nothing. Encouraged by Charles’ industry, I too spoke with Schattenberg.

‘From the blood tests you do, you know the haematocrit of every rider in the Tour de France?’

‘That’s right,’ he said.

‘I’m not going to ask for the haematocrits of each rider because I know you will say that is private medical information. I’m not going to ask for the average for each team, but can you say what, according to your blood tests, is the average haematocrit for riders in the Tour de France this year? No names, just the overall average?’

‘I’m sorry,’ he said, ‘I can’t give you that information.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because it is not information I am allowed to give.’

‘The reason you don’t give out this information is that if you did the public would see the average was much higher than it should be, and realise a lot of guys in this race are using EPO.’

Schattenberg wasn’t responsible for what was effectively a cover-up and the UCI would argue that without a test for EPO their hands were tied. But they could have done more, even if it was to publicly say that haematocrits were unusually high (especially in some teams), because the governing body was well aware that it wasn’t a clean Tour.
¹¹

Some of the more thoughtful practitioners of our trade like to say that if you are to be a sportswriter it’s better to love the writing more than the sport. I loved the sport. I loved the role that sportswriters could play in sport: afflicting the comfortable, comforting the afflicted, as news reporters used to say. No longer did I see it as our role to smile up at the dais for a press conference, reassuring the organisers and competitors that ‘there ain’t nobody here but us chickens’.

French police and customs had forced us to open our eyes in ’98 and I wasn’t going to close them again. I didn’t want to be a fool just because of my love for sport. And I didn’t want to act as an agent in making fools of readers and fans on behalf of the UCI. This was supposed to be the Tour of Renewal! So far there were plenty of questions but no answers.

Two days after Armstrong’s dominant performance at Sestriere I wandered through the
salle de presse
feeling nothing but sadness at the unfolding story. The scepticism felt by many as he soared like an eagle on that first mountain stage was less apparent now as the realisation dawned that Armstrong was going to win, and it was better to accept, even embrace, his performance.

There were a few whom I knew would not be so easily turned, guys who didn’t want to be peddling the fantasy. There was Philippe Bouvet, now the chief cycling writer at
L’Équipe
, the son of a former professional and a man who had grown up with the sport. Philippe had written questioningly of Armstrong and the sport through the first two weeks.

He believed the Tour was racing at ‘
deux vitesses
’ [two speeds], caused by the fact of many but not all riders using EPO. Armstrong, he described as ‘an extraterrestrial’. It didn’t take genius to work out where exactly Philippe was coming from, and it wasn’t from the same upbeat rose-tinted place that the organisers wished him to be.

‘What do you make of it?’ I asked.

‘There is a new kind of cycling,’ he replied. ‘You see things you don’t understand. Doping is an old story in cycling, but over the past few years the manipulation of riders’ blood has changed the nature of competition. What we are getting is a caricature of competition. It is killing the sport. I can still write about cycling, but not in the same way, not with the old passion. Cycling has to change.’

Philippe’s belief about EPO killing the sport is important. Almost always the first line of the dopers’ defence, when a question is asked about their affairs, is to point out that to pose the question is to hurt the sport. For many years the former president of the UCI, Hein Verbruggen, would berate journalists for ‘talking too much about doping’.

Through the eyes of too many riders and administrators, doping was always yesterday’s problem. ‘Perhaps there was a problem . . . I hope cycling renews itself and we should start now,’ Armstrong had said on the first day. He wanted us to forget when the imperative was not to forget. In fact the first task of anybody who cared about the sport, let alone dusty abstracts like journalism and truth, was to be standing up and shouting, ‘Stop!’

Among the journalists who cared for the sport more than a three-week carnival around France in July, it was common to find sadness and a reluctance to celebrate. Jean-Michel Rouet’s daily column in
L’Équipe
expressed disbelief at Armstrong’s resurgence and the idea of this as a Tour of Renewal. His approach was based on bitter experience. ‘What we learned last year was that everybody in this sport can fuck us,’ he said.

Rouet held onto his disbelief, as did another strong-minded French journalist, Jean-François Quénet, writing then for
Ouest-France
. ‘I haven’t written an enthusiastic line about Armstrong,’ he said to me. ‘They told us cycling would change but it hasn’t. After all the drugs last year, they said this would be slower because there would be no dope. This year’s race will be the fastest in history.’

Professional cycling has always exercised an
omerta
and it has played a significant role in the endurance of a drug culture. But more than a code of silence is at work here and it is not coincidental that the Sicilian word has become so associated with the peloton, because when a rider breaks the code, he can expect a mafia-like response.

After his individual time trial at Metz earlier in the day, Christophe Bassons watched television coverage of the leaders in his hotel room. They travelled at a speed he couldn’t believe, for the race against the clock had once been his own speciality. He was especially interested in Armstrong’s performance because their physiological profiles weren’t that different: same height, same weight, Armstrong’s VO2 Max was 83 to Bassons’ 85. Regarded as a key barometer of athletic potential, the VO2 Max is the maximum capacity of an individual’s body to transport and use oxygen. Yet when Antoine Vayer did the maths afterwards, he told Bassons that he would have finished 6 kilometres behind Armstrong if they’d started at the same time.

On the night of Sestriere, Bassons and his teammates watched highlights of the American riding away from his rivals on the mountain and they were stunned by the ease with which he outdistanced them. They didn’t believe it. Bassons continued to tell every journalist who crossed his path that the doping culture had not gone away.