Lanced: The Shaming of Lance Armstrong

by David Walsh

  "I'd forgotten I'd denied it like that," he says. "When I lied I did try to tug on people's heart strings. It's sad. I'm not proud of it. I tried hard to lie well, I guess. I was very passionate about denying it. Being seen as honourable, that's always been the most important thing to me. Up until cycling got dirty for me, I was a pretty honourable guy."

  He tells a story from his youth when downhill skiing was his sport. Accomplished and fiercely courageous, he made the New Hampshire state team and at the end-of-year awards, he and two buddies were each given a pass that would allow them to ski free anywhere in the state through the following year.

  "We were high school kids, didn't have a lot of money and one day during spring break, conditions got windy at the area where we were and we went to another. On the way out we sold our tickets, made $20 each. We drove to a different mountain, got our tickets, sold them, went to another and made another 20. Then in the last place, we got greedy, we went to the two ticket windows, one on the east side, the other on the west, and we got caught.

  "My dad came from Boston and brought me home. It was the most disappointed I've ever seen him. We talked about it and went through all the people I had let down. I said I would write letters to each one. I sat at home and hand-wrote 40 letters. The sentiments were heartfelt and apologetic."

  How come a kid like that ended up being a sports cheat? WHAT do you do when your training partner edges the front wheel of his bike a fraction ahead? You press harder on the pedals until you are alongside. When he again nudges ahead, you respond. You don't give him an inch. If this keeps happening and you never give in, you are Tyler Hamilton. This stubbornness was what he had, the DNA of his soul.

  He went to Europe. They doped, and to keep up he doped. They doped some more; he doped more. In the US Postal he became an elite cyclist and a Class A doper.

  Eventually he would get caught and sound like Mother Teresa's picked-upon grandnephew when questioned. One evening in June 2010 his mobile phone buzzed. The text was matter-of-fact. "I'm Jeff Novitzky, an investigator with the FDA [the Food and Drug Administration in America]. I'd like to talk to you; please call me on this number." Novitzky told Hamilton he could voluntarily submit to interview or be forced to appear before a grand jury.

  They set aside four hours for his grand jury appearance but when that elapsed, there was more he wished to tell them. For three more hours, he continued to describe the minutiae of US Postal's doping culture and what went on within the sport of professional cycling.

  Around this time the writer Daniel Coyle suggested to Hamilton they write a book. The Secret Race is a brilliantly detailed inside account of how doping works in professional sport. We feel the chill in our veins when a bag of Hamilton's refrigerated blood is dripped back into his body. We feel his panic when blood begins to seep from the syringe-made hole in his arm after he has left the surgery of Dr Eufemiano Fuentes in Madrid.

  What we read is too detailed to be mistrusted, too full of insight to have been concocted. How could you know that when the sun tanned your arms, it highlighted needle scars? Hamilton tells the story of his own doping with such intimacy and detail that you feel you could pinpoint that part of his stomach where he injected the EPO. The book is a bestseller in both Britain and the United States.

  Sales figures, Hamilton says, don't matter to him. "For me what mattered was getting it out there. If we sold one or one hundred or one million copies, it didn't really matter. Writing the book was the hardest thing I've done in my life. I'm proud that I've done it but I'm not proud of what's in there. It's hard reading about yourself doing the things I did.

  "Going over the drafts was painful. Dan would call me up, 'What do you think of what I've sent you?', and I would say, 'I'm only on page 20'. It was hard to stomach.

  "Now people come and say, 'I love the book, man, crazy stories'.

  I would prefer if they said, 'Well done for being truthful, it must have been hard'. What we were doing was disgusting, those crazy stories are repulsive."

  Pointing to a room beyond the kitchen of the Missoula home he now shares with his wife, Lindsay, he says: "The book is there but I don't think I will ever read it. It was a disgusting world. When you're in it, things happen so fast you don't have time to think. When Jeff Novitzky called, I was forced to reflect on everything and it was like I had all this stuff buried inside me and I realised, 'Wow, what a f*****-up world we were part of'."

  I remind him of the people who told the truth and had their careers cut short or their characters assassinated. The idealistic young French rider Christophe Bassons, driven out of the 1999 Tour de France by the leader of Hamilton's US Postal team, Armstrong. Bassons' crime was to tell the truth about doping.

  "I kind of knew what was going on with Bassons and knew it was in my best interests not to talk to him. Looking back, it was wrong, same with Filippo Simeoni in 2004."

  When the former US Postal soigneur Emma O'Reilly spoke honestly of her time as Armstrong's masseuse, he made scurrilous and untrue allegations against her character.

  By the time O'Reilly's story was made public, Hamilton had left US Postal but still he didn't stand up for O'Reilly. "I didn't know about the personal stuff that Lance brought up. If I had, I would have backed Emma 100%.

  "Emma was the best soigneur I ever had. A great, great person, you can see it in her eyes, she's the salt of the earth and everyone on the team knew that. When she came out with the doping stuff about Lance, I couldn't be seen to support her but I knew what she was saying was true. And I liked it in a strange way: 'The asshole', I thought, 'is getting some heat'. I kind of felt he deserved it."

  The Armstrong portrayed in The Secret Race has few redeeming characteristics. "Everything in the book is the truth," Hamilton says. "Obviously he's got some great qualities. If he was leading by five or six minutes going into the last week of the Tour de France, he would be in a good mood and could be very funny."

  A story of how Armstrong chased and beat up a motorist is far from amusing. "We all have our darker side, a lot of mine is in the book and I felt it was fair to share some of the stories about Lance. Sometimes he went way beyond where the majority of people would go. In that incident with the motorist, if I had done what he did I would feel bad for that guy for the rest of my life."

  For the three Tours from 1999 to 2001, Hamilton and Armstrong rode in the same US Postal team and he charts the team leader's doping almost as meticulously as his own: the red eggs (testosterone), the Edgar Allan Poe (EPO) and the BBs (blood bags for transfusions).

  Before the 1999 Tour, Hamilton obtained EPO from Armstrong's stash in the fridge at his (Armstrong's) home in Nice. Later they would have their blood drawn before the 2001 Tour.

  It is all there: the time it took to re-infuse a bag of blood, the many ways to beat drug tests, the greed that led Fuentes, the doping doctor, to take on too many clients, Hamilton's absolute conviction that Armstrong ratted on him to the UCI in 2004, which led to cycling's world governing body warning Hamilton about his suspicious blood values.

  In the early years Hamilton tried to convince himself that with most people doping, the playing field was level. "It's not true, though. Drugs affect everyone differently, some react to them better than others. If you've not got that much money, that affects how much you can dope. It is a rich man's game. And there were guys who just didn't want to do it, some for moral reasons; others because they didn't want to take the risk.

  "Most people prepared for the Tour with EPO, showed up at the start with haematocrits around 47 but it was what happened during the race that really mattered. In 2003 and 2004 I had blood bags delivered at different points because I had the money and the connection to Fuentes. But it wasn't a level playing field. If Frankie [Andreu] had taken the same amount of EPO that we had, and used transfusions during the race, he would have finished in the top 20, maybe the top 15."

  I ask a question. "If no-one had doped, how many Tours would Armstrong have won?" "Look what he did in his fou
r Tours before his cancer. He never competed in the mountains. With no-one doping, he couldn't have won seven. Maybe he could have won one. Maybe, I don't know."

  "Will he tell the truth?" "From the bottom of my heart, I hope he does. I really mean that. I wouldn't wish the kind of suffering I've had, holding these secrets, getting accused of all this stuff, and just denying, denying, denying. I hope he comes clean because his life will improve if he does. I understand he could ask a hundred different lawyers and each one would say, 'Don't tell the truth because there could be serious financial consequences'. But I think it would be worth it. It's his way to freedom."

  At a key moment in a May 2011 interview given to the 60 Minutes programme on CBS, Hamilton looked host Scott Pelley in the eye and asked what he, Pelley, would have done if faced with the dilemma Hamilton had in the late 90s. Dope or go home? Pelley's body language suggested he might well have taken the same path. It made it seem that what Hamilton had done was almost natural, the only choice he had.

  The day before the interview he and Lindsay had said they would like to start a family.

  "Imagine," I say now, "you have a son and he is a 25-year-old pro cyclist. He calls you from Europe and says, 'Dad, if I don't dope I can't get to ride the Tour de France'. What do you say?" Hamilton doesn't have to think. "'Come home', I would say. If he insisted that as an adult he had the right to make up his own mind, I would beg and plead, make him read my book. I would never let up. If he persisted in doping, it would be pretty serious between us, a very difficult thing for our relationship."

  At the end of a second day in Missoula he drives me back to my hotel and talks of having stayed up late the night before. "Remember I asked you yesterday," he says, "whether we will have clean cycling? You were pessimistic, saying too many ex-dopers were still involved. I thought about that last night and didn't feel like sleeping for a while."

  There is something else on his mind. "You know how I've still got every bit of memorabilia from my career, tons of stuff from the Tours and classics; bikes, jerseys, trophies, race numbers, everything. It fills an entire room. I don't want any of it and have been thinking what to do with it. I'm going to auction it online and donate the proceeds to anti-doping. Do you think that would be okay?"

  The women who stood up to the bully

  David Walsh

  October 14, 2012

  "

  Remember this, life is like a wheel: what goes around comes around

  "

  Memories of the first conversations have never dimmed. With Betsy Andreu it was a phone call while driving from Heathrow to Cardiff on a winter's evening in 2002. The tip-off had come from a mutual friend, James Startt, an American photo-journalist in Paris. "Betsy thinks you should call her," he said, passing on her number in Michigan.

  Emma O'Reilly turned up almost out of the blue. That was June 2003. "I don't mind telling you what I saw when I worked with the US Postal team. Pantani's dead, Jimenez is dead," she said, referring to two top cyclists who had been involved in doping and had died in their early 30s. "It isn't right."

  For two years at Postal she had been Lance Armstrong's personal masseuse but this was hardly mentioned in that first phone call. Before breaking the code of silence, she had to know what she was getting into.

  "Let me come to Liverpool [at the time O'Reilly lived with her boyfriend Mike Carlisle] and we'll have dinner. Afterwards you decide if you still want to go ahead." We went for supper to Villa Jazz in Oxton; Emma, Mike and I, and for much of the evening we spoke about Mike's beloved Manchester United. The other stuff could wait.

  With Betsy, you didn't get to tip-toe around the subject of Armstrong. Before I was 10 miles down the M4 towards Cardiff she had taken me inside a consulting room at Indiana University Hospital in October 1996. The Dallas Cowboys were on the television and two doctors were alongside Armstrong. "We should leave now," Betsy said as the doctors began to speak.

  "It's okay," said Armstrong. "You can stay."

  And then Betsy heard the conversation that would change her life. "Have you used performance-enhancing drugs?" asked one doctor.

  Matter-of-factly, Armstrong listed them. "EPO, testosterone, growth hormone, cortisone and steroids."

  Betsy freaked. The message to Frankie, her husband, was in her eyes: "You and me, we gotta speak outside," and he knew to follow. "If you're f*****g doing that s**t, I'm not marrying you," she said.

  That was Betsy in a nutshell. Right was right, wrong was wrong and that three-hour journey to Cardiff passed in a moment. She had much to tell; how she and Lance were once good friends, how he'd loved her risotto and would go with her to the supermarket. They argued about God. She believed; he didn't and maybe if he'd allowed her to leave that hospital room before the question, things would have turned out differently.

  Betsy's difficulty was Frankie's job. He had quit riding in 2001 but had remained in the sport. Pro cycling was the only job he'd ever known and Betsy knew that Armstrong could hurt her husband's career. Frankie wanted her to step back and let others lead the race to find out the truth about Armstrong. "Who, Frankie, who will do it?" she would ask before delivering her bottom line: "I'm not lying for him, don't dare ask me to do that."

  Three weeks after the dinner in Liverpool, I turned up at Emma O'Reilly's house in Oxton. It was a July afternoon, the 2003 Tour de France was on the television but the race no longer interested us. Emma zapped it and seven hours later she stopped describing her time with US Postal. She told about the day she went to Spain to pick up drugs for Lance; the time at the 1999 Tour de France she bought the concealer to cover the syringe marks on his arm; the night she dumped his used syringes in Belgium; and the time she picked up testosterone for George Hincapie.

  There was also the evening during the '99 Tour she heard Armstrong and two team bosses concoct a story to get round a positive test for cortisone.

  "Now, Emma," Armstrong said at the end of that night, "you know enough to bring me down." He never thought she would because he sensed she had a vague admiration for his drive and ambition. But she saw beyond that. She was never taken in. "Lance was Lance," she would often say, meaning you had to know the rough and the smooth.

  With Emma I never understood how guilty she would feel about betraying people in the Postal team she liked. Tyler Hamilton, Jonathan Vaughters and the head mechanic Julian de Vriese, with whom she became very friendly. Julian was old school; Belgian, once mechanic to Eddy Merckx and later Greg LeMond. He looked after Armstrong. Old enough to be Emma's father but they liked each other.

  He wouldn't understand why she would spit in the soup. That's what they called it when someone spoke of cycling's dark sub-culture, cracher le soupe. Betraying Julian bothered her but then she'd think of another Belgian, Johan Bruyneel, her boss at Postal.

  Through her last year with the team, he bullied her and made her life miserable. After stealing her diary, he went to her colleagues and lied about her writing nasty things about them. Emma thought Bruyneel manipulative and underhand and indescribably stupid for believing he could treat her as he had and still expect her to carry the team's secrets to her grave. Betsy and Emma had very different personalities but shared one quality. Everything they said, you felt was the truth.

  In late June of 2004, LA Confidentiel, les secrets de Lance Armstrong, was published in France. It was a book I had co-authored with Pierre Ballester and its two most important witnesses were Emma O'Reilly and Betsy Andreu. Before the book came out, The Sunday Times wrote about what these two women had seen during their time in Armstrong's world.

  All hell broke loose after the book came out. Betsy and Emma weren't ready for it. Neither was I. Armstrong sued The Sunday Times, Emma O'Reilly, the publishers of LA Confidentiel, the magazine that serialised it. All that was entirely predictable but not so was the extent to which Armstrong went after the two women.

  During that summer's Tour he summoned Frankie Andreu to his hotel room and politely told him that Betsy had become a problem
, but there was a solution and he would get Bill [Stapleton, Armstrong's manager and attorney] to speak with him. They met in a car park a couple of days later. Suspicious of Armstrong's motives, Andreu secretly taped his meeting with Stapleton.

  Through Stapleton, Armstrong asked that Betsy put out a statement discrediting me and the work I'd done. "The best results for us all," said Stapleton, "is to pick away at him ... extract an apology, drop the f****** lawsuit and it all just goes away." The lawyer went on to say he wanted to avoid a "full-out war in a French court" because it "could blow the whole sport". Suggesting to Betsy Andreu that she lie wasn't clever and just made her more determined. I marvelled at her strength and she would wonder what I meant. "I just don't like people saying I'm lying when I'm not," she said.

  Frankie was never going to put Stapleton's proposal to his wife. His career was adversely affected by Betsy's willingness to say she'd heard Armstrong admit to doping in that Indiana hospital. He lost one job managing a team, then another with a television channel and though nobody said it was because of Betsy, they both knew.

  Frankie's parents thought Betsy was wrong to endanger her family's future and she was reminded many times of how her stance could have an impact on their three kids; little Frankie, Marta and Stevie. Betsy's dad thought she was wrong, only her mum supported her. "It's crazy to me," she would say to her parents, "that I have to justify refusing to lie."

  Family members would tell her she didn't have to lie, just say nothing. "That's the same as lying," she'd say. Between her and Frankie it wasn't smooth. Though reading from the same book, they weren't on the same page. He hadn't doped as much as Armstrong, Kevin Livingston, Hamilton, Hincapie and others, he had been the only rider who refused Armstrong's request to work with Dr Michele Ferrari and within the sport, he was the bad guy. When he admitted in a New York Times interview that he doped, Bruyneel bizarrely threatened to sue him.