Bad Blood

by Jeremy Whittle

  It made for an intriguing read, even if it had the tone of a press release in parts. It was unquestioning, and accepting of the Armstrong legend, of the tenets of hard work, commitment and desire. Lance even pulled out some new bumper stickers: ‘Go hard or go home,’ he told Campbell, when asked for any tips for young athletes.

  ‘Don’t Mess With Texas, Go Hard or Go Home, Ride Like Ya Stole Something, Live Strong …’

  The more interviews Lance gave, the more of these inanities he trotted out. On a slow afternoon, we would sit around in the procycling office coming up with clichés in the style of Lance. Travel writer, raconteur and cycling anorak, Tim Moore, who spent some long hours with me in the Tour car one year, was annoyingly good at the daytime TV self-help platitudes that Armstrong often resorted to.

  ‘Hey – I climbed a mountain and when I got to the top, I met a guy I liked. And you know what? That guy was me!’ Tim intoned in a flat, bored drawl as we motored onwards through the Alps.

  We weren’t alone; in response to the epidemic of ‘Livestrong’ wristbands covering the planet, a website selling ‘Livewrong’ wristbands, T-shirts and baseball caps soon popped up. As ever, Lance demanded a reaction; he didn’t leave people indifferent to him.

  Campbell and I talked again as that year’s Tour ended in Paris. Could I arrange accreditation for him for the final stage? He wanted to write a piece on Lance’s historic win and was hopeful he’d be able to have a chat with The Great Man too. Late at night on the Tour’s final Saturday, as we drove north towards Paris, my phone flashed in the darkness. It was another text message from Alastair. ‘When can I get the passes?’ he asked. We finally got to the Meridien hotel at about two in the morning, had a nightcap and then turned in. Just before eight the next morning my phone rang. It was Campbell again. He was downstairs in reception. He wanted his tickets.

  ‘Give me twenty minutes to get dressed,’ I told him.

  ‘I’m wearing an orange T-shirt,’ he said.

  ‘I know what you look like, Alastair,’ I said.

  He was in shorts and trainers having jogged his way over from the British ambassador’s residence, where he was staying with his family. As we finally shook hands, I realised he’d been standing in a blast of air conditioning in a sweaty T-shirt, waiting for me.

  In person, Campbell was immediately charming and chatty. We talked for ten minutes, he thanked me for the VIP passes and then, narrowing his eyes, he leaned forward and asked: ‘Tell me, Jeremy – why is it that the French don’t like Lance?’

  Over the years, I have developed several answers to this question. Simon Barnes, chief sports writer on The Times, had asked me the same thing a couple of years earlier and then filed a piece highlighting French chauvinism that concluded: ‘The French just don’t like the cut of his jib.’

  The reality was far more complicated than simply Lance’s inability (and unwillingness) to charm his hosts. My usual responses to the ‘why do they hate Lance’ question ranged from ‘because he’s not French’, ‘because he makes it look too easy’, ‘because they like to think he’s on drugs’, ‘because he can be a pompous ass’ to ‘because they’re uncouth bigots’. Sometimes, it had been all of the above.

  I paused for a moment, looked at Campbell and said: ‘Maybe it’s because they feel disconnected from him and don’t really understand him, his culture or his attitude. They respect his achievement but I don’t think they like him or warm to him. It’s all the talk about him as a “brand”. He’s too much of a ready-made hero. That makes them suspicious. Tradition dictates that no rider should be bigger than the Tour itself, but these days that’s happened with Lance.’

  I told him about the way that Armstrong black-balled those who challenged him, like French rider Christophe Bassons and doping whistle-blower Filippo Simeoni, the Italian who had self-sabotaged his career by opting to testify against Ferrari: ‘Some people feel that he was bullying Simeoni, that he was making his personal gripe more important than the Tour itself. Some say that he was taking control of a situation that wasn’t his to take control of …’

  Alastair Campbell listened intently, leaned in a little more, and then, with a wry smile, said: ‘Hmm, yes – but I quite like that, you see …’

  LEARNING THE HARD WAY

  MESSAGE BOARDS PULSE with the poisonous, fetid glee of anonymous, untraceable hate. They post their rage in pixels, little darts of fury, for all to see. They hate Greg LeMond for his jealousy, his bitterness, for his attempts to debunk Lance Armstrong, Floyd Landis and Tyler Hamilton.

  They hate Greg LeMond for believing that Americans could cheat or lie.

  Greg LeMond – what did he ever do, compared to Lance? Why, he’s even got a French name … What a Judas, what a turncoat.

  And it’s true: LeMond is deeply outraged by cycling’s slew of doping scandals. He doesn’t hide it and he tells anybody who cares to ask him exactly how he feels. But he also doesn’t care if the dopers are Italian, French, British or American – it disgusts him. He belongs to a more genteel time in cycling, that, if not Corinthian, at least had some notion of etiquette and hands-across-the-ocean social responsibility.

  And shh … shoot! No swearing, please honey.

  There’s one big difference between LeMond and Lance: Greg actually quite likes the French. He gets on with them. He rode for French sponsors, he speaks French well, he respects the differences and the traditions. In fact, he embraces them. He says his favourite French village is Venasque, tucked away at the foot of Mont Ventoux, with its slumbering mediaeval streets, old-fashioned bar-tabac and nearby olive groves and vineyards.

  But all that old stuff, the cobbles, the morning bread ritual, the endless handshakes, the three-hour lunches, the multiple national holidays, the bonjours, and the ça vas – that’s the stuff that makes Lance mad because it slows things down and gets in the way.

  It is easy to see how LeMond became alienated from the new generation of cycling obsessives, the evangelical Lance fans. As Armstrong became more famous, LeMond kept on shooting him down, dividing opinion, pricking consciences, fuelling suspicion. Some said that he’d grown bitter and isolated, twisted by his own disappointments into attacking those who have come in his wake. Others see him as a failed romantic, an idealist, generally sickened by what has become of the sport he once loved.

  But then a sense of fair play seems to be in LeMond’s blood. His mother was a big fan of the Olympic Games, his sister a national-level gymnast. LeMond’s parents instilled in him the belief that cheating and stealing was cheating and stealing from yourself: in the LeMond household, he recalls, cheating was ‘just plain wrong’.

  Yet Greg LeMond knows well enough that there has been no golden age in cycling’s ethics. ‘Through all the years of cycling there has always been unethical behaviour, a willingness to go one step further. But I came from a background with no history of the doping culture in cycling. I didn’t even believe that it existed!’

  He was eighteen when, riding for the American national team, he first came to Europe to race. ‘I won against professionals, East Germans – strong countries.’ That success led to a contract with the Renault team in the early 1980s. But even then, a boy racing against men, LeMond maintains that he remained an innocent abroad.

  ‘This is not everybody else’s perspective. I know other riders who were in different teams where there was obviously a doping culture. In a way, I kept my blinkers on … I purposely didn’t want to go there. It would have shattered my ambitions in cycling.’

  Unlike some others, Greg was lucky with his coaches. There was Cyrille Guimard, team manager at Renault and Bernard Hinault’s coaching guru, and then, following LeMond’s move to La Vie Claire, Swiss sports scientist Paul Koechli. When Greg left Renault to join Hinault’s new La Vie Claire team, Guimard was unimpressed. ‘He implied that I would probably never win the Tour without him, and in my mind he meant that I would have to take “stuff” to win the Tour.’

  LeMond says that Guimard’s
veiled but disparaging comment sealed his fate. ‘I don’t like to be held prisoner by anybody, or depend on them for my own success.’ LeMond was fortunate in that Koechli was staunchly anti-doping and convinced that, with the right preparation, LeMond could win the Tour – and win it clean. Koechli’s stance fuelled Greg’s idealism even further. As a result, he remained isolated from what was going on around him.

  ‘If you’re an alcoholic you know a lot of other alcoholics,’ LeMond says. ‘Same if you’re a drug addict. If you aren’t in that crowd, you don’t realise who’s doing it and who isn’t.’

  In La Vie Claire’s studious Koechli, he found a kindred spirit. ‘Greg did not use any stuff,’ Koechli maintained, in clipped English, years later. ‘I say that two hundred per cent certain.’ Both Koechli and LeMond believed that a reliance on doping was down to a lack of strength of character.

  Yet despite the fine words and high ideals, LeMond was a professional cyclist racing in Europe: inevitably, he came to a crossroads, a point at which doping seemed seductive. Accidentally shot in a freak hunting accident in the spring of 1987, just a few months before he was due to defend the Tour title he had won in 1986, Greg almost bled to death. His comeback proved long and traumatic. For months on end, his form remained woeful.

  Like other riders, he arrived at a watershed when he was at his most vulnerable, desperate for results, making his way back from injury, keen to justify himself to his sponsor. But he stepped back from the precipice.

  LeMond went on to win two more Tours – in 1989 and 1990 – but as he entered his thirties, he could see the writing on the wall. The landscape had changed. Riders who had once finished far behind him were now leaving him for dead on the mountain passes. Blood doping, and in particular the then undetectable EPO, was rewriting the form book in his sport.

  ‘At first, I didn’t say, oh, they’re taking drugs – I just wondered if maybe I wasn’t as good as I thought. And in the back of my mind, I was worried that the lead pellets still in my body from my hunting accident were hindering my performance.

  ‘We’re talking about a ten per cent increase in average speeds of the Tour,’ he recalls. ‘I look back to 1991 as the crossroads in EPO use, because in 1990 I wasn’t even at my best, but in 1991 I was highly prepared – as well as I’d been since 1986, when I won.

  ‘There were probably sixty or seventy guys that year on EPO. I looked at my team, who’d won the race overall the previous year, and the difference between us and the dopers got more and more pronounced as the race went on.’

  As EPO culture took root, the omerta tightened its grip. The dependence of the peloton’s key figures on each other, allied to the pressure to maintain the sport’s status quo, became increasingly apparent.

  Champions opted to race less and trained in secret, returning dramatically to the scene to win key events. LeMond, in contrast, often accused of basing his whole season on simply the Tour, rode many of the Spring Classics, the Giro d’Italia and, usually, the World Championships. The long absences of others were described as training ‘microcycles’, although it may also have been a way to perfect ‘preparation’ and avoid detection. Many such riders went on to become cycling royalty, with a long line of successes to their names. Slowly but surely, the use of EPO became an open secret.

  Exhausted and embittered, LeMond cut a dejected figure at his final few races in 1994. EPO use, he had realised, was sweeping unchecked through his sport. Testosterone and amphetamines were now drugs for novices or idiots. Certainly, blood transfusions had been used in the past, but a new, more sophisticated, more professional era of blood doping, administered by highly paid experts and fuelled by advances in medical technology, had opened up. LeMond became deeply outraged by the unblinking acceptance of it.

  ‘If you understand the physiology of cycling, you will know that at the end of three weeks of the Tour, your haematocrit has a descending value. Those who aren’t on EPO can start off with a certain power output and a certain amount of haematocrit, of red blood cells. But by the end of the Tour, there’s usually a decrease in the red blood cell count, which correlates to a five to ten, maybe twelve, per cent decrease in oxygen intake.’

  When cumulative fatigue is such a huge factor, EPO comes into its own. ‘Certain riders would have a serious drop in haematocrit, perhaps from forty-three per cent to thirty-eight per cent. Now, imagine you’re competing against an EPO user topping himself up to maybe fifty per cent, which, by all accounts in the mid 1990s was relatively low. Red blood cells correlate very closely to power output.

  ‘When you take the spread between a guy whose level drops to thirty-eight per cent, compared to a guy who’s racing at fifty-five per cent, and then run that over a three-week race – where the difference becomes increasingly pronounced – no matter how talented the first rider is, there’s no way he’s able to compete against the guy who’s taking EPO. It’s not about recovery,’ he says. ‘It’s about getting the edge to win.’

  By the mid 1990s, doctors were on the road with almost every leading team, supposedly keeping athletes healthy, guarding against doping by keeping their charges on the straight and narrow. For a while, baffled by the jargon of sports science, everybody fell for it: meanwhile, behind closed doors, blood was being manipulated and results perverted.

  At the Telekom team of Bjarne Riis, Erik Zabel and Jan Ullrich, institutionalised doping took the German squad to victory in the Tour in 1996. LeMond had seen it coming and after the disappointment of the 1991 Tour, he never again threatened to win a major race.

  Even so, his image, that of a rare, clean winner of the Tour, has come under attack in recent years, perhaps because he is so vociferously anti-doping that he has sometimes sounded holier-than-thou. But he argues in his own defence that even at eighteen and nineteen, his results were outstanding. ‘You’d have to believe that I was on drugs then, because my results were immediately at a high level – I was competitive against Hinault, the Tour de France champion. I was third in my first Tour. I showed consistency. There were no abnormally bizarre performances beyond my normal genetic level.’

  But how does he respond to those who say that he is just bitter and jealous? Aren’t the top riders faster now than twenty years ago simply because of better equipment and advances in training and physiology?

  ‘Whenever I hear anybody say the training’s better, the bikes are better … my career spanned fourteen years and probably the biggest innovations happened in the 1980s. Carbon fibre, aero bars, disc wheels, clipless pedals – that all happened when I was racing.’

  He struggled to recover his form after his hunting accident, but puts that down to chronic anaemia, which he admits was treated during the 1989 Giro d’Italia with three iron shots. ‘But I watched the doctor break open the vial in front of me. There was none of this “Oh, I’ll come back in a minute with a syringe …” But people will say what they want about me … and that’s one of the reasons I am so disgusted with the sport right now, because the riders in today’s world taint anyone who’s won the Tour in the past. If I had taken three illegal injections, why would I have ever said anything about them?’

  * * *

  When Greg LeMond retired, he left a vacuum in American cycling. Lance Armstrong soon filled it. LeMond, however, was not impressed. Greg and Lance, the traditionalist and the upstart, became rivals for the affections of the growing army of stateside cycling fans. Theirs was always an uneasy relationship, but they were tied together by their mutual business interests. By the turn of the millennium, fuelled by Armstrong’s success, interest in road cycling in America was reaching unprecedented levels. Trek bikes, who sponsored Armstrong and who also distributed Greg’s own LeMond-branded machines, were experiencing phenomenal sales.

  On the back of that, a growing market for luxury cycling tours in France and Italy, tailored to silver-haired CEOs from California and New England, began to show itself. Trek Travel, another of the bike manufacturer’s brand extensions, was quick to realise the opp
ortunity.

  Fronting it all was the lure of the Armstrong brand, the kick-ass legend that fuelled the dreams of each and every one of the corporate gurus as they pedalled their way through the Alps and Pyrenees in US Postal replica kit.

  But then Greg LeMond would open his big mouth, butting in with some other inappropriate comment. As the 2001 race ended with a third Armstrong victory, a race in which he had climbed to victory on Alpe d’Huez ten minutes faster than Hinault and LeMond in 1986, Greg was asked by David Walsh what he thought of Lance’s relationship with Ferrari.

  ‘All I said was that I was disappointed,’ LeMond recalls. ‘And who wouldn’t be? This was a sport that was trying to clean up and the guy who’s won the Tour is calling Ferrari his best buddy. It just didn’t make sense.’

  Then he waited for the backlash.

  Within forty-eight hours of Lance’s victory, Greg and I were walking through Mayfair towards our lunch with the oil company. The next day, after Greg’s flight landed back in the States, he switched on his phone. That was when Lance called. It wasn’t to ask if he’d picked up anything special in Harvey Nichols.

  Greg and Kathy LeMond have claimed that Lance was threatening and aggressive – but Armstrong has dismissed this and asserted that LeMond was rambling and incoherent.

  Lance wanted Greg to retract his comments about Ferrari. He refused, even though he enjoyed a business relationship with Trek, Armstrong’s influential key sponsors, and was putting himself at risk. In the end, through a clumsily worded press release that saw the light of day a few weeks later, he apparently did. Like many others, I was stunned to see the retraction. It didn’t sound like the Greg LeMond I knew. Knowing the depth of his feeling, I called him.