French Renaissance

by Jeremy Whittle

  ‘Everything is so slanted against him, all the coverage in the media – I mean, I saw those films – they’re so biased, just raking over the bad stuff. When I think of all the money he raised, all the good he’s done for Austin . . .’

  Quickly, we’re past the State Capitol, through the stop signs, across the mighty river and back in South Congress, outside the door of the hotel. I climb out of the car and then realise I should have tipped, but when I turn around, he’s already gone.

  It’s the small hours back home. I’m half-asleep before I reach the door of my room. My head hits the pillow and I’m gone.

  Yes, I know.

  I know what you probably think of him, and I can guess what you think of me, for even talking to him. After the way he behaved, after the way he treated people. How can I let him off the hook so easy?

  The one certainty about doping scandals is that the athletes always pay, while the ‘system’ – the collective of bureaucrats and administrators, promoters and sponsors, coaches and managers – survives to live, work and sell another day. That’s why Nike, Oakley and Trek are still cashing in on the Armstrong name, from sales of their products in Mellow Johnny’s, just a few blocks from the site of those ticker-tape receptions, in downtown Austin.

  The UCI has never accepted culpability for any doping scandal. Even though it runs cycling, the governing body would have you believe it is powerless and blameless when scandals occur, just as they were with Simpson in 1967 and with Merckx in Savona in 1969, with Festina and 1998 and Puerto in 2006.

  Name all the scandals, list all the corruption and cover-ups – from Armstrong and the UCI, through to Blatter and FIFA, the Russians and the IAAF – and it’s clear that the business of sport is so conflicted, so compromised as to be seemingly incapable of self-regulation.

  To me, the truth is pretty banal: Lance Armstrong was not the devil in Lycra, just as he was never Jesus on a bike. He was an opportunist, embittered by serial rejection during his youth, who grew to embody the ethics of the landscape he inhabited. He learned that cycling was a lawless sport and that there were no boundaries: so he exploited that, just as others exploited him. He fought like a dog to get into a position of power and then fought like a dog to defend all that came with it.

  I don’t think he needs to apologise to any promoters, to any journalists, to any sponsors. They were all part of that ‘system’. His remorse should be directed at those he gave false hope to and those whose careers were damaged or ended by the culture he embodied. His paranoia and cynicism damaged his peers, many of whom were less well-equipped to protect themselves.

  But he was as abused as he was abusive. Ultimately, when the moment came to exile him, he proved as disposable as any rider caught in that culture. ‘Lance Armstrong has no place in cycling,’ Pat McQuaid said, as if the UCI, after all the years of sitting on its hands, was fit to pass judgement.

  The backlash – the ongoing ‘crucifixion’ of Armstrong – has been as absurd, overblown and self-serving as the canonisation ever was. In fact, the continuing obsession with him plays perfectly into the hands of those who still want their own true histories obscured.

  How can ASO excise him from the record books, when Bjarne Riis, Marco Pantani, Erik Zabel and all the others remain enshrined, cited as champions? How can the great and good in athletics – Steve Cram and Seb Coe – sit back and mock cycling’s traumatic history, while they have failed to clean up the chronic corruption within their own sport? How can Trek, Oakley, Nike ditch Armstrong but then profit from sales of their merch in his bike shop? How can the UCI wash their hands of responsibility, when all the evidence they needed to investigate him was always on their doorstep?

  At the heart of all this, at the heart of the broken Legend of Lance, at the heart of the doping that blighted the careers of Malléjac, Simpson, Pantani and so many others, is corrupt governance. To my mind, this long-standing dysfunction – allowing hypocritical, cynical administrators to grow fat and wealthy from the exploitations of others – is far worse than individual cheating. It is far worse than anything Lance Armstrong ever did.

  Two days later, we meet again. Once again, we walk from his house down the same leafy avenues to our lunch table. There, he settles into a chair on the deck and stirs the crushed ice in his ‘Arnold Palmer’. ‘It’s an ice tea with lemonade,’ he explains. ‘The John Daly is an Arnold Palmer with vodka. But I’ve never had one. I like vodka but it doesn’t sound that good.’

  Once again, I’d sat in the wrong place. Once again, he insisted we swap. He wanted his back to the door. And, yes, the cap stayed on. Armstrong says he’s not anxious, not paranoid, even if a Jimmy Kimmel special could be dedicated to him reading out ‘mean tweets’.

  ‘People are perfectly decent,’ he maintains. ‘I’ve never had anyone get in my face. Nobody hassles me. I mean, sometimes you get the sense that they might want to, but people are nicer than you think.’ In Austin, at least, it seems that Armstrong can relax.

  ‘I don’t think that many people have read the books or seen the documentaries. I think the percentage is remarkably low. They might have read an Associated Press story, USA Today or the New York Times, but not the books.’

  Even so, his televised confession to Oprah Winfrey in 2013 opened a trapdoor beneath his feet. He says now that he was unprepared for the repercussions and the ensuing free fall. ‘My business manager, Bart, has a perspective on the Oprah interview that I think is pretty spot-on. He says that for the diehard cycling fan Oprah didn’t say enough, didn’t burn anybody or name names, but that for most people, it was way too much, because all they heard was blood bags, EPO, doping.

  ‘It was either not enough or too much,’ Armstrong shrugs. ‘In the end, everybody was pissed off.’

  So why do it then, why do it that soon?

  ‘I was going to get sued by everybody. I was going to get deposed and they were going to ask those questions a thousand times. That’s why I did it. I’d rather do that, bad as it was, or bad as it ended up, somewhat on my terms. If I’d done it in a deposition, they would have just leaked it, so you’d have had this grainy video, where they’re really being dicks, just hammering me, and then that gets leaked to the world. I didn’t want it to go that way either.

  ‘The thing I’d say now, and that took me years to understand and that I didn’t understand then, is that Oprah came too soon.

  ‘I was stuck. I wanted to get it out of the way, but it was too soon, it was still too fresh, and I hadn’t worked through it all in my own head. I still haven’t.’

  Armstrong soon learned that in professional sport, everyone’s your best friend – until you’re damaged goods.

  He shrugs again. ‘I’ve learned who my friends are. I knew when it was all going on that a lot of people were there for the party, there for the ride.’

  And for the money, I say . . .

  ‘Some people surprise you that they ran – you’re like, “What a dick!” – but then others surprise you when they lean in. “Hey, I’m still here – what can I do to help?”

  ‘So you see the best and worst – you get both sides of it. And there are still people I can count on . . .

  ‘The innocent ones had a genuine sense of betrayal,’ he acknowledges, ‘but the people that knew, the people who now act appalled – there’s a special spot in hell for those people. To turn around and act so appalled . . .

  What about UCI Presidents Hein Verbruggen and Pat McQuaid? Hein always had your back, I say. I had run-ins with him about you . . .

  ‘Yeah, but what was Hein gonna do?’ he says dismissively. ‘Go to 1997. What do you do? You know that everybody’s using EPO . . .’

  He stares at me. ‘What do you do?’ he demands again. For a moment I can’t believe that he’s standing up for the UCI.

  – But Verbruggen was so weak, I say. He was running the sport, he—

  – ‘Okay, so what’s strong? Tell me strong,’ he interrupts.

  – I don’t know exactly.
I wasn’t president of the UCI. More though – much more than what he did—

  – ‘Okay, smart guy,’ he says, a hard tone to his voice, ‘what the fuck would you have done?

  ‘So let me tell you: there was nothing to do. We now know all these guys operate the same – the UCI, the IAAF, FIFA. They’re sitting on this stuff thinking, “If we nuke this, our sport is burned to the ground.”

  ‘They would have known what happened to me, they would have seen what happened to the sport – total meltdown. They’d go, “No way – you’re not messing with our equity.” That’s what they’d say.’

  Lance Armstrong climbed the Ventoux in the Tour de France, the Dauphiné Libéré and, although not all the way to the summit, in Paris–Nice. But as his list of victories elsewhere grew, success on the Ventoux repeatedly slipped from his grasp. Meanwhile, upstart team-mates and rivals – Jonathan Vaughters, Tyler Hamilton and Iban Mayo – blew him away. The Giant looked on, taunting him.

  ‘I consider the Ventoux the hardest climb in France,’ Armstrong says. ‘I don’t think anything compares. Alpe d’Huez doesn’t compare, the Pyrenees don’t compare.

  ‘People ask me: “I’m going to France – what’s the hardest climb?” and they expect the answer to come from the Alps or the Pyrenees, but the answer lies right in the middle.’

  No matter the stage wins on other famed climbs – the Alpe, Sestrières, Pla d’Adet, Plateau de Beille, Luz Ardiden, La Mongie – the Ventoux always eluded him. ‘Nothing really compares in terms of difficulty. I mean, Alpe d’Huez is steep, but every two or three minutes you get a ten-second window when it’s essentially flat, when you go through a switchback. So you get a little bit of recovery, but the Ventoux is truly relentless.’

  Armstrong, like almost every other rider, cites the turn at St Estève as the decisive point. ‘The run up to that can be really nervous, and windy sometimes, with everybody fighting for position. St Estève is to me the real start of the climb, and then the next milestone is Chalet Reynard, where the trees end.

  ‘After Chalet Reynard, it becomes a completely different climb,’ he says.

  Perhaps that’s why, I suggest, the telling attacks in recent years have come before Chalet Reynard?

  ‘Oh really?’ he says sarcastically. ‘Attacks? I didn’t know there were any attacks in cycling any more. The Tour is boring. The coverage is boring, the racing is boring – there are moments that are exciting, but 90 per cent of the time they’re just sitting there, riding through France.’

  Like others before him, Armstrong found the Ventoux a stifling, breathless environment. ‘For whatever reason – and at two thousand metres at the top it isn’t that high – but it always felt like it was four thousand metres. The air even looks thin. I’m no scientist but there’s something about the air up there . . .

  ‘The other thing that’s always a factor is the wind. It’s so exposed. There’s something going on there, but I tell you, it’s my favourite climb. Plus I love that area, below the Ventoux. It’s pretty special.’

  Long before they scrapped their way to the summit of Ventoux in the 2000 Tour, things were not good between Armstrong and Marco Pantani. But what happened on the mountain that day only made things worse.

  Tyler Hamilton was riding for the US Postal Service team defending Armstrong’s overall lead, pace-setting on the Giant’s lower slopes. ‘My stage ended before we reached Chalet Reynard,’ Hamilton said. ‘Kevin Livingston and I were switching on and off, but I think Kevin had a better ride that day.’

  Hamilton led into the bend at St Estève, kicking hard as the gradient increased, with Livingston on his shoulder and Armstrong just behind. Within seconds of Hamilton’s acceleration, the field had disintegrated. ‘Once you take that left-hand turn at St Estève and it kicks, you quickly realise where your legs are. You don’t know until you get there, but you soon find out. From there it just goes, and goes, and goes, all the way up.

  ‘You come out of that bend,’ Hamilton says, ‘and it’s like a bomb has gone off in the peloton. It’s either: “Thank you! I have good legs”, or the immediate realisation: “I’m not gonna be able to hang with these guys.” ’

  Hamilton, jersey unzipped almost to the waist, face creased in pain, led the peloton through the forest. ‘We were switching that whole Tour on who’d be the last guy riding for Lance,’ Hamilton recalled. ‘I burned my matches before Kevin.’

  So high was their tempo that US Postal had already reduced the lead group to just six riders, well before reaching Chalet Reynard. As ever, Armstrong focused on controlling Jan Ullrich’s one-paced diesel. Ullrich, for all his power, he could handle, but the American never liked the jumpy, snappy climbers, their unpredictability and volatility. That afternoon, Armstrong was wary of two: Roberto Heras of Spain and, of course, Pantani.

  As Armstrong’s group closed on the summit, he thought Pantani had cracked. He hadn’t expected the familiar shaven head to reappear at his shoulder on the upper slopes, and then to attack. There is a dark Darwinian beauty to the extreme battle, high on the Ventoux, between Armstrong and Pantani in those final kilometres as they raced diabolically to the summit, goading each other, haring blindly past the Simpson memorial, unheeding of history, in a crazed culmination of Generation EPO’s excesses.

  It was repellent and dysfunctional but, in many ways, it was compelling too. Both of them later paid the price: Pantani’s public humiliation as his career nosedived was nothing compared to the sordid death that almost destroyed his family. Armstrong’s athletic successes were dwarfed by the loathing, scorn and detestation heaped upon him and his family after his downfall. For somebody who had once enjoyed Christ-like status, it was a long-drawn-out crucifixion.

  But there was a twist that day. As they neared the summit, Armstrong realised he could show some solidarity with the Italian, offer him an olive branch, somehow make amends for Pantani’s own humiliation when he was thrown off the 1999 Giro d’Italia in the crucifixion at Madonna di Campiglio.

  Pantani, the instinctive climber, the artiste, beloved Italian icon, the posturing prima donna, who would die of addiction within four years, battled against Armstrong, his nemesis, the all-powerful but unfeeling radio-controlled Robocop, cold, pragmatic, scientific. It was here, close to the summit, that Armstrong chose to offer Pantani redemption. As they sped towards the top, propelled and then buffeted by a gusting Mistral, the Texan drew alongside the Italian and called out a few words.

  ‘I said, as best I could in Italian, “Tu vince, tu vince” – you win, you win – meaning that he could have the stage, but that wasn’t what he heard.’

  Maybe the Mistral snatched the words away and threw them into the valley below. Maybe Pantani heard them but chose to ignore them.

  ‘I had a pretty commanding lead overall, so I felt it was OK for him to win. After everything that had happened to Pantani, I thought it would be a generous thing to do. But Eddy Merckx was right when he said it at the time – and I know now – that you never give away the Ventoux.’

  Pantani, fighting to hold Armstrong’s wheel as they rode on, thought the American was patronising him. ‘He took it as derogatory,’ Armstrong says, ‘as if I was telling him he was too slow.

  ‘But who knows what he heard – it was windy, and it’s the heat of the battle in the middle of the Tour de France – it’s just frenzied.

  ‘I certainly didn’t tell him to go faster – we were already going fast enough. But he took it as an insult. He wasn’t the kind of guy that wanted any handouts, or any charity.’

  There was little time in 2000 for sentiment or gestures, no time at those speeds and in that wind to doff a racing cap in memory of Tom Simpson, or to contemplate the past, as they climbed beyond the spot where he had died. As they rode through and beyond the brutal final right-hand bend, Armstrong hung back a little, so Pantani could move ahead and cross the line first. Even now, sitting having lunch in Austin’s suburbs, the memory gets under Armstrong’s skin.

 
‘At the time it wasn’t a major disappointment, but looking back now,’ he says, ‘we should have just fought it out and sprinted for it . . .’

  Almost immediately after the stage finished, the war of words began. Armstrong was patronising, the Italian said, and he, Pantani, didn’t need charity. ‘Pantani does not need Armstrong to give him a victory,’ he said, grandly.

  Pantani was, Armstrong responded, a ‘shit-stirrer’.

  ‘No more gifts,’ Lance said ominously.

  When I remind him of that, Armstrong smiles, a little embarrassed by the memory. ‘Look, our relationship was never very good. I think primarily we didn’t get on, but there was also a lack of communication – he didn’t speak English, I didn’t speak Italian.

  ‘I mean, even if you could speak his language, my sense was that he would have been a hard person to communicate with. That’s not a criticism: he was just a complicated guy, but then, having said that, so am I. Put the two of us together, throw in a major language barrier, throw in a rivalry, and it’s a recipe for not working out.’

  Yet both of them wanted to somehow be reconciled. The next spring, brought together by Italian sportswriter Pier Bergonzi, Armstrong and Pantani met at the 2001 Tour of Valencia. ‘We went out and tried to sort things out, but Marco was a volatile guy. I admired his star quality, but, in the end, I didn’t really care if he liked me or not. I was on my own schedule and whether he was upset or not . . . well . . .’

  Armstrong pauses. ‘But when I was in France for the Day Ahead ride, in the summer of 2015, Bergonzi called me and said that Marco’s mum would like to meet with me. I was pretty surprised. Not trying to be a dick or anything, I said, “Why?” I was puzzled.

  ‘Bergonzi said, “She’d like to meet you, she cares about you, she’d just like to talk to you.” ’

  And maybe there was a memory too of a July day on the Ventoux, when, on the mountain he most feared, Armstrong clumsily tried to forge a bond with her troubled son, only for it to be misunderstood.