by Ned Boulting
We needn’t have worried. Within minutes, Woody was pinning a microphone on Baden Cooke, and his roommate Brad McGee. These weren’t just any old riders. Cooke showed me his collection of green and white jerseys, all packed away in his suitcase. McGee trumped that by laying out a clutch of yellows on his bed. And being Aussies, once they saw the red light for ‘record’ blinking on the front of the camera, they couldn’t resist a bit of showing off. So we even got our banter. TV requires banter, you see. It’s a necessity.
This strange encounter had all taken place in a tiny, hot room. The two riders shared this limited space in an airless hotel in the foothills of the Pyrenees, and they had sacrificed what little privacy they might have enjoyed to oblige a British TV crew. By the time we left them it was nearly eleven and they had to try and prepare for the next day’s stage. We took our shoes off, and padded down the corridor.
So it is that, half-guest, half-pest, we go about our half-welcomed, half-intrusive business, unsure of where we stand or how far we can push our luck. The Tour de France has a knack of keeping you in a state of perpetual uncertainty.
But at least it isn’t sterile.
INTRODUCING ARMSTRONG
‘Lance. If I bet a hundred dollars that you would one day be President of the USA, would I be wasting my money?’ I posed the question on the eve of the 2005 Tour. I wasn’t being sycophantic; I was just curious.
His answer was archetypal Armstrong. He picked me out from a very big crowd of journalists in a hall, paused for a moment, and then spoke slowly.
‘I have no plans to move into those circles.’ He paused. Everyone at the press conference thought he was finished. ‘But if the bet wins, do I get my cut?’
I’ve kept that tape, just in case.
I first glimpsed Lance Armstrong in 2003 at the centre of a scrum of camera crews, snappers and reporters that had formed around him in the blink of an eye. The whole ridiculous fleshy circle was drifting across the open expanse of an empty exhibition hall in Paris like a cyclone inching its way over the Atlantic. At the eye of the storm was Armstrong, small but in very clear command, despite the chaos raging around him.
I was astonished by the scale of the interest in him. I had only marginally heard of this man just a few weeks prior to arriving on my first Tour. Now I had come face to face with the insatiability of the media’s appetite for Armstrong, and I couldn’t believe it. I had been given my instructions to get some shots of his arrival at the hall in Paris where the Tour had set up shop two days before the start of the race. I had naively imagined being able to sit him down, one-on-one for a few minutes, to introduce myself formally and to start to build some sort of working relationship with the man whose endeavours were about to shape the pattern of my first three weeks on the Tour.
What I hadn’t envisaged was getting a thick ear from a Flemish photographer and my toes stamped by an Italian radio presenter.
Armstrong, in 2003. Madness in a moment.
The man himself looked almost a little amused by the insanity enveloping him. Down the years I have often felt this. That he has been quietly delighted by the absurdity of the scenes that unfold before him day after day on the Tour. Television crews will stop at nothing to be the first ones to thrust a microphone under his nose. Radio’s no different. Everyone wants a bit of him and, this being the Tour, you can get close enough to take a bit, too. Yet, to me, he remains uncompromised, aloof. Not haughty, just amused.
On the 2009 Tour, the first year of Armstrong’s much-hyped comeback, Matt Rendell found himself in pole position in the most almighty bundle that formed within seconds of the American’s Astana team completing the team time trial. This time, rather than the conventional scrum, Armstrong had disappeared into the heart of a moving mass of bodies. The whole seething entity was proceeding at jogging pace. Armstrong, in the middle, was flanked by a dozen CRS French riot police, who were in turn encased, like the core of a Scotch egg, by an outer layer of reporters and cameramen. At the front of this absurd sight, Matt’s cameraman John was running backwards, filming, while Matt, attached to him by a microphone, was being lifted off his feet by the ever-tightening circle of bodies. At the point at which he lost all contact with the ground and was literally being carried aloft, he caught Armstrong’s attention. Instead of framing an insightful enquiry about the General Classification, he beamed broadly and launched into the best question ever asked of Lance Armstrong: ‘Lance, doesn’t this ever strike you as completely ridiculous?’
Armstrong, caked in the drying sweat from a roasting Montpellier sun, smiled the briefest of smiles. ‘Yeah, well. It does make me miss lying on the beach with a beer.’
Indeed.
In 2004, for some odd reason, we started calling him Larry. Not that he was ever aware that he had acquired a new nickname. We certainly never said it to his face. No, we were far more subtle than that. We said it behind his back.
It’s hard to remember just how the name Larry stuck. Certainly there was an element of debunking about it. Lance sounds epic; Larry just sounds suburban. But actually, it had more to do with his relationship with the singer Sheryl Crow. After his marriage to Kristin, his first wife, fell apart, he hooked up with Sheryl. I understood that she was famous on a global scale, and had been responsible for the ‘sun coming up on the Santa Monica Boulevard’ but we all kept forgetting her name. I was convinced she was called Shirley. I still think she should be. And Larry would be just right for Shirley.
As luck would have it, we were allocated the Novotel on the outskirts of Liège as our hotel for the two days prior to the start of the 2004 Tour. Sheryl Crow, Lance Armstrong and the rest of the US Postal Team were staying in the same hotel. It was the first and only time we were ever billeted in the same place. It worked out pretty well, at least for us.
After twenty-four hours, and largely due to Matt Rendell’s blossoming relationship with Armstrong, we had secured an exclusive sit-down interview with Crow, or Sheryl, as I kept intoning to myself to stave off the awful, but very real danger of slipping up and calling her Shirley.
When the hour came, we set up the camera in the appointed room and waited for the lady to arrive. Which she did, right on time. There was little that I remember from that interview save for one quote.
‘I think it’s incredible, just getting out and meeting people, particularly in France, how much love there is for Lance Armstrong. How they just totally love the man.’
I felt a judder from behind me, as John, who was shooting the interview tried to control a fit of cynicism.
After the interview, Woody posed for a photo with Crow, presumably because he didn’t often get the opportunity to be seen next to people shorter than him, and we all said thanks and went our separate ways.
Later that evening, we were all caught in the lift together: Matt, John, Woody, Larry, Shirley and I. Armstrong said something nice about Matt’s latest book to Sheryl. Then the banter subsided, and we all started not concentrating on what her name wasn’t. It was a long twenty seconds.
There is an aura that surrounds Armstrong. I have known three men in my life who have possessed it in equal measure. Sir Alex Ferguson, Lance and the headmaster of my secondary school, C.I.M. Jones (I never knew what the C stood for, let alone the I and the M). When Larry left the Tour for the first time in 2005, he took some of the race with him, and diminished its standing by his absence.
In 2007, when we reached Paris for the final stage, there were rumours spreading like wildfire that Lance was in town, ending a two-year absence from the Tour. The retired champion had, seemingly, arranged with the US TV Network OLN to take a ten-minute turn in the commentary box alongside their regular team.
Now this was remarkable news. ASO (the Tour organisers) and Armstrong were like a newly divorced couple, enjoying the freedom after their years of mutual dependence. An uneasy cohabitation during his racing years: France never really took to the American, and the feeling was often mutual. Suffice to say, when Armstrong decided to dr
op in on the Champs-Elysées, as far as the Tour was concerned, he wasn’t welcome.
To this day, we don’t know how he did it, but there was talk that he’d smuggled himself onto the race in the back of a Discovery Channel team car. I wouldn’t rule it out either. Like José Mourinho who, it was claimed, jumped into a laundry bin, threw towels over himself and was wheeled into the Chelsea dressing room to circumvent a UEFA ban, Armstrong has always had a showman’s ego.
So, there I was on the Champs-Elysées, tipped off about Armstrong’s imminent arrival, waiting for at least an hour at the back of the commentary truck with a cameraman. Facing the wrong way. Inevitably.
By the time I’d noticed him, he’d stolen a march on both of us and we were charging to get past him so that I could fire in a question. John and I were now running backwards, fast. After a two-year abstinence from chasing the Armstrong sound bite, I was suddenly back in business.
‘Welcome back to France, Lance. Have you missed it?’ I thrust the mic in his direction, still trotting backwards.
I never heard his answer, because suddenly I was lying flat out among the TV cables and the dog shit, having tripped on the root of a tree.
I did, however, see him stepping politely over me, offering an apologetic smile, edged with a veneer of amusement.
Later that day, just as Armstrong was completing his stint for OLN, there was a sudden loss of power to their commentary box. All their communications went down. To this day, no one has been able to explain why it only affected the Americans, but needless to say, the conspiracy theories have been entertaining.
I have other memories of Armstrong, which are more dignified than falling over in front of him. At home above my desk, I have framed the front page of L’Equipe from 12 July 2003. The headline reads ‘Armstrong, oui mais’. The picture beneath shows Armstrong in yellow for the first time that Tour, answering questions in front of a forest of microphones at the summit of Alpe d’Huez. He looks, if not jubilant, then careworn. I am in the picture too, straining forward to catch his eye and get my questions heard. Behind us, the unnatural blue of the Alpine summer sky lights the scene with infrared intensity.
This is how I often remember Armstrong. It was my first Tour, and my first exposure to his nature. The climb that day had been won by Iban Mayo, who had attacked and ridden away from the bunch. Further down the switchbacks of the famous mountain, Armstrong had been furiously repelling attack after attack from riders like Tyler Hamilton and Joseba Beloki. He neutralised them all. After the podium protocol, he stood in front of us, empty with the effort, his eyes almost betraying tiredness, as he questioned his rivals, ‘Are they racing the Tour?’ he wondered. ‘Or are they racing me?’
The grip he held them in. By the end of his reign, during the fag end of the drab 2004 and 2005 Tours, his power in the peloton was unquestionable. No stage was gifted, no breakaway allowed, no lesser rider accorded his hour on the stage without the volition or at least tacit permission of the champion.
Since the races themselves were among the dullest Tours, we spent much of the time on the sniff for something else to talk about other than the castration of the opposition: a fading Jan Ullrich, about to be discredited; Ivan Basso, a good friend of Armstrong and too close to him for anything other than what looked like a rather neutered challenge; Tyler Hamilton and Floyd Landis, former teammates who were ekeing out the embarrassing final chapters of their careers.
And so it was that we leapt on a little scandal which played itself out over the closing days of the 2004 Tour, a race that was decided even before Jean-Marie Leblanc had penned the word ‘Paris’ on the route map. It was revealing, in that it threw Armstrong’s true nature into sharp relief.
Filippo Simeoni was a rider with a problem. A tall, awkward, emotional man with a decent, albeit doping-tainted, career both behind and before him. He was riding out the end of an anonymous Tour in the garish colours of the completely underwhelming Domina Vacanze team. On Stage 18, he fancied a bit of the action.
Simeoni had previous form. After admitting to doping offences a couple of years prior to that, he had testified in an Italian court that Dr Michele Ferrari had, on a number of occasions, prescribed him EPO. Ferrari had worked closely with Lance Armstrong. This testimony naturally enough reflected badly on the Texan, who reportedly denounced Filippo as a liar. Simeoni promptly started proceedings against him for defamation. Brave, especially when you have to spend three weeks alongside the man, riding to the edge of collapse, up and down mountains in the searing summer sun. Armstrong counter-sued but in the end both men withdrew their cases.
That day six riders broke away, not one a threat to Armstrong’s lead. Nor was Simeoni when he attacked and rode across to the break. But the yellow jersey was enraged. He tore off the front of the bunch, hammered across to the breakaway, and informed them that he would stay there for as long as Simeoni was part of their number. Behind them on the road, T-Mobile, the team of Jan Ullrich, had to react and, unsure of how this might play out, they hit the front and started to bring the race back together again.
The original six pleaded with Simeoni to relent. Eventually, wordlessly, the Italian sat up, and dropped away, Armstrong alongside him. T-Mobile called the chase off, and as the bunch swallowed up the two riders, Simeoni fell back through the peloton and, it is said, was spat at repeatedly.
Nothing and no one moved in those years without Armstrong’s say-so.
At the finish line, the story of what had happened was tearing through the media village. We were trying to get our accounts straight, each of us running through the dense undergrowth of high voltage cables coiled around the hundreds of broadcast vehicles, snatching a rumour from the Dutch, a fact from the Danes and a tip-off from the Italians. The chatter had thrown up a story, which, if confirmed, would give some more substance to the Simeoni feud.
Back in April of that year, it was rumoured, during the Tour of Georgia, Lance Armstrong’s people had contacted Mario Cipollini, the pantomime-camp king, flamboyant sprinter and leader of the Domina Vacanze team, and asked him in no uncertain terms to make sure that Simeoni was not part of the Tour roster. This would have been a preposterous intervention. A grudge is one thing, but this would have taken it into very uncomfortable territory.
The reason that we, in the media, were drawn to this story was simple enough. There was in those years an unspoken sense that we were all subject to the Armstrong Orthodoxy. He was big news. And as a result of his endeavours year on year, the Tour grew bigger. The bigger the Tour, the better our job prospects, our security. Why rock the boat?
This issue, though, enabled us to touch on controversy; to hint at a different way of reporting on Armstrong. We had bitten our lips, buried our more cynical instincts, but this suggestion of bully-boy tactics on the part of Armstrong worked as a pressure valve. We were letting out a little air, without running the risk of a full-blown puncture.
By now the breakaway had been whittled down to three riders who were passing under the flamme rouge, which signifies that a kilometre is left to go. They were sweeping towards the finish line near the Place de la Liberte in Lons-le-Saunier. A twenty-six-year-old Spanish domestique named Juan Miguel Mercado outmanoeuvred his nearest rivals to win the stage. To this day, that is the greatest result of his racing career. He sailed across the finish line, arms aloft, pursued by a camera team from RTB Belgian TV, but obdurately ignored by the rest of us who smiled apologetically at him before returning our attentions to the sinuous run-in, in the hope of snatching Armstrong the moment he arrived.
We waited for eleven minutes and twenty-nine seconds, the history books tell me, before Thor Hushovd announced the arrival of the main bunch by winning the sprint. Behind him, and flanked as ever by his guardsmen Hincapie and Beltran, came Armstrong, left leg extended on the pedals as he drifted in.
The scrum ensued. An undignified tangle of cables and lenses. Armstrong looked grim, as he studiously ignored us all, which wasn’t hard since no one was actuall
y addressing a question at him. Yes, microphones and cameras were thrust in his face as he jostled his way through us to the podium area, but not a single question came his way. Instead, we fought among ourselves. I trod on the ankle of a French radio reporter; German TV tried to wheel the shopping trolley that houses the generator for their wireless TV signal through the pack of sweating and stressed journalists; Norwegian writers went elbow to elbow with a Basque snapper. It was laughable. Only the main man wasn’t laughing.
He disappeared through a gap which appeared miraculously in the barriers, sending the whole ghastly entourage sprinting 150 metres round the outside of the compound to the official media area. All this was played out to the sarcastic applause of the watching public, whose scorn I understood. I would have laughed too. At the mixed zone we waited for his officially sanctioned appearance. This was in no doubt. The wearer of the yellow jersey, along with that day’s stage winner and all the other jersey holders, are obliged by the Tour organisers to make themselves available for interview. Even Armstrong.
Most days he obliged us, and would only shirk his responsibilities when there really was nothing to say. This was his fourth day in yellow, having memorably loaned it out to Thomas Voeckler for ten days in the middle of the Tour. This close to the end of the Tour, and after relatively few days as wearer, the sense of routine had not yet settled in, and there was still much to talk about. Not least, of course, his extraordinary spat with Simeoni. Armstrong’s not a shirker, we thought to ourselves. He would come.
He didn’t. We waited till the protocol was done with. However, as the uninspiring strains of the Tour’s ponderous anthem cranked up for the final time over the PA system to close out the ceremonials, we caught sight of the leader of the Tour de France hopping on his Trek bike and making for the exit to the compound. Like a plague of accredited locusts, we took flight and ran after him.
