by David Walsh
First he got rid of his fellow escapees but behind, the monster in the yellow jersey, Miguel Indurain had him in his sights. Chiappucci’s pace was too much for Indurain’s teammates, however, so the leader had to make his own pursuit, which evened things up. I loved the style and recklessness of Chiappucci, his Italian need to win on the day the race crossed into his country. This was bravura. This was the Tour offering us a late-twentieth-century epic. This was sport. This was why we came.
In cycling you cheer for the guy who, in the French expression, ‘makes the race’. But Chiappucci had been out there so damn long that we became fatalistic. These guys always get hauled in. The romance of the Tour is that there is no romance. It’s hard and it’s cruel and it’s crushing. On the climb to Sestrierre, Indurain was close enough to know that he could take Chiappucci. Whenever he wished.
In his pomp Indurain was as relentless and uncharismatic as one of the riders of the apocalypse.
His shadow would catch Chiappucci any second. And we knew that Chiappucci and his dream were dead. Indurain was going faster. Chiappucci had been hanging on for too long and Indurain knew what would happen when he bore down on an opponent. He would devour him like a python coming off a Lenten fast. Ciao Claudio.
And then this half-crazy Italian resurrected himself. Strength returned to his legs like a river undammed. The dreamer in you imagined that this was strength leased from his great Italian heart. He went again. There would be a happy ending after all. Chiappucci forged a small gap, increased it and got away from the monster through the last gruelling kilometres.
He won by 1.45 on a day so brutal that eighteen riders who finished outside of the time limit were eliminated. Victory wouldn’t be enough to win Chiappucci the Tour but his breakaway wasn’t about a place high on overall classification but about glory, a thing of beauty in itself. That day he gave us as grand and swashbuckling a race as we could ever hope to see. As sweet as it gets. Romance.
It sounds embarrassing now but I cried in the press room when Chiappucci found the strength to hold off Indurain. I couldn’t help myself as it was the most beautiful, romantic, heroic thing I’d ever covered. Courage beat calculation, as an athlete driven by the need to perform before his own people, transcended himself.
EPO and the weary cynicism it generates weren’t on our radar. I stood there and wept. Not alone either. This was why we loved the Tour. Why July in France could be the best month of your year, any year.
Four years later Chiappucci told an Italian judge Vincenzo Scolastico he had been using EPO since 1993 and, older, wiser, more cynical, I thought, ‘That’s convenient, Chiappa, your greatest ever performance happened just before you started doing EPO. Yeah, right.’ Chiappucci would later retract that admission, but what did it matter, he failed an EPO test before the 1997 Giro d’Italia and later that year was kicked off the Italian team for the World Championships because of an excessively high haematocrit, indicating EPO use.
And I could never see that late surge away from Indurain with the eyes that had originally seen it. That second wind, is that what EPO can do? Was that the first great EPO ride? The circus had turned us into the rubes and the dupes, the suckers and the mooks. And the romance of Fausto and Arduino was chemically shrunk. Happy tears in the salle de presse would be no more. Question everything. Ask what Mary and Joseph did with the gold.
4
‘A boo is louder than a cheer.’
Lance Armstrong
In 1999 Sestriere became a fork in the road for the press corps. Those who wanted to do journalism went one way; their old comrades took the other route. Things wouldn’t be the same for a long time.
Survey this 213km toil through the Alps. We begin at the ski station in Le Grande Bornand and then hit the climbs through the Col du Télégraphe laurelled already by storm clouds, onto the mighty Galibier (in 1911 when the Galibier was introduced to the Tour only three of the peloton didn’t get off their bike and walk), through the Maurienne Valley and then up the climb of Montgenèvre, before we finish with the 11km ascent to Sestriere.
Early in the day Armstrong’s US Postal teammates hauled the pack after them on the Col du Télégraphe, allowing their leader to focus on nothing but the wheel in front of him as they took care of the rest before hurtling down into the town of Valloire, recovering and going again on the early slopes of the Galibier.8
It is raining now. The peaks are dressed with freezing mist. Few things sap the morale of the pack quite like rain and mist and freezing cold. A shivering peloton rolls on. The lead group is down to ten, pursued by twelve more desperadoes a minute behind. Armstrong is with the front group. Comfortable.
Onto Montgenèvre and now only the strong survive. One from Armstrong, Alex Zulle, Fernando Escartin, Ivan Gotti and Richard Virenque will win. Armstrong still looks comfortable but, with his teammates no longer around him, you guess he will be happy to hang in there. As they descend from Montgènevre, Gotti and Escartin make their move. They get to Sestriere 25 seconds ahead of the rest.
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.
<
br /> 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 w
ith 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.
