Seven Deadly Sins: My Pursuit of Lance Armstrong

by David Walsh

  After his individual time trial at Metz earlier in the day, Christophe Bassons watched television coverage of the leaders in his hotel room. They travelled at a speed he couldn’t believe, for the race against the clock had once been his own speciality. He was especially interested in Armstrong’s performance because their physiological profiles weren’t that different: same height, same weight, Armstrong’s VO2 Max was 83 to Bassons’ 85. Regarded as a key barometer of athletic potential, the VO2 Max is the maximum capacity of an individual’s body to transport and use oxygen. Yet when Antoine Vayer did the maths afterwards, he told Bassons that he would have finished 6 kilometres behind Armstrong if they’d started at the same time.

  On the night of Sestriere, Bassons and his teammates watched highlights of the American riding away from his rivals on the mountain and they were stunned by the ease with which he outdistanced them. They didn’t believe it. Bassons continued to tell every journalist who crossed his path that the doping culture had not gone away.

  His refusal to observe the code of silence was a challenge to the leaders in the peloton, especially the rider in the yellow jersey. Armstrong was more than happy to deal with the upstart.

  On the morning after his win at Sestriere, the yellow jersey decided the following day’s race should be sedate until the approach to the first climb. The patron has the right to do this and normally such decrees are strictly observed. But Bassons thought, ‘What the hell, I’m the black sheep anyway,’ and he launched his breakaway in defiance of the informal truce.

  With Bassons gone, Armstrong gave the nod to his US Postal teammates and they immediately pursued. It didn’t take long for them to recapture the breakaway and as they joined him Armstrong put his hand on Bassons’ shoulder indicating he had something important to say, as a mafia boss might when deciding to personally deliver the punishment.

  ‘What are you doing?’ asked Armstrong.

  ‘I’m making the race. I attack.’

  ‘You know what you’re saying to the journalists, it’s not good for cycling.’

  ‘I’m simply saying what I think. I have said there is still doping.’

  ‘If that’s what you’re here for, it would be better if you returned home and found some other kind of work.’

  ‘I am not going to leave when I haven’t changed anything. If I’ve things to say, I will say them.’

  ‘Ah, fuck you.’

  By this point Bassons’ own team had turned against him, believing they were being victimised by the peloton for his speaking out of turn. They told him he had to stop, he said he wouldn’t, but the pressure was beginning to tell. Two days after the dressing down, he left the team hotel in Saint-Galmier and abandoned the race.

  So that morning we left Saint-Galmier and the news that Bassons had abandoned was delivered on Radio Tour. The previous evening he’d cracked and, despite his fiancée Pascale and his friend Antoine pleading with him to remain, he couldn’t cope with the hostility coming from his fellow professionals. In the car I railed against the treatment he’d been subjected to, especially by Armstrong. Charles and Rupert agreed. John remained silent.

  Somewhere along the way to Saint-Flour we passed under a banner draped high across the road: FOR A CLEAN TOUR, YOU MUST HAVE BASSONS. Seeing that was the high point of my day.

  Before his bullying of Bassons, I considered Armstrong nothing more than a likely, almost certain cheater, one of a great number of professional cyclists still hooked up to the old doping drip. His treatment of Bassons revealed a nasty, almost sociopathic side to his nature.

  On the morning after Bassons left, there were various reports that quoted his fellow professionals. Sympathy for the departed one was virtually non-existent. ‘He wasn’t injured, so why did he go home?’ said one, and the general view was that he had behaved unprofessionally. It was an important moment for the Tour. The new patron had sent out a message: anyone who broke the law of silence would be dealt with.

  ‘Would a clean rider, one committed to sport without drugs, have treated Bassons as Armstrong has treated him?’ I asked in another car debate.

  ‘I don’t believe so,’ said Charles, in that measured way of his.

  We could hear the gentle flow of air up John’s nose.

  After successfully defending the yellow jersey through the Alps, Armstrong’s position seemed unassailable even with two days in the Pyrenees to come. With Bassons banished there would be no dissent from within, but the French newspapers were still holding back. Le Monde and Libération, perhaps the two most thoughtful, were derisive when not dismissive and L’Équipe’s most important writers – Bouvet, Rouet and Ballester – clearly didn’t believe.

  Because L’Équipe is part of the organisation that owns the Tour de France and because it gives so many pages each day to its coverage of the race, its refusal to warm to the championelect was significant. It was almost as if official recognition was being denied to the race leader. Armstrong felt it and a week before the end of the race he saw to Ballester in Saint-Gaudens, the last staging post before the Pyrenees.

  They knew each other as Ballester had been to Austin to interview Armstrong during his recovery from cancer. That friendship didn’t count for much in Saint-Gaudens as the rider held Ballester’s arm to draw him closer and then, loud enough for others to hear, said, ‘This journalist isn’t professional.’ Ballester was flabbergasted. ‘Hey, Lance, you can’t leave it at that. What’s this about?’ But Armstrong had disappeared into the US Postal team bus.

  That evening Armstrong called Ballester on his mobile phone, complaining that L’Équipe wasn’t being fair to him, and, like any good journalist, Ballester convinced the rider the best way to express his sense of injustice was in a one-on-one with the newspaper. They arranged it for the following day. Armstrong began by expressing his disappointment about what he saw as unfair treatment in the press. Ballester thought, ‘Fine, that’s part of the story,’ but he had some doping-related questions that would give the rider an opportunity to end the speculation.

  ‘Are you using any medical certificates?’

  ‘None,’ said Armstrong.

  ‘None at all? Not for corticosteroids or EPO?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Did you ever use this product to cure your cancer?’

  ‘No, never.’

  ‘Are you taking any medication to stop any return of your cancer?’

  ‘No, absolutely nothing. I just have to consult my oncologist, Dr Einhorn, once every four months.’

  Ballester is a tough, straight-to-the-point interviewer, utterly unfazed by the reputation of his interview subject. His piece on Armstrong wasn’t the hymn of praise normally sung to athletes on the cusp of their greatest triumph. Armstrong’s denials were convincing enough except for his insistence he had not been treated with EPO during his recovery from cancer, when he had. Under pressure, it seemed he couldn’t admit using EPO even when it was legal and proper to do so, and a normal part of cancer treatment.

  Jean-Marie Leblanc, the Tour de France organiser, was furious with Ballester for what he saw as unfair and overly aggressive questioning. Leblanc let Ballester know what he thought, complaining the interview read like a ‘police interrogation’. He also arranged a meeting with Rouet, the newspaper’s cycling editor.

  The following morning I met Rouet and he mentioned how upset Leblanc was with L’Équipe’s coverage of the race, especially its treatment of Armstrong. Had Rouet been working for a newspaper that was totally independent of the race, he might have listened to Leblanc’s complaints but they wouldn’t have got past his interior walls. This was different.

  He and Leblanc had once been colleagues and they were now still branches of the same tree. On a commercial level, the Tour is a godsend for the newspaper, as circulation and advertising rise during the month of July. And within the organisation, the Tour de France organiser was further up the food chain than the newspaper’s cycling editor.

  Sensing that Rouet had been shaken
by his conversation with Leblanc, I read every piece in the newspaper through the remaining five days and it wasn’t difficult to detect a shift in L’Équipe’s position. They were softer on Armstrong, more accepting of him as the Tour de France champion.

  I don’t know how much influence the Tour de France organiser was able to exercise over what appeared in L’Équipe, or what consequences (if any) were threatened or hinted at; but the questions were no longer phrased in headlines and the newspaper somehow seemed to suspend its disbelief. They never descended to cheerleading, and Bouvet, Rouet and Ballester stayed true to their disbelief, but no longer could you say, ‘L’Équipe doesn’t believe Armstrong.’

  I was learning lessons, and the first was that with a drugs story you know you are onto something when somebody in control warns you to stop and perhaps gently suggests you remember who puts the butter on your croissant.

  Almost ten years earlier, when Paul had quit the peloton and written Rough Ride, the chorus of disapproval from his old comrades was loud and aggressive. One of his old teammates tried to physically assault him. He had spat in the soup. Many of his new colleagues in the press tent weren’t a lot better. They were sipping from the same bowl.

  Armstrong’s last important challenge in the race didn’t come in the Pyrenees or in the individual time trial at Futuroscope on the penultimate day, but from an investigation by the journalist Benoît Hopquin of Le Monde that showed he had tested positive for a banned corticosteroid earlier in the race. Such drugs can be permitted under prescription, but Armstrong didn’t mention he had one when signing his doping control form. At a press conference in Saint-Gaudens, Hopquin asked what had happened.

  Without so much as a quiver of doubt, Armstrong pressed the ‘attack’ button and called Le Monde ‘the gutter press’ and then, turning on Hopquin, said, ‘Mr Le Monde, are you calling me a doper or a liar?’ The journalist was taken aback by Armstrong’s aggression, and every other journalist in the room remained silent, instinctively fearing any intervention would draw the wrath of Armstrong upon them.

  Le Monde would run the cortisone story saying he had tested positive, but the UCI quickly released a statement saying it was not a positive test, clarifying that it had received a prescription for the drug found in Armstrong’s urine and reminding journalists to exercise caution before writing about this story. In its communiqué, the UCI did not specify when it received the prescription from the US Postal team.12

  The Tour rolled on to Paris. And Lance Armstrong, for whom the years since his last Tour had been spent in part having a testicle, lung cysts and brain lesions removed from his body, showed not a hint of vulnerability. On the morning of the final stage, riders transferred by train from Futuroscope to Arpajan, south of Paris. Only three of us made that journey in the car as John got a one-on-one interview with Lance and travelled as his guest on the train.

  Already the story had divided the salle de presse, even split our little group of four. A Dutch journalist complained to me of the French: ‘There is no evidence and in Holland everyone gives Armstrong credit.’ I asked what if the suspicions of doping turned out to be true. He looked at me with pity. ‘Everyone knows Tour de France riders are doped. If you don’t accept that you shouldn’t be covering the sport.’ And we, the guys asking the questions, were the cynics?

  Armstrong’s control of the race was absolute and for a diminishing few in the press tent this was disturbing. For others their sense of admiration made any suspicions or questions a trespass. Some of those who knew the most about what we were seeing said the least.

  In my mind the pro-Lance masses were cheerleading a great sport all the way to the hospice. Close to Paris Jean-Marie Leblanc, God bless his commercial soul, declared that the Tour ‘has been saved’.

  On the day that the race entered the Avenue des Champs-Elysées, the headline on the story I wrote for the Sunday Times said, FLAWED FAIRYTALE. I was proud of that because, written back in London, it offered support that was hard to find on the race.

  ‘This has been no renaissance Tour,’ I wrote in the second paragraph of that Sunday Times story, ‘rather a retreat into the old ways of the peloton where doping is their business, not ours. Where the law of silence supersedes all others.’

  For the piece I had spoken to Dr Armand Mégret, head of the French cycling federation’s medical commission, and asked if he believed the Tour was racing at ‘deux vitesses’? ‘If by this expression you mean there are clean riders and others who are not clean, then the answer is yes, this is cycling at two speeds. Doping has not been eradicated.’

  In Gilles Delion I saw another Kimmage, an older Bassons. A 32-year-old veteran at the time, his innocence was taken a long time before but he had once been a young, talented and ambitious rider. In his first Tour he finished 15th, 21 places higher than Armstrong’s best in his first four, but Delion wouldn’t dope and his career meandered downhill.

  He was asked about the Tour of Renewal: ‘That makes me laugh. The renewal affects just one part of the peloton,’ he said. Writing about Delion, Kimmage or Bassons, I felt a lot better about my job as a sportswriter.

  As for readers of the Sunday Times, I hoped they would think a little before loving this new hero. ‘For too long sports-writing has been unrestrained cheerleading, suspending legitimate doubts and settling for stories of sporting heroism. Of course there are times when it is right to celebrate, but there are other occasions when it is equally correct to keep your hands by your sides.’

  That afternoon on the Champs-Élysées I had no desire to applaud the winner of the Tour de France.

  5

  ‘He’s not the messiah, he’s a very naughty boy.’

  Monty Python, The Life of Brian

  Americans who characterise the French as a nation of cheese-eating surrender monkeys have never met Pierre Ballester. If every one of us press-room trolls could be like Pierre I think that even Lance would respect us. He’s an impressive guy. We’ve done a lot of work together, a lot of work that I am proud of, but anybody who winds up working with Pierre feels like Garfunkel to his Simon.

  I liked the guy from the start: his sense of humour, his take on what journalism was about. We met during the 1993 Tour de France when he was working for L’Équipe and hit it off from the start. He’s serious about work, quick to serve up the scoop du jour, but less serious about life. He’s good fun over lunch, as a Frenchman should be, but then sharp and focused once he’s dialled into a story. What threw us closer as journalists was the fear and loathing on the 1999 Tour and our shared allergy to the official version of the Lance Armstrong story. The more spoonfuls of good news we were force fed by the UCI, Jean-Marie Leblanc and many of our friends in the media, the more prickly we became.

  At the centre of our difficulties was the enigma that was Lance Armstrong. There was a curious contradiction in the other riders’ view of Armstrong. Many in the peloton chain gang didn’t appreciate his Texan arrogance or his view of himself as a natural leader among men. Most, though, reckoned Lance to be a good thing for a sport that was still in intensive care after the Festina scandal. Just a year before, as Festina unfolded in all its Technicolor squalor, Armstrong was commentating on the Tour as many of the riders felt hounded by the police and alienated from their public. Now he was among them again, a good news story without the stain of ’98 upon him. The riders enjoyed the warmth from his halo as they rode in his slipstream.

  This view of him being good for the sport, a tonic for the Tour, became orthodox and was propagated by Tour organiser Leblanc, the sponsors, the UCI and the majority of the journalists. There was a moratorium on questions as the vested interests of cycling implored Lance to redeem the Tour and cleanse everybody with the sparkling pure waters of his urine samples.

  Lance was the saviour with additional feature benefits. He would blaze a trail towards El Dorado, the lucrative US market, and like filings to a magnet the public would be pulled back to cycling. They’d realise how much they loved the sport
and how they’d missed it. And they’d want to be part of this era because, well, Lance Armstrong was a damn good story.

  All of this was evident and many in the press room, as well as in the steamy world of cycling administration, were relieved that it was business as usual again. Cometh the hour, cometh the man, etc.

  Yet Pierre and I in our conversations found that we held the same view, borrowed from Monty Python’s Life of Brian. We wanted to tell the world, ‘He’s not the messiah, he’s a very naughty boy.’ Maybe it was a contrarian instinct in the face of so much hype, but I think that your visceral response remains yours, no matter what you are being told. That gut feeling is the only thing left after so much else has been taken. Journalists should always listen to what their gut is saying. Like me, Pierre didn’t believe in Armstrong. He’d had his doubts from way back. He could recall how uneasy he first felt after visiting Lance in Austin, Texas in November 1996, during his recovery from stage four testicular cancer. Now, on the 1999 Tour, Pierre’s gut was aching from too much déjà vu.

  Pierre is an especially fearless interviewer. He suffers from some sort of deference deficiency. He’s not arrogant but nobody impresses or intimidates him. The question-and-answer session with Armstrong that Tour organiser Jean-Marie Leblanc had depicted as ‘a police interrogation’ was a fine piece of journalism. What Leblanc disliked was what I liked. Pierre didn’t genuflect before the championelect. He didn’t coat the difficult questions with sugary moral cowardice.

  ‘Your critics claim that . . .’ blah, blah, blah.

  ‘How do you respond to those who . . .’ blah, blah, blah.

  ‘Is this experience being diminished for you by . . .’ blah, blah, blah.

  Pierre asked Armstrong if he’d used EPO. Straight question: yes or no? Pierre Ballester wanted to know. By virtue of asking that question, Pierre would put himself in Armstrong’s bad books, the library from which there is no escape. By proxy, Leblanc was infuriated. An injury to Lance is an injury to us all was the war cry of those who would protect the soup from journalistic expectorations.