Seven Deadly Sins: My Pursuit of Lance Armstrong

by David Walsh

  That disapproval wouldn’t have bothered Pierre one whit. It was more like winning an award. His Lance interview was a text-book example of how we should all get up off our knees and approach stars with a level gaze and honest questions. I drank it in and felt better, stronger.

  Pierre had asked the questions and because Armstrong wasn’t open and honest in his answers, there was a strong sense that we were looking at a young man whose obituary would one day state that he could ride but he just couldn’t hide. Pierre had merely done his job, but in a press tent crammed to dangerous levels with sycophants and time servers you wanted to hand over the Pulitzer there and then.

  We knew that the ’99 Tour de France was ushering in the reign of a great pretender but were powerless to do much about it. It wasn’t just the feeling that Armstrong had doped and won, what most rankled was the confederacy of cheerleaders which protected him: the UCI bosses who knew about the uniformly elevated haematocrit values, especially in the US Postal team, and decided that was a part of the story best kept secret; the journalists who saw poor Bassons being bullied out of the race and thought, ‘That’s okay, he’s only a small rider’; and the Tour de France organiser who decreed that Armstrong had ‘saved’ the Tour.

  Poor old Jean-Marie Leblanc. He had gone to Notre-Dame des Cyclistes to say a prayer for a saviour to appear on the 1999 Tour. He’d forgot to ask for the extra miracle he needed to persuade every agnostic in the house. Leblanc would need to do some pretty charismatic preaching to get Pierre and me to buy what he was selling.

  Pierre was so tired of the dishonesty that in one of our final conversations at the ’99 Tour he said that he would continue covering cycling but not like before. Every story from then on would in one way or another deal with doping, and if his newspaper didn’t allow him to do this, he would turn his hand to something more fulfilling.

  (I was reminded of the possibly apocryphal story of the journalist at the New York Times who went to his bosses and argued that he would only continue to cover the Olympic Games if every report bearing his byline concluded with an asterisk and the words, ‘None of the above reflects the beliefs of the writer.’)

  If you’d said to Pierre that doing only doping stories in cycling would hurt his career at L’Équipe, he would have shrugged and said, ‘Yeah and so what?’

  As for Pierre’s stubbornness, I loved him for it and felt a similar desire to do more investigating, to start writing more about doping. I went to a mirror and practised shrugging like a Frenchman.

  Linford Christie, the 100m Olympic champion from Barcelona, empathised with my situation. He reached out to me. Six months before, the previous February, he had competed at an indoor meeting in Dortmund, Germany, and had been randomly selected for dope control. His sample contained a level of the banned steroid nandrolone that was almost 100 times over the limit. At the time he was two months short of his 39th birthday. Those in Linford’s corner scoffed at the ludicrousness of it. ‘Do you really think that, with his career virtually over, he would endanger his reputation by taking nandrolone?’

  This was another version of the seemingly irrefutable Armstrong defence: ‘Do you really believe that after what he’s been through he would put banned drugs into his body?’ In both cases I thought, ‘Yes, actually, it’s entirely possible.’

  Christie was 38 but not running like an old man. Three weeks before the positive test, he’d done 6.57secs for 60m in Karlsruhe, his best start to the indoor season for six years. ‘It was the performance of runner-up Linford Christie which was really sensational,’ said the reporter for Athletics International at the meet. Such was his form that Christie struck a bet with a friend that he would run 6.5secs before the end of the season, something only three Europeans had done before, Christie being one of the three.

  After suffering through a Tour de France in which most of the leading contenders filled their tanks with undetectable EPO, this was a reminder that testing can sometimes work. Often just by dumb luck. But even when athletes test positive, it is startling to see a little cottage industry spring up manufacturing excuses for the offender. Search parties are sent out to scour the countryside for a loophole through which their man can escape. Doping is the great scourge; more testing is needed. Meanwhile it seems that only the innocent get caught.

  There were plenty of people in the UK athletics community who didn’t want to believe Christie had taken nandrolone. He was that most attractive of stars: half man, half media. His colleagues on the BBC’s panel of athletics experts, Roger Black, Steve Cram and Sally Gunnell, all supported him. Perhaps they should have spoken with Professor Wilhelm Schanzer, head of the IOC-accredited laboratory in Cologne, who had dealt with Christie’s sample.

  ‘I did not have to think too much about this case after I made the analysis,’ he said. ‘It was a very clear finding. If the concentration of the banned substance is low we have to do additional work to make sure what we estimate is correct. In this case there was no need for this. It is nearly correct to say the result was one hundred times greater than the permitted level. It was a clear, clear result.’

  It was good to write the Christie story and to ask why it took six months for the story to be made public. The tale only saw the light of day when an IAAF source leaked the information to L’Équipe. UK Athletics, who had been informed of Christie’s positive test in March, denied they had covered it up, saying they had to allow their disciplinary process to run its course. Their hand was forced by the leak. UK Athletics banned the former Olympic and World champion for two years.

  For the sportswriter determined to be more journalist than fan (and, let’s face it, keen to finish ahead of Sally Gunnell in the Sports Journalist of the Year Awards), the difficulty comes when you measure the toll that doping question takes on your enthusiasm.

  Armstrong wins the Tour de France but you’re sure he’s cheated, so that’s not much fun. The world goes all happy clappy and you stand there with a face like a slapped backside, shaking your head slowly. But if you observed closely, you weren’t alone. As the stampede to turn the water of maillot jaune into the wine of sporting salvation passed by in a cloud of dust and cheering, the Italian Vincenzo Santini also stood to one side: ‘I hope that the governments and the cycling authorities can find a way out of the mess that cycling is in. Until that happens we can forget the joy of the victory.’

  Back in England an ageing Olympic champion sprinter can also forget the joy of victory because he is due to take receipt of a two-year suspension.

  As for me I’m off to sunny Spain, to beautiful Seville for the World Athletics Championships. I’m hoping that this will re-energise me. Give me back the old enthusiasm, restore some belief. Lately I’ve found myself sitting morosely in the corner of bars as people celebrate and snog and sing. I have a little sign in front of me, beside my drink. It says Beware. Man With Too Many Questions.

  Sadly, when I hit Seville there is only one story in town: Merlene Ottey’s exclusion following a recent drug test, another nandrolone positive, has got there before me. It’s so tiring carrying a head full of questions everywhere. Especially questions about Merlene Ottey, the queen of Jamaica, who will one day become the Queen of Slovenia. She is glamorous, beautifully athletic and at this point in her career, she is a 39-year-old with eight Olympic medals and still competing at the very highest level. She is immensely likeable. And four days before the start of Seville, she has announced that she has tested positive for nandrolone. Oh, say it ain’t so, Merlene, say it ain’t so.

  So, in the same month, two 39-year-old sprinters, one an Olympic gold medallist in the 100m and the other an eight-time medallist at the Olympics, are dealing with the fall-out from positive drug tests.

  And no matter how many times you tell people that you are a sportswriter the response is the same, ‘Oooh, I would love to do your job.’ And it feels churlish to argue. When everybody is celebrating it feels odd sometimes to be wondering if it’s natural for a sprinter to be so competitive when
he or she is crowding forty?13 The easy choice would be to suspend the disbelief and go with the flow. Let this be mere entertainment, not sport. Release sport of all the burdens you place on it just by loving sport and believing in sport and wanting to be inspired by sport. In Seville this means trying not to remember that the new women’s 200m world champion Inger Miller has knocked 0.3secs off her best time in the final. Better to forget too that earlier in the year Miller tested positive for caffeine.

  In the midst of the debate over Ottey’s positive, Marion Jones came to her rival’s defence. With friends like Marion . . .

  ‘I don’t think I’m one hundred per cent sure that it’s the correct testing procedure. Over the last couple of weeks our beautiful and lovely sport has been marred by all of this.’14

  Thanks Marion. See you at the drive for five.

  I watched Michael Johnson run majestically in the 400m, Hicham El Guerrouj’s brilliance in the 1500m and Maurice Greene winning the 100m, but I was no longer the kid enraptured by the Kip Keino–Jim Ryun rivalry or the young man once riveted by Steve Ovett and Seb Coe. After the men’s 1500m final in Seville my poor brain was boiling with questions. I wondered why third, fourth and fifth were all Spaniards and all had run 3.32. Was I dreaming? Were they making drugs now that didn’t just make people run faster but made them all run precisely the same time?

  Encountering an IAAF official, I mentioned how unlikely this was.

  ‘Do you think I believe it?’ he asked.

  So I settled for writing about Paula Radcliffe with her bobbing head, her grimacing face, and the plucky red ribbon pinned to her GB vest. The ribbon was a call for more anti-doping action from the authorities, namely the introduction of blood tests, but my attraction to Radcliffe was down to the sense that she could be trusted. She ran her heart out to finish second to the Ethiopian Gete Wami and collapsed a few yards beyond the finish line. Radcliffe’s exhaustion recalled the athletics of our childhood, sport more human and easier to identify with.

  I asked her about the decision to wear the ribbon. ‘It was building up inside me,’ she said. ‘I was training my guts out, making all the sacrifices and asking myself, “Do I want to be doing this if I am getting nowhere?” I didn’t accuse anybody but I sensed women were following the men into using drugs. And I hated the idea that people might be asking, “What’s she on?”’

  In January 2000, separate investigations into doping in sport were taking place in the Italian cities of Turin, Bologna, Ferrara, Venice, Trento and Brescia. Two of the investigations involved athletes that interested me. In the inquiry into the Ferrara-based doctor, Professor Francesco Conconi, Ireland’s Tour de France winner Stephen Roche was listed among twenty-three riders in what would be called ‘the EPO file’.

  Equally intriguing was Kevin Livingston’s involvement with another Ferrara-based doctor, Michele Ferrari, who was being investigated on suspicion of doping cyclists. Livingston was Lance Armstrong’s most trusted lieutenant on the US Postal team in the 1999 Tour and his involvement with Ferrari raised important questions.

  The Sunday Times agreed I should go to Italy and see what I could find out. It was a good trip, made memorable by an interview with Fulvio Gori, a likeable Italian policeman who worked for NAS, the Italian anti-drug squad, in Florence. Gori sat behind a big desk in an office that was more like a small warehouse, with floors covered with boxes of files. He was a portly, amiable man who laughed at the slightest excuse and kept a photo on the wall of the amateur football team he coached. Trying to get a handle on doping in cycling was the worst part of his life.

  ‘In this investigation,’ he said, ‘I have interviewed almost thirty cyclists, brought them into this office, sat them down and not from one of them did I get co-operation. They tell nothing about what they do.’

  In May 1996, the Carabinieri discovered that a pharmacy in Tuscany had been selling large quantities of EPO to professional cyclists. They didn’t need Sherlock Holmes to figure that the riders were re-stocking their supplies for the Giro d’Italia later in the month. So the Carabinieri in Florence decided they would pay a surprise visit to the Giro to see if they could find some of that EPO.

  That year the Giro began in Greece, spent three days there before making a ferry crossing to Brindisi, and the police plan was to arrive as the team cars were coming off the ferry. ‘Here we were,’ said Gori, ‘driving from here to Brindisi, eight hundred kilometres. I am reading La Gazzetta, my feet up on the dashboard, and I come across a tiny story on one of the cycling pages. It says, “The police are planning a surprise visit to the race in Brindisi where they will check the team cars for drugs.” I struck the dashboard with my fist. I was so angry, angry, angry.

  ‘How did they know? Why was it printed in the newspaper? It made us more determined. I swore from then on we would never let them go.’

  Knowing the Carabinieri were coming, some team cars came the long way home, overland through Albania, Montenegro and Croatia before re-entering Italy from the north. Other teams opted to dump their stashes of drugs into the sea. After Gori and his partner made the long journey back to Florence, not having found even a trace of a banned substance anywhere, their office-bound colleagues were waiting for them: ‘We hear there are enormously big fish, with great stamina, swimming across the Adriatic Sea.’ Gori wasn’t amused.

  Bike riders not telling journalists about their doping is to be expected, but it was a surprise to learn from Gori that the Italian riders felt they could bring their omerta into a Florence police station. At the time doping was not a crime in Italy and they could stonewall Gori and his colleagues with impunity. Somehow they had come to think of themselves and their secret culture as separate from the outside world, beyond the reach of the law.

  Rather than be mindful that the doctors who advised them to take banned substances and the pharmacies who sold them were both breaking the law, they felt honour-bound to protect their suppliers.

  Fulvio Gori was a relatively young man, early 40s, married, no kids. Thirteen months later he died from cancer. Partly because he was taken so prematurely, the time spent with him remains a vivid memory.

  Stephen Roche’s involvement with Conconi was a difficult story as Roche and I went back a long way. He’d retired six years before but the files related to the last two years of his career. He was in the file under his own name but also under aliases, two of which were Rocchi and Roncati.

  Roche’s career had been highly successful and in 1987 he won the Giro d’Italia, Tour de France and World Championships, a treble previously achieved only by the legendary Eddy Merckx. Before this connection with Conconi, Roche had never been linked with doping. I had written his official autobiography, The Agony and the Ecstasy, in 1987, and though we were not close friends we had remained very friendly.

  While writing his book, I had stayed at his home in Paris, and at his then in-laws’ holiday home in south-west France; we’d spent a lot of time in each other’s company. Ringing him about this story wasn’t an easy call. He was relatively calm: ‘I met Conconi once; after that I did all my blood tests for our team doctor, Giovanni Grazzi. I know Grazzi was based at the University of Ferrara [as was Conconi] and it’s possible that’s how we ended up in Conconi’s files.’

  He was trying to say it was all a mix-up. ‘My haematocrit was forty-six or forty-seven when I raced; forty-four when I rested, and it never went above those levels,’ he said, perhaps unaware that haematocrit drops when one races, rises during periods of rest.

  I asked Roche why Conconi had used aliases. ‘I asked Grazzi the same question and he told me it wasn’t that unusual for code-names to be used for high-profile athletes.’

  But why?

  As Roche had once been a national treasure in Ireland and remained a high-profile former champion, the story that he may have doped caused a stir. I knew there would be blowback. Just not how much.

  Let me explain something.

  There are only two types of people in Ireland, though at thi
s stage it would be hard to tell which is in the minority. There are those who watch The Late Late Show. And there are those who have been on The Late Late Show. In 2002 I was promoted to the latter group.

  The Late Late Show has been the crucible for many of the debates which have shaped Irish society down through the years, but as the presenters have changed and become more wooden so the format has had to be adjusted to something more safe and predictable. Still, the programme has always retained some of the cachet of its heyday. It still tries to mix the responsibilities of being a national forum with the requirements of light entertainment. The show still has a ‘here comes everybody’ feel to it.

  The call to appear on The Late Late Show isn’t unlike an invitation to Buckingham Palace. It is expected that you be undemanding and a little awestruck. You should dress nicely, arrive sober and try to fit in with the royals no matter what they suggest. Here was what The Late Late Show suggested to me as the format for a ‘debate’ with Stephen Roche on the issue of drugs following my disclosure of his name on the Conconi files. It would be a production starring Stephen Roche as the wronged party. Stephen would come out first to sit and be interviewed with respectful stiffness by our host Pat Kenny. After a while the subject of drugs would be introduced and, lo, the camera would swing around and there, sitting in the audience like a malevolent stalker, would be me.

  And I would have to account for myself and the things that I had written about a man who wasn’t in the audience, a man who had attained sufficient celebrity within Irish society as to be an actual guest on The Late Late Show. And Pat Kenny and Stephen Roche would face me down and people in the seats either side of me would look uncomfortable being seen in the company of such a kook. So I declined that invitation.