Seven Deadly Sins: My Pursuit of Lance Armstrong

by David Walsh

  Sadly, it is we sportswriters who are often the most willing promoters of that pretence.

  From about that time, Sandro started to devote more time to educating young athletes and their coaches about sport’s ethics. I don’t doubt he can achieve more in education than in fire-fighting.16

  As we became friendly, trust grew and he helped me find a way through Italy’s doping corridors. It was through Sandro that I met the good-humoured policeman, Fulvio Gori, in Florence and I better understood the measure of what we face when we examine doping in any sport. It isn’t just the perversion of sport, the abuse of the health of athletes, the duping of spectators: it is a business.

  When I hear journalists moan about there being no point in asking questions or digging into the background of events which don’t feel or look right, my sympathy is short. Not because I see myself as some sort of super ferret digging and digging, but because usually the answers aren’t buried that deep. And usually somebody has been there before you, asking the right questions.

  While I was still young and in love with Sean Kelly and the mythology of the peloton, Sandro was there at the beginning of the events which now make up a perfect timeline for modern, privatised cheating. At one stage we liked to think that doping programmes were something which ambitious nation states carried out along with five-year plans and mass military manoeuvres. Thirty years ago though, we freed the world so that anybody could stake out their own private piece of duplicity.

  When Sandro met Francesco Conconi for that chat back in 1981 (his introduction to the doping cave, as he called it), the world was a more innocent place. There were men like Conconi out there, however, who were willing to change that. Pioneers you might say.

  For a warning about the possible complicity of the authorities in any organised scheme of cheating, you just have to look at the names and administrators who were too close to Conconi. Mario Pescante, one of the world’s top sports administrators, failed to act on the first EPO dossier. The late Primo Nebiolo, who went on to become the head of world athletics, badgered Sandro Donati to go along with Conconi’s blood-doping programme.

  Prince Alexandre de Mérode, once the IOC’s doping czar, appointed Conconi to the IOC medical committee and helped fund Conconi’s supposed research into a test to detect the use of EPO. The IOC-accredited Anti-Doping Laboratory in Rome was working to establish just how long it took traces of banned drugs to disappear from the urine samples of the individual athletes.

  This information and more was all out there. All you had to do was draw your finger along the line and marvel at how Sandro Donati had stayed sane while travelling through the bizarre landscape of corrupted sport. He laughs when recalling the pleasure of being drawn back into the fold in the early nineties to become head of CONI’s research department (Settore Ricerca e Sperimentazione). Now, Sandro, we’d like you to join our most earnest and high-powered scientific anti-doping committee. And, best of all, among your colleagues will be the eminent Prof. Conconi, whom we believe you already know. There it was all the time. Whatever we talked about, Sandro had been there, done that, bought the T-shirt and caught the reprimand.

  Digging? It was more a case of following the line of money and cheats and incompetents. We just had to go out and round up the usual suspects: sports run by confederations of dunces, athletes and agents on the make, doctors who had gone to the dark side. Sandro had already done the hard work in the trenches. He wasn’t bitter, but by the time I belatedly made his acquaintance he had become a little sceptical of journalistic enthusiasms.

  Still, a little company in the trenches was better than none. He offered guidance and encouragement. He made a wise point about the conflict of interests involved in media organisations becoming financially involved in the sports which they then cover. Cycling is the obvious example: the Giro d’Italia is run by the company that owns La Gazzetta dello Sport; the Tour de France by the company that owns L’Équipe; even Team Sky is sponsored by BSkyB which is part of News Corp, the ultimate owner of the Sunday Times. For the media to extract itself from that type of marriage would be difficult.

  But he finished our meal with some warm words of encouragement, a reminder that strving for an ideal didn’t have to be embarrassing in this jaded, irony-sated world. If you were a journalist you had a professional obligation to be honest and to keep the public fully and correctly informed.

  That was a chastening thing to hear, but encouraging too. The next step was to go and pick up the trail where Conconi had left off and his prize student Michele Ferrari had stepped in.

  Ferrari, I knew, worked with Lance Armstrong’s best friend and team-mate Kevin Livingston. It just seemed too unlikely that Livingston, one of life’s followers, would have gone to Ferrari of his own volition.

  I was a few steps behind Donati. Victor Frankenstein’s monster had a decent sense of humour. When he appeared before his creator he would introduce himself along the lines of, ‘Good evening, I am the Adam of your labours.’ When I think of Lance Armstrong and how he became the greatest pharmaceutical panata the peloton had ever seen, I see Michele Ferrari as Frankenstein. I’m not sure either would object.

  ‘Yo, Michele, I’m Lance, the Adam of your labours, dude.’

  Imagine then the poignant scene unfolding early one morning on the doorstep of an understated villa amid a copse of trees just outside the dusty but elegant university town of Ferrara, in the moments after a parcel courier raps on the oak door. It’s June 2000 and Michele Ferrari, still in his dressing gown, signs for the package with a smile. Amazon, bless their .com hearts, have sent him the advance copy he had ordered of Lance Armstrong’s groundbreaking book, It’s Not About the Bike. Gleefully he tears the sturdy cardboard wrapping apart, gazes for a fond instant at the familiar handsome face leaning toward him on the front cover. And though Michele Ferrari is not a man who needs the roar of the crowd, he has wondered how he will be listed in the index.

  Under the Fs? Probably. Ferrari, Michele, debt to, genius of, teachings of, etc.

  Maybe the Ks. Kahuna, the Big, wisdom of.

  Or maybe the Ms. Michele, friend, trainer, go-to man.

  Possibly the Ss. Schumi, affectionate name for Michele.

  He doesn’t usually allow himself to be disappointed by people, but right now Michele Ferrari is deflated. A book about his greatest creation and it contains no index. Lance, I didn’t just tell you what EPO would do, how you’d beat the tests, I gave you the numbers. No index. So he must scan the book chapter by chapter, his eyes sprinting from page to page, seeking Ferrari, Michele or even Schumi. But there is nothing. Rien! Nichts! Nada! NIENTE!

  You work with a guy for five years, making him. And now this? Nothing from the Adam of your labours. In a book specifically titled, It’s Not About the Bike?

  It’s a lonely world on the dark side of doping.

  In the peloton, Michele Ferrari is much spoken about and seldom seen. From time to time he will ghost in and out of a team’s hotel, but it is said he disguises himself. Mostly his work is done in his nondescript camper-van when a stage has finished and his clients slip in a car, pull shades over their eyes and their baseball hat right down. We know that sometimes he will take a call from Lance’s directeur sportif, Johan Bruyneel, wondering if the rival who’s broken clear in the mountains can maintain his current pace.

  We know if a rider is Italian he may refer to Ferrari as Il Mito, The Myth. Or, if the rider is American, he may use the name which Armstrong himself minted: Schumi. As in Michael Schumacher and the Italian car he once drove, Ferrari. We know too that Ferrari is important in the timeline. Or bloodline. Conconi begat Ferrari. Ferrari begat Lance. And Lance can be the creator of a new generation of dopers.

  Everything we know is stuff that Michele Ferrari would prefer for us not to know. Ferrari rarely, rarely, gives interviews. He works largely in secret. When we speak about doping and all the shades of morality, hypocrisy, piety and fear surrounding the subject, Ferrari is the riddle at the centre
of it. We wonder about Michele Ferrari and men like him, the accommodations they have made. He stands on the far shore of the philosophical argument on doping, gazing across at us, perplexed at our concerns. Crazed zealots all hopped up with what Philip Roth called the ‘ecstasy of sanctimony’.

  Ecstasy never comes into it. It’s not about the sanctimony. Back when Sandro Donati educated me as to the chronology of serious privatised doping, he showed me the starting point as being the moment in the early eighties when Francesco Conconi decided that he would take the Finnish invention of blood doping and create a Mediterranean version.

  To examine how Lance became all that he would become, I would have to go back to my own starting point in his story. The kid I met in Grenoble in 1993 was brash and arrogant, certainly, but I doubt he had thought too much about needles and pills. A couple of hard, sobering years changed that. The 1994 season in particular provided a difficult education for all in Armstrong’s Motorola team.

  Who killed Lance in the Flèche Wallonne on that midweek afternoon in Belgium? The Gewiss boys: Argentin, Furlan and Berzin. And who created them? Ferrari. If you want to be the best you work with the best, and after that day there was one more Texan out there who was tired of having his ass kicked.

  It was Eddy Merckx, the old cannibal of the roads, who introduced them. Eddy’s son Axel had turned in a decent ride for Motorola in the Milan–San Remo classic in that spring of 1995. The only member of the team not embarrassed, he finished 21st. Axel wasn’t Eddy and 21st wasn’t bad. The guys knew that Axel was working with Ferrari.

  So Armstrong and Eddy spoke about Ferrari and Eddy made the call. Could Michele take a new client? Strong kid. You know, world champion in 1993. Ferrari resisted but, finally, in November 1995 Armstrong drove to the medieval town of Ferrara and met with Michele Ferrari. The meeting would change both their lives.

  Ferrari didn’t swoon when first presented with Armstrong. He was a strong physical specimen but too heavy. Those swimmers’ shoulders carried too much useless muscle. Yeah, maybe, he could snaffle the odd win in the one-day classics but that body wouldn’t survive a long tour.

  Still, when Ferrari put Armstrong through the tests he was encouraged. Not because he was anything special physiologically (he wasn’t), but he had a good attitude, he could deal with pain and, when they stopped testing, Armstrong asked the right questions. The best pupils are the ones who know how to learn. This one wanted to learn everything.

  Ferrari told Armstrong he could come back again. From then on they worked closely, with Armstrong regularly making the three-hour trip from Como to Ferrara. They had a training camp in San Diego early the following year. Ferrari came from Italy for that, and when Armstrong was struck down by cancer later in the year, they stayed in touch.

  With Livingston, Bobby Julich and Frankie Andreu, Armstrong returned to Europe in January 1997 for the annual launch of Cofidis, the French team for which he had signed. He also had a quiet visit with Ferrari, for they were friends now. Lance was declared clear of cancer in February 1997 and soon after began the long and slow climb back towards a career. Michele Ferrari had found the perfect canvas for the expression of his life’s work.

  Ferrari grew up in the traditional university town of Ferrara, a place of venerable old buildings and quiet piazzas transfused with the life students bring. Ferrari was a decent runner in his teenage years and won a 1000m national championship while still in school. He was good enough to have to make a choice. Academia or sports? He opted for education and stayed at home to study medicine at the local university.

  One of his professors was a man of similar interests. Dr Francesco Conconi and Ferrari would often run together before returning to work shoulder by shoulder in the laboratory. In 1981 Ferrari assisted as Conconi developed a simple field test, now known as the Conconi Test. The test permitted endurance athletes to determine their anaerobic threshold, essentially their maximum cruising speed.

  With the athlete on a treadmill, Conconi could measure his or her heart rate at varying rates of stress, recording on a data graph the heart rate on one axis and the speed on the other. The heart rate would increase in a roughly linear fashion until it hit a plateau. This point was called the anabolic threshold. The test would continue while the athlete went well past the threshold.

  The Conconi Test was considered a useful tool in better understanding the potential of endurance athletes, but far more exciting developments were afoot. Knowing a man’s capabilities is one thing, but having the means to take him well beyond that is quite another. Blood transfusions and later EPO were the way of the future and a group of doctors at the University of Ferrara were leading the way.

  They had to decide which side of the coming war they were going to be on. Ingeniously, Conconi opted to be on one side while pretending to be on the other. Ferrari was a different kettle of fish, with no wish to ever be seen on the side of the Establishment.

  By 1984 the sedate pace of university life had begun to pall with Ferrari. He’d enjoyed working with the Italian cyclist Francesco Moser, who set the world hour record in Mexico City in ’84. Everyone knew Moser was a friend and client of Conconi’s but they didn’t appreciate how involved Ferrari had been. It was then through Moser’s influence that he became team doctor for his Gis Tuc Lu.

  He continued to work as a team doctor until 1994, by which time he was with the Gewiss-Ballon team and making quite a name for himself. He saw himself more as a ‘prepatore’ (sports training coach) than as a medical doctor.17 Ferrari has spoken affectionately of those early days and his involvement with riders like Moser and the Swiss star Tony Rominger.18

  Moser and Rominger were strong characters, Ferrari’s preferred type, and he would recognise even more of this quality in Armstrong.

  By the early nineties, Ferrari had established himself as a high priest of performance enhancement. His reputation depended on who you were speaking to. Pro clients flocked to him and passed the word on quietly.19 Beyond this circle of riders who happily paid Ferrari a percentage of their salary was a world of whispers and rumours about exactly what type of bang the boys were getting for their buck.20

  Something had to give. And it did. On 12 August 1998, the Carabinieri launched a raid on Ferrari’s villa, seizing mainly computer discs containing files and records. These included the training diaries of his clients. It was Lance Armstrong’s good fortune that what was seized were the records for 1997, the year he spent recuperating in America. He had contact with Ferrari during that year but was not a regular visitor and as he was not racing he would have had no need for doping.

  Ferrari later told an interviewer from Cycling News that he asked the lead officer on the raid what exactly they were looking for. The policeman said, ‘We want to see what you do.’

  Among the riders whose files came to light were Claudio Chiappucci, Axel Merckx, Gianluca Bortolami (whose Festina team were at the centre of the previous month’s scandal storm) and Kevin Livingston.

  I was convinced from early on that Armstrong had to be working with Ferrari, and conversations with Sandro Donati hardened the idea in my head. In September 2001, Michele Ferrari was going to stand trial in Bologna. It wouldn’t be his last such experience. Earlier that year Sandro directed me towards contacts of his within the Carabinieri drug squad in Florence. Documents seized from Ferrari’s computer were made available to me solely because I was a friend of Sandro Donati’s. I scanned the pages for Livingston’s numbers.21 The huge fluctuations in his haematrocrit, from very low 40s to very high 40s, were indicative of EPO use.

  This was fascinating. Livingston was a good equipier, a popular member of the team, but a follower rather than a leader. His involvement with Ferrari had to have followed on from Armstrong, not preceded it. He looked up to Armstrong.22 Livingston’s connection to Ferrari raised obvious questions.

  8

  ‘We have to distrust each other, it is our only defence against betrayal.’

  Tennessee Williams

&
nbsp; In April 2001 Bill Stapleton called me. A grey, dry morning in England, and I had just pulled into my dentist’s car park, so obviously it was all very exciting.

  In this life you remember two key things. One: where you were when Kennedy got shot. Two: where you were when Stapleton called. On the previous year’s Tour, it was Bill who had leaned close to me in the press centre and politely offered me a choice in life. If I didn’t get with the programme, well, Lance’s people would be coming after me. But if I chose to let things lie there might be some pretty good access down the line.

  Stick or carrot? My call.

  Though I tried not to show it, I had been flattered by this sign that the Armstrong camp wasn’t completely indifferent to my existence. We hadn’t spoken since, though, and I was beginning to think that perhaps they didn’t care about me after all. Now, as before, Bill presented himself as an emissary coming in peace. He mentioned that he and Lance were aware of some people whom I’d had been speaking to and some questions that I had been asking.

  He paused, drew in a breath and made his pitch. ‘David, I know things have not been good between you and Lance, but Lance would be prepared to do an interview with you.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘As soon as you can get to France.’

  I wanted to blurt out the word yes. I wanted to say, ‘Bill, you had me at, “Hello”.’ The words wouldn’t come. I realised that I wasn’t keen on Bill reporting back to Lance that, yes, the plan was working: ‘Walsh just gushed and jumped into my arms telephonically at the mention of an interview. What did I tell you, dude?’

  I told Bill I would call him back later. And then I went and sat in a dentist’s chair for an hour of contemplation and wholly legal injections.