by David Walsh
An audience with Lance. The idea was interesting. The fact that the offer had come from the Lance camp was intriguing. Most newspapers are suckers for access. An interview, no matter how bland, with a big star is cheaper and easier to sell than a long investigation with lawyers circling like vultures in the sky above. This was a major break because there were so many doping-related questions I wanted to put to Armstrong.
‘Alex,’ I said to the Sunday Times sports editor in a phone call that afternoon, ‘allow me to make your day.’
‘Go on.’
‘Got an interview lined up for this week.’
‘With whom?’
‘Armstrong.’
‘No?’
‘Yes. His lawyer/agent Bill Stapleton called. They want me to come to France later this week.’
I got a little star to wear on my suit and my picture went up on the employee of the week board. Second place. To Alex.
My thoughts turned to Lance. Or the Frost–Nixon interview, as I was fast coming to see it. Maybe Lance thought this interview would be the first chapter in a friendship renewed for tactical reasons. Maybe all this drug stuff was a misunderstanding. Or maybe he just thought that he could crush me.
If he recalled our conversation in 1993, he would know that I wasn’t a single-issue obsessive. Back then we’d spoken for three hours without one mention of doping. We had talked as two passionate men might: I was passionate about cycling, he was passionate about winning and about seizing the opportunity of his career. Perhaps he wanted to show me that the man I warmed to that evening hadn’t gone away.
Two days later I sat down to interview Lance Armstrong in the Hotel La Fauvelaie near the village of Saint-Sylvain-d’Aanjou in the east of France. We sat in the lobby of the virtually deserted hotel. Lance wore casual team gear and an air of slight indifference. It was the first time we had sat together since that afternoon in Grenoble eight years earlier.
Much had changed. Lance had lost the muscular square shoulders of the swimmer and, although he was thinner, he somehow looked stronger. Hard bodied. And of course he was already a two-time Tour winner. His earnings from being in the saddle were estimated at $8 million a year. It’s not all about the bike, though. Endorsements were bringing in another $5 million. Donald Trump had turned up to listen in on a press conference Lance gave in New York. People mentioned this as if it was a good thing.
The 2001 edition of Lance Armstrong came with pretty much all the things that the 1993 edition had lacked and wanted. He could now ride time trials better than anyone, he was the strongest in the mountains and he enjoyed the backing of the best equipped and most organised team in the peloton. What these things gave him was what he most wanted: the power to control his destiny.
He got cancer.
He got well.
He came back.
He saw.
He kicked ass.
And if he was describing it all in a word he would have said, ‘neat’.
So why doesn’t he seem happy as he sits on the fake leather sofa opposite me?
Perhaps this is because everything in the Garden of Eden isn’t blooming. He knows that at the very least I and many other snakes with arms suspect that he is doping. He brings me here to find out what I know and on the off chance that I might be bought with the illusion of friendship and promises of access.
Travelling from London, I’d told myself the interview would work best if my mind stayed open and he got the fullest chance to answer the questions. But the legacy of the 1998 Tour was that there could no longer be a presumption of innocence. The line from my friend Jean-Michel Rouet had stayed with me: ‘What we discovered [from the Festina Affair] was that everyone in this sport can fuck us.’
It was true. A guy in a yellow jersey had only to say, ‘Chook, chook, chook, chook,’ and we the chickens gathered round to have scraps dropped at our feet.
The first thing Lance asked was if I minded Bill Stapleton sitting in on the interview. As it happened I wasn’t keen on Bill inserting himself into proceedings, but Lance’s body language suggested that he wasn’t actually asking a question. So Bill Stapleton sat down and placed a tape recorder on the table. I put my tape recorder down beside Bill’s.
I then put my cards on the table.23
‘Here’s how I am going to approach this, Lance. I am only going to ask you questions about doping because that is all that is relevant to me. If I don’t believe you’re clean there is no point in asking you about your next races. I have no interest. This will give you the opportunity to maybe convince people that you are clean.’
I was quite calm. Surprisingly so in retrospect. I don’t enjoy confrontation and in the years since then anecdotes about Lance’s ability to bully people have given him the reputation of a sociopath. Perhaps I was shielded by a little self-righteousness. Or maybe this confrontation was easier because we had met eight years earlier when we were both different people. I’m not known for being a tough guy, but I didn’t find Lance remotely intimidating. I almost wanted to say, ‘Hey, hold on, I knew you when you were kid and I liked the way you’d closed the door when walking into cycling’s living room, so hard the walls shook.’ Meeting him now, I wondered how he had developed, what had changed. I was convinced he was doping but it wasn’t like he was going to admit it.
What would be interesting was how he dealt with aggressive questioning. And for me the interview was a chance to get some on-the-record answers on issues he didn’t usually have to address.
‘That’s fine,’ he replied. ‘Ask all the doping questions you like.’
My tactic was to begin with broad, general questions which suggested I didn’t know too much. Lance would have comfortable answers to these questions. Later we would move on to the specifics.
I asked about the 1994 Flèche Wallonne classic, famous for being the race that made Michele Ferrari famous. We all knew the story. Riders whom Ferrari prepared, finished first, second and third. Lance Armstrong was strong that day, he chased the three breakaways but he couldn’t latch onto them. Like all the Motorola riders, he was finally blown away. They hadn’t one guy in the top ten. Doping in any sport isn’t always a gradual evolution. There are great leaps forward. This was one. Three riders from the same team breaking away from the pack in a classic – well that’s pretty much unheard of.
Moreno Argentin was first. Giorgio Furlan and Evgeni Berzin came in second and third. Too much. Every journalist had questions. Where better to start but at the court of Dr Michele Ferrari. This was so outrageous, the usual niceties were dispensed with.
What about this drug, EPO? ‘EPO is not dangerous,’ the good doctor memorably said, ‘it’s the abuse that is. It’s also dangerous to drink ten litres of orange juice.’
Gewiss sacked him, but Flèche Wallonne and the orange juice quote made Ferrari’s reputation. If he had hung out a shingle announcing his services to the world he couldn’t have been clearer about what he had to offer.
It was one of the landmark moments in doping history. Except to Lance Armstrong.
‘Their doctor, Michele Ferrari, made his famous statement on the evening of that race about r-EPO being no more dangerous than orange juice. Do you remember your reaction to that?’
(Long pause) ‘Ahmm, no.’
‘You didn’t even wonder what r-EPO was?’
‘I think that sometimes quotes can get taken out of context and I think that even at the time I recognised that.’
So it went.
By the mid-nineties it was well known that EPO had become a staple for many Tour riders. How conscious of this phenomenon were Lance and his teammates in Motorola?24
‘We didn’t think about it. It wasn’t an issue for us. It wasn’t an option . . .’25
On and on. The Lance version of omerta.
‘Did you know that Kevin [Livingston, a fellow US Postal rider] was linked with the [police] investigation into Michele Ferrari in Italy?’
‘Yes.’
‘Did you discuss
it with him?’
‘No.’
‘Never?’
(Nods his head.)
‘A guy who is your best friend?’
‘In an indirect way, you are trying to implicate our sport again.’
Classic! Never ask a cyclist a hard question! Never crache dans le soupe. You are damaging the sport. Spoiling it for everybody.
As we talked, Michele Ferrari hovered over us like Banquo’s ghost. It was Ferrari’s name that produced the most tortuous circumlocutions from Lance.
‘Did you ever visit Michele Ferrari?’
‘I did know Michele Ferrari.’26
‘How did you get to know him?’
‘In cycling when you go to races, you see people. There’s trainers, doctors; I know every team’s doctor. It’s a small community.’
‘Did you ever visit him?’
‘Have I been tested by him, gone and been there and consulted on certain things? Perhaps.’
‘You did?’
(Nods in the affirmative.)
‘He’s going to be tried for criminal conspiracy.’
‘I think the prosecutors and judges should pursue everybody regardless of who it is. It is their job to do that.’
Looking back, I attribute the odd nature of these responses (and the Sean Kelly-like gesture of nodding into a tape recorder) to some anxiety on Lance’s part that perhaps I knew more at that time than I actually did. He was aware, certainly, that I had been asking about the Ferrari connection, that I had been to the police station in Florence, the basement of which housed the many, many boxes of files seized by the NAS (Nucleo Antisofisticazioni Sanità) in raids on doctors with alleged links to doping.
Not knowing precisely what I knew, though, Lance chose neither to deny nor to affirm the issue of visits to Ferrari. As it happened, I wouldn’t be able to confirm the pattern of Lance’s visits until just before the Tour in 2001.
In the year since then, as Lance’s status as an icon grew bigger and bigger, people would often say to me how clever he was in terms of dealing with and manipulating the media. I never found that. Saying, for example, that he and Kevin had never ever discussed Ferrari, even though Kevin was involved in the case, was just plain stupid.
One thing for sure, he was different.
In Breaking Away, the classic cycling/coming-of-age movie made back in the seventies, four young guys in an Indiana town brought colour to their lives by sucking in the romance of pro cycling. Some part of the writer in me would love it if Lance, with his screwed-up background, had enjoyed the refuge of the same dreams back in Plano, Texas.
But that wasn’t his past. He has no sepia days. He hadn’t time to dream, going from shop to shop looking for a sponsor to fund his teenage triathlon career, and when no one stumped up, he bought a tank top and had I LOVE MY MOM printed where the sponsor’s name would have been.
‘I know nothing of the history of the sport,’ he says. I look at him and realise that what he is saying is true. This isn’t Hollywood, dude. This thing, this Tour de France, it is a mountain. Everybody can see it. You need a plan, and you need to see yourself standing at the summit. Lance Armstrong from Plano in Texas. Somebody.
So I thought of another mountain. Ventoux. Threw its legend out there.
‘So you’ve never heard of Tommy Simpson? C’mon, surely you’ve heard of Tommy Simpson?’
He had heard but his answer is bizarre.
‘I did, but Tommy Simpson never tested positive.’
I’ve never met a cycling person who doesn’t automatically shake his head in sadness at the fate of Tommy Simpson and what his death told us about cycling. The sadness isn’t just borne out of the knowledge of what happened that day but from knowing that after the tragedy the peloton decided to carry on doping. And here we were in 2001, post-Simpson, post-Festina, in a world where a champion rider reaches for a response delivered in legalese when a subject related to doping is mentioned. Here was a wall between the peloton and the broader world.
Tommy Simpson’s death on the Tour of 1967 was a tragedy.27 Amphetamines were in his bloodstream, alcohol too; amphetamines were found in his back pocket. The medical view held that he had contributed to his own death but Simpson was also a victim of cycling’s drug culture.28
But hey, he never had a positive test.
Lance’s response was true but without meaning. Simpson had drugs in his blood, drugs in his jersey, drugs in his suitcase. Lance’s answer was instructive though, as it was the reflex response of riders and athletes for decades. It tells us nothing. It tells us plenty. Bernard Hinault used to say it every time.
‘Well, Le Blaireau, did you take drugs?’
‘I passed every test.’
Lance had learned. The tests he’d taken and the tests he’d passed didn’t prove anything, but there would always be a constituency out there happy to defend him by parroting the old line about being the most tested athlete on the planet and never having failed once.
In 1993 he had been a kid unimpressed or unaware of the romance of the Tour but determined to use the opportunity to make something of himself. Eight years on he was somebody and wanted me to know whatever methods he and his team deployed . . . well, that was insider stuff. Nothing for you to see here.
Journalists were there to sell the myth in return for limited access. The rest was business; theirs not ours. You don’t see the greedy calculations going on behind the walls of mirrors in Las Vegas casinos. Lance felt that what went on behind the walls of mirrors in pro cycling was private business too. The absence of romance, the hardness, the steely arrogance, it all diminished him but he never saw this.
Frankie Andreu or one of the other riders told me he’d heard that Lance was furious when he came back upstairs after the interview. Fuming. The impression the other riders got was that Armstrong was shocked by what I seemed to know. For my part I was amazed by what Lance pretended not to know. The news of his anger made me smile. In our game of huffing and bluffing Lance and I had just played out a draw.
In the spring when I had interviewed Lance in person I put the Livingston situation to him, and in keeping with the tone of the interview he was vague to the point of absurdity. How can best friends not discuss the fact that one of them has been dragged into a criminal investigation? The point that I missed was his sense of not having to answer to anyone. So what if it’s a dumb answer? What are you going to do about it?
There was only one thing I could do. I went back to Sandro Donati and asked if there wasn’t some evidence of Armstrong’s presence in Ferrara. Next time I got an audience with Stapleton or Armstrong, I wanted to have something. I asked Sandro to check if the Carabinieri were absolutely sure Lance hadn’t been to Ferrara. Donati first got back to me and said he couldn’t come up with evidence that Armstrong had been there. But my friend was nothing if not dogged. Soon he came back to me with information from local hotels. The information had come from the Carabinieri, through Sandro to me.
He’d been there.
Lance had been to Ferrara for two days in March 1999, three days in May 2000, two days in August 2000, one day in September 2000 and three days in late April/early May of 2001, the last visit shortly after our interview at La Fauvelaie. The visits came at key points, for Tour preparation and just before the 2000 Olympics, where Armstrong had wanted a medal. In Ferrara he had stayed at the five-star Hotel Duchessa Isabella and at the four-star Hotel Annunziata. During our interview, he feared I knew more than I was letting on. Now I did.29
I’d travelled to the US, to Rome, to Florence in the previous year. I was getting a better picture of the world I was trying to understand. I’d been disappointed with the outcome of the Lance interview in the spring. I’d travelled with a decent stock of evidence but I hadn’t even rattled his cage.
There was his coach. If Ferrari was the genius behind the story then Chris Carmichael, Lance’s coach and mentor, was the presentable face of things. Carmichael had kept himself out of an odd doping case taken by a fo
rmer US amateur, Greg Strock, who claimed he had been injected with cortisone against his will and had his career ruined. To extricate himself from the case, Carmichael had made an out-of-court payment to Strock.
I’d asked Armstrong how he felt about his long-time coach paying money to stay out of a doping case. He said it was matter between Chris and Greg.
‘If Chris had paid money to keep his name out of a doping case, it would imply he had something to hide?’
‘It’s a hypothesis.’
‘But it wouldn’t look good, would it?’
‘At the same time, does it look good that Greg Strock just takes the money? Let’s flip it around. Is this about money or is this about principle.’
I had the work of Hugues Huet, a journalist with French TV, who the previous summer had tailed an unmarked US Postal car, filming the two occupants disposing of five plastic bags of rubbish. The bags contained 160 syringe wrappers, bloodied compresses and discarded packaging that indicated the use of a legal but right-on-the-limit product called Actovegin.
Then there was Kevin Livingston, the skinny on what he’d been doing.
A little mountain of evidence was forming. As Lance would say, it didn’t look good. Yet when I’d put it all to Lance he had shrugged it away. In the interview he’d pulled a draw out from the jaws of defeat. Champions only need to draw.
This news from Ferrara was different though. This was a game changer. I felt that we had something concrete. We were talking about sixteen days spent in Ferrara over two years. That excluded any visits made in the other direction by Ferrari, which we now know occurred both when Lance lived in Nice (Ferrari liked to test Armstrong on the Col de la Madone climb just outside town) and in Girona, where Armstrong moved in 2001.
All this time spent in Ferrara and Lance had made a point of not mentioning it. Not in his autobiography, not in his press conferences, not in his interview.
Now I have all this information. It hasn’t involved hacking computer files or breaking into buildings or meeting anonymous sources in underground car parks. It has just been simple journalism. Questions. I can’t believe that Lance has produced his autobiography, it’s come out maybe a year before, and the name Michele Ferrari hasn’t appeared in the pages. Ferrari is being investigated for doping, soon he will be charged and sent to trial.
