Seven Deadly Sins: My Pursuit of Lance Armstrong

by David Walsh

  He likes this question even more than the last because it is an opportunity to show graciousness, modesty, even a touch of class. It is only right to compliment the journalist on his discerning question.

  ‘I really like Jan Ullrich. It’s not a rivalry full of hatred. I think there’s a serious amount of mutual respect there. To me, he’s the only rider who really scares me. If he has a good day or a good year, he could be impossible to beat.’

  And so the press conference saunters along in this way, as if there wasn’t a troll in the building. But the sixteenth adoring question is too much: ‘What makes you so superior to the rest of the field?’

  I shoot a glance at Lars. Will Lance just say EPO and get it out there once and for all? ‘EPO makes me the best. EPO and Michele!’

  Lars’ eyebrows are stretched skywards, and a few others are feeling the same way because it starts now, the doping debate. It is a French journalist who gets the ball rolling for, in a general sense, the French journalists, especially those working for Libération and Le Monde, have been the least gullible in the press tent. Lance is asked about doping. He gives the usual reply: this is an issue for sport, not just cycling. Global problem, he says: ‘I think cycling is on its way out of the crisis because it has done more than any other sport.’

  But of course there will always be people who don’t want to believe. Trolls like me, suffering with cancer of the spirit.

  And once the debate moves onto doping, a strange thing happens. Lance looks at me when he is answering, even though I’ve not asked the question, as if he’s trying to convince me alone and not everyone in the room. Every time he talks about doping, he stares at me.

  Someone wonders aloud if cynicism will follow him to the end of his career?

  Lance answers straight to my face.

  ‘I’m prepared to live with it. It’s unfortunate. I can get up every morning and look at myself in the mirror and my family can look at me too. That’s all that matters.’

  Raising your hand to ask a question of a man who despises you is interesting because you’re not sure how he will respond. I have heard him talk of cycling’s problems and what the sport is doing to drag itself out of a mess and I ask if he feels a personal responsibility to promote a better image, and how does he reconcile that with his doctor/trainer being so associated with doping?

  He has prepared for this moment.

  ‘Well, David, I’m glad you showed up, finally. It’s good to see you’re finally here.’

  Though soaked in sarcasm, he also wants me to know that he knows when I’m on the Tour, when I’m not. He cares.

  ‘I’m confident in the relationship [with Ferrari]. I’ve never denied the relationship, even to you. I believe he’s an honest man. I believe he’s a fair man and I believe he’s an innocent man. I’ve never seen anything to lead me to believe otherwise.’

  He doesn’t address the question of whether associating with a controversial doctor is bad for the sport but glides off into that sunset where Lance gets to interview Lance. It is a technique he has used many times in the past and it never fails to deliver the answer he wants.

  ‘People will look at the facts, they will say, “Okay, here’s Lance Armstrong. Here’s a relationship, is that questionable?” ’

  ‘Perhaps.’

  ‘Do they say, “Lance Armstrong tested positive?” ’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Has Lance Armstrong been tested?’

  ‘A lot.’

  ‘Was Lance Armstrong’s team put under investigation and their urine from the 2000 Tour tested for urine?’

  ‘Yes it was.’

  ‘Was it clean?’

  ‘Absolutely.’

  ‘Is there now an EPO test?’

  ‘Absolutely.’

  ‘Will he pass every test because he does not take EPO?’

  ‘Yes he will.’

  This Lance-interviews-Lance interlude is magical in its simplicity and effectiveness. He asks himself the difficult questions, but because he’s the journalist and the sports star, he controls everything. And in fairness these are questions that 95 per cent of the journalists in the room wouldn’t have asked anyway.

  As for the trolls, they may as well crawl back underneath the rocks. But we don’t.

  Sitting well away to my left, Lars reminds Lance that he hasn’t answered ‘Mr Walsh’s question’ as to why a clean cyclist would want to work with a dirty doctor?

  ‘Until there’s a conviction, until someone is proven guilty, then I can’t view them as guilty. Does that answer your question, David?’

  It seems obvious to me that he is lying, but in this room it is a minority view. My question to every journalist I’d encountered on the race was: why would a rider who says he is clean and opposed to doping work with a doctor who has the dirtiest reputation in cycling and is about to go on trial for doping professional riders? Especially when the rider himself is dogged always by questions. So now I put this to Lance.

  In the middle of my question, Armstrong interrupts: ‘I have the proof, which you refuse to believe.’

  ‘Let me finish the question,’ I say with a firmness I barely recognise. I wait a moment for lightning from the heavens to strike me down. Nothing happens. I press on with my insubordination.

  ‘Would it not be in the interests of cycling for you to suspend your relationship with Ferrari until he has answered the doping charges against him?’

  He is taken aback by the reasonableness of the suggestion.

  ‘You have a point.’

  It’s likely he’s already considered with Bill Stapleton the possibility of publicly distancing himself from Ferrari. But ‘the Adam of all your labours’ cannot turn his back on Frankenstein. ‘It’s my choice. I view him as innocent. He’s a clean man in my opinion. Let there be a trial. Let the man prove himself innocent . . . how can I prosecute a man I’ve never seen do anything guilty?’

  This press conference has lasted for an hour and ten minutes, another day at The Trial of Lance Armstrong, and he’s defended himself ably. But he will have noticed that, as the conversation progressed, the number of journalists asking doping questions increased. More doping questions than at any previous rest-day press conference and they seem to think they had the right to ask. But he saw who they were, their faces were noted and soon their credentials, allowing access to the Lance Armstrong Circle of Trust, will be withdrawn.

  He has done well here today and the tactic of staring at me throughout the doping debate will have left the subliminal impression that it was almost a private discussion between him and me.

  Before he walks free from the court room, there is one last question.

  ‘If you have to endure this questioning about your success, where does the happiness come from? Is it the actual winning, the performing in front of these people, or riding the bike itself?’

  Ouch. Right over the line.

  ‘All of the above,’ he said. ‘I mean, guys, I’m going to walk out of here in about thirty seconds and you’re all out of my life. When I go back to the hotel, I get a massage and I relax. When this race is done I go back to my family and you’re really out.’31

  Lars paid a price for encouraging Armstrong to answer ‘Mr Walsh’s question’. Afterwards whenever he approached Johan Bruyneel with a question, the US Postal team director would say he had no time. Too busy. ‘It was like he pulled down the curtain and I wasn’t allowed in any more,’ says Lars.

  A few evenings later I was in the car with Rupert heading back to our digs when we made a short stop at a team hotel, as Rupert needed to check something with one of the Australian riders in the race. Unluckily for Rupert, this was also the hotel of US Postal. No sooner had he entered the lobby than he was confronted by Postal directeur sportif, Johan Bruyneel.

  Bruyneel had seen Rupert with me. He collared poor Rupert to let him know that he couldn’t associate with me and expect to have access to anyone on the Postal team. Bruyneel was livid. The finger jabbed close to Ru
pert’s face. ‘You’re a fucking traitor, you’re with Walsh. You come in here to talk to riders and you ride with Walsh. We know your game.’

  Rupert defended himself. Bruyneel kept on and on until eventually Rupert told him that I was out in the car and why didn’t Bruyneel just come on out and tell me directly what he was saying in the hotel.

  Bruyneel turned and stalked off.

  To people living outside LanceWorld, this must have seemed like the strangest encounter: two middle-aged men arguing furiously because one of them has been seen with another man. Bruyneel didn’t take up Rupert’s offer to come outside, something that on balance I was later pleased about; and although the whole thing might seen hilarious now, that wasn’t how it felt on the night.

  I’d known Rupert for more than twenty years; we’d run together countless mornings, eaten together in the evenings and we spent a good percentage of our lives sharing the backseat of a car. In that time I only once saw him angry.

  It was that night.

  On the day Lance rides across the line on the Champs-Élysées to claim his third consecutive Tour de France, I have written another piece for the Sunday Times stating there’s nothing to celebrate here as too many unanswered questions remain.

  It was a piece I had written, on average, three times every July for three years, which was testimony both to my willingness to endlessly repeat myself and to my sports editor Alex Butler’s patience. He could have decided he’d heard enough, as the majority of our readers felt they had, but he let me go on. The piece at the end of the 2001 Tour ran under the headline, PARADISE LOST ON TOUR, and it had one redeeming feature: I’d got Greg LeMond to go on the record about Armstrong.

  LeMond had won the Tour de France three times and he knew that by criticising Lance on the day that he’d won his third, he left himself open to accusations of jealousy. But LeMond had heard things: first from his old mechanic Julien DeVriese, who was now Lance’s mechanic, about the culture of secrecy around the team which, Julien said, was designed to hide the doping.

  Then LeMond spoke with journalist James Startt, who told him that Lance’s former teammate Frankie Andreu and his wife Betsy had heard Lance admit to doctors in Indiana University Hospital that he had used performance-enhancing drugs. That was in 1996 while being treated for testicular cancer. This put doubt in LeMond’s mind, but the information was confidential and not something he would say publicly.

  But Michele Ferrari was different.

  Straw.

  Camel’s back.

  LeMond believed that since doctors took over from old-school soigneurs (medically unqualified ‘carers’ who dispensed doping products in the old days), the situation in cycling had gone from bad to much worse. From everything he’d heard and read about Michele Ferrari, LeMond thought the guy was toxic. He read a line by the journalist Alex Wolff on the Sports Illustrated website that summed up his view of Ferrari: ‘The only reason you go to Ferrari is to tell him to get the hell out of your sport.’

  So, three days after the Pau press conference, I rang LeMond and caught him at a good time. He wanted to speak about Lance and Ferrari, but first he wanted people to understand this wasn’t a jealous has-been knocking his successor.

  ‘When Lance won the prologue to the 1999 Tour, I was close to tears. He had come back from cancer. In the middle of my career I had to come back from being accidentally shot [while hunting in 1987] and it felt like we had a lot in common.

  ‘But when I heard he was working with Michele Ferrari, I was devastated. In the light of his relationship with Ferrari, I just don’t want to comment on this year’s Tour . . .’ and then LeMond paused, considering if should say any more. He couldn’t help himself: ‘In a general sense, if Lance is clean, it is the greatest comeback in the history of sport. If he isn’t, it would be the greatest fraud.’

  That wasn’t a quote Lance was ever going to miss.

  A couple of days later, LeMond returned to his home city Minneapolis–Saint Paul following a business trip to London. Kathy, his wife, came in her Audi station wagon to pick him up.

  ‘You wanna drive?’ she asked.

  ‘Yeah, I’ll drive.’

  Then his phone rang.

  ‘Greg, this is Lance.’

  ‘Hi Lance. What are you doing?’

  ‘I’m in New York.’

  ‘Ah, okay.’

  ‘Greg, I thought we were friends. Why did you say what you said?’

  ‘About Ferrari? Well, I have a problem with Ferrari. I’m disappointed you are seeing someone like Ferrari. I have a personal issue with Ferrari and doctors like him. I feel my career was cut short. I saw a teammate die. I saw the devastation of innocent riders losing their careers. I don’t like what has become of our sport.’

  ‘Oh, come on now. You’re telling me you’ve never done EPO?’

  ‘Why would you say I did EPO?’

  ‘Come on, everyone’s done EPO.’

  ‘Why do you think I did it?’

  ‘Well, your comeback in eighty-nine was so spectacular. Mine was a miracle, yours was a miracle. You couldn’t have been as strong as you were in eighty-nine without EPO.’32

  ‘Listen, Lance, before EPO was ever in cycling I won the Tour de France. First time I was in the Tour I was third [in 1984]; the second time I should have won but was held back by my team [second in 1985 behind teammate Bernard Hinault]. Third time I won it [1986]. It is not because of EPO that I won the Tour – my haematocrit was never more than forty-five – because I had a VO2 Max of ninety-five. Yours was eighty-two. Tell me one person who said I did EPO.’

  ‘Everyone knows it.’

  ‘Are you threatening me?’

  ‘If you want to throw stones, I will throw stones.’

  ‘So you are threatening me? Listen, Lance. I know a lot about physiology; no amount of training can transform an athlete with a VO2 Max of eighty-two into one with a VO2 Max of nine-five, and you have ridden faster than I did.’

  ‘I could find at least ten people who will say you did EPO. Ten people who would come forward.’

  ‘That’s impossible. I know I never did that. Nobody can say I have. If I had taken EPO, my haematocrit value would have exceeded forty-five. It never did. I could produce all my blood parameters to prove my haematocrit level never rose above forty-five. And if I have this accusation levelled against me, I will know it came from you.’

  ‘You shouldn’t have said what you did. It wasn’t right.’

  ‘I try to avoid speaking to journalists. David Walsh called me. He knew about your relations with Ferrari. What should I have said? No comment? I’m not that sort of person. Then a journalist from Sports Illustrated called me. I’ve spoken to two journalists in total. Maybe I shouldn’t have spoken to them, but I only told them the truth.’

  ‘I thought there was respect between us.’

  ‘So did I. Listen, Lance, I tried to warn you about Ferrari. This guy’s trial is opening in September. What he did in the nineties changed riders. You should get away from him. How do you think I should have reacted?’

  That conversation finished Lance with Greg. No more Christmas cards.

  It was time to make LeMond toe the line. The first call came from Thom Weisel, the west-coast entrepreneur whose vision created the US Postal team and who has made a small fortune in providing financial services. He gently told Greg it wasn’t good for him to say those things about Lance. After Weisel came Terry Lee, CEO of Bell Helmets, a cycle accessories company, and he too was conciliatory.

  ‘If it was me in your position, Greg, I wouldn’t do it.’

  After Lee came a call from John Bucksbaum, chief executive of a real estate company, and another businessman who was in the Lance camp. He was calling, of course, as a friend. The full-court press went on. At the end of that week, Greg got a message to call John Burke, chief executive officer of Trek, the company that had a licensing agreement with LeMond to manufacture, market and distribute LeMond bicycles.

  Burke told LeMond h
e was in a difficult position because his company also sponsored Lance and he needed Greg to publicly retract his statement about Ferrari and Lance. Only if that happened would Trek be able to continue its relationship with LeMond.

  ‘It was like the troops were mobilised to shut Greg up,’ said Kathy LeMond.

  I spoke with Greg a lot during these difficulties with Trek and the pressure to which he was subjected by the group of high-powered businessmen in Lance’s corner. He resisted for a time, but the endless conversations with his lawyer and the anxiety over what Trek were going to do with his business took their toll. He told his lawyer to do what was necessary to bring about some kind of closure because he wanted to extricate himself from all of this.

  A little over two weeks after the fractious conversation with Lance had happened, Greg’s apology appeared in USA Today:

  I sincerely regret that some of my remarks seemed to question the veracity of Lance’s performances. I want to be clear that I believe Lance to be a great champion and I do not believe, in any way, that he has ever used any performance-enhancing substances. I believe his performances are the result of the same hard work, dedication and focus that were mine ten years before.

  Sal Ruibal, a writer who was staunchly supportive of Lance through the early years, was rewarded for his work by being given the statement and Lance’s gracious response to it.

  ‘It is nice,’ Armstrong said, ‘to hear there was a clarification. I’ve always had a lot of respect for Greg as a rider and for what he’s done for our sport. I respect and appreciate him even more for going out of his way to say that. I didn’t have hard feelings before he made the statement and don’t have them now.’

  LeMond first saw that statement on the sport pages of USA Today. It sickened him. Not just because the statement did not represent how he felt about Armstrong’s success but more because he had allowed himself to be browbeaten by men in powerful positions. It had happened once, LeMond told himself, but it would never happen again.

  10

  ‘Are we supposed to believe anything Betsy Andreu says?’