Seven Deadly Sins: My Pursuit of Lance Armstrong

by David Walsh

  Lance Armstrong

  Here’s Betsy Andreu. Small, dark and wired. Implacable. From the moment you meet her you know that she is as tough and scrappy as a honey badger. If Lance Armstrong was any judge of character, he would have shut up the medicine shop the moment he met her. Nope. Here’s Betsy Andreu. She was on the inside. Now she’s on my side.

  The downside of having broken the Ferrari story in 2001 was a falling off in the number of Christmas cards I received and the knowledge that my take on cancer’s most famous survivor placed me out of the running for Humanitarian of the Year. Again.

  One of the many advantages was that it put me on the radar of the other poor souls out there who cared about such things.

  James Startt was an American photo-journalist for Bicycling who lived in Paris. He’d come to Europe to work and he’d got to know a number of the American riders. I’d met James on the Tour. Liked him. He knew Frankie Andreu. If you knew Frankie, you would know his wife Betsy. If you knew Betsy for any length of time, you got to know her views on the talented Mr Armstrong.

  At some point either in person or on the phone Betsy, one of life’s natural networkers, had asked James if she knew this guy David Walsh. As it happened James did know David Walsh and he was prepared to admit it.

  ‘Tell him to call me.’

  ‘Yes, Betsy.’

  James duly passed on the message.

  ‘She says she knows some things that you should know.’

  I dialled the number straight away. In Dearborn, Michigan, US of A, somebody answered straight away. Betsy Andreu.

  Sources are like blind dates. You meet a lot of duds before you talk to one that’s worth the trouble. Sometimes, though, you just know when you have found the right person. The voice coming down the phone suggested intelligence and a fierce morality. Nothing I have learned about Betsy Andreu in the many years since has changed that first impression.

  With Betsy, you didn’t have to tip-toe around the subject of Lance Armstrong. Our first proper conversation was on a Friday evening. I’d flown into Heathrow from an assignment and had to drive cross-country to Cardiff for a rugby game which was happening the following afternoon. We started talking as I was leaving Heathrow. We were still talking as I pulled into my hotel in Cardiff. It says something for the support of my employers at the Sunday Times that the mobile phone bill was paid without demur, and if Vodafone had sponsored the journalist awards that year, I’d have got a prize.

  Within minutes of me hitting the M4, Betsy was offering (to use a phrase of Lance’s) liquid gold. She took me back to the gathering inside a consulting room at Indiana University Hospital in October 1996. Something about Frankie’s combative and switched-on nature had earned him Lance’s respect back in Europe. They were friends. When the news came of Armstrong’s cancer in October 1996, it had hit Betsy and Frankie hard. They were six weeks away from a wedding and now their friend had cancer. Life was random and life was cruel.

  They headed to Indianapolis for a few days intending to spend every spare minute keeping their friend company. Now the room with the bed in it had become too crowded and they had moved to a hospital common room, Lance clutching his IV as they went.

  The Dallas Cowboys were on the television. The small group of friends and acquaintances watched with various levels of interest. In the room were Betsy Andreu, Frankie Andreu, Lance’s coach Chris Carmichael and his wife Paige, Lance’s then girlfriend, Lisa Shiels, and a woman called Stephanie McIlvain who worked as liaison with Oakley, who were Lance’s sunglasses sponsor.

  Two doctors now entered the room. They had questions for the patient. Necessary questions.

  ‘We should leave now,’ Betsy said, as the doctors began their checklist.

  ‘It’s okay,’ said Armstrong. ‘You can stay.’

  And then Betsy heard the conversation that would change her life and make her life and Lance Armstrong’s life very difficult.

  ‘Have you used performance-enhancing drugs?’ asked one doctor.

  Matter-of-factly, Armstrong listed them: ‘EPO, testosterone, growth hormone, cortisone and steroids.’

  Betsy was stunned. The message to Frankie Andreu, her fiancé, was flashed with her eyes: ‘You and me, we gotta speak outside. Now.’

  Frankie knew enough to sense that this wasn’t good. He’d better follow. ‘If you’re fucking doing that shit, I’m not marrying you,’ she said.

  Frankie was a tough man of the roads. He learned bike racing in harum-scarum rides around the Dearborn Towers near home, at hard races in little-sung placers like Downers Grove. And he kept getting better. That summer he had been fourth in the road race at the Atlanta Olympics. This time, however, he was in trouble.

  When Armstrong asked Frankie a while later how Betsy had reacted to his disclosure, two words sufficed: ‘Not good.’

  Over the years, Betsy stuck to her account of what had happened in that room. In the days after, she had called friends Dawn Polay, Piero Boccarossa and Lory Testasecca and spoke to them about what had been said. She was still shocked and upset. Could she marry Frankie after what she had heard? Should she? The advice that came back was to talk it out long and hard. They did.

  Frankie promised to be clean. Betsy Kramar became Betsy Andreu when the pair got married just over two months later on New Year’s Eve 1996.

  It was a lonely road, though. Never for a second did Betsy understand why she should lie and cover for Lance Armstrong. When her view became known, when people learned that she was slurring an American icon, she had only the support of her friends, her mom and a few others to fall back on. From the world in which her husband lived and worked, only Greg LeMond, his wife Kathy, Jonathan Vaughters, an old teammate of Frankie’s, and James Startt were supportive; and, for a long time, so too was Stephanie McIlvain. But Betsy didn’t care. Honesty needs no approval.

  When she first told me the hospital-room story, so early in our relationship, it stunned me. It was such a small human thing for Lance Armstrong to do. He assumed so much of people. Later, people would say: surely he would never have admitted taking performance-enhancing drugs in front of six friends?

  Betsy and Frankie talked about this. ‘Frankie, why would he be so indiscreet?’

  ‘Honey,’ Frankie said, ‘the previous day he’d had lesions removed from his brain. He wasn’t sure he was going to live. Right then performance-enhancing drugs weren’t the biggest thing on his mind.’

  And this room in Indiana, where the disease eating his body changed the context of everything, this room far away from pesky testers and shifty Europeans, this room with its poorly drawn borders of confidentiality, this was where it happened.

  A small human thing, but Betsy’s account was utterly believable. Lance was comfortable being surrounded by people who all had a stake in him one way or another. He misread the terrain. He didn’t ever think it would matter. He never understood that Betsy’s concern would be for the man she was due to marry, for his honour and health.

  The clincher was Betsy hauling Frankie outside for the most frightening random test of his career. ‘You and me gotta talk.’ Lance Armstrong, even the Lance of 1996, couldn’t imagine that he would be such a bit player in the drama of that conversation.

  Betsy told me that story and, like everybody she has told it to before or since, I believed her. It wasn’t proof. It wasn’t the smoking gun. For journalists in doping cases there is no such thing. I remember in Atlanta in 1996 meeting a prominent American journalist who told me about a lengthy investigation he had carried out into the drug practices of a hugely admired American athlete. Finally, after a drip feed of damaging stories, the athlete had let loose his lawyers and a meeting was called between the journalist, his employers, the athlete and his lawyers.

  The paper, unnerved, either by celebrity or by the sight of so many assassins in fine suits, just caved in. It was agreed the reputation of this fine man was being impugned and the paper assured the lawyers that it would all stop. Everybody got up an
d shook hands. Very civil and cordial. The last shake was between my friend the journalist and his quarry, the athlete. Eye contact and an aggressively firm shake. The athlete left with a backward glance and the smile for which he was famous.

  My friend looked down at his palm. Pressed into the skin was a small dianabol pill.

  ‘Fuck.’

  He showed it to his bosses with whom he was already very displeased. Wow, they said. Look at that. You were right. But, listen: that proves nothing. You can’t even write it because of what it would imply.

  Betsy’s story was a little blue pill in my palm. And luckily it had come to me without the hindrance of lawyers or injunctions. It wasn’t proof because for years it would be a he said-she said debate. For me, though, it was confirmation. Reassurance. Keep going. Keep looking. Keep talking to people. Keep asking the questions. Keep writing. It was an irony Lance wouldn’t enjoy, but I found Betsy’s information to be performance enhancing.

  For her part, she always asked at least as many questions as she would answer. ‘What do you know? How do you know? Have you put that to him? What did he say?’ A sports editor like her and I’d have burned out years ago. She scanned the newspapers around the world and knew which writers were taking which positions. Those without a spine she wanted me to get phone numbers for so she could call them and ask what had happened to their self-respect.

  Betsy is a one-off. Her humanity and her morality made her instantly believable. The daughter of a Serbian jeweller and a Slovakian librarian, Betsy grew up as a devout catholic in Dearborn, Michigan, graduated from University of Michigan and met Frankie in April 1994 in a pizza joint. He was a stringy professional cyclist with a blue-collar work ethic and a flashing smile. When they met, Betsy was just getting ready to open an Italian-themed coffee shop.

  Italy! Frankie lived a world away in Como, Italy. He hung with a loose and lively cycling community with a strong constituency of ambitious Americans. Frankie was a flatmate of Lance Armstrong’s and the two seemed close; neighbours included guys like Kevin Livingston, Jeff Pierce and Bob Roll, all of whom had found their way to the area.

  Frankie had been cut up by the death of their teammate Fabio Casartelli on the 1995 Tour. Fabio died descending Col de Portet d’Aspet. Betsy had seen the pictures. Blood on the road. Frankie and Lance hurting during a minute’s silence in the aftermath. Black armbands. Frankie with a pair of wraparound shades hiding his pain. Lance just weeping. They were brothers of the road, living life and learning.

  Cycling, which for the amateur seems like the most pure of endeavours, was making itself known to the Americans in the hard, professional sense. They watched in awe and bemusement as riders like Mario Cipollini came to early-season races and devoured the climbs. WTF, man? Rumours were everywhere. People talking about r-EPO, comparing their haematocrit levels, the sound of ice rattling in a thermos, a necessary prop for a drug that needed to be chilled.

  There were spooky stories of riders who were so hopped up on this stuff that their levels were up above 60 per cent. They had to wear pulse meters at night so that when their pulse rate dipped below a certain point an alarm would sound and they would get up and exercise furiously before their blood turned to treacle. This was the shit that killed eighteen or so Belgian and Dutch cyclists in the nineties? And it works?

  But Betsy Andreu didn’t care what races Frankie won or how much he earned, if the means to the end was cheating and endangering his health. EPO was meant for sick people, right? Some wives and partners were like Betsy, but others saw doping as part of the deal and even assisted in their partners’ wrongdoing.

  The doors were opening to a world that Frankie didn’t much like. He was a good professional, a cool and able strategist on the road, and he had a natural abrasiveness which earned respect among his peers. He hadn’t gone into professional cycling to start messing with drugs, but all these rumours and the talk were a dust cloud which was about to float over his life. He didn’t know how he would square any of it with his future wife’s black-and-white sense of right and wrong.

  What I remember most vividly about so many conversations with Betsy Andreu is that they seemed to pass in a flash, yet I would come away with an almost cinematic memory of whatever she had been describing. The stories never wanted for detail or consistency. Bill Clinton used to tell people that he could feel their pain. If he’d met Betsy he could have felt her pain, her frustration, her anger, her humour, her loyalty. She put it all out there. When she’d describe a row with Frankie, no shrinking violet himself but the man on the frontline of the old dilemma about whether to go along or get along, I would agree with Betsy’s point of view but feel sorry for Frankie. He was facing into a force of nature.

  Frankie knew he’d got lucky, though. As I was to find out, it was good to have this particular force of nature as an ally. Asking questions about Lance Armstrong, sporting hero and pioneer in the fight against cancer, could make you feel like something of a cancer yourself. And if you didn’t feel that, there were people willing to help.

  One of the early letters to the Sunday Times came from a reader, Keith Miller, who hadn’t been impressed by my scepticism. ‘I believe Armstrong’s victory was amazing, a triumph in sport and life. I believe he sets a good example for all of us. I believe in sport, in life, and in humanity . . . Sometimes we refuse to believe for whatever reason. Sometimes people get a cancer of the spirit. And maybe that says a lot about them.’

  ‘Betsy, let me tell you what this guy said in a letter . . .’

  And here on the phone from Michigan, she was listening, somebody who would be a companion on the road ahead. ‘I told Frankie, I ain’t lying for Lance.’

  If people around me were bored of me teasing out the details of the story in their presence, there was somebody a phone call away who never got bored with the topic. Betsy was in this for the long haul and she would suffer as much abuse as anybody, and she would take it without flinching.

  After they had got married, Frankie and Betsy lived together in Europe for a while. Frankie had raced with Lance in his pre-cancer days at Motorola, and when Lance recovered and signed for US Postal, Frankie followed. Armstrong continued to be a part of their lives.

  The conversation in the hospital room in Indianapolis was not forgotten. Betsy had married Frankie with love and a few caveats. She decided, though, that perhaps the drugs trail began and ended with Lance. Frankie was different. He didn’t have the assassin’s cold remove, the same driven ruthlessness. Lance could live his life. Betsy and Frankie would live theirs. That was okay.

  There were tensions. Life is that way when you live in the shadow of a volcano. Frankie and Lance were pulling in different directions.

  Back in 1998, when Willy Voet was caught driving his little shop of horrors, Frankie thought out loud on the team bus after the prologue in Dublin. He had some sympathy for Willy but he hoped that this was the beginning of the end of the doping culture in the Tour. He hated it and hated the pressure and hated that Betsy worried over it. And above all it wasn’t fair, he said. When he’d come into the Tour you could ride the three weeks on spaghetti and water. Now?

  Frankie had joined French team Cofidis before Lance’s illness in the expectation that his old friend would be at his side. Instead he rode the 1998 Tour for the French team while Lance was elsewhere, rebooting himself.

  Betsy travelled to the Tour that year with Kevin Livingston’s wife Becky. As the scandal unfolded with police raids, and teams ducking for cover and withdrawals and sit-down protests, many around the world of pro cycling felt that things had gotten out of hand. Frank was a little ambivalent. He hoped this would be the watershed, the end of the pressure he felt to dope. But, hey, the police didn’t have to be so heavy-handed. No way. Betsy’s reaction was distinctive as usual. If the riders were that upset they must have plenty to hide. End of story.

  Funny, Betsy’s problem was never really with Kristin Armstrong. When Kristin was pregnant in the spring of 1999 Betsy and her fell
into a conversation on the subject of hiring nannies. They were in the car on the way to the Milan–San Remo classic. Betsy felt that if you had a child and could be there for it then a nanny was unnecessary. Kristin agreed. Sometime later Betsy was trawling a cycling forum and came upon a discussion of Kristin’s pregnancy. Somebody speculated with a sneer that the Armstrongs would be hiring a nanny. Betsy, ever the lioness, logged on and posted a reply that she knew Kristin and there would be no nanny, so put an end to the bullshit, please.

  Next time she was talking to Kristin she happened to mention the online exchange, the nerve of somebody making a post like that. She told Kristin she had backed her up and put an end to it. To her surprise Kristin burst into tears. Inconsolable for a while, she later apologised. She was feeling very hormonal, she said. Betsy understood.

  A day later, though, Kristin must have mentioned the whole business in innocence to Lance. Armstrong confronted Frankie, jabbing him in the chest: ‘Tell your fucking wife to get out of my wife’s face, you tell her to stop fucking upsetting Kik.’

  Soon there was a full-scale shouting match between two of the tougher hombres in cycling, the boys butting heads like stags in the glen. Lance was unhappy anyway because Betsy had become close to Kevin Livingston’s wife Becky and they hung out together. Which meant that Kristin Armstrong was a little isolated and this annoyed Lance, who took it out on Frankie in the most crass of ways.33

  Things cooled a little between Frankie and Lance by the summer of 1999. What happened didn’t destroy their friendship but it was never quite the same again. Betsy sent Lance an email pointing out to him that he didn’t treat people the way he would like to be treated, that he had a habit of walking all over anybody who got in his way.

  And then there were good times. Breaks in the weather. Nights out drinking and plotting in Chez Wayne, their local in Nice; evenings when Betsy and Frankie would have the Armstrongs over and Lance would talk sweet to Betsy about the wonder which was her risotto. He’d go to the supermarket with her, she challenging his atheism, he arguing against her belief in God. They used to get along.