Seven Deadly Sins: My Pursuit of Lance Armstrong

by David Walsh

  The best of times and not quite the worst of times. Lance had got better. Frankie and Lance had gone back to work. They had been flatmates in Como before the gang moved to Nice. That couldn’t be wiped. US Postal was a serious team, the best Frankie had worked for. Lance was becoming the star he had planned to be when he came to Europe. Good times again.

  In July Lance duly won his first Tour de France with his team pushing him all the way. With Frankie busy, Betsy went back home to Dearborn and watched most of the race from there between visits to friends and family. She told me about that day to Sestriere, the first mountain stage. She had been at home looking on in alarm as she saw her husband drive the race up the early Alpine climbs on the way to Lance’s first win in the mountains. She knew Frankie Andreu like nobody else did. This wasn’t a recognisable version of her Frankie. She called up a friend in Paris, Becky Rast, who was married to James Startt, to see if Becky was seeing what she was seeing.

  ‘Isn’t it great?’

  ‘He isn’t a climber. What the hell is he doing pulling at the front on a first-category mountain? Frankie is about as much of a climber as the Pope is an atheist.’

  Towards the end of the race, she flew to France with her two-month-old son Frankie. They joined the Tour at Carcassonne in the deep south, but it wasn’t the time or the place to confront her husband.

  The boys went all the way to Paris with Lance in the lead. She watched her husband at the moment of his greatest triumph on the shoulder of the champion. The famous and giddy ride down the Rue de Rivoli, onto the Place de la Concorde and then up the Champs-Élysées. She let Frankie have his time.

  That night she went to join the boys at the victory party in the Musée d’Orsay. The world wanted a part of this now. She thought of the Motorola years and the subdued Sunday nights they’d spent in Paris in other years. The mood here was jubilant and a little triumphalist. They had conquered Europe. By now, though, there was only one subplot which interested Betsy: drugs.

  At the party she was expected to congratulate Lance Armstrong, to take her place in the line and kiss his ass like everyone else.

  ‘Did you shake hands and congratulate Lance?’ said Frankie, when she caught up with him.

  ‘No.’

  ‘You gotta shake his hand. It’ll look bad.’

  ‘I don’t care. I want to talk to you about EPO.’

  When Betsy told me this story, I smiled. By now we were talking every day, sometimes twice a day. People warmed to her because of her passion for the truth. Even though it was clear to everyone she was a non-believer in The Legend of Lance, she had regular conversations with a member of Lance’s extended family, she spoke with someone very close to Bill Stapleton and she knew far, far more than the libel laws would allow me to print.

  She would track down stories and reports and pass them on. Two, three, four emails, with links to Lance stories. ‘See what this idiot wrote,’ she’d say. I couldn’t help, though, imagining tough Frankie Andreu having ridden through three weeks of hell getting to the victory party only to face his biggest challenge.

  ‘By the way, Betsy, did you shake Lance’s hand in the end?’ I asked her much later.

  ‘I thank God for giving me the strength not to shake the hand of that asshole.’

  A short time after that first Lance Tour, Betsy found a thermos with EPO in Frankie’s fridge at their flat in Nice. It brought things home in a harsher light than just seeing him lead the way to Sestriere. This stuff was in their home. After all the conversations that followed the hospital visit in 1996, all the reassurances and promises, it felt like a betrayal. Betsy confronted her husband.

  ‘What’s this?’

  ‘Nothing,’ he said, but instantly he caved

  He explained that before the Tour, with expectations high, Frankie had felt the pressure like never before. He couldn’t let the boys down. The culture was that if you weren’t doping you weren’t committed. Frankie didn’t want to dope but his commitment was the greater influence. He drove to Switzerland and rattling with nerves bought some EPO over the counter in a chemist’s. He administered it to himself in the flat in Nice, jabbing himself in the shoulder with the needle and getting on with the day quickly so he could forget what he had done. He didn’t bring his little thermos to the Tour but he felt the benefits of its contents.

  He was contrite and he was sorry but there was nothing he could do. In Betsy’s world things might be black and white. In Frankie’s world it was different.

  Betsy recalled a discussion she’d had with Kristin earlier that season, the day at Milan–San Remo. Betsy asked Lance’s wife what she thought about the EPO thing. ‘A necessary evil,’ Kristin had shrugged.

  Betsy Andreu never saw an evil which she found to be necessary. For Frankie bringing home the corn meant that sometimes he had to go along to get along. They argued.

  ‘You don’t understand. This is the only way I can ever finish the Tour now. After this I promise you. I’ll never do it again.’

  She hated the argument because this time of year, winding down and recovering after the Tour, was one of her favourites. She had a bottom line, though. If the team was making Frankie dope, he had only one option.

  ‘Get off the US Postal Service team. Just get off it.’

  ‘This is a problem for every team though, hon.’

  ‘You’ve got to promise me you won’t do it again. I don’t want you to do this, even if you don’t ride as well.’

  ‘I am not going to do it again.’

  So Betsy won out, as she always knew she would. After the 1999 Tour de France win, it fell to Frankie to go to Armstrong to ask him to pay his eight teammates the $25,000 each he owed them for helping him win the Tour. It told Betsy much that Armstrong had to be reminded. By then Armstrong was moving into a different stratosphere as an earner and as a celebrity. Those who shielded him from the elements, paced him on the climbs, led him on the descents, needed every dollar they could earn.

  Lance could never understand why Frankie wouldn’t go with Ferrari. He called him a cheapskate, too mean to pay and, for sure, Frankie didn’t like the idea of handing over a significant slice of his salary to a doctor in Italy, but it wasn’t just the money. He knew Ferrari meant big-time doping and that wasn’t what he wanted to do. And, in any case, Betsy would have killed him.

  By the end of 2000 Betsy had got her wish. Frankie rode an ordinary tour. He was dead when it finished and was cut loose from Postal. Lance, who had the power to stop him going, just shrugged.

  When I caught up with Betsy she had already been through the mill a few times. She would tell me the story of how some time after Frankie was cut adrift from US Postal, having refused to submit to the ministrations of Ferrari, he took a call one night from his directeur sportif Johan Bruyneel.

  If Lance was, as the French liked to say, cryptically, on ‘another planet’, Bruyneel was his representative on earth. Not a voice to make Frankie skip to the phone in excitement.

  When the call came, Frankie was in the process of putting his professional life back together. The culture of US Postal had changed quickly since 1998 and if you didn’t commit to doping you were considered not to be committed. Period. Frankie had received offers from two other teams to work as directeur. He had the brain and the toughness to be good at that, and the passion for the sport to want to do it.

  ‘What teams?’ asked Bruyneel.

  Betsy signalled across the room for Frankie to shut his mouth. Don’t tell Bruyneel anything. Frankie blurted out the names anyway. Fuck Bruyneel. Frankie wasn’t afraid.

  Within days the job offers had evaporated.34 Word was out that Frankie Andreu, with nine Tours as a super domestique on his CV, just wasn’t a team player. Bruyneel resurfaced. He offered to put Frankie back on the payroll. American director for US Postal. Betsy and Frankie saw the play right then, they didn’t like it but they had a family now and couldn’t afford not to go with it. Bruyneel put Frankie back on the books. Kept him in America, away fr
om people asking the wrong questions. And bought his silence for a while longer.

  Incidents like that meant that, in the early days of our contact, Betsy didn’t want to go public straight away. Whatever trappings his drug-fuelled success had brought to Lance Armstrong’s life, Frankie Andreu’s reward for being a lieutenant was a life determined by tight domestic budgets. Small things like Armstrong’s refusal to pay him a mere $6000 when Frankie’s contract with US Postal was ended had a serious effect on the family budget. In the larger scheme of things within US Postal, $6000 wasn’t a lot. To Frankie and Betsy it made a difference.

  The difficulty was always Frankie’s job. He had quit riding in 2001 but had remained in the sport. Pro cycling was the only job he’d ever known and Betsy knew that Armstrong could hurt her husband’s career. Frankie wanted her to step back and let others lead the race to find out the truth about Armstrong.

  ‘Who, Frankie? Who will do it?’ she would ask before delivering her usual bottom line: ‘I’m not lying for him; don’t dare ask me to do that.’

  It frustrated the hell out of Betsy that she had to be so guarded about what she said about Armstrong. As much as she wanted the truth out there, she knew the consequences for Frankie and their family if she was the one accusing Lance. Yet she was also able to take a longer-term view and she believed that one day she would be able to say exactly what was on her mind.

  Parallel to the conversations Betsy and I had through 2003, I spoke on and off with Pierre Ballester. Though he didn’t cover the Tour any more and had left L’Équipe, we remained friends. I learned from the Ferrari story in 2001 that a good newspaper – and the Sunday Times was a very good one – could only ever tell part of the Armstrong story.

  From the moment on the 1999 Tour that gut instinct said, ‘This guy ain’t clean,’ my sports editor Alex Butler had said, ‘That’s how you see it, that’s how you write it.’ In the English-speaking world, it was a story we had on our own; an ‘exclusive’ our rivals were happy to pass on. But the newspaper pieces could only stretch so far. It was time to write a book.

  Pierre Ballester and I first discussed the possibility in August 2001, and knowing why he’d fallen out with L’Équipe, I thought he would be a perfect co-author. He believed in the story and, with his contacts in France and his knowledge of the sport, he would bring a lot to the project. We agreed to put out feelers to my contacts in London publishing houses; he would try in Paris.

  Most London publishing executives were enthused; all of their legal people were dead against. With a different set of libel laws, Pierre got a better response in France and in no time we were speaking with La Martinière. The deal was soon done and towards the beginning of 2002 we were dividing up the various angles. At the time it felt like the most exciting thing I’d ever done. Betsy was pleased with the news: ‘A book,’ she said. ‘You know I’ll help you whatever way I can.’

  I flew to America in December 2003. It was a four-pronged trip. I spoke to riders Marty Jemison in Park City, Utah and Jonathan Vaughters in Colorado (while there, I also squeezed in a chat with Andy Hampsten). I went to Minnesota to meet Greg LeMond and to Dearborn to meet a woman I’d never met but who felt almost like a sister.

  The trip was mainly an information-gathering exercise. In stories like this there is always a big difference between what you know and what you can actually print. For now I was happy to just know more. So the interviews with Jemison, Vaughters and Andreu took place in two parts. One general section, which I was allowed tape, were unsurprisingly bland. And then a juicier section, where I would only take notes. This was the good stuff. This was what they wanted me to know but couldn’t be seen to tell me. I’m not sure about the legal status of such an arrangement but we all trusted each other to stick to the rules.

  In Michigan I stayed at a plush hotel near where the Andreus lived in Dearborn. It would be the only time they let me stay at a hotel: I got the room in the basement of their home after that. A friendship grew out of what had been a business relationship: I went to Betsy’s church, had coffee at her favourite diner; we walked through the pretty university town of Ann Arbor, she took me to a college football game involving her beloved University of Michigan. I went with big Frankie to watch little Frankie play ice hockey.

  And Betsy and I talked, and talked. She lectured me on the need to pursue the truth. We laughed, too, and had fun seeing each other as Lance saw us. So I called her ‘the crazed bitch’ and she called me ‘the troll’. (Not even in my top ten list of the worst things I have ever been called.)

  I loved watching the dynamic of the relationship between Frankie and Betsy. One evening early on, Betsy cooked these amazing steaks with a lovely dressed salad. Frankie sat down, surveyed the table and frowned.

  ‘Where’s the ketchup?’

  ‘You want ketchup? With this? Frankie? That’s disgusting?’

  ‘Yeah. I want ketchup.’

  The ketchup was fetched and Frankie wrapped his hand around the bottle and shook it until a sea of red sauce covered half his plate. Betsy shook her head for the benefit of the visitor but flashed a little Mona Lisa smile to her husband.

  On the cycling internet forums and in places where people have tried to tease out the multiple ramifications of the Lance Armstrong story, Betsy and Frankie’s relationship has been a source of intrigue. There is wonder they survived as a couple, and many firmly believe the strain on their marriage was close to breaking point.

  But that was simply not true. Of course there was a lot of stress, but the remarkable thing about that was the more stressed Betsy felt about the Lance situation the closer she felt to Frankie, and it worked the same the other way. At the time when Frankie was losing jobs and being passed over for positions that were made for him, they were at a low point, and Betsy suggested to Frankie that he should tell people they were getting divorced.

  ‘Just say we’re splitting up and you’ll get a job.’

  ‘Don’t say that,’ he said. ‘That’s not funny.’

  ‘I’m not being funny. Just tell them we’re getting divorced. You get a job and you tell them we’ve changed our minds.’

  ‘Betsy, I’m not going to do that. I would never do that. Don’t ask me to do that.’

  She thought this was sweet because Frankie didn’t often get mad, but she could see he was upset at her suggestion. And, anyway, she would never get divorced because of Armstrong.

  Because Betsy and Frankie needed to go on raising their family with earnings from the cycling industry, we knew that Betsy couldn’t go public with the hospital story. The retribution would be swift. So we decided to see if somebody with no stake in cycling or in Lance would confirm. The obvious person to track down was Lance’s former girlfriend, Lisa Shiels, who had also been in the room that evening some seven years previously.

  Back in 1996 Lisa had been a chemical engineering co-ed from the University of Texas. Lance had the reputation in the cycling world of being a legendary ladies’ man and teammates referred to him for a while as FedEx (‘When you absolutely, positively have to have it overnight’). Doubtless as he mellowed he became more US Postal. Lisa had stuck with Lance through his diagnosis and treatments and it was said that he had intended to get engaged to her . . . then he came across Kristin and fell in love. Since that time Lisa had, presumably, returned to a normal quiet life. Betsy undertook to make a few phone calls in an attempt to track her down. Then I would step in and see what Lisa was prepared to say about that day in the hospital.

  A few years later, Betsy would wonder and spend a little time investigating if someone had been hacking into her computer. A lot of strange things happened and when the experts looked into it they agreed something was going on, but it would cost a lot of money to find out who was behind it. Betsy had a lot of things but not a lot of money. In any case, Lance always had a retinue of loyal flunkies who would call or email him if there was the slightest word of dissent in the winds. He got wind of Betsy’s search for Lisa pretty quickly. Bets
y had asked Becky, wife of Kevin Livingston, if she had a number.

  On 15 December 2003, at 4.22 a.m., the Andreus’ computer blinked out the news of a newly arrived email. It was directed to Frankie. From Lance, with love. He referenced a previous exchange where he had chastised Frankie for the behaviour of his wife.

  Frankie, thanks for the help here. The more I think about this though the harder I find it to understand why your wife did what she did. Let me get this straight: you work for the team (or some form of USPS), oln [TV network] (where we work together on a daily basis), and all she cared about was getting left alone by this little idiot . . . to go around and say to Becky, ‘Please don’t tell Kevin,’ is as snaky and conniving as it gets. I know Betsy is not a fan, and that’s fine, but by helping to bring me down is not going to help y’all’s situation. There is a direct link to all of our success here. I suggest you remind her of that. Again, not to be a dick but this really stings, and I cannot for the life of me, get my arms around it.

  thanks, la

  It was clear I was the ‘little idiot’ being referred to. That would change to the ‘little troll’, and I was grateful for that. Trolls have a little more about them. And I had come to terms with the fact that Lance and I were no longer in love. Of more concern was the situation Betsy and Frankie were in.

  Frankie replied to Lance later that day. Wisely, he chose not to mention that a couple of hours later he would be sitting down to dinner with his house guest, the little idiot.

  15 December 2003, 4.50 p.m.

  I told you I would talk with Walsh. I tried to get some information for you and he finally called back. Betsy answered the phone and he started to ask her some questions but she told him she had nothing to say and called me to the phone. Generally he asked some questions about [Michele] Ferrari. I don’t think he will call back again so I don’t know if I can follow up at all on anything. I don’t know if this helps at all but I tried.