Seven Deadly Sins: My Pursuit of Lance Armstrong

by David Walsh

  He too could see what the team lacked in comparison to bigger, more successful outfits. That bonded them. He liked to work with Emma because she was the best of an average lot.

  In 1998, though, despite two years of virtually holding her hands over her ears whenever there was talk of drugs among riders or crew, she got dragged into the circle anyway. George Hincapie overheard her say that she had to go to Belgium for a trip. He asked if she would mind picking up something for him from a friend. No problem. The friend was a person known to her but no longer associated with the team.

  Emma arranged a meeting at the Hotel Nazareth in Ghent. The package was handed over. She was surprised by how small it was but said she would try to get it to Hincapie if she saw him down in Girona in Spain, where several of the team were living. If not, she would catch up with him in the States and hand the package over there. There was a pause. Her contact said: ‘Emma, don’t do that. Give it to George. It’s testosterone and you don’t want to transport it yourself.’

  ‘Really. And why would George want testosterone?’ she asked, unable to help her own curiosity.

  ‘He needs to have strength for a sprint at the end of long stages.’

  ‘Oh.’

  By the end of 1998 this minor piece of work as a drugs mule would look distinctly innocent. The Tour de France began in Emma’s home town Dublin, so she headed back to Ireland a few days early for some family time. She arranged to meet the team as they came off the ferry.

  Unbeknown to her, as she’d been spending the day with her family, Willy Voet, the Festina soigneur, had been arrested carrying a cornucopia of performance-enhancing and leisure drugs in his car. So when she got to the ferry, which was an hour late, the Irish police were present. She thought for half a second they were giving the team an escort to their hotel and thanked them.

  ‘No,’ they said, ‘we’re customs officers. We have some searches to do.’

  This was home turf for Emma O’Reilly and on this particular turf nobody is very impressed by uniforms. She gave the customs officers some advice.

  ‘Lads, let me tell you, for your own sakes, don’t even try it. There’ll be a riot. They’ve been travelling all day, they’re very grumpy. Come to the hotel in the morning if you have to.’

  And remarkably, as the biggest scandal in Tour history was breaking all around them, the customs men left it at that. It stayed like that for the duration of the Tour. US Postal were somehow protected by their innocence, their American-ness and their big brand backers; they seemed somehow to be set aside as war loomed between the police and the teams. And when it got a bit scary one afternoon, with the police in the field where the team vehicles were parked, US Postal flushed a lot of stuff down the drain.

  It is the summer of 2003 as we are sitting and talking in Emma’s house: almost exactly four years since I watched Lance ride the 1999 prologue and came away scratching my head. It’s been four years of circling a fortress, finding little cracks but never anything big enough to let me in. I’ve been on trips all over the place speaking to scientists, cyclists, police, doctors, testers.

  Now here I am chatting with a woman from Dublin and, incredibly, she is from the inside. She’s talking about Lance Armstrong, the world’s favourite sporting icon and medical miracle. And she has the goods. Just like that. I keep glancing at the tape recorder making sure the little red light is still illuminated. I try to keep my mouth from hanging open. It gets better, stranger. I can’t believe I’ve been sent down this trail. Emma tells me stories and anecdotes and this is an interview I never want to end. Maybe to pause for a second, bring the world in by the ear and say, ‘Listen to this woman, just listen.’

  Lance didn’t compete in the 1998 Tour, but afterwards he was back in Europe to ride the Tour of Holland. Emma drove him to the airport after that and, as he was getting out of the team car, he handed her a bag and said, ‘Look, Emma, I didn’t get rid of these, will you get rid of them for me?’

  The bag was full of empty, used syringes.

  She accepted the bag but didn’t know what to do. She was heading to Ghent in Belgium and when she got over the border and relaxed a little she found herself getting pulled over for being marginally over the speed limit. She cursed and cursed before winding down the window for the policeman. She noticed she was shaking with fear.

  ‘I’m sorry about that, officer.’

  ‘No. Do you know Mark Gorski?’

  ‘Yes. He’s my boss.’

  The policeman was a former rider. She gave him a contact number for his old friend. Emma and her syringes drove off into the night leaving the policeman behind on the road waving cheerily.

  The casual nature of it all astonishes me. Sure, there’s a cloak-and-dagger element to what Emma is relating, but there is a bravura too. An arrogance. Just dump these for me.

  She tells me she deliberately refused to get involved in finding out who was taking what, as most European soigneurs would. Her style was to open the truck where the medications were kept and tell the team, ‘There you go, lads: help yourselves.’

  Armstrong’s view of the other soigneurs never really changed while Emma was there, so he tended to work with her exclusively and she would massage him and listen to what he had to say, his complaints and his views on other riders. In terms of staff, Lance was the kingmaker. People came and went at his whim. Johan Bruyneel arrived as directeur sportif for 1999 and became Lance’s enforcer. He promoted Emma to the post of head soigneur, but the honeymoon period between them was brief.

  She paints a comprehensive picture of a team more ramshackle on the inside than it ever appeared from the outside. The characters, the incompetents, the savants, the bluffers. Again and again she makes me laugh. Her relationship with the Bruyneels, Johan and his former wife Christelle, was a book all in itself.

  ‘I know this is terrible but he [Bruyneel] wore cheap clothes, even though he was quite wealthy; he was a team director, but he never dressed really appropriately. When everyone else wore khakis, he would wear those stupid things with the zips on them and stuff like that. Things you could turn into three-quarter-length shorts!

  ‘Oh god, the poor fella got beaten up by the ugly tree coming down.’

  While the world thought he was Lance’s lieutenant and enforcer, Emma viewed him differently. Lance’s lap dog.

  What fragments I’d gathered over the years about life inside the US Postal team, Emma was able to glue together easily. She had been in the Last Tango restaurant in Sestriere the night that Michele Ferrari came to dine with the team. She wasn’t surprised to see Ferrari with Lance. It confirmed a lot of things.

  ‘I knew his role in cycling was dirty, that no rider he worked with was known to be clean.’

  She described the deterioration of her relationship with Johan Bruyneel, and the surprise she felt when having been asked to drive to Spain from France in May 1999. That day at the team’s base in Piles, Bruyneel even managed to squeeze some pleasantries out of himself as he slipped a pill box into her hand to be brought back to Lance.

  She told Simon, her boyfriend at the time, what was happening as part of their journey. It created a sort of giddy nervousness in the car. During an earlier squabble, Bruyneel had commandeered the last team car available, leaving Emma and Simon to hire a rental. As they waited to be waved through at the border, Emma wondered if Bruyneel hadn’t planned the entire thing this way because a rental car was less likely to be stopped than a pro-cycling team car.

  She brought the pill box to Armstrong and left it at that. Soon after, her relationship with Bruyneel began to become intolerable.

  The 1999 Tour was a triumph, of course, and she had written in her diary before the start, ‘We’re going in to win the Tour.’

  And then there was that strange incident the day before the prologue, when Lance noticed the syringe marks on his arm en route to the pre-race medical. He wanted Emma to spread some of her make-up over the needle bruises, but she said her make-up would be no good for that j
ob. She went to a pharmacy and got some proper concealer. With some horror she looked at the job she’d done, thought it looked terrible, but he seemed happy.

  One evening well into the race, she was giving Lance his evening massage when there was a big kerfuffle about a positive cortisone test. Two team officials were there, then a third, and they agreed that a backdated prescription was the best way to deal with the problem. That was accepted and she got the impression everyone just wanted a ‘clean’ Tour.

  They said Lance had saddle sore, but he never mentioned that to her and she didn’t believe it. She did see the team doctor Luis del Moral, who had taken over from Celaya at the start of the season, getting all hot and bothered about the prescription, as if he’d been asked to rewrite the law of gravity. But that took care of it. Lance Armstrong. Pure as driven snow.

  ‘Now, Emma,’ Armstrong said at the end of that night, ‘you know enough to bring me down.’

  The Tour de France of 1999 would be Emma’s last. The relationship between her and Bruyneel deteriorated quickly after that. She believed that Bruyneel felt threatened by the respect that Armstrong had for the soigneur. Emma knew she was empowered by that respect. Something had to give. The lap dog knew how to bite. Bruyneel marginalised and bullied her to the point where she knew for a considerable time that this part of her life was ending. After stealing her diary, Bruyneel went to her colleagues and lied about her writing nasty things about them.

  Emma resigned her job in early 2000.

  It was another staff member who had told her about the intrusion into her diary. The same guy told her not to worry.

  ‘In one conversation with him he twirled round the front wheel of the bike he was working on. “See, Emma-tje,” he said, using the affectionate version of my name in Dutch, because we were friends. “Look at the valve there. When I spin the wheel it goes round but the valve always comes round too. Remember it, Emma-tje: what goes around comes around.” ’

  It was coming around now. Surely.

  12

  ‘One must not cheat anybody, not even the world of its victory.’

  Franz Kafka

  One evening, when things were going badly, Jan Swart turned to her husband Stephen and asked him a simple question.

  ‘Stephen, why did you do this?’

  This. This had brought fire and brimstone down upon them. For this they had lost friends and business. For this they had been excoriated in low-rent media. For this her husband was portrayed as a bitter loser. That hurt her so much.

  This. Why had he done it?

  And Stephen said: ‘Jan, when I’m on my rocking chair at eighty-four years of age and I don’t have a lot of time left to live, I will look back on this and I will regard it as one of the finest things I’ve ever done in my life.’

  That was all she needed to know. A good man is hard to find. They would battle on.

  When Lance Armstrong unravels his life and pulls apart all the strands, he’ll wonder (just perhaps) at the serendipitous nature of events that would eventually undo him. Stephen Swart was an early piece in the jigsaw: a former rider and, as they say, a stand-up guy.

  He came into my orbit in a roundabout way. Consider the odds. An Irish journalist, through a series of life events, comes in middle age to make a new start in England. He and his wife, their five kids and their new daughter Molly wind up in Cambridge. Molly might not go to school but she’d meet the scholars.

  In Cambridge they would meet a distinguished New Zealander, an investigative journalist who, having done a fellowship in Oxford in 1996, was now completing a fellowship at Cambridge. For his fellowship at Wolfson College, Phil Taylor was studying sports doping. He trawled the internet for UK journalists who wrote about doping and, as this was the very month when I happened to be in France interviewing Lance Armstrong, my name was soon in his net.

  He’s a journalist, so he got the number easily enough.

  ‘David, you wouldn’t happen to live anywhere near Cambridge?’ he said.

  ‘About four miles,’ I said.

  He came for lunch, stayed for the afternoon and the time flew. I told him he had to go see Sandro Donati in Rome, which he did. He, too, loved Sandro. We talked about the Armstrong case and he told of an interview he had in 1997 with a compatriot of his, Stephen Swart, who had ridden with the Motorola team and been in the same team as Lance Armstrong for two years.

  Phil wanted to do a story about Stephen’s particular experience in the Motorola team and how it was decided that only by using EPO could they hope to compete. Twenty-three-year-old Lance Armstrong was one of the strongest advocates for doping in the team. Phil wanted to write a story about Stephen’s personal experiences, but it was too soon for Stephen: he was in his first retirement season and he wasn’t ready for the backlash. Soon afterwards, Phil gave me a transcript of Stephen’s recollection of doping in the Motorola team.

  I wanted to meet Stephen Swart.

  Now Auckland, New Zealand, is one of those places in the world where you can’t really claim to be just passing through. So when preparing to cover the Rugby World Cup in Australia in 2003 I mentioned to Alex, my long-suffering friend and boss, that it might be the mark of a great editor to send a winged minion across to New Zealand to do a piece on Jonah Lomu, the great All Black wing who was suffering from kidney disease at the time.

  Not long afterwards, Alex had the idea of sending a winged minion to Auckland to do a piece on Jonah Lomu. Selflessly I undertook the four-hour flight from Sydney and – why not? I was going to be passing through anyway – made time to see Stephen Swart. I met him at a hotel in the city and he drove us to the port where the yachts rocked gently on their anchors and the Tour de France seemed to be part of another universe.

  ‘Is it here that the Rainbow Warrior was sunk?’

  ‘Ah, those French . . .’ Stephen remembers with a grin. ‘Over there. That one. She won the America’s Cup.’

  We found a restaurant, kept the harbour and yachts in our sights, and talked about things in general. If he didn’t mind, I wanted to do the interview at his home the next day. He was cool with that. Very little in Stephen’s life was a hassle. I told him about Betsy and Frankie Andreu, Greg LeMond, Jonathan Vaughters, Prentice Steffen, Emma O’Reilly and many others who had all helped to show that Lance Armstrong was part of a doping culture at both Motorola and US Postal.

  It mattered to him that he wouldn’t be the only one putting his head on the chopping block.

  Stephen grew up in Morrinsville on the North Island and in his junior racing days he and his older brother Jack were big names in the New Zealand cycling community. Jack would be New Zealand cyclist of the year six times, but Stephen would be the one to have the pro career and get to ride the Tour.

  In middle age the two of them are still cycling. There’s a clipping I saw from just a couple of years ago where Jack won a stage on a race in New Zealand on the same day that Stephen was voted ‘Most Aggressive’ rider. They make them different down there.

  Just eight years before our meeting in 2003, Stephen had been earning his bread in Europe riding a bike. He’d loved Europe, even if it hadn’t showered him with reward. He’d become a hard and respected pro and the Tour de France was for him the most exhilarating time of the year, a career highlight.

  When he stopped cycling, he and Jan and the kids had come back home. Having been a rider all his life, Stephen worked for a while in a company associated with cycling, then he started his own company as a property developer. He finds a place that needs some attention, buys it, does the work and puts it back on the market. Not easy, but it’s a living and life is good.

  There’s a gap there, which he is conscious of, though. I’ve heard Paul Kimmage and other guys talk about the same thing. The void of not knowing. Stephen gave the best years of his life to cycling and when the sport spat him out he felt as if he had been short-changed, duped.

  Doping had done that. He couldn’t throw himself into the life of the needle, not in the
way you needed to. He tried it and felt uncomfortable with it and with himself. He’d never know how far he might have gone if he had been racing in a clean peloton.

  The transition back to ordinary life had been difficult. The Swarts didn’t have a lot of money and then suddenly the dream was dead, and the rest of life looked like it might be something they just settled for. It had been easy to unpack the suitcases, but it was harder to deal with their contents.

  ‘I said to myself, “Did I really learn the profession?” In other words, did I know enough on the medical plan? Maybe I wasn’t a good enough pharmacist? But why was it necessary to learn that? You do not get into sports thinking that you have to learn this type of thing. You don’t go to school saying to yourself: “Well, I want to be a racing cyclist, and to be one, I’ll have to know medicine and get a pharmacist’s diploma.” I felt that I had more than average abilities, that if you remove everything and just look at the guys naked on their bikes, I would have had an advantage. I knew I had this advantage, but that, against professional cyclists, it meant nothing.’

  Stephen Swart became a pro back in 1987. There were no firework displays. It wasn’t breaking news. A nation didn’t see him off at the quays. He signed with the English team ANC-Halfords. Meanwhile, fate had taken up kickboxing. Six months later, Stephen wasn’t getting his monthly wage of £500. The team was broke.

  Back then he was a wide-eyed and innocent Kiwi. Before the team dissolved, the riders had been rounded up by their old-school soigneur, Angus Fraser, and each injected with an undetermined substance. They all wondered but nobody asked.

  ‘We had complete confidence in this guy, because we thought he knew what he was doing. Like if you go to the doctor when you’re sick, you have confidence in him. You think it can’t be very bad since it doesn’t test positive. And I wasn’t a big enough cyclist to have the right to ask questions. I remember two cyclists from the team who carried their own briefcases, and it wasn’t papers that they carted around with them.’