Seven Deadly Sins: My Pursuit of Lance Armstrong

by David Walsh

  For Stephen that summer of ’95 was a glimpse of the future. He was old enough and mature enough by then to know that Europe could no longer promise anything like the pure joy he had known growing up, watching his brother Jack compete on the two-lane blacktop around New Zealand. These weren’t the footsteps he had dreamed of following.

  He’d had his pro career, he’d done the Tour, done the lot. If he didn’t take EPO he was going to be left behind. Instead he left cycling behind. He came home to New Zealand. His story took four or five hours of a pleasant antipodean evening to tell. He was a strong character and a guy who had found his happiness beyond the peloton.

  Stephen’s wasn’t evidence that would bury Lance Armstrong, and neither was it intended to be. Telling about his career was something he needed to do for himself.

  I left Auckland though with a better feeling for the pattern of things in Lance’s life in the mid-nineties, before cancer; a sense of when he had first been beguiled by Michele Ferrari. It was a place far away and a time long ago, but Lance had been riding so hard and fast he crossed the borders without noticing. Guys like Stephen Swart just stepped off the ride and got away when they had the chance. His story made a deep impression. I left Auckland with something else too.

  A sense of responsibility to people like the Swarts.

  13

  ‘For most of my life I had operated under a simple schematic of winning and losing, but cancer was teaching me a tolerance for ambiguities.’

  Lance Armstrong

  I can still remember that one of the satisfactions of sitting talking to Emma O’Reilly on that July day in 2003 was a small, spiteful pleasure. The sort of thing I would never confess to Sandro Donati. Somewhere off in France Lance Armstrong was busting his gut chasing after another Tour. He might have noted, perhaps with sorrow, my absence from press conferences. He may have thought that I’d given up, been pulled from the case, finally been admitted to a home for the bewildered.

  As I sat with Emma I hoped he’d noticed that I was missing and I hoped he’d wondered for a second: ‘What’s the little troll up to now?’ Because now, right now, as he sweated through the French countryside bossing the peloton, I was sitting with one of the people who had been spat out from the US Postal machine. I was looking at this smart, bright young woman and wondering what was wrong with Lance Armstrong that he couldn’t have seen the sense of retaining her loyalty. Did he not know she was from Tallaght?

  By the time I spoke to Emma, the business of writing the book which would be called L.A. Confidentiel was a significant part of my life. After Ferrari in 2001, I realised that if all this really mattered to me I couldn’t continue on the basis of going to the Tour every year and sending the Sunday Times my annual three dissenting pieces. It wasn’t enough.

  Pierre and I conceived the book and then like proper journalists took a long time to do anything serious about it. It had become evident early on that English publishing houses weren’t going to risk their lives in a scrum for the publishing rights, so it would be a French book, and we were determined that it would be a good book. Years on and I’m glad to say that there is very little which appeared in the USADA report of 2012 which didn’t appear eight years previously in L.A. Confidentiel. Admittedly, the report had more detail but the stories were the same.37

  Setting to work, we divided up the tasks and somehow I ended up with the glamour and Pierre ended up with the grit. If you’re from County Kilkenny and dealing with a charismatic Frenchman, this is as good a deal as life has to offer.

  While I stacked up the air miles, Pierre did the dog work. Pierre has a talent for the forensics of doping, an understanding of the scientific implications of numbers and figures and graphs. I went around sticking my tape recorder under people’s noses and asking questions. Pierre went to laboratories and offices and doctors, and pored over figures and then went back again looking for explanations. At the end of it, he could have passed himself off as an oncologist.

  I put some batteries in the recorder and headed off. I’d been to San Francisco in 2001 to interview the former US Postal team doctor Prentice Steffen.38 That piece would be a starting point.

  Steffen was the team doctor for US Postal in 1996, the year before Armstrong joined the team. Steffen had been with the team since 1993, when it was known as Subaru–Montgomery, and continued as team doctor in the first year of US Postal’s involvement. He saw the team as distinctly American and felt it should represent the mores of American cycling.

  With US Postal’s backing and money, however, came the ambition to compete against Europe’s best. In 1996 they entered the Tour of Switzerland. A big step up.

  Then Steffen recounted a conversation which causes trouble to this day.

  ‘We were wiped out,’ said Steffen. ‘Two of my riders approached me saying they wanted to “talk about the medical programme”. It was said that, as a team, we weren’t able to get to where we wanted to go with what I was doing for them. I said, “Well, right now I am doing everything I can.” They might have come back with “more could be done” and I said, “Yeah, I understand, but I am not going to be involved in that.”‘

  Steffen was sure that he was being asked to help the two riders, Tyler Hamilton and Marty Jemison, to dope. Jemison, the more experienced of the pair (he had ridden in Europe on European teams before), did all the talking. Hamilton listened.39

  After that informal discussion, relations cooled between the doctor and his riders. Four months later, a message was left on Steffen’s voicemail telling him that the team no longer needed him.

  Steffen sent a letter to his boss, Mark Gorski.

  Dear Mark,

  I’ve had a week now to consider the message you left for me concerning your decision to use Johnny’s doctor [Johnny Weltz, the team’s new directeur sportif] instead of me next season. I’m afraid you’ve seriously misjudged me and that you will need to reconsider your position.

  I feel that, by my efforts with the team since the ’93 season, I’ve earned the opportunity to provide medical support for the team as we enter a new and exciting phase of our development. Certainly my training, qualifications, experience, knowledge and dedication cannot be questioned. So why your decision?

  As is my habit I discussed the situation with two of my close friends. The explanation soon became clear. What could a Spanish doctor completely unknown to the organisation offer that I can’t or won’t? Doping is the obvious answer.

  November 1996, and Steffen received a letter of reply. It came from the firm of Keesal, Young & Logan, attorneys for the US Postal team. The letter said Steffen’s suspicions about his departure were incorrect but he would be held responsible for his comments if he made them public.

  Steffen departed. Pedro Celaya came in as team doctor. At the 1997 Tour de France all nine US Postal riders made it to the finish. Prentice Steffen was pretty sure he knew why.

  That interview was a useful building block.

  In late autumn 2003 I saw the former Postal rider Stephen Swart in New Zealand. Then I went to Park City, Utah, and sat and talked with Marty Jemison. In Colorado I met Jonathan Vaughters (who now runs the Garmin team; Prentice Steffen is the team doctor). I went to see the LeMonds in Minneapolis and on up to the Andreus in Michigan.

  I just about made it home to Mary and the kids for Christmas 2003 in Cambridge. The New Year came with a mountain of writing to be done.

  When the book came out in the summer of 2004 it was the claims in the interviews which made the impact. Newspapers always go for the drama: Wife of ex-teammate slams Armstrong. Former masseuse rubs Lance wrong way.

  Obviously Emma was the star turn of the book. She had been longest and furthest into the belly of the beast and her descriptions of the internal culture she witnessed were compelling. The Indiana hospital story went over big as well but, overall, the impact was hard to see in the blizzard of legal actions which Lance Armstrong launched to greet the book.

  His response was more of a story than anyt
hing in the book.

  A lot of the real nourishment in L.A. Confidentiel was provided through Pierre’s work. This was largely ignored on the grounds that it was insufficiently sexy. Pierre did the science. Science has no ambiguities.

  Pierre raised questions which we have never really got answers to. Lance signed for the Cofidis team from Motorola just weeks before being diagnosed with stage iv cancer. According to the Englishman Paul Sherwen, who was public relations manager for Motorola at that time, ‘For a very long time, Lance Armstrong felt a shooting pain that did not worry him overmuch. We even made him a special cushion.’

  A key rider in a Tour de France team was experiencing pain severe enough for the PR flunkie to know about it, but it doesn’t seem to have come to the attention of the medical staff who would have fussed about him every evening.

  If they did know, why no disclosure to Cofidis? And what were Cofidis doing spending so heavily on a new signing with no medical test required?

  And then there was the question of the human chorionic gonadotropin.

  Human chorionic gonadotropin, or hCG, is commonly referred to as the ‘pregnancy hormone’ because elevated levels of hCG are present when a woman conceives. Produced by the placenta, these higher levels of hCG are detectable eleven days after conception, and are what urine-based pregnancy tests use to calculate a positive result. So far, so good.

  In addition to pregnancy, there are other health-related factors that may cause hCG levels to be elevated. After a cycle of steroid use, many users take hCG to boost their natural testosterone levels again. A slowing down of the work-rate in the testes is a side effect of steroid abuse.

  In men and non-pregnant women, high levels of hCG are sometimes associated with cancerous and non-cancerous tumour growth. Tumour growth that causes increased hCG usually occurs in the reproductive glands, like the testicles or ovaries, but can also be caused by other tumours in the abdomen.

  Which leads us back to 1996. In its synthetic form, hCG has for a long time been a banned product for male athletes. Lance Armstrong was tested thirteen times during the summer of 1996. If he was suffering from stabbing pains and using a special cushion on his saddle and was to be diagnosed with stage iv cancer in the autumn, it is more than reasonable to assume that he was showing distinct levels of hCG in those tests.

  Armstrong himself has said:’I knew that hCG was looked for in anti-doping controls. I would like to know what my level was at the time of the control [he’s talking about the anti-doping control given at the Swiss Grand Prix, in August, six weeks before his cancer was detected]. If it’s true that the UCI keeps all the results, it should be possible to know where my cancer was at that time.’

  Oddly enough, Lance never pushed the issue any further. Or communicated it, so far as we know, to the UCI. And the UCI have carefully avoided giving any explanation.

  At the time the French national anti-doping laboratory was under the control of Jean-Pierre Lafarge. Questioned by Le Monde, Lafarge said, ‘Control of hCG was systematic. The cases are rare, probably lower than one case out of 10,000. In Lance Armstrong’s case, it is surprising that no trace of the illness was detected during the controls.’

  Pierre knew that the anti-doping controls taken on the Swiss Grand Prix in August 1996 were analysed at the Institute of Biochemistry of the German sports university based in Cologne.

  Its director, Wilhelm Schänzer, has confirmed that his ‘laboratory had the capacity to find traces of hCG’. It seems quite clear that the beta-hCG content in Lance Armstrong’s blood in August 1996 was screened. At the time, the Cologne laboratory detected a slight abnormality in the analysis of testosterone, but did not find it suspicious enough and sent a negative result to the UCI.

  The only official reaction to this contradiction came from Anne-Laure Masson, who was then the medical co-ordinator of the UCI.

  ‘I’m perplexed because if the level of hCG was also high, Lance Armstrong should have tested positive, in principle. For now, it’s inexplicable.’

  We know that at the time his cancer was detected Armstrong’s beta-hCG level was through the roof. Beta-hCG is a tumour marker for the specific type of cancer Armstrong had. Normal level in males is 1-2 nanograms per millilitre of blood and pretty much always under 5ng/ml. Armstrong has given several different numbers for what his level was when he was diagnosed.

  The figures vary according to which source you give credence to: 52,000ng/ml or 92,380ng/ml or 109,000ng/ml. The first figure came from Armstrong himself in an interview with Pierre in L’Équipe in November 1996. The other two figures are extracted from his autobiography It’s Not About the Bike.

  This is extraordinary. Even if we accept the lowest figure, Armstrong’s beta-hCG levels had to have been enhanced for quite some time. Stranger still that in the years since then Armstrong has apparently satisfied himself with these vague answers.

  Was there negligence? Were riders passing tests regardless of findings? If Armstrong’s urine was carrying hCG, shouldn’t he have been immediately informed and it be ascertained whether he was doping or had some kind of cancer, unrelated to doping?

  One of Armstrong’s attending physicians, Dr J. Dudley Youman, has attempted to place a date on the birth of the cancer. ‘In my opinion, this cancer was in his organism for several months.’

  Other medics told Pierre that there was a mathematical relationship between the level of the hCG marker when properly noted and the extent of the illness.

  Testicular cancer advances rapidly, but for Lance Armstrong to have had his cancer for less than a month before being diagnosed ‘is just not possible’.

  Pierre delved into this world page after page, report after report, doctor after doctor. It is impossible to do his journalism justice here, but it was never done justice anywhere, and those questions which he raised were just left hanging in the air.

  It was Pierre’s quiet excavations which uncovered what for me is still one of the mysteries of Lance: a letter from Alain Bondue of the Cofidis team to Bill Stapleton with a copy to François Migraine, head of Cofidis. The letter is dated 22 April 1997:

  I must inform you that during his period of training in January [at Marcq-en-Barœul], Lance was in Italy to see Dr Ferrari, and that Cofidis made the reservation and paid for his airfare, although the trip was considered a personal trip that had not been decided by Cofidis.

  This still strikes me as extraordinary. The Cofidis press conference to launch the team for the year took place on 8 January. The team then went to Marcq-en-Barœul to train. Armstrong was just three weeks over his last chemotherapy session. He was not expected to work with the team, who were indeed flabbergasted to see him turn up for the press launch.

  Ferrari, as we know, received no mention in Lance’s autobiography, yet even before he was given the all clear from cancer (February 1997), Lance was going out of his way to spend time in Ferrara. At the time Dr Craig Nichols, his physician in Indiana, was firmly on the record as saying that it was at that point unclear as to whether Lance would be able to resume a career as a professional cyclist.

  What was in his head? What decisions had he made?

  Someday I hope he tells us about all these things.

  14

  ‘Litigation: A machine which you go into as a pig and come out of as a sausage.’

  Ambrose Bierce

  I walked out of my boss’s office knowing what I had to do. Alan English, the deputy sports editor, was seated at a desk to the left.

  ‘Alan, I’m leaving the Sunday Times. I don’t have an option.’

  I had been at the paper for more than eight years and had been chief sports writer for the previous three. Something the footballer Teddy Sheringham once said about Manchester United reflected how I felt about the Sunday Times. ‘When you leave United,’ Sheringham said, ‘you accept that where you’re going won’t be as good.’

  I felt nothing but intense sadness. Eight years and then at the very moment when L.A. Confidentiel, les Secrets de La
nce Armstrong, is about to appear on book shelves all over France, I am leaving a job and a newspaper that I love.

  Alan could see how I felt. ‘I’ll walk with you to the car.’

  We went in silence.

  ‘Think about it,’ he said, as I got in the car.

  ‘I have. I don’t have a choice.’

  It was a Thursday evening, a little after seven o’clock and London’s rush hour had passed. Knowing what was going on, I was in no rush to get home.

  The more I thought about it, the worse it seemed. Emma O’Reilly, Betsy Andreu and Stephen Swart were putting their necks on the line for me and now, when I needed the newspaper’s support, I didn’t feel I had it. Anger passed, replaced by sadness and a sense of hopelessness. I dialled Alex’s number.

  ‘I don’t think we need to fall out over this but I’m resigning from the paper.’

  ‘I’m sorry you’re doing that,’ he said. I could tell he felt let down by me.

  ‘I’ll send you an email when I get home confirming it.’

  ‘Okay.’

  I rang Betsy.

  ‘I’ve resigned from the Sunday Times,’ I said.

  ‘Oh my God, are you kidding?’

  ‘No. It’s true.’

  ‘What are you gonna do?’

  ‘I’m not sure. Hopefully, there will be options.’

  ‘I cannot believe this. This is crazy. No wonder we broke away from the British, with the stoopid libel laws you got.’

  At home I wrote a short email to Alex, confirming the resignation. Telling Mary wasn’t the easiest bit, but she could see the sadness and tried not to think about the consequences. ‘If that’s what you think you had to do, then you didn’t have a choice.’