by David Walsh
They knew Armstrong had his finger on the trigger but they weren’t ducking for cover.
At around five o’clock on the Saturday evening, an hour or so before deadline, Alan emailed me the piece. I told him I didn’t think much of it, feeling that it hadn’t gone far enough and had left out too much of the most damning evidence. It was a thoughtless and classless response to a friend and colleague who had done so much for me. Alan was furious but, still seeing myself as the victim, I never even saw that.
Alan’s piece would cost the Sunday Times £600,000: £300,000 as a contribution to Armstrong’s legal fees and £300,000 to cover its own legal expenses.42
Two years were spent fighting the case, reams of evidence were gathered, many witnesses pledged to come and testify on our behalf, but after a ruling decreed that the meaning of the article was that Armstrong doped, and that to win the case the Sunday Times would have to prove that he doped, the game was up. How do you prove a rider has doped? We were supposed to wait for him to test positive. British libel law wanted to make cheerleaders of us all.
Tim Herman, Armstrong’s long-time lawyer from Texas, came to London to finalise the settlement with the Sunday Times’ then managing editor Richard Caseby. It was civilised and Richard recalls Tim saying they were never going to allow the case to go to court. Something about Lance one day going into politics and a court case about doping not being that helpful.43
In France, Armstrong sued the publishers of the book La Martinière, the authors, and L’Express magazine who published extracts. After lodging the complaint in France, Armstrong had three months to press ahead with the case. Shortly before the three-month deadline passed, the case was dropped. His climbdown was hardly noticed.
In America, Armstrong showed how masterful he had become at dealing with doping allegations. By now there was a pattern: every six or nine months brought a new wave of allegations, but he spun this to his advantage. ‘This is not the first time I’ve lived through this,’ he said. ‘Every time, we’ve chosen to sit back and let it pass. But we’ve sort of reached a point where we really can’t tolerate it any more and we’re sick and tired of these allegations and we’re going to do everything we can to fight them. They’re absolutely untrue.
‘Enough is enough. We don’t use doping products and we will sue those who suggest we do.’
Judith McHale, president of Discovery Communications, the company that had committed millions of dollars to Armstrong and the team, was reassured. ‘Lance is a role model known for determination, integrity and a spirit that never gives up. There is no better ambassador for quality and trusted information.’
In England, the fall-out was very different. Emma O’Reilly felt the strain more than anyone else. She was exposed. She’d come from Tallaght, brought the resilience of the area with her, but you couldn’t be prepared for this: running her own business, living in England with a good man who was dealing with multiple sclerosis, and, when the door bell rings, it is a policeman who wants to serve you with a subpoena. And not just one.
In the run-up to publication of L.A. Confidentiel, Marc Grinsztajn, a slight, engaging and clever man who worked for our publishers, had said to me a couple of times to look out for Emma in the aftermath. Of all of us she would be the one most vulnerable. I nodded but didn’t see it.
Her interview with me had come to just under 40,000 words of transcription. I’d gone back to her and asked her to check through all of it again, which she did assiduously. I’d edited them down, asked her once more. I’d produced about 25,000 words of Emma-related copy and gone back a third time to ask her to confirm she was happy with it. All this and a stream of calls confirming things which weren’t clear to me, or looking for a steer here, or new information there.
When we had first met I had spoken to her about her input in terms of the book being a chorus of voices who would be speaking out at once. As it turned out, she was becoming the star attraction and everybody else was on backing vocals. Pierre and I were almost made of Teflon by this stage: none of the comments or abuse hurled at us ever stuck. But Emma was doing so much of the work and taking so much of the risk.
In the end Pierre and I spoke and agreed we would each contribute 2500 Euros in order to give Emma a modest sum for about five weeks of evening-and weekend-work on the book. It wasn’t a payment. It was a small thank you.
I volunteered this information to Joe Lindsey during an interview for Outside magazine in the US and, unsurprisingly, this was used to single out Emma again and make her a target. In retrospect she had been vulnerable right from the start. When Lance held his press conference in Maryland in June 2004 to launch the Discovery sponsorship it was Emma he personally attacked.
Armstrong was by nature a straight-talker but, when necessary, he could do slyness too. ‘It’s not going to be my way to speak badly of her,’ he said of Emma, at the Discovery Communications press conference, and then did just that, ‘but there were issues, within the team management, within the riders, and she was let go.’ He didn’t specify what the issues were, just let it hang out and the darker your imagination, the more he had succeeded.
By that point I’d spoken to many people Emma had worked with and each spoke highly of her professionalism and her personality. Three riders – Frankie Andreu, Jonathan Vaughters and Marty Jemison – all said they liked her, both as a therapist and as a person.44 So for Armstrong to suggest impropriety and not explain what he meant was nasty. Emma thought it low, but she wasn’t surprised. ‘Lance is Lance,’ she often says, as if this explains everything.
With Emma I never understood how guilty she would feel about betraying people in the Postal team she liked: Tyler Hamilton, Jonathan, Frankie, the head mechanic Julian DeVriese with whom she was friendly. Julian was old school: Belgian, once mechanic to Eddy Merckx and later Greg LeMond. He looked after Armstrong in Emma’s time. Old enough to be her father, they still liked each other.
He wouldn’t understand why she would spit in the soup.
Then, pretty soon after publication of L.A. Confidentiel, the lawyers came over the hill and charged into her life. The subpoenas began to arrive, so frequently for a while that the local police officer serving them would ring Emma’s home and tell Mike to put the kettle on because he had another. Keith Schilling, a lawyer representing Armstrong, asked to see her. Emma called our dashing French lawyer, Thibault de Montbrial, who gave the go-ahead for her to speak to him. Mike said he wanted to be with her when Schilling came.
She told Schilling that everything in the Sunday Times and in L.A. Confidentiel was the truth. He wanted to know if the interview had been taped. She said it had. But, at this time, she was in something way over her head. She will never forget what Schilling said during their conversation. ‘I’m surprised the paparazzi aren’t already outside.’ It stayed with her because she and Mike didn’t feel he said it out of concern for her wellbeing.
The effect on Mike was what hurt Emma the most. They knew the stress would worsen his multiple sclerosis. He became agitated by what Armstrong was allowed to do to his girlfriend, causing a noticeable deterioration in his condition. Emma’s final decision to let her testimony go into L.A. Confidentiel had come when she’d been upset by the death of Marco Pantani in early 2004. But now she felt responsible for Mike. And she wasn’t pleased with me, feeling I should have known how things would play out.
Sometimes on the phone or in an email I got one barrel, other times I got both. Things were bad between us through the summer of 2004. She asked me to contact her former husband Simon Lillistone, who had been in the car with her on that journey to Spain to pick up drugs for Armstrong. ‘He can verify that story.’ I called Lillistone, who at first tried to say he didn’t know but then admitted he did. On a follow-up phone call he was upset and said he didn’t want his name used, that it would damage his career. He now works for British Cycling, had a high-profile role at the London Olympics and his career has blossomed.45
Emma never changed her story and
never ran away from it. Tough woman from Tallaght.
She would tell me later that the experience really made her feel exposed and guilty for a long time. She was sad to have put people through so much and sad that it seemed to be acceptable for Lance Armstrong to attempt to take everything from her: finances, reputation, self-esteem.
In the end the UK’s libel laws gagged Emma. She got no protection in the country that she lives and works in. She did an interview with the American weekly magazine Sports Illustrated and they told her that what she said would be fine in the US, but if Armstrong sued her in Britain it could be a problem.
‘So I shut up. Plenty of others were running scared so why should I risk ruining the lives of those closest to me by speaking the truth?’
Enough said.
Armstrong frightened every media outlet in the UK, but that didn’t explain why so few journalists were interested in Emma’s story at the time. Her allegations against the US Postal team were detailed and indicated a pervasive doping culture within the team. I remember Sam Abt, a veteran editor on the International Herald Tribune at the time, who would also cover the Tour de France for that newspaper and the New York Times, writing a cutesy little piece on Emma during her US Postal days.
I knew Sam well, and asked how he found her. He said he’d really enjoyed meeting her and the piece reflected his enthusiasm for her. In my naivety I wondered if Sam would go back to Emma and see what motivated her to speak out and try to satisfy himself as to the truthfulness of her story. But by then Sam was friendly with Lance, and if there was one of those little Lance gatherings to which a journalist needed an invitation, he would have been near the top of the list.
Emma was trouble: trouble to get to in England and much more trouble when you got back and had to write the piece.
I spoke with Sam after the book was published and went through a lot of the allegations in the book, saying there was a lot of evidence, especially from Emma and Stephen Swart, but there wasn’t a smoking gun. Of course, that was the one line from me that Sam emphasised in his piece. I felt like the late Severiano Ballesteros, who had been let down by his caddie: ‘Please,’ said Seve, ‘don’t blame yourself, I’m the idiot who hired you.’ Well, I was the idiot who gave that quote to Sam. What did I expect?
It had been an interesting June 2004 at the Sunday Times: the legal threat, endless discussion over the extract, a chief sports writer so consumed by one plot he lost sight of all the others, then a page-long article that I thought wasn’t strong enough and London judges of libel thought had blasphemed St Lance. Can we ask some questions about this guy setting out to win his sixth consecutive Tour de France? No, you can’t.
But we did anyway and paid for it.
A service to our readers, we thought, but they too were unimpressed. To convey the general reaction, two of the letters were published:
How many times does Lance Armstrong have to defend himself against drug allegations, and why does David Walsh feel the need to keep digging? Is it because the Tour de France is about to begin, and by bringing out a book questioning the favourite, he may get good sales? Martin Clayton, Holmfirth.
I was shocked to find the Sunday Times used to promote a book co-written by David Walsh, one of your journalists, condemning Lance Armstrong. As someone who has gone through the same chemotherapy as Armstrong, the thought of taking drugs that could cause more damage is abhorrent. Why not print something positive about him and his work involving testicular cancer?’ Colin Millsop, Les Lecques, France.
15
‘There’s no shame in being a pariah.’
Marge Simpson
Liège isn’t a city you’d lose your heart to. It’s not so good that they’ve named it twice. Nobody croons about ‘my kind of town, Liège’.
But me?
I’ll always have Liège. I’ll always feel something for the biggest rivet in the Belgian rust belt.
The Place Saint Lambert in Liège is a very large square which loosely links the old part of the town with the new. The square is bordered by some interesting buildings but, as a precaution against charm, the Belgians have filled the entire square with concrete.
Twice I can remember being a speck in this grey vastness. The first time was for the start of the much-loved one-day classic cycling race known as Liège–Bastogne–Liège. It was a Sunday in April 1984, and I still have a photograph taken that morning shortly before the start of the race.
It was shot by a photographer who we knew back then only as Nutan, and it showed the great Belgian cycling champion Eric Vanderaerden worming his way through the masses of fans to the start line. As he did so, a man in his early thirties held a baby in his left arm, and with his right hand he stretched the child’s left hand forward until the infant’s fingers touched the cyclist’s back.
Devotion to a sport had never been so poignantly expressed or beautifully captured. Back then I could identify totally with the innocence in that act of adoration.
Twenty years later, I was back in Place Saint Lambert. The same grey square but my world was a different place and cycling had changed utterly: Paul Kimmage had retired and written Rough Ride, the book which would begin cycling’s long period of painful introspection. And now Pierre Ballester and I had produced L.A. Confidentiel. We’d nailed our theses to the door of the cathedral. We awaited the whirlwind.
Well, I awaited. Others had wearied. My co-author and friend Pierre had walked away from covering Tours. He couldn’t write about doping, and fiction wasn’t his thing. Benoît Hopquin of Le Monde, the journalist who revealed Armstrong’s positive test for a corticosteroid during the first Tour victory in 1999, was gone too. He was now writing about the environment and feeling like he was doing something.
Even Jean-Michel Rouet, who was the thoughtful lead writer for L’Équipe on that 1999 Tour, the man who had, with subtlety and eloquence, expressed his early doubts and had, for his trouble, received a personal chastisement from the Tour . . . even Jean-Michel has dismounted and walked down to the football stadium.
It is now Friday evening, the day before the start of the 2004 Tour de France, and the innocence with which I’d come to this square in 1984 is just a memory. This will be Lance Armstrong’s sixth Tour de France victory, and though present to cover this race, I have come also to defend the book Pierre and I have co-authored.
It will need defending. In the past few weeks I have been in Portugal, a place that I love, covering the European soccer championships. I leave for Portugal the same day that I’ve unresigned from the Sunday Times and though I spend two weeks at the football, the time is spent dealing with endless phone calls from journalists wishing to speak about L.A. Confidentiel.
Other things have been happening, though. Last month in Maryland, Armstrong announced a brand-new sponsorship deal with Discovery Channel. Dull enough, but coverage was boosted by the exposure given to his legal team. The previous day he had leaked the joyous news of the filing of the libel suit in London against myself, the Sunday Times, my colleague Alan English, Emma O’Reilly and Stephen Swart.
Meanwhile, a court in Paris had rejected Lance’s attempt to force our publisher to insert his denial of doping accusations into all copies of the book. With a little welcome French style, the judge, Catherine Bezio, called Armstrong’s request an abuse of the legal system and ordered him to pay Pierre, me and the publishers a symbolic $1.20 fine.46 That was a bit of fun, but the forecast for the legal climate ahead was more serious.
The book would sell more than 100,000 copies and reach number two on the French bestseller list, but to Armstrong and those around him it was The Satanic Verses.
In the salle de presse just now, US Postal team director Johan Bruyneel saw me arrive and said at the top of his voice: ‘Hey, Mr Walsh, good job, good job, eh!’ Poor Bruyneel, he lacked so much class that his was almost a medical condition. I could imagine him skipping off to tell Lance the clever thing he had said to the troll.
No surprise that Bruyneel would be here
today. Armstrong is just about to give a press conference to launch his Tour. Bruyneel was usually to be found around his boss’s coattails being a good goon. He lived vicariously. As Armstrong was to comment a few years later, J.B. Confidentiel wouldn’t have been much of a seller.
For late arrivals, it was standing room only, but I found a seat in the second row, not far from the stage where Armstrong would sit. I felt that I should have given the journalists either side of me T-shirts with the legend ‘I’m Not With the Troll’ on the front.
Early in the Liège press conference, Lance was asked about L.A. Confidentiel. He dealt with it well. In all the time I watched Lance in press conferences and around journalists, I was invariably impressed by how he handled himself and how he seemed to be aware that many of the men in the room longed to be just like him. He knew they would be the ones laughing hardest at his wisecracks and nodding most vigorously at his aphorisms. Today Lance hit a home run.
A journalist sent in a cowering shivering wretch of a question to set him up nicely.
‘Lance, have the controversial allegations upset your preparations in any way?’
The question should have carried a placard with it saying, We Mean No Harm, We Mean No Harm.
‘I’ll say one thing about the book,’ replied Lance. ‘Especially since the esteemed author is here. In my view, I think extraordinary accusations must be followed up with extraordinary proof.
‘And Mr Walsh and Mr Ballester worked for years and they have not come up with extraordinary proof.’
The soundbite was good and it pleased many of those in the room. I could understand that. Many of the guys in the seats around me simply preferred to write about an exciting Tour rather than to roll up the sleeves and delve into the murkiness of drugs. They didn’t want to know. And that was okay: I didn’t want to stop them doing their jobs. I just resented that so many of them wanted to stop me doing mine. They had no appetite for this stuff. This ‘extraordinary proof’ line from Lance was good enough to lead with and then wrap up the whole drug thing.
