Seven Deadly Sins: My Pursuit of Lance Armstrong

by David Walsh

  Marc Belinfante, a Dutch journalist, attempted twice to ask serious questions.47

  ‘How did Lance feel about what Stephen Swart had said?’

  ‘No comment.’

  ‘Or Emma O’Reilly’s allegations?’

  ‘Next question.’

  All over. The media had read the book. Lance had given them several dozen words of response. The mood of the afternoon was reflected in a rare expression of gratitude from Armstrong to his friends in the cycling media.

  ‘I have received many, many calls from journalists in this room who’ve read the book, people who’ve read the book and said to me, “Okay, what’s the big deal? There is nothing there.” And I appreciate the support.

  ‘Y’all know who you are and I just want to say publicly to you, “Thank you for reaching out to me at a time when I think there was a lot of expectation but there wasn’t a lot of delivery.”‘

  Wow. Lance Armstrong. Cancer survivor. Troll survivor. Thanking the guys. It was masterful stuff. Ronald Reagan meets John Wayne.

  I knew it was supposed to make me and a few others like me feel isolated. To some extent it worked.

  For Pierre and me that whole month of June 2004 had seemed seminal and surreal. Microfilm of L.A. Confidentiel had been whisked to a secret printing house in the French provinces, and from there the printed word was escorted to a secret warehouse from where it would be distributed throughout France. The secrecy was because of the publisher’s fear that an injunction sought by Armstrong could lead to the book not reaching the public. For two journalists used to smudgy notebooks and chaotic desks, the whole business of microfilm and secrecy was pure James Bond.

  Now things weren’t quite as much fun.

  I recalled suddenly a small incident which took place on a rest day during the 2002 Tour de France. With literally nothing much better to do, a Danish journalist, Olav Andersen, and I had travelled to the village of Miribel-les-Échelles in south-east France, where the US Postal team were staying at a favourite hotel, Les Trois Biches.

  Close to the village, we saw the actor Robin Williams out on his bike with some friends. Williams and Armstrong were friends even though at that stage I think Armstrong had appeared in more decent films. It wasn’t unusual, though, to see Mrs Doubtfire at the Tour supporting the team.

  At the hotel a waiter told us that the team were out training. Andersen decided to have a coffee in the hotel bar while I sat on a wall on the village green. Part of me didn’t want to be actually in the team hotel when the boys came back. Another part of me wanted to sit out on that wall knowing full well that Armstrong would see me on his return. I’d look at him. He’d look at me. Maybe I’d wave. He’d know that I was there.

  I’d been sitting and contemplating for about forty minutes when the small train of US Postal riders zoomed back into Miribel-les-Échelles. Armstrong was at the front and he immediately noticed my presence. He gave me a slightly more surprised version of the much ballyhooed second glance he had given to Jan Ullrich in 2001. The Look. Well, The Look Lite. I didn’t feel his steely blues piercing my soul.

  Poor Andersen sipping his espresso didn’t know this was happening at all. As soon as Armstrong returned to the hotel, he spoke with the owner and the atmosphere in the bar changed.

  Immediately the owner was moving through it, looking closely at the few wastrels who were having a coffee or a drink.

  He came to Andersen and could see the outline of an accreditation badge dangling beneath a T-shirt. He stood eyeballing the Danish journalist for a while. He wanted to ask Andersen to leave but he didn’t dare. It was a public bar and hard for the patron to eject a customer, even if it was on suspicion of being a journalist – but it was a close-run thing. If that accreditation badge had been on the outside of the T-shirt Andersen would have been on the outside of the hotel pretty quickly.

  It was certainly a demonstration of the fact that, in the month of July at least, Lance Armstrong could usually get what Lance Armstrong wanted.

  Two years later now and that fact was about to be demonstrated to me again not long after the Liège press conference. That year I was due to travel on the race with three journalists – Wilcockson, an American, Andy Hood, and my old Australian pal, Rupert Guinness – in the VeloNews car as so often before.

  John Wilcockson and I had travelled together on the 1984 Tour and had shared car space on any number of Tours after that. Since 1999 and the ascent of Lance, of course, we’d had the slightly combative relationship detailed earlier. Guinness and I were still friends and still hauling our ageing bodies over French fields on early-morning runs during the Tour.

  Now, an hour after the press conference, John collared me with a bit of news. The expedition was going ahead without me. It was pretty bad luck but they couldn’t take me in their car this year because, well, Armstrong would find out. And then Lance would no longer co-operate with VeloNews. The sun, quite possibly, would cease to shine.

  John looked at me as if to say, ‘Chin up, old chap.’

  I was stunned. I asked him with whom I could now travel?

  John shrugged his shoulders compassionately and said that he was sorry but there was nothing they could do. They needed Armstrong like fish need oxygen.

  John certainly did. In 2009 he would write a book, LANCE: The Making of the World’s Greatest Champion. By 2009 John was the last man on earth selling Lance Armstrong hagiographies.

  ‘That leaves me on the side of the road,’ I said.

  He shrugged his shoulders again.

  ‘Fuck you,’ I thought. ‘I’ve been ditched in better joints by better doyennes.’

  Still, it stung.

  Guinness would later apologise for what he felt had been a very bad judgement call. Years later Wilcockson would write that he had been acting on orders from on high: the executive suite on Floor 100 in the VeloNews building no doubt. Whatever the truth, it was a long weekend in Liège: taxis everywhere until reporters from the French newspaper Le Monde offered me a place in their car. I needed to travel in an accredited vehicle to follow the Tour and so couldn’t just hire one. There was no English-speaking journalist I could have asked with any confidence.

  At this time the difficulty in discovering the truth about Lance wasn’t just timid journalism or the challenge of substantiating wholly credible allegations. It was the entire framework in which we were operating. In June, Armstrong’s London lawyers had sent a letter to virtually every print house in Britain urging the proprietors to keep their hands clean of L.A. Confidentiel and the fall-out. What was printed in the British media after the book surfaced were a few small reports giving quotes from the press conference in Liège and little round-ups of who was suing who. No debate took place.

  And, of course, the British legal system actually worked against journalism and whistleblowers in the Armstrong case. In a time when we hear much discussion of the vileness of the tabloid relationship with celebrities and the desirability of fostering a culture of investigative journalism, it is the libel laws that are sorely wanting.

  English libel law seemed to state that asking questions implied that you had come to a conclusion. If we listed the questions which we felt Lance Armstrong needed to answer, then those questions in themselves implied that we didn’t consider Lance Armstrong to be unimpeachable, just as he was. The law protected Lance’s defence of first resort: he didn’t test positive. Beyond that any expression of doubt could libel him.

  It was like trying to follow the logic of Alice in Wonderland.

  He looked like a duck, walked like a duck, sounded like a duck, but until the laboratory actually came out and said that he was a duck, we weren’t supposed to even ask a question about His Duckness.

  In France, when Lance got us into court with his attempt to make us insert a rebuttal into every copy of the book, he made himself almost a figure of fun. The judge wanted to know why he had declined, for almost a month, to reply to the questions raised in the book. They had been put to him again a
nd again. Our lawyer argued that investigative journalism could not be practised if those under suspicion refused to answer questions but were then allowed to insert broad denials into everything written about them.

  In her decision Judge Bezio noted that the questions and allegations in the book ‘do not necessarily constitute defamation’. In France no libel is committed if allegations are made in good faith, without malice, or if they turn out to be true.

  The Sunday Times tried its best and in the end had to work within the legal system of the land. Part of the reason why L.A. Confidentiel had come about in the first place was because, quite early on in the Lance years, I had become convinced that the drip, drip of small, tightly legalled stories in a newspaper wasn’t going to be enough to make the argument.

  In one way I might as well have sent the pieces to the shredder instead of to France. L.A. Confidentiel sold well in France – over 100,000 copies – but its impact elsewhere was small. Lance handled the book effectively in that Liège press conference and his lawyers did the rest.

  Our experience with the French legal system was a breath of fresh air compared to England. Thibault de Montbrial went through the legal aspects of L.A. Confidentiel in two hours. When he decided who the good guys were, he gave all of his amazing energy and intellect to them.

  His position was that he wanted this book published. All of it. If there was anything he wasn’t happy with, he enthusiastically told us what to do to make him happy. His position from the start was that we were going to find a way to get this done. I have been in so many rooms with lawyers who want nothing more than to save their backside by keeping something out of a newspaper altogether that I felt I had died and gone to heaven. Two hours to go through the book and then in the weeks afterwards we happily went about the tasks he had set us. It was a liberating way to work.

  In the end at least I felt the satisfaction of having got the book out: I knew we had succeeded in putting a lot of good journalism between two covers. The system, though, seemed tilted to me. At no stage did I, Pierre or any other journalist I met want to do a hatchet job on Lance Armstrong. We wanted to believe in the great race more than anybody. To us the cynics were the guys and women who just wanted to pretend, who wanted to be a part of pushing what might be a bogus event on their readers. The system did a hatchet job on us.

  And Lance Armstrong can be smart and very decisive. He saw the system, he understood it and he played it beautifully. America was his principal market and his sponsors’ principal market. So he would have small intimate round-table press conferences with American journalists, who would be flattered to be texted a summons to come on over and sit down with Lance at the hotel in twenty minutes or so. The French, German, Spanish, Dutch, Italian media? Really, how many people in heartland America were going to translate and analyse that stuff? Euroweenies out to get Lance.

  That left me, an English-speaking writer on a very credible paper. For all the talk and bluff in his years of prominence, the Sunday Times and I were the only legal battle Lance really took on and suggested he was prepared to take all the way. And he did enough to claim a win but never wanted things to proceed to the spectacle of a trial and witnesses being called to testify under oath.

  Legally he got the bragging rights, and with that came something more important: the gagging rights.

  In 2004, I left Liège behind without so much as a glance in the rear mirror. In no part of me could I find a trace of the wide-eyed innocence I’d had in this same place twenty years before. The thrill was gone, stolen by gimlet-eyed doctors and oily administrators and brainless riders who betrayed the thing they loved the most and screwed the friends who refused to join their brotherhood.

  Lance was starting his campaign for a sixth Tour de France in succession. I could see nothing that would stop him winning numbers seven, eight or nine.

  The road ahead seemed to stretch for ever. And I was tired.

  I had no real right to feel jaded.

  There are worse things in life than being dumped in the middle of Liège by John Wilcockson! Pierre and I had done the work and seen a bit of the world. The satisfactions and rewards were internal. Other people were having it harder.

  The LeMonds had each other and they had been in the firing line since 2001. Greg went through tough times because he dared to say that working with Michele Ferrari was a bad thing and if Lance’s story wasn’t true it was the greatest fraud in the history of sport. What’s there to disagree with? We spoke a lot during the two years after 2001 and my feeling was that without his wife Kathy’s strength, it might have been impossible.

  Stephen and Jan Swart in New Zealand would get some nasty backdraft. They worried how their three children would react to their dad admitting he had doped during his career, especially as so many in the media wanted to portray Stephen as the bad guy. The remarkable thing was the kids understood better than people paid to be loudmouths hosting radio phone-ins. Not once did they question their dad’s decision, and when Stephen and Jan went on television in New Zealand to explain why Stephen had broken cycling’s law of silence, the kids ribbed them about being famous.

  One time Jan came across a nephew of Stephen’s, who had come to visit, on a cycling website. She trawled through the comments, one more ignorant than the last. She got so angry, then so sad, then angry again because these snipers would fire only from behind the cover of aliases and she wanted to go on there and give them a mouthful. She thought better of it. What was the point?

  She kept all that stuff from Stephen because it would have only upset him. And there were so many times when she questioned why he’d done it. And what did he say? ‘One of the finest things I’ve done in my life.’ Storms are weathered best by those with the right clothing.

  The others? In Michigan I felt Betsy would be protected by two things. Her part of the book was structured so that she appeared to be a reluctant witness fending off our intrusive questions. Secondly, Betsy Andreu could handle herself and protect those around her. She would look any detractor in the eye and say, ‘I was never going to lie for him, never.’

  Frankie, though, was right here in Belgium and Lance was pissed. He sensed the Andreus had given me more than I was letting on. In short, he didn’t believe that Betsy hadn’t talked. To compound matters I had suggested on Irish radio that although she wasn’t named as a source she was one of a number of witnesses who would come forward in a court case and back up allegations made in the book. With Frankie still dependent upon cycling for his livelihood, Lance thought there was no way Betsy would do that.

  Frankie was summoned to Lance’s room in Liège. Lance told Frankie that Bill Stapleton wanted to talk to him about the possibility of having Frankie persuade Betsy to put out a statement saying she had not been a source for the book and to generally discredit me. Frankie was uncomfortable. He knew Betsy would be reluctant to do that, but he also knew he wouldn’t have much of a life in cycling if Lance was pulling against him.

  Following Bill’s call, he and Frankie agreed to meet near the start at Charleroi the next day, shortly after the Tour had pulled out of town. Stapleton came with his colleague Bart Knaggs, and they probably knew getting Frankie to put the frighteners on his wife wasn’t going to be straightforward.

  The previous night Frankie had called Betsy and told her about what was happening. He was feeling the pressure. If Stapleton and Armstrong could use their influence in cycling to get Betsy to sign a statement discrediting one of the authors of L.A. Confidentiel, it was game, set and match to them. To Betsy’s surprise, Frankie had a plan. He intended to tape Stapleton and Knaggs the next morning. Betsy always knew that she had married a genius.

  ‘If it’s not taped, they’ll deny the conversation ever took place.’

  She told him to be careful and wished him luck.

  The next morning Frankie slipped an ordinary digital recorder into the breast pocket of his shirt and waited for Stapleton and Knaggs to come across the car park.

  Stapleton
got to the point quite quickly: ‘You know your wife is a source for Walsh?’

  Frankie: No, no, no. My wife is not a source for Walsh. When David Walsh called the first time, I called up Lance and told him – cuz Lance said. Lance told me specific to talk [to him]. I talked with him two times and the other time when David Walsh called I wasn’t home, and that was when he asked about the hospital room [inaudible]. And then she [Betsy] said, ‘No comment. I got nothing to say.’

  Bill: That’s it?

  Frankie: About talking to him?

  [inaudible comments]

  Bill: Yeah.

  Frankie: Well, yeah.

  Bill: Yet he claims she’s a source for that conversation. Would she be willing to clarify that though?

  Frankie: I read in the book that LeMond’s the one who gave him that story.

  Bill: No. Walsh was talking to LeMond and I think LeMond told him he heard it from Betsy and he [LeMond] claims Betsy is the source.

  Frankie: Greg LeMond and Betsy don’t even know each other. One hundred per cent don’t know each other . . . and Betsy did not tell Greg LeMond about the hospital.

  Bill: Well, is Betsy willing to issue a statement that – or go on the record that – she didn’t give [inaudible] no comment to Walsh and was never interviewed by him?

  Frankie: She’ll say that when he called she said: ‘No comment.’

  Bill: About everything that she talked to him about?

  Frankie: No, because there were other conversations. When I was there I talked to him and the one time I was there, there might have been some nicky picky nothing stuff, but she didn’t really talk that much, you know. I don’t know exactly, but dealing with the hospital-room thing, that is what she said.

  At this point there is some discussion punctuated by inaudible sections about my radio appearance in Ireland, where I had said that, if needed, my anonymous sources would back up their version on oath. I then mentioned Betsy as one of these.48