Seven Deadly Sins: My Pursuit of Lance Armstrong

by David Walsh

  Frankie: Well, I’d like to get a transcript of that [the radio show].

  Bart and Bill: Okay.

  Frankie: David Walsh is lying. He does not have a taped thing of Betsy saying that she would do that.

  Bill: All right.

  For some time Frankie sticks to the version of events that involves Betsy saying ‘no comment’. Stapleton and Knaggs are not to be diverted from their plan, however. Again and again they press.

  Bill: It would be very helpful if she would . . . was just willing to make a statement, cuz, see [Walsh] has talked to other people about her and said that she’s very courageous, and she’s willing to take a stand against Lance, [that] she knows these things about Lance. That she’s told him [Walsh].

  And again.

  Bill: [Walsh is] trying to take the people that gave him very little . . .

  Bart: . . . and build them up . . .

  Bill: . . . and make them bigger, like LeMond. LeMond’s not going to testify against Lance and all those people.

  And once again.

  Bill: The question . . . the question is, if she’d be willing to take a strong position that she [inaudible] didn’t give him anything about the hospital room [inaudible]. That’s very important, cuz it says that he’s lying [inaudible], he lied about sources . . . and if she’s willing to make a statement that she’d never testify against Lance: again, that makes him a liar . . .

  The fascinating aspect of this conversation and the Armstrong camp’s attempt to destroy my credibility is that at no stage does Bill Stapleton attempt to convince Frankie Andreu that the hospital story is untrue, and at no stage does Bill Stapleton try to convince Frankie Andreu that he – Stapleton – had been in the room at the time. Stapleton and Lance would both later claim this to have been the case.

  In the end – the conversation took about twenty minutes – Bill Stapleton sums up the overall strategy for Frankie:

  Bill: Because the best result for all of us is to [inaudible] pick away at him [inaudible] enough between his witnesses that he has taken things, pieced this hodge-parcel together, and show the Sunday Times and show his publisher that it really is falling apart, and [at] that point extract an apology, drop the fucking lawsuit and it all just goes away [inaudible]. Because the other option is full-out war in a French court [inaudible] and everybody’s gonna testify [inaudible]. It could blow the whole sport.

  Frankie: I agree.

  That was Frankie and Betsy’s story. You grow up close to Detroit you learn how to handle yourself. They had each other.

  I knew they’d be okay.

  16

  ‘As a society aren’t we supposed to forgive and forget and let people get back to their job? Absolutely. I’m not sure I will ever forgive you.’

  Lance Armstrong to Paul Kimmage, 2009

  In July 2005 Lance Armstrong won his seventh Tour de France but, unlike him, I had by then grown tired of the procession around France. It was like a dull party game: pass the yellow jersey from rider to rider until it got to the guy from Texas. He’d keep it all the way to Paris.

  So, I passed on the ’05 race, feeling there was nothing more I had to say, apart from three standard homilies of disapproval. Staying away denied me the privilege of hearing Lance express sympathy for the trolls of the world. ‘I’m sorry that you can’t dream big.’ By then, however, I suspected that even his sincerity was fake.

  It wasn’t supposed to end like that: Lance, on the podium, wreathed in sunshine and smiles, delivering a two-fingered salute to those of us who had tried and failed. Heist over, he was heading for the hills.

  A week before, I had been covering golf at the Open Championship in St Andrews, the delightful little town on the Fife coast in Scotland. We stayed at a house not more than a mile from the Old Course and I shared a room with Paul. Two of us. Twin beds. Like Father Ted and Father Dougal.

  It was the Saturday night, our work for the Sunday Times was done, Tiger Woods had a two-shot lead going into the final round, and we were lying in our beds not yet ready for sleep. There was something Paul needed to tell me.

  ‘I want to talk to you about Armstrong,’ he said.

  ‘What about?’ I asked.

  ‘I think you’ve got to let it go. You’ve done great work, taken it so far and now is the time to move on.’

  ‘Why do you think so?’

  ‘Because it has taken over your life and I think Mary and the kids have suffered by you being so wrapped up in this.’

  ‘Do you really believe that?’

  ‘Yeah, I do. Do you realise that virtually every conversation we have now is about Armstrong? Every time you call me it’s because of something you’ve heard about him, and I’m left thinking that if it wasn’t for him, I wouldn’t hear from you.’

  ‘Have I been that bad?’

  ‘Yeah. And this isn’t that good for your career either. You saw what happened last year when you nearly left the paper. You have done your bit; get a bit more balance back in your working life and make sure you’ve got more time for your family. And remember too that Armstrong is only one guy, you don’t want to forget all the others.’

  I didn’t argue the case. When your closest friend says something important, it is worth listening. Presume he is right and think about it. Paul was right about how much of my life Armstrong consumed.

  It was once believed a man thought about sex every seven seconds, but more recent research says the true number is twenty times a day. My Armstrong thoughts were somewhere between those two figures.

  ‘And, Mr Walsh,’ the immigration officer at Chicago’s O’Hare Airport would say, ‘what is the purpose of your visit to the United States?’

  ‘Business, sir.’

  ‘And what is the nature of your business?’

  ‘I’m a sportswriter, and I’m going to be interviewing people about Lance Armstrong.’

  ‘Lance Armstrong, he’s the cyclist, right?’

  ‘Yeah. I’m hoping to show that actually he’s a fraud, been using banned drugs to win.’

  ‘Oh . . . you have a good day now.’

  Or I’m standing in a slow-moving line to the x-ray scanner at an airport and the stranger alongside me is wearing a yellow Livestrong wristband. ‘Do you support Lance?’ I say to entrap him. He says, ‘Yeah I do,’ and I give him the full history, the overwhelming evidence, the sense that you would have to be brain dead not to see the truth. One victim has stayed in my mind: dark business suit, white shirt, clean cut, no watch, just the wristband. He looked at me, shook his head, and forfeited ten places in the line to get away.

  A wet evening in Christchurch, New Zealand, 2005, getting on a media bus after the British and Irish Lions had lost a Test match to the All Blacks. I take my seat as the much-liked Independent rugby writer Chris Hewett offered a little light-hearted banter: ‘Here comes Lance Armstrong.’ It earned a few giggles but none were mine. ‘Chris, what the fuck did you ever do that was worthwhile?’ Chris is a fine writer and a well-rounded man, and he must have thought I had lost it completely. Possibly I had.

  Despite his warning to me, Paul wasn’t much better himself. In 2006 we were sharing a house in Augusta at the sportswriter’s dream event, the Masters. Paul is friends with Fanny Sunesson, the caddie, and Fanny had a friend over from Sweden, a 16-year-old elite amateur keen to watch every minute of Masters play. Alas he had no pass for the final day, which Fanny mentioned to Paul, who had a spare pass.

  It was arranged for Fanny’s friend to come to our house early on the Sunday morning. A little after nine there was a knock on the door. He was a very impressive looking 16-year-old, over six feet tall, pencil-thin but still giving the impression of strength. And if he did make it to the pros he wouldn’t have to change his wardrobe because he was dressed in creased white slacks with a bright yellow polo shirt. Blond hair and blue eyes didn’t detract from the overall look. There was only one thing that didn’t sit well with Paul and me. The yellow wristband. Now a pass for the final day’s play
at the Masters may be the hottest ticket in world sport, but if you’re getting it from Paul Kimmage free, gratis, and for nothing, don’t turn up with the wristband.

  It wasn’t my pass and not my problem. All I did was open the door and stand to one side. Paul’s brain switched to overdrive.

  ‘Hi,’ he said. ‘Fanny’s friend, you’ve come for the pass?’

  ‘Yes, that’s right.’

  ‘Okay, first though, just let me see your wristband.’ The guy stretches his right arm towards Paul. ‘No, just let’s see it,’ says Paul, indicating that he wants him to remove it. He does that and hands it to Paul, having no idea why he’s doing this. I move another step back from the action. ‘Now,’ says Paul, looking at Young Swede, ‘watch this.’

  He walks across to the drawer containing the cutlery and picks out a large pair of scissors. Then he takes the wristband and folds it over once, then a second time, then again, until it is a tightly wound coil of rubber. Young Swede is utterly perplexed but, as Paul brings scissors and rubber together, it becomes clear what is going to happen next.

  The scissors slice silently through the rubber and the fragments are suddenly all over the kitchen floor. There is an embarrassed silence, broken then by Paul as he matter-of-factly points to the floor. ‘That guy,’ he says, ‘is a fraud. You should know that.’

  The young Swede remains silent. Paul then produces the pass, smiles as he’s handing it over and says, ‘I hope you really enjoy it out there today.’

  ‘Thank you,’ says our new friend.

  Paul was right about the story consuming more of my life than it should. But because it was unresolved, it wouldn’t go away.

  That August L’Équipe journalist Damien Ressiot wrote a piece that was the culmination of an extraordinary investigation into the re-testing of urine samples from the 1999 Tour which showed Armstrong had used EPO when winning his first Tour that year. Central to the brilliance of the story was Ressiot’s cleverness in getting the UCI to hand over the rider’s doping-control forms so that Ressiot could check laboratory numbers against numbers on Armstrong’s forms.

  In the end Armstrong himself gave the go-ahead to the UCI to release the forms to Ressiot because the journalist had suggested he was investigating the rider’s use of TUEs (Therapeutic Use Exemptions). Armstrong hadn’t used TUEs in 1999, and thought the story would reflect well on him. With Lance’s doping forms, Ressiot’s job was then straightforward: compare the numbers on those forms to the numbers on the lab’s ‘positives’. There were six correlations.

  LE MENSONGE ARMSTRONG, [The Armstrong Lie] was the giant headline on L’Équipe’s front page, and the story proved beyond doubt that six of the ‘positives’ discovered in the retro-testing of 1999 samples belonged to Armstrong. Ressiot’s determination to investigate the seven-time Tour winner stemmed from disgust at the bullying of the Italian rider Filippo Simeoni in the third to last stage of the 2004 Tour. Simeoni had testified against Michele Ferrari in an Italian doping trial and that made him Lance’s enemy. So when he tried to join a breakaway group in that third to last stage, Lance personally chased him down and told the other escapees they wouldn’t get any leeway if Simeoni was one of their number.

  But the catch was that the retrospective testing had been carried out for research purposes and the results could not be used to instigate a disciplinary action against Armstrong. Knowing he couldn’t be charged on the basis of these positives, Armstrong confidently dismissed the allegations, saying it was likely the samples had been spiked. He believed it was a French witch hunt and suggested it reflected the anti-US feeling that existed in France at the time.

  This wasn’t an intelligent explanation because there was no way for the French laboratory to spike numbered samples and know they belonged to Armstrong; Ressiot knew they were his only because Lance had given him the reference numbers. The UCI set up an ‘independent commission’ under its chosen investigator Emile Vrijman, a Dutch lawyer and a friend of Hein Verbruggen’s. When Vrijman delivered his report, the World Anti-Doping Agency dismissed it as unprofessional and lacking impartiality: ‘Mr Vrijman’s report is fallacious in many aspects and misleading.’

  Though Armstrong survived the Ressiot story, it was a watershed moment because it established he had used EPO in 1999. It was easy to argue that the rules couldn’t allow research testing to be the basis for a case against Armstrong, but there could be no disputing that Ressiot had demonstrated the rider cheated. Including the front page, six pages of that day’s L’Équipe were given over to the story.

  Ressiot is a journalist in the mould of Pierre: he now works the doping beat at L’Équipe, as Pierre had once done. ‘What I can’t stand is the deceit,’ he says. ‘We sell stories of extraordinary achievement but when we learn they are not that, we don’t like to take them back. I feel I have done my job as a journalist [in producing the Armstrong story], and as a profession we need to stop building dreams on false premises.’

  Many of the journalists who had been on Armstrong’s side were glad to see the back of him in 2005 because it had grown harder to write about him. What more was there to say? His leaving the sport seemed an opportunity for me to let go of the story, but that wasn’t possible. It kept coming back. Journalists wanting to do some more excavation on the Armstrong site, saw me as someone who could help.

  Joe Lindsey came from Colorado to our house to do a piece for Outside magazine and wrote a balanced account of the case for and against Armstrong. Around the same time, Dan Coyle came to Cambridge and we spoke for hours in a small restaurant.49 He was writing Lance Armstrong’s War, his book on his year embedded with the US Postal team. As with Joe, Dan wrote fairly of the work I had done on the Armstrong story.

  In the course of the interview, Dan asked about John and the impact of his loss on our family. I’ve never needed much encouragement to speak of our eldest son and off I went, recalling memories of a great kid and telling stories I love to tell. It is a tragedy that John’s life lasted just twelve years and eight months, but he gave us so much in that time. At John’s funeral my old boss at the Sunday Tribune, Vincent Browne, gently promised that time would help us all to cope with John’s loss and get on with the rest of our lives. At the time, it didn’t seem so simple. ‘We will get on with the rest of our lives,’ I said, ‘but they will be lesser lives.’

  That is as true now as it seemed then. So many times I’ve thought of what John would have brought to our lives: the laughs, the tears, the celebrations, the arguments, the matches that we haven’t watched together. I remember too that, a few days after his accident, Emily came running into the kitchen with a joyous smile on her face, and though Mary and I were in a pit of grief we couldn’t remain there.

  Without Kate, Simon, Daniel, Emily, Conor and, two years later, Molly, it would have been so much tougher.

  In the interview with Dan, I said I’d loved John more than any person I’d ever known. That’s how it seemed at the time, but Emily says that in the same circumstances I would have said the same about any of the others. That is probably the case. Towards the end of the interview with Dan, I said that one of John’s legacies to me was to have the courage to stand up to things, to ask difficult questions and not to go with the flow even if that allows you to float along. ‘If I carry a little of that with me, then I’m pleased about that,’ I said.

  In the final chapter of his book, Dan describes taking a draft of his book to Armstrong who, he has agreed, can see it before it goes to the publishers. Without any prompting, Armstrong brings me up. ‘Don’t call him the award-winning world-renowned respected guy.’ In an effort, presumably, to appeal to Armstrong’s human side, Dan said that I seemed motivated, at least in part, by John’s memory. Dan mentioned that John was my favourite, which was true only in the sense that he is my all-time favourite human being.

  That mention of John unhinged Armstrong. This is how Dan described it:

  Armstrong’s eyes narrow. He cracks his knuckles, one by one.

/>   ‘How could he have a favourite son? That guy’s a scumbag. I’m a father of three . . . to say “my favourite son”, that’s fucked, I’m sorry. I just hate the guy. He’s a little troll.’

  His voice rises. I try to change the subject, but it’s too late. He’s going.

  ‘Fucking Walsh,’ he says. ‘Fucking little troll.’

  I’m sitting on the couch watching, but it’s as if I’m not there. His voice echoes off the stone walls – troll, casting his spell on people, liar – and the words blur together into a single sound, and I find myself wishing he would stop.

  You won, I want to tell him. You won everything.

  But he won’t stop; he can’t stop, and I’m realising that maybe this has nothing to do with Walsh, or with guilt or innocence or ego or power or money. This isn’t a game or a sport. It’s a fight, and it can never end, because when Armstrong stops fighting he’ll stop living.

  A birdlike trill slices the air; Armstrong’s eyes dart to his phone. The spell is broken.

  ‘Listen, here’s where I go,’ Armstrong says after putting down the phone. ‘I’ve won six tours. I’ve done everything I ever could do to prove my innocence. I have done, outside of cycling, way more than anyone in the sport. To be somebody who’s spread himself out over a lot of areas, to hopefully be somebody who people in this city, in this state, in this country, this world can look up to as an example. And you know what? They don’t even know who David Walsh is. And they never will. And in twenty years, nobody is going to remember him. Nobody. And there are a million cancer patients and survivors around the world, and that’s what matters.’

  All the stuff about me being a troll and him being a messiah, that’s water off a duck’s back. But it hurt that he dared to speak of my relationship with John in the terms that he did. Only Lance Armstrong would have said such a thing.