by David Walsh
In the end, I just let it go. His time for tears would come. What’s meant to be always finds a way.
17
‘In a time of universal deceit – telling the truth is a revolutionary act.’
George Orwell
L.A. Confidentiel turned Pierre and me into the Serge Gainsbourg and Jane Birkin of cycling journalism. Our output scandalised English-speaking people everywhere but we went over big in France, and its pages were as toxic as The Satanic Verses to the church of Lance fundamentalists.50 Few had read it but many denounced it. Sufficient unto the day was the outrage thereof.
Sufficient. And then some.
Like a stone dropped into a lake the book caused ripples which eventually reached all the way to the shore. Lance Armstrong would wind up in the boardroom of his lawyer’s Dallas office with a video camera trained on him and a stenographer poised as he prepared to be deposed under oath. Many of us involved in the case of the book would wind up in similar rooms.
It all started with a punt. Bob Hamman was once the Lionel Messi of bridge. The Michael Jordan. The Babe Ruth. He won twelve world championships but famously lost one in Bermuda to a pair of Italians who he reckoned had cheated him. He was a tough man to begin with, but being cheated brought out the Joe Pesci in him. You think I’m funny, funny how?
Bridge has a sedate, dusty image but Bob Hamman learned the game by playing for money. He was an excellent chess player, a fine poker and backgammon player, but in the end he was drawn to the complexity of bridge. He is a big, broad and burly man with a crown of grey hair on a glorious head.
In 1986 Bob Hamman set up a company called SCA Promotions. SCA stands for Sports Contests Associates. It was a business venture premised on Bob’s greatest talent. He could calculate the odds on virtually anything. Bob has a bookie’s brain and SCA, in essence, was a bookie’s business with a respectable front office. The big idea? The underwriting of the risk involved in special events and promotions by other companies.
So a company sponsors the blindfold half-court overhead-throw event for audience members at an NBA game. They don’t think anybody will actually sink a shot and claim the million-buck prize, but just in case somebody gets lucky they insure themselves with SCA. For a premium SCA carries the risk.
And they will carry almost any risk. Once when NASA was putting two Rover vehicles on Mars, a company called Long John Silver approached SCA. If NASA found an ocean on Mars they wanted to give free shrimp to everybody in America. Bob came to an agreement that an ocean on Mars would have to cover the same proportion of the planet’s surface as the smallest ocean on earth (the Arctic) covers.
Nothing was found. Bob didn’t have to pay for a nation’s shrimp.
As big ideas go it is a good one and SCA has become the world leader in guaranteeing prizes and bonuses. It seemed like grist to the very profitable mill then when Kelly Price, an insurance broker with a company called Entertainment and Sports Insurance Experts, contacted SCA in the winter of 2000.
The deal he proposed involved SCA taking on some of the risk which was at that time being carried by Tailwind Sports, 51 the owners of the US Postal team. Tailwind had been both pleased and alarmed at the prospect of Armstrong going on to record a long sequence of Tour de France victories. Pleased because that was why they had a cycling team in the first place. Alarmed because such success was going to cost them a fortune.
So Tailwind were asking SCA to give them a quote on a deal they had come up with which would give Armstrong $1.5 million if he won in 2001 and 2002, a further $3 million if he went on to win in 2003 and then a final $5 million payment if he rolled on into the history books with a sixth successive Tour in 2004.
The SCA underwriter who dealt with the query was Chris Hamman, a son of Bob. Chris didn’t much like the idea, but his father was one of life’s natural dealmakers and when he took the notion to Bob he saw things differently. It was odds. Risk. Two hundred riders each year. And the same guy was going to keep on winning? Cancer guy? Bob gave the thumbs-up. In January 2001 a contract was drawn up. For a premium of $420, 000 SCA would agree to pay Lance Armstrong staggered payments amounting to $9.5 million if he could win every Tour from 2001 to 2004.
After the Tours of 2002 and 2003 SCA promptly sent out the cheques to Tailwind Sports who passed the $1.5 million and $3 million cheques on to Lance Armstrong with a smile.
And then L.A. Confidentiel appeared. Having allowed the book to play such a large part in our lives over the previous two years, Pierre and I were delighted by sales but disappointed by how little influence the book had. All the evidence seemed to us to emphatically say something was very wrong here. We hadn’t counted on the media’s enduring love of an easy good news story (which Lance was) and on Lance’s ability to intimidate and denigrate anybody outside his tent.
Perhaps we should have seen all that coming, but we could never have guessed that somewhere in America, a company called SCA would have a slightly unconventional lawyer by the name of John Bandy who had spent six years of his life living in France and some of those years studying at l’Université de Paris, La Sorbonne. John Bandy had fluent French and he picked up a copy of L.A. Confidentiel out of personal curiosity and professional duty. He read it, tapped out his own translation and paused. Hey, attendez un peu.
Armstrong had been due to receive his final bonus of the deal, $5 million, on 3 September 2004. Instead, the money had been placed into a custodial account with J.P. Morgan until the doping allegations detailed in L.A. Confidentiel were cleared up. Lance was not amused. The trolls were costing him money.
Armstrong and Tailwind duly lodged proceedings against SCA in a Dallas County District Court on 14 September. It was an odd sort of legal impasse at first. Technically, Lance’s problem was with Tailwind, not with whoever Tailwind had insured the deal with. The contingent contract was between SCA and Tailwind and made it clear that the obligation to reimburse Tailwind was premised upon the fact that ‘the conditions of the events scheduled herein and the sponsors’ [contract with Lance Armstrong] had to comply with the terms and conditions of this contract.’
This was understood to mean more than just win the races, Armstrong had to win in a manner consistent with the requirements of the contingent contract. In other words, the question was similar in nature to the one facing journalists. It wasn’t whether Lance won, but how he won. SCA were asking Tailwind the question: was Lance in compliance with all rules or was he using performance-enhancing drugs? In the end, to avoid a chain reaction of litigations, Lance was permitted to join party with Tailwind and the two sides were lined up.
Both SCA and Tailwind stated that they wanted an arbitrator to settle the matter.
The issue was simple. Tim Herman, the lawyer acting for Armstrong, claimed that SCA hadn’t the right to question the Tour victories. For SCA Bob Hamman decided to do much of the investigating himself. He arrived in Europe to meet Pierre and me, he went to Auckland for a session with Stephen Swart, he spoke with Greg and Kathy LeMond, and to Emma O’Reilly. Everybody he spoke with stood over what was in the book.
I was contacted in September 2004. I immediately decided on two things: I had to protect sources; I had to protect our book. I was happy to point anybody who was interested in the truth in the direction of the truth. There followed, as I testified later, maybe twenty-five phone calls and a dozen or so emails between myself and SCA in the next year and four months. I helped with contact numbers, a few technical details and gave my opinion on the credibility of several people whom SCA were thinking of contacting.
On 19 January 2006, after a couple of false starts, I sat down in a room in a law office in Dallas to give testimony. The charm of the place is evident from the address: 12655 North Central Expressway, Suite 810, city of Dallas, County of Dallas, State of Texas. Whose bucket list is that not on?
You sit in a room waiting your turn, eating bought-in food and making small talk with other witnesses and legal people. Eventually you end up in a big room set up s
o that you can look across to your right and direct your answers to the three-man arbitration panel. After lawyers from both sides get to ask their questions, the three-man panel can also ask questions which, in my case, they did. Though everything is under oath, it didn’t feel pressurised.
My testimony was given late in the proceedings and, unlike most of the others involved, I hadn’t been deposed beforehand. It was a civil discourse limited to technical questions about the practice and ethics of journalism. Why did you call this person? Why not that person? Etc, etc. Inevitably we trawled back over a couple of greatest hits from the Lance years:
Tim Herman: Now, in testimony provided previously in these proceedings by Mr Stapleton, he testified that Ferrari was not a big story. That you, David Walsh, made it scandalous and made it into a big story by writing it. Is that a fair representation?
Walsh: It’s complete nonsense.
Herman: Why?
Walsh: Because when the Sunday Times ran the story in early July 2001, pretty much every single newspaper across Europe, some of them on the front pages – and these were serious, quality newspapers – ran stories saying the Sunday Times had revealed Armstrong worked with Ferrari. I went to a local newsagent in my town and got a huge amount of newspapers from across Europe, and every one of them reported on the Armstrong–Ferrari connection, because Ferrari had that kind of reputation and, as I say, Lance was a huge figure in the sport.
At one stage, amusingly in hindsight, we had some back and forth about the admissibility of a transcript of an interview I had conducted with an unnamed source. I stuck to my right to protect the identity of the source through questioning. I was briefly dismissed and the account of what was said when I was out of the room showed the esteem in which sacred journalistic principles were held. Jeff Tillotson for SCA, the guy who was doing the friendly part of the cross-examination, explained to the arbitrators and opposing counsel while I was gone: ‘There’s a transcript. It’s as clear as day it’s Frankie Andreu, that he’s an unnamed source.’
It was agreed among them that I would be permitted to proceed without naming the source and that Frankie would be recalled at a later date. Then I was readmitted and every-body politely pretended that they didn’t know who I was talking about as we discussed the transcript.
A lot of evidence and a lot of hearsay got trawled through in the SCA case, and it revealed two things above all else. Firstly, anybody not still in cahoots with Lance was afraid of Lance. People had started taping conversations about Lance. And Lance had taken to calling some of those giving evidence before they could be deposed. Just saying hello! And, secondly, everybody around Lance and in the SCA was obsessed with what Betsy Andreu had heard in that hospital room in October 1996.
Most of all, what Bob Hamman and the SCA team wanted to get to was the nub of what happened in that room. The question still reverberated. The SCA hearing would spend a lot of time on who said what in Indiana. There was a small ambush during my testimony on the matter. Tim Herman for Tailwind and Lance Armstrong did the honours. Somebody had tracked down Lisa Shiels, Lance’s old girlfriend. I had tried. SCA had tried. We had concluded that she had vanished in the wind. Now somebody had succeeded in finding her.
Herman: Now, you haven’t seen this before, Mr Walsh, but this is an email exchange between Lisa Shiels and a lady at ESPN in 2004. And in it Ms Shiels, when asked about this hospital incident by someone totally unrelated to Mr Armstrong, indicated she had no recollection of that happening. Had you talked to Ms Shiels, or had you been in possession of this email, would that have given you some pause about the reliability of the account that was given to you by Ms Andreu?
Walsh: Absolutely not, because my information had come from three people, the two Andreus and Stephanie McIlvain, and I believed them.
Herman: All right. What if you had known there were not just six people in the room but nine people in the room, would you still have been as confident with the story from Mr and Mrs Andreu, who left the room right after the alleged statement was made?
Walsh: From my conversation with the Andreus and Stephanie McIlvain, it wouldn’t have mattered if there had been one other person in the room. I thoroughly believed what they told me.
Who would have thought one line from the mouth of Lance Armstrong would be so disputed all this time later? During the taking of early depositions for the case on 25 October 2005, Betsy Andreu had gone to a small room in a Detroit hotel to be deposed on the matter. There was a surprise observer present. Armstrong showed up for the Andreus’ depositions, intending to sit in on Frankie’s session. The order was reversed, however, and he ended up sitting through Betsy’s session instead.
Frankie is a tough man. Betsy is tougher.
When Lance turned up that day, he extended his hand to Betsy. She accepted it. ‘Hey, how’s it going?’ he said.
‘Goin’ fine,’ she said.
He then said, ‘You wanna see some pictures of the kids,’ and he pulled out some photographs of his children with his then girlfriend, Sheryl Crow.
She thought, ‘He thinks I’m going to lie for him.’ But that had been the point of her existence through the previous six years. She was not going to lie. Betsy was pressed again and again about what had happened once the doctors had swept in to that conference room back in 1996:
Herman: I want to focus on events that have been alleged in this case regarding certain statements Mr Armstrong made to doctors. If you can, describe for us now how these events came about. What took place?
Betsy: We were in his hospital room, and he was having a scheduled meeting with his doctor. He was having a scheduled meeting with his doctor or with a doctor, I’m not sure. There was going to be some sort of meeting. And there were quite a few people there, so we went into a conference room, and there at the conference room, people that were there were: me, and Frankie and Lance, Stephanie McIlvain – that was the first time I met her – Chris Carmichael, his then girlfriend now wife, Paige.
Herman: Anyone else that you recall?
Betsy: Lisa Shiels.
Herman: Who was she?
Betsy: His girlfriend at the time.
A pivotal part of Lance’s rebuttal of the Indiana hospital incident was his claim that it was impossible that it had occurred without three other people being present: his mother Linda, his friend Jim Ochowicz, and his lawyer/agent Bill Stapleton. Betsy stuck to her guns.
Betsy: They began to ask him some questions – banal questions. I don’t remember. All of a sudden, boom: have you ever done any performance-enhancing drugs? And he said, ‘Yes.’ And they asked what were they, and Lance said, ‘EPO, growth hormone, cortisone, steroids, testosterone.’
Herman: Are you absolutely certain that’s what he said?
Betsy: Yeah, I’m positive.
Herman: Now, as you recall, you were sitting there when this conversation took place, where Mr Armstrong said the events that you told us today he said. Who else was around you that you believe heard this same thing?
Betsy: Everybody in that room heard it. Every single person.
The fly in the ointment was Stephanie McIlvain, the Oakley sunglasses representative who had been in the hospital room that day. As previously noted, she and Betsy had met for the first time that day and had become firm friends afterwards. They had spoken many, many times since about the incident. In all those conversations since 1996, Betsy and Stephanie had chatted on the basis that they had both heard Armstrong rhyme off the substances he had taken. Betsy recalled Stephanie coming to Dearborn for a stay and the three of them – Stephanie, Betsy and Frankie – discussing the issue around the kitchen table. Now Stephanie had changed her mind and given a different account under deposition a few days earlier.
Herman: In connection with your visits to the hospital with Mr Armstrong, did there ever come a time where you were with him and with other people where there was any discussion regarding Mr Armstrong’s use of performance-enhancing drugs or substances?
McIlvai
n: No.
Herman: Okay. There’s been testimony— Let me rephrase that. Were you ever at a hospital room or other part of the hospital with Mr Armstrong where he said anything about performance-enhancing drugs?
McIlvain: No.
Herman: Do you have any recollection of any doctor in your presence asking Mr Armstrong if he used in the past any performance-enhancing drugs or substances?
McIlvain: No.
Poor Stephanie McIlvain. She recollected that Betsy Andreu had called her up some time afterwards and asked if she remembered an incident where two doctors came in and asked Lance Armstrong about performance-enhancing drugs, and Lance had told them what he used. Stephanie McIlvain testified that she had said no, that she didn’t remember that. Yet when we had contacted her in connection with L.A. Confidentiel she had told us that she had been present in the room and remembered the conversation in the same way that Betsy did. She had still been willing to give that evidence when the Sunday Times was considering publishing the book extracts.
It would be wrong to be too judgemental about this situation. Stephanie was almost certainly feeling a lot of pressure. She had a better relationship with Armstrong than most of the other people being deposed. In 2001, when her two-year-old son Dylan was diagnosed with autism, Stephanie had decided to give up her Oakley work to be at home more. Armstrong had intervened and made it possible for her to work from home. As kindnesses go, it was no small thing and the type of gesture which Lance was capable of. More recently she had been in touch with him about a neighbour stricken with cancer. To be placed in the position she was now in was close to impossible.
It got worse. She had spoken to Greg LeMond about the incident and he had already said in deposition that he recalled the discussion.
McIlvain: No, I told Greg LeMond I remember being in a room and I remember watching a football game and first meeting Betsy and Paige Carmichael.
Herman: Do you remember if Mr LeMond asked you if Mr Armstrong said he used drugs while you were in that room?
