Seven Deadly Sins: My Pursuit of Lance Armstrong

by David Walsh

  How must he have felt on 22 October?

  When Pat McQuaid and the UCI cast the final stone at Lance, I was mystified. Was this the same organisation whose Honorary President Emeritus, Hein Verbruggen, had only last year loudly and publicly stated Lance Armstrong had never doped? It seemed to me that very little in USADA’s report was news to the UCI. The UCI has been the fox watching the hen house. I guess it is now time for them to change uniforms.

  As I further reflected on McQuaid’s statement – ‘I was sickened by what I read in the USADA report’ – I was amazed that information disseminated by the ‘Witch Hunters of USADA’ would create such an expression of astonishment – such an apparently allergic reaction from the head of an organisation which, for over a decade, appeared to be very derelict in the discharge of the responsibilities to which it had given continued lip service since the Festina affair. Or perhaps McQuaid was simply having withdrawal symptoms because his supply of anti-doping medications purchased with the donations made to ‘Fight Doping’ had been depleted.

  But still, McQuaid’s words in no way removed the blight on motherhood or apple pie that was caused by SCA’s unethical decision to question Saint Lance’s conscientious observation of virtually every propriety known to man.

  I also marvel that this unmerited criticism of the Saint has caused his previously oblivious sponsors to unjustly come to the jarring realisation that they had been hoodwinked egregiously. This shows how unfair the world can be.

  In any event, since all those throwing stones seem to be having such a good time, perhaps it is time for SCA to join the party.

  It sort of reminds me of a situation many years ago at a break in a high-stakes game of gin rummy, when one of the participants asked an observer what he thought of the game. The observer replied: ‘Your opponent is cheating every way he can think of, but you can spot him that.’ Even though the truth has been acknowledged by friend and foe alike, we did learn a painful lesson that we cannot always ‘spot him that’, especially if the fix is in. Hopefully, now that the last of the ‘referees’ has left the arena and there is no one left to provide covering fire, we can get back to somewhere within shouting distance of even.

  On the day Armstrong won his first Tour de France, I wrote a piece for the Sunday Times suggesting the achievement of the cancer survivor should not be applauded: ‘There are times when it is right to celebrate, but there are other occasions when it is equally correct to keep your hands by your sides and wonder . . . [and in this case] the need for inquiry is overwhelming.’

  The paper ran the piece without question, although quietly my colleagues must have wondered what we were getting into. The years that followed were tough on my boss Alex Butler. There were times, too, when they were made tougher by my blind refusal to acknowledge that he had any duties at all except to be my shield and sword. He would say, ‘When the truth comes out, you will be able to write exactly what you want.’ That always seemed too far away for me.

  We made several lawyers very unhappy too, but the Sunday Times did something that very few newspapers ever do. They ended up putting their money where my mouth had been. Lance did well out of us. But I’m still here and Alex is still there. On the legal business, the fat lady has yet to sing but our people have given her the nod. She’s clearing her throat. The Sunday Times felt defrauded at the time and the time has come to reclaim what is justly ours.

  Arbiter of the newspaper’s approach to the story in 1999, Alex has seen a lot of water flow under the bridge.

  I have only one regret. I didn’t keep the letters. Over the years, there were scores, possibly hundreds. ‘Why are you hounding this man? Can’t you just marvel at his achievements? You should be ashamed.’ I did keep them at first. I promised myself that I would reply to each and every one on the day he was exposed. But as the years passed, that was just another resolution that fell by the wayside. And now that the game is up, how I wish I could be replying to those letters.

  When the L.A. empire finally came crashing down in October 2012 I felt glad for David. For Mary. But I can’t say I felt any great emotion or surprise. Why? Easy. I’d made my mind up years ago. Did I always believe he was a doper? Maybe not. I’m a hopeless romantic. I wanted to believe. But I also wanted to believe David Walsh. And that’s not been easy. Because that’s not been my role. My job has been to dispute and argue with David. To doubt his conclusions.

  But very early on in this thirteen-year saga, I was convinced that David knew what he was talking about. He loved the Tour de France. He loved the sport of cycling. And he knew the sport. Much more than I did. Patiently, and methodically, he laid out his case against Armstrong in my office and in the pages of the Sunday Times. And I became a believer. For despite all the disquiet that David’s stories created, nobody could answer me one simple question: if everyone on the Tour is taking performance-enhancing drugs, how come this American guy is leaving them for dust? I always felt that David’s explanation was more plausible.

  And I never warmed to Armstrong. Or his bullying. Or his people. Or his expensive lawyers. Or his chums in the media. The tame, fawning cycling correspondents. The L.A. fan club. Even the countless journalists who told me how great a job they thought the Sunday Times was doing while their own newspapers joined in the L.A. adulation made me cringe. And even worse, the journalists who poured scorn on Walsh’s investigations because they were too damned lazy to undertake their own. They know who they are.

  Even after we were forced to settle with Armstrong when he sued the Sunday Times, I always felt we would win in the end and get our money back. It was only a matter of time. Why? Because sooner or later, someone would talk. Americans were the leading players in this saga. I used to tell David: ‘Someone will become a born-again Christian, have a costly divorce to pay for or just simply want to tell the truth and unburden themselves . . . it’s the American way.’ And one by one, the riders of the US Postal team have told their story. A story that would have been told years earlier but for our stringent libel laws.

  Favourite moment? Dancing around a bedroom in Holland in August 2005 after a 6.30 a.m. phone call from David informing me of L’Équipe’s superb exclusive report – headlined THE ARMSTRONG LIE – which revealed the Texan had used EPO in 1999.

  Lowest moment? The sheer grind of litigation. And sitting in the office as Mr Justice Eady dismantled our defence while Armstrong sat smirking in Texas. The British libel laws have a lot to answer for.

  Most embarrassing? When Pat McQuaid said that ‘Lance Armstrong has no place in cycling’, it slowly dawned on me that I had promised publicly to run around the office naked when L.A. was eventually exposed.

  The reason I was able to keep reporting the Armstrong story was enough people cared about the truth. They spoke to me on and off the record. Exactly one week before Christmas Day in 2003, I sat with Jonathan Vaughters at a table in a Denver restaurant and he told me how riders were now micro-dosing EPO and how easily they were beating the new test. He also told me something that made me so mad about what the sport had become. It was the epitome of screwed-up.

  When he was on the point of leaving US Postal for Crédit Agricole towards the end of the 2000 season, he showed his then directeur sportif Johan Bruyneel the contract being offered by the French team. It was far more money than Postal had offered, but Bruyneel had the option of upping his team’s offer to keep Vaughters. Bruyneel studied the Crédit Agricole offer.

  ‘With your haematocrit level [Vaughters has a naturally high haematocrit, 48 or 49], ’ he said, ‘you will not be able to justify this salary.’

  This was nature being turned on its head: a naturally high haematocrit should be an advantage, but on Planet Doping it’s a negative.

  I asked Vaughters how 22 October felt to him. He wrote:

  I can’t say I felt much of anything the day the UCI upheld USADA’s decision regarding Lance Armstrong. I didn’t feel happy or relieved. I didn’t feel right or wrong. Within me, I always knew that this woul
d come to pass, this way, if I chose to be honest about what had happened. So, the emotion was tied to the decisions that I made many years ago as to how I would behave if asked questions regarding doping and regarding Lance.

  Frankly, David, it is you that convinced me to change my path. When you came to see me in 2003, writing your book and asking questions no one wanted answered, that was where there was emotion. At that point, I had decided to leave cycling and to never look back, never re-enter the sport and never be around the sport again. You said to me, ‘How can a sport ever turn the corner if the good guys all leave or get pushed out?’ That stuck.

  I am not a good guy but it made me realise that I needed to make sure they didn’t leave cycling, and it made me realise my place in cycling was to make sure they didn’t get pushed out.

  With that realisation, I decided that, when the right day came, I needed to be honest about my past and about the past of cycling. That moment, many years ago, contained a lot of emotion. Not many people in this world truly confront what they’ve done wrong. Doing so is very painful. Real emotion.

  Everything from that moment forward has simply been what I’ve always expected to happen. A slow roll towards an inevitable conclusion. One that has no benefit, unless the good guys that haven’t been driven from the sport decide to use the emotion and pain and direct it so that this process doesn’t repeat itself. Maybe that gives me hope. And hope is the one and only useful feeling that should come from that day.

  So I guess I did feel something: an uneasy hope. Hope that the sport can learn and can change. Change, so that this never happens again.

  Pierre Ballester had a different take on cycling. He tried to be part of the solution and got fired from L’Équipe for his troubles. L.A. Confidentiel was our big roll but the dice were loaded. How can you reveal the truth if those to whom you are speaking don’t want to hear? The UCI didn’t want to know their sport was diseased; the Tour de France preferred to turn a blind eye to the circus the race had become, and too many of the fans couldn’t bear to be told the saints were sinners.

  ‘Tant pis, ’ thought Pierre. He did his time at the front line but ended up thinking it was a pointless war. He knew his own mind. After L’Équipe he got a job with the FFR, the French rugby federation, and he combines that with his teacher’s job at the Centre de Formations des Journalistes (CFJ) on rue du Louvre in the second arrondissement of Paris. When he’s not writing about rugby or inspiring France’s next generation of Pierre Ballesters, he’s writing books.

  Early in 2013, his newest book will go on sale in France, and it is the extraordinary story of a French woman who eighteen years ago travelled deep into the Amazon, close to the Brazil–Venezuela border, to help the native Indian Yanomami people prepare for the changes that will be forced upon them. She learned their language, educated their teachers, and taught their people Portuguese.

  She learned to be their nurse and doctor and she would marry a native Indian Yanomami man. So immersed did she become in life in one of the remotest parts of the world, her native French grew rusty, and when she contacted her young brother in Paris, she emailed him in English. In eighteen years she has returned to Paris just three times.

  In October 2010 Pierre travelled to where this woman now lives in the Amazon. It took him nine days to get there. The last four days of the journey were in a small boat. He spent a month living among the Yanomami. ‘It is a completely different world. There is no property, no notion of time, and the lives of the people are guided solely by the need to find food. They hunt and they fish and they make sure they have enough drinking water.’

  The Yanomami affectionately call their Parisian ‘The Lady with the Black Eye’, because when she first turned up she was wearing black eyeliner. They had never seen that. Pierre called his book, L’Amazone, which is a play on the name of the river and the mythical warrior woman. It is the story of Anne Ballester, his sister.

  So you can guess that Pierre wasn’t glued to his computer on 22 October, waiting for the UCI’s response to the USADA report:

  I was at the CFJ that Monday. I’d forgotten it was on, but one of the students heard it and knew I had been involved in the Armstrong story. He told me about it. Later I heard the details: ‘McQuaid shocked by what was in the report, ’ and I just laughed. What hypocrisy. Armstrong might deserve his punishment, but how can you single him out from the others? What is the difference between him and Ullrich and Basso? I feel sympathy for Lance because that night in the Oslo nightclub, after he won the world championships, you could see he was an interesting guy. You could have conversations with him about many things, not just cycling, and I thought, ‘I like this guy.’

  But he changed. After he came back to the sport in 1998, he was harder, like steel. Maybe the cancer experience had that effect on him. I still consider him an exceptional guy. Of course he lied, he cheated, he was a fucking bastard to a lot of people, but can you imagine what intelligence it took to create what he created? He had to take care of a lot of things.

  I have no respect for the way the majority in the media have dealt with this story. When Lance was winning he was their friend the hero. They wouldn’t say a bad word about him. Back then they were cowards and, as they kill him now, they’re still behaving in a cowardly way. Burying Lance Armstrong now is too easy.

  What disgusted me about Lance was the way he held the cancer community hostage while doing his own thing in his career.

  I envy my sister a little, being part of a world where the challenge of life is just getting enough food and water. She is fighting to make life better for the Yanomami people, trying to protect the environment, and she is doing something really useful. That’s what I envy her the most.

  In the summer of 2004 Lance turned the heat on our witnesses: Emma O’Reilly and Stephen Swart were sued, though he did not see his cases against them go through; Armstrong called up Greg LeMond; Frankie Andreu got the persuasive charm of Bill Stapleton in Charleroi. It was a time of stress and, if Emma felt it more than anyone, Stephen was the coolest. After the book’s release, he did an interview with Phil Taylor in the New Zealand Herald in which he reiterated everything he had said about Lance being an advocate for doping in 1995.

  I remember speaking to Emma about Stephen’s interview, and she drew strength from it. Stephen’s like that: quietly spoken but unwavering. ‘As long as you believe in the stance you are taking and why you are taking it, then you have to stay strong with it. My motivation was that the sport, when I left it [at the end of 1995], was in a very bad state. I had a young son showing interest and asking questions. What was I supposed to tell him?’ he said, in a later interview with Phil Taylor in the New Zealand Herald on 12 October 2012.

  Stephen never set out to show that Armstrong was a doper but to tell the story of his career in pro cycling. It just happened that Lance Armstrong was an influential figure in the discussions on doping taking place in the Motorola team of the mid-nineties. It would have been convenient but dishonest to have left him out. Jan Swart tagged a link to Taylor’s interview onto their son Logan’s Facebook page.

  Logan is currently cycling the length of South America and his Facebook comment on the interview pleased his mum: ‘My dad is the man, ’ he wrote. His friends were quick to add their comments: ‘He sure is’; ‘You must be proud, Logan!’ etc. On the morning after the UCI’s acceptance of the sanctions against Armstrong, a neighbour left a newspaper on their doorstep, because it had an article praising Stephen’s courage.

  It is not in Stephen’s nature to see what he’s done in terms of courage:

  I’ve received plenty of ‘good on ya’s’, especially from people I don’t even know. From family and friends, the support has always been fantastic and, when it all came out, I thought, ‘This is more for them than me because they believed in what I said and why I said it.’ My opinion of the UCI is they are a weak, struggling organisation with a bad culture that starts at the top. There is the need for some serious house cleaning
, and promptly.

  I’d rather think about my plan to meet up with Logan in Puerto Montt in southern Chile at Christmas and then set off on our bikes on the Carretera Austral trail to Cochrane, which is approximately 1200 kilometres. I’ve been on bike trips to New Zealand’s Southern Alps and cycling around there for a week, but this is longer and very different. It will be like a race, days when you don’t want to get back out there but you do it. It will be great.

  And it will be good for me to spend this time with Logan. We’ve never been away for anything like as long and some of the nights we will be in our two-man tent. He knows his way around, as he’s cycled from Holland to Istanbul and he’s toured Nepal on his bike. While in Nepal he slept on a dirt floor for six months in an orphanage and looked after the kids. He’s seen far more of the world than I have but this will take me out of my comfort zone. And it will be just him and me, which is good.

  Lots of the people I met along the way became friends to me. And some became heroes. I had my job, the support of a paper and a sports editor and a monthly wage. I was never conflicted. I saw men and women, though, who had parts of their lives and parts of their hearts tied up in the other side of the argument. People who had lots to lose. People who grappled with their consciences every day and pushed themselves to do the right thing. As much as anything I have seen in a sporting arena, those struggles spoke of heroism and character. Emma O’Reilly would always have a special place in that list.

  I was busy that Monday and don’t think I really caught up on the news until the next day. I listen to Pat McQuaid and the way he’s tried to distance himself and the UCI from Lance and they’re just trying to distance themselves from the problem. It seems to me the cycling community is changing for the better quicker than the body that should be driving that change. As for the riders, they do what it is natural for them to do: protect their short-term interests.