How I Won the Yellow Jumper (8 page)

This strange encounter had all taken place in a tiny, hot room. The two riders shared this limited space in an airless hotel in the foothills of the Pyrenees, and they had sacrificed what little privacy they might have enjoyed to oblige a British TV crew. By the time we left them it was nearly eleven and they had to try and prepare for the next day's stage. We took our shoes off, and padded down the corridor.

So it is that, half-guest, half-pest, we go about our half-welcomed, half-intrusive business, unsure of where we stand or how far we can push our luck. The Tour de France has a knack of keeping you in a state of perpetual uncertainty.

But at least it isn't sterile.

‘Lance. If I bet a hundred dollars that you would one day be President of the USA, would I be wasting my money?' I posed the question on the eve of the 2005 Tour. I wasn't being sycophantic; I was just curious.

His answer was archetypal Armstrong. He picked me out from a very big crowd of journalists in a hall, paused for a moment, and then spoke slowly.

‘I have no plans to move into those circles.' He paused. Everyone at the press conference thought he was finished. ‘But if the bet wins, do I get my cut?'

I've kept that tape, just in case.

I first glimpsed Lance Armstrong in 2003 at the centre of a scrum of camera crews, snappers and reporters that had formed around him in the blink of an eye. The whole ridiculous fleshy circle was drifting across the open expanse of an empty exhibition hall in Paris like a cyclone inching its way over the Atlantic. At the eye of the storm was Armstrong, small but in very clear command, despite the chaos raging around him.

I was astonished by the scale of the interest in him. I had only marginally heard of this man just a few weeks prior to arriving on my first Tour. Now I had come face to face with the insatiability of the media's appetite for Armstrong, and I couldn't believe it. I had been given my instructions to get some shots of his arrival at the hall in Paris where the Tour had set up shop two days before the start of the race. I had naively imagined being able to sit him down, one-on-one for a few minutes, to introduce myself formally and to start to build some sort of working relationship with the man whose endeavours were about to shape the pattern of my first three weeks on the Tour.

What I hadn't envisaged was getting a thick ear from a Flemish photographer and my toes stamped by an Italian radio presenter.

Armstrong, in 2003. Madness in a moment.

The man himself looked almost a little amused by the insanity enveloping him. Down the years I have often felt this. That he has been quietly delighted by the absurdity of the scenes that unfold before him day after day on the Tour. Television crews will stop at nothing to be the first ones to thrust a microphone under his nose. Radio's no different. Everyone wants a bit of him and, this being the Tour, you can get close enough to take a bit, too. Yet, to me, he remains uncompromised, aloof. Not haughty, just amused.

On the 2009 Tour, the first year of Armstrong's much-hyped comeback, Matt Rendell found himself in pole position in the most almighty bundle that formed within seconds of the American's Astana team completing the team time trial. This time, rather than the conventional scrum, Armstrong had disappeared into the heart of a moving mass of bodies. The whole seething entity was proceeding at jogging pace. Armstrong, in the middle, was flanked by a dozen CRS French riot police, who were in turn encased, like the core of a Scotch egg, by an outer layer of reporters and cameramen. At the front of this absurd sight, Matt's cameraman John was running backwards, filming, while Matt, attached to him by a microphone, was being lifted off his feet by the ever-tightening circle of bodies. At the point at which he lost all contact with the ground and was literally being carried aloft, he caught Armstrong's attention. Instead of framing an insightful enquiry about the General Classification, he beamed broadly and launched into the best question ever asked of Lance Armstrong: ‘Lance, doesn't this ever strike you as completely ridiculous?'

Armstrong, caked in the drying sweat from a roasting Montpellier sun, smiled the briefest of smiles. ‘Yeah, well. It does make me miss lying on the beach with a beer.'

Indeed.

In 2004, for some odd reason, we started calling him Larry. Not that he was ever aware that he had acquired a new nickname. We certainly never said it to his face. No, we were far more subtle than that. We said it behind his back.

It's hard to remember just how the name Larry stuck. Certainly there was an element of debunking about it. Lance sounds epic; Larry just sounds suburban. But actually, it had more to do with his relationship with the singer Sheryl Crow. After his marriage to Kristin, his first wife, fell apart, he hooked up with Sheryl. I understood that she was famous on a global scale, and had been responsible for the ‘sun coming
up on the Santa Monica Boulevard' but we all kept forgetting her name. I was convinced she was called Shirley. I still think she should be. And Larry would be just right for Shirley.

As luck would have it, we were allocated the Novotel on the outskirts of Liège as our hotel for the two days prior to the start of the 2004 Tour. Sheryl Crow, Lance Armstrong and the rest of the US Postal Team were staying in the same hotel. It was the first and only time we were ever billeted in the same place. It worked out pretty well, at least for us.

After twenty-four hours, and largely due to Matt Rendell's blossoming relationship with Armstrong, we had secured an exclusive sit-down interview with Crow, or Sheryl, as I kept intoning to myself to stave off the awful, but very real danger of slipping up and calling her Shirley.

When the hour came, we set up the camera in the appointed room and waited for the lady to arrive. Which she did, right on time. There was little that I remember from that interview save for one quote.

‘I think it's incredible, just getting out and meeting people, particularly in France, how much love there is for Lance Armstrong. How they just totally love the man.'

I felt a judder from behind me, as John, who was shooting the interview tried to control a fit of cynicism.

After the interview, Woody posed for a photo with Crow, presumably because he didn't often get the opportunity to be seen next to people shorter than him, and we all said thanks and went our separate ways.

Later that evening, we were all caught in the lift together: Matt, John, Woody, Larry, Shirley and I. Armstrong said something nice about Matt's latest book to Sheryl. Then the banter subsided, and we all started not concentrating on what her name wasn't. It was a long twenty seconds.

There is an aura that surrounds Armstrong. I have known three men in my life who have possessed it in equal measure. Sir Alex Ferguson, Lance and the headmaster of my secondary school, C.I.M. Jones (I never knew what the C stood for, let alone the I and the M). When Larry left the Tour for the first time in 2005, he took some of the race with him, and diminished its standing by his absence.

In 2007, when we reached Paris for the final stage, there were rumours spreading like wildfire that Lance was in town, ending a two-year absence from the Tour. The retired champion had, seemingly, arranged with the US TV Network OLN to take a ten-minute turn in the commentary box alongside their regular team.

Now this was remarkable news. ASO (the Tour organisers) and Armstrong were like a newly divorced couple, enjoying the freedom after their years of mutual dependence. An uneasy cohabitation during his racing years: France never really took
to the American, and the feeling was often mutual. Suffice to say, when Armstrong decided to drop in on the Champs-Elysées, as far as the Tour was concerned, he wasn't welcome.

To this day, we don't know how he did it, but there was talk that he'd smuggled himself onto the race in the back of a Discovery Channel team car. I wouldn't rule it out either. Like José Mourinho who, it was claimed, jumped into a laundry bin, threw towels over himself and was wheeled into the Chelsea dressing room to circumvent a UEFA ban, Armstrong has always had a showman's ego.

So, there I was on the Champs-Elysées, tipped off about Armstrong's imminent arrival, waiting for at least an hour at the back of the commentary truck with a cameraman. Facing the wrong way. Inevitably.

By the time I'd noticed him, he'd stolen a march on both of us and we were charging to get past him so that I could fire in a question. John and I were now running backwards, fast. After a two-year abstinence from chasing the Armstrong sound bite, I was suddenly back in business.

‘Welcome back to France, Lance. Have you missed it?' I thrust the mic in his direction, still trotting backwards.

I never heard his answer, because suddenly I was lying flat out among the TV cables and the dog shit, having tripped on the root of a tree.

I did, however, see him stepping politely over me, offering an apologetic smile, edged with a veneer of amusement.

Later that day, just as Armstrong was completing his stint for OLN, there was a sudden loss of power to their commentary box. All their communications went down. To this day, no one has been able to explain why it only affected the Americans, but needless to say, the conspiracy theories have been entertaining.

I have other memories of Armstrong, which are more dignified than falling over in front of him. At home above my desk,
I have framed the front page of
L'Equipe
from 12 July 2003. The headline reads ‘Armstrong, oui mais'. The picture beneath shows Armstrong in yellow for the first time that Tour, answering questions in front of a forest of microphones at the summit of Alpe d'Huez. He looks, if not jubilant, then careworn. I am in the picture too, straining forward to catch his eye and get my questions heard. Behind us, the unnatural blue of the Alpine summer sky lights the scene with infrared intensity.

This is how I often remember Armstrong. It was my first Tour, and my first exposure to his nature. The climb that day had been won by Iban Mayo, who had attacked and ridden away from the bunch. Further down the switchbacks of the famous mountain, Armstrong had been furiously repelling attack after attack from riders like Tyler Hamilton and Joseba Beloki. He neutralised them all. After the podium protocol, he stood in front of us, empty with the effort, his eyes almost betraying tiredness, as he questioned his rivals, ‘Are they racing the Tour?' he wondered. ‘Or are they racing me?'

The grip he held them in. By the end of his reign, during the fag end of the drab 2004 and 2005 Tours, his power in the peloton was unquestionable. No stage was gifted, no breakaway allowed, no lesser rider accorded his hour on the stage without the volition or at least tacit permission of the champion.

Since the races themselves were among the dullest Tours, we spent much of the time on the sniff for something else to talk about other than the castration of the opposition: a fading Jan Ullrich, about to be discredited; Ivan Basso, a good friend of Armstrong and too close to him for anything other than what looked like a rather neutered challenge; Tyler Hamilton and Floyd Landis, former teammates who were ekeing out the embarrassing final chapters of their careers.