Seven Deadly Sins: My Pursuit of Lance Armstrong (3 page)

Kelly finished third that day, went to doping control and failed. The banned drug Stimul was found in his urine. What I remember now is how Sean Kelly looked that evening. A small semi-circle of journalists stood around him at Rhode-Saint-Genèse asking about his third-place finish but it was his deathly white face and the enlarged pupils that struck me. He didn’t look like himself.

When the news of his positive test was made public, he did what all cyclists did: denied using Stimul and said there had to have been a mix-up in the doping control room. One of his arguments was that there were six or seven people in the room when he was giving his sample as opposed to the stipulated two. If Kelly had used Stimul, he had behaved very stupidly because it was an easily detectable drug and by finishing third he had ensured that he would be tested.

Robert Millar, the Scottish rider, was dismissive of the charge, not on any moral grounds but on the basis that Stimul was passé, a seventies drug no one used any more. Karl McCarthy, international secretary for the Irish Cycling Federation, flew into Brussels to plead on Kelly’s behalf, and when the Belgian Federation still insisted he was guilty, the Union Cycliste Internationale (UCI) sent the case back to them and asked them to reconsider.

Sixteen months after the race, the UCI confirmed the original result stood.

Kelly was fined 1000 Swiss francs, which was approximately one sixth of what he earned for showing up at a village race, and given a one-month suspended sentence. When I wrote about the 1984 Paris–Brussels in the biography, I didn’t mention the rattle of pills in the morning and I tried to make the case that it was hard to believe Kelly had used a substance so easily detectable. I chose to see the ridiculous leniency of the authorities as proof that, at worst, it was a minor infraction. It wasn’t how a proper journalist would have reacted. At the time I knew what I was doing.

Things changed over the following fifteen years.

We returned to Ireland in 1985, reluctantly leaving Paris, and I went back to covering the entire range of major sports. Paul stayed for a second year on the amateur circuit in France, achieved better results and earned a pro contract. It was a dream for him, something we had talked about over so many teas and coffees at rue Kléber. I couldn’t wait to see how his career would turn out. It was to be a bitter-sweet experience for him, a four-year collision with the reality of professional cycling. He experienced the joy of finishing the Tour de France but that, in the end, was overwhelmed by the certainty that if you didn’t dope, it was virtually impossible to compete.

In those years we spoke on the telephone a lot and Paul’s despair at cycling’s doping culture was palpable. He rode the Tour in 1986 and on the day at Alpe d’Huez that Bernard Hinault and Greg LeMond held hands as they rode across the finish line, I interviewed him for a piece commissioned by
Magill
, a current affairs magazine in Dublin.

It was a long interview, almost four hours, as we had so much to talk about. Kimmage wasn’t able to speak about doping because if he did he would have been drummed out of the sport the next day, but he spoke about the race like no one I had ever heard speak about the Tour de France. Honest, human, unromantic, but packed with insight. On the Monday morning that the race ended, the magazine editor Fintan O’Toole rang.

‘Where’s the piece?’

It wouldn’t be the last time I would hear that question.

‘How much do you need and when do you need it by?’

‘Five thousand words and by two-thirty this afternoon.’

It was a little after nine in the morning, and I had yet to listen to the tapes.

‘Fintan,’ I said, trying to sound authoritative, ‘this piece will work as a first-person piece, directly from the mouth of a rookie.’

‘That’s okay. I will send a bike to your house for two-thirty. Okay?’

‘Fine.’

Then the strangest thing happened. I sat down, played the tape and started typing. Every other minute there was something that had to be in the story. Paul had the gift of storytelling; gritty and unromantic but wonderful for that. It was by far the easiest five-thousand-word piece I’ve ever written: the Tour de France as you had never seen it. I can still remember his description of the pain as he struggled up the Col du Granon. So wasted he could barely keep the pedals turning and in danger of being outside the time limit, his slow progress and tortured face were an unspoken plea, ‘
Poussez-moi, poussez-moi.
’ And the fans did, pushing him forward as they have done for those in difficulty since the Tour began.

Of course it is against cycling’s rules to accept a push and in the team support car directly behind, a man known to Paul only as Robert screamed at the fans to stop. Confused, they stepped back, and after this had happened a few times Paul mustered up the energy to turn his head back to the car: ‘Robert, for fuck’s sake, let them push me.’ And Robert, embarrassed by the mistake, then yelled at the fans to help Paul.

After Kimmage’s first-person account of the race appeared, Fintan O’Toole called to say that in his time as editor it was the best piece he had ever run. I knew from the ease with which I’d extracted five thousand words from the tape that Kimmage could be a journalist and told him so. He didn’t believe me but that would change.

In 1988, two years after that
Magill
piece, Paul began writing columns about his life as a pro cyclist for the
Sunday Tribune
, the paper where I was working at the time. Given that he had no sports-writing experience, the columns were absurdly good. Vincent Browne was an outstanding editor at the
Tribune
and a man who didn’t often doubt his own judgement. He read the Kimmage columns and felt he knew the score: Kimmage told his story to Walsh who dressed it up as journalism.

‘Vincent, Paul is doing these columns entirely on his own.’

‘Yes, David, but you’re editing.’

‘I’m not, and if I was I couldn’t make them as good as they are.’

‘I still don’t believe he’s doing them on his own.’

‘Okay, Vincent, when Paul calls in with his column this week, you go and sit by the copytaker and see what he dictates.’

Vincent stood over Rita Byrne as she tapped out Paul’s words on her electric typewriter, scanning each sentence as it appeared on the page. This little exercise didn’t last long. Next time Paul was back in Dublin, Vincent offered him a full-time job as sportswriter. Paul’s writing was going better than his riding and he was enjoying it far more. We would speak on the phone about pro cycling and I now knew enough about the sport’s doping culture to understand he hadn’t a hope.

He retired in 1989 and then wrote a masterful account of his life in the peloton,
Rough Ride
. His memoir became the definitive tome on doping in cycling but Paul was vilified for writing it. And the criticism came exclusively from within the cycling family. It was shocking to hear the lies people told, distressing to watch the self-serving assaults on Paul’s character. His one-time teammate and friend Roche was one of those complaining the loudest. The other great Irish hero of the roads, Kelly, studiously avoided passing any critique on the book or on Paul.

‘I’d like to read the book but I just haven’t got round to it yet,’ Kelly would say to enquiring journalists for years afterwards.

And the fan who had followed Kelly from race to race in 1984 was having his eyes opened, slowly and painfully. At the 1988 Tour de France, the raceleader Pedro Delgado tested positive for the drug probenecid which was banned by the International Olympic Committee because it masks the use of steroids. Conveniently probenecid wasn’t due to be banned by cycling’s authorities until ten days after the Tour ended. There was no legitimate reason for any Tour rider to use probenecid and after the news broke the director of the Tour de France Xavier Louy went to Delgado’s hotel and asked him to leave the race.

The Spaniard refused, saying he hadn’t broken any rule. Technically that was the case.

The following morning I wandered through the corporate village at Limoges still angry that a guy caught using a masking agent was about to win the Tour de France. Standing there alone for a moment was Dutch rider Steven Rooks, second overall and the one who would have won the Tour had Delgado been sanctioned.

‘Do you not feel cheated, that you are the true winner of the Tour de France?’ I asked, wanting him to agree.

He looked at me as if I was an alien with no understanding of anything human.

‘No, not at all. Delgado has been the best rider in the race, he deserves to win. It is okay for me to finish second.’

‘But he has used this masking drug?’

‘He is still the strongest guy in the race.’

Rooks wanted me to know that doping wasn’t any of my business. He resented any line of questioning that suggested he was the legitimate leader of the Tour de France. Effectively, there was an understanding between him and Delgado of what was permissible and his rival hadn’t breached that. As for you, the journalist, just stay out of it.

Cycling wasn’t the only sport with a drug culture.

Two months later I was in Seoul watching Florence Griffith-Joyner break a world 200m record while decelerating. Though she passed the tests, and said she was clean, the performances didn’t make sense. Many of those who wrote of Flo-Jo’s brilliance on the track were faking it. Then a couple of nights after the men’s 100m final Doug Gillon from the
Herald
in Glasgow knocked on my apartment in Seoul. It was 3.30 in the morning.

‘Doug, what’s up?’

‘Johnson’s tested positive. Get dressed.’

I could have kissed that Scot for thinking of me and the rest of the Seoul Olympics passed in a blur with only Johnson in focus. After it was all over I followed the path beaten by so many journalists to Toronto, the gym where Johnson still worked out, the track where he used to train and the office of his then lawyer Morris Chrobotek working to show Ben in the best light.

Chrobotek was funny, sometimes intentionally, sometimes not. At the suggestion that one of of Ben’s rivals was clean, he threw his head back, then brought it forward: ‘I may be ugly,’ he said, ‘but I’m not stupid.’ Afterwards when doping suspicions arose I tried to apply the Chrobotek principle: it was okay to be ugly, not okay to be stupid.

But there is a choice for the sportswriter and it’s not straightforward. Most of us have chosen journalism because we love sport. We say we love our jobs but it is getting paid for going to big sporting events that we love. Enthusiasm for the game is what drives our work. When doubts about the worth of the performance arise, they drain our enthusiasm.

This is why so many refuse to ask the obvious questions.

I was lucky when it came to Lance Armstrong.

Most things are a question of timing. Perhaps if the right questions were asked during the 1980s and ’90s, it might have emerged that EPO, which was then in widespread use and undetectable, had changed the sport. I saw many of those Tours and never asked a question.

So why, when Lance Armstrong won the first of his seven in the Tour de France, did I have such a different reaction?

I’ve always thought of my enthusiasm for sports-writing as existing in a well; you draw from it, it replenishes but not quite at the level that you have drawn from it. This used to be a worry. What if the well went dry? That thought doesn’t bother me any more because at the 1999 Tour, when the story of Lance Armstrong first announced itself, my enthusiasm for professional cycling was at a very low ebb.

Lance, Tour champion extraordinaire, came into my journalistic life at precisely the right moment.

2

‘The race is everything. It obliterates what isn’t racing. Life is the metaphor for the race.’

Donald Antrim

On 25 June 1995, I returned home to Ireland after five weeks covering the Rugby World Cup in South Africa. It was about ten o’clock when the plane landed in Dublin. Mary drove from our home in County Westmeath to pick me up, and Paul and his wife Ann came from their home not far from the airport to meet us for a coffee. We spent a couple of hours catching up before heading in our separate directions.

At home, turning into our drive, it was obvious something was wrong. Neighbours were standing around – not just neighbours but the schoolmaster, the priest – no one sure where to look. Inside the car you felt the certainty that once you opened the door your life was going to change forever. I can’t remember who it was told me that John, our 12-year-old son, had been in an accident on his bicycle.

‘But is he okay?’ I asked.

‘No, he broke his neck.’

‘Where is he now?’

‘He’s gone in the ambulance.’

‘But how is he? Is he going to be okay?’

‘No, he isn’t.’

That was it. We knew. Then we were thinking of our other children: Kate, Simon, Daniel, Emily and Conor, who all knew before we did. Where were they? How were they?

The accident had happened an hour earlier. John had played a gaelic football match that morning, his team had lost and he’d passed on the sandwiches and soft drinks provided afterwards. Turning into our driveway on the right-hand side of the road, he was struck by an oncoming car and died instantly. There wasn’t a mark on his face or body. It was just the force of the collision and the angle of his fall.

John was the second eldest of our children, a kid with an insatiable appetite for life. He was good at school, fiercely scrupulous about getting his homework done: ‘Dad, can’t talk, I’ve got three hours homework and there’s Champions League on the television.’ You stood to one side and let him get on with it. We played a lot of football on our lawn with the Kilmartin kids from next door and often they ended in fights; John and I, mostly.

‘It’s our throw.’

‘It didn’t cross the line.’

And from there all hell would break loose. His passion was forgivable. I should have had more sense.