Seven Deadly Sins: My Pursuit of Lance Armstrong (42 page)

I don’t think the UCI should apologise. They didn’t hold his hand when he stuck a needle in his backside. He is an adult and they know they are breaking the rules. It’s not the president’s responsibility if they go into a doping programme. Another thing that annoys me is that Landis and Hamilton are being made out to be heroes. They are as far from heroes as night and day. They are not heroes. They are scumbags.
Pat McQuaid

The truth is, Lance Armstrong, on their [UCI’s] watch, pulled off the greatest heist sport has ever seen.
Travis Tygart

Kayle Leogrande went back to the tattoo game. Joe Papp served a period of time under house arrest in his mother’s place back in Pennsylvania.

22

‘Show me a hero, and I will write you a tragedy.’

F. Scott Fitzgerald

A grey Monday afternoon in a café off London’s M25 motorway. I have a cappuccino that won’t froth and a phone that won’t stop ringing. Its demands are ceaseless. Like a child tugging my sleeve. It won’t stop. Same every time.

‘David? Is that David? About Lance Armstrong and today’s news, are you available to do an interview?’ Canada, Australia, New Zealand, France, the US, Ireland, Netherlands, Belgium and so many closer to home. No, no, no, yes, no, no, no, no, yes, no, no, no, yes, no, no, no, no.

Seven requests are from the BBC: Radio 4, Radio 5 live, Radio 2, BBC Radio Foyle, BBC Belfast, Newsnight, World Service. There was a time when the Armstrong story had black circles on its body from the BBC pushing it away with a 40ft barge pole. There was a time when to doubt Lance Armstrong was to walk among media people wearing a bell which warned that you were unclean.

But this is the day, 22 October 2012, that Lance has been officially declared an outcast, banished from the sport by his own people: cycling’s governing body, the Union Cycliste Internationale (UCI). Its president, Pat McQuaid, has decreed that the former seven-time Tour de France winner has no place in cycling’.

This has been a squalid story from the beginning, conceived through greed and cynicism and then fuelled with the best drugs money could buy.

I wonder how Pat McQuaid can feel that he himself has a place. I’ve thought many times about that seminal 1999 Tour de France and the UCI’s failure to protect their sport. They knew from the previous year that cycling was a mess; they knew from their ‘99 pre-Tour blood tests that most of the top riders were using EPO; and they knew that an EPO test was on the way.

How difficult would it have been to discreetly re-test the ‘99 samples in the autumn of 2000 when the test was in place? Quite a number of high-profile cheats would have been kicked out of the sport for two years, Lance included. What a statement that would have made. Instead, the UCI sat idly by as one worthless Tour de France followed another.

McQuaid wasn’t president in ‘99 but still, listening now, I hear only brazenness.

But this is a momentous day. Armstrong himself will soon change the profile on his Twitter page, removing the five words ‘7-time Tour de France winner’. He’s history now, another ageing story of cheating and lying and doping and bullying and sport that wasn’t sport. An icon until the mask was taken away. ‘The greatest heist sport has ever seen, ’ says Travis Tygart, chief executive of the United States Anti-Doping Agency.

I think back to the kid I met in 1993, when I interviewed Armstrong in the first week of his debut Tour. We talked for three hours in a hotel garden outside Grenoble and got on well. He was a Texan in France, so uncool you warmed to him, and if his American gaucheness didn’t win you over, his need to succeed did. Nothing was going to get in the way.

Was he always the same man? He doped before cancer, but when he came back he was harder, more focused, less tolerant of failure and, yes, less concerned by the path to victory. He’d had four shots at the Tour, his best finish was 36th. After cancer he returned a changed man: physically, psychologically and chemically enhanced. From him we learned there was a doping programme and there was an élite doping programme. He had moved up in the world.

Readers of the
Sunday Times
were mostly disgusted by what I wrote. Keith Miller’s put-down touched a nerve. ‘Sometimes people get a cancer of the spirit. And maybe that says a lot about them.’

You think you’re impermeable, until someone says you’ve got cancer of the spirit.

For thirteen years, this story has been a central part of my life. Mary, my wife, has lived it more than anyone. While I have been away writing this book, she emailed her thoughts.

When Lance Armstrong first came into our lives thirteen years ago, I never dreamt he would have the impact he had. I don’t think of it as good or bad, just ever present. We have six children and meal time was question time. If I had to sum up what the kids thought, it would be that they believed their dad when he said Lance was doping but they also felt it would never come out. ‘You’re not going to be able to prove it, Dad.’

Dave was always very passionate about the story. For the right reasons, I felt. He wanted people to see Lance for the person he really was. When people told me my husband was obsessed by Lance, I didn’t feel he was. But Lance followed us everywhere; to dinner parties, weddings, gatherings in the village hall; there was always someone who had a question, often there was a line of five or six. And then there were the journalists, the TV crews who came to our house. Once, as Dave was leaving the house to play golf, he shouted back to me that there was a TV crew coming later in the day but he would be home before they arrived. They were from Canada and they got to our house two hours before Dave. What’s a woman meant to do?

My friend Fiona tells me there were times when I was afraid Lance Armstrong would cost Dave his job, and I suppose I must have been at one time. When the end came for Lance, and he was finally stripped of those titles, in a strange way I felt sorry for him. I was sorry that so much of his life was spent earning the admiration of people from all over the world and then to have himself exposed . . . You might imagine our dinner table isn’t as lively now but, believe it or not, there are still lots of questions from us about Lance.

My final memory is of sharing Dave for a number of years with Betsy. I’d walk into his office, he’d be on the phone and, before I’d say a word, he’d say, ‘It’s only Betsy.’ How many times did I hear that!

Now, on this day, 22 October 2012, the game is up for Armstrong. ‘Vindicated’ is the word every interviewer uses. Quickly I grow to dislike ‘vindicated’. It is not how I feel. I didn’t need McQuaid to tell me what he and I both knew. What satisfaction there is comes from the meaning it has for a group of people that had, in one way or another, contributed to the search for truth in this story.

I thought of Christophe Bassons and how his persecution on the 1999 Tour de France was the defining moment in my reaction to Lance Armstrong. Back then, it was obvious you could not be anti-doping and anti-Bassons. Impossible. But they ran him out of town and at the head of the lynch mob, lacking only a white hood and length of rope, was Armstrong.

Bassons left pro cycling long before he should have. His trainer, Antoine Vayer, told him to go back to education. That’s what he did and now he works for the French Ministry of Sport in the Bordeaux region, making sure that sport is properly organised and, where there should be doping controls, they are in place and properly executed.

Asked how he felt on 22 October, when his old nemesis went down, this is what Christophe wrote:

The news that Lance Armstrong was stripped of his Tour wins brings no great joy to me, just an appreciation that justice has been done. He cheated; it was important that this was established and that he was sanctioned. It was also important to establish that the people who questioned his performances were not bitter, but true and honest.

I have no regrets about what I did in 1999. The way Armstrong treated me in that Tour was a reflection of his character and the manner in which he imposed his will on the peloton. He was the only one to say to my face what the other riders were thinking of me. If they had had the opportunity or the intelligence to create the empire he made, they would have done exactly the same. They weren’t any more honest than he was, just less intelligent and courageous. They have no right to point a finger at him, like some have already done.

Having said that, I was surprised at the influence he had on his teammates in threatening and inciting them to dope. It reminded me of how things were at Festina a few years before. Richard Virenque, like Armstrong, was not easy on his teammates, especially those who disagreed with him.

For the moment I think it’s probably better to stay in the present and allow Lance Armstrong to explain himself to the American justice system. The world of sport should forget him but should not destroy him psychologically. Armstrong is still a human being with an individual personality that was built during his childhood. I know he had a difficult childhood, which might explain his need to win at all costs, even if that meant not respecting other people.

Today I feel more pity than contempt for him. I always preferred to be in my position than in his. I am honest, straight and happy. I don’t think he can say the same.

Contrary to what some people believe, Laurent Jalabert [the former cyclist and now television commentator] in particular, I do not consider Lance Armstrong to be a great champion. He was just someone who was prepared to abandon his morals to win at all costs. His is a story of failure and nothing else.

The spotlight now should not be on Lance Armstrong but on a sport that is still gangrenous with doping and deceit. The Tour de France 2012 did not reassure me.

Bassons showed us there were two ways of riding the Tour de France, and that you couldn’t support both. And you couldn’t sit on the fence. His was the side to be on, and the only cancer of the spirit in cycling was in those injecting chemicals into their veins every morning.

Once upon a time professional cycling enthralled me, tapping into my innocence and winging me off to a world that was beautifully simple and richly complex. On the same day, a stage of the Tour de France can push a man further than ever he’s gone and still seem like chess on wheels. In those unsuspecting years, when EPO hadn’t come with its power to distort and poison, Greg LeMond was the greatest cyclist ever I saw – so blessed with natural talent it seemed almost unfair on his rivals.

He had once been a supporter of Lance Armstrong, but the relationship turned ugly as time went on. Greg’s legacy as a brilliant and clean cyclist was always greater than anything Lance could achieve. That didn’t stop Lance. He hurt Greg, professionally and personally. In the three years after 2001, we talked a lot and Greg went through a lot of tough times. Without Kathy, he mightn’t have got to the other side. I asked Kathy LeMond how she felt on 22 October:

I felt some anxiety leading up to the UCI decision. I have always known that the leaders of the UCI shouldn’t be trusted to make an unbiased decision, but felt that they were going to rule in the only way they could to save themselves, at least temporarily. This meant they had to find Lance guilty. He needed to be kicked out of the Tour in 1999, but the system didn’t work.

When this all came out there was no joyous whooping it up at our house. This sport and our family have been through too much for that. To me this was like a criminal trial in which the accused is found guilty. The crime has happened and the victims are grieving. Yes, the accountability feels good but there is no joy, more a feeling of relief. There are others who have not yet been held accountable for their actions and I hope that those verdicts will be coming.

Greg’s reputation, our business, our children’s teenage years, were all consumed by a vicious vendetta against Greg and our family because we wouldn’t go along with the lies. Greg and I made the decision that, even though the fall-out would be terrible, there was no other option but to be honest about what we knew. The kids were with us when we told the truth about Lance Armstrong, so it strengthened our family to be in this ordeal together. They always supported their dad.

I imagine that maybe I could feel sorry for Lance, but not after so many years of interfering in our life. No way. He was different to others. There seemed to be no limit to his ability to insert himself into all areas of our life. It was really sick.

It is interesting that he’s on Twitter and taking photos with his seven yellow jerseys. That, to me, really shows that he is different to the average person. Where is the shame? I don’t see any. No apology to all those whose lives and careers were destroyed; people duped for years into believing his story – nothing for them. We all heard his speech on the podium at the Tour de France chastising people for questioning his performances: how do you get to be like that?

It is a great disappointment to me that it took so many years for ex-teammates and staff to commit to unravelling the story. All those riders that participated only told their stories with their backs against the wall. I know it will seem ungracious to ask now, but how do you keep silent when so many innocents are being destroyed?

Greg lost so much in this ordeal. He had the courage to say things that needed to be said, and it was unpopular, but he was authentic. Truly, David, as Greg and you said almost twelve years ago, it was either the greatest comeback in the history of sport or the greatest fraud. We know now.

And my oldest friend, Paul Kimmage? We have ridden side by side through all this. Innocents before this war started, we’re jaded veterans now. In the war against doping in sport, you need moral certainty, and Paul has that. It fuels his courage. He once reminded me what Sam said in Lord of the Rings: ‘There’s some good in the world, Mr Frodo, and it’s worth fighting for.’ Paul takes off the gloves, fights bare-knuckled, but he’s always on the side of right.