Seven Deadly Sins: My Pursuit of Lance Armstrong (5 page)

On the day of Smith’s last race she had a problem with her goggles and was late to the starting blocks. Not far from where the three of us sat were the nine or ten Irish journalists who had been writing hymns of praise. They didn’t much like us that week and we weren’t their biggest fans either.

But with Smith’s starting block temporarily vacant, six or seven of her journalist fans rose from their seats and headed for the stairs that would take them down to the pool area. As they filed past us, one of them looked up and caught my eye. ‘She’s been done,’ he said quietly, meaning he reckoned Smith had learned of a positive test and that explained her failure to come out with the other seven finalists. She hadn’t ‘been done’, but it was a little insight into the minds of her believers.

The two years that followed were difficult but transformative. ‘Daddy, why are you mean to Michelle Smith?’ the kids asked when they came home from school. In the end, Michelle would receive a four-year suspension for tampering with a urine sample she provided at her home in Kilkenny in 1998, but until her final hearing in Lausanne everything the three of us published on the topic of her miraculous rise was greeted with hostility and catcalls. Paul and I did okay on Smith, Tom was outstanding.

But asking the obvious questions, like John’s simple query in that classroom, ‘What did Mary and Joseph do with the gold?’ had become an unavoidable duty. The bonus was that it felt like journalism.

The following summer Paul, Tom and I were thrown together again. The World Athletic Championships in Athens were an anti-climax media wise. Sonia O’Sullivan, the perennial Irish favourite, had another difficult meet, but on a broader level the people of Athens seemed as indifferent to what was happening on the track as the rest of the world. At one point, the IAAF asked the Greeks if they couldn’t fill the empty seats in the stadium with military personnel. It’s an old sporting custom, but the Greeks said this wasn’t why they maintained an army.

Stories were few and our newspapers weren’t overworking us. There was time to enjoy Athens, the Acropolis and all that, but first a round of golf. Paul and I are keen and Tom was dragged along to the splendid Glyfada course in the suburbs. The great and good of Athens had fled to the islands for the hottest weeks of summer and we had the fairways of Glyfada to ourselves. Well, Paul and I had the fairways. Tom preferred the rough.

For once in our lives our press accreditation impressed somebody. We were treated like royalty at Glyfada. The club locker room was thrown open to us and we were permitted to choose our weapons from row after row of members’ bags. Each bag was as big as a trailer home and the clubs they housed left us with no excuses.

Something was bothering Tom, however, and it wasn’t just his driving. This was unusual because unlike Paul and me, he’s not by nature contrary. When he got it off his chest, the three of us fell to arguing passionately and the sightseeing agenda was forgotten about. Tom had listened to a lot of our old Tour de France stories. The day Kelly did this, the day Kelly said that. Paul and I encouraged Tom to get to the Tour and see for himself.

What Tom couldn’t figure was the gap between the affection and the esteem in which myself and Paul still held Sean Kelly and the position we had taken on Michelle Smith.

‘Surely a doping offender is a doping offender?’ he said. ‘And Kelly twice tested positive?’

‘But, Tom, the difference between Kelly and Smith is that he was beating the world’s best from his first season with the pros. He was a genuine talent from day one; she was nowhere near.’

‘There are no degrees of guilt here. No good dopers and no bad dopers,’ he said.

‘It’s not as black and white as that. Cycling is a different sport to swimming. Virtually all the top guys do stuff in cycling.’

‘Look, both of you guys have written successful books on cycling. Paul, your book showed how much doping there is in cycling but neither of you has called out Kelly.’

‘Tom,’ said Paul, ‘I wanted to focus on the doping culture and how every rider was forced to make a choice: dope and have a career; don’t dope and watch your career go down the drain. If I’d pointed the finger at individuals, people would have missed the more important point. It’s the sport that corrupts the individual.’

‘But still, you both have had opportunities to remind people that Kelly twice tested positive, but because you like the guy you haven’t done it.’

It was true that we liked Kelly and when our questions about him weren’t soft, they were non-existent. That morning in Senlis, when he jumped on his bike and sent those pills rattling against the plastic, we knew exactly what we’d heard, and when he later tested positive for the urine sample he gave that day we didn’t tell about what we’d heard.

We’d rationalised it in a way that suited us and tried to tell Tom that he didn’t understand the context.

‘Tom, the people who knew swimming were the loudest in saying they didn’t believe Smith. Those inside professional cycling loved Sean Kelly and never expressed any suspicion about his status as champion. So there was no basis for anyone else to be suspicious.’

‘Weren’t two positive tests basis enough?’

‘Eddy Merckx twice tested positive and everyone accepts he was the greatest ever cyclist. So, should we say Merckx wasn’t a true champion?’

We told Tom about how the French and Belgians loved Kelly and if anyone knew the sport, it was them. To them he was a legendary hard man. We painted the picture of a world where, yes, most riders took drugs but in a kind of egalitarian way and the outcomes would still have been the same. Kelly would have been one of the
patrons
of the peloton no matter what.

And we told Tom some of our best stories, showing Kelly’s insatiable appetite for training, his need to win, the shyness that once made him nod in answer to a question on radio. I told about the times I’d seen him stick 20,000 French francs in small bills down his underpants after being paid for riding a criterium.

‘Tom, you’re just not getting the context.’

‘What I get is the effect. If the strongest guys dope, what effect does that have on guys down the food chain? Don’t they then have to dope to remain in the same world? Here is this sport of yours, so beautiful in its simplicity, so inspiring in its stories, and you’re telling young riders that in order to survive you need to put this and you need to put that into your body.’

We didn’t have an answer.

Paul had been one of those young riders, forced to make that choice.

‘Fuck. Fuck you, Tom, you’re right. That’s what I wrote the book about, the choice, that’s the story I told in
Rough Ride
. That culture is why my career got screwed up; where you end up not knowing how good you could have been.’

Paul is rightly proud of
Rough Ride
but, six years after it came out, we both wanted to pretend that Kelly could be separated from this doping culture, almost as if he was somehow different. Tom wasn’t buying it. We were blinded by our affection for Kelly. We drove back to Athens in silence.

That was the summer of 1997.

Over the years I’ve often thought about how my life changed in the years before 1999 and how my attitude to the Tour de France was so different in ’99 to what it had been when I first discovered it in 1982. I’ve wondered, too, about the effect on Armstrong of having life-threatening cancer.

After he came back and questions of doping were raised he would say, ‘Do you really think I would put that stuff in my body after what I’ve been through?’ It was a convincing argument. But there was a voice in my head that said, ‘Hold on, he’s had to deal with the possibility of dying, how scary must that have been? Now maybe nothing scares him.’

Now, in the summer of 1997, Armstrong was turning his thoughts to a comeback.

3

‘The greater the suffering, the greater the pleasure.’

Tim Krabbé,
The Rider

Two weeks before the start of the 1999 Tour de France, race organiser Jean-Marie Leblanc made the journey to Notre-Dame des Cyclistes in Aquitane to say a little prayer. As he settled into his pew beneath the stained glass window depicting the great rivals Coppi and Bartali at peace, Leblanc had good reason for seeking a little serenity himself.

Twelve months earlier, customs and police officers had taken the world inside the Tour de France, revealing a fetid counter-culture fuelled by unimaginable quantities of banned drugs. The tightly knit brotherhood of pro cyclists didn’t enjoy sharing the secrets of their private lifestyle with the police and the broader public. Six teams withdrew from the race in protest. Cycling’s mass audience was horrified. The ’98 Tour might as well have never got on the road for all it had to do with sport.

A year on, Leblanc wanted God on his side and while he visited the cyclists’ church he spoke also to the Abbot Massier, though he wouldn’t reveal what was said. Leblanc promised the world that the 1999 Tour would be different. He even came up with a catchy sound-bite: the Tour of Renewal.
Le grand boucle
would be cleaner and more credible than ’98. Lower, slower, weaker. Leblanc said he didn’t mind that the pace of the ’99 Tour would be more sedate because that would show everybody there were fewer drugs in circulation.

Not just God, Leblanc wanted the media on his side. He wanted sponsors on his side. He wanted his old life back. He wanted to enjoy the month of July.

I knew Leblanc from back in ’84, when he was chief cycling correspondent for
L’Équipe
. We would meet at races and occasionally we would shoot the breeze as he would often ask about Sean Kelly. Having seen him in action one afternoon at a swanky reception, hosted by the Tour de France organisers in the centre of Paris, I had decided he was destined for a life more prestigious than filling
L’Équipe
’s cycling pages.

When I showed up that afternoon he was immersed in conversation with three important-looking corporate types and, as he saw me approach, he quickly averted his gaze, fearing I would come and say hello and he would have to introduce me and a high-powered conversation would drop a few notches.

Nothing personal,
mon ami
, but this isn’t the moment. I understood. He would be director of the Tour de France within five years, one in a line of former journalists promoted to one of the most powerful roles in world cycling. I wondered whether a former pro like him believed it possible to have a clean Tour.

I was returning to the ’99 Tour after missing ’98 and ’97 and, in part, my return to the race was down to my colleague John Wilcockson with whom I had travelled on and off at the Tour since 1984. Softly spoken and unfailingly polite, John is the epitome of the reserved Englishman. He qualified as an engineer but his passion, which bubbled well beneath the surface, was cycling: first as a competing amateur and then as a reporter/writer. For cycling he would go out in the midday sun.

The thing about John was that he never grew old; his slim physique didn’t gain a pound, his curly hair seemed to twirl itself a little tighter with each year, while his enthusiasm, which started at the summit of Mont Blanc, was now moving on to Everest. He loved talking to cyclists, writing about them, just being in their space, and when I wasn’t wondering about the darker side of the sport he and I got on well.

In ’98, I would be in France covering the football World Cup as the race unfolded. My sports editor at the
Sunday Times
, Alex Butler, asked who we could get to cover the Tour. ‘John Wilcockson,’ I said. ‘He covered the Tour for us way back, he’s reliable and, unlike me, he’ll file on time.’ Alex thought this a good deal, John agreed and everything was dandy until the Wednesday before the start when Willy Voet, a masseur with the cycling’s number one team Festina, was stopped by customs with a bulging cargo of banned drugs in the boot of his car.

John wrote about the drugs bust and the recriminations that followed but his heart wasn’t in it. He preferred the romance, heroic breakaways, riders once eloquently described by our old friend Robin Magowan, as ‘angels on wheels, Simon Pures somehow immune to the uppers and downers of our own pill-popping society’. In the midst of all the vials of EPO, testosterone patches, rider protests and police interrogations, John could still find the enthusiasm to describe that year’s Tour winner, the Italian Marco Pantani, as ‘the nine-stone wonder climber from Cesantico’.

‘Next year,’ Alex said to me, ‘you’re back on the Tour.’

I returned, but as a different journalist. Michelle Smith was the most recent reminder that fairytales in sport can be just fairytales and the legacy of the ’98 Tour was that pro cyclists would now have to prove their innocence.

The Tour started at the theme park Le Puy du Fou in the Vendée in western France and at the end of the race’s traditional opening test, a short individual race against the clock for each cyclist, Lance Armstrong became the first winner at the ’99 Tour. He stormed round the 6.8km prologue course, 8 seconds faster than runner-up Alex Zülle. This, you thought, must have been what LeBlanc and Abbot Massier were discussing privately at the cyclists’ church two weeks before.

For what could have been more uplifting for the Tour than a man who had survived life-threatening testicular cancer returning to his sport to reveal an even more heroic version of himself? And in the Tour of Renewal too? It helped that Armstrong hadn’t raced the 1998 Tour and that his four pre-cancer years in the peloton were untainted by suspicion of drug abuse. He seemed what the race needed.

But, of course, for those who had witnessed or followed the parade of drug takers and drug traffickers from the year before, there were questions to ask and the man in the yellow jersey is expected to answer them. Leaner and looking physically harder than before his cancer, Armstrong was ready for doping enquiries. ‘I will speak about this now and that’s all I will say,’ he said at Le Puy du Fou.