Seven Deadly Sins: My Pursuit of Lance Armstrong Read online

  For John, his brothers, his sisters and mum

  I watch the Olympic Games but I don’t bother to remember the names of the athletes any more. It’s like theatre – but I prefer the theatre because the relationship between actor and spectator is clear. In sport’s theatre, both are still pretending it’s real.

  Sandro Donati

  You’re no messiah. You’re a movie of the week. You’re a fucking T-shirt, at best.

  Brad Pitt, Se7en

  Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Acknowledgements

  Photographs

  Prologue

  ‘Finally, the last thing, I’ll say to the people who don’t believe in cycling, the cynics and the sceptics: I’m sorry for you. I’m sorry that you can’t dream big. I’m sorry you don’t believe in miracles.’

  Lance Armstrong, 2005 Tour de France victory speech

  Le grand depart.

  My first conversation with Lance Armstrong was in the garden of the Chateau de la Commanderie hotel about ten miles south of Grenoble. This was late afternoon on Tuesday 13 July 1993, a rest day on the Tour de France, and with its trees and shrubs, its wrought-iron chairs and tables overlooking the swimming pool, the setting couldn’t have been much better.

  At a nearby table Armstrong’s teammate Andy Hampsten sat with some friends. A little further away another journalist interviewed the team’s Colombian climber, Álvaro Mejía. Armstrong and I sat in the shade and spoke for more than three hours. He did most of the talking, but then he had much to say and I had a book to write.

  It was the force of his personality that struck you the most: like a wave crashing forward and carrying you with him. Twenty-one years old but he wasn’t like most young men of that age. If he had been, he would have talked about the thrill of riding his first Tour de France. Most young sportsmen know the clichés that we like to see recycled. He didn’t mention the thrill or the honour, nothing even close. He’d been told by the team bosses he was at this Tour to learn for the future, but he didn’t see the good in that. He wanted to win right now. I am Lance Armstrong, you’re gonna remember my name. As he machine-gunned his way through his past and speeded into the future, he had me at his side, and on his side.

  ‘You’ve got to see this kid,’ I said over dinner to my friend, fellow journalist and former Tour rider Paul Kimmage, that evening.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘He is different. He’s got this desire. He’s going to win a lot of races, and he’s so open. Wait ’til you meet him.’

  ‘You always get too enthusiastic,’ Kimmage said.

  Eleven years earlier, I’d turned up at the Tour de France for the first time and fallen in love. The man-crush is a hazard of life for the sportswriter. That debut trip covered just the last two race days in 1982; the boat from Rosslare in the south-east of Ireland to Le Havre, a car drive to pick up the penultimate stage and then on into Paris for the race to the Champs-Élysées. I travelled with four people from Carrick-on-Suir, the home town of Sean Kelly, who was then one of the world’s best cyclists. Kelly’s fiancée Linda Grant was part of our group, as was her father Dan, and local shopkeeper Jim O’Keeffe. Professional cycling wasn’t big news in Ireland then, and if Kelly managed to win a stage in the Tour de France, the result just about made it onto a sports page. Down in Carrick-on-Suir, O’Keeffe was ahead of the rest of us because he knew how to tune his radio into some French station that gave regular updates from the Tour, and if the local hero did well, the local shopkeeper knew it first.

  One afternoon O’Keeffe caught news of Kelly winning a stage at the Tour, it might have been the leg to Thonon in 1981. Beside himself with joy he left his shop and just walked down Main Street hoping to meet someone he could tell. Coming in the opposite direction was Kelly’s Uncle Neddy, wheeling his bicycle.

  ‘Neddy,’ said O’Keeffe, ‘you’re not going to believe this. I’m just after hearing Sean won today’s stage in the Tour de France.’

  Taking a second to digest the news, Neddy replied, ‘Why wouldn’t he win, he does nothin’ else except cycle that bike.’

  Telling Irish people that they had produced a world-class athlete called Sean Kelly became my first crusade. But in terms of the Irish attitude to Kelly’s prowess, things didn’t change quickly, and the following year I could get to the Tour de France only by taking two weeks holidays and the considerable risk of travelling on the back of Tony Kelly’s BMW 1000 motorbike. On a clear road Tony could get that baby up to 130 mph, and whatever happened, I knew it wouldn’t take long. We saw Kelly take the yellow jersey in Pau, found a cheap restaurant and toasted his achievement with a bottle of wine.

  Stephen Roche, our other countryman in the race, had the white jersey for the ‘leading young rider’ and that evening in the Basque city we felt proudly Irish, members of a privileged elite. Next day we waited on the Col de Peyresourde and measured the scale of disaster by the minutes Kelly and Roche lost to the new leaders. As hard as it was to see your men wither in the mountains, it was impossible not to be captivated by the great race beyond them. The Tour thrilled me like no other sporting event, and no sooner had Tony returned me to Dublin I was talking to my wife about how good it would be to move to France. So in 1984 Paris became home and I got to follow most of the great races on the cycling calendar.

  One experience begot another until, in early 1993, I agreed with the UK publishers Stanley Paul to write a book about the Tour de France, a series of stories from the three-week pilgrimage around France that I envisaged as a Canterbury Tales in lycra. At the beginning would be the story of the rookie, the kid in his first Tour: he’d be starry-eyed and about to have his senses overwhelmed and his body wasted. Armstrong was the obvious choice, the youngest rider in the race but also the newcomer with expectations on his shoulders. Perfect.

  I don’t know about Lance but I was pumped and ready. He had agreed to do the piece and arranged for me to come to the Motorola team hotel in Bourgenay on the evening after the opening prologue.

  I turned up at Les Jardins de l’Atlantique but was met by Jim Ochowicz, his team manager, who told me that Lance felt down after his disappointing ride in that day’s prologue. The rider wanted to know if we could do the interview sometime later, perhaps on the Tour’s scheduled rest day. I agreed but continued to observe him for my background notes. I watched him in the tented village at Avranches on the sixth morning as an Italian journalist tried to interview him. He wasn’t rude, but the moment two attractive French girls passed by in their short skirts it was clear they interested him far more than the questions. Human, I thought.

  So here I am in the Chateau de la Commanderie, sitting down with a young man who will be a central part of my life for almost the next twenty years. He doesn’t exude the sense that this will be the start of a beautiful friendship, but that’s okay. Meanwhile I want to know everything about him.

  His biological father?

  ‘I never met him. Ah, I guess I met him but I was a one-year-old at that point. That’s when he left.’

  The stepfather he never li
ked?

  ‘When I was young I got along with him all right. You don’t know how to dislike somebody at that age, but I tell you, the first day I learned to dislike somebody, I disliked him.’

  Phew! Whatever happened to Mom’s apple pie and starry-eyed rookies?

  He tells about the impact on him of his mum and stepdad splitting up. ‘When you’re growing up, you’re fourteen, fifteen or sixteen and you’re in high school, or whatever, your friends’ parents are getting divorced and the kids are falling apart. They start crying, they get upset, all of this. And my stepfather has left and I had a party, you know, because it’s such a load off my back. I got confused because I thought, “Well, man, what is wrong with you? This tears kids up and yet we’re kicking this guy out and you’re ecstatic.” For a while I thought maybe something’s wrong with me.’

  I wanted to like him. Sportswriters are like this, especially with the young ones, toting pencils through the foothills on their journey to Mount Olympus. We want to say we walked some of the way with them. Knew them before the world knew them. And this Armstrong, you knew he wasn’t going to settle for an ordinary life.

  He had something inside that made him unlike any other young sportsman I had met. Radioactivity. How did I know this? Because it was obvious.

  ‘I mean when I’m in there, physically I’m not any more gifted than anybody else but it’s just this desire, just this rage. I’m on the bike and I go into a rage, when I just shriek for about five seconds. I shake like mad and my eyes kinda bulge out. I swear, I sweat a little more and the heart rate goes like two hundred a minute.’

  Then he paused, became more reflective. ‘And it’s funny, every time I do that I think about my mother, I really do, because if she was there . . . she didn’t raise a quitter and I would never, I’d never quit. I’d never, just never. And that’s heart, man, that’s not physical, that’s not legs, that’s not lungs. That’s heart. That’s soul. That’s just guts.’

  I left the Chateau de la Commanderie knowing I’d met a kid with a future. He wasn’t going to be another rider in the pack. I couldn’t wait to tell Kimmage. To let him know that I’d just got into the lift on the ground floor with a guy who was going up.

  1

  ‘Yesterday’s rose endures in its name, we hold empty names.’

  Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose

  Breakfast at 10 rue Kléber in Courbevoie, west of Paris, followed a pattern. An early morning walk to the patisserie, a dawdle at the newsagents on the way home and then the luxury of strong coffee, warm croissants and L’Équipe. It is August 1984 and sitting across the breakfast table is Paul Kimmage, a young Irish amateur cyclist who my wife and I have rescued from a hovel in Vincennes on the east side of Paris. I’ve known Paul for four years, since I was a rookie sports reporter covering the bike races he rode. He was moody and headstrong then and still is, but he is also intelligent and honest. It’s an easy trade-off.

  We became friends quickly. When Paul went to Paris to pursue his dream of being a pro bike rider I followed him soon after. I’d agreed to write a book about my hero, the cyclist Sean Kelly, and I wanted to live in his world. As Paul and I were both in Paris, it was always likely I would bump into him. He had come with his brother Raphael who was also hoping to turn pro and they rode for the best-known Parisian amateur team, ACBB. Raphael fell sick a lot, missed races and then he just got sick of being sick. So he went back to Dublin, leaving his brother alone in Vincennes. It was then Paul came to live with us.

  He and I shared a love of cycling; he was born to it while I rode in on the bandwagon fuelled by Kelly’s success. But by this point I’d been at the Tour de France three times, covered all the spring classics, Paris–Nice, the Tour of Switzerland and could read the cycling pages of L’Équipe. I considered myself virtually French. It was however the minor accomplishment of my literacy that brought tension to the breakfast table on that August morning in 1984.

  ‘Bloody hell! Roche isn’t riding the Worlds, an insect bite or something,’ I say, speaking of the Irish cyclist Stephen Roche and guessing the meaning of les mots that I don’t understand.

  ‘Look, I’d rather read the paper myself, after you’re done with it,’ Paul says.

  ‘What’s the difference? I’m telling he’s out of the Worlds.’

  ‘I’m telling you, I’d rather read it myself.’

  ‘That’s just stupid.’

  ‘Okay, it’s stupid.’ And we mightn’t then talk for an hour or two. And then we would talk for an hour or four. He told stories of the hardship and indignities that came with riding as an amateur and I brought stories back from Hollywood. What Kelly and Roche were up to, what it was like at the Tour de France, what a talent this young American Greg LeMond was, whether Laurent Fignon was right to taunt his French rival Bernard Hinault, but mostly we talked about Kelly and Roche.

  I told Paul about the Saturday afternoon after the Amstel Gold race in Holland when we waited for Roche to finish at drug control so we could get on the road to Paris – they were giving me a ride back home while Kelly’s fiancée Linda would drive his car back to their home near Brussels. As we sat around in the car park waiting for Roche, Linda leaned against Sean’s immaculately clean Citroën and placed an open palm on the bonnet. After she moved away, Sean sidled over to where she had been, then discreetly took a tissue from his pocket and cleaned away the little hand-stain left by his wife-to-be.

  Catching this unspoken reprimand, Linda wasn’t impressed. Only half-joking, she said, ‘Sean, that’s so typical of you. In your life it’s the car, the bike and then me.’

  Kelly never blinked an eye, nor offered the hint of a smile. ‘You got the order wrong, the bike comes first.’

  Where we were from defined our allegiances: Kimmage, like Roche, came from Dublin, and was in his camp. I sprang from the south-east of Ireland, no more than 20 miles from Kelly’s home town. He was my man. But Kelly’s hardness had a universal appeal and there wasn’t a Kelly story that Kimmage didn’t want to hear.

  He was interested in journalism as well, would check what I wrote and say whether he thought it was any good. And he railed against my refusal to speak the little French I had. One day in the kitchen he pursued this theme in front of a few visitors.

  ‘He reads L’Équipe, but won’t speak French,’ he said.

  ‘I don’t know enough French to speak it,’ I said.

  ‘You know enough to try. Once you start, it gets easier.’

  ‘It’s okay for you, you’re in a French environment at ACBB, you have to. I’m mixing with English-speaking journalists.’

  ‘No, you’ve got to try because you do have enough vocabulary. French people like it when you try to speak their language.’

  ‘Do they?’

  ‘Course they do. So look, don’t be afraid to just speak it.’

  Paul can be persuasive and suddenly I felt emboldened.

  ‘Okay,’ I said, ‘I’ll do it. I’m covering the Blois–Chaville classic on Sunday and I need to get a hotel in Blois for Saturday night. I’ll just ring up and book one.’

  Picking up the thick Michelin hotel guide in the next room, I rifle through the options and come up with a perfect resting place in Blois: Hotel La Renaissance, 150 francs (£15) for the night. ‘Right,’ I say to the half-full kitchen. ‘I’m ready to go for this.’ A respectful hush falls and I dial the number for La Renaissance.

  ‘Hello?’ the voice says.

  ‘Hello,’ I say, triumphantly.

  ‘Oui?’

  ‘Oh . . . je m’appelle David Walsh, je suis journaliste irlandais, je voudrais une chambre avec salle de bains pour une nuit, cette samedi.’

  ‘This is a fucking private house,’ the guy says.

  I want to die but I do worse than that.

  ‘How did you know I spoke English?’

  He hangs up. And there it ended, my life as a French speaker. From this moment on I will accept only non-speaking parts in French movies.

  I got t
o Blois and followed the race to Chaville, hoping that Kelly might win his third one-day classic of the year, for he’d been the season’s dominant rider and, as his biographer, I wanted it to finish well. Paul had ridden the Grand Prix de L’Équipe earlier in the day, that race finishing in Chaville, and he waited by the final corner to see the finish to the pros’ race. Kelly came around that last corner in 10th or 12th place and Kimmage thought it would be a miracle for him to get in the top three. He won easily.

  In the salle de presse that evening, there was the now customary procession to where I sat. ‘Parlez-vous avec Kellee?’ Everyone knew Kelly spoke to me and because he wasn’t always the most forthcoming interviewee, this gave me status. That evening back at rue Kléber, Paul and I sat up talking, about how good Kelly had been, about whether Paul would get to realise his dream of riding with the pros, and no matter how much we talked there was more to say.

  That was how much in love with cycling I was back in those days. The truth is that I thought of little else and dreamed of little else. If I read a paper it was for cycling news. Ditto the television. If I thought of a double entendre it invariably had to do with bikes rather than sex.

  The 1984 World Championships were to be held in Barcelona early in September. Sean Kelly was always conflicted about his preparations for the Worlds. He needed some good three- or four-day stage races, but he preferred to pocket the guaranteed appearance fees earned in small-town criteriums. For Kelly getting paid was important. That’s why he did what he did.

  So it was that he came to be racing in a small-time mid-week criterium in August in the one-horse town of Chaumeil in Limousin, central France. He was the star. The prize money meant nothing. The appearance money meant a lot. To me, as his Boswell, the criterium was an opportunity. I contacted the various Irish media I was working for and sold their bemused sports editors the idea of me travelling to Chaumeil. I guaranteed that I would have unhindered access to Kelly. And as I was writing a biography about Kelly it was good to combine the needs of the newspapers with my need to get material for the book. Better if the newspapers paid for the trip, which they did.