Lanced: The Shaming of Lance Armstrong Read online

  "If by this expression you mean there are clean riders and others who are not (clean), then the answer is yes: this is cycling at two speeds," said Dr Armand Megret, head of the French federation's medical commission. "Doping has not been eradicated."

  French riders hinted at the beginning of the race that if they believed their rivals were using drugs, they would not suffer silently. Then they watched the alienation of Christophe Bassons and thought again. Bassons dared to speak about doping in the peloton and because of that he became an outcast. His crimes were honesty and innocence. Within the peloton they ridiculed him. Cynicism without frontiers.

  Before the mob turned the screw on Bassons, he offered glimpses of the reality: it was extremely difficult for a clean rider to win anything in the Tour; a number of rivals found it hard to believe Armstrong's performances - and a much greater number resented Bassons's openness. "For a clean Tour, you must have Bassons," said one banner on the road to Saint Flour, but by then Monsieur Propre had been cracked and sent on his way.

  As journalists, we do not care for losers. The former cyclist Paul Kimmage tells a story of sharing rooms with Stephen Roche during Roche's run of success in 1987: "At night the journalists came to the room and completely ignored my presence before sitting on my bed, half-crushing my foot."

  Gilles Delion was 23 when he rode his first Tour de France in 1990 and did outstandingly well to finish 15th. Delion, like Kimmage and Bassons, wouldn't take drugs, and before it had truly begun, a promising career meandered downwards. Who cared? Asked what he thought of the Tour of Redemption, Delion smiled. "That makes me laugh. The redemption affects just one part of the peloton," he said.

  If you accept the notion of two pelotons and two speeds, there is an obvious question: can such a race be won by a clean rider? Quick, too quick, to celebrate winners, the 1,200 journalists on the Tour have been divided, and a significant minority have chosen simply to report Armstrong's victory. The French have been the most sceptical, and even though the American has been scathing in his criticism of the reaction, the French do understand the sport.

  "The attitude of the French press has been despicable," said a Dutch journalist. "There is no evidence and in Holland everyone gives Armstrong credit." And what if the suspicions are well founded? "Everyone knows Tour de France riders are doped. If you don't accept that you shouldn't be covering the sport."

  For too long sportswriting has been unrestrained cheerleading, suspending legitimate doubts and settling for stories of sporting heroism. Of course there are times when it is right to celebrate, but there are other occasions when it is equally correct to keep your hands by your side and wonder.

  This not to suggest Armstrong has done anything wrong in his preparation for this triumph, but the need for an inquiry is overwhelming. He has always been an outstanding cyclist, something that was clear from his first year in the peloton. But for four years he was a one-day rider and it is highly unusual in this sport for such a rider to become a champion-stage racer.

  That the change happened after his successful battle with life-threatening cancer three years ago does not make it any easier to understand. Part of Armstrong's difficulty is that the Tour itself is so tainted with drugs and the certainty that many are still doping. Before any other question, there is the issue of whether a clean rider can win the Tour. Neither have Armstrong nor his US Postal team manager, Johan Bruyneel, reassured us with their words. Asked last month about the problem of doping in the sport, Bruyneel said: "The situation is very simple. Cycling is a sport in a very bad light and the reason we got there is the fact that three years ago the riders accepted too easily the fact that the authorities could install blood controls. Having these controls would have been a very good thing if it had not been done only in cycling."

  Reminded that it was the riders who proposed the blood controls, Bruyneel replied: "Yes, but who were those riders? They were riders near the end of their careers."

  Asked about the exposure of Festina's systematic doping programme, Armstrong said he was "greatly surprised by it". Questioned about whether he discussed the problem of doping with other riders, Armstrong replied: "No, not at all." Listening to the race leader, one could be forgiven for concluding that his sport didn't have a problem.

  Three of the top five in this year's Tour were part of Festina's intensive doping programme last season. Two of the three, Alex Zulle and Laurent Dufaux, served absurdly short six-month suspensions and the other, Virenque, has yet to be sanctioned.

  As well as refusing to properly punish those who cheat, cycling has yet to implement random and out-of-competition drug testing. Given the extent of the sport's problem, this is depressing.

  One journalist asked Armstrong for his definition of doping. "The use of banned performance-enhancing drugs," he replied. That narrow understanding of doping allows the use of drugs which are not banned but should be. Armstrong could have defined it as "the use of performance-enhancing drugs".

  One evening during the Tour, Laurent Madouas reluctantly agreed to answer questions. Now a rider with Festina, Madouas rode with Armstrong when they were part of the Motorola team. We met late in the evening, after he had had a bad day in the mountains. "I rode hard yesterday, today I hadn't the legs." Madouas understood that the conversation would soon turn to Armstrong. "Lance Armstrong was always a natural leader."

  What of his Tour de France performances? Were the suspicions about him unfair? Madouas didn't like the question and spent time considering his answer. "I think what Lance Armstrong has done, coming back from cancer, has been a fantastic thing. I would not have had the courage to get back on the bike after an illness like that. To come back and win the Tour is something else. Whatever way he has done it, it is a fantastic thing."

  And that was as far as Madouas wished to go.

  He is, of course, right. Armstrong's recovery from the most virulent form of testicular cancer has been inspirational. Without reservation, we can celebrate that.

  Poison in the heart of sport

  David Walsh and John Follain

  January 9, 2000

  "

  This was East Germany revisited except that in the way of capitalism, the government was not involved and the rewards were greater

  "

  On a freezing morning late last month, a state security van pulled up outside the Bologna office of the prosecutor Giovanni Spinosa. Boxes of files were carried from inside, loaded into the waiting vehicle and soon the van was making its way south towards the Rome headquarters of the Italian Olympic Association (Coni). It was the beginning of a journey that will in time end at the heart of the negligence and corruption that has poisoned Italian and international sport.

  Spinosa's investigation concerned doping in sport, the trafficking and administration of drugs dangerous to health. Sports doctor Michele Ferrari and pharmacist Massimo Guandalini are accused of having been involved in a criminal conspiracy and Spinosa has recommended that they be sent to trial.

  While on one of his afternoon runs last week, Francesco Conconi would have thought about his former colleague Michele Ferrari. Ten years ago Conconi was a world leader in sports science, Ferrari was his protege. Now Ferrari faces criminal charges, and a separate investigation into Conconi will be concluded by June.

  The investigations are two of seven doping-related probes taking place in Italy. Each seeks to discover the extent of the problem in Italian sport but the implications go beyond this country's boundaries. Athletes from different walks of international sport will track the inquiries because many of them are listed in the files of Conconi, Ferrari and other doctors under official scrutiny.

  World-class footballers such as Didier Deschamps, Zinedine Zidane and Alessandro Del Piero will be interested to know the outcome of Raffaele Guarianello's probe in Turin, because part of his brief is to examine Juventus FC and the possibility that doping existed at the club. Last year's Tour de France winner Lance Armstrong will have seen that his most able teammate, Kevin
Livingston, was listed by the Bologna prosecutor as one of the athletes who dealt with Michele Ferrari.

  It will become clear that doping in sport depends upon the incompetence and, in many cases, the complicity of sport's doctors, officials and organisations. Prosecutor Pierguido Soprani's investigation into Conconi will show that while the professor and his doctors were blood-doping from the university in Ferrara, they were being funded by Coni and by the International Olympic Committee. Many of those currently being investigated would, not so long ago, have been regarded as pillars of Italian sport.

  For much of the time that Conconi blood-doped athletes, the practice did not break sport's rules. But the manipulation of an athlete's blood to articificially create greater oxygen-carrying capacity has always been considered unethical, unsafe and unfair.

  Over the 18 years of blood-doping, the cheating involved athletes from many Olympic sports. Officials knew it was happening and in some cases encouraged athletes to become part of it. This was East Germany revisited except that in the way of capitalism, the government was not involved and the rewards were greater. The ghost of systematic doping had returned to haunt sport.

  When that van pulled up outside the offices of the Italian Olympic Association in Rome, the prosecutor was offering Coni the opportunity to launch its own inquiry. Few inside would have relished the prospect.

  IN MAY, 1996, Italian police became aware of a pharmacy in Tuscany selling large quantities of the blood-boosting drug erythropoietin (EPO) to professional cyclists. Later that month the Tour of Italy began in Greece and spent three days there before crossing the Adriatic and restarting from the Italian port of Brindisi. Secretly, the Carabinieri planned to be in Brindisi and expected their swoop to turn up large quantities of banned drugs. They telephoned Coni, checked the arrival time of the ferry into Brindisi and then began the long trek south. Two investigators travelled in one car; the driver and a colleague who read La Gazzetta dello Sport in the passenger's seat.

  "Here we were," recalled the second investigator last week, "going to the south to make a raid on the Giro d'Italia. I am reading La Gazzetta and I come across a tiny story. It says 'the police are planning a surprise visit to the race in Brindisi where they will check the team cars for drugs'. I struck the dashboard with my fist. I was angry, angry, angry. How did they know? Why was it printed in the newspaper? It made us more determined. We swore that from then on we would never let go. We would be like a dog that has its enemy by the ankle."

  Informed that the Carabinieri would be in Brindisi, cycling teams took evasive action. Some team officials opted to return to Italy by road, driving from Greece, through Albania, Montenegro and Croatia, before returning to the race via northern Italy.

  Others dumped their stock of drugs during the ferry crossing to Brindisi. Vanquished, the Carabinieri returned to their bases and over the following weeks colleagues ribbed them about reports of enormously big fish, with limitless stamina, swimming the Adriatic sea.

  The trawl for the big fish of the doping world had only just begun. After the Brindisi humiliation, the Carabinieri decided all professional cycling teams were suspect. They looked closely at the teams and the riders and discovered many used doctors who had been trained and had their base at the University of Ferrara, run by the most famous sports doctor of all, Conconi. In a short time they had enough information to investigate the professor. Other probes would follow.

  Professor Conconi first revealed his interest in blood-doping in 1981, although he preferred to call it "blood transfusion". Conconi had seen the blood-doped Lasse Viren win the 5,000m and 10,000m gold medals at the Munich Olympics in 1972 and again at Montreal in 1976. He believed he could improve upon the methods of Finnish doctors. Even though it was widely known Viren had cheated, the IOC did not ban blood-doping until 1986.

  Its refusal to act was an invitation to Conconi. He met with officials of Coni and convinced them blood-doping would be good for the country's athletes. Coni agreed not only to go with the blood-doping programme but to fund it. Coni also used its influence with the various sports federations to encourage co-operation with Conconi.

  The proposal was presented in the guise of science: each athlete would undertake the so-called "Conconi test" to determine his or her potential and would then take part in a programme of blood transfusions. Conconi talked confidently of the benefits of his methods; a 10,000m runner, he claimed, would improve by 30-40 seconds, a 5,000m runner by 15-20 seconds, a 1500m runner by three to five seconds. Many Italian and international athletes worked with Conconi: cyclists and runners, skiers and canoeists, basketball players and biathletes.

  Not all surrendered to the promise of improved performance. Stefano Mao, the outstanding long-distance runner of the late Eighties, consistently refused to work with Conconi. So, too, did the miler Claudio Patrignani, who visited the professor in early 1984. "He invited me to the University of Ferrara and when we met he proposed blood transfusion. I said no, I was the son of very simple people, my father was a refuse collector. I wanted to be able to look at myself in the mirror."

  From 1981-86, Conconi blood-doped with the co-operation of Coni and the tacit approval of the IOC, who did not ban the unethical and dangerous practice. Conconi was, in fact, very much part of the sporting establishment, a member of the medical committee of Coni and also on a medical research committee of the IOC.

  In 1986 the Italian government made it unlawful to blood-dope and soon afterwards the IOC added the practice to its list of banned products. Three years later EPO made its way onto sport's illicit drug market and was quickly banned. The game, as we had known it, would never be the same. EPO achieved the same results as the old-fashioned blood-doping but was easier, quicker and more powerful.

  Conconi and his team of doctors at the University of Ferrara remained in the front line of elite sport. As well as Conconi himself, Michele Ferrari, Ilario Casoni, Luigi Cecchini and Giovanni Grazzi were lauded for their abilities as sports trainers. They were key players, the men who got their athletes going faster and then kept them going. All five doctors are now official suspects in the Ferrara investigation.

  Remarkably, Conconi stayed above suspicion for almost 15 years. But then he was wonderfully connected. On his training rides, he was accompanied by the current president of the European Commission, Romano Prodi. Asked what he spent his time doing at the University of Ferrara, Conconi said he was in the process of finding a test that would rid sport of the EPO scourge. In 1994 he applied to Coni for funding to continue his search for an EPO test and, when turned down, he sought and received financial backing from the IOC. Dr Patrick Schamasch, the head of the IOC's medical commission, has said Conconi was given $60,000 in 1996 and the same amount last year.

  That search for a test to detect EPO is an important element in the case against Conconi. At the 1993 Winter Olympics in Lillehammer, he gave a talk to the IOC which detailed his attempts to find ways of identifying EPO use. In the same year Conconi and his team at Ferrara had a paper on the same subject published in the International Journal of Sports Medicine.

  Both the talk and paper were based on an experiment that, according to Conconi, was carried out on 23 amateur athletes who, with their written consent, had been treated with EPO. Conconi's conclusion was that although he was making progress, he had not come up with a definitive test for EPO. Four years later Bologna police raided the University of Ferrara and, as part of their investigation, seized Conconi files.

  By matching the results quoted in Conconi's 1993 study with results found in the files taken from his computer, the authorities discovered the 23 amateurs did not exist. They were in fact 23 professional athletes who were competing at the highest level of their sport while their blood tests were used in Conconi's experiment. Conconi's 23 included six cyclists from the Carrera team, one of whom was the former world champion and Tour de France winner Stephen Roche. The Irishman stressed he worked with his team doctor, Grazzi, and only once met Conconi. Roche also insist
s he was not aware of being involved in any experiment and says he merely did blood tests which Grazzi passed onto the University of Ferrara for analysis.

  On one page of the Conconi file the 23 are listed, with the Carrera riders each being given a number of fictitious names. A source close to the investigation claims that the false names were probably created to disguise the frequency with which the Carrera riders were being blood-tested. This source also claimed he had seen haematocrit readings (percentage of red cells to volume of blood) of 49.6 and 50.2 for Roche in the Conconi files. Readings of 50 or greater are deemed to indicate but not prove EPO use. Roche claims his haematocrit never exceeded 46-47%.

  Documents in the possession of The Sunday Times show that in Conconi's files there are a number of listings for Roche in a column indicating he was being treated with EPO.

  Conconi's test sought to highlight the rate of erythropoiesis, which is stimulated by EPO, in the blood. The results are indicated by what he describes as a transferrin receptor concentration. According to the Conconi study, an untreated athlete (one without EPO) could not have a concentration higher than 3.1. The report concludes that "the increased concentration of transferrin receptor could be employed as an indirect indicator of EPO misuse in Sports".

  The results he and his doctors keyed into their secret files after analysis of blood tests on Roche and other athletes are damning. They show Roche with the fifth highest concentration of the 23 who were tested. Tests carried out on June 3 and June 14 of 1993 (and revealed in the files under the bogus names of "Rocchi" and "Roncati" respectively) both show readings of 5.5. The highest level is the 6.5 recorded under the name of a cyclists called "Chiari" and "Chierici", in reality Claudio Chiappucci and Mario Chiesa. Both are former teammates of Roche in the Carrera squad and have denied involvement in the Conconi experiment.