Seven Deadly Sins: My Pursuit of Lance Armstrong Read online

The numbers took some explaining.

  Back in 1993 Miguel Indurain, stoic and unconquerable in the middle of his run of five Tour victories, devoured the prologue in one mouthful, covering the 6.8km in 8 minutes 12 seconds. He was a specialist against the clock. Lance came into that Tour as a strong one-day rider with a definite game plan. Accepting he wouldn’t be fast enough to beat Indurain and other specialists in the prologue, he figured that if he gave it everything, he could finish somewhere in the top 15. From there he could then infiltrate a breakaway group in the first week and be in position to take the yellow jersey.

  But he rode a terrible prologue, starting too fast and arriving at the Côte du Fossé 4 kilometres in with nothing left. Eventually, he puttered in at 8.59 putting him 81st in the 189-rider field. He wasn’t in much humour for entertaining a journalist. Eighty-first? No Texan had ever been 81st in anything. ‘Could we do the interview on the rest day?’

  Six years later, same course, same conditions, another massacre but this time Armstrong had inflicted it, not endured it. He rode the course in 8.02, more than 8 seconds per kilometre faster than he had recorded in 1993, and the performance catapulted him to a new level. It was also 10 seconds faster than Indurain’s winning time in ’93. Inside the race and around its margins, people wondered how he’d become so good in this short race against the clock.2

  In the press centre, some eyebrows were raised but most of the eyebrows were still receiving physio for the lingering fatigue of the Festina wars. The easy rationalisation was that this was just a prologue, one tiny leg of a three-week marathon: a neat story, for sure, but it wasn’t like Armstrong was going to go on and win it. Reporters at the Tour also found that when they spoke with their sports editors, they realised that the further one’s distance from this story, the more believable it seemed.

  ‘This is the guy who had cancer, right?’

  ‘Yeah, testicular, only given a fifty-fifty chance of pulling through.’

  ‘Yeah, good story. It’s amazing, isn’t it? Cancer survivor with a chance of winning the most gruelling race in sport!’

  Any suggestion the prologue victory was a one-off was quickly dismissed. As soon as the race left Le Puy du Fou it was clear Armstrong was very strong, as was his US Postal team, and their strategy was exemplary. They allowed Jaan Kirsipuu from Estonia take the yellow jersey at the end of the first stage, putting the onus on Kirsipuu’s French team Casino to control the race. US Postal then sat back and saved their energy for the mountains, by which point Kirsipuu would be back in the pack.

  My travelling companions on the Tour were my old buddy Wilcockson, his colleague from Velo News magazine Charles Pelkey and the Australian journalist Rupert Guinness whom I knew from way back.

  Our routine at the Tour was to leave our hotel early in the morning so we could mosey around the cordoned-off corporate village to which sponsors brought their guests and journalists mingled in the hope of bumping into a cyclist. Sometimes you got lucky but mostly you picked up a newspaper, had a coffee and gossiped with other journalists.

  During that first week a 25-year-old French competitor in the Tour wrote a column for Le Parisien which was easily the most arresting written about the race. Christophe Bassons poured cold water all over the Tour of Renewal.

  ‘We are racing at an average speed of more than 50 kilometres per hour, as if the roads of France are nothing more than one gigantic descent.’

  Le Parisien ran Bassons’ column beneath a strap-line that said, ‘Bassons rides the Tour on pure water, that is to say without doping products.’

  Bassons also said he didn’t think it possible for anyone to be in the top ten and ride clean.

  In the car, we talked about the race. Charles was our driver, on his third Tour; tall, thin, always ready to laugh but with an enquiring mind. He came with the American’s enthusiasm for a country and a race that had a lot of history, and though he loved bicycle racing he was the one paying most attention when I began expressing scepticism.

  Rupert was an experienced cycling writer and an enthusiastic wearer of Hawaiian shirts. Like me he had once moved to France to experience the sport first hand before returning to Australia to settle down, but he never lost his love for the Tour. We would run together in the mornings and he had the grinder’s diesel engine.

  Once, 50 minutes into our run, he stopped to help an old lady who needed directions. I didn’t wait. It was the only time I beat him. Cyclists liked Rupert because he was a good bloke and though he didn’t disagree with the questions I was asking, he also didn’t want to become too sceptical.

  John, the eternal enthusiast, rarely engaged in any conversation that questioned Armstrong.

  In that first week, we discussed Bassons’s view that you couldn’t be in the top ten without doping.

  ‘I believe this guy. Why would he say it if it wasn’t true?’ I said.

  ‘I kind of agree,’ said Charles. ‘And I definitely agree that Bassons believes this to be true.’

  ‘The thing about Bassons is that he’s inside that peloton and he feels how fast everyone is going. And we know from the average speed of the race so far, this Tour’s going to be faster than last year’s, when we know doping was pervasive.’

  ‘But if it’s a tiny bit faster, how much does that prove?’ Charles would ask.

  ‘Not a lot but Leblanc said he looked forward to a slower tour, proving that fewer drugs were being used.’

  On and on we went, Charles trying to offer counter-arguments but mostly coming down on the side of scepticism. I sensed Rupert thinking we were probably right. Without uttering a word, John emitted sound that expressed displeasure. He didn’t have much time for our debate.

  His reluctance to engage irritated me far more than if he’d attacked our arguments. The obvious counter was that I was basing too much on hunch and not coming up with any evidence of Armstrong doing wrong. It would have been better if he said Armstrong was clean but he just didn’t want that debate. His silence meant my taunting went on, like a matador flashing the red cape and the bull just sucking the air in through his nostrils, squeezing it out of his mouth, his hoof scraping the ground.

  In the press room, there was widespread indifference to Bassons. Armstrong was a better story and any reporting of Bassons’ complaints would lessen the feel-good effect of the back-from-cancer hero. More attention was paid to the French rider by his fellow professionals.

  ‘You’ve got to stop your bullshit,’ Pascal Chanteur, a rider with another French team, told Bassons one day. ‘You’re on your own; you’ve turned everybody against you. What you’re doing is wrong. Journalists are idiots.’

  Thierry Bourguignon, a veteran French rider, was one of the few riders in the peloton to speak with Bassons and he gently suggested the journalists were using him to further their own agendas. ‘I know that but I am also using them to say what I have to say,’ said Bassons.

  Bourguignon was concerned at the consequences of being associated with the young rebel.

  ‘Why do you always mention me in your columns?’

  ‘Because you are the only one who continues to speak with me,’ Bassons replied.

  Through my friend Pierre Ballester, I’d been introduced to an exercise physiologist/coach called Antoine Vayer, who lived at Laval in the Vendée. Thirty-six years old, Vayer had been a physical trainer with the world’s number one team Festina but refused to be involved with the team’s systematic doping programme. Bassons was one of three Festina riders from a squad of twenty-three who rode clean and he and Vayer became friends.

  Their friendship and coach–rider relationship survived the disintegration of the Festina squad.

  On the fourth day of the ’99 race, the Tour de France rolled into Laval, and Vayer thought it a good opportunity to bring some like-minded journalists together for an informal gathering at the Gobelen bar. Invitation was by word of mouth and the rendezvous had a clandestine feel to it as only journalists known to be openly anti-doping were going to be pres
ent, and the group wasn’t more than twenty strong.

  As soon as I walk into the Gobelen, the owner nods discreetly. He knows who I’ve come to see and points his head towards the small garden at the back. Outside, charcoal smoke climbs into the night air and the man standing over the barbecue is a giant with a two-foot fork.

  Around the tables are the revolutionaries, the ones who don’t believe the Tour of Renewal is what it’s meant to be and understand the need for a more radical journalism. Pierre Ballester is here, so too Stéphane Mandard from Le Monde and there are one or two others whose faces I recognise, but the evening is held together by the balding Vayer around whom everyone loosely sits.

  They know more than I do, they have lived in this country, breathed the Tour de France and among them Vayer is the most interesting because he has worked with a doping team, tested their riders and seen for himself the effects of doping. Towards the end of the evening I coral him and we talk in English. What was it like for him being at Festina?

  ‘Of course I was marginalised. I had no credibility. I was not allowed to go to team meetings and when I was around, the riders would not speak openly. But I came to the team with my integrity and I left with it.’

  He could see some improvement from 1998 but not a lot. ‘Before last year, pro cycling was a junkie sport – not because of what people took but because of the mindset of the rider. Things have improved a little but, really, the culture is still the same. For example, the use of corticosteroids: riders take them when they are stressed, they take them when they are down, they take them if they mess up. For them, life must be without stress. It’s a junkie mentality.’

  Speaking about pro cyclists, Antoine’s lack of reverence set him apart from the majority of those who worked in teams, and virtually everyone in the press tent. He saw them as human beings sucked into a doping culture and desperately in need of help. ‘I met Hein Verbruggen [UCI president] the other day and we spoke for an hour. He said he was head of 171 federations and I said, “Stop your shit, your only duty is to stop doping. That’s all you have to do.”’

  Antoine’s passion came with empathy; his belief was that doping didn’t just damage health but also had dehumanising effects. ‘Many of the best riders have become psychotic. They want to win money, to screw others because, compared to them, everybody else is small. They want to have a nice house, a nice wife, a nice car and they will do whatever to get these things. They have no more emotion, no more thinking, no more feeling, no internal life. Everything they are is down to their success and they would kill to hold on to that.’3

  We talked about Bassons and the trainer said how good he’d been as an amateur and how he’d then made a successful transition to the pros. Word went out that he had ridden clean through his first two seasons in the professional peloton and it was also known he had a naturally low haematocrit which made him more valuable because when he started using EPO, he would be able to use a lot without exceeding the 50 per cent maximum put in place by the UCI.4

  Antoine spoke about Bassons as a father might speak about a son. On one occasion Christophe received a cortisone injection for a painful knee and, as his doctor had prescribed the treatment, he was free to race. But feeling the cortisone was enabling him to perform better, he voluntarily withdrew from the competition.

  Results were never what they should have been and many advised him to get real and commit to a doping programme; even his parents said they would understand if he felt he had to. He discussed it with Pascale, his fiancée, and she said she would not want to marry a man who used banned drugs. Pascale was more important to him than winning bike races and he never seriously considered doping.

  Everything Antoine said about Christophe endeared him to me.

  His Festina teammates accepted he wasn’t one of them and made the best of it. He was useful when the testers showed up for he would be sent down first to stall them while his teammates got hooked up to the saline drip that would dilute their blood and keep them safely below 50.

  Then the ’98 Tour happened, the Festina team was caught with its hand in the pharmaceutical sack, so too many other teams, and Bassons thought this the ill wind that would blow some good his way. Greater scrutiny would lead to lesser doping, and in this new world his career would be better.

  This is not how it worked out. From the early part of the season the average speed in races was such that Bassons knew doping was still rife. By the time he got to the Tour he was despairing, and then to see the peloton riding much faster again was too much. He offered forthright honesty to every journalist who asked, and within the peloton he became a pariah.

  In my mind he was being screwed by his own sport. After four days of the race, he was the only rider I was sure about.

  Excited by the subversive atmosphere in that back garden and energised by Antoine’s passion for greater fairness in the sport, I left the Gobelen feeling I’d joined an underground movement committed to fighting doping in professional cycling. Slipping back unnoticed into the hotel I shared with John, Rupert and Charles, I thought about the twenty or so journalists who had turned up to the meeting and knew them as some of the finest, most intelligent journalists on the race.

  My faith in the Tour of Renewal was diminishing by the day but my evening at the Gobelen was a reminder that you had to keep trying. And if you didn’t support Christophe Bassons, how could you call yourself a journalist?

  Most times the Tour de France runs to a plot determined by what happens in the first individual time trial eight or nine days into the three-week race. If one of the contenders for overall victory wins that, he will generally take the yellow jersey, and it is then his to lose. Soon after that time trial the race goes into the mountains, and often that first venture into the Alps or Pyrenees is the favourite’s greatest test.

  Over a 56.6km circuit in the eastern city of Metz, Armstrong won the time trial and regained the yellow jersey he had claimed on the first day but then given up on the second. His victory in the race against the clock was emphatic and it gave him a lead of 2 minutes and 20 seconds over second-placed Christophe Moreau. From being a contender, Armstrong became everyone’s idea of the Tour winner.

  To me, the time-trial performance was puzzling at best, downright suspicious at worst. He had ridden the Tour de France four times before falling ill with cancer in ’96 and recorded remarkably consistent results the three times he rode it.5 In ’93 he finished 6.03 minutes down on the winner, 6.23 minutes in ’94 and 6.24 minutes in ’95. He wasn’t bad but nowhere near the best. To go from there to being the best was a staggering leap.

  But two days later, Armstrong would go into the mountains for the first time and tell us whether he was going to win the Tour or be an adornment. The mountains shouldn’t have been his favoured landscape by any means. The form sheet was there. In his previous Tours Armstrong’s best placing on a mountain stage was 39th on the Saint Etienne to Mende leg of the 1995 Tour. In the other eight mountainous races he’d ridden, his placings were much worse and the deficits far greater.

  Yet in the press room in ’99 there is an expectation among his growing number of disciples that this new edition Armstrong will be different as he’d ridden well in the previous year’s Tour of Spain and, post-cancer, he was much stronger. From being a man who might finish 8 or 28 minutes behind, he has become the peloton’s mountain goat. The way is being prepared for Clark Kent’s next deed. No need to wonder, folks, it can all be logically explained.

  Me?

  My instinct says, ‘Don’t believe it. This is all about as logical as the Tour being led by a lobster on a bike. A lobster complete with helmet and a moving backstory about a last-minute escape from a pot of boiling water.’

  The first mountain stage is a brutally tough 213-kilometre race to Sestriere over the border in Italy. Sestriere is an iconic climb of both the Giro d’Italia and the Tour de France. Taken alone it is not an especially long ascent, nor a particularly hard and punishing one, but it is beloved becaus
e of its location and its history and because of the style of the men who’ve conquered it.

  It was here that the charismatic Fausto Coppi broke clear and stole almost 12 minutes on his eternal rival Gino Bartali on his way to the 1949 Giro. Coppi also won the Tour that year. His first double.

  Three years later, Sestriere first appeared on the Tour route. Sestriere was stage eleven but stage ten, two days earlier, was the first stage to finish at the summit of Alpe d’Huez. Coppi, on his way to another Giro–Tour double, took the yellow jersey on Alpe d’Huez and then came out and massacred the field with a heroic solo ride through wind and rain to the summit finish at Sestriere.

  For those present on this day, there was a memory for life. Coppi was a character and stories about him were once told around the fireplace or at the foot of a bed and they created a romance that wrapped itself around the Tour and kept it warm.

  One of the Coppi stories goes back to when he was a prisoner of war in 1943, having been captured by the British in Tunisia. In captivity he shared his food bowl with another prisoner, an amateur racer called Arduino Chiappucci. Coppi had gone to war as a great hero of Italian sport and such was the affection in which he was held that the Italian army tried to keep him away from danger for as long as possible.

  In captivity Chiappucci grew close to his idol Coppi and often gave him his own food in order to keep up the great man’s strength and morale. When the war ended Coppi and Chiappucci went their separate ways. Coppi rode part of the way home on his bike and then hitched a lift with a lorry-load of former detainees.6

  Chiappucci went home and raised a son, Claudio, whose head he filled with tales of his time with the great Coppi, whose most wondrous deeds were still to come.

  Forty years after Coppi’s lonely ride to Sestriere, Arduino Chiappucci’s son won on the same mountain. I was there on that day in 1992 and this was a classic ride straight out of the book of Coppi mythology. A Saturday afternoon and 254 kilometres worth of attrition, stretching from St Gervais to Sestriere. Just 12 kilometres in, Claudio Chiappucci attacked, which seemed much too early, but we knew not what was about to unfold.7 All we saw was daredevil ambition. No strategy, just attack, attack, attack; scorching off into the land of pain.