Lanced: The Shaming of Lance Armstrong Page 5

  Ferrari is accused of treating riders with EPO, the drug that increases the blood's oxygen-carrying red cells and enhances the rider's endurance. For most humans, red cells account for 43% or 44% of the total blood volume, a measure known as the haematocrit level. To counter the abuse of EPO, the authorities now ban riders whose haematocrit exceeds 50%. The Sunday Times has seen pages from Livingston's file at Ferrari's office. The readings for his blood parameters are unusual. In December 1997 Livingston's haematocrit is recorded at 41.2%. Seven months later, a few days before the start of the 1998 Tour de France, Livingston's haematocrit is 49.9%. Such a variation in a seven-month period is uncommon.

  Did you know Kevin was linked with the doping investigation?

  "Yes."

  Did you talk with him about it?

  "No."

  Never?

  "No. You keep coming up with all these side stories. I can only comment on Lance Armstrong. I don't speak for others."

  This was your best friend?

  "But I don't meddle in their business."

  So we speak of Lance Armstrong and Michele Ferrari. Did you ever visit Dr Ferrari?

  "I did know Michele Ferrari."

  How did you get to know him?

  "When you go to races, you see people. I know every team's doctor. It's a small community."

  Did you ever visit Ferrari?

  "Have I been tested by him, gone there and consulted on certain things? Perhaps."

  Sources close to the investigation of Ferrari are more precise about Armstrong's relationship with the doctor. They tell of a series of visits by the rider to Ferrari's practice at Ferrara in northern Italy: two days in March 1999, three days in May 2000, two days in August 2000, one day in September 2000 and three days in late April/early May of this year. While he was in Ferrara, Armstrong stayed at the five-star Hotel Duchessa Isabella and at the four-star Hotel Annunziata.

  Is Ferrari a good trainer?

  "Regardless of what goes on," he replies, "these guys that are under a lot of pressure, guys like Conconi, Cecchini, Ferrari; these Italian guys, they are fantastic minds, great trainers. They know about physiology."

  Francesco Conconi and Ferrari have been investigated on doping charges and the prosecuting judges have recommended that both be sent for trial. The case against Luigi Cecchini was dropped.

  WE speak about the French investigation into the US Postal team. On last year's Tour de France two staff members of the US Postal team were followed by journalists from the TV station, France 3. They were seen to carry rubbish bags from the team hotel and put them in an unmarked car. The journalists followed.

  The chase lasted for five days. Thirty miles from Morzine, the US Postal employees dumped the bags in a bin by the side of the road. Tipped off about the discovery of the blood-boosting drug Actovegin in the medical waste, French police opened an investigation.

  Seven months later, the inquiry has not been completed. Armstrong says that analyses of blood and urine samples provided by the team to the investigation are clean. The judge leading the inquiry, Sophie-Helene Chateau, says such a conclusion is premature.

  Who were the team members who dumped that rubbish?

  "One was a team doctor, the other was our chiropractor."

  Names?

  "That's not important."

  US Postal said it carried Actovegin to treat riders' abrasions and to treat a staff member who suffers from diabetes. Who was the staff member?

  "That is medical privacy," says Armstrong.

  For more than an hour and a half, we traded punches. At times he was generous and charming; at others confrontational. Wearied by my scepticism, he reached for the put-down: "There will always be sceptics, cynics and zealots." But he knows it is not that simple. He knows, too, that for the next three weeks on the Tour de France, the questions will follow him.

  Not having the answers won't bother him. What matters is that his urine and his blood are clear.

  Those who expect him to falter, either on the murderous road to Alpe d'Huez or under the weight of public scepticism, may be in for a long, long wait.

  Paradise lost on Tour

  David Walsh

  July 29, 2001

  "

  If Lance is clean, it is the greatest comeback in the history of sport. If he isn't, it would be the greatest fraud

  "

  It is midday on Wednesday in a cyber bar not far from the Place Royale in the centre of the Pyrenean city of Pau. Nicolas Fouillout washes and cleans glasses and waits for his young clientele to come to have a beer, surf the internet and play computer games.

  Two hours earlier, the Tour de France had left town. Down the Boulevard des Pyrenees, the departing ribbon of noise and colour had passed. A man in a white chef's jacket raced from a restaurant and made music with a saucepan and wooden spoon. Riders saluted his enthusiasm; a young woman held her baby and then waved the infant's left hand. Au revoir.

  Towards the back of the peloton, Lance Armstrong chatted with the German rider Jens Voigt. The mountain passes have been crossed, the challengers seen off, and from here to Paris it would be a cruise to Armstrong's third consecutive Tour de France. For a man who knows what it is like to wake up after brain surgery to remove cancerous lesions, this should have been a different kind of paradise. But for the past three weeks, and for many years before, the Tour has been Paradise Lost. What we see today is a stranger to the race of our youth. They ride the mountains as they once rode the flat; the speed and the stamina are a vision of the future we dare not imagine. The epic has become the enigma.

  Armstrong's difficult moments have been explaining his six-year working relationship with Michele Ferrari, a doctor who has long been suspected of doping. On Monday last week Armstrong defended his right to work with Ferrari, said he found him "an honest man", "a clean man", and insisted he had "never seen anything that would lead me to think otherwise". Two days later, Filippo Simeoni's story was published by the Italian edition of GQ magazine.

  Simeoni, a middle-of-the-road Italian rider, worked with Ferrari from October 1996 to July 1997 and kept diaries that were seized by the carabinieri investigating Ferrari. Unable to refute the evidence of his diaries, Simeoni collaborated with the police. He claimed that Ferrari encouraged him to use the powerful blood-boosting drug erythropoietin (EPO) and testosterone and helped him to get around drug controls by advising him on masking drugs. According to Simeoni, Ferrari never spoke about the potential side-effects of performance-enhancing drugs.

  Asked about Simeoni's testimony, Armstrong said it was an old story. The statement to the police had been made two years before, but until GQ's story few except the rider himself and the carabinieri knew it existed. The fact that it was evidence against Ferrari changed nothing for Armstrong: he would not be reconsidering his relationship with the doctor.

  So while he dominates in the mountains and destroys his rivals, Armstrong cannot obliterate the doubts. Even within the race, where solidarity is normally sacred, there have been murmurings. Rudy Pevenage, team director of the rival Telekom squad, says: "I am somewhat surprised by Armstrong. When others gasp for air with open mouths, he rides with a closed mouth, as if there is nothing to it."

  Pevenage's star rider, Jan Ullrich, will finish second to Armstrong when the Tour ends this afternoon. The German has been gracious in defeat and generous to his conqueror. But then neither he nor his teammates can dare to accuse any rival. During last month's police raid on the Giro d'Italia, many products were found in the rooms of the Telekom riders. Various drugs, medical equipment and syringes full of a white substance were taken for analysis.

  Seven Telekom riders, including Ullrich, were placed under investigation. Among the products seized from Ullrich's room were theophylline, otobacid, sultanol, ephynal and bonalin. He insisted on his innocence. The substances were, he said, approved asthma treatments.

  THE USE of therapeutic corticoids, performance-enhancing but permitted in the treatment of certain conditio
ns, has reached epidemic proportions. After one Pyrenean stage last weekend, seven of the eight obligatory urine tests sent to the French anti-doping laboratory contained banned products. Not one could be declared positive because in each case the rider had permission to use the drug.

  Michel Boyon, president of France's anti-doping council (CPLD), believes there is widespread abuse. "I am worried by it," he says. "We have a high percentage of riders using corticoids. Salbutamol and the anti-asthmatic substances are the most common. At the CPLD, we believe that in 95% of the cases where corticoids are permitted, there is an alternative treatment."

  Since the scandal of Willy Voet's arrest, the expulsion of the Festina team and the sustained scandal of the 1998 Tour, some things have changed. The sport is now more scrutinised, riders are tested more regularly, but it would be wrong to believe that the culture of doping has disappeared.

  In their raid on the Tour of Italy, the carabinieri seized a wide range of doping products. Large quantities of insulin were discovered, many riders had testosterone patches and many teams still carried mobile laboratories that could be used to ensure riders do not fail the obligatory drug tests.

  In the cyber bar, still Nicolas Fouillout waits. We talk about the Tour. A few people from the social services office across the road come to watch the race in his bar, but it has never interested him. He has heard of Lance Armstrong? "He's the guy that was very sick, cancer," he says. "Yeah, I like him. Maybe some racers still dope, I don't care about that. He's a tough guy."

  The Hotel Roncevaux is on Rue Louis Barthou, and in the early afternoon, checking to see whether television coverage of the day's stage has begun, you hit upon a re-run of the 1989 stage to Alpe d'Huez. There is no suspense because this is a story well remembered, but still you sit there, unable to move.

  The Dutch rider Theunisse has broken away. Behind him the Colombian Rondon and the Spaniard Delgado chase furiously, in their slipstreams the yellow jersey of Greg LeMond and his principal rival, Laurent Fignon. They race with their mouths open, sucking whatever oxygen there is on the upper slopes of the Alpe.

  About three miles from the top, Fignon attacks. LeMond tries but cannot follow. Soon Delgado counter-attacks and the exhausted LeMond is left behind. It isn't the ebb and flow of the chase that keeps you sitting on a hotel bed 12 years on, but the inhumanity of the suffering. Delgado's head bobs wearily, Fignon's shoulders lurch from right to left, LeMond's legs can barely turn the pedals.

  It would be wrong to portray the Tours of yesterday as paragons of fair play. Theunisse, who won that stage to Alpe d'Huez, would test positive for testosterone on three separate occasions. A year before, Delgado had used the masking drug probenicid in the Tour de France. Still, the 1989 climb of Alpe d'Huez appeared different from Armstrong's tour de force on the same mountain in this year's race.

  Even 12 years ago, the race seemed more human, more engaging. Antoine Vayer, once an ethical but unappreciated trainer with the disgraced Festina team, believes the great change came with the introduction of EPO in the early 1990s.

  "I did lots of testing with the Festina riders," he says. "Before EPO, we used to say a VO2 max (the measure of an athlete's ability to process oxygen) of 85 was damn good, but all that changed. When I tested the riders in December 1997, the average VO2 max might have been 72 or 73. But when I tested them later, at a time when riders were using EPO, the guys who were doping recorded a VO2 max that was 25-30% greater. That's totally unnatural. Christophe Moreau, who won the prologue to this year's race, had a VO2 max of 70, and three months later it was more than 92. Crazy.

  "It was scary, too. As you turn up the power, the VO2 test gets harder and the production of lactate should act as a brake. It should have made them slow down. But with EPO, this didn't happen; they felt no pain in their legs and the lactate acted as a fuel that made them go faster. I looked at what they were doing and thought, 'We're not dealing with human beings any more'."

  The tests designed to catch those who cheat have never been good enough. Voet's admission that he helped more than 500 riders to dope but did not have one positive test tells all that we need to know about the efficacy of the controls. And those who believe cycling is lifting itself out of the hell of blood-boosting drugs will find it hard to reconcile that belief with the fact that this year's Tour will be the third-fastest in history. The four fastest have been won by Armstrong (1999), Pantani (1998), Armstrong (2001) and Armstrong (2000).

  The irony for the racers is that the ever-rising speeds do not excite the fans. Rather, they distance them. In the French newspaper Liberation on Thursday, the philosopher and cycling fan Robert Redeker wrote of the gulf that now exists between the race and the racers: "The athletic type represented by Lance Armstrong, unlike Fausto Coppi or Jean Robic, is coming closer to Lara Croft, the virtually fabricated cyber heroine. Cycling is becoming a video game, the one-time 'prisoners of the road' have become virtual human beings, an expression that could be applied to Indurain, Virenque, Ullrich and Armstrong. Gino Bartali, Robic, Coppi, Louis Bobet have been substituted by Robocop on wheels, someone with whom no fan can relate oridentify."

  LeMond, the three-time winner of the Tour, now watches from afar and admits to not knowing how to react: "When Lance won the prologue to the 1999 Tour, I was close to tears. He had come back from cancer, in the middle of my career I had to come back from being accidentally shot (while on a hunting trip in 1987) - it felt like we had a lot in common.

  "But when I heard he was working with Michele Ferrari, I was devastated. One American journalist wrote that the only reason you visit Ferrari is to tell him to get the hell out of your sport. I agree with that. In the light of Lance's relationship with Ferrari, I just don't want to comment on this year's Tour.

  "In a general sense, if Lance is clean, it is the greatest comeback in the history of sport. If he isn't, it would be the greatest fraud."

  In the performance-enhancing game there is no shortage of fraud. Last Tuesday morning Torben Rask Laursen and Ole Steen left the Tour for a day and travelled an hour south to the Spanish city of Girona. Rask Laursen is a journalist with Ekstra Bladet in Denmark, Steen a photographer. They randomly selected four pharmacies and asked if they could buy four prescription drugs, all performance-enhancing and including EPO. In each they were told it would be possible. At the fourth, in the western suburb of Sangregori, they purchased six ampoules of 0.5 millilitres of Eprex, a brand of EPO, for 60 euros. They were not asked for a prescription and were not quizzed on why they wanted to buy them.

  Serge Lansaman is the night manager at the Hotel Roncevaux. It has been a long night, but he has slept a little and as a three-times-a-week swimmer, the long hours don't hurt him. He was 18 when LeMond won his first Tour, beating Bernard Hinault, and he thought it was the best performance he had ever seen.

  Lansaman watches the Tour now, but doesn't believe what he is seeing. "The improvement over the past 10 years has been too much," he says. "Doping is a big problem, as it is in my sport, swimming. It is not normal to go as fast as they now go. I still watch, but it's not the same. Armstrong is a champion because of how he recovered from cancer, but LeMond is my favourite cyclist."

  I ask Lansaman how best to describe him. "Typical French guy," he says.

  Stopwatch brings uncertain time for Tour

  David Walsh

  August 5, 2001

  "

  Fifteen years ago, Greg LeMond and Bernard Hinault memorably climbed Alpe d'Huez side-by-side, well clear of their rivals. They climbed Alpe d'Huez 10 minutes slower than Armstrong

  "

  The Tour de France has been and gone, leaving us with a better understanding of where it has come from, but with no sense of where it is going. According to the organiser, Jean Marie Leblanc, the signs are good. "This year the Tour rediscovered its smile," he said. The organiser was encouraged, too, about the race's battle with doping: "Things are getting better."

  Hardly had Lance Armstrong crossed the line on the Champs
Elysees than he was off on the celebrity circuit. He bantered with David Letterman, met mayor Rudolph Guiliani at US Postal's offices in New York and called round to see President Bush at the White House. The parade will be this week.

  So all's well then? Let me tell you about a fine piece of journalism in Paris Match. The author was Antoine Vayer, a sports scientist and former trainer with the discredited Festina cycling team. Vayer has long been an opponent of performance-enhancing drugs and when most of the riders and management at Festina were involved in a systematic doping programme, he worked only with those who refused to dope.

  Fundamental to Vayer's argument in Paris Match was that the introduction of the blood-boosting hormone erythropoietin (EPO) in the early 1990s changed the nature of performance and competition in professional cycling. There had always been doping in cycling, but no drug had as much impact as EPO. Scientific research and anecdotal evidence suggests it improves performance by up to 20%.

  In explaining the increased speed in the Tour over the past decade, Vayer pointed to two factors: the shortening of the route and doping products. Thirteen of the 15 fastest Tours have been achieved in the past 14 years. Over the past three years, it has been harder for the riders to use EPO. Blood controls aimed at curbing the abuse of the hormone were introduced and there is now a urine test that detects EPO taken within three days of the test.

  But is the race cleaner?

  The Tour organisers insist it is. Before this year's race, they suggested it would be a slower Tour and that the fatigue of the riders would be obvious in the third week. It didn't happen. Armstrong won the race riding at an average speed of more than 40kph, the second fastest in history. More startling was the speed with which he and the other leading riders crossed the mountain passes.