At Speed: My Life in the Fast Lane (27 page)

Four years on, I was doomed, once again, to be the “forgotten man.” Well, perhaps not completely forgotten, given that I was due to make my debut as an in-studio pundit for the BBC in the velodrome, and most TV viewers would probably be sick of the sight and sound of me within a few days. Even so, I was still somehow the runt of the British cycling litter. In the BBC studio, I would happily play along with and even encourage any reference to my Olympic jinx, but certain comments and questions, like the one from the BBC guy after the road race, still made me shudder. My own disappointment didn’t stop me reveling in the so-called British gold rush on the track, or in my new gig as the BBC’s track cycling oracle. I’d done similar things before, but in previous TV appearances found that the presenter’s ego sometimes got in the way of whatever insight you were trying to deliver. Fortunately, this wasn’t the case with Jake Humphrey, and I thoroughly enjoyed myself. The hardest part was purging my speech of all swearwords.

After Brad’s Tour win and then yet more success, it was wonderful to see Britain suddenly gripped by cycling fever, as much as I
thought there were some riders who had sacrificed too much to be competing in London. I was fairly blunt about Geraint Thomas and what I perceived as his misplaced priorities in
Boy Racer
. Typically, though, Gee didn’t hold it against me: one, because he’s not the kind to bear grudges, and two, because he already knew exactly where I was coming from. I felt the same as I had after Beijing, and Gee reacted similarly when we spoke at the Tour of Denmark a month after the London Olympics. I was aware that it sounded disrespectful and like sour grapes, but I firmly believed what I was saying: The gold medal that Geraint had won in London in the team pursuit, to go with the one he already had from Beijing, would change nothing for him.

“What, so I should have just concentrated on helping you win the road race? Is that it?” he replied.

I explained that, no, what I meant was that he had sacrificed too much for the track, and got what out of it? Your average Joe in the street didn’t even know who was in the team pursuit team.

Which was fine—it wasn’t that kind of recognition that interested me, either—but Gee had put his road career on hold for years for those medals. In the peloton, he is rightly considered to be one of the most powerful and talented riders around, yet at the time of this writing, he himself would acknowledge that he has won very little, and certainly not an amount commensurate with his ability.

With my business head on, and based on my experience over the previous few years, I could also hazard a guess at how much money it had cost him to prioritize the track over the road. Even having gone down the track route and won that second medal, I thought Gee and some of the other guys, like Pete Kennaugh, or whoever represented them, weren’t doing enough to boost their profile. I told Pete that
he should be doing
Attitude
magazine cover shoots … and was only half taking the piss.

Perhaps I had another, more fundamental conviction—you could even call it a prejudice—about the comfort zone that they had found at British Cycling and Team Sky. From their point of view, with their objectives, I could see how Sky was the perfect team. No other team would have allowed them to put their road careers on the back burner in the same way as Sky, certainly not on their salaries. This brought both advantages and disadvantages for them personally and for cycling in the UK.

While Team Sky might have been the perfect team for someone like Gee, the same wasn’t true for me. I was different and so were my feelings about where would be the best place to pursue my career. Having informed Brailsford a few days before the Olympics that I wanted out, I gathered that he was also open to an amicable separation. The negotiations had dragged on but finally reached a satisfactory resolution at the beginning of the autumn.

A year and a week after I was unveiled as Team Sky’s new star signing, another announcement was made to confirm that I would ride for Omega Pharma–Quick-Step in 2013.

o
n January 17, 2013, in a hotel in Argentina, I found a position on the floor as close as possible to the TV, turned the volume low so as not to disturb my sleeping roommate, and watched a man I used to know tell the world that he was the biggest cheat in sport.

My instinctive reaction to Lance Armstrong on
Oprah’s Next Chapter
? Too many adverts.

Lance and I had met at the Interbike trade show in Las Vegas in September 2008. Introduced by George Hincapie, once Lance’s domestique deluxe and then mine, we had instantly struck up a rapport. There was something mesmeric about Lance. That’s something people often say about so-called celebrities, but not until I spent an hour or two with Lance did I really fully appreciate what it meant. I think it’s best summed up by saying that if Lance was in a crowded restaurant or bar, you could somehow sense or feel his presence. There was a buzz, an electricity that seemed to take hold of the room. The energy he radiated seemed to hang everywhere, yet when Lance spoke, the space suddenly emptied to leave just you and him. His eyes were
like strobe lights, burning through you. He inserted your name into every sentence, paid attention to everything you did, remembered everything you said. It was hard, as a 23-year-old who had watched him win seven Tours de France, goggle-eyed, not to be impressed or at least intrigued. My teammates that year, George Hincapie and Michael Barry, would continually tell stories about him—sometimes more appalled than amused, but Lance clearly fascinated them.

That first encounter in Vegas had coincided, within the space of a few days, with the announcement that Lance was making a comeback to the sport. A couple of nights out in Las Vegas hadn’t suddenly made us close friends, and we had no contact until a congratulatory text message after my victory in Milan–San Remo in March 2009. For the next couple of months after this, George would tell Lance that I’d bought an expensive watch, or a sports car, and I’d get a text from Lance: “Cav! Don’t waste your money on watches! What did I tell you? Save it. Be smart with it.” And so he had told me; in fact, in Vegas he never tired of repeating it. Perhaps I was under his spell, but when it came to giving me advice, he appeared both genuine and generous.

For all that he was the same man—brash, charismatic, uncompromising—I think that Lance could see as soon as he came back in 2009 that a lot had changed in the four years since his infamous farewell speech on the Champs Elysées in 2005, in which he told the “cynics and skeptics” that he was “sorry they can’t believe.” The signs were there at the Tour of California in February 2009, where the Irish journalist, Paul Kimmage, tackled him in the pre-race press conference. Kimmage thought, and had written, that Lance had cheated his way to those seven Tour titles, and likened his comeback to the
recurrence of a cancer; this led to a fairly feisty exchange that, of course, Kimmage’s colleagues in the press lapped up.

Like everyone else, I was well aware of the doping rumors that had swirled around Lance and his career, but I never dwelled on them too much: first, because I hadn’t been competing against him between 1999 and 2005; and second, I had gathered from riders who had competed in that era that doping had been widespread if not endemic. Rolf Aldag, my directeur sportif at T-Mobile and later HTC, had made this very clear in a presentation to the team at the beginning of my 2007 debut season. In his era, Rolf said, the sport had been so poorly policed that it had degenerated into anarchy, which in turn had made drug-use a near necessity for most. That, at least, was how they saw it. Rolf was telling us this, he said, because he wanted us to understand that cycling had changed beyond recognition and that excuse—“everyone did it”—no longer washed. You could compete and win races completely clean. Having heard murmurs about the grim reality of professional cycling and for years having been told by fellow junior and amateur riders that doping was de rigueur, Rolf’s words came as a massive relief. They were also confirmation of what I’d already seen in the handful of races I’d done as a T-Mobile stagiaire at the end of 2006: I could hold my own with nothing more in my medicine cabinet than a normal multivitamin.

So, no, I wasn’t completely naive about Lance, but neither was all the speculation going to prejudice my relationship with him. The same went for Kimmage after that press conference in California in February 2009: When he requested an interview a few months later for his newspaper, the
Sunday Times,
I happily obliged and went in with a completely open mind. Just because a friend or acquaintance
doesn’t get on with someone, I’m not going to allow that to color my judgment before meeting the person. That’s just not my style.

For Lance, though, I can imagine the face-off with Kimmage was an early hint that he wouldn’t inspire the same kind of deference the second time around. I saw him again at Milan–San Remo in March, then again at the Giro in May. We talked a fair bit at the Giro, but one thing really struck me: If he had been a capo or patron once—the unelected but also uncontested spokesman and overlord of the peloton who ruled by intimidation—he wasn’t that guy anymore. You can usually spot a capo—when they take a toilet break, the peloton slows immediately until they’ve attended to nature’s call and slotted back into the pack. One day at the 2009 Giro, I was shocked, then, to see Lance pull over to the side of the road and the peloton swish by without batting an eyelid. I caught a glimpse of Lance’s face as he realized, and his expression was one of fury and indignation, perhaps tinged with sadness. You could almost see the penny dropping—
I was that guy, but they don’t think I’m that guy anymore
.

At the Tour that year, Lance was extremely strong—too strong, according to the United States Anti-Doping Agency (USADA) and the 202-page report in which they laid out their evidence against Armstrong just over a year later. Lance swore to Oprah Winfrey that he didn’t dope for his comeback, but an expert quoted in the USADA report stated that the likelihood of certain anomalies in blood samples taken from Lance during the 2009 and 2010 Tours was “less than one in a million.”

In 2009 and even on the eve of the 2010 Tour, when the
Wall Street Journal
published allegations aimed at Lance by his old teammate Floyd Landis, I’d paid very little attention to the low, slow drumroll of controversy. Now, though, the idea that Lance had doped to ride
that 2009 Tour in which I’d won six stages switched something in me. If the suffering that we sometimes endure in races is hard to convey to the ordinary punter, it’s even more difficult to describe the bitterness of knowing the pain was made even worse by other riders cheating. I had felt the same anger after the 2008 Giro and Tour, where certain riders were lit up like fireworks but were caught much too late for it to make any difference to those of us whom they had tortured on the road.

Even ignoring the immorality of it, the betrayal of the sport and the fans, it was very easy to condemn doping when you were its direct victim; the outrage came less spontaneously, less naturally when the crimes were committed years ago, when you’d been told, like I had, that back then that was the norm. It was also harder to demonize someone, like Lance, who had always treated you well and given you the impression that he liked and valued you. Having reason to believe that person had tried to cheat you out of a race and part of your livelihood—plus inflicted dire agony on you for five, six hours over giant Pyrenean or Alpine passes—immediately changed things. I can only imagine how someone like my old HTC teammate, Marco Pinotti, must have felt about Lance and the large number of other riders who had been doping in, for instance, the 1999 Tour. Or, for that matter, how Marco, who I know has always ridden clean, had even managed to finish that Tour in his first year as a pro.

As the allegations rumbled to a crescendo through and beyond Lance’s comeback, up to the moment when he was forced to confess, being repeatedly asked to give my opinion on the matter became somewhat tiresome. Some won’t believe me or will accuse me of being short-sighted or self-absorbed when I say that I, like the majority of clean pros now, simply don’t feel that what happened 15 years
ago bears any relevance to us. Or rather it does, but only really on two levels: On one hand, we’ve all benefited from the slow, no doubt belated recognition of the problem and from the resulting, huge improvements in anti-doping; on the other hand, we’re also now held accountable for an era and a poisonous culture that is alien to what we know. We’re asked to comment on Armstrong and have our morals judged on the strength of what we say, when a lot of us are, rightly or wrongly, too preoccupied with the here and now to have an opinion.

Even though I was watching those Tours that Lance won, wide-eyed and innocent, I also can’t pretend that I’m eaten up with resentment or feel betrayed now that I know that it was all a big charade. As unjust, as distressing as it may be, as hard as it is for us to accept, I’m sure that Lance still feels that no one and nothing can take away the emotions of those seven Tours at the time, and the same really goes for those of us who were watching.