Bad Blood (25 page)

Nonetheless, reaching for the syringe had got to him. ‘It was on my conscience, but I was only trying to keep up by doing what everybody else was doing. Once I retired from racing, I didn’t really think about it until I had to start speaking about it, and it seemed to be a continuing problem in the peloton.

‘People say, “Why bring up the past?” But I’m bringing up
the
past to be able to clean up the present. It got to the point where the problem got out of control. Now we’re struggling to get things back to a clean sport. Riders want to race clean. They don’t like the fact they may have to dope to race or that the sport is known to be so dirty.’

He believes that there is plenty of doping still going on. ‘As things stand now a rider can micro-dose, which means that they can take just a little bit of something, to stay out of that huge window that is the positive area,’ he said.

In the United States, Andreu’s confession was read by some – including Armstrong himself – as a direct implication of his former team leader and estranged friend.

His relationship with Armstrong has only gone backwards since Andreu took the decision to testify in the SCA arbitration case. Even though he and Lance were once ‘very good friends’ while racing together, they have become estranged over the past few years.

‘We lived together for a while in Italy, although once I retired we drifted a little bit apart, but we were still friends. Then the Walsh book came out, and the SCA case came out and things fell apart very quickly. I didn’t talk to Lance for about two and a half years,’ Frankie recalls.

Lance had kept his phone number, though. ‘When I got subpoenaed for the SCA case, the day before I was deposed, he phoned me up, out of the blue. I was very surprised by that.’

Andreu and his wife, Betsy, told the SCA arbitration hearings that in 1996, when being treated for cancer in hospital, Armstrong had, in their presence, told doctors that he had used doping products. Armstrong, and other witnesses who were present at the time, gave evidence and denied that he ever said this.

Frankie and Lance, once seemingly inseparable, were now on opposite sides of cycling’s great divide. ‘It didn’t bother me – I was living my life, he was living his life, and I was fine with our
paths
not crossing again, but then the SCA case made things a lot more difficult. Lance really attacked my wife’s character and my character. I didn’t appreciate that, so there’s no love lost for him now.’

In the aftermath of his confession, Andreu says it was quietly suggested to him that he might like to resign from his role at USA Cycling. ‘I declined,’ he said. He knows that he might yet suffer the same fate as those who went before him, shouting their mouths off about doping. He may join others, such as Christophe Bassons and Filippo Simeoni, in no-man’s-land.

For the moment, his resolve is holding firm. Perhaps it helps that, unlike Simeoni, he is no longer fighting to hold down a professional contract with an elite European team. He remains involved in cycling, though, as a coach and TV pundit.

‘I always thought highly of Simeoni. The guy’s never really done anything wrong. Armstrong was the one who was very aggressive towards him. I didn’t doubt anything that Simeoni said.

‘I remember Christophe Bassons speaking out. Again, the guy who went after him was Lance. I don’t think there were many other riders who went after him and attacked him – it was just Lance,’ Frankie said. ‘Lance went after Simeoni, Lance went after Bassons.’

And, I say to him, it turns out Bassons and Simeoni were right: doping was still an issue in 1999, because Frankie and his anonymous teammate had used EPO and look, it was still an issue in 2004, because Frankie’s ex-teammate, Tyler Hamilton, another of the US Postal class of ’99, got busted for blood transfusions. And it was still an issue in early 2008, when his old boss, Johan Bruyneel, found his Astana team blackballed from every significant professional event.

Frankie reflects on that thought for a moment. ‘In a way, maybe I’m lucky, because I didn’t mess around with all that stuff for a long period. But,’ he says, ‘a lot of other riders did.’

* * *

Bob Stapleton may have been a member of the Champion’s Club, but he believed he was not compromised by past relationships.

‘I don’t have any ties that stop me from saying what I think,’ he maintained, as we sat talking in the Spanish sunshine. I never doubted that Stapleton meant what he said. It’s just that I was not convinced that he fully understood the nature of what he was dealing with.

All that stuff about ‘cleaning up the sport’ – they said all the same things after the Festina Affair, and look at what had happened since then. So why should we believe it now? Why should T-Mobile be different to the others and to what has gone before?

Stapleton had come on board to restore T-Mobile’s credibility, but the key to the continuation of the sponsorship lay in results. T-Mobile is a big global brand – it is not T-Mobile Milan, T-Mobile United, or T-Mobile Madrid, built on a sense of place or a loyal fan base; this multimillion-euro sponsorship was about selling, and to sell, the team needs results.

Stapleton nodded and listened. But he sounded as if he was shooting for the stars when he said that ‘what’s different is that T-Mobile is now a like-minded group of managers, athletes and sponsors, focussed on the mission. We consciously went through a clean-out – we changed most of our people – and now we have over twenty-five new people in terms of management and athletes. We have a medical advisory board that makes sure that all of our methods are the best, both in terms of anti-doping and in terms of athlete development.’

A reliance on doping, he argued, is based on ignorance. ‘The philosophy behind doping starts with thinking that everybody is doing it, that to be on a level playing field it’s necessary, and that you’re disadvantaged if you don’t do it. But in many cases the riders have very little information. They hear things, they’re told things by people that seem influential and once they start, it’s a very slippery slope. It’s very hard to change. The psychology of doping is treacherous.’

Team insiders said that T-Mobile came within a hair’s breadth of pulling out of cycling when the sky fell in Strasbourg and Ullrich’s reputation collapsed. The spin was that the sponsor had stayed to clean things up and to set a good example. Even so, there were still riders in T-Mobile’s squad whose good intentions had been questioned in the past. Giuseppe Guerini, tormentor of Filippo Simeoni, was still there, as was multiple world champion Michael Rogers, whose working relationship – although terminated – with Michele Ferrari became public knowledge during the 2006 Tour.

Stapleton continued, explaining that the riders would adhere to a new, more personalised training regime and follow a daily ‘Pillar Strength’ routine with a team of American fitness specialists who had also worked with Jurgen Klinsmann’s highly successful German national football team. But I sat there thinking, that’s great – and where will they get that extra twenty per cent that Frankie Andreu believed EPO gave him? From a Pillar Strength routine?

‘We definitely have athletes who have come because they are fed up and they want to be in an environment where they feel they can develop naturally and there is no pressure. If we can bring some fresh clean faces that have a commitment to anti-doping we will regain public interest.’

It was a stirring speech.

When he ended it, despite my misgivings, I was, for a brief moment, up there with Bob Stapleton, flying the flag, waving to the cheering crowds, imagining that bright new tomorrow, free of the syringes and the
omerta
and the bitterness, embracing that new dawn that cycling so desperately needed.

I walked away with a spring in my step and a warm and sunny feeling towards my fellow man. But then I heard Kimmage’s voice telling me, ‘No second chances …’ and then Lance’s voice, growling about ‘protecting the interests of the peloton’, and I checked myself and realised that it was really not as simple as Bob Stapleton imagined it was.

And then I remembered that the last time I’d felt the same ‘we are the world’ glow was when the northern bottlenose whale was winched out of the Thames, with people cheering from the riverbank in Battersea Park and the collective love of the British capital willing it to survive. But the whale died.

Stapleton had talked of creating a ‘clean and fair’ team, one that could win from March until October. The big question as the minivans ferried the press back to Palma airport, was could T-Mobile’s riders achieve results if they were all, as he insisted, clean?

Sitting beside me in the departure lounge, a German journalist poured scorn on T-Mobile’s transformation under Stapleton. ‘How can they win any races without doping, without any leaders, when other teams are doping?’ he said. ‘This is PR bullshit. It won’t work.’

After Operacíon Puerto cut a swathe through the starters at the 2006 Tour de France, there was a notion, based on little more than a feel-good factor, that the race was somehow purged of doping.

On the night before his victory parade on the Champs-Elysées, Floyd Landis didn’t want to talk about doping. ‘Got any other questions?’ he snapped, at the winner’s press conference, when Operacíon Puerto became the main theme. The sentiment that, with the Fuentes network in disarray, it had been a cleaner Tour, didn’t last long. Two nights after I got home from Paris, the biggest story of all broke.

Late in the evening, I stood in my back garden, mobile pressed to my ear. Music was blaring from an open window on the other side of the wall. My phone beeped ominously as the battery ran down.

‘You’re sure? At Morzine? It’s definitely Floyd?’

The voice at the other end of the phone, speaking softly from a deserted office block in central Paris, assured me again that it was indeed Floyd Landis who had tested positive for
testosterone
, just two days after celebrating victory in the 2006 Tour de France.

‘
Ouai … c’est sur
. Jeremy – yes.’

‘
D’accord, merci
. Thank you –
à bientôt
.’

My phone beeped once more and then went dead.

I ran inside, grabbed my wife’s phone and called the UCI president, Pat McQuaid.

I apologised for calling so late and then in the same breath said: ‘The positive – it’s Landis, isn’t it?’

He wouldn’t confirm or deny the rumours.

But he did say this: ‘I’m extremely angry. The credibility of the sport is at stake. It’s the worst-case scenario.’

And after Pat McQuaid had said that, I knew that it just had to be Floyd.

As he has got older, Greg LeMond has become increasingly outspoken. At first he was discreet about his opinions; now he shouts them from the rooftops.

‘I told Floyd Landis the other day,’ he was saying, ‘I want to believe that I would have been somebody who was strong enough to say no, but I can’t be sure of that because I didn’t come into cycling in 1993, 1994, 1995, when blood doping was rampant. I didn’t have to make that choice.’

LeMond has been through the mill over the past few years. He has been tested by dark secrets from his childhood, by his son’s addiction problems, by his own reliance on alcohol – now a thing of the past, he says – and by the strain all of this has put on his marriage to Kathy.

A few months after the news over Floyd’s positive test broke, Greg spoke to him on the phone. LeMond recalled the conversation. ‘He’d got two positive tests for synthetic testosterone out of one sample, and I was just saying,
“Please
– don’t do a Tyler Hamilton.”’

Landis was taken aback by LeMond’s advice. Immediately afterwards, his strict upbringing in the obscure and separatist
Mennonite
religion showed when he told an Internet forum that he would rather ‘talk to Satan before Greg LeMond’.

When I interviewed him over email, Landis explained further: ‘Greg basically told the press that I called him and admitted that I had doped. No such thing ever happened. I was legitimately upset when I made that comment on the forum,’ he told me.

LeMond scorned Landis’ anger. ‘I’ve gone through my own personal change in the last three or four years and have looked at myself in terms of who I am. I didn’t want to upset anybody. I always wanted people to like me, but that was at a personal cost to me. I let people take advantage of me. I’ve decided to stand up for my own principles, regardless of whether it’s unpopular or not.’

Landis also wrote on his website, ‘If I reveal what Greg told me, it would destroy his character.’

LeMond insisted that he was only trying to save Landis from the pain of living a lie. ‘I told Floyd that I’d lived with a secret for most of my life and it almost destroyed my marriage.’ He paused. ‘The secret was that I was sexually abused before I got into cycling.

‘I felt bad for Floyd – he’d been writing the most disgusting mean things about me, comparing me to Satan. I was trying to tell him, that if he did indeed take testosterone, that to go on having to defend yourself and live in fear of somebody finding out that you really did cheat, that the cost emotionally is so much greater than the short-term shame and embarrassment of coming clean.

‘I’m not a saint,’ Greg continued. ‘I’ve got stuff in my life, in my past that on a personal level I am not proud of, but I am human and we all have flaws. The fact that I can tell you about being abused – I mean, four years ago I couldn’t even tell my wife without a bottle of Scotch in me. But I was really forced to face it because I was going to lose my family.’

Poor Floyd. What a catastrophe winning the Tour was for him. For those who cheered him on, from disastrous failure to heroic
comeback
, who supported him to ‘victory’, the sense of waste was equally overpowering – wasted time, wasted hopes, wasted effort.

I had never warmed to Landis. I first spoke to him one spring evening long ago when he was racing for the ill-fated Mercury team, ironically on LeMond-branded bikes. He was sitting on the edge of the curb outside the team hotel. He’d been friendly enough. But, once into the US Postal bubble, in the orbit of Armstrong and Bruyneel, his head seemed to be turned.