Seven Deadly Sins: My Pursuit of Lance Armstrong (23 page)

One day he said, ‘Emma, I need to know what your time of month is?’

‘You what?’ she asked.

‘Just so I understand your mood swings.’

‘Hey. I have an excuse. What’s yours?’

Another day she caught Waldek looking her up and down appreciatively as he talked to a buddy.

‘Don’t you ever fucking eye me up and down like that again,’ she said. Soon she had made proper space for herself in the testosterone-splashed world of the team.

Late in the year they won a stage of the Tour of China and the money was divvied among the team. Emma got about $3000 which went on top of her $20,000 a year salary. It was a pittance for a life on the road, a life of 24/7 availability, but she figured that she had no expenses when she was on the road and that this was what she’d come to America for.

From that first meeting with Thom Weisel at his offices in the Pyramid Building, she knew that whatever results were achieved in ’96 they would be bettered in ’97; and that prospect excited her. Good wages or bad, she wanted in.

Of course other things were happening in late 1996. Lance Armstrong, the young American rider with Motorola, had cancer. And rival team Motorola were departing the scene. By the time Emma got back to Ramona for pre-season work the following January, her team, now known as US Postal, had acquired some Motorola trucks and a biggish name, Viatechslav Ekimov. Too big a name for most of the team to get their mouths around actually. He was known ever after as Eki.

Andy Hampsten had retired and the team also had a new
directeur sportif
, a friendly Dane by the name of Johnny Weltz, and a new doctor, a Spaniard, Pedro Celaya. And another promising American rider, George Hincapie.

Emma worked the American spring races, but the word coming back from Europe was that Johnny Weltz and Waldek weren’t hitting it off. Neither were Waldek and Pedro Celaya enjoying their new togetherness. Emma smiled. In time the call came. An SOS.
Soigneur
needed. Emma arrived in Europe in time for April’s Tour of Flanders.

That season they weren’t competitive or particularly organised but they got through, and continued to learn the ropes. Still much of the talk was about drugs. Riders would comment that they had ridden
pan y agua
or on ‘bread and water’. Some riders never rode that way apparently. In the US Postal set-up, they were looking at some astonishing performances from rivals and often they would shake their heads and ask each other just where that had come from. ‘What planet is he on?’

The culture was changing, but it was still acceptable within US Postal to dismiss a rival who evidently doped as a cheat or a moron.

Emma felt that if there were drugs around US Postal that summer it was minor-league stuff compared to what seemed to be going on elsewhere. The only time she thought awhile on the question was when a colleague from the Rabobank team said to her, late in the season: ‘Well, we all know that you have a good doctor now.’

Emma took the compliment at face value. They had nine riders and all had stayed healthy, so Pedro Celaya must have been a good doctor. But maybe something else was being implied.

Johnny Weltz had brought a Spanish
soigneur
in with him as part of his deal. A guy called José. He wasn’t greatly appreciated for his massage, but his facility with a needle was revered. What was in the syringes which José so deftly applied and disposed of wasn’t Emma’s business. Some of the European ‘culture’ was seeping in, however.

Late in the year, Emma travelled to the World Championships in San Sebastián with the Irish team. She got a call in the hotel from a Postal colleague. ‘They’ve signed him. This will be great. Things will change.’

‘Him’ was Lance Armstrong. Things did change.

Emma is a natural teller of stories. I knew from that first dinner we had had that she had things to tell me. I knew it would be worthwhile but I never guessed at her sense of detail. Also she had a diary in which she had kept notes. A smart, articulate woman with a diary. No downside. Better still, she had a sense of humour and had retained affection for Lance Armstrong. He wasn’t perfect but he had treated her right and respectfully. She hoped that might continue.

Lance Armstong arrived in Emma’s life in 1998 in, where else, Ramona. He arrived with Christian Vande Velde. Emma shook hands with Vande Velde: ‘Hi, I’m Emma.’

She had the impression Armstrong was speaking to somebody on the phone as he came in, so she ignored him. Vande Velde laughed and when she looked again Armstrong was standing with an outstretched hand.

‘Here, he’s trying to say hello,’ said Vande Velde.

They shook hands and from there out they got on just fine.

Emma was a good worker and bright enough to see the deficiencies in the organisation. Armstrong had been with Motorola before his illness and he had helped ‘Europeanise’ their attitude and preparation. Now that nobody else would give him a shot after his recovery he had settled for this, a small contract with a middle-sized team – but big bonuses would accrue if he performed well.

He too could see what the team lacked in comparison to bigger, more successful outfits. That bonded them. He liked to work with Emma because she was the best of an average lot.

In 1998, though, despite two years of virtually holding her hands over her ears whenever there was talk of drugs among riders or crew, she got dragged into the circle anyway. George Hincapie overheard her say that she had to go to Belgium for a trip. He asked if she would mind picking up something for him from a friend. No problem. The friend was a person known to her but no longer associated with the team.

Emma arranged a meeting at the Hotel Nazareth in Ghent. The package was handed over. She was surprised by how small it was but said she would try to get it to Hincapie if she saw him down in Girona in Spain, where several of the team were living. If not, she would catch up with him in the States and hand the package over there. There was a pause. Her contact said: ‘Emma, don’t do that. Give it to George. It’s testosterone and you don’t want to transport it yourself.’

‘Really. And why would George want testosterone?’ she asked, unable to help her own curiosity.

‘He needs to have strength for a sprint at the end of long stages.’

‘Oh.’

By the end of 1998 this minor piece of work as a drugs mule would look distinctly innocent. The Tour de France began in Emma’s home town Dublin, so she headed back to Ireland a few days early for some family time. She arranged to meet the team as they came off the ferry.

Unbeknown to her, as she’d been spending the day with her family, Willy Voet, the Festina
soigneur
, had been arrested carrying a cornucopia of performance-enhancing and leisure drugs in his car. So when she got to the ferry, which was an hour late, the Irish police were present. She thought for half a second they were giving the team an escort to their hotel and thanked them.

‘No,’ they said, ‘we’re customs officers. We have some searches to do.’

This was home turf for Emma O’Reilly and on this particular turf nobody is very impressed by uniforms. She gave the customs officers some advice.

‘Lads, let me tell you, for your own sakes, don’t even try it. There’ll be a riot. They’ve been travelling all day, they’re very grumpy. Come to the hotel in the morning if you have to.’

And remarkably, as the biggest scandal in Tour history was breaking all around them, the customs men left it at that. It stayed like that for the duration of the Tour. US Postal were somehow protected by their innocence, their American-ness and their big brand backers; they seemed somehow to be set aside as war loomed between the police and the teams. And when it got a bit scary one afternoon, with the police in the field where the team vehicles were parked, US Postal flushed a lot of stuff down the drain.

It is the summer of 2003 as we are sitting and talking in Emma’s house: almost exactly four years since I watched Lance ride the 1999 prologue and came away scratching my head. It’s been four years of circling a fortress, finding little cracks but never anything big enough to let me in. I’ve been on trips all over the place speaking to scientists, cyclists, police, doctors, testers.

Now here I am chatting with a woman from Dublin and, incredibly, she is from the inside. She’s talking about Lance Armstrong, the world’s favourite sporting icon and medical miracle. And she has the goods. Just like that. I keep glancing at the tape recorder making sure the little red light is still illuminated. I try to keep my mouth from hanging open. It gets better, stranger. I can’t believe I’ve been sent down this trail. Emma tells me stories and anecdotes and this is an interview I never want to end. Maybe to pause for a second, bring the world in by the ear and say, ‘Listen to this woman, just listen.’

Lance didn’t compete in the 1998 Tour, but afterwards he was back in Europe to ride the Tour of Holland. Emma drove him to the airport after that and, as he was getting out of the team car, he handed her a bag and said, ‘Look, Emma, I didn’t get rid of these, will you get rid of them for me?’

The bag was full of empty, used syringes.

She accepted the bag but didn’t know what to do. She was heading to Ghent in Belgium and when she got over the border and relaxed a little she found herself getting pulled over for being marginally over the speed limit. She cursed and cursed before winding down the window for the policeman. She noticed she was shaking with fear.

‘I’m sorry about that, officer.’

‘No. Do you know Mark Gorski?’

‘Yes. He’s my boss.’

The policeman was a former rider. She gave him a contact number for his old friend. Emma and her syringes drove off into the night leaving the policeman behind on the road waving cheerily.

The casual nature of it all astonishes me. Sure, there’s a cloak-and-dagger element to what Emma is relating, but there is a bravura too. An arrogance. Just dump these for me.

She tells me she deliberately refused to get involved in finding out who was taking what, as most European
soigneurs
would. Her style was to open the truck where the medications were kept and tell the team, ‘There you go, lads: help yourselves.’

Armstrong’s view of the other
soigneurs
never really changed while Emma was there, so he tended to work with her exclusively and she would massage him and listen to what he had to say, his complaints and his views on other riders. In terms of staff, Lance was the kingmaker. People came and went at his whim. Johan Bruyneel arrived as
directeur sportif
for 1999 and became Lance’s enforcer. He promoted Emma to the post of head
soigneur
, but the honeymoon period between them was brief.

She paints a comprehensive picture of a team more ramshackle on the inside than it ever appeared from the outside. The characters, the incompetents, the savants, the bluffers. Again and again she makes me laugh. Her relationship with the Bruyneels, Johan and his former wife Christelle, was a book all in itself.

‘I know this is terrible but he [Bruyneel] wore cheap clothes, even though he was quite wealthy; he was a team director, but he never dressed really appropriately. When everyone else wore khakis, he would wear those stupid things with the zips on them and stuff like that. Things you could turn into three-quarter-length shorts!

‘Oh god, the poor fella got beaten up by the ugly tree coming down.’

While the world thought he was Lance’s lieutenant and enforcer, Emma viewed him differently. Lance’s lap dog.

What fragments I’d gathered over the years about life inside the US Postal team, Emma was able to glue together easily. She had been in the Last Tango restaurant in Sestriere the night that Michele Ferrari came to dine with the team. She wasn’t surprised to see Ferrari with Lance. It confirmed a lot of things.

‘I knew his role in cycling was dirty, that no rider he worked with was known to be clean.’

She described the deterioration of her relationship with Johan Bruyneel, and the surprise she felt when having been asked to drive to Spain from France in May 1999. That day at the team’s base in Piles, Bruyneel even managed to squeeze some pleasantries out of himself as he slipped a pill box into her hand to be brought back to Lance.

She told Simon, her boyfriend at the time, what was happening as part of their journey. It created a sort of giddy nervousness in the car. During an earlier squabble, Bruyneel had commandeered the last team car available, leaving Emma and Simon to hire a rental. As they waited to be waved through at the border, Emma wondered if Bruyneel hadn’t planned the entire thing this way because a rental car was less likely to be stopped than a pro-cycling team car.

She brought the pill box to Armstrong and left it at that. Soon after, her relationship with Bruyneel began to become intolerable.

The 1999 Tour was a triumph, of course, and she had written in her diary before the start, ‘We’re going in to win the Tour.’

And then there was that strange incident the day before the prologue, when Lance noticed the syringe marks on his arm
en route
to the pre-race medical. He wanted Emma to spread some of her make-up over the needle bruises, but she said her make-up would be no good for that job. She went to a pharmacy and got some proper concealer. With some horror she looked at the job she’d done, thought it looked terrible, but he seemed happy.

One evening well into the race, she was giving Lance his evening massage when there was a big kerfuffle about a positive cortisone test. Two team officials were there, then a third, and they agreed that a backdated prescription was the best way to deal with the problem. That was accepted and she got the impression everyone just wanted a ‘clean’ Tour.

They said Lance had saddle sore, but he never mentioned that to her and she didn’t believe it. She did see the team doctor Luis del Moral, who had taken over from Celaya at the start of the season, getting all hot and bothered about the prescription, as if he’d been asked to rewrite the law of gravity. But that took care of it. Lance Armstrong. Pure as driven snow.