Seven Deadly Sins: My Pursuit of Lance Armstrong (24 page)

‘Now, Emma,’ Armstrong said at the end of that night, ‘you know enough to bring me down.’

The Tour de France of 1999 would be Emma’s last. The relationship between her and Bruyneel deteriorated quickly after that. She believed that Bruyneel felt threatened by the respect that Armstrong had for the
soigneur
. Emma knew she was empowered by that respect. Something had to give. The lap dog knew how to bite. Bruyneel marginalised and bullied her to the point where she knew for a considerable time that this part of her life was ending. After stealing her diary, Bruyneel went to her colleagues and lied about her writing nasty things about them.

Emma resigned her job in early 2000.

It was another staff member who had told her about the intrusion into her diary. The same guy told her not to worry.

‘In one conversation with him he twirled round the front wheel of the bike he was working on. “See, Emma
-tje,
” he said, using the affectionate version of my name in Dutch, because we were friends. “Look at the valve there. When I spin the wheel it goes round but the valve always comes round too. Remember it, Emma
-tje
: what goes around comes around.” ’

It was coming around now. Surely.

12

‘One must not cheat anybody, not even the world of its victory.’

Franz Kafka

One evening, when things were going badly, Jan Swart turned to her husband Stephen and asked him a simple question.

‘Stephen, why did you do this?’

This. This had brought fire and brimstone down upon them. For this they had lost friends and business. For this they had been excoriated in low-rent media. For this her husband was portrayed as a bitter loser. That hurt her so much.

This. Why had he done it?

And Stephen said: ‘Jan, when I’m on my rocking chair at eighty-four years of age and I don’t have a lot of time left to live, I will look back on this and I will regard it as one of the finest things I’ve ever done in my life.’

That was all she needed to know. A good man is hard to find. They would battle on.

When Lance Armstrong unravels his life and pulls apart all the strands, he’ll wonder (just perhaps) at the serendipitous nature of events that would eventually undo him. Stephen Swart was an early piece in the jigsaw: a former rider and, as they say, a stand-up guy.

He came into my orbit in a roundabout way. Consider the odds. An Irish journalist, through a series of life events, comes in middle age to make a new start in England. He and his wife, their five kids and their new daughter Molly wind up in Cambridge. Molly might not go to school but she’d meet the scholars.

In Cambridge they would meet a distinguished New Zealander, an investigative journalist who, having done a fellowship in Oxford in 1996, was now completing a fellowship at Cambridge. For his fellowship at Wolfson College, Phil Taylor was studying sports doping. He trawled the internet for UK journalists who wrote about doping and, as this was the very month when I happened to be in France interviewing Lance Armstrong, my name was soon in his net.

He’s a journalist, so he got the number easily enough.

‘David, you wouldn’t happen to live anywhere near Cambridge?’ he said.

‘About four miles,’ I said.

He came for lunch, stayed for the afternoon and the time flew. I told him he had to go see Sandro Donati in Rome, which he did. He, too, loved Sandro. We talked about the Armstrong case and he told of an interview he had in 1997 with a compatriot of his, Stephen Swart, who had ridden with the Motorola team and been in the same team as Lance Armstrong for two years.

Phil wanted to do a story about Stephen’s particular experience in the Motorola team and how it was decided that only by using EPO could they hope to compete. Twenty-three-year-old Lance Armstrong was one of the strongest advocates for doping in the team. Phil wanted to write a story about Stephen’s personal experiences, but it was too soon for Stephen: he was in his first retirement season and he wasn’t ready for the backlash. Soon afterwards, Phil gave me a transcript of Stephen’s recollection of doping in the Motorola team.

I wanted to meet Stephen Swart.

Now Auckland, New Zealand, is one of those places in the world where you can’t really claim to be just passing through. So when preparing to cover the Rugby World Cup in Australia in 2003 I mentioned to Alex, my long-suffering friend and boss, that it might be the mark of a great editor to send a winged minion across to New Zealand to do a piece on Jonah Lomu, the great All Black wing who was suffering from kidney disease at the time.

Not long afterwards, Alex had the idea of sending a winged minion to Auckland to do a piece on Jonah Lomu. Selflessly I undertook the four-hour flight from Sydney and – why not? I was going to be passing through anyway – made time to see Stephen Swart. I met him at a hotel in the city and he drove us to the port where the yachts rocked gently on their anchors and the Tour de France seemed to be part of another universe.

‘Is it here that the
Rainbow Warrior
was sunk?’

‘Ah, those French . . .’ Stephen remembers with a grin. ‘Over there. That one. She won the America’s Cup.’

We found a restaurant, kept the harbour and yachts in our sights, and talked about things in general. If he didn’t mind, I wanted to do the interview at his home the next day. He was cool with that. Very little in Stephen’s life was a hassle. I told him about Betsy and Frankie Andreu, Greg LeMond, Jonathan Vaughters, Prentice Steffen, Emma O’Reilly and many others who had all helped to show that Lance Armstrong was part of a doping culture at both Motorola and US Postal.

It mattered to him that he wouldn’t be the only one putting his head on the chopping block.

Stephen grew up in Morrinsville on the North Island and in his junior racing days he and his older brother Jack were big names in the New Zealand cycling community. Jack would be New Zealand cyclist of the year six times, but Stephen would be the one to have the pro career and get to ride the Tour.

In middle age the two of them are still cycling. There’s a clipping I saw from just a couple of years ago where Jack won a stage on a race in New Zealand on the same day that Stephen was voted ‘Most Aggressive’ rider. They make them different down there.

Just eight years before our meeting in 2003, Stephen had been earning his bread in Europe riding a bike. He’d loved Europe, even if it hadn’t showered him with reward. He’d become a hard and respected pro and the Tour de France was for him the most exhilarating time of the year, a career highlight.

When he stopped cycling, he and Jan and the kids had come back home. Having been a rider all his life, Stephen worked for a while in a company associated with cycling, then he started his own company as a property developer. He finds a place that needs some attention, buys it, does the work and puts it back on the market. Not easy, but it’s a living and life is good.

There’s a gap there, which he is conscious of, though. I’ve heard Paul Kimmage and other guys talk about the same thing. The void of not knowing. Stephen gave the best years of his life to cycling and when the sport spat him out he felt as if he had been short-changed, duped.

Doping had done that. He couldn’t throw himself into the life of the needle, not in the way you needed to. He tried it and felt uncomfortable with it and with himself. He’d never know how far he might have gone if he had been racing in a clean peloton.

The transition back to ordinary life had been difficult. The Swarts didn’t have a lot of money and then suddenly the dream was dead, and the rest of life looked like it might be something they just settled for. It had been easy to unpack the suitcases, but it was harder to deal with their contents.

‘I said to myself, “Did I really learn the profession?” In other words, did I know enough on the medical plan? Maybe I wasn’t a good enough pharmacist? But why was it necessary to learn that? You do not get into sports thinking that you have to learn this type of thing. You don’t go to school saying to yourself: “Well, I want to be a racing cyclist, and to be one, I’ll have to know medicine and get a pharmacist’s diploma.” I felt that I had more than average abilities, that if you remove everything and just look at the guys naked on their bikes, I would have had an advantage. I knew I had this advantage, but that, against professional cyclists, it meant nothing.’

Stephen Swart became a pro back in 1987. There were no firework displays. It wasn’t breaking news. A nation didn’t see him off at the quays. He signed with the English team ANC-Halfords. Meanwhile, fate had taken up kickboxing. Six months later, Stephen wasn’t getting his monthly wage of £500. The team was broke.

Back then he was a wide-eyed and innocent Kiwi. Before the team dissolved, the riders had been rounded up by their old-school
soigneur
, Angus Fraser, and each injected with an undetermined substance. They all wondered but nobody asked.

‘We had complete confidence in this guy, because we thought he knew what he was doing. Like if you go to the doctor when you’re sick, you have confidence in him. You think it can’t be very bad since it doesn’t test positive. And I wasn’t a big enough cyclist to have the right to ask questions. I remember two cyclists from the team who carried their own briefcases, and it wasn’t papers that they carted around with them.’

Having gone over the edge with Halfords, he headed for the glamour of Belgium. He joined the SEFB outfit in 1988, noting that the team was sponsored by a bank. At that time, some people believed that cycling was clean and others believed that banks were a safe bet. Stephen believed both.

He arrived in Liège to find that SEFB was a modest organisation and one of cycling’s wallflowers. The team struggled to get invited to decent races. Their
directeur sportif
was a character: Ferdinand Bracke, record holder for the hour in 1967, when he rode 48.093km in 60 minutes. Bracke was winner of the Tour of Spain in 1971, third in the Tour de France in 1968 and an old cyclist straight from central casting.

Among Stephen’s teammates was a guy at the other end of the colour scale, a rider called Johan Bruyneel.

Back then Bruyneel was a young professional and not yet a member of the boss class. He was riding for the first time in the peloton, having forged himself a good reputation on the Belgian amateur circuit. His teammates had high hopes for him.

SEFB’s small budget and half-filled-out dance card meant that there was no doctor attached to the team, and in the matter of doping everybody was left to choose for himself. The
soigneurs
, of course, were more opinionated than taxi drivers.

‘One evening, I went to a
soigneur
’s room,’ Swart remembers. ‘All the products were there and the cyclists came to use them as they wanted. Another evening during the Tour de Suisse, we were sitting in a room and the
soigneur
came in with medications. Everyone helped themselves. The guys filled up these enormous syringes like you use for horses and shot up. I can tell you it wasn’t the first time. It was the culture.’

Swart doesn’t know what he took. Because he was young, and he didn’t speak Flemish or French, he was left to himself. Afraid of medications and ignorant of their use, he generally avoided them. This was before the time of EPO, when people still cheated in minor chords. On his day, a clean rider could still catch a cheat.

Swart had a natural exuberance in the saddle and when he was going well he loved his job. He finished 13th in the general classification of the Tour de Suisse. In the big mountain stages he was equal to the best. After the finish, he went back to Belgium by car with Bracke. They talked a lot.

‘Bracke was crazy; he couldn’t even drive normally. He was anxious over nothing. Something in him wasn’t working right. During this trip he told me about all the big projects he had for me.’

The best laid plans, etc.

The season ended prematurely for Swart, whose mother became seriously ill and died two weeks after his return to New Zealand. He took a job in a bicycle shop in Auckland, and slowly got back his desire to train. Around the end of the year, he decided to reboot his career in the United States, a place Swart appreciated because the races weren’t as hard there and the sport had a more hip, more middle-class, slightly alternative feel. The doping culture, which was everywhere in Europe, was practically non-existent.

He began riding with a club in California and before long he had won enough races to come to the attention of Jim Ochowicz,
directeur sportif
with the Motorola team. Ochowicz offered him a place on the team and an opportunity to return to the European circuit.

Swart couldn’t resist the temptation. He’d become bored with the States. He was riding with Coors, a decent team, but the landscape was limited: an enthusiastic culture, but the same races every year, and it wasn’t competitive enough. He wasn’t getting any younger and whatever he was winning was being eaten by utility bills. Time to shoot for the moon.

When he got back to Europe he found that things had changed, changed utterly.

‘In 1994, everything was completely changed. The increase in speed was incredible. Especially in the mountains. In 1988, I had been as good as some of the best. On the climbs, I could stay in the top ten. On the 1988 Tour de Suisse, I was at the summit with the Dutchman Gert-Jan Theunisse and Steven Rooks, the best climbers of the Tour de France three weeks later. And now, though I knew I had made progress, I couldn’t keep up.

‘They didn’t use the same gears as before. No one put on the little brackets any more. All that had disappeared in five years. Incredible, the level had gone through the ceiling. I understood pretty fast that I was going to have to face something. I had heard EPO talked about, the word had made its way to the United States. We knew that it doped the blood, increasing the oxygen capacity, but I never thought that it could have changed things so much.