Seven Deadly Sins: My Pursuit of Lance Armstrong (27 page)

It was Pierre’s quiet excavations which uncovered what for me is still one of the mysteries of Lance: a letter from Alain Bondue of the Cofidis team to Bill Stapleton with a copy to François Migraine, head of Cofidis. The letter is dated 22 April 1997:

I must inform you that during his period of training in January [at Marcq-en-Barœul], Lance was in Italy to see Dr Ferrari, and that Cofidis made the reservation and paid for his airfare, although the trip was considered a personal trip that had not been decided by Cofidis.

This still strikes me as extraordinary. The Cofidis press conference to launch the team for the year took place on 8 January. The team then went to Marcq-en-Barœul to train. Armstrong was just three weeks over his last chemotherapy session. He was not expected to work with the team, who were indeed flabbergasted to see him turn up for the press launch.

Ferrari, as we know, received no mention in Lance’s autobiography, yet even before he was given the all clear from cancer (February 1997), Lance was going out of his way to spend time in Ferrara. At the time Dr Craig Nichols, his physician in Indiana, was firmly on the record as saying that it was at that point unclear as to whether Lance would be able to resume a career as a professional cyclist.

What was in his head? What decisions had he made?

Someday I hope he tells us about all these things.

14

‘Litigation: A machine which you go into as a pig and come out of as a sausage.’

Ambrose Bierce

I walked out of my boss’s office knowing what I had to do. Alan English, the deputy sports editor, was seated at a desk to the left.

‘Alan, I’m leaving the
Sunday Times
. I don’t have an option.’

I had been at the paper for more than eight years and had been chief sports writer for the previous three. Something the footballer Teddy Sheringham once said about Manchester United reflected how I felt about the
Sunday Times
. ‘When you leave United,’ Sheringham said, ‘you accept that where you’re going won’t be as good.’

I felt nothing but intense sadness. Eight years and then at the very moment when
L.A. Confidentiel
,
les Secrets de Lance Armstrong
, is about to appear on book shelves all over France, I am leaving a job and a newspaper that I love.

Alan could see how I felt. ‘I’ll walk with you to the car.’

We went in silence.

‘Think about it,’ he said, as I got in the car.

‘I have. I don’t have a choice.’

It was a Thursday evening, a little after seven o’clock and London’s rush hour had passed. Knowing what was going on, I was in no rush to get home.

The more I thought about it, the worse it seemed. Emma O’Reilly, Betsy Andreu and Stephen Swart were putting their necks on the line for me and now, when I needed the newspaper’s support, I didn’t feel I had it. Anger passed, replaced by sadness and a sense of hopelessness. I dialled Alex’s number.

‘I don’t think we need to fall out over this but I’m resigning from the paper.’

‘I’m sorry you’re doing that,’ he said. I could tell he felt let down by me.

‘I’ll send you an email when I get home confirming it.’

‘Okay.’

I rang Betsy.

‘I’ve resigned from the
Sunday Times
,’ I said.

‘Oh my God, are you kidding?’

‘No. It’s true.’

‘What are you gonna do?’

‘I’m not sure. Hopefully, there will be options.’

‘I cannot believe this. This is crazy. No wonder we broke away from the British, with the stoopid libel laws you got.’

At home I wrote a short email to Alex, confirming the resignation. Telling Mary wasn’t the easiest bit, but she could see the sadness and tried not to think about the consequences. ‘If that’s what you think you had to do, then you didn’t have a choice.’

It should have been one of the better weeks of my working life.

L.A. Confidentiel
was the product of two years’ work; of finding sources, earning their trust, reassuring them, and then convincing them to allow their stories into the light. With our book in draft form, I had sent emails to Lance Armstrong and Johan Bruyneel asking questions that gave them the opportunity to address many of the allegations contained in our book. I sent eleven questions to Bruyneel; eight to Lance.

Question to Bruyneel:

According to several sources, some US Postal riders are known to use doping products. What can you say about this?

Did you ever transport doping products? Did you ever ask any US Postal staff member to do so?

The questions for Lance weren’t any less explicit:

I have heard you once admitted using performance-enhancing drugs to your cancer doctors?

Witnesses claim they saw needle marks high up on your arm. What do you say about this?

These questions were sent in late May 2004, about three weeks before printing presses would begin churning out copies of
L.A. Confidentiel
. We had enough time to include responses from Armstrong and Bruyneel in the book but not enough to allow them to launch some form of legal offensive that could have delayed publication. The emails deliberately did not mention whether I was writing a newspaper article or a book, merely that I had been researching the team and needed some answers. An alarm was triggered inside Lance’s world, caused no doubt by the aggressiveness of the questions.

His response was delivered through the London law firm Schillings in a letter addressed to me and faxed to the
Sunday Times
on Tuesday 8 June. They guessed we were planning to run a piece in the newspaper about Armstrong and now it was over to Schillings, representing the team’s owner Tailwind Sports llc, Lance Armstrong and Johan Bruyneel. Schillings’ first letter was short, just to say they anticipated sending a fuller response the following day. ‘In the meantime, please note our interest in this matter.’

On that same day, a meeting was taking place in the sports department of the newspaper attended by sports editor Alex Butler, Alan English, the
Sunday Times
lawyer Alastair Brett and myself. They wanted to know the most convincing evidence in the book. I went through it:

Emma O’Reilly:
former head
soigneur
at US Postal and Armstrong’s masseuse in 1998 and ’99, who had given me an explosively frank account of her five years in the team. She dumped Lance’s used syringes, went on a ‘drug run’ to Spain, applied some women’s concealer to hide the needle marks on his arm, witnessed the cover-up of his positive test at the Tour de France, and picked up testosterone for another Postal rider. I had done a taped interview with Emma.

Stephen Swart:
former teammate of Armstrong at Motorola in 1994 and ’95. He says the team decided to use EPO in 1995 and that Armstrong was a strong advocate for the team resorting to banned products. Swart admits he used the drug for ’95 Tour de France and did so because it was a team decision.

Betsy Andreu:
she told me she heard Armstrong tell his doctors at Indiana hospital in October 1996 that he used performance-enhancing drugs before his cancer. Another witness in that room, Stephanie McIlvain, confirmed that she too had heard this. Because Betsy’s husband worked in cycling and Stephanie worked for Armstrong’s sponsor, Oakley, they didn’t want to openly say they heard it but they would testify under oath to having heard it if there was a need.

Greg LeMond:
LeMond and his wife Kathy had told me about an incriminating conversation between Greg and Lance after the 2001 Tour de France when, according to Greg, Lance said he could get ten witnesses to say he, LeMond, had used EPO and that ‘everyone used EPO’.

Since I had first raised questions about Armstrong, the challenge had been to get people who knew things on the record. Alex was cautiously excited by the possibilities, Alan was very excited, while Alastair was nervous but appreciative of the fact that much new evidence against Armstrong had been uncovered. I was asked to go away and put together a long extract that could be broken into ten or twelve different stories, as the plan was to run four pages of Armstrong/US Postal material in the Sunday Times.

The material ran to 11,000 words and, for me, this was the moment to say, ‘This is our case against Lance Armstrong; how do you feel about him in the light of this evidence?’ I was proud of the book but frustrated that it would be printed only in French. All of my sources for the book were from the English-speaking world and I saw the four-page report in the
Sunday Times
as the right platform for their stories.

On the Thursday, three days before publication, I turned up with my 11,000-word extract from
L.A. Confidentiel
, feeling the nervous excitement journalists feel when there’s a potentially explosive story sitting inside their laptops. Before me, a courier had arrived at the security office of the
Sunday Times
on Pennington Street in Wapping. His letter, marked ‘Private and Confidential’, was addressed to me and from my friends at Schillings. This was their ‘response’ to the expectation that we were planning to run a piece about their clients, Armstrong and Bruyneel, on Sunday.

Their clients had passed on the questions I had emailed to them. According to Schillings, the allegations implicit in the emails were false, highly defamatory and extremely damaging. They concluded from the emails that I believed Armstrong and US Postal had achieved their success through cheating, in particular by the use of performance-enhancing drugs. They wanted me to understand that it would be highly improper to publish false and very serious allegations concerning their clients.

And if the allegations were published, ‘our clients’ would have no alternative than to resort to law.

In other words, print and be sued.

One of the consequences of being consumed by a story like this is that it detaches you from mainstream society and takes you into a smaller world where only your sources and your desire to expose the wrongdoers matter. I saw Schillings as the legal wing of an operation well versed in intimidation. For the previous five years I’d experienced, firsthand, the many ways the Armstrong machine tried to discourage accusers and doubters. This threatening letter was just the latest example.

Alastair, the company lawyer, didn’t see it quite like this.

We discussed the story and what could be done to firm it up. Alastair wanted me to get emails from Betsy and Stephanie McIlvain confirming they would stand over the hospital-room confession in the likelihood of a lawsuit. ‘Okay,’ I said, ‘I’ll call them.’

Stephanie McIlvain’s situation was extremely difficult. She and Lance went way back, and though their friendship ebbed and flowed, her job with Oakley depended upon her having a good relationship with him, which she managed to do most of the time. Her husband, Pat, was a vice-president of global marketing for Oakley, and, between them, the McIlvains had much to lose if ever they fell out with Lance.

After Stephanie met Betsy in the Indiana hospital room in 1996, they became friends. Through Betsy, I got to know Stephanie. During the early months of 2004, I began calling her and we spoke many times. She was a keen runner and we would talk about how far she’d run and her pace and, of course, we spoke about Lance. In the beginning, before the ‘Inc’ would be tagged onto the end of his name, she and Lance were close and she recalled how he had consulted with her about his choice of agent. There were some big players pitching for the business but she suggested he go with the Austin-based lawyer Bill Stapleton, and she was pleased he did.

We spoke too about the hospital-room admission and she told me she had heard it but, given her position and her husband’s position with Oakley, she couldn’t publicly say that. She and Betsy spoke all the time and both were in that position of not wanting to lie about it and not being able to tell the truth. For the purpose of telling about the hospital-room admission in
L.A. Confidentiel
, we agreed a compromise that would make it clear Lance did admit to using banned drugs without the two women having to say he did.

So, in the book, the hospital-room scene was described, the visitors listed, and I then question Betsy about it:

‘Were you there when Lance admitted to his doctors that he used banned performance-enhancing drugs?’

‘I’ve nothing to say on that. It’s a question more for Lance than me.’

‘But did you hear him say he used performance-enhancing drugs?’

‘I’ve told you. I’ve nothing to say on that subject.’

‘If you never heard him say this, just say so.’

‘I’ve got no comment.’

This routine was repeated with Stephanie:

‘Were you in the room that day?’

‘Yes, I was there.’

‘Did you hear him tell his doctors he used performance-enhancing drugs?’

‘I am sorry, I have nothing to say on this subject. It is a question for Lance. I have nothing to say.’

‘But listen, just say yes or no. Did he say he used performance-enhancing drugs?’

‘Sorry, no comment. If you have any questions that need to be answered, you must put them to Lance.’

Betsy, Stephanie and I believed that no one could miss the significance of these conversations. They admit they were in the room and all they’ve got to say is, ‘I never heard him say that,’ but they refuse, leaving readers to believe they did hear it but were afraid to admit it. Both women reassured me they would not lie under oath about the admission. Betsy also said that her husband Frankie, who was also present, would not lie under oath about it.