Seven Deadly Sins: My Pursuit of Lance Armstrong (28 page)

Alastair was still nervous about running anything on the hospital room without written assurances from Betsy and Stephanie, and so I left Alex’s office where we were discussing it and set up a conference call with my two sources. I explained to them what I needed. Betsy was willing to write the email but Stephanie was unsure, fearing the consequences of Lance finding out about her complicity in the story.

‘Stephanie, you’ve got to do the right thing,’ Betsy said.

It was a fraught phone call. Stephanie was afraid and upset. Betsy was certain and unwavering. Eventually they agreed to send emails confirming they would stand over what they heard in the hospital room. I was so impressed by both women’s willingness to tell the truth about this incident because they had so much to lose. Without Lance’s goodwill, Stephanie wouldn’t have had a job, while Betsy’s forthright views on Lance had hurt her husband’s career.

I returned to Alex’s office, convinced I’d done enough to make sure we could get the hospital-room incident into our story; but with more time to reflect and no doubt to think more about Schillings’ letter, Alastair had grown more cautious.

‘They will write emails,’ I said.

‘I think we need affidavits from them,’ he said.

‘That’s ridiculous. Now we’re just looking for ways to keep this story out of the paper. These women are being incredibly brave and we’re trying to make it impossible for them.’

‘We’re just trying to protect ourselves,’ Alastair said. ‘We’ve had that letter from Schillings and we pretty much know they are going to sue, so we’ve got to do everything we can.’

Knowing how difficult it had been to get Stephanie to agree to the email, I couldn’t just go back to her now and say we need an affidavit. Instead I turned the flame-thrower on Alastair.

‘Alastair, three weeks ago I was in Paris when we had a meeting to sign off on all the legal issues arising out of all this stuff and we worked with a lawyer there, Thibault de Montbrial, who, from the first moment of the meeting, convinced Pierre Ballester and me that he was on our side. He wanted our story in the public domain and wanted every detail in there. Then he showed us how we could do it. He was inspiring to work with. This is fucking depressing.’

Alastair was upset by my withering put-down and had every right to be. It was grossly unfair because it did not take into account the significant differences between French and English libel law. The French allow journalists who are honestly seeking the truth to do their jobs, but this is not the case in England. Here we had five witnesses – O’Reilly, Swart, Andreu, McIlvain and LeMond – who were all offering direct evidence that linked Armstrong to doping, but somehow it wasn’t enough.

Whatever I brought to this discussion, it wasn’t objectivity. My loyalty was to the people who had gone out on a limb for me, risked much so that Pierre and I could get more of the story out there. In all of the debate that Thursday afternoon and into the early evening, I didn’t get the significance of the Schillings’ letters and how difficult it would be for us to defend a case against a multiple Tour de France winner and cancer icon.

My understanding of the threat wasn’t helped by some simplistic thinking. The previous day the Dutch newspaper
De Telegraaf
repeated comments made by Armstrong about me: ‘Walsh is the worst journalist I know,’ he had said in an earlier interview. ‘There are journalists who are willing to lie, to threaten people and to steal in order to catch me out. All this for a sensational story. Ethics, standards, values, accuracy – these are of no interest to people like Walsh.’

‘So,’ I raged at Alastair, Alex and Alan, ‘he can say that about me and we can’t run the interviews we have done with people who worked with him and rode with him and give a completely different picture of him to the one fed to the public? Where’s the fairness in that? Is there any chance that the
Sunday Times
might support its journalist?’

Over the years I have discovered that anger hasn’t helped me to convince those on the other side of an argument. I didn’t consider that Dutch libel laws are very different to England’s, and Armstrong’s comments about me in
De Telegraaf
were probably not libellous and, anyway, I wasn’t going to sue. Alastair knew Armstrong would sue us regardless of what we printed about him. There was nothing veiled about Schillings’ threat.

I went out and called Betsy and discussed the possibility of getting an affidavit from her, but what was the point? Stephanie wasn’t going to be able to do this. Betsy, of course, was more than willing: ‘I ain’t lying for Lance. I told Frankie that.’ The more Alastair thought about it, the more he felt the 11,000-word piece was unusable without affidavits from both of them. If I had been able to stand back and assess things dispassionately, it would have been obvious to me that the dice were just loaded against us in England.
⁴⁰

Deep in the back of my mind, I knew Alastair was right.

Emma O’Reilly’s recall of all that happened at the US Postal team during her five years was detailed and wholly convincing. You listened to her story and knew she was telling the truth. But Armstrong would say she was lying and he could probably have produced five witnesses from within the team who would claim everything Emma said was a lie. What then?
⁴¹

When I went back in to Alex’s office, Alastair said he had to recommend not running the Armstrong story because of the certainty we would be sued and the likelihood we would lose. Alex couldn’t overrule the lawyer, especially when it was clear to everyone but me that the lawyer was right. They hadn’t any doubts about my evidence and they, too, were certain Armstrong was doping, but their responsibility to the newspaper meant they couldn’t dive headlong into a legal battle they felt we would lose.

I understand that now, but didn’t understand it then. Demoralised, I made the decision to resign.

The morning after you’ve resigned from a job you didn’t want to leave isn’t going to be the brightest of your life.

Alan English thought it wrong that I should leave the newspaper this way and wanted to find some way to undo it. He reckoned the position I’d taken meant it would be difficult for me to come back, even if the newspaper wanted me, if nothing about Armstrong appeared in that week’s paper. He spoke to Alex and asked if he could look at the 11,000-word piece I’d originally submitted to see if he could take it and distil a piece that Alastair would pass.

Alex told him to go ahead and then sent me an email saying that the newspaper was seeing if there was a way out of this and to hold off in relation to the resignation. Though still feeling incredibly low, I was happy to do that. I didn’t want to work for any other newspaper.

Paul Kimmage had joined the
Sunday Times
two years before and that weekend he was in Florida on a golf story. When told I had resigned, he felt he too would resign because he knew how much I’d put into the Armstrong story and he was almost as keen as I was to see it in the newspaper. It wouldn’t come to this, as Alan wrote a story that contained many of the allegations in the book and made a strong case for the need to ask questions of Armstrong. Alan’s piece had the balance that my piece lacked, although it didn’t have a few of the most serious charges against Armstrong.

Mindful of how Britain’s libel laws work, Alan quoted Lord Justice Brooke’s recently expressed view that the media are the general public’s eyes and ears. ‘In a free society,’ he said, ‘fearless reporting has often exposed information which it has been in the public interest to expose.’ It definitely was in the public’s interest to know there were good reasons for suspecting Lance Armstrong was not who he said he was.

In his piece, Alan also argued that with lawyers charging a £400 hourly rate, newspapers could be held to ransom by those with the financial wherewithal to do so. The
Sunday Times
knew Armstrong had the means to commit to this battle and that the further it progressed, the more our libel laws would serve his interests.

In the piece Alan refuted the suggestion, made by Schillings in their letter, that I had a vendetta against their client. He insisted my opposition was to the cancer of drugs in sport and that was true. I had written about doping in athletics, doping at the Olympics, Ben Johnson, Linford Christie, Michelle Smith and Stephen Roche, and he reminded readers that young cyclists were dying because of doping.

In a two-month period at the turn of the year, the ’98 Tour de France winner Marco Pantani had died, so too his contemporary the great Spanish climber José Maria Jiménez, and also the 21-year-old Belgian Johan Sermon. Here, Alan was attempting to reflect my concern for cycling’s deep-rooted culture of doping, and he was pleased the piece was passed with few changes by Alastair, Alex and the editor John Witherow.

They knew Armstrong had his finger on the trigger but they weren’t ducking for cover.

At around five o’clock on the Saturday evening, an hour or so before deadline, Alan emailed me the piece. I told him I didn’t think much of it, feeling that it hadn’t gone far enough and had left out too much of the most damning evidence. It was a thoughtless and classless response to a friend and colleague who had done so much for me. Alan was furious but, still seeing myself as the victim, I never even saw that.

Alan’s piece would cost the
Sunday Times
£600,000: £300,000 as a contribution to Armstrong’s legal fees and £300,000 to cover its own legal expenses.
⁴²

Two years were spent fighting the case, reams of evidence were gathered, many witnesses pledged to come and testify on our behalf, but after a ruling decreed that the meaning of the article was that Armstrong doped, and that to win the case the
Sunday Times
would have to prove that he doped, the game was up. How do you prove a rider has doped? We were supposed to wait for him to test positive. British libel law wanted to make cheerleaders of us all.

Tim Herman, Armstrong’s long-time lawyer from Texas, came to London to finalise the settlement with the
Sunday Times
’ then managing editor Richard Caseby. It was civilised and Richard recalls Tim saying they were never going to allow the case to go to court. Something about Lance one day going into politics and a court case about doping not being that helpful.
⁴³

In France, Armstrong sued the publishers of the book La Martinière, the authors, and
L’Express
magazine who published extracts. After lodging the complaint in France, Armstrong had three months to press ahead with the case. Shortly before the three-month deadline passed, the case was dropped. His climbdown was hardly noticed.

In America, Armstrong showed how masterful he had become at dealing with doping allegations. By now there was a pattern: every six or nine months brought a new wave of allegations, but he spun this to his advantage. ‘This is not the first time I’ve lived through this,’ he said. ‘Every time, we’ve chosen to sit back and let it pass. But we’ve sort of reached a point where we really can’t tolerate it any more and we’re sick and tired of these allegations and we’re going to do everything we can to fight them. They’re absolutely untrue.

‘Enough is enough. We don’t use doping products and we will sue those who suggest we do.’

Judith McHale, president of Discovery Communications, the company that had committed millions of dollars to Armstrong and the team, was reassured. ‘Lance is a role model known for determination, integrity and a spirit that never gives up. There is no better ambassador for quality and trusted information.’

In England, the fall-out was very different. Emma O’Reilly felt the strain more than anyone else. She was exposed. She’d come from Tallaght, brought the resilience of the area with her, but you couldn’t be prepared for this: running her own business, living in England with a good man who was dealing with multiple sclerosis, and, when the door bell rings, it is a policeman who wants to serve you with a subpoena. And not just one.

In the run-up to publication of
L.A. Confidentiel
, Marc Grinsztajn, a slight, engaging and clever man who worked for our publishers, had said to me a couple of times to look out for Emma in the aftermath. Of all of us she would be the one most vulnerable. I nodded but didn’t see it.

Her interview with me had come to just under 40,000 words of transcription. I’d gone back to her and asked her to check through all of it again, which she did assiduously. I’d edited them down, asked her once more. I’d produced about 25,000 words of Emma-related copy and gone back a third time to ask her to confirm she was happy with it. All this and a stream of calls confirming things which weren’t clear to me, or looking for a steer here, or new information there.

When we had first met I had spoken to her about her input in terms of the book being a chorus of voices who would be speaking out at once. As it turned out, she was becoming the star attraction and everybody else was on backing vocals. Pierre and I were almost made of Teflon by this stage: none of the comments or abuse hurled at us ever stuck. But Emma was doing so much of the work and taking so much of the risk.

In the end Pierre and I spoke and agreed we would each contribute 2500 Euros in order to give Emma a modest sum for about five weeks of evening-and weekend-work on the book. It wasn’t a payment. It was a small thank you.

I volunteered this information to Joe Lindsey during an interview for
Outside
magazine in the US and, unsurprisingly, this was used to single out Emma again and make her a target. In retrospect she had been vulnerable right from the start. When Lance held his press conference in Maryland in June 2004 to launch the Discovery sponsorship it was Emma he personally attacked.

Armstrong was by nature a straight-talker but, when necessary, he could do slyness too. ‘It’s not going to be my way to speak badly of her,’ he said of Emma, at the Discovery Communications press conference, and then did just that, ‘but there were issues, within the team management, within the riders, and she was let go.’ He didn’t specify what the issues were, just let it hang out and the darker your imagination, the more he had succeeded.