Seven Deadly Sins: My Pursuit of Lance Armstrong (32 page)

That August
L’Équipe
journalist Damien Ressiot wrote a piece that was the culmination of an extraordinary investigation into the re-testing of urine samples from the 1999 Tour which showed Armstrong had used EPO when winning his first Tour that year. Central to the brilliance of the story was Ressiot’s cleverness in getting the UCI to hand over the rider’s doping-control forms so that Ressiot could check laboratory numbers against numbers on Armstrong’s forms.

In the end Armstrong himself gave the go-ahead to the UCI to release the forms to Ressiot because the journalist had suggested he was investigating the rider’s use of TUEs (Therapeutic Use Exemptions). Armstrong hadn’t used TUEs in 1999, and thought the story would reflect well on him. With Lance’s doping forms, Ressiot’s job was then straightforward: compare the numbers on those forms to the numbers on the lab’s ‘positives’. There were six correlations.

LE MENSONGE ARMSTRONG
, [The Armstrong Lie] was the giant headline on
L’Équipe
’s front page, and the story proved beyond doubt that six of the ‘positives’ discovered in the retro-testing of 1999 samples belonged to Armstrong. Ressiot’s determination to investigate the seven-time Tour winner stemmed from disgust at the bullying of the Italian rider Filippo Simeoni in the third to last stage of the 2004 Tour. Simeoni had testified against Michele Ferrari in an Italian doping trial and that made him Lance’s enemy. So when he tried to join a breakaway group in that third to last stage, Lance personally chased him down and told the other escapees they wouldn’t get any leeway if Simeoni was one of their number.

But the catch was that the retrospective testing had been carried out for research purposes and the results could not be used to instigate a disciplinary action against Armstrong. Knowing he couldn’t be charged on the basis of these positives, Armstrong confidently dismissed the allegations, saying it was likely the samples had been spiked. He believed it was a French witch hunt and suggested it reflected the anti-US feeling that existed in France at the time.

This wasn’t an intelligent explanation because there was no way for the French laboratory to spike numbered samples and know they belonged to Armstrong; Ressiot knew they were his only because Lance had given him the reference numbers. The UCI set up an ‘independent commission’ under its chosen investigator Emile Vrijman, a Dutch lawyer and a friend of Hein Verbruggen’s. When Vrijman delivered his report, the World Anti-Doping Agency dismissed it as unprofessional and lacking impartiality: ‘Mr Vrijman’s report is fallacious in many aspects and misleading.’

Though Armstrong survived the Ressiot story, it was a watershed moment because it established he had used EPO in 1999. It was easy to argue that the rules couldn’t allow research testing to be the basis for a case against Armstrong, but there could be no disputing that Ressiot had demonstrated the rider cheated. Including the front page, six pages of that day’s
L’Équipe
were given over to the story.

Ressiot is a journalist in the mould of Pierre: he now works the doping beat at
L’Équipe
, as Pierre had once done. ‘What I can’t stand is the deceit,’ he says. ‘We sell stories of extraordinary achievement but when we learn they are not that, we don’t like to take them back. I feel I have done my job as a journalist [in producing the Armstrong story], and as a profession we need to stop building dreams on false premises.’

Many of the journalists who had been on Armstrong’s side were glad to see the back of him in 2005 because it had grown harder to write about him. What more was there to say? His leaving the sport seemed an opportunity for me to let go of the story, but that wasn’t possible. It kept coming back. Journalists wanting to do some more excavation on the Armstrong site, saw me as someone who could help.

Joe Lindsey came from Colorado to our house to do a piece for
Outside
magazine and wrote a balanced account of the case for and against Armstrong. Around the same time, Dan Coyle came to Cambridge and we spoke for hours in a small restaurant.
⁴⁹
He was writing
Lance Armstrong’s War
, his book on his year embedded with the US Postal team. As with Joe, Dan wrote fairly of the work I had done on the Armstrong story.

In the course of the interview, Dan asked about John and the impact of his loss on our family. I’ve never needed much encouragement to speak of our eldest son and off I went, recalling memories of a great kid and telling stories I love to tell. It is a tragedy that John’s life lasted just twelve years and eight months, but he gave us so much in that time. At John’s funeral my old boss at the
Sunday Tribune
, Vincent Browne, gently promised that time would help us all to cope with John’s loss and get on with the rest of our lives. At the time, it didn’t seem so simple. ‘We will get on with the rest of our lives,’ I said, ‘but they will be lesser lives.’

That is as true now as it seemed then. So many times I’ve thought of what John would have brought to our lives: the laughs, the tears, the celebrations, the arguments, the matches that we haven’t watched together. I remember too that, a few days after his accident, Emily came running into the kitchen with a joyous smile on her face, and though Mary and I were in a pit of grief we couldn’t remain there.

Without Kate, Simon, Daniel, Emily, Conor and, two years later, Molly, it would have been so much tougher.

In the interview with Dan, I said I’d loved John more than any person I’d ever known. That’s how it seemed at the time, but Emily says that in the same circumstances I would have said the same about any of the others. That is probably the case. Towards the end of the interview with Dan, I said that one of John’s legacies to me was to have the courage to stand up to things, to ask difficult questions and not to go with the flow even if that allows you to float along. ‘If I carry a little of that with me, then I’m pleased about that,’ I said.

In the final chapter of his book, Dan describes taking a draft of his book to Armstrong who, he has agreed, can see it before it goes to the publishers. Without any prompting, Armstrong brings me up. ‘Don’t call him the award-winning world-renowned respected guy.’ In an effort, presumably, to appeal to Armstrong’s human side, Dan said that I seemed motivated, at least in part, by John’s memory. Dan mentioned that John was my favourite, which was true only in the sense that he is my all-time favourite human being.

That mention of John unhinged Armstrong. This is how Dan described it:

Armstrong’s eyes narrow. He cracks his knuckles, one by one.

‘How could he have a favourite son? That guy’s a scumbag. I’m a father of three . . . to say “my favourite son”, that’s fucked, I’m sorry. I just hate the guy. He’s a little troll.’

His voice rises. I try to change the subject, but it’s too late. He’s going.

‘Fucking Walsh,’ he says. ‘Fucking little troll.’

I’m sitting on the couch watching, but it’s as if I’m not there. His voice echoes off the stone walls – troll, casting his spell on people, liar – and the words blur together into a single sound, and I find myself wishing he would stop.

You won, I want to tell him. You won everything.

But he won’t stop; he can’t stop, and I’m realising that maybe this has nothing to do with Walsh, or with guilt or innocence or ego or power or money. This isn’t a game or a sport. It’s a fight, and it can never end, because when Armstrong stops fighting he’ll stop living.

A birdlike trill slices the air; Armstrong’s eyes dart to his phone. The spell is broken.

‘Listen, here’s where I go,’ Armstrong says after putting down the phone. ‘I’ve won six tours. I’ve done everything I ever could do to prove my innocence. I have done, outside of cycling, way more than anyone in the sport. To be somebody who’s spread himself out over a lot of areas, to hopefully be somebody who people in this city, in this state, in this country, this world can look up to as an example. And you know what? They don’t even know who David Walsh is. And they never will. And in twenty years, nobody is going to remember him. Nobody. And there are a million cancer patients and survivors around the world, and that’s what matters.’

All the stuff about me being a troll and him being a messiah, that’s water off a duck’s back. But it hurt that he dared to speak of my relationship with John in the terms that he did. Only Lance Armstrong would have said such a thing.

In the end, I just let it go. His time for tears would come. What’s meant to be always finds a way.

17

‘In a time of universal deceit – telling the truth is a revolutionary act.’

George Orwell

L.A. Confidentiel
turned Pierre and me into the Serge Gainsbourg and Jane Birkin of cycling journalism. Our output scandalised English-speaking people everywhere but we went over big in France, and its pages were as toxic as
The Satanic Verses
to the church of Lance fundamentalists.
⁵⁰
Few had read it but many denounced it. Sufficient unto the day was the outrage thereof.

Sufficient. And then some.

Like a stone dropped into a lake the book caused ripples which eventually reached all the way to the shore. Lance Armstrong would wind up in the boardroom of his lawyer’s Dallas office with a video camera trained on him and a stenographer poised as he prepared to be deposed under oath. Many of us involved in the case of the book would wind up in similar rooms.

It all started with a punt. Bob Hamman was once the Lionel Messi of bridge. The Michael Jordan. The Babe Ruth. He won twelve world championships but famously lost one in Bermuda to a pair of Italians who he reckoned had cheated him. He was a tough man to begin with, but being cheated brought out the Joe Pesci in him.
You think I’m funny, funny how?

Bridge has a sedate, dusty image but Bob Hamman learned the game by playing for money. He was an excellent chess player, a fine poker and backgammon player, but in the end he was drawn to the complexity of bridge. He is a big, broad and burly man with a crown of grey hair on a glorious head.

In 1986 Bob Hamman set up a company called SCA Promotions. SCA stands for Sports Contests Associates. It was a business venture premised on Bob’s greatest talent. He could calculate the odds on virtually anything. Bob has a bookie’s brain and SCA, in essence, was a bookie’s business with a respectable front office. The big idea? The underwriting of the risk involved in special events and promotions by other companies.

So a company sponsors the blindfold half-court overhead-throw event for audience members at an NBA game. They don’t think anybody will actually sink a shot and claim the million-buck prize, but just in case somebody gets lucky they insure themselves with SCA. For a premium SCA carries the risk.

And they will carry almost any risk. Once when NASA was putting two Rover vehicles on Mars, a company called Long John Silver approached SCA. If NASA found an ocean on Mars they wanted to give free shrimp to everybody in America. Bob came to an agreement that an ocean on Mars would have to cover the same proportion of the planet’s surface as the smallest ocean on earth (the Arctic) covers.

Nothing was found. Bob didn’t have to pay for a nation’s shrimp.

As big ideas go it is a good one and SCA has become the world leader in guaranteeing prizes and bonuses. It seemed like grist to the very profitable mill then when Kelly Price, an insurance broker with a company called Entertainment and Sports Insurance Experts, contacted SCA in the winter of 2000.

The deal he proposed involved SCA taking on some of the risk which was at that time being carried by Tailwind Sports,
⁵¹
the owners of the US Postal team. Tailwind had been both pleased and alarmed at the prospect of Armstrong going on to record a long sequence of Tour de France victories. Pleased because that was why they had a cycling team in the first place. Alarmed because such success was going to cost them a fortune.

So Tailwind were asking SCA to give them a quote on a deal they had come up with which would give Armstrong $1.5 million if he won in 2001 and 2002, a further $3 million if he went on to win in 2003 and then a final $5 million payment if he rolled on into the history books with a sixth successive Tour in 2004.

The SCA underwriter who dealt with the query was Chris Hamman, a son of Bob. Chris didn’t much like the idea, but his father was one of life’s natural dealmakers and when he took the notion to Bob he saw things differently. It was odds. Risk. Two hundred riders each year. And the same guy was going to keep on winning? Cancer guy? Bob gave the thumbs-up. In January 2001 a contract was drawn up. For a premium of $420, 000 SCA would agree to pay Lance Armstrong staggered payments amounting to $9.5 million if he could win every Tour from 2001 to 2004.

After the Tours of 2002 and 2003 SCA promptly sent out the cheques to Tailwind Sports who passed the $1.5 million and $3 million cheques on to Lance Armstrong with a smile.

And then
L.A. Confidentiel
appeared. Having allowed the book to play such a large part in our lives over the previous two years, Pierre and I were delighted by sales but disappointed by how little influence the book had. All the evidence seemed to us to emphatically say something was very wrong here. We hadn’t counted on the media’s enduring love of an easy good news story (which Lance was) and on Lance’s ability to intimidate and denigrate anybody outside his tent.

Perhaps we should have seen all that coming, but we could never have guessed that somewhere in America, a company called SCA would have a slightly unconventional lawyer by the name of John Bandy who had spent six years of his life living in France and some of those years studying at l’Université de Paris, La Sorbonne. John Bandy had fluent French and he picked up a copy of
L.A. Confidentiel
out of personal curiosity and professional duty. He read it, tapped out his own translation and paused. Hey,
attendez un peu
.