Bad Blood

by Jeremy Whittle

  ‘Upper limits generate aberrant beliefs in athletes: doping is no longer taking rEPO but instead having haematocrit levels greater than the upper limit. Abusing rEPO and having haematocrit values below fifty per cent is felt by some athletes to be fully normal behaviour.’

  For Cazzola, blood doping is ‘a betrayal of the Hippocratic oath for the physicians who are involved in it. Sport is intended to improve people’s health – doping worsens it.’ But as the money kept coming in and the Tour’s global audience grew, nobody in cycling seemed to be listening.

  THE BOTTOM LINE

  AUGUST 1993, LEEDS, Yorkshire. Nearly six months after shattering my knee in Battersea.

  My big break. The Leeds Hilton hotel. My first interview, my first ‘sold’ story. I hobbled through the lobby.

  ‘I am here to see Lance Armstrong,’ I announced grandly to the receptionist, leaning on my stick. Her expression was blank.

  ‘Who?’ she said.

  ‘Armstrong, Lance Armstrong. He’s a cyclist – the Motorola team. Can you, erm, give me his room number … please?’

  This was my first mistake.

  You don’t prowl the hotel corridors, you wait in reception. You don’t knock, uninvited, on a professional cyclist’s bedroom door. You don’t disturb their afternoon nap after a hard morning’s training.

  But, back then, I didn’t know that. I went up in the lift. I prowled the corridors, hobbling through the shadows until I found the right door. I took a deep breath, and knocked once, firmly.

  No response. I knocked again, harder. And that was how I woke him up. The door was snatched open.

  There he stood, all Texan testosterone. Jaw jutting, barrel-chested, frowning, narrowed eyes, clad in white T-shirt and jogging pants, unsmiling – pissed at me already. And I hadn’t even opened my mouth.

  I stammered through an introduction. He stared at me.

  ‘Yeah …?’ he growled. ‘I’m sleeping. Wait downstairs …’ And the door slammed shut before I could apologise.

  I hobbled back through the shadows to the lift, muttering, ‘Idiot. Git. Blown it, blown it – first chance and you’ve blown it.’ I sat in the lobby, despondent, wondering whether it was actually worth waiting, checking my watch and the Leeds to London train times, over and over.

  An hour or so later, he strolled out of the lift, chewing gum, wearing a baseball cap, clutching his phone. He even smiled when we shook hands. Everything I’d read about him said he was brash, outspoken, arrogant; very much from the wrong side of the tracks. But it was the softer, more charming Lance who I met that day.

  We sat down and talked for about forty-five minutes. He listened thoughtfully to each question. He was dry, funny and sharp. This, in brief, is what he said.

  ‘I don’t study cycling, like some people study art.’

  ‘I don’t like Europe at all. I really miss the States. When I go home to Italy, life sucks. I miss Texas.’

  ‘I’m not frightened of anybody or their reputations. I grew up on the ropes and I don’t have to take anything from anyone. I don’t like being told what to do …’

  ‘People always think Texans are tough, but there are a lot of wimpy Texans too – it’s a big place …’

  ‘I don’t let the media pressure or the fans’ expectations get to me – I mean we’re not U2 and I’m not Bono!’

  ‘Last year in the Tour, I found the Alps just incredibly difficult, harder than I’d expected. After that I realised that it will take me a while to become a Tour contender.’

  And …

  ‘The bottom line is that I expect to win.’

  I thanked him and former British professional Paul Sherwen, then working as Motorola’s PR officer. We stood up and shook hands. A photographer took Lance outside to pose for pictures with his bike.

  ‘How do you like your bike to be set up?’ asked a journalist.

  ‘Man – I just get on it and ride,’ Lance said. We all laughed.

  Two weeks later, arrogantly, brashly, decisively, Lance won the World Championship road race in Oslo. By a street.

  ‘The bottom line is that I expect to win.’

  JEEPS AND SHOTGUNS

  NOVEMBER 1996. THREE years on from the Leeds Hilton.

  The taxi swept me away from the airport terminal, picked up speed and joined the freeway heading downtown.

  Flatbeds, limousines and jeeps slid past, bumper to bumper, in the outside lane. Alongside the slab of elevated road, football stadiums towered over shopping malls and parking lots.

  Through the cab’s windscreen I saw shotguns stacked against the rear windows of passing trucks, and read bumper stickers with the ominous warning: ‘Don’t Mess With Texas’.

  This was Austin, Texas. Lance Armstrong’s home town.

  I checked in to the motel, dropped my bags on the bed, downed a bottle of water, and thumbed through my contact book. Lance in Como, Lance in Santa Barbara, Lance in Nice, Lance in Austin, and finally, Lance at Bill’s – his agent Bill Stapleton’s office. I called the number and scribbled down the address they gave me. I would have to wait. Then I took a shower, switched on the TV, shut my eyes and slept.

  Across town, off another exit from another freeway, somewhere on the edge of the Texas hill country, and very much on the right side of the tracks, Lance Armstrong, pale, bald and scarred, was moving slowly through his luxury home on a gated estate. He had been diagnosed with testicular cancer and had undergone surgery and chemotherapy. He’d agreed to be interviewed. At the time, he had seen only a few journalists, mostly American. French sports paper L’Equipe, later to become his nemesis, had already been and gone. I was the only other European presence.

  The last time I had seen him had been that summer, first at the Tour de France and then, in August, at the start of the San Sebastian Classic in northern Spain. He’d quit the Tour with a shrug and a wry grin, as a dark thunderstorm swept over Aixles-Bains. The news broke over race radio as we arrived at the press room. I turned the car around and headed across country to his team’s hotel, anxious to find out what was wrong.

  I parked up and waited until he arrived. Eventually a Motorola team car swept up to the front door and he hopped out. I walked with him to his room. After he had showered and changed out of his racing kit, we chatted.

  ‘So what happened?’ I asked.

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said with a troubled frown. ‘I just feel … blocked.’

  In Spain, a couple of weeks later, we had talked again. He seemed unsure of himself, and kept his eyes hidden behind his Oakley shades. Something was still wrong – that ‘blocked’ feeling – but he didn’t know what was causing it.

  The phone rang, waking me from my jet lag.

  Lance would see me at the house on Lake Austin the next morning, but they told me to go easy on him and make sure I didn’t wear him out. ‘If he looks tired, Jeremy, then you gotta stop the interview.’

  Another grey and humid Texan morning. Another taxi, another freeway exit and then we were driving down suburban streets of clapboarded wraparounds with beaten-up trucks parked in scrappy front yards. Under the oppressive sky, dogs on chains sat morosely under porches.

  Then, just as quickly, we were out of town, heading towards the shores of Lake Austin through rolling hills and scrubland.

  We skirted a hillside overlooking the lake, and slowed at the entrance to a gated community of modernist houses backing onto the water’s edge. Sports cars and jeeps dotted the sweeping driveways. Jet skis growled across the lake in the distance.

  I didn’t know what to expect. My memories of Lance Armstrong were of a powerhouse jock of an athlete, aggressive, raging, fuelled by intense competitive desire and a quick wit. I rang the bell and waited.

  After an age, he came unsteadily to the door, shrunken, slow, washed out, a baseball cap hiding his hair loss.

  He was twenty-five, but he moved like an old man. I was so stunned at his decline that I remember that, yes – I very nearly hugged him. I didn’t, which given ev
erything that has happened since, may have been for the best. But an arm instinctively went around his shoulder. He registered the shock on my face, straightened himself and smiled.

  He walked back into his kitchen and made coffee. Then, for the next hour or so, we sat in his airy lounge with its panoramic views across the lake and high white walls dotted with tasteful contemporary art, talking about cancer. As ever, he was a deceptive interviewee. He can appear relaxed and calm, receptive and open, but every now and then a gesture or a look betrays the tension simmering just below the surface.

  He told me about his treatment, about his fear of death, about his hopes for recovery and, with luck, even for a successful comeback.

  ‘I ride for about an hour to an hour and a half as often as I can,’ he said. ‘But I have to sleep a lot each day. Life’s normal apart from sometimes feeling drowsy – and having no hair. But I can take it. As long as I’m alive, that’s what matters.’

  Cancer, he said, had chosen him.

  ‘Was there anything in your background, your past, to make you susceptible to it?’ I asked.

  He narrowed his eyes and gave me a stare that was later to become known as ‘The Look’.

  ‘A couple of other people have said that and it pisses me off,’ he growled. What did he mean? I was baffled.

  ‘Well, erm, I meant in your family history – your mother, your father – if there was any hereditary reason …’ His face relaxed. It was the only wrong note of the meeting.

  Only later, when I read that connections had been made by some between testicular cancer and doping, did I understand his response. But I remained baffled – did he really think that I had flown halfway across the world to make a ham-fisted accusation of doping-induced cancer, even as he endured full-blown chemotherapy?

  Kevin, the photographer, finished shooting, packed up his kit and left. Lance relaxed a little more. The physical impact of his illness had made him self-conscious in front of the camera. Relieved, he lifted off his cap and ran his hand over his bald head.

  I saw the two angry crescent scars, like ring pulls on a beer can, on the top of his scalp. These were the remnants of surgery on the lesions to his brain. He yawned and rubbed his eyes wearily.

  It was time to go.

  SOME KIND OF SUPERSTAR, PART ONE

  MARCH 1999, THE south of France, the final weekend of the Paris-Nice stage race, four months before Lance Armstrong’s first and wholly unexpected Tour de France victory.

  In the lobby of a hotel in Sisteron, after a day spent racing through the hills of the Vaucluse and Drome, he sprawls across an armchair.

  Lance has recovered from cancer. He is not tired any more. He has hair, eyebrows, muscles again. He has a new all-American sponsor, US Postal Service, a team built to serve him, and a very ambitious new team manager, Johan Bruyneel.

  And, he has his attitude back.

  ‘Man, the fuckin’ French,’ he says. ‘They’re so …’ Unable to find the right words, the sentence trails off, his contempt hanging in the air.

  We were discussing the details of a film we were about to make together to coincide with the launch of procycling magazine, and to publicise the work of his cancer charity, the Lance Armstrong Foundation. The following Monday we were planning to shoot footage at Lance’s house in Nice.

  I was one of procycling’s launch editors. We didn’t have much money but we wanted to make a big statement for our second issue by giving away the film. Nine months after the catastrophe of the Festina doping scandal at the 1998 Tour, the search for a fresh start seemed to be encapsulated by Lance’s comeback.

  The builders – the ‘fuckin’ French’ builders, that is – should have been long gone by now, Lance said. But being French, they weren’t. So we would have to film around them. It might be inconvenient, noisy and distracting, but Lance wasn’t going to send them away.

  I sipped my coffee. We ran through the agreed schedule one more time. The footage had to be shot in one day. I was aware that he could, just possibly, change his mind at the last moment, that a chorus of drills, hammering and cursing – in Provençal and Texan – might punctuate the soundtrack, but then, like many others, I was learning not to argue with Lance.

  When the film crew arrived on the race, there was genuine amusement in the press room. ‘Why are you wasting your time making a film about Armstrong?’ a Belgian colleague sneered. ‘He’s finished!’

  Ah, but they were all wrong. They had underestimated him. This was Lance The Avenger, back from cancer, lean, focussed, brooding, ruthless, driven to succeed at all costs. He raced anonymously in Paris-Nice, working for his teammates, his eyes on a far bigger prize at the height of the French summer. His dark hair was cropped close, emphasising his new intensity and his high, more pronounced cheekbones. He didn’t talk – he growled.

  At nine-thirty the following Monday, clutching the tattered Michelin 245 that he’d scribbled his address on, we tumbled out of a people carrier outside Lance’s villa, high on that Niçois hillside. Kids screeched in a nearby playground. I rang the bell. The gate buzzed open and we climbed a set of steps onto the terrace with its panoramic view of the city, the Mediterranean coast and away to the right, the Provençal Alps, where Armstrong had been honing his form.

  He and his wife Kristin appeared, cradling mugs of coffee. The French and their inadequacies were still playing on his mind. Despite the noise, he again insisted that the builders carried on working in the house even as we filmed an interview with him beside the pool.

  ‘If they go, they’ll never come back,’ he said, giving me The Look – his ‘this is not up for discussion’ stare. So get used to it …

  A little after ten, Kevin Livingston, his US Postal Service teammate, arrived on his bike and in kit, ready for training.

  ‘Late again,’ tutted Armstrong, clearly the boss in this relationship.

  Livingston offered his excuses, and Lance headed upstairs, reappearing in team kit a few moments later. We trooped down the steps from the terrace and back out through the gate. Armstrong swung open his garage doors, pulled a Trek road bike off the rack and slipped into his racing shoes.

  Two minutes later we were crammed back into the van, speeding after them through tight suburban bends as they dropped down from the villa to the foot of the Col d’Eze climb. They swung right and immediately began to ride up the hill, side by side, chatting. Armstrong’s style was all latent power, Livingston lighter and more elegant on the pedals, yet somehow less threatening.

  A kid on a scooter buzzed past, deliberately close – and far too close for Armstrong’s liking. He flew into a rage, yelling abuse and bunching his fist as the scooter moved ahead on the incline and disappeared around a bend.

  ‘Man, the fuckin’ French …’

  As they rode on, we overtook them, the back doors of the van wide open, Tony the cameraman suspended over the bumper by bungee cords, filming them as they climbed.

  Even now, after all these years, I can remember clearly that on that beautiful March morning Armstrong looked better than I had ever seen him on steep gradients. He was a new rider; as powerful as ever, yet more fluent, and infinitely more at ease. There was an effortlessness to his riding style: the rocking muscularity, the fight against pain, had gone from his climbing.

  At the top, in Eze village, we pulled over and filmed as they ordered coffees.

  ‘They shot some of that movie Ronin here,’ Lance said. But he didn’t like stopping. ‘I don’t wanna catch cold,’ he said. Prompted by Lance, Livingston hurriedly slurped back his coffee and got to his feet.

  Quickly, we shot more staged footage, Lance riding back and forth, sprinting at the camera. Then, half a dozen takes later, they were away, flying back down the Col d’Eze with the van, doors swinging open, careering through the bends in pursuit. Tony, snapped this way and that by the bungee cords, howled in protest. Near the bottom we finally sped past and got the shot we wanted – of Armstrong The Avenger, revelling in his renewed athleticism and p
ower, speeding into Nice. We’d been scheduled to spend the whole day filming, but when Lance got back to the villa his mind was elsewhere. ‘Come back at two,’ he said.

  That afternoon, despite the comings and goings of the builder, we shot an interview focussing on Lance’s comeback. If the story had become a little familiar now, the depth of his bitterness against those who had written him off still surprised me. He was not in the mood to forgive those who’d spurned him.

  ‘I just keep a list, a mental list, and if I ever get the opportunity … I’m gonna pull out that list,’ he growled, brow knotted.

  ‘Jeez, I thought as we packed up, ‘that’s one list I would never want to be on.’

  By July 1999, four months on from that breakneck day of shooting, Lance was hot news.

  The lobby of the cavernous Westotel on the outskirts of Nantes in western France, was crowded with TV and radio crews, hoping for a glimpse of the new Tour de France leader. I snuck past them, wandering into the deserted dining room – and got lucky. Sitting alone at a round table scattered with the debris of his teammates’ breakfast, was the new King of Cycling.

  Lance looked up. ‘Jeremy! Sit down …’

  ‘You sure?’ I asked. ‘I don’t want to interrupt.’

  ‘Hey – you’re my friend …’ he said.

  I congratulated him on his win in the Tour prologue and we chatted and drank coffee together. Photographer Rob Lampard fired off some frames.

  In the stage winner’s press conference the night before, I’d asked him how he’d coped with the media frenzy surrounding the Tour, eleven months after the Festina Affair. ‘Frenzy? About what?’ he’d responded, disingenuously.

  ‘So what was all that about then?’ I asked him as he poured another coffee.

  ‘Aww, I was just fuckin’ with ya,’ he grinned.

  Finally, he stretched, eased himself out of his chair and we strolled back together to his room.

  ‘Kristin’s pregnant,’ he told me as we walked.

  We had talked about IVF treatment over email. It turned out to be common ground. All the same, I was stunned by their immediate success.