‘I tried to sort out some flights and tried like hell to get to Italy,’ Armstrong says, ‘but I couldn’t make it work. But if I get back over there again, I’d like to meet with her . . .’
I eat half-heartedly, too engrossed in the conversation. We talk some more, mulling over the scandals enveloping football, athletics and tennis. ‘Maybe people are at the point now where, if they follow any world sport, they realise that what they were sold is just not true,’ Armstrong says.
He has little time for those who insist that he has still not apologised adequately to his peers, or to ex-colleagues and journalists who he maligned. ‘The famous ones I’ve made amends with – every one of them. Not one of them can say, “He’s not reached out to me, he’s not apologised to me” – whether that’s been through an apology or a settlement.
‘Even David Walsh. Amends were made,’ he says, citing the two-million-dollar settlement with the Sunday Times. ‘I only bring that up because on his “victory” tour, it’s the first thing Walsh comes out with – “Lance hasn’t apologised to me yet.” ’
So, if he emailed you and said, ‘Let’s have lunch . . .’?
Armstrong seems flummoxed by the idea. ‘Just lunch? An off-the-record lunch?’ There’s a long pause. ‘I don’t see why not – it wouldn’t be my first choice of a lunch date. But why not? Jeremy, at this point, I have no fear.’
Armstrong remains dismissive of the journalist often credited with fuelling his downfall. ‘It wasn’t, it was Jeff Novitzky,’ says the American of the federal agent who first pursued him. ‘Without Novitzky, none of this happens. Everybody needs to stop taking the credit because there’s one person who deserves the credit, if credit is the right word – Jeff Novitzky.
‘He had the power of the badge and the gun,’ he says, banging his fist on the table. ‘Badge on the table, gun right here. After that, they’re fucking singing. Journalists can’t do that, David Walsh can’t do that, Travis Tygart [CEO of USADA] can’t do that. But when a federal agent says, “I wanna hear everything and if I don’t like what I hear then you’re looking at jail time” – then he got a lot, quickly.’
Didn’t you ever worry?
‘Worry?’
Yes – when it was all going on, when you were all on the programme – that somebody might slip up, that somebody might make a mistake?
‘No . . .’
But a lot of people knew.
‘Yeah – and maybe we were too loose on that. But that’s the nature of cycling. Nine riders on the team, 30 staff at the Tour – people leave and change teams, they get mad, they get upset . . . You can’t control all that.’
So you relied on them keeping quiet, on the power of the omertà?
‘Honestly, it didn’t cross my mind. I didn’t worry about it. Maybe we should have considered that more.’
You were very loyal to a lot of people . . .
‘Yeah, and I still am.’
Loyalty is a big thing for you.
‘Yeah, of course. It matters to me big time.’
Isn’t some of that loyalty misplaced?
‘I’m very loyal to Johan [Bruyneel]. I don’t know if that’s good or bad for me – I don’t care. I love him . . .’
You love him?
‘Like a brother. He’s a great man. He’s the greatest coach in the history of sports. Fact.’
I struggle not to laugh in disbelief. Lance, I say, people would fall off their chair to hear you say that . . .
‘I don’t care,’ he replies, with that all-too-familiar fuck-you attitude, and then catches himself. ‘Anna says I say “I don’t care” too much.
‘But,’ he continues, ‘they weren’t in the war, they didn’t race with him, they didn’t race under him, they didn’t race against him. What do they know? They don’t know anything about cycling.’
For all his defiance, Armstrong seems finally to be aware of the impact of his confession on those who, for years, had supported him.
‘All those people who had my back – they had to sit there while the others came back and said, “Hey, how do you like your boy now?” They felt like idiots. That’s a heavy burden to carry and to live with. They’re all I care about.’
But then he rails, too, against the perception that his success was solely attributable to doping. ‘Travis put that out there. That upsets me. It’s just not true. Travis had three or four key messages to pound home – most sophisticated doping programme in history, greatest fraud in the history of sport, he forced young men to put dangerous substances in their body – all of which is untrue.’
So your team-mates willingly doped? You didn’t stand over them telling them to dope?
‘Me?’ he says incredulously. ‘Of course not!’
And you didn’t foster a culture where that went on?
‘No – the sport fostered that culture. You had a substance, EPO, that was so good,’ he continues. ‘And if they have an equivalent tomorrow, that was undetectable, everyone would be on it.’
None of his peers, he says, see him as a cheat. ‘All these depositions – Floyd, Tyler, Andreu – they all admit, “He was the best, he was the toughest, he was the hardest-working, he was the most motivating.”
‘For those seven years our story was: we train harder than anybody else, we are more organised than anybody, we have better tactics, a better team, more reconnaissance, better technologies, wind tunnels, equipment . . .
‘That was all true, but we just didn’t mention the last part.’
But surely the last part – the doping – was the biggest?
‘No! Of course not – the last part wasn’t the biggest part. It would have been if nobody else had it, but everybody had it.
‘So now that’s been flipped. They say: “He told us it was the training, he said it was this and that, but now we know.” But the idea that we just sat around and then doped and won the Tour is not true.’
You always thought that the riders weren’t respected enough, that they were cannon fodder – that cycling was very amateur . . .
‘It still is,’ he says. ‘It’s getting worse. The business model is hardly a business model. The crashes are getting worse – all the road furniture – all that shit makes bike racing dangerous. It’s good for traffic; it’s not good for bike races.’
Does the lack of status of the riders fuel doping?
‘Of course it does. The riders don’t feel any sense of investment. Their only sense of investment is in their contract. When that’s up in a year, or two years, they ain’t got shit. So until they have proper equity in the sport, the guys are gonna be tempted – they’ll look around and think, “It’s every man for himself.” ’
‘Every man for himself.’
Like Tom Simpson, I think, fending off Eddy Merckx, fighting to retain his status, doing anything to get over the Ventoux, desperate for a good result, desperate to keep his place in the firmament.
The Ventoux was Lance Armstrong’s first long climb in the European peloton, his first real experience of the mountains.
‘My first time on the Ventoux was Paris–Nice in 1993, when we climbed from Bédoin up to Chalet Reynard. Armand de Las Cuevas was crushing it. But I stayed in the front group, which was a big deal to me.’
But after 1993, almost every time Armstrong rode the Ventoux, it threw up questions and dilemmas. Riding the Dauphiné Libéré in June, his all-too-frequent misfires on the Ventoux only fuelled anxieties over his form for July. ‘If you said, “Give me the top three regrets of your career”, then not winning on the Ventoux would be one of them.’
Worse, team-mates like Jonathan Vaughters and Tyler Hamilton were climbing the mountain faster. ‘Other than the day with Pantani, Lance definitely struggled on the Ventoux,’ Hamilton says. ‘The team and Johan tried to break down all the different reasons why Lance wasn’t ever as good there. I remember once there was an idea that there was less oxygen up there, because of fewer trees – but I don’t know what it was.’
Arm
strong dismissed the suggestion that his serial disappointments on the Ventoux were down to abortive doping programmes. ‘No – it was the hardest mountain, but there are plenty of other divisive and dynamic climbs. I mean, they’re all hard,’ he said. ‘The Ventoux didn’t require doping any more than any other climb.’
For a while, a long while, the preppy Hamilton was the alter ego to Armstrong’s trailer-park street kid. Tyler came from the right side of the tracks, Lance definitely didn’t. It was cycling that threw them together. As team-mates at US Postal, they lived close to each other in Nice. They trained together, pushing each other, harder and further. And they shared their ‘Poe’ – their cache of EPO – as they pursued doping in pursuit of excellence.
Once, in the summer of 2000, I met Hamilton at his Nice apartment, overlooking the corniche roads of Villefranche-sur-Mer, and then drove behind him as he rode over to Armstrong’s apartment. I’d been to Armstrong’s house before, drunk coffee on the terrace, so got out and began to follow Hamilton to the gate. ‘Better wait here,’ he said sharply, as he saw me step out of the car, an uneasy look in his eyes.
It took a good ten minutes for him to reappear, with Armstrong in tow. I thought little of it then, but now I wonder: were they doing ‘Poe’ while I sat in a hire car, waiting on the street outside?
Earlier that summer, when Hamilton won the Dauphiné stage to the summit of Ventoux and left his team captain well over a minute behind, the cracks in their relationship began to show. As Armstrong struggled further to overcome his Ventoux hex, Hamilton’s apparent ease became all the more irritating. ‘Lance was in yellow,’ Hamilton recalled of that afternoon in June 2000. ‘I had to be there on the climb and cover all the attacks. I remember that day was probably the best legs I ever had there.’
With less than a month to go until the 2000 Tour started, this was also the day when Armstrong was supposed to shine, a key test on his road to winning form. ‘I kept waiting, covering attacks until we got above the tree line. I was waiting for Lance to come up, but that never happened.’
Behind him, flagging on the Giant’s upper slopes, Armstrong was yet again found wanting. ‘About one kilometre from the finish,’ Hamilton recalled, ‘Johan came on the radio and said, “You’re good to go.” ’
Still uncertain, Hamilton used the radio to check with his team leader. ‘Go – just fucking go,’ came the blurted response.
‘So I attacked,’ Hamilton says. ‘By the finish I was cross-eyed. It was definitely harder to breathe up there. By the time I got to the top, it felt like I was breathing through a straw.’
But within minutes of stepping down from the podium presentation, he knew that the dynamic within the team had changed. As talk of Hamilton as a future Tour contender gathered pace, Armstrong distanced himself. ‘There’d been some rumblings before that. There was talk the year before, during the 1999 Tour, when I finished quite high. Winning on the Ventoux, winning the Dauphiné – now that was a big deal.’
For Armstrong, another underperformance on the Ventoux, so close to that year’s Tour start, cut deep. ‘Lance is a competitor,’ Hamilton said. ‘That day bruised his ego. It was tough because he was trying to win. It changed things between us. I could tell when he climbed on the bus that he was pretty bummed out.’
All the more extraordinary then, in the light of that disappointment, that when he had the chance, little more than a month later, to win on the Ventoux, to add the mountain he rated the hardest in France to his list of stage wins, Armstrong backed off.
Given the many and varied pan-European locations in which, over the years, I have spoken to Jonathan Vaughters, it’s a little anticlimactic that when we do finally sit down to talk about the Giant of Provence, it’s in the Holiday Inn, at Westfield Shopping City, in east London. But, hey, this is modern globalised cycling. Yorkshire is now as legendary as the Alps, Qatar as coveted as the Koppenberg. Not every interview is conducted on a hotel terrace in Mallorca, Liguria or the Côte d’Azur, as the sun sets over a dappled Mediterranean. Sometimes you just have to make do with sitting in a beige dining room picking at an all-you-can-eat buffet.
Vaughters, now CEO of the Cannondale-Drapac team, is one of the leading lights in the modernisation of cycling, a key figure within Velon, the collective of leading teams seeking to build a new business model for world cycling’s top teams. Yet he’s also resolutely quirky. His Twitter feed is a mashup of in-jokes and irony, fishing references, fart gags and wine expertise. It inhabits a corner of social media where Bart Simpson collides with Friedrich Nietzsche and Oz Clarke. Possibly.
He sits opposite me, bearded, elegantly frayed, and a little bleary from his flight to London from Denver. We had planned to meet in Whitechapel and seek out the best balti in the East End. Sadly, Jonathan’s jet lag got the better of him, so here we are eating in the restaurant a few floors down from his room. He orders the Holiday Inn’s finest chicken tikka masala.
‘That’ll get things moving,’ I think to myself.
The beard and the sartorial nod towards tweedy fogeyness mark him out among the seas of corporate sportswear that dominate most major races. His eclecticism gives him the look of a professorial hipster, who’s wandered into the wrong seminar. The beard also makes him seem a bigger man than he actually is, although it’s true to say that he is more rounded now – in every sense – than the skinny, slightly gauche goofball with flying V sideburns who broke the climbing record for the Ventoux in 1999.
Earlier in the week, he’d dressed up as Santa for the Cycling Podcast’s Christmas event. The next night he was one of a panel musing over the future of cycling at a sold-out Rapha event in Soho. He’s still a little bemused by the explosion of interest in cycling in Britain. ‘We’d struggle to pull off stuff like that in the States,’ he says of both events.
A few years ago maybe not, but since they slayed Lance Armstrong, well, yes, that’s probably true. But it’s a little ironic hearing it from Jonathan, given that he is of course a confessed doper, former team-mate to Armstrong during the glory years and a pivotal player in the infamous USADA investigation into his erstwhile team-mate which definitively debunked the Texan’s iconic status.
Unlike Armstrong, Vaughters has actually won on the Giant, taking the 21-kilometre time trial from Bédoin to the summit in June 1999, during the Dauphiné Libéré. The Coloradan beat team-mate Armstrong, who could only finish fifth, to take the overall race lead. But it was a bittersweet moment and pivotal in the subsequent trajectory of both his racing career and his life.
He also won the 2001 Dauphiné time trial through the Ventoux foothills, over 43 kilometres from Beaumes-de-Venise to Valréas, beating another rider – David Millar – who was later to be a key figure in his development as a team manager. ‘The day before that time trial, we’d ridden up the north side and finished in Carpentras. The north side was more difficult for me because it’s a more uneven gradient. It’s more punchy.’
The south side of the Ventoux, he says, always suited him better. ‘It’s steadier. I would think 95 per cent of riders that you speak to would rather it the other way round – they’d prefer climbing from Malaucène to climbing from Bédoin.’
Jonathan’s affection for the Ventoux isn’t just based on his climbing prowess. His love of Rhône wines has morphed into an obsession and, in July 2009, he was inducted into the Echansonnerie des Papes, a prestigious club of wine lovers centred on the Châteauneuf-du-Pape region, just the other side of the A7 autoroute, as it follows the Rhône south to the sea.
‘It’s not just cycling that I have a connection with,’ he explains. ‘They made me an Echansonnerie, a key holder – kinda knighted, I guess – of Châteauneuf-du-Pape.
‘It’s a ceremony that you get nominated for, this whole shebang, with everyone in purple robes, but even if you get nominated you don’t get the key and the robe and to be an Echansonnerie des Papes unless you taste and identify three wines.’
Sounds like becoming president of the UCI, I sug
gest. ‘Hmmm, yeah, right,’ he responds drily.
‘One is a Côtes du Rhône, one a Côtes du Ventoux and one a Châteauneuf-du-Pape. They’re all made out of the exact same grapes – slightly different soil, different temperatures – but they’re very close to one another.
‘And to get the key, the robe and the scroll, you have to identify the Châteauneuf-du-Pape. If you get it wrong you don’t actually get a ceremonial naming as an Echansonnerie, it’s just “désolé, monsieur” – sorry, bud.’
Were you nervous? I ask him.
‘Shit, yeah,’ he says. ‘I was like, “There’s no way I’m going to get this right.”
‘But anyways, I did and I got the robe, the scroll and the key. I like the wines from there – from that whole region. I love Châteauneuf-du-Pape and I like a good Côtes du Ventoux.’
Before the obsession with Rhône wines, though, came the obsession with climbing and the bike. And Jonathan quickly discovered that the terrain and the heat of the Vaucluse, and in particular the higher slopes of Ventoux, really suited him. ‘I was always good when it was hot and dry. Higher altitude, arid – that all suited my engine better than cold and humid. It’s not that you yourself go faster in the heat, it’s that some of the others suffer and go slower.’
He quickly acclimatised to the Ventoux’s gradients. ‘I liked the dry, arid air, the lack of flat spots. It never gets incredibly steep but it never lets up. It just drags the whole time.’
And then he says something that no cyclist, professional or not, other than Betty Kals has ever said to me: ‘It never intimidated me. I looked forward to the Ventoux.
‘Every race I ever won at World Tour level was within 40 miles of the Ventoux. Even in 2001, when I beat Dave Millar in that flat time trial in the Dauphiné, it was around the side of the Ventoux.’
Unlike others, who tend to fall back on tried and tested clichés to describe the suffering on the Ventoux, Vaughters is more able to detail the attributes required to succeed. The specific characteristics of the climb, he says, just don’t suit some riders. ‘It’s not for a more anaerobically explosive rider, who’d rather a climb that goes flat then steep, has hairpins, where you can really hit the steep sections hard and then recover a little on the bends. They prefer a climb where the effort level bounces around.
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