by David Walsh
Exasperated by my ingratitude, The Late Late Show conceded that I could sit on a grown-up’s chair beside Pat and Stephen for the debate, but I couldn’t come out and sit on the chair until Stephen had been given a good fifteen minutes’ headstart out there, doing a tender one-on-one with Pat. Stephen does beatific very well; he gives great piety. He would remind everybody that butter wouldn’t melt in his lycras. Then I’d come out. Boo!
I accepted the deal reluctantly. On the night, Stephen wore a dark suit, dark shirt and dark tie and slicked-back hair, and if it wasn’t for that madly camp half-French, half-Dublin accent of his, he could have passed for an unctuous undertaker to an accident-prone mafia family. He duly spoke with Pat Kenny about his life and career for fifteen minutes or so. Then with a shout of ‘unchain the gimp’ the journalist was sent in. The early exchanges were civil and a little on the dull side. We reassured everybody that there would be no bloodshed, that we had known each other for many years, and had the utmost respect for each other.
Stephen was doing his wounded soul routine. ‘Daveeed, I accept what you are zaying but I never told you a lie.’
I, like any experienced parent, was making the point that I wasn’t cross with Stephen about his name(s) turning up on the Conconi files; no, not cross, just a little disappointed. I was attempting to remain controlled and get my message across. Roche was unsure as to whether he could be seen to be trying to land a knockout punch, so he either acted baffled or was actually baffled by the evidence.
To demonstrate bafflement Stephen had brought with him a sheet that he held up to the camera. It listed the various aliases that Francesco Conconi had given him during tests carried out in Italy. There were all sorts of notations and great swathes of dayglo highlighter which made the document look like a schoolchild’s study schedule. The dates and the results of various tests sat alongside the letters s or n (for sì or no) which Conconi had filled in depending on what levels he found. It was all meaningless and there was enough bafflement for everyone in the audience.
When Stephen was asked if he had dealt with Conconi, he replied helpfully that Conconi wasn’t the team doctor, implying that he, Stephen, was strictly a one-doctor sort of guy. The debate was flagging, the details of the chart were confusing for everybody and the discussion was about to fizzle out when Pat Kenny produced his trump card.
In the audience, possibly in the seat once earmarked for myself, Pat had planted some help: Dr Bill ‘that’s entertainment’ Tormey from Beaumont Hospital in Dublin. Now in TV terms if you scrape the barrel long enough and then reach down for what is under the barrel and then go on some more you end up with Bill Tormey in your audience. He’s the man who once called a female hospital colleague a ‘right geebag’ and who would later become famous for his primitive views on gay marriage and for calling for missionaries returning from Africa to be Aids tested.
Now he was here to play to the gallery. And he felt the gallery should be grateful. To paraphrase Wilde: Bill, if you had to do it all again, would you still fall in love with yourself? He began by reciting a litany of Irish sporting stars and then announced that, ‘Stephen Roche is right up there.’
Without further ado he hopped to the science bit. Stop reading if you lack a Nobel Prize in either physics or chemistry. ‘Now, Pat, as you know, I am a cynic. The only reason I am out here tonight is because of what they are doing to this man. I wouldn’t come out otherwise, even though you’re a good bloke yourself [crowd all cheer ecstatically].
‘I tell you this. Stephen Roche is a great bloke. [Shit. Pat and Stephen Roche are both blokes within the good to great range. I feel isolated and unworthy.] To hammer a guy like Stephen Roche who, in 1987, won the Tour de France, the Giro d’Italia and the World Championship, and I am grateful to Jimmy Magee for actually showing it to us on TV [for the uninitiated Jimmy Magee is a commentator, not an actual TV channel] and I must say one thing about Stephen, to do that when EPO wasn’t even on the market? Everybody here should realise that you couldn’t inject EPO into yourself in 1987 because it wasn’t available in 1987. That’s the first thing. That’s very relevant. So Stephen won this stuff clean because at the time, if he was taking amphetamines, remember what happened to Tommy Simpson taking amphetamines [he died, but, as Lance Armstrong himself has pointed out, he didn’t test positive], Stephen would have been caught taking amphetamines, the only other thing that’s worth a damn in terms of endurance testing for something like cycling, to the best of my knowledge, anyway, at the moment . . .’
I was starting to think that this was actually a skit, a piece of light entertainment, the heavyweight expert as buffoon. Then Tormey inflated a little further and finally started speaking of himself in the third person. He addressed Stephen Roche personally, great bloke to great bloke.
‘I am going to assume that the hangman, judge and jury that is sitting up there beside you from the Sunset Times, Murdoch’s organ, is correct. Tormey is now the court of appeal judge and I am going to go through this . . .’
And he proceeded to demonstrate that he had not only the specific doping expertise of a bright seven-year-old but the legal knowledge of a dim six-year-old to boot. He held a little mock appeal hearing in monologue, and grandly pronounced a verdict of not proven for Roche. And to the stockade of shame for the Sunset Times (comedy gold by the way! Sunset Times! ).
And then up on stage we went back to our chat for a few minutes, ploughing on to the end of the stage and an advertisement break: Bill Tormey and Pat Kenny drafting Stephen Roche all the way to the line; me a domestique in the media peloton suddenly realising what it must have felt like to be Christophe Bassons on a bad day.
On the way out of RTE’s television centre that night, one of the staffers at the station said they had taken almost 400 telephone calls from viewers and they had broken down evenly: half supported Stephen, half were for me. To me that sounded like a result.15
Being more confident when he has the scent of a story, Pierre would have handled Roche and Tormey better than I did that night.
Like me, Pierre went back quite a way with Lance Armstrong. They had met in a nightclub in Oslo on the night in 1993 that the Texan had become the youngest ever winner of the World Championships.
The new world road race champion had yet to discover that all us journalists were, as he would later say, snakes with arms. He sipped a beer, talked candidly with a small group of journalists and, according to his media companions, was good company. He laughed easily and never let the conversation slow.
Given the beer, the celebration, the noise and the relaxed atmosphere this was a different Lance to the one we would come to know. Nothing was taboo that evening. No boundaries. He talked a lot. Pierre could see that he enjoyed talking and would have sat trading stories until sunrise if Armstrong’s friends hadn’t hauled him away.
They had an early start the next morning. Four hours after leaving the nightclub they were on the plane to a criterium in Châteaulin, but Pierre and Lance had established a relationship. They spoke again for interview purposes in the spring of 1996. Lance said that he had been acting like a jerk around the time of La Flèche Wallonne and then in Liège. Pierre wrote it as he heard it. The next time he met Armstrong he braced himself for an earful of Texan but Lance just shrugged the shoulders. ‘It’s okay; it’s true. That’s what I said to you.’
Pierre felt there was some mutual respect. When Lance fell ill later that year, his agent Bill Stapleton was snowed under with interview requests. He showed them all to Lance, who picked two: veteran Sam Abt, who for many years has written for the New York Times and the Herald Tribune, and Pierre.
Flying to Austin in November 1996, Pierre was greeted by a thin and frail-looking Lance. A cap was pulled down tight over his bald head. There was a weak Texan sun in the sky but Armstrong didn’t look like a man feeling its warmth when he greeted Pierre on the doorstep of his Mediterranean-style villa tight by a branch of the Colorado River.
Abt and Pierre arrived at the
same time and Lance brought them to his kitchen where they passed the time in small talk as he made himself a vegetable smoothie. The two journalists offered to interview him simultaneously, but Lance said he’d rather do them separately.
Sportswriters always prefer one-on-ones and Ballester and Apt were quietly pleased that Lance decided on two interviews. He also decreed that Abt would go first. At a loose end, Pierre wandered around the huge house. Armstrong has always been a fan of paintings and Pierre studied what was on the walls. In the garage he ran his hands slowly over the five bikes which hung there. He leaned down to peer in at the speedometer of the black Porsche. Things had changed hugely in this young man’s life since that night in Oslo three years earlier.
Rambling on, Pierre arrived in a hallway that led to a bedroom. He sensed somebody behind him. ‘Are you looking for something?’ said Armstrong.
‘Something? No, nothing special. I didn’t want to disturb your interview with Sam so I’m walking around, that’s all. A newspaper article needs a sense of atmosphere, as you well know.’
‘But there’s nothing in my bedroom.’
‘Nothing? How do you mean? Nothing? At all?’
‘If you think you’re going to find a bag of dope . . .’
‘A bag of . . .? What are you talking about? Excuse me, but I don’t understand.’
Armstrong abruptly ended the exchange and grinned. It was a strange episode but now it was closed.
When Pierre sat down for the interview some time later, he encountered the other Lance, the one who could speak movingly about coming face to face with death. Pierre liked this Lance.
Their relationship changed at the 1999 Tour de France. Lance thought L’Équipe treated him unfairly but doing a one-on-one interview with Pierre only made a difficult relationship between Tour leader and newspaper worse. Pierre had changed since that nightclub encounter in Oslo, too.
Lance would have preferred the early-model Pierre.
Next time they met was at US Postal’s pre-season camp in 2000 at San Luis Obispo, California. It was January. The team had, for promotional purposes, invited thirty international journalists to their camp. Pierre didn’t think the press conference was much good to a man who had flown 6000 miles to be there. He collared Lance afterwards.
‘Well, what do you want?’
‘Not this.’
‘What do you mean “not this”?’
‘Not this quarter hour devoted to the press. Some people travelled six thousand miles to see you, and I’m one of them.’
‘I know. I saw your name on the list.’
‘As interesting as your press conference was, you can understand that my newspaper and I want to spend a little more time with you.’
Lance turned around. He was playing with the room key in his hands, pretending to think about it. He cracked a little smile.
‘If I didn’t want you to come, you wouldn’t have been allowed. How much time do you want?’
‘Three quarters of an hour would be good. Tomorrow, does that work for you?’
‘Tomorrow. Okay for tomorrow. A half hour.’
‘Thanks, Lance.’
The interview the following day took thirty minutes precisely. Not one minute more. Pierre asked that John Wilcockson be allowed sit in. Lance declined. The answers were short and terse. Nothing he heard allayed Pierre’s suspicions but he came away thinking that Lance Armstrong scarcely cared any more. Pierre had been banished to that world where Lance Armstrong sends people he has no more use for.
A month or so before the 2000 Tour de France, Lance Armstrong’s autobiography, It’s Not About the Bike: My Journey Back to Life, was published. Ghost written by the Washington Post columnist Sally Jenkins, the story of the cancer survivor who came back from the brink to win the Tour de France was quite brilliantly told. Jenkins’ skill is apparent throughout and the book would become a worldwide bestseller. More than that, it would become a source of inspiration to many stricken with serious illness, especially those with cancer. As well as earning millions of dollars for Armstrong, the book did more than anything to make him a global icon.
I read the book and was carried along by Jenkins’ story-telling which was remarkable, as a source from inside Armstrong’s world had said that Lance had not been as available to Jenkins as both would have liked and that she’d had to rely on interviews with friends and family, especially his close friend John ‘Collidge’ Korioth. What did it matter? The story was gripping, inspiring and hugely entertaining and the public loved it.
There were, though, a couple of contradictions. In the book Armstrong was portrayed as a sympathetic character, one who would never have turned on Christophe Bassons as he did during the 1999 Tour and, naturally, there was no mention of his contretemps with the French rider in the book.
The second element that didn’t stack up was the hostility to drug testing expressed in the book, which he described as ‘demeaning’: ‘Right after I finished a stage I was whisked away to an open tent, where I sat in a chair while a doctor wrapped a piece of rubber tubing around my arm, jabbed me with a needle and drew blood. As I lay there a battery of photographers flashed their cameras at me.’
He went on to add: ‘The drug tests became my best friend, because they proved I was clean. I had been tested and checked and retested.’
This portrayal of the drug-testing operation at the Tour de France was so confused and inaccurate it wasn’t worth bothering about except in that it gave one a sense of Armstrong’s antipathy towards the system. Would it not be more demeaning to ride clean and have to compete against forty or fifty doped-up riders? It was also a bad joke to suggest the tests proved Armstrong rode clean. How could they when the most important drug EPO was undetectable?
The 2000 Tour began at another theme park, Futuroscope, and it was there that Bill Stapleton entered my life. I’d never met him before; he didn’t introduce himself and I didn’t recognise him. But he knew me and perhaps thought I would know him. Halfway through our conversation, it twigged.
‘David, I just want to have a word?’
‘Yeah, fine.’
‘Look, we’re aware of what you wrote about Lance last year, what you’ve been writing this year.’
‘Yeah?’
‘Well, we could have a better relationship, things could be better between you and Lance.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘What I mean is that if you were more balanced in what you wrote, we could help with access.’
‘I believe I’ve been fair.’
‘We are going to be watching what you write very closely and we will not be afraid to take action if that is necessary?’
‘Bill, is that a threat?’
‘It is a threat.’
Bill Stapleton, agent to Lance Armstrong and attorney at law, had delivered his message.
6
‘No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader.’
Robert Frost
A media tale.
After the 1999 Tour de France, Pierre Ballester sat down with his cycling editor and friend Jean-Michel Rouet and spoke softly about hard things. Pierre explained that he no longer had the stomach for writing about the sport. At least he couldn’t write as he had for much of the previous decade. Reporting races, interviewing victors, presenting winners as heroes, he couldn’t do this any more. Jean-Michel empathised with Pierre’s dilemma and was happy for him to concentrate on the doping side of the sport.
‘It wasn’t possible for me to cover cycling in any other way. No longer could I do the touchy feely stories because I didn’t believe in these guys. I wasn’t sure how L’Équipe would react and I was aware that covering doping could harm my career and even put my job at risk but, at the time, they thought they needed me and they wanted to keep me happy.’
L’Équipe is a serious operation. The newspaper has 380 journalists. Pierre was the only one to ask if he could concentrate his work on doping, s
urely the biggest ongoing sports story of our time. For a while the newspaper saw Pierre as their moral conscience made flesh. And doping was becoming a bigger story, and doping investigations were good for selling newspapers. Perhaps this was the right idea at the right time. In October 1999 doping was a story. The Festina trial was beginning at Lille in the north of the country.
This was the official inquiry into the widespread doping revealed by customs and police at the 1998 Tour de France. Pierre enjoyed every moment of his time in Lille, sifting through the wreckage of the 1998 Tour. For once he felt that he was able to report the realities of professional cycling. Witness after witness came forward, each telling a story more wretched than the previous one. The scandal of the previous summer had left a lingering bad taste and the French people demanded some honesty and contrition from the cycling community.
Pascal Hervé, a rider with the Festina team, said he would have told the truth earlier but for the fact ‘just us nine idiots [Festina’s team at the ‘98 Tour] were caught’. Laurent Brochard, another Festina rider, told how he won the World Championship road race in 1997, subsequently tested positive but an official from the UCI informed his team manager that a backdated medical certificate would get him off. Thomas Davy, who rode alongside five-time Tour winner Miguel Indurain at the Banesto team in Spain, said: ‘There was a systematic doping programme, under medical supervision, at the team.’
Richard Virenque, who had lied incessantly for eighteen months about his doping, was told by Judge Daniel Delegove to tell the truth. And at last he did. ‘Even though I doped,’ Virenque added, ‘I did not have an advantage over my rivals.’
Antoine Vayer, the exercise physiologist who refused to play any part in doping while working at Festina, was called as an expert witness. ‘Armstrong rides at fifty-four kph,’ he said. ‘I find it scandalous. It’s nonsense. Indirectly, it proves he is doping.’ A second expert said Vayer’s analysis made perfect sense. And Pierre Ballester was in his element, writing the pieces that might help cycling to face its problems.