Seven Deadly Sins: My Pursuit of Lance Armstrong

by David Walsh

  And that was it. Somewhere out there Lance Armstrong was waiting and watching. The pulse just ran a little faster.

  11

  ‘When Johan Bruyneel and Lance advocate and support the use of performance-enhancing drugs and then make out they are cleaner than the driven snow, discrediting those that don’t toe the line; well, you can’t get away with that for ever.’

  Emma O’Reilly, L.A. Confidentiel, 2004

  One of the good things about working on a story that nobody much approves of is that you don’t have any competition. You work away on the story, you check your facts, write your transcripts, dot your i’s and cross your t’s and all the time you sleep soundly at night. You know that there is no eager young super sleuth out there ready to scoop you in cold blood.

  Take Emma O’Reilly. Another paper could easily have taken Emma but, in May 2003, just a few months after finding Betsy Andreu, Emma fell out of the sky and into my life.

  I’d heard of her. An Irish name had cropped up in several accounts of the early years of US Postal. O’Reilly? Emma? Irish? Who knew?

  Paul Kimmage’s contacts in the Dublin cycling community were better and fresher than mine. I had tried to get a contact number or a lead for this Emma O’Reilly and had failed. Paul hit a wall as well. Could be nothing. I’d come back to her again perhaps. Then one day an English colleague approached me at an event we were both covering. He knew the cycling game. Knew it well. He agreed there were questions about Armstrong and he didn’t think I was wrong to ask them and, by the way, he said, ‘I think Emma O’Reilly might talk.’

  I kept a stiff upper lip. In my heart I wanted to embrace him.

  ‘Any way of getting in touch with her?’

  ‘Her former husband is a guy called Simon Lillistone. Get in touch with him and he’ll get you a number for Emma.’

  It surprised me that my colleague was prepared to try to put me in touch with Emma. It wasn’t like we wrote for the same newspaper and the only explanation was that he was fearful of the consequences from the US Postal team of writing a piece that might be critical of Armstrong. From what he said, he knew Emma was going to spill some beans. I had a laptop which ran on spilled beans.

  I rang Simon. He cautiously agreed to email Emma, and seemed like a guy who did everything cautiously. I explained and asked him to see if she would speak with me. Four or five days later I got a call from Emma O’Reilly.

  ‘No, I don’t mind telling you what I saw when I worked with the team,’ she said. ‘It wasn’t right.’

  I don’t know if this was the happiest moment of my life but it would give the others a run for their money.

  Emma O’Reilly came from Tallaght, a massive suburb to the south of Dublin often referred to as Tallaghtfornia for its sense of urban grey sprawl. Tallaght is an overgrown town that generally lacks the quality of being a town, but Tallaght produces feisty and proud people, all the same. They have a tribal quality. Emma O’Reilly is feisty and a little tribal. You wouldn’t want to cross her.

  There was cycling in her family – not a lot, but enough. Her brother Norbert rode locally with the Irish Road Club, and when Emma began going to his races she liked the easy atmosphere, she enjoyed the company of the weekend warriors. She was a runner herself, competing for the Tallaght club Cú Chulainn, but cycling seemed like better fun. From then on she ran only to keep fit.

  Emma had that sense of adventure that has scattered Irish people all over the world. She began training as an electrician, a mildly unusual job choice for a woman in the Ireland of the early 1990s, and then decided that if she could become a massage therapist as well and get her name around the cycling community in Ireland there might be a chance to get to see a little bit of the world.

  It worked. She finished training as an electrician in 1991 but, for the final couple of years of her apprenticeship, she had taken night courses in massage therapy and sports injury as well. She dedicated herself to this, got herself noticed and was soon working with the Irish national team. The work and travel dream materialised. The electrician work put bread on the table; the massage work brought travel. She worked a few World Championships, brought her table to Britain and France again and again. Good times, but her feet itched. There was even more to the world.

  At a race one day she got talking to a guy who was a mechanic with the LA Sherriff team on the west coast of America. She’d been thinking about the US for some time and when the mechanic saw her working he recommended her to his team as a soigneur.

  So far so good. She got her visa paperwork sorted and took it to the US Embassy in Dublin. I’m Emma O’Reilly and I’m off to live in Santa Barbara where I will be working as a soigneur for a cycling team. They looked at Emma and her qualifications. Electrician and massage therapist? Of course. Of course. Get a fake job as a ‘soigneur’, whatever the heck that is, and then disappear into the world of contractors and building sites? Not on our watch, Missy. They declined to stamp her visa.

  As somebody would later tell her in times of crisis: what goes around comes around. The following year she won a green card through the US immigration lottery system. She touched down in Boulder, Colorado, in the spring of 1994, not long before her 24th birthday.

  She began working with the San Francisco-based team Shaklee, but they said they couldn’t offer her work for the full summer. So she went back to Boulder and began working in electrical sales. The next year Shaklee came looking for her again, which was not a surprise because Emma was a good massage therapist. This time she ran away with the circus and stayed.

  The cycling world is small and reputations are made quickly on the basis of character and efficiency. Emma was good and had a way with people. She didn’t defer, she had a sense of humour and a spark. She was a team player. A rider called Mike Engelman knew her work and when he moved from Coors to US Postal (or Montgomery Securities, as the team was known at the time before becoming US Postal in 1997), he put in the good word.

  Still, it wasn’t a done deal. She had no idea at first what she was getting into. She got a call telling her that the team would fly her to San Francisco for an interview. ‘Could they not just call me?’ she thought, but she was impressed. Montgomery Securities sounded to her like the sort of operation that sold home alarms. She didn’t want to seem grateful for being flown out to San Francisco, but it did give the sense that this team meant business.

  By accident she found out at the eleventh hour that she was dealing with a firm of financiers. Change of dress code. Bye, bye jeans. Buy, buy business suit.

  She hit San Francisco and took the shuttle to the Financial District where she found the Pyramid Building, as instructed. Even for a finance company, the building was pretty impressive. So this was how the other half lived. A security guard accompanied her in the silent lift to the 23rd floor and ushered her towards the office of Thom Weisel.

  It went well. For a few minutes she fretted that they intended putting her to work with a new women’s team they hoped to start. The prospect was none too exciting. She made her feelings known: ‘I don’t want to be involved in the women’s programme, thanks. I know it’s terrible to say this but I can’t handle women riders. It’s better to have a guy deal with them.’

  The women’s programme never materialised. Thom Weisel’s dream was of a serious team that would compete in Europe. Everything was geared toward that dream. Emma left San Francisco with the feeling that all had gone well.

  That was December. She came home to Tallaght for Christmas. Flew back to Boulder in January and the next day she found herself in Ramona, near the Mexican border, about three quarters of an hour inland drive from San Diego. Training camp. The adventure had truly started.

  This was the ticket to the big time.

  Emma and I spoke a few times on the phone. She was prepared to talk but was cautious, too. There would be consequences. Finally it was agreed I would travel to meet her in Liverpool where she was living with her boyfriend, Mike Carlisle. I would try to sell her the ide
a of a major interview to be published within the covers of a book that would ask a range of questions about the state of cycling and the reign of Lance Armstrong.

  She would be one voice among many.

  I had no idea as to the story she would tell, but I knew she had spent five years with the US Postal team, and worked as personal masseuse to Lance for two of those years. She knew a lot more than I knew.

  That first meeting in Liverpool was a pure getting-to-know-you occasion. We went for supper to Villa Jazz in Oxton out on the Wirral peninsula. Her boyfriend Mike came along, and for much of the evening we spoke about his beloved Manchester United. The other stuff could wait. Impatient as I was, I didn’t bring a recorder or notebook. Emma had to get a sense of who I was and of my reliability and sincerity. I had to get an idea of her credibility.

  I was interested in sussing out her motivation for wanting to speak publicly about her time with US Postal. She hinted several times that doing this might cause her problems, but on the other hand she didn’t see why she shouldn’t speak about what she had seen. That evening I didn’t want us to get into any of the stuff that went on in the team. It could wait.

  My sense was that Emma believed cycling had lost its soul, that doping was rife, that this wasn’t the sport she had fallen in love with as a teenager in Tallaght, hitting the road with the gang from the Irish Road Club. Yet she still felt an affinity with and loyalty to various people within the cycling world.

  As she mentioned in that first call, she knew of riders who had died because of doping. She had been an employee of a major team and I would learn that, in the end, she had been treated unfairly. A pragmatist, she didn’t resent that overly, but she felt that it excused her from the law of omerta that held the whole thing together. If she didn’t want to carry US Postal’s secret practices around in her head she wouldn’t. First, though, she would have to find somebody she could trust to handle what she had to say.

  In our early discussions, I think that what attracted Emma to the idea of being interviewed for the book (which would become L.A. Confidentiel) was the idea of being one of a number of voices speaking out. That seemed preferable and more manageable than the fall-out from a one-off interview. That first night in Oxton we got on well, and at the end of the evening we agreed to stay in touch by phone and to meet up a few weeks later to formally do the interview.

  It would be early July before we sat down and faced each other again. We met in Emma’s home at Oxton, sitting on the sofa in the living room, my digital recorder between us. Coverage of that day’s Tour stage had already started when we met, and we watched a short burst of Eurosport before we started talking. It was a flat stage and not very interesting.

  We watched for a while before Emma said decisively, ‘We don’t want to watch this, do we?’ and banished the picture with the zapper. If it had been a half-decent mountain stage that would have been different.

  Emma’s story would take six hours to tell and the transcript would run to about 40,000 words. As she spoke, I realised Emma O’Reilly’s voice in this story wouldn’t just be one of many. Among the many, hers would stand out. This was a world that had possessed her. Now it was letting her go.

  The nascent team with which Emma linked up in Ramona in January 1996 might have had the backing of money but it didn’t have the smell of money. Ramona was a one-horse place and in the evenings they all ate together in the local sizzler. There was another female soigneur too: Alison Baker, the sister of Darren, a rider in the team.35 The team director’s nephew was working as a mechanic. The atmosphere was good and the plan was to do a few smaller European races over the following two years and then to hit the old continent full time. Emma couldn’t quite see it all working out so smooth, not there in tatty little Ramona, but it was an adventure gift wrapped in steady pay cheques.

  Then Andy Hampsten joined. Hampsten was a veteran on the descent but he was a name, which suggested intent, and he could still climb better than anyone in the team. There was potential in guys like Tyler Hamilton and Eddy Gragus, but no one was getting carried away.

  That first year was the Galibier of learning curves: long and steep. Emma worked the domestic programme Stateside in the early months but found herself in Europe from April. The team stuck to competing in the smaller races. Any time they traded pedal strokes with the big boys they got crushed. As the year progressed, riders began to come up with reasons why they were so far behind other teams.

  It was a source of tension in the team. By the Tour de Suisse, riders were lobbying the team doctor Prentice Steffen for something with a bit more poke than Anadin and the vitamin pills he was dishing out, but he wouldn’t shift. Doping was a constant topic of team conversation. Emma, still in love with the sport, stayed out of the chat. She didn’t want disillusionment to spoil the adventure.

  As her responsibilities grew she gained a reputation for being efficient, for being a top-class masseuse and for taking no shit. The crew had a distinct Polish flavour at the time and a guy called Waldek Stepniowski was the head soigneur. First, Waldek had to learn a thing or two.

  One day he said, ‘Emma, I need to know what your time of month is?’

  ‘You what?’ she asked.

  ‘Just so I understand your mood swings.’

  ‘Hey. I have an excuse. What’s yours?’

  Another day she caught Waldek looking her up and down appreciatively as he talked to a buddy.

  ‘Don’t you ever fucking eye me up and down like that again,’ she said. Soon she had made proper space for herself in the testosterone-splashed world of the team.

  Late in the year they won a stage of the Tour of China and the money was divvied among the team. Emma got about $3000 which went on top of her $20,000 a year salary. It was a pittance for a life on the road, a life of 24/7 availability, but she figured that she had no expenses when she was on the road and that this was what she’d come to America for.

  From that first meeting with Thom Weisel at his offices in the Pyramid Building, she knew that whatever results were achieved in ’96 they would be bettered in ’97; and that prospect excited her. Good wages or bad, she wanted in.

  Of course other things were happening in late 1996. Lance Armstrong, the young American rider with Motorola, had cancer. And rival team Motorola were departing the scene. By the time Emma got back to Ramona for pre-season work the following January, her team, now known as US Postal, had acquired some Motorola trucks and a biggish name, Viatechslav Ekimov. Too big a name for most of the team to get their mouths around actually. He was known ever after as Eki.

  Andy Hampsten had retired and the team also had a new directeur sportif, a friendly Dane by the name of Johnny Weltz, and a new doctor, a Spaniard, Pedro Celaya. And another promising American rider, George Hincapie.

  Emma worked the American spring races, but the word coming back from Europe was that Johnny Weltz and Waldek weren’t hitting it off. Neither were Waldek and Pedro Celaya enjoying their new togetherness. Emma smiled. In time the call came. An SOS. Soigneur needed. Emma arrived in Europe in time for April’s Tour of Flanders.

  That season they weren’t competitive or particularly organised but they got through, and continued to learn the ropes. Still much of the talk was about drugs. Riders would comment that they had ridden pan y agua or on ‘bread and water’. Some riders never rode that way apparently. In the US Postal set-up, they were looking at some astonishing performances from rivals and often they would shake their heads and ask each other just where that had come from. ‘What planet is he on?’

  The culture was changing, but it was still acceptable within US Postal to dismiss a rival who evidently doped as a cheat or a moron.

  Emma felt that if there were drugs around US Postal that summer it was minor-league stuff compared to what seemed to be going on elsewhere. The only time she thought awhile on the question was when a colleague from the Rabobank team said to her, late in the season: ‘Well, we all know that you have a good doctor now.’

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sp; Emma took the compliment at face value. They had nine riders and all had stayed healthy, so Pedro Celaya must have been a good doctor. But maybe something else was being implied.

  Johnny Weltz had brought a Spanish soigneur in with him as part of his deal. A guy called José. He wasn’t greatly appreciated for his massage, but his facility with a needle was revered. What was in the syringes which José so deftly applied and disposed of wasn’t Emma’s business. Some of the European ‘culture’ was seeping in, however.

  Late in the year, Emma travelled to the World Championships in San Sebastián with the Irish team. She got a call in the hotel from a Postal colleague. ‘They’ve signed him. This will be great. Things will change.’

  ‘Him’ was Lance Armstrong. Things did change.

  Emma is a natural teller of stories. I knew from that first dinner we had had that she had things to tell me. I knew it would be worthwhile but I never guessed at her sense of detail. Also she had a diary in which she had kept notes. A smart, articulate woman with a diary. No downside. Better still, she had a sense of humour and had retained affection for Lance Armstrong. He wasn’t perfect but he had treated her right and respectfully. She hoped that might continue.

  Lance Armstong arrived in Emma’s life in 1998 in, where else, Ramona. He arrived with Christian Vande Velde. Emma shook hands with Vande Velde: ‘Hi, I’m Emma.’

  She had the impression Armstrong was speaking to somebody on the phone as he came in, so she ignored him. Vande Velde laughed and when she looked again Armstrong was standing with an outstretched hand.

  ‘Here, he’s trying to say hello,’ said Vande Velde.

  They shook hands and from there out they got on just fine.

  Emma was a good worker and bright enough to see the deficiencies in the organisation. Armstrong had been with Motorola before his illness and he had helped ‘Europeanise’ their attitude and preparation. Now that nobody else would give him a shot after his recovery he had settled for this, a small contract with a middle-sized team – but big bonuses would accrue if he performed well.