The Program: Seven Deadly Sins My Pursuit of Lance Armstrong

‘The race is everything. It obliterates what isn’t racing. Life is the metaphor for the race.’

Donald Antrim

On 25 June 1995, I returned home to Ireland after five weeks covering the Rugby World Cup in South Africa. It was about ten o’clock when the plane landed in Dublin. Mary drove from our home in County Westmeath to pick me up, and Paul and his wife Ann came from their home not far from the airport to meet us for a coffee. We spent a couple of hours catching up before heading in our separate directions.

At home, turning into our drive, it was obvious something was wrong. Neighbours were standing around – not just neighbours but the schoolmaster, the priest – no one sure where to look. Inside the car you felt the certainty that once you opened the door your life was going to change forever. I can’t remember who it was told me that John, our twelve-year-old son, had been in an accident on his bicycle.

That was it. We knew. Then we were thinking of our other children: Kate, Simon, Daniel, Emily and Conor, who all knew before we did. Where were they? How were they?

The accident had happened an hour earlier. John had played a gaelic football match that morning, his team had lost and he’d passed on the sandwiches and soft drinks provided afterwards. Turning into our driveway on the right-hand side of the road, he was struck by an oncoming car and died instantly. There wasn’t a mark on his face or body. It was just the force of the collision and the angle of his fall.

John was the second eldest of our children, a kid with an insatiable appetite for life. He was good at school, fiercely scrupulous about getting his homework done: ‘Dad, can’t talk, I’ve got three hours’ homework and there’s Champions League on the television.’ You stood to one side and let him get on with it. We played a lot of football on our lawn with the Kilmartin kids from next door and often they ended in fights; John and I, mostly.

And from there all hell would break loose. His passion was forgivable. I should have had more sense.

We went on a holiday to the west of Ireland before the 1987 Tour de France and did the hike to the statue that stands on a hill 300 metres above Kylemore Abbey. To get to the statue you follow a steeply rising trail with countless switch-backs. At the top we were all tired but John just wanted to start running back down. We warned him it was too steep for running but we might as well have told him it would be a blast and to go for it.

Waiting wasn’t what John did. He just went; I sprinted after him. He was four, I was thirty-one and a regular runner at the time. Again I was the one who should have had more sense. Some sense. With his ten-metre start, it should have taken about a minute for me to catch him. I never saw him until I got to the bottom of the hill. He scared the life out of me. It exhilarated him and, even at four, he savoured that victory over his dad.

It didn’t matter what the sport was, he loved it. He played gaelic football, loved Liverpool, taped every game that mattered in the 1995 Rugby World Cup knowing I would watch them when I got home. Seeing how he’d indexed them and lined them up on a shelf in my office was heartbreaking.

He could break your heart in others ways too. Once, when Paul came to the house, John ambushed him.

‘Paul,’ he said. ‘You know in your book with Andy Townsend?’ (Paul had ghost-written the autobiography of the ex-footballer.)

‘Townsend talks about the night Arsenal beat Liverpool at Anfield to stop them winning the double?’

‘Townsend says in the book he can still see David Seaman bowling the ball out to Lee Dixon, a long, long ball to Alan Smith and then the pass to Michael Thomas for the goal?’

‘It wasn’t Seaman who was in goal for Arsenal that night. It was John Lukic.’

In September 1994 I travelled to the All-Ireland gaelic football final with Martin McHugh, who had been a star of the Donegal team that had won the title two years before. McHugh and I were friends and John came with us. Down beat Dublin that day and on the journey home John asked Martin question after question about the game. He never stopped and Martin’s patience never wavered.

Next day back in his native Donegal, Martin bought a pair of Patrick football boots for John and had them couriered to our home.

‘I’ve spoken to a lot of kids about football,’ he said, ‘but never with an eleven-year-old who asked questions like your lad’s.’

You may think it impossible to find any comfort when your son is taken but I did. Soon after his death, the school principal Tim Looney told a story of a day in the classroom when some boy had mischievously written on the blackboard.

The silence and the detention continued into the lunchtime break and with the principal showing not the slightest inclination to back down, someone had to do something. John put up his hand.

Standing up, he turned to his best friend. ‘Andrew,’ he said, ‘you know you did it, we know you did it and you probably won’t be even punished if you admit it.’ Andrew stood up and said, ‘Sir, I did it.’

Later, another teacher, Mrs Twomey, told of reading the Nativity to John’s class and getting to the point where she related how Mary and Joseph lived a modest life in Nazareth because Joseph was just a carpenter. John’s hand went up.

‘If they were so poor, what did they do with the gold they were given by the three wise men?’

Mrs Twomey had been reading the story of the Nativity to children for more than thirty years.

‘John, that’s the first time anyone’s asked me that. I don’t know the answer.’

I have held onto all the stories, especially the two from the classroom. If you can, you’ve got to stand up and be counted. And you have to ask the obvious but sometimes difficult questions. What did Mary and Joseph do with the gold?

Sean Kelly came to John’s funeral and, finding me on my own, he asked how exactly the accident had happened. From which direction had John been coming; which direction the car? We walked down the garden so he could get a better picture of precisely what had happened. Kelly then asked about my trip from Dublin Airport and whether John might have expected us to be already home as he cycled down the road to the house. I said we should have been back but we had a long coffee with Paul at the airport.

‘As John’s coming to the house,’ he said, ‘he’s already looking to see if your car is in the driveway. He’s glancing across while his brain is telling him to turn, but his eyes aren’t on the road in front of him. I’ve done it a few times, turned across a road like that, but was lucky no car was coming against me.’

Though it was hard to have someone talk you through your son’s fatal accident, I appreciated Kelly helping me understand how it happened.

A year after John’s death, on a sticky summer’s night in Atlanta, a small group of us found ourselves in dwindling light in a small garden behind the swimming arena at Georgia Tech University. I was with my old friend Paul, now well into his career as a successful Sunday newspaper journalist, and our newer friend Tom Humphries of the Irish Times. Tom’s humour made us laugh, his talent kept us humble.

Irish swimmer Michelle Smith had just stormed the first day of the Olympic Games, and won a gold medal. It was an incredible achievement from a woman who through her career up to then had seemed destined for much lesser things. The obvious but difficult question was whether her improvement was credible? Could she have won this gold without drugs? This was the start of the aftermath.

As we stood under the cicadas and rhododendrons only the lights from the now empty arena illuminated the scene as three of us debated the implications with a group of American journalists and swimming people. We were uneasy. What we had just seen had a bad smell to it.

We didn’t know a lot about swimming but there was the old joke that a good result for Irish swimming was one where no one drowned. Of course, this wasn’t fair but we weren’t a nation that excelled at swimming, au contraire. Jimmy Meagan, my one-time colleague at the Irish Press, who is no longer with us, told a swimming story from the Montreal Games in ’76. One morning Jimmy wrestled with his conscience about going to a morning session to see an Irish swimmer compete in a heat. There was no chance he would qualify but a sense of duty got the better of Jimmy’s common sense. He’d get a quote from the guy for the last edition of the Evening Press.

Off went Jimmy with a colleague from the Irish Independent and, sure enough, the swimmer finished last in his heat, a long way behind the guy in second last place. Disappointment lay not in being last but in a time that was well outside the swimmer’s personal best.

‘I’m desperately disappointed. I can’t believe I’ve swam that slowly.’

From there to here, from Montreal’s buffet breakfast to a gold medal at the Georgia Tech was a leap, and we knew our newly minted national heroine was the wrong age (twenty-six) to have made the improvements she had made. More than that, she was the wrong shape, the wrong height and she was keeping the wrong company. In a sport where the business of coaching had attained the status of science, Michelle was coached by her husband, Erik de Bruin, a shot putter and discus thrower from the Netherlands who was also, inconveniently, serving a four-year doping ban.

An old interview with Erik had resurfaced in which he discussed doping. His stance was, at best, ambivalent.

Patriotically, we tossed the arguments for Michelle into the night air to see how more knowledgeable people would respond. Suppose she had trained ‘smarter’? What if coming up to Atlanta, her third Olympics, she had got more serious about the sport? Maybe Erik’s background in athletics was actually an advantage? What if everybody else is wrong and our girl is right? But those who knew the most believed the least. They swatted our arguments away.

Then the various conversations hushed. Having finished some interviews for his native Dutch television, Erik joined us in the garden. He had detected (or anticipated) some scepticism in the Georgia air and had come to spin. He sat on a low wall and we gathered around him. But spin works best when coming from a charmer, and while you might have accused Erik of many things, you couldn’t have called him one of nature’s charmers.

The exchanges were brief and edgy. First, some soft questions swaddled with compliments about this dream which had just come true. What a romance. Then the conversation moved onto the subject we really wished to speak about.

‘People here have said that when you were competing you tested positive for steroids?’

‘No. That’s not true. There was a problem with a test, but I was reinstated by my own federation and the Dutch courts, but I don’t want to get into that right now.’

‘No, I coach. You think I can coach and compete?’ he said, dismissively and as he got up.

‘Always the same,’ Erik shouted as he muscled through us and back into the arena. ‘Always the fucking same.’

Paul, Tom and I drew away from the main group and began walking slowly towards the media buses. It was late on Saturday night, not long before dawn in Ireland, and many of our compatriots were going to wake up with a smile. Our country didn’t often win gold medals, especially not in a sport dominated by the Americans. Tom would have to write a piece for Monday’s Irish Times while Paul and I were glad to have a week to think about what we would write for our Sunday newspapers.

As we walked and talked, there wasn’t a chance we would shirk from asking the questions. That wasn’t an option. Anybody in the garden a few minutes before knew that the suspicions of the swimming world would become a big part of the story. There was too much simmering anger. Michelle’s rise was too weird and too wonderful to go unquestioned.

We knew too, though, what would be going on at home. Mass celebrations. Delirium. People who had never before watched a swim race, seeing our redheaded, Gaelic-speaking Michelle destroying the field to take gold in an Olympic final. In terms of Irish sporting celebration this would be as good as it gets. You ring home and you realise your own family has really ‘gotten into the swimming’, and you want to say, ‘Better get out of it.’

Paul, Tom and I parted company with heavy hearts. Michelle would be racing all week long. She would be standing on podiums every other day. The madness at home would increase with every race. We were going to be asking the nation to sit down and have a cup of tea because we had some bad news.

As it happened, the three of us were the only members of the Irish media who opted to ask any questions. Everywhere else it was a whitewash job: big brush, broad strokes. Let’s all drink to Michelle, and none of that old tea, thank you. ‘Michelle, how did you feel when they played the national anthem and you saw the flag go up?’ Hear no hard questions. Speak no hard questions.

Those in Michelle’s corner saw the questioning of her performances as the evil work of jealous Americans trying to steal away Ireland’s sunshine. America, after all, had no more bitter rival in the world of sport than Ireland. No sight churned the American gut more severely than that of a red-haired, freckled Irish girl winning races against the odds. They could accept reds from Russia, communists from China, but not this smiling Irish cailín. So they tried to muddy the waters. And spit in our stew.

A lot of journalists chose to sell that story, and back in the homeland there were buyers. Others chose to ignore the story completely. We didn’t. Our stories said her victories couldn’t be trusted because the improvement was too great to be natural. A small handful made a cottage industry out of attacking the three of us in print and on the airwaves. We were attention-seeking traitors who would get our comeuppance as soon as Michelle got around to suing us for libel. You are going to sue them, Michelle, aren’t you? Take away their houses and their jobs and their reputations? Soon, please Michelle?

Long before we came home from Atlanta, the three of us were isolated and denounced. The debate over Atlanta took place in two different languages. Paul, Tom and I attempting to lay out the basis for asking questions about how an earnest second-rate swimmer should morph into one of the great Olympians. The other story was glorious: a week-long hallelujah, a fairytale written by journalists whose enthusiasm overwhelmed every critical faculty. Perhaps they also sensed what the Irish public wanted.

I have always been a sucker for wanting to win people round to my point of view. On the Wednesday of this ‘special week for Irish sport’, I got talking with Anne Cassin, who was then a television news reporter for Ireland’s national broadcaster, RTE. She was open to persuasion.

‘The thing is, she’s been an international swimmer for ten years, been at two Olympic Games before this and no one ever saw her making a final. Now this.’

‘Of course it is. Her incredible improvement happens after she falls in love with a discus thrower who later tests positive for a banned drug and gets a four-year ban.’

And on I went. A believer in Smith at the beginning, Anne was pretty convinced of the case against her by the time we finished. She was going to speak with her producer back in Dublin and make the point that they too should be asking questions. It seemed like a little victory. Later that evening, I met Anne at the pool. She had spoken to her producer and he gently dissuaded her. ‘We don’t really want to interfere with the national mood, do we?’ he said. Ireland was en fête.

On the day of Smith’s last race she had a problem with her goggles and was late to the starting blocks. Not far from where the three of us sat were the nine or ten Irish journalists who had been writing hymns of praise. They didn’t much like us that week and we weren’t their biggest fans either.

But with Smith’s starting block temporarily vacant, six or seven of her journalist fans rose from their seats and headed for the stairs that would take them down to the pool area. As they filed past us, one of them looked up and caught my eye. ‘She’s been done,’ he said quietly, meaning he reckoned Smith had learned of a positive test and that explained her failure to come out with the other seven finalists. She hadn’t ‘been done’, but it was a little insight into the minds of her believers.

The two years that followed were difficult but transformative. ‘Daddy, why are you mean to Michelle Smith?’ the kids asked when they came home from school. In the end, Michelle would receive a four-year suspension for tampering with a urine sample she provided at her home in Kilkenny in 1998, but until her final hearing in Lausanne everything the three of us published on the topic of her miraculous rise was greeted with hostility and catcalls. Paul and I did okay on Smith, Tom was outstanding.

But asking the obvious questions, like John’s simple query in that classroom, ‘What did Mary and Joseph do with the gold?’ had become an unavoidable duty. The bonus was that it felt like journalism.

The following summer, Paul, Tom and I were thrown together again. The World Athletic Championships in Athens were an anti-climax media wise. Sonia O’Sullivan, the perennial Irish favourite, had another difficult meet, but on a broader level the people of Athens seemed as indifferent to what was happening on the track as the rest of the world. At one point, the IAAF asked the Greeks if they couldn’t fill the empty seats in the stadium with military personnel. It’s an old sporting custom, but the Greeks said this wasn’t why they maintained an army.

Stories were few and our newspapers weren’t overworking us. There was time to enjoy Athens, the Acropolis and all that, but first a round of golf. Paul and I are keen and Tom was dragged along to the splendid Glyfada course in the suburbs. The great and good of Athens had fled to the islands for the hottest weeks of summer and we had the fairways of Glyfada to ourselves. Well, Paul and I had the fairways. Tom preferred the rough.

For once in our lives our press accreditation impressed somebody. We were treated like royalty at Glyfada. The club locker room was thrown open to us and we were permitted to choose our weapons from row after row of members’ bags. Each bag was as big as a trailer home and the clubs they housed left us with no excuses.

Something was bothering Tom, however, and it wasn’t just his driving. This was unusual because unlike Paul and me, he’s not by nature contrary. When he got it off his chest, the three of us fell to arguing passionately and the sightseeing agenda was forgotten about. Tom had listened to a lot of our old Tour de France stories. The day Kelly did this, the day Kelly said that. Paul and I encouraged Tom to get to the Tour and see for himself.

What Tom couldn’t figure was the gap between the affection and the esteem in which myself and Paul still held Sean Kelly and the position we had taken on Michelle Smith.

‘Surely a doping offender is a doping offender?’ he said. ‘And Kelly twice tested positive?’

‘But, Tom, the difference between Kelly and Smith is that he was beating the world’s best from his first season with the pros. He was a genuine talent from day one; she was nowhere near.’

‘There are no degrees of guilt here. No good dopers and no bad dopers,’ he said.

‘It’s not as black and white as that. Cycling is a different sport to swimming. Virtually all the top guys do stuff in cycling.’

‘Look, both of you guys have written successful books on cycling. Paul, your book showed how much doping there is in cycling but neither of you has called out Kelly.’

‘Tom,’ said Paul, ‘I wanted to focus on the doping culture and how every rider was forced to make a choice: dope and have a career; don’t dope and watch your career go down the drain. If I’d pointed the finger at individuals, people would have missed the more important point. It’s the sport that corrupts the individual.’

‘But still, you both have had opportunities to remind people that Kelly twice tested positive, but because you like the guy you haven’t done it.’

It was true that we liked Kelly and when our questions about him weren’t soft, they were non-existent. That morning in Senlis, when he jumped on his bike and sent those pills rattling against the plastic, we knew exactly what we’d heard, and when he later tested positive for the urine sample he gave that day we didn’t tell about what we’d heard.

We’d rationalised it in a way that suited us and tried to tell Tom that he didn’t understand the context.

‘Tom, the people who knew swimming were the loudest in saying they didn’t believe Smith. Those inside professional cycling loved Sean Kelly and never expressed any suspicion about his status as champion. So there was no basis for anyone else to be suspicious.’

‘Eddy Merckx twice tested positive and everyone accepts he was the greatest ever cyclist. So, should we say Merckx wasn’t a true champion?’

We told Tom about how the French and Belgians loved Kelly and if anyone knew the sport, it was them. To them he was a legendary hard man. We painted the picture of a world where, yes, most riders took drugs but in a kind of egalitarian way and the outcomes would still have been the same. Kelly would have been one of the patrons of the peloton no matter what.

And we told Tom some of our best stories, showing Kelly’s insatiable appetite for training, his need to win, the shyness that once made him nod in answer to a question on radio. I told about the times I’d seen him stick 20,000 French francs in small bills down his underpants after being paid for riding a criterium.

‘What I get is the effect. If the strongest guys dope, what effect does that have on guys down the food chain? Don’t they then have to dope to remain in the same world? Here is this sport of yours, so beautiful in its simplicity, so inspiring in its stories, and you’re telling young riders that in order to survive you need to put this and you need to put that into your body.’

‘Fuck. Fuck you, Tom, you’re right. That’s what I wrote the book about, the choice, that’s the story I told in Rough Ride. That culture is why my career got screwed up; where you end up not knowing how good you could have been.’

Paul is rightly proud of Rough Ride but, six years after it came out, we both wanted to pretend that Kelly could be separated from this doping culture, almost as if he were somehow different. Tom wasn’t buying it. We were blinded by our affection for Kelly. We drove back to Athens in silence.

Over the years I’ve often thought about how my life changed in the years before 1999 and how my attitude to the Tour de France was so different in ’99 to what it had been when I first discovered it in 1982. I’ve wondered, too, about the effect on Armstrong of having life-threatening cancer.

After he came back and questions of doping were raised he would say, ‘Do you really think I would put that stuff in my body after what I’ve been through?’ It was a convincing argument. But there was a voice in my head that said, ‘Hold on, he’s had to deal with the possibility of dying, how scary must that have been? Now maybe nothing scares him.’