‘A boo is louder than a cheer.’
In 1999, Sestriere became a fork in the road for the press corps. Those who wanted to do journalism went one way; their old comrades took the other route. Things wouldn’t be the same for a long time.
Survey this 213km toil through the Alps. We begin at the ski station in Le Grande Bornand and then hit the climbs through the Col du Télégraphe, laurelled already by storm clouds, onto the mighty Galibier (in 1911 when the Galibier was introduced to the Tour only three of the peloton didn’t get off their bike and walk), through the Maurienne Valley and then up the climb of Montgenèvre, before we finish with the 11km ascent to Sestriere.
Early in the day, Armstrong’s US Postal teammates hauled the pack after them on the Col du Télégraphe, allowing their leader to focus on nothing but the wheel in front of him as they took care of the rest before hurtling down into the town of Valloire, recovering and going again on the early slopes of the Galibier.8
It is raining now. The peaks are dressed with freezing mist. Few things sap the morale of the pack quite like rain and mist and freezing cold. A shivering peloton rolls on. The lead group is down to ten, pursued by twelve more desperadoes a minute behind. Armstrong is with the front group. Comfortable.
On to Montgenèvre and now only the strong survive. One from Armstrong, Alex Zülle, Fernando Escartín, Ivan Gotti and Richard Virenque will win. Armstrong still looks comfortable but, with his teammates no longer around him, you guess he will be happy to hang in there. As they descend from Montgenèvre, Gotti and Escartin make their move. They get to Sestriere 25 seconds ahead of the rest.
Before them, above them, the picturesque ski resort freckled with chalets marks the last great challenge. Armstrong is in that second group but all he has to do is keep his one dangerous rival, Zulle, within his sights. After five and a half hours in the worst conditions, he’s just got to stay there. Hold on to what he’s got.
The final skirmishes that day were breathtaking but not in the manner of Chiappucci. You can’t walk into the same river twice because neither you nor the river is the same. Eight kilometres from the summit, Armstrong rose out of the saddle and let the juice flow. In the space of a kilometre he closed 21 seconds to Gotti and Escartín, who were both shattered.9
His rhythm never dropped and Zulle, his rival, was left behind. Armstrong, with a new yellow jersey on his back, had done his post-race interviews and was back in the US Postal team bus while most of the field was still labouring up Sestriere.
I had watched the final climb to Sestriere on a big screen in the salle de presse. At the moment of Armstrong’s acceleration there was a collective and audible intake of breath and, as he rode clear, there was ironic laughter and shaking of heads. Not every journalist was overcome with scepticism, not even the majority, but there were enough to form a platoon of sceptics. This wasn’t everyone’s Tour of Renewal.
That evening I called Alex Butler, my sports editor at the Sunday Times.
‘Hell of a stage today,’ he said. ‘Armstrong’s got it now, hasn’t he?’
‘He will win the Tour, no doubt about that.’
‘You’re not convinced about him?’
I can hear disappointment in his voice.
‘Afraid not. Actually, I think it stinks. This guy has ridden the Tour de France four times before now, ridden nine mountain stages and not been anywhere near. Suddenly he’s an outstanding climber.’
‘David, if we are going to cast doubt on him, a lot of readers are going to be upset.’
‘I know that but I don’t believe we can applaud. There’s a young guy in the race, Bassons, and I would like to write a shorter piece about him. He’s talking about doping, saying it’s still a big problem. The other riders have turned against him.’
‘But back to Armstrong for a minute, David. Do you believe he’s doping?’
‘Yeah, I do. Of course I can’t prove it. I’m going to talk to people, see what others are saying.’
‘Well, make sure you give it to us in time for the lawyers to see.’
This was the first time Alex said this to me. It wouldn’t be the last. In fairness he didn’t flinch.
Covering the Tour de France means spending considerable time in the company of the journalists with whom you travel. Not quite Brian Keenan and John McCarthy chained together in Beirut, but close. With these guys you co-ordinate hotel accommodation, eat evening meals at the same table, breakfast the next morning and also drive to the start of the stage, before undertaking the five- or six-hour journey to the finish, day after day for twenty-three days.
Rupert, our itinerant Aussie, shared the back seat with me, his ever-dazzling selection of shirts bringing a little piece of Caribbean sunshine with him every day. His dress code reflected an easy and sweet nature. He could cheer up mourners at a funeral just by appearing. In the driver’s seat, Charles’ freshness was a joy, as he wanted to know again and again why I couldn’t warm to Armstrong, and why I was so unconvinced about the Tour of Renewal. John would keep his head down, writing down the name of every escapee in the breakaway even though we all knew they would be reeled in in no time.
Day after day in the car, evening after evening over dinner, we spoke about the race and what we were seeing. Frequently we would discuss my refusal to accept it was possible without doping to make the leap Armstrong had made.
‘I don’t understand how a guy can ride the Tour de France four times and show nothing that indicates he will one day be a contender to suddenly riding like one of the great Tour riders.’
‘Was he that bad in those four Tours?’ Charles asked, lobbing the balls up for me to smash home.
‘Well, he was always capable of winning one of the flat stages but he didn’t even enter the race for the final yellow jersey. His usual was six minutes behind in the long trial, anything from seven to thirty in the mountains.’
‘David, he was only twenty-one when he first rode the Tour,’ Charles would say.
‘But Anquetil, Merckx and Hinault, who all won five Tours, won the first one they rode. LeMond was third in his first, second in his second when he should have won, and then he did win his third. Armstrong went into his third Tour in ninety-five on the back of good form and got his best ever placing, thirty-sixth. The bottom line was he couldn’t time trial well enough and couldn’t survive in the mountains.’
Occasionally I would aim a question straight at John.
‘You were here last year, saw how much drugs the police found. And here we are a year later and the average speed is higher. Just doesn’t make sense?’
And once, he engaged: ‘The speed of the race now has a lot to do with the improved road surfaces, the lighter-framed bikes, and this year the meteorological conditions have been favourable.’
But mostly when I said something directly to John, he would turn his head a little to the side so the words could flow in one ear and out the other. Perhaps he was so focused on the race itself that he didn’t want to look underneath it all.
So it was back to Charles.
‘This is mad. Clean guy goes faster than the EPO generation? So what do you think, Charles? Smoother road surfaces? Tail winds every day? Lighter bikes? Or these leaders are doping, as Bassons says?’10
‘I can’t argue with your logic,’ Charles said, ‘but I find it really hard to believe that a guy who has had cancer, pretty serious cancer too, would come back and put that shit in his body.’
‘I know, that’s the bit that’s hard to believe. But, on the other hand, what drug do they give you when you’re recovering from cancer? EPO. Side-effects? Seemingly far less than for most drugs. The bottom line is that you can’t go faster without EPO than with it, and we’re being asked to believe you can.’
I had shared a car with John as far back as the Tour of 1984, but Sestriere was the fork in our relationship. He couldn’t live on this race without access to certain riders; namely the top Americans and Lance. He would do the bread-and-butter job of reporting better than most, but for him the cream came in the team hotel in the evening, when you might snatch a fifteen- or twenty-minute interview with one of your favourites.
His enthusiasm for the company of the stars irked me, because it was never balanced by any expression of concern for the lesser-known riders who might be having their careers destroyed by the doping of others. I never heard him wonder about Christophe Bassons and the possibility that he was having his career stolen. Just as I never heard him empathise with the injustice Paul had exposed in his book Rough Ride.
And I was tired of the duplicity. The tests were useless because there was no test for the drug of choice, EPO. Instead the UCI tried to control its abuse by withdrawing from races those riders whose haematocrit exceeded 50, which was considered dangerous to a rider’s health but not proof of doping. It wasn’t proof but everyone knew that haematocrits generally got to 50 because of EPO abuse.
Charles was curious and spoke to Dr Leon Schattenberg, who was on the UCI’s medical committee and believed the haematocrit limit ensured those riding clean didn’t have to compete against riders with ridiculously high haematocrits, and that this was better than nothing. Encouraged by Charles’ industry, I too spoke with Schattenberg.
‘From the blood tests you do, you know the haematocrit of every rider in the Tour de France?’
‘That’s right,’ he said.
‘I’m not going to ask for the haematocrits of each rider because I know you will say that is private medical information. I’m not going to ask for the average for each team, but can you say what, according to your blood tests, is the average haematocrit for riders in the Tour de France this year? No names, just the overall average?’
‘I’m sorry,’ he said, ‘I can’t give you that information.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because it is not information I am allowed to give.’
‘The reason you don’t give out this information is that if you did, the public would see the average was much higher than it should be, and realise a lot of guys in this race are using EPO.’
Schattenberg wasn’t responsible for what was effectively a cover-up and the UCI would argue that without a test for EPO their hands were tied. But they could have done more, even if it was to publicly say that haematocrits were unusually high (especially in some teams), because the governing body was well aware that it wasn’t a clean Tour.11
Some of the more thoughtful practitioners of our trade like to say that if you are to be a sportswriter it’s better to love the writing more than the sport. I loved the sport. I loved the role that sportswriters could play in sport: afflicting the comfortable, comforting the afflicted, as news reporters used to say. No longer did I see it as our role to smile up at the dais for a press conference, reassuring the organisers and competitors that ‘there ain’t nobody here but us chickens’.
French police and customs had forced us to open our eyes in ’98 and I wasn’t going to close them again. I didn’t want to be a fool just because of my love for sport. And I didn’t want to act as an agent in making fools of readers and fans on behalf of the UCI. This was supposed to be the Tour of Renewal! So far there were plenty of questions but no answers.
Two days after Armstrong’s dominant performance at Sestriere, I wandered through the salle de presse feeling nothing but sadness at the unfolding story. The scepticism felt by many as he soared like an eagle on that first mountain stage was less apparent now as the realisation dawned that Armstrong was going to win, and it was better to accept, even embrace, his performance.
There were a few whom I knew would not be so easily turned, guys who didn’t want to be peddling the fantasy. There was Philippe Bouvet, now the chief cycling writer at L’Équipe, the son of a former professional and a man who had grown up with the sport. Philippe had written questioningly of Armstrong and the sport through the first two weeks.
He believed the Tour was racing at ‘deux vitesses’ [two speeds], caused by the fact of many but not all riders using EPO. Armstrong, he described as ‘an extraterrestrial’. It didn’t take genius to work out where exactly Philippe was coming from, and it wasn’t from the same upbeat, rose-tinted place that the organisers wished him to be.
‘What do you make of it?’ I asked.
‘There is a new kind of cycling,’ he replied. ‘You see things you don’t understand. Doping is an old story in cycling, but over the past few years the manipulation of riders’ blood has changed the nature of competition. What we are getting is a caricature of competition. It is killing the sport. I can still write about cycling, but not in the same way, not with the old passion. Cycling has to change.’
Philippe’s belief about EPO killing the sport is important. Almost always the first line of the dopers’ defence, when a question is asked about their affairs, is to point out that to pose the question is to hurt the sport. For many years the former president of the UCI, Hein Verbruggen, would berate journalists for ‘talking too much about doping’.
Through the eyes of too many riders and administrators, doping was always yesterday’s problem. ‘Perhaps there was a problem . . . I hope cycling renews itself and we should start now,’ Armstrong had said on the first day. He wanted us to forget when the imperative was not to forget. In fact the first task of anybody who cared about the sport, let alone dusty abstracts like journalism and truth, was to stand up and shout, ‘Stop!’
Among the journalists who cared for the sport more than a three-week carnival around France in July, it was common to find sadness and a reluctance to celebrate. Jean-Michel Rouet’s daily column in L’Équipe expressed disbelief at Armstrong’s resurgence and the idea of this as a Tour of Renewal. His approach was based on bitter experience. ‘What we learned last year was that everybody in this sport can fuck us,’ he said.
Rouet held on to his disbelief, as did another strong-minded French journalist, Jean-François Quénet, writing then for Ouest-France. ‘I haven’t written an enthusiastic line about Armstrong,’ he said to me. ‘They told us cycling would change but it hasn’t. After all the drugs last year, they said this would be slower because there would be no dope. This year’s race will be the fastest in history.’
Professional cycling has always exercised an omerta and it has played a significant role in the endurance of a drug culture. But more than a code of silence is at work here and it is not coincidental that the Sicilian word has become so associated with the peloton, because when a rider breaks the code, he can expect a mafia-like response.
After his individual time trial at Metz earlier in the day, Christophe Bassons watched television coverage of the leaders in his hotel room. They travelled at a speed he couldn’t believe, for the race against the clock had once been his own speciality. He was especially interested in Armstrong’s performance because their physiological profiles weren’t that different: same height, same weight, Armstrong’s VO2 Max was 83 to Bassons’ 85. Regarded as a key barometer of athletic potential, the VO2 Max is the maximum capacity of an individual’s body to transport and use oxygen. Yet when Antoine Vayer did the maths afterwards, he told Bassons that he would have finished 6 kilometres behind Armstrong if they’d started at the same time.
On the night of Sestriere, Bassons and his teammates watched highlights of the American riding away from his rivals on the mountain and they were stunned by the ease with which he outdistanced them. They didn’t believe it. Bassons continued to tell every journalist who crossed his path that the doping culture had not gone away.
His refusal to observe the code of silence was a challenge to the leaders in the peloton, especially the rider in the yellow jersey. Armstrong was more than happy to deal with the upstart.
On the morning after his win at Sestriere, the yellow jersey decided the following day’s race should be sedate until the approach to the first climb. The patron has the right to do this and normally such decrees are strictly observed. But Bassons thought, ‘What the hell, I’m the black sheep anyway,’ and he launched his breakaway in defiance of the informal truce.
With Bassons gone, Armstrong gave the nod to his US Postal teammates and they immediately pursued. It didn’t take long for them to recapture the breakaway and as they joined him Armstrong put his hand on Bassons’ shoulder indicating he had something important to say, as a mafia boss might when deciding to personally deliver the punishment.
‘What are you doing?’ asked Armstrong.
‘I’m making the race. I attack.’
‘You know what you’re saying to the journalists, it’s not good for cycling.’
‘I’m simply saying what I think. I have said there is still doping.’
‘If that’s what you’re here for, it would be better if you returned home and found some other kind of work.’
‘I am not going to leave when I haven’t changed anything. If I’ve things to say, I will say them.’
‘Ah, fuck you.’
By this point Bassons’ own team had turned against him, believing they were being victimised by the peloton for his speaking out of turn. They told him he had to stop, he said he wouldn’t, but the pressure was beginning to tell. Two days after the dressing down, he left the team hotel in Saint-Galmier and abandoned the race.
So that morning we left Saint-Galmier and the news that Bassons had abandoned was delivered on Radio Tour. The previous evening he’d cracked and, despite his fiancée Pascale and his friend Antoine pleading with him to remain, he couldn’t cope with the hostility coming from his fellow professionals. In the car I railed against the treatment he’d been subjected to, especially by Armstrong. Charles and Rupert agreed. John remained silent.
Somewhere along the way to Saint-Flour we passed under a banner draped high across the road: FOR A CLEAN TOUR, YOU MUST HAVE BASSONS. Seeing that was the high point of my day.
Before his bullying of Bassons, I considered Armstrong nothing more than a likely, almost certain cheater, one of a great number of professional cyclists still hooked up to the old doping drip. His treatment of Bassons revealed a nasty, almost sociopathic side to his nature.
On the morning after Bassons left, there were various reports that quoted his fellow professionals. Sympathy for the departed one was virtually non-existent. ‘He wasn’t injured, so why did he go home?’ said one, and the general view was that he had behaved unprofessionally. It was an important moment for the Tour. The new patron had sent out a message: anyone who broke the law of silence would be dealt with.
‘Would a clean rider, one committed to sport without drugs, have treated Bassons as Armstrong has treated him?’ I asked in another car debate.
‘I don’t believe so,’ said Charles, in that measured way of his.
We could hear the gentle flow of air up John’s nose.
After successfully defending the yellow jersey through the Alps, Armstrong’s position seemed unassailable even with two days in the Pyrenees to come. With Bassons banished there would be no dissent from within, but the French newspapers were still holding back. Le Monde and Libération, perhaps the two most thoughtful, were derisive when not dismissive and L’Équipe’s most important writers – Bouvet, Rouet and Ballester – clearly didn’t believe.
Because L’Équipe is part of the organisation that owns the Tour de France and because it gives so many pages each day to its coverage of the race, its refusal to warm to the champion-elect was significant. It was almost as if official recognition was being denied to the race leader. Armstrong felt it and a week before the end of the race he saw to Ballester in Saint-Gaudens, the last staging post before the Pyrenees.
They knew each other as Ballester had been to Austin to interview Armstrong during his recovery from cancer. That friendship didn’t count for much in Saint-Gaudens as the rider held Ballester’s arm to draw him closer and then, loud enough for others to hear, said, ‘This journalist isn’t professional.’ Ballester was flabbergasted. ‘Hey, Lance, you can’t leave it at that. What’s this about?’ But Armstrong had disappeared into the US Postal team bus.
That evening Armstrong called Ballester on his mobile phone, complaining that L’Équipe wasn’t being fair to him, and, like any good journalist, Ballester convinced the rider the best way to express his sense of injustice was in a one-on-one with the newspaper. They arranged it for the following day. Armstrong began by expressing his disappointment about what he saw as unfair treatment in the press. Ballester thought, ‘Fine, that’s part of the story,’ but he had some doping-related questions that would give the rider an opportunity to end the speculation.
‘Are you using any medical certificates?’
‘None,’ said Armstrong.
‘None at all? Not for corticosteroids or EPO?’
‘Nothing.’
‘Did you ever use this product to cure your cancer?’
‘No, never.’
‘Are you taking any medication to stop any return of your cancer?’
‘No, absolutely nothing. I just have to consult my oncologist, Dr Einhorn, once every four months.’
Ballester is a tough, straight-to-the-point interviewer, utterly unfazed by the reputation of his interview subject. His piece on Armstrong wasn’t the hymn of praise normally sung to athletes on the cusp of their greatest triumph. Armstrong’s denials were convincing enough except for his insistence he had not been treated with EPO during his recovery from cancer, when he had. Under pressure, it seemed he couldn’t admit using EPO even when it was legal and proper to do so, and a normal part of cancer treatment.
Jean-Marie Leblanc, the Tour de France organiser, was furious with Ballester for what he saw as unfair and overly aggressive questioning. Leblanc let Ballester know what he thought, complaining the interview read like a ‘police interrogation’. He also arranged a meeting with Rouet, the newspaper’s cycling editor.
The following morning I met Rouet and he mentioned how upset Leblanc was with L’Équipe’s coverage of the race, especially its treatment of Armstrong. Had Rouet been working for a newspaper that was totally independent of the race, he might have listened to Leblanc’s complaints but they wouldn’t have got past his interior walls. This was different.
He and Leblanc had once been colleagues and they were now still branches of the same tree. On a commercial level, the Tour is a godsend for the newspaper, as circulation and advertising rise during the month of July. And within the organisation, the Tour de France organiser was further up the food chain than the newspaper’s cycling editor.
Sensing that Rouet had been shaken by his conversation with Leblanc, I read every piece in the newspaper through the remaining five days and it wasn’t difficult to detect a shift in L’Équipe’s position. They were softer on Armstrong, more accepting of him as the Tour de France champion.
I don’t know how much influence the Tour de France organiser was able to exercise over what appeared in L’Équipe, or what consequences (if any) were threatened or hinted at; but the questions were no longer phrased in headlines and the newspaper somehow seemed to suspend its disbelief. They never descended to cheerleading, and Bouvet, Rouet and Ballester stayed true to their disbelief, but no longer could you say, ‘L’Équipe doesn’t believe Armstrong.’
I was learning lessons, and the first was that with a drugs story you know you are onto something when somebody in control warns you to stop and perhaps gently suggests you remember who puts the butter on your croissant.
Almost ten years earlier, when Paul had quit the peloton and written Rough Ride, the chorus of disapproval from his old comrades was loud and aggressive. One of his old teammates tried to physically assault him. He had spat in the soup. Many of his new colleagues in the press tent weren’t a lot better. They were sipping from the same bowl.
Armstrong’s last important challenge in the race didn’t come in the Pyrenees or in the individual time trial at Futuroscope on the penultimate day, but from an investigation by the journalist Benoît Hopquin of Le Monde that showed he had tested positive for a banned corticosteroid earlier in the race. Such drugs can be permitted under prescription, but Armstrong didn’t mention he had one when signing his doping control form. At a press conference in Saint-Gaudens, Hopquin asked what had happened.
Without so much as a quiver of doubt, Armstrong pressed the ‘attack’ button and called Le Monde ‘the gutter press’ and then, turning on Hopquin, said, ‘Mr Le Monde, are you calling me a doper or a liar?’ The journalist was taken aback by Armstrong’s aggression, and every other journalist in the room remained silent, instinctively fearing any intervention would draw the wrath of Armstrong upon them.
Le Monde would run the cortisone story saying he had tested positive, but the UCI quickly released a statement saying it was not a positive test, clarifying that it had received a prescription for the drug found in Armstrong’s urine and reminding journalists to exercise caution before writing about this story. In its communiqué, the UCI did not specify when it received the prescription from the US Postal team.12
The Tour rolled on to Paris. And Lance Armstrong, for whom the years since his last Tour had been spent in part having a testicle, lung cysts and brain lesions removed from his body, showed not a hint of vulnerability. On the morning of the final stage, riders transferred by train from Futuroscope to Arpajan, south of Paris. Only three of us made that journey in the car as John got a one-on-one interview with Lance and travelled as his guest on the train.
Already the story had divided the salle de presse, even split our little group of four. A Dutch journalist complained to me of the French: ‘There is no evidence and in Holland everyone gives Armstrong credit.’ I asked what if the suspicions of doping turned out to be true. He looked at me with pity. ‘Everyone knows Tour de France riders are doped. If you don’t accept that you shouldn’t be covering the sport.’ And we, the guys asking the questions, were the cynics?
Armstrong’s control of the race was absolute and for a diminishing few in the press tent this was disturbing. For others their sense of admiration made any suspicions or questions a trespass. Some of those who knew the most about what we were seeing said the least.
In my mind the pro-Lance masses were cheerleading a great sport all the way to the hospice. Close to Paris, Jean-Marie Leblanc, God bless his commercial soul, declared that the Tour ‘has been saved’.
On the day that the race entered the Avenue des Champs-Élysées, the headline on the story I wrote for the Sunday Times said, FLAWED FAIRYTALE. I was proud of that because, written back in London, it offered support that was hard to find on the race.
‘This has been no renaissance Tour,’ I wrote in the second paragraph of that Sunday Times story, ‘rather a retreat into the old ways of the peloton where doping is their business, not ours. Where the law of silence supersedes all others.’
For the piece I had spoken to Dr Armand Mégret, head of the French cycling federation’s medical commission, and asked if he believed the Tour was racing at ‘deux vitesses’. ‘If by this expression you mean there are clean riders and others who are not clean, then the answer is yes, this is cycling at two speeds. Doping has not been eradicated.’
In Gilles Delion I saw another Kimmage, an older Bassons. A 32-year-old veteran at the time, his innocence was taken a long time before but he had once been a young, talented and ambitious rider. In his first Tour he finished 15th, 21 places higher than Armstrong’s best in his first four, but Delion wouldn’t dope and his career meandered downhill.
He was asked about the Tour of Renewal: ‘That makes me laugh. The renewal affects just one part of the peloton,’ he said. Writing about Delion, Kimmage or Bassons, I felt a lot better about my job as a sportswriter.
As for readers of the Sunday Times, I hoped they would think a little before loving this new hero. ‘For too long sportswriting has been unrestrained cheerleading, suspending legitimate doubts and settling for stories of sporting heroism. Of course there are times when it is right to celebrate, but there are other occasions when it is equally correct to keep your hands by your sides.’
That afternoon on the Champs-Élysées, I had no desire to applaud the winner of the Tour de France.