‘No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader.’
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, surely 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.
His work from the Festina trial was praised by his bosses at L’Équipe but, while there was no shortage of doping stories, L’Équipe’s enthusiasm for the subject wasn’t anywhere close to Pierre’s. The newspaper’s bosses would praise him for the work he did in Lille, but his fellow reporters in the cycling department weren’t so impressed.
Each of the major sports at L’Équipe has a separate department. Cycling, for example, had its editor, Rouet, his number two (Philippe Bouvet) and then nine reporters. ‘I’d known Jean-Michel and Philippe for a long time and they’re good guys. But when I concentrated on doping, I knew some of the others wouldn’t like it very much. They didn’t think my writing about doping was good for the newspaper, and at least two of them, Philippe Le Gars and Manuel Martinez, believed my writing was making it harder for them to get access to the riders.’
One of the bosses spoke with Pierre about his concerns.
‘He said that he didn’t think I was in harmony with the newspaper and I replied, “Am I the problem or are you the problem?” They wanted me to write some things about doping, but there were just too many doping affairs for their liking.’
While working exclusively on doping, Pierre discovered something unexpected. Always, the message came back to him that riders and everyone else complained about his work but whenever he sat down one to one with a rider and looked him in the eye, the reaction from the other side of the table was positive. ‘The ones who would actually talk had a lot of respect for what I was doing and many of them wanted me to keep doing it.’
Tensions increased on L’Équipe’s cycling desk.
At first some of the other journalists were suspicious, then they refused to speak with Pierre, and in time he became a pariah, totally alone within that group of nine. He was Monsieur Propre. His presence made people uneasy. It was a terrible time for Pierre. Philippe Le Gars and Manuel Martinez were particularly unhappy about his work. It was clear that they would have been happy if Pierre was fired.
Pierre knew that Le Gars and Martinez were friends with some of the top cyclists and liked to socialise with them. This was the time when partying bike riders would swap their performance-enhancing drugs for recreational drugs and inject pot belge, a lethal mixture of recreational drugs including heroin, cocaine and amphetamine.
People gossiped about Le Gars and Martinez. There were rumours that they had been present at some of these pot belge parties. Sensing that these same two journalists were undermining his position at the newspaper, Pierre decided to make enquiries about the social habits of his colleagues.
He spoke with Bruno Roussel, the former Festina team director; Willy Voet, the former masseur; and Jerome Chiotti, a former Festina rider. They told Pierre they knew Le Gars and Martinez had been at some of those parties, had gotten drunk with the riders and injected pot belge, sharing needles with the riders. A Festina car had been damaged on the way back from a party.
Pierre asked each of his contacts to write down what they knew about the journalists, as if they were writing witness statements, and to sign them at the bottom. They knew these statements would be shown to senior people at L’Équipe and still they all agreed to make formal statements about the involvement of Le Gars and Martinez.
At first, Pierre tried to work things out through Jean-Michel, but after showing the cycling editor the three damning testimonials, he realised his friend didn’t want to deal with the discovery that two of his reporters had engaged in recreational drug use with professional cyclists. Pierre believed L’Équipe’s reputation as a serious newspaper was compromised by the journalists’ behaviour.
‘I didn’t want them to lose their jobs but I wanted to say to them, “You’ve gone too far here, you can’t behave like this.” I thought they should be disciplined and reminded of their responsibilities as journalists and representatives of L’Équipe.’
Jean-Michel Rouet and Philippe Bouvet are fine journalists and good men but they are not by nature confrontational. They didn’t want to have anything to do with the three testimonials. Pierre thought, ‘That’s okay, I’ll take them higher.’ He spoke about what he’d learned to the newspaper’s editor Jérôme Bureau and his right-hand man Claude Droussent.
In February 2001, Bureau, Droussent, Ballester, Le Gars and Martinez met in a room at L’Équipe’s offices. Bureau read the statements of Roussel, Voet and Chiotti, and his anger towards Le Gars and Martinez was made clear. Though Pierre could feel the hostility of his fellow journalists, he wasn’t bothered. They thought he was the problem. He thought they were the problem. Bureau and Droussent could decide.
A week or so later, Bureau arranged a meeting with Pierre. Le Gars and Martinez had received a warning about their future behaviour. Pierre wasn’t sure how the newspaper would deal with him. ‘If I had any worries it was because I felt they weren’t enthusiastic about the role I wanted for myself at the newspaper.’
Pierre wanted to be the doping correspondent on a paper that had 379 other journalists out there selling the illusion. He was savvy enough to realise that L’Équipe sells an image of sport that is about role models and heroes, great victories and heartbreaking losses, triumph and emotion, and it didn’t want to look at the backside of this. He knew he wasn’t in tune with what his bosses saw as the editorial needs of the paper.
‘For the previous six months I wasn’t able to get as many doping stories in as I wanted, so I said to Jean-Michel, “Just let me do doping and editing, I don’t mind sitting at a desk editing the work of the guys at the races, but please don’t send me any more.” When I met Jérôme I thought I would be placated and allowed to continue doing this.’
That wasn’t how it turned out. ‘I met Jérôme and he spoke to me about how people working for the same department needed to be a team and I hadn’t been a team player. He said I was wrong to have got the evidence against my colleagues and I would have to go.’
Pierre was fired a fortnight later.
L’Équipe’s view was that he had behaved improperly and they were entitled to dismiss him without any compensation. Pierre was convinced they couldn’t do this, but different people had warned that L’Équipe might try to justify sacking him and insist he wasn’t entitled to a pay-off. Pierre’s situation was complicated by the fact that his wife, Liliane Trevisan, was a basketball writer at the newspaper. Still, he wasn’t going to allow L’Équipe to get away with what he considered a totally unjust sacking.
Pierre knew a Parisian lawyer, Thibault de Montbrial, a young man who once encountered is not easily forgotten. When you get past the good looks, charm and supreme confidence, what strikes you about Thibault is his intellect and his natural affinity with journalists who challenge institutions.
Thibault knew the kind of journalist Pierre was and he liked him. When he heard the story of Pierre’s dismissal, he was staggered. He wanted Pierre not to treat this as a simple employer–employee case but as something more serious which he would take before an industrial tribunal. His professional opinion was that Pierre would be awarded a substantial sum of money as a result of the damage done to his reputation by an unjustifiable decision.
‘It was a difficult situation for me because Liliane liked her job at L’Équipe and it was going to be bad for her if I took up a big legal case against the paper. I did not want her to be affected by my situation with L’Équipe. If we’d gone before the tribunal, I don’t think she would have been able to stay there. So I decided not to go that route.
‘Thibault said it was certain we would win and the pay-off would be far greater than normal. I said to him, “Look, I just want them to pay what they should have paid when they were letting me go.” He said that wouldn’t be a problem and in the end he made them write a pretty good cheque. It was the right thing for Liliane and me because she wanted to continue working there.’
Liliane Trevisan continues to work the basketball beat for L’Équipe. Philippe Le Gars and Manuel Martinez remain reporters in the cycling department.