The Program: Seven Deadly Sins My Pursuit of Lance Armstrong

1 L’Auto was deemed to have been too close to France’s wartime puppet president Philippe Pétain and was ordered to be closed after the war. L’Équipe was permitted as a successor but one condition of its publication was that it be printed on white paper rather than yellow, which was too closely associated with L’Auto.

2 The 1999 Tour de France opened with the prologue on 3 July. Armstrong won the prologue, but within days received notice of a positive test for a banned substance for which he did not have medical authorisation. A cover story was concocted backdating a prescription for cortisone cream and suggesting that the prescribed medication was to treat saddle sores. We hailed this as ‘the butt-cream defence’. The UCI bought it though.

3 When Vayer made this case for the top cyclists being psychotic he was not thinking of Lance Armstrong, who at this point was just another contender in what seemed a wide-open race. In hindsight, much of what he did say would prove to be applicable to Armstrong.

4 Haematocrit is the amount of red cells in blood expressed as a percentage of total blood volume. Because the UCI allowed riders to have a haematocrit up to 51 per cent in 1999, this meant a rider with a naturally low haematocrit like Bassons was deemed to have a natural advantage. Because of his low haematocrit, he could use a lot of EPO to generate extra red cells without pushing beyond the 51 limit. Bassons refused to dope and therefore his ‘natural advantage’ was irrelevant.

5 Armstrong got sick early in the 1996 Tour de France and had pulled out before the first time trial.

6 Coppi is one of the great figures of cycling, but no saint. Gino Bartali, his old rival, watched him like a hawk when they competed together. In their retirement the pair often appeared on television together. Bartali, who as a racer had been in the habit of searching his rival’s room after he left a hotel, looking for traces of what had been consumed, would tease Coppi, crooning at him about ‘the drugs you used to take’. One famous exchange tells us much about the culture of a time when doping had been invented but not yet banned:

Coppi: ‘Yes, and those who claim otherwise, it’s not worth talking to them about cycling.’

7 Later we learnt Chiappucci had worn a heart monitor for the stage to Sestriere, which was unheard of at the time.

8 Funny thing. In a hospital in Indiana in 1996, Betsy Andreu heard Lance Armstrong tell a physician that he had used performance-enhancing drugs. Betsy made her husband Frankie swear to her that he would never do the same. Betsy watched the first two weeks of the 1999 Tour on TV at home in Dearborn, Michigan. She saw Frankie lead his friend Lance up the early climbs that day and shook her head. ‘It was the first mountain stage, the one to Sestriere, and as they began the climb Frankie was at the front of a line of Postal riders. Frankie is about as much a climber as the Pope is an atheist. “What the hell is this about?” I said.’ She called her husband and said she didn’t believe he was clean any more. He was too tired to argue, but Lance’s troubles were just beginning. Betsy would later recall that one night at a late dinner in Nice some months before the 1999 race, Pepe Marti, the US Postal Service team trainer, arrived to provide what she was told was EPO to Armstrong. The dinner was late because Marti was travelling from Spain and considered it ‘safer to cross the border at night’. Armstrong took a brown paper bag from Marti, held it up and pronounced it, ‘liquid gold’.

9 In his autobiography It’s Not About the Bike, Armstrong wrote of almost bumping into the pillion passengers of the escort motorbikes in front of him, of how it felt ‘effortless’.

10 We now know that during first two weeks of the Tour, Armstrong, Tyler Hamilton and Kevin Livingston used EPO every third or fourth day, injecting themselves quickly then placing the syringes into Coke cans which they would crush till flat. Dr Luis del Moral would then dispose of the cans containing the syringes as quickly as possible.

11 In his book The Secret Race, Tyler Hamilton wrote that UCI’s pre-race blood tests showed most of the US Postal riders had haematocrits just below or above 50 (in 1999 up to 51 was okay). The high numbers were caused by using EPO. UCI privately expressed their dissatisfaction to the team but that was it. The governing body could hardly have been unaware that most riders in the team were using EPO.

12 Emma O’Reilly, Armstrong’s masseuse at the time, explained in L.A. Confidentiel: les Secrets de Lance Armstrong, that she was present on the night Armstrong and two team officials decided to get team doctor Luis del Moral to write and backdate a medical prescription to get round the problem. Much later, in an affidavit to the United States Anti-Doping Agency, Jonathan Vaughters said he had heard from within the team that Armstrong had used the banned corticosteroid Kenacort before the Tour and that this was what the test detected.

13 Ottey claimed her positive test was the result of a ‘mistake’ and, after being given a two-year ban by the IAAF, she appealed to the Court of Arbitration for Sport. Her appeal was upheld on a technicality and the suspension was lifted. She now lives in Slovenia and competed at last summer’s European Championships at the ripe old age of fifty-two.

14 At the Sydney Olympics a year later, Marion Jones won four gold medals. In 2007 she admitted she had used banned performance-enhancing drugs as far back as those 2000 Olympics. Her Olympic medals were returned and Jones was given a six-month prison sentence a year later for lying under oath before a Grand Jury investigation into doping in sport.

15 The question of whether or not Roche and his fellow riders in the Conconi file doped would be answered by Judge Franca Oliva in a summary delivery some time after the end of the case against the accused doctors, Conconi, Grazzi and Ilario Casoni: ‘The accused have, for several years and with systematic continuity, aided and abetted the athletes named in the court indictment in their consumption of erythropoietin, supporting them and de facto encouraging them in that consumption with reassuring series of checks on the state of their health, with examinations, analysis and tests designed to assess and maximise the impact of that consumption with regard to sports performances. Therefore, on a point of law, the crime as originally charged against the defendant still stands.’

16 On the night in February 2004 that the ’98 Tour de France winner Marco Pantani was found dead in a hotel room I spoke with Sandro Donati, who was saddened by the tragedy and angry with those who had helped to bring it about, especially the doctors who helped him to dope. ‘I have just watched pictures on the Italian news of him winning in the Tour de France, the Giro d’Italia, and it was pornography, nothing else. There is meaning in Pantani’s life and death but we cannot find it in those pictures.’

17 Ferrari was speaking some years later to Cycling News, which in an amusingly tender and sometimes awestruck interview elicited exchanges along the lines of:

Dr M.F.: ‘If you asked me “define your methods” beyond that point, there are the specific scientific aspects and values that are found in the riders’ tests and are quite complex. I’d need a lot of time to explain these to you . . .’

Cycling News: ‘But I understand from some riders that you have trained that you have a special way to work with riders, a humanistic approach that these riders found quite easy to deal with.’

18 Rominger in particular may wish that Ferrari might be a little less effusive. Late in 2012 newspapers reported that Rominger had ‘denied accusations that his management company has links to what Italian investigators believe is a network designed to finance doping, aid tax evasion and launder money’. La Gazzetta dello Sport had reported in October 2012 that a large-scale Italian investigation into Ferrari’s activities had opened a ‘Pandora’s Box’ of dubious business practices involving money-laundering through various European countries. Riders were also among the individuals at the centre of the investigation.

19 It would be six years after he started that some of Armstrong’s teammates first realised he was working with Ferrari. One assumes ghostwriter Sally Jenkins didn’t know either, for there was no mention of the maestro in It’s Not About the Bike.

20 And it was quite an amount of bucks. Transactions between Armstrong and Ferrari as uncovered by USADA in 2012 report:

2/21/1996: $14,089.65 CREDITO SWIFT NATIONSBANK NA 1, NATIONS HEADQUA O-LANCE ARMSTRONG AC- XXXXXXX RE F. XXXXXXXX USD 13615 – LESS CO USD 14’089.65 (bank record)

5/9/1996: $28,582.33 CREDITO SWIFT LANCE ARMSTRONG AC/XXXXXXX ./.SPESEN/SKA US 7.32 USD 28’582.33 (bank record)

7/24/1996: $42,082.33 CREDITO SWIFT LANCE ARMSTRONG . LINDA WALLING/RFB/XXXXXXXX/ CABLE ADV AT NOC USD 42’082.33 (bank record)

7/2/2004: $110,000.00 AVIS DE CREDIT DONNEUR D’ORDRE: /LANCE ARMSTRONG XXXXXXXXX AUSTIN TEXAS 78703 USD 110,000.00 (bank record)

3/29/2005: $100,000.00 Avviso di accredito D’ORDINE DI LANCE ARMSTRONG USD 100 000.00 (bank record)

21 This was the material referenced many years later in USADA’s 2012 report. ‘Multiple handwritten training plans for Kevin Livingston were found in Dr Ferrari’s files during a search of his residence in the first investigation of Dr Ferrari. The cyclists who have worked with Dr Ferrari describe handwritten training plans prepared by Dr Ferrari, and have testified that he placed notations on their plans to indicate the dates on which they were supposed to use performance-enhancing drugs. Multiple asterisks are an evident feature on all of the training plans in the file for Kevin Livingston,’ USADA stated.

22 Livingston’s relationship with Armstrong is one of the few to have endured, as he runs a fitness centre, Pedal Hard, alongside Armstrong’s bike shop in Austin, Mellow Johnny’s. Apart from Armstrong, Livingston was the only other American rider to refuse to co-operate with USADA in their investigation into the US Postal team.

23 The tapes of the interview would become a contentious issue in later legal proceedings. Despite Bill Stapleton having taped the conversation himself, the Armstrong legal team pressed for me to produce a direct transcript of what had been said.

24 A 2010 study in the Journal of Sports Sciences noted that between 1989 and 1997, the average length of the Tour de France rose from 3,285km to 3,944km (2,040–2,450 miles) and featured 17,000m (55,770 feet) of additional climbing. Average speeds should have slowed by 11.3 per cent during this time. They improved by 4.5 per cent.

25 In testimony in the subsequent SCA case, Stephen Swart, the New Zealander who rode with Motorola in the mid-nineties, said that top riders on the team discussed EPO in 1995. He testified that Armstrong told teammates that there was ‘only one road to take’ to be competitive. I was aware of Swart’s claims at the time of the Armstrong interview. We soon learned that Armstrong had begun working with Ferrari as far back as 1995.

26 I would learn later that Lance had actually spent a few days with Ferrari not long before the interview. As well as six days in three separate visits the previous season.

27 The aftermath of Ventoux produced mixed results in terms of coverage. Simpson’s famously heroic last words, ‘Put me back on my bike!’ were never uttered. They were invented by Sid Saltmarsh, who was covering the event for the Sun and Cycling. Saltmarsh, however, wasn’t present at the time. In fact he was even in a reception blackspot for live radio accounts of the Tour.

28 Some honour accrued to the fourth estate. Another British reporter, J.L. Manning of the Daily Mail, dealt with the news in a rather more honourable way. Manning was a serious character who performed his job well. His exposure marked the first time that a real connection had been made between drugs and Simpson’s death, and, happily, he inspired a wave of good reporting among his colleagues. Manning wrote that ‘Tommy Simpson rode to his death in the Tour de France so doped that he did not know he had reached the limit of his endurance. He died in the saddle, slowly asphyxiated by intense effort in a heatwave after taking methylamphetamine drugs and alcoholic stimulants.’ One consequence of Manning’s work, and of those journalists who supported him, would be familiar to those of us who worked the Tour (of Renewal) in 1999. After Tommy Simpson’s death there were promises: ‘Dear Tom Simpson,’ said Tour organiser, Jacques Goddet, ‘you will not have fallen in vain on the stony desert of the Ventoux,’ as there would be promises after the Festina scandal in 1998. The reality? Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.

29 In his 2004 pow-wow with Cycling News, Ferrari gave a mildly self-pitying version of these events.

Cycling News: ‘In the past, didn’t investigative journalists come to Ferrara and obtain information about Lance Armstrong’s hotel stays during his visits to your clinic?’

Dr M.F.: ‘No, that’s not how things went; this sports reporter for a British newspaper didn’t come to Ferrara, he went to Firenze and spoke to the N.A.S. [National Drug Squad] Carabinieri. They called the Ferrara police station and asked them to check their hotel records for Lance Armstrong. And that information was then put in the paper.’

Dr M.F.: ‘It’s not normal! This was an excessive use of the power of the Carabinieri: they are not supposed to give a journalist this type of information. But we had nothing to hide regarding Lance; he came here to do his tests and we never denied it at all! It wasn’t hidden at all. I don’t know this journalist; I’ve never met him at all.’

30 Years later I would meet Mike Anderson, Armstrong’s one-time personal assistant. He remembers the hypoxic tent being kept in a shed at the Dripping Springs ranch. Once the Armstrong kids played with it, otherwise Mike never recalled it being taken out of the bag.

31 This was a line spun often by Armstrong. His career would end, he would disappear, find himself a nice beach, have his family, a few cool beers, and we would still be back in the press room wondering how he’d done it. What actually happened is that he went away in 2005, couldn’t live in retirement and came back in 2009. Had he been able to stay away, the likelihood is that the truth of his story would never have been fully revealed.

32 There is no evidence that EPO was being used by cyclists in 1989. Most agree, EPO made its cycling debut in the early nineties.

33 Interestingly, Armstrong showed Emma O’Reilly the offending email from Betsy on a significant day in a significant place: Sestriere on 18 May 1999. That same night Michele Ferrari came to dine with several team members in the Last Tango restaurant. Armstrong and Ferrari sat together and talked all evening. If only Betsy had known.

34 It wasn’t the last time this would happen. Most notably in 2006, after Frankie’s deposition in the SCA case was leaked, he was suddenly removed as directeur sportif of the Toyota United team. No satisfactory explanation ever emerged.

35 When the house of cards came tumbling down in October 2012, two former US Postal riders issued a statement calling on UCI president Pat McQuaid and honorary president Hein Verbruggen to resign. One was Scott Mercier, the other Darren Baker.

36 The story would be fairly unremarkable were it not for the ironies sown. The buying and selling of stages, one-day races and criteriums is an age-old practice in cycling, but after his retirement Stephen Swart’s next turn in the limelight would be when he told this story as part of his testimony in the SCA case in 2006. SCA were withholding money due to be paid to Lance Armstrong. SCA were an insurance company who accepted premiums to guarantee big prizes like that due to Armstrong for winning successive Tours de France. (Or the million dollars for the Thrift Drug Triple Crown of Cycling.)

37 There were conflicting reactions to L.A. Confidentiel at the time and even now commentators disagree on what it achieved. Below are two recent takes on the book.

‘Here’s what was so surprising about Wednesday’s Lance Armstrong evidence dump from the United States Anti-Doping Agency: not all that much. Sure, USADA filled in many shocking details about Armstrong’s doping practices, but the basic outline of this story has been known since 2004, when David Walsh and Pierre Ballester published L.A. Confidentiel, a groundbreaking investigative work that was mostly ignored at the time.’

Outside magazine, 2012

‘It’s just so easy to say, “Yeah the journalists should have dug deeper.” Well, my God, Walsh and Ballester dug as deep as you could dig and, you know, they didn’t get anywhere. They really did not get anywhere. I’ve gone back, in fact, and looked at some of the things that I wrote at the time and I don’t find any of it embarrassing. Now of course, I did find it uninformed.’

Samuel Abt, New York Times, Herald Tribune, 2012

38 The repercussions of that interview would be long lasting. In 2005 Steffen told L’Équipe that some time afterwards in 2001 he had received a phone call from Lance Armstrong. Lance said: ‘I have a lot of money, good lawyers, and, if you continue to talk, I’ll destroy you.’

In 2008 at the Tour of Utah, Steffen ended up getting a punch in the face from Marty Jemison, whose name featured in the interview.

39 Hamilton claims not to remember the conversation. Prentice Steffen sticks to his version still. Jemison says he was asking about B12 injections and legal means. It is possible that Jemison and Steffen were merely at cross purposes in a time of stress.

40 Years later, Alex Butler would say that as we were going to be sued no matter what we wrote, we should have run the original piece and be shot for a sheep as a lamb.

41 In the nine years that have passed since she and I did that first long interview, Emma O’Reilly has despaired about Britain’s libel laws. All she ever wanted to do was tell the truth and she discovered it was possible to do this in the US and in France but not in England. Judge Leveson and his inquiry into the media could have done worse than to invite Emma in to tell them her experience of British libel law.

42 In the light of the USADA report in October 2012, the Sunday Times decided to seek reimbursement of that payment to Armstrong and legal costs of its own during that 2004–2006 case. The file remains open.

43 Armstrong’s legal team were the masters of brinkmanship. At one point they were proceeding against the Sunday Times and me over an article about L.A. Confidentiel, dealing with an unfair dismissal claim by former personal assistant Mike Anderson, and a counter-claim by Armstrong. Along with a public defamation suit by Italian cyclist Filippo Simeoni, to be heard in Paris; a libel action, also in Paris, against me, Pierre, Emma O’Reilly and Stephen Swart; a libel action against La Martinière, publisher of L.A. Confidentiel; and one against L’Express, which published extracts from the book, Lance was also facing an Italian police inquiry into sporting fraud. He ultimately managed to avoid going under oath in any of the cases.

44 In September 2012, Tyler Hamilton spoke publicly about Emma O’Reilly. ‘Emma was the best soigneur I ever had. A great, great person. You can see it in her eyes: she’s the salt of the earth and everyone in the team knew that. When she came out with the doping stuff about Lance, I couldn’t be seen to support her but I knew what she was saying was true. And I liked it in a strange way. “The asshole”, I thought, “is getting some heat.” I kind of felt he deserved it.’

45 During his relationship with Emma, Simon got to know different people in and around the US Postal team, and perhaps his reluctance to publicly support Emma’s account of the drug trip to Spain was based in part on a desire to preserve those friendships. Up until recently he was exchanging tweets with Johan Bruyneel.

47 Belinfante could see I was the black sheep of the cycling family. Pitying me, he asked if I’d like to do an interview for his television station. In October 2012 he sent a link to the piece, recalling a time and a Tour de France that wasn’t much fun as it happened.

The last question he asked was if I thought Armstrong would win the 2004 Tour. ‘This is a strange answer,’ I said, ‘but I mean it: I don’t care. I don’t care who wins the race. What I care about is clean sport. We must come back to the Tour believing in it more than we do now. This is a bad time for cycling but I hope the times will get better and they will get better if we’re honest.’

48 It was brainless of me to mention Betsy by name as a source for L.A. Confidentiel and it brought trouble Frankie’s way, but neither Andreu complained. Remarkable people.

49 Daniel Coyle is a former editor of Outside magazine in the US, who spent 2004 living with the US Postal team in Girona, Spain. The subsequent book Lance Armstrong’s War became a bestseller. Since then he’s collaborated with Tyler Hamilton to deliver The Secret Race, another bestseller.

50 Fourteen English-language publishers considered L.A. Confidentiel and said no. Schillings’ threat to sue anyone who repeated the charges against Armstrong made in the book was enough to discourage would-be UK publishers.

51 Tailwind was principally a cadre of elite businessmen who shared an enthusiasm for cycling. They funded Thom Weisel’s US Postal team and every spring got to spend a day at training camp hanging out with Armstrong and the boys. Weisel and five other investors originally put up about $2.5 million to finance what later became Tailwind Sports, the cycling-management firm that owned the Postal team. The ownership group eventually numbered at least twenty but the company remained stubbornly in deficit.

Investors also enjoyed good access to their team during the Tour de France. As the race would proceed, the businessmen, a macho bunch by all accounts, would pedal segments of the course. A following convoy of cars carried their food and water bottles. They ate well and were whisked to prime viewing spots each day. Like the team they would end the day with a massage. Having claimed to own roughly a 10 per cent stake in the company during the SCA depositions in 2005, Armstrong had changed his mind in 2010: ‘I was a rider on the team. I was contracted with Tailwind Sports, I never had any dealings with the Postal Service – zero. I didn’t own the company [Tailwind Sports]. I didn’t have an equity stake. I didn’t have a profit stake. I didn’t have a seat on the board. I can’t be any clearer than that.’

52 In fact, nowhere in testimony did Betsy Andreu say that she hated Lance Armstrong. In another reference to a secret tape, Timothy Herman had asked Betsy to recall the conversation that Frankie Andreu had wired himself up for in France in 2004 when asked to meet Bill Stapleton and Bart Knaggs. Herman had asked, ‘Without going through in detail, Frankie, on several occasions in that conversation with Mr Knaggs and Mr Stapleton, talks about how much you hate Lance Armstrong, doesn’t he?’ Betsy demurred: ‘No. He just says they don’t like each other but that’s the extent of it.’

54 In USADA’s ‘Reasoned Decision’ on Lance Armstrong it was noted that, in an arbitration over whether Mr Armstrong used performance-enhancing drugs to win one or more of his Tour de France victories, Mr Armstrong stated words to the following effect, under oath and subject to penalties of perjury:

1. That Dr Ferrari never prescribed, administered or suggested any kind of a drug or doping programme for Lance Armstrong.

2. That there was nothing in Lance Armstrong’s dealings with Dr Ferrari that would suggest that Dr Ferrari was encouraging other athletes to use performance-enhancing drugs.

3. That Lance Armstrong had not had any professional relationship with Dr Ferrari since 1 October 2004.

4. That Lance Armstrong never violated the rules of the UCI or the Tour de France in connection with the Tour de France in 2001, 2002, 2003 or 2004.

5. That Lance Armstrong had never taken any performance-enhancing drug in connection with his cycling career.

6. That Lance Armstrong never had any knowledge of Tyler Hamilton using illegal substances when he was Armstrong’s teammate.

As demonstrated by the testimony of numerous witnesses in this case, each of the above statements made under oath and subject to the penalties of perjury were materially false and misleading when made.

55 Tyler Hamilton has told the story of how, after an impressive ride up Ventoux in the Dauphiné Libéré in 2004, he got a call from Hein Verbruggen of the UCI. Verbruggen wanted to meet as soon as the race finished. At the meeting in Aigle, Switzerland, the UCI’s chief medical officer, Dr Mario Zorzoli, produced data which suggested that Hamilton may have been transfused with blood from another person. Hamilton brazened it out, claiming that such a thing was impossible. Zorzoli didn’t push the matter any further.

A few weeks later on the Tour de France, Floyd Landis told Tyler Hamilton that somebody had dropped a dime in a phone booth and called the UCI after the Ventoux ride. Lance Armstrong on line one.

56 This now stands as a straightforward error rather than cause to doubt the substance of the story. In The Secret Race, Tyler Hamilton wrote, ‘Yes, Lance tested positive for EPO at the Tour of Switzerland. I know because he told me.’ Hamilton went on to quote Armstrong on the subject: ‘“No worries dude, we’re gonna have a meeting with them. It’s all taken care of.”’ Further on again Hamilton writes of listening to Armstrong call Hein Verbruggen from the team bus: ‘He may just as well have been talking to a business partner, a friend.’ UCI officials claim Armstrong’s test at the 2001 Tour de Suisse was ‘suspicious’, not positive.

It was at this time that Armstrong made a donation of $25,000 to the UCI to support their anti-doping work.

In October 2012, Pat McQuaid, president of the UCI, described Landis and Hamilton as ‘scumbags’.