In the wake of the worst year in the history of the Tour, something, or someone, was needed to come to the rescue and save the race from the mire and mud of Festina. And it seemed that someone did: a great new champion arose, and became the first man ever to win seven Tours, surpassing Thys, Bobet, Anquetil, Merckx and Induráin. What’s more, Lance Armstrong achieved his victories in what appeared peculiarly heroic circumstances. He should have been the white knight redeeming the hour. Alas, it didn’t work out like that. For all Armstrong’s supposed heroism, his victories were achieved amid a continual miasma of allegation and suspicion, which turned out to be more horribly justified than even the most cynical detractor could have guessed. The greatest hero would prove to be the greatest villain.
A Texan hailing from Austin, the pleasant state capital, and seat of the great University of Texas, Armstrong came from what in American terms was a distinctly modest background, born when his mother was seventeen and brought up in no lap of luxury. He was a precociously gifted athlete, a champion swimmer at twelve, then a triathlete, before concentrating on cycling. In 1993, aged twenty, he was road World Champion, the second American to win the championship in the footsteps of LeMond, and then in his very first Tour in 1993 he announced his arrival by winning a stage, from Châlons-sur-Marne to Verdun. He didn’t complete that year or the next, but was thirty-sixth in 1995 after winning the antepenultimate stage to Limoges.
A year later he won the Tour du Pont in Carolina, but something was wrong. It was the fans who noticed that he hadn’t noticed himself: ‘Usually, when I won a race, I pumped my fists like pistons as I crossed the finish line. But on that day, I was too exhausted to celebrate on the bike. My eyes were bloodshot and my face was flushed.’ ‘When my right testicle became slightly swollen that winter, I told myself to live with it, because I assumed it was something I had done to myself on the bike.’ In October Armstrong was diagnosed with fourth-stage testicular cancer.
But the treatment worked, and he was discharged in 1997. Plenty of people wondered whether he could ever ride again. Cofidis told him they didn’t think he could be re-employed; he waited for offers from other teams; the offers didn’t come. Finally he signed with a new – not immediately promising, and quaintly named – team, United States Postal Service. Lee Dembart of the International Herald Tribune isn’t the only one to have wondered: ‘How come the US Postal Service [that is, the Post Office] sponsors a pro bicycle racing team?’
‘At first, the 1999 season was a total failure’ for Armstrong. He crashed and almost broke his shoulder in the Tour de Valencia, he finished in mid-pack after grim struggles in the Paris–Nice and Milan–San Remo. But he returned to the Tour with the words, ‘It’s been a long year for cycling and as far as I’m concerned it’s history.’ He would one day make more history than anyone could have imagined. After winning the Puy de Fou Prologue on 3 July from Zülle, Armstrong lost the yellow jersey to the Estonian Jaan Kirksipuu in St-Nazaire two days later, then won it back after six days in the Metz time trial, this time 58 seconds ahead of Zülle, whom he beat yet again two days later in the first Alpine stage from Le Grand Bonnard to Sestrières, and he held the lead to the end. Armstrong won four stages in that Tour and was the first rider since Induráin to win all three time trials; for a man in remission from metastasized cancer it seemed impossible to believe. It should have been a time of rejoicing.
In truth the race had begun in very unhappy circumstances. Desperate to restore the Tour’s reputation, Leblanc had tried to exclude Virenque because of his part in the Festina scandal. But the French public warmed to Virenque and in a display of characteristic national perversity his name had been painted on the road during the Tour more than anyone else’s. And so the UCI, with pusillanimous double standards no less striking for being predictable, yielded to pressure and insisted that he be allowed to ride. Back in the race, he climbed so well that he ended with the red-peas jersey, salving the pride, if that’s the word, of France, whose riders hadn’t won a stage and whose best finisher was, of all people, Virenque himself in eighth, a national hero even if a dubious and tainted one.
And Armstrong? Even before the race began, a harsh spotlight had been trained on him by the French press. The Monde always regards itself as, and sometimes actually looks like, one of the world’s great newspapers, and is with the Figaro the nearest thing France has to a national paper, for all its quaint method of publication, a Paris evening paper bearing the date of the following day when it will be available in Bordeaux, Brest and Briançon (hence the Parisian quip, ‘Le journal de demain avec les nouvelles d’hier’). It has never devoted much space to cycling as such, or indeed any other sport, and it may be wondered how many Monde editors could tell a dérailleur from a domestique.
But the paper is very interested indeed in dopage, and claimed that on that first victorious Tour Armstrong was taking corticoids. So he was, he replied: in a skin cream called Cematyl prescribed to him for allergies. The amount of corticoid in the cream, Armstrong said, ‘was so minute that it was there one day and not the next, the traces are so small it has absolutely nothing to do with performance’. The UCI, which was supposed to abide by a rigid code of confidentiality, broke silence to confirm that he had furnished a medical certificate for using the cream. Armstrong had indeed taken numerous drugs, including EPO, he said, but as part of his chemotherapy. That didn’t quieten the paper, which persisted with allegations, and questions put directly at press conferences to Armstrong, who replied with the brazenness that was his great strength, ‘Mr Le Monde, are you calling me a doper and a liar?’ He was of course both, but his aggressive response silenced most critics for the time being.
Though not all. Armstrong’s ability on the steepest climbs to pass the field as if they were standing still was freakish, uncanny or ‘extraterrestrial’, as some French commentators obliquely put it, while the Équipe, the great French sports paper, wrote that Armstrong was ‘sur une autre planète’, another way of hinting at something suspicious. While most of the London press joined in the cheering, there was one conspicuous exception. David Walsh is an Irish journalist – a Kilkenny man who began his career in Dublin, although in the 1980s he also lived for a time in Paris, and he befriended the Irish rider Paul Kimmage – who was dismayed by the prevalence of doping in the sport. After Armstrong’s first victory, Walsh wrote that others might clap, but he was keeping his arms by his side. Armstrong was bitter about what he called ‘vulture journalism’. It had blighted his victory, but he proposed to ignore it: ‘It’s been hard, I’ve suffered more from the stress on the bike, and some journalists wanted me to crack, but I wasn’t going to crack for them.’ At the same time he could be heard to murmur ‘Not normal’, his own phrase for other riders who surpassed themselves, and he surely knew what he was talking about.
So what was the real story? Familiar cinematic techniques include the flashback, when we return to earlier events, and the cut from one place to another. Since this book was first published, so much has been learned about bike racing, and the truth about the Tour and the man who was once acclaimed as its greatest hero, culminating in the astonishing events of 2012 and 2013, that it would be artificial to keep the reader waiting until we reach those years and then flash back to the beginning of Armstrong’s nefarious career. Instead, let’s stay in 1999 and cut between scenes, from the parcours to Armstrong’s villa near Nice that same summer.
A friend enters with the words, ‘Hey dude, you got any Poe I can borrow?’ This was Tyler Hamilton, who might again say, ‘Gonna visit Edgar. My old buddy Edgar.’ Hamilton’s book The Secret Race, published thirteen years after Armstrong first won the Tour, explained these seemingly obscure allusions to the author of ‘The Raven’. Hamilton was a New Englander, born in Marblehead, Massachusetts in 1971, the same year as Lance Armstrong. His first love was skiing until an injury forced him to change to cycling. He was already with US Postal when Armstrong joined them in 1998.
They were doping from the start. While that was presumably true on the teams Armstrong had ridden for before, as soon as he joined US Postal he was not only the team leader but the leader of their doping regime. As Hamilton described it, they began with little ‘red eggs’ of testosterone on the tongue before graduating to injected EPO: ‘Edgar Allan Poe’ to the American riders, ‘my old buddy Edgar’. Within the team, this could not even be called an open secret: Armstrong kept phials of Edgar in the fridge next to the milk.
How did they get away with it? They made some cursory attempts to cover their tracks: a soigneur would collect the needles they shot up with, push them into a Coca-Cola can, crush it and throw it away where it couldn’t be traced. There were also tricks of the trade. The Posties would be quite careful in the doses of EPO they took, and when – not long was needed for testosterone or EPO to be flushed out of the system so that it would not show up in a urine test, while the energy-boosting effects lasted. Then there were masking agents. In the case of steroids, a harmless diuretic could cover their use, and EPO could be masked also.
In any case, there was for some time simply no effective test for EPO. The most absurd thing of all about the 1998 ‘Tour de Farce’ was that, after the busting of Festina showed how rife doping was, there were more than a hundred tests, all of them negative. This patently meant not that no one was doping, but that testing was ineffectual. No dope could be detected in any of several samples taken from Armstrong during the 1999 Tour – at that time. Some of these samples were frozen and kept in a lab for some years until there was a better test, which had dramatic consequences.
Before long Armstrong would soon begin to utter what became an incantation: he was the most tested athlete on earth and he had never failed a test. The logical flaw in that should have been obvious. A mob capo who uses every form of intimidation and bribery to bend policemen, jurors or even judges to his will and ensures that no court ever finds him guilty can say with literal truthfulness that he has never been convicted of any criminal offence. That does not mean that he has never broken the law. And the fact that Armstrong had never tested positive did not mean – as events would show for sure! – that he had never used drugs.
One other explanation for how they got away with it is the sheer laxity of those who should have been invigilating the sport. Maybe in some subjective way the ASO (the Amaury Sport Organisation, which owns and runs the Tour) and the UCI would have liked the sport to be clean, but it also appeared that they did not want another scandal, and that their desire to avoid one tempered what should have been their zeal to stamp out doping. One way and another, the record of the UCI in particular was feeble, under the Dutchman Hein Verbruggen, president from 1991 till 2005, and his Irish successor, the current incumbent Pat McQuaid. Aside from road racing, the BBC alleged that the UCI accepted $3 million from Japan, where the keirin race is more popular than elsewhere, to add this discipline to the roster of Olympic cycling sports, as was duly done, and the UCI has sometimes shown more energy trying to sue journalists who exposed its failings than to dealing with the canker at the heart of cycling.
To return briefly to the official story, in 2000 Armstrong finished first again. Jean-Claude Killy had been succeeded by Patrice Clerc, and there were a few gimmicky innovations. Apart from a couple of new étapes, at Loudun in Poitou (where Aldous Huxley’s devils came from) and Draguinan, the race reached Troyes on the penultimate day and then transferred to Paris by the Orient Express, before the final stage of 138 kilometres spun round the streets of Paris, which had been decorated with a concentration cyclotouristique to mark the millennium. Hamilton had won the Dauphiné Libéré, Erik Zabel displayed the prowess that would win him the green jersey again by winning his third Milan–San Remo in four years, and young David Millar – no kin of Robert, but like him in international competitions a Scot, albeit from the Highlands of Buckinghamshire – showed that he was now a force to be reckoned with by winning the Prologue at Futuroscope from Armstrong by two seconds. Alas, Millar’s name would become more famous for an unhappier reason.
After the lead was taken by Jalabert, he was followed by the Italian Alberto Elli, as the race ran from Brittany to the south-west. Armstrong moved on the first Pyrenean stage from Lourdes to Hautacam, then gave a successful defensive ride on Mont Ventoux. Botero and Pantani won stages in the Alps, and so, to the glee of the unruly French, did Virenque. But Armstrong’s victory in the Fribourg-im-Breisgau–Mulhouse time trial ensured that he would reach the finish in Paris more than six minutes ahead of Ullrich.
By now the cult of Armstrong had grown apace. For Americans, bike racing had long been a rather uninteresting sport, another European pastime. If soccer was ‘a game played in the park on Sundays by elderly Hungarians’, then cycling was something the French or Belgians did, despite the evident increasing enthusiasm in America for both recreational and competitive cycling. Then again, Americans love a winner, and Armstrong was congratulated on his first Tour win by President Bill Clinton, a man whose standards of honesty and veracity some might say were rather similar to the cyclist’s.
Soon after he had won (or ‘won’) his first Tour, Armstrong wrote a memoir about his heroic recovery from cancer to take the great prize, with the help of Sally Jenkins, a Washington Post journalist who played a curious part in the story. It’s Not About the Bike was rapturously received by reviewers, became a bestseller on both sides of the Atlantic and in London won the esteemed William Hill Sports Book of the Year for 2000. It is impossible to read now without wincing, or even retching, from the first line – ‘I want to die at a hundred years old with an American flag on my back and the star of Texas on my helmet, after screaming down an Alpine descent on a bicycle at 75 miles per hour’ – to the last: ‘I would ride again, into the highest hills, up the pitch of a mountainside, where the green leaves quiver in the cold sun.’ No, it wasn’t about the bike, nor the Texas star or the quivering leaves, it was about a syringe full of Edgar Allan Poe.
If Armstrong was still getting away with it, luck was running out for Virenque. His culpability in the Festina scandal now became so clear that the wavering authorities were obliged to suspend him for a season, and he missed the 2001 Tour. That race began with a Prologue at Dunkirk won by Christophe Moreau before pottering through the Channel ports and then heading clockwise to Verdun, Strasbourg and the Alps. The lead passed from Marc Wauters, to the Australian Stuart O’Grady, who wore the yellow jersey from Seraing to Colmar and then again from Pontarlier to l’Alpe d’Huez after his Crédit Agricole colleague Jens Voigt had worn it for a day. François Simon then took the lead from the Alps to the Pyrenees, but Armstrong gave two more extraterrestrial performances in the Alps, from Aix-les-Bains up to the summit at l’Alpe d’Huez and then the next day in the Grenoble–Chamrousse time trial. He took the yellow jersey from Foix to St-Lary-Soulan. On that stage, Jalabert made a long and successful escape that ensured that he would pinch the red-peas jersey from Laurent Roux, and Zabel pinched the green jersey from O’Grady.
Once again the Tour was Armstrong’s, and once again from Ullrich, runner-up for the second successive year. At least on paper, that is, and as it was recorded at the time. Many observers had watched that ascent to l’Alpe d’Huez awestruck by Armstrong’s astonishing power, which took him past a seemingly stationary field on the steepest of climbs, and yet among the observers were an increasing number of sceptics who looked harder at one more freakish performance. Was it possible, in normal terms? At that time, Gordon Brown, the Chancellor of the Exchequer relentlessly boasted about the economic miracle over which he was presiding, but as a few wiser economists warned, when something looks too good to be true, it usually is.
And so it was with Armstrong’s extraterrestrial climbing. Some years later, a German cycling correspondent was asked about Armstrong, and said, ‘My admiration used to outweigh my suspicion, but now it’s the other way round.’ That summed up what many of us felt as the years went by, and for everyone who covered the Tour there was an unidentifiable turning point. It had come earlier for Walsh. He had met and liked Armstrong in the early 1990s but then, as we have seen, came to feel doubts about him which steadily hardened. He harried Armstrong at press conferences and then in 2001 met him for a tense interview, their last as it proved, when Walsh began by saying that he wanted to talk about doping and nothing else. The ‘champion’ parried him with the usual evasions behind his icy, threatening smile.
In 2002 the Tour began in Luxembourg, a part of Europe little frequented except by Eurocrats and the Luxembourgers themselves, but a most charming city of castles and valleys fit for a fairy prince. The reigning champion starts the Prologue last and, in the shadow of the US Postal team bus parked in the departure village, I stood for some time a few feet away from Armstrong as he rode his bike on rollers while his mechanic tuned the gears gazing at him while I brooded about what made this mysterious creature tick. His rivals had been falling away. Gilberto Simoni was busted and suspended for using cocaine during the Giro, and Ullrich withdrew with a damaged knee, although he also had another little difficulty when he was arrested off duty for using good old-fashioned recreational drugs in a nightclub.
The Tour director Jean-Marie Leblanc admitted that this race was less likely to offer cliffhanging suspense than an opportunity to watch what he rashly called a great athlete at his peak, while that athlete himself said: ‘It’s up to us, the riders, to make the race exciting.’ After the Prologue, Rubens Bertogliati took the yellow jersey on the second day. On the Wednesday US Postal looked as if they might be thwarted by ONCE in the team time trial from Epernay to Château-Thierry, but a puncture for ONCE’s Mikel Pradera gave the ‘Posties’ an uncovenanted advantage, besides the one they were administering themselves. I watched them cruise into town not long after I had stopped a policewoman to find the way to the finish. She asked whether I was driving, I said I had left my car on a boulevard on the edge of town, she said ‘Sage décision’, before showing me the best way to get there on foot, and I thought what a wonderful country it was where a lady agent de police could make such a reply.
The second Sunday of the race began at St-Martin-de-Landelles, birthplace of the great Daniel Mangeas. Had they chosen the village because of him, Leblanc was asked, and replied with pleasing candour, ‘Of course’, just as he had explained why the race had begun in Luxembourg: ‘Because they asked us.’ The following day Armstrong dropped to eighth overall, but there were to be no real shocks now, except one that blighted this Tour for all of us who covered it. On the tenth stage, from Bazas to Pau on 17 July, the publicity caravan was passing through the village of Retions throwing out sweets and knick-knacks when a seven-year-old boy saw his grandparents on the other side of the road. As he ran to join them, he was knocked down by a publicity Land Rover belonging to one of those sweet companies and killed instantly.
It wasn’t the first such accident in Tour history: a child had been killed in Ireland in 1998 and another on the Avignon–Draguinan stage on Bastille Day in 2000, and as I have said, to watch the Tour, not least the caravan, is sometimes to wonder why there are not more accidents. The Tour authorities are conscious of this and, following the 2000 accident, they had at least made some efforts to improve the standards of driving. On this very 2002 Tour more than 300 speed controls had been carried out on vehicles, and several drivers had been stripped of their right to drive on the parcours with the coveted stickers on their cars. For Daniel Baal, deputy chairman of the Société du Tour de France, dismay was matched by despair: ‘We have put special security measures in place, speed limits, regulations, warnings, and we divert as many people as possible off the parcours every day, but this still happens. Every day we see children crossing the road when the race is coming and it really scares me.’ It scares everyone, all the more after the name of young Melvin Pimple was engraved for ever in the sad annals of the Tour.
After the Pyrenees, the race was as good as over. David Millar cheered British fans with a stage win to Béziers, before Armstrong was beaten up Mont Ventoux by Virenque. ‘I rode as good as I could and as strong as I could, and Richard was stronger,’ he said, but his feigned amiability was not reciprocated by the French fans, who continued to hound Armstrong. ‘If I had a dollar for every time somebody yelled “Dopé, dopé,” I’d be a rich man,’ he said. ‘The people are not very sportsmanlike.’ On the last day, riding through Brie towards Paris and the finish, the ‘Posties’ cheerfully or even insolently clinked champagne glasses from bike to bike, a change at any rate from the stimulants they used in private, before they reached the Champs-Élysées.
At least it seemed to have been a clean and scandal-free Tour. That was until the race ended in Paris, when another car was stopped a long way away containing another mobile pharmacy. This time the driver wasn’t a soigneur but a spouse. Edita Rumsas, wife of the third-place rider, the Lithuanian Raimondas Rumsas, was arrested at Chamonix on the very day the Tour ended, on her way to Italy, and her car was found to be stuffed with ‘medications that could be considered as doping products’. The rooms of her husband’s Lampre team were searched inconclusively, while Rumsas himself disappeared. He sent word, apparently true, that he had tested negative, added a note of music-hall burlesque by saying that these manifold medicaments had been intended for his mother-in-law, before finally agreeing to meet the police for questioning if Edita was released and allowed to rejoin their three children.
As the centennial Tour de France approached, there was a mood of expectancy tinged with apprehension. Might the great event be marred by another scandal? After his rather tame victory in 2002, there was quite enough drama in Armstrong’s life in the early months of 2003. He announced his prospective retirement, although not until after two more seasons; he separated from his wife; and he publicly opposed the war against Iraq waged by his friend and fellow-Texan President George W. Bush. Armstrong’s attitude must have surprised some of those fans who had held up ‘Don’t mess with Texas’ banners on Mont Ventoux. ‘I’m no fan of war,’ he said. He was no fan of Saddam Hussein or terrorism either, ‘but it’s wrong to go to the front without the support of Europe or the United Nations’.
The war was opposed by President Jacques Chirac, the French government and an overwhelming majority of the French people. Franco-American relations were at their lowest ebb for decades, with a wave of anti-American sentiment in France matched by contemptuous rage across the Atlantic, where ‘French fries’ were childishly removed from menus on Capitol Hill. While Bush and his cabal might have consoled themselves with the Duke of Wellington’s words, ‘We always have been, we are, and I hope that we always shall be detested in France’, Armstrong could scarcely say that, but his position was certainly delicate.
An appropriately nostalgic parcours was mapped out for the centennial Tour. It included all the villes-étapes of 1903, Paris, Lyons, Marseilles, Toulouse, Bordeaux, Nantes and back to Paris; but of course the changes in a hundred years were as striking, with seven mountain stages taking the riders over the great cols of the Télégraphe, Izoard and Peyresourde. Against that, the road stages were much less intimidating. A total of 3350 kilometres compared with the 2428 kilometres of the first Tour, but also with 5745 kilometres in 1926. In 1903 the shortest stage was 268 kilometres and the longest 471, in 2003 (time trials apart) those distances were 160 and 230 kilometres. One curiosity was the return of Marseilles as a ville-étape. It was of course one of the cities visited in 1903, and thirty-one times in all up to the centenary, but never between 1971 and 1989. That was because of an untoward incident when the timing went wrong, the riders arrived earlier than expected and Gaston Defferre, imperious mayor of the great city, was made to look silly; he vowed that the race would never return there under his aegis.
After a huge crowd watched the riders leave the Eiffel Tower on 6 July, the first week from Paris across eastern France to Lyons and the Alps saw a series of bunch sprint finishes dominated by Alessandro Petacchi, who won four stages in all beginning on the first Sunday into Meaux. But the action that day was immediately behind him: a horrendous pile-up near the line brought down scores of riders and badly hurt several. Armstrong escaped bruised but intact; not so Tyler Hamilton. He had fractured his collarbone, but far from abandoning the race he managed to continue riding in acute pain, strapped up, with the pressure in his tyres reduced to make the roads less unbearable.
The third road stage was marked by one incident which reminded us of something which would become much more important later, the Tour’s unwritten code of etiquette. An unknown rider called Anthony Geslin, a 23-year-old Frenchman with Brioches–La Boulangère, achieved fifteen minutes of fame when he ‘grillé le ravito’: that is to say, he attacked and left the peloton while the musettes were being collected at the zone de ravitaillement, the feeding station. The peloton made its feelings known to the wretched Geslin, who nevertheless hung on in and finished the Tour in 114th place. David Millar complained that ‘there is less and less respect in the bunch’ and that younger riders would do anything to escape, even if it meant ignoring custom and practice.
On the second Sunday it looked as if the piece might be played according to the script: up into l’Alpe d’Huez, Iban Mayo won the stage from the young Russian Alexander Vinokourov, with Armstrong behind them in fourth, taking the yellow jersey for the first time. One man riding well was Joseba Beloki. The next day he was chasing down an escape by Vinokourov with Armstrong pedalling hard to stay on his wheel. He followed Beloki on to a seemingly inoffensive stretch of road between harvested cornfields. The heat had been mounting as the race was run and was now intense; a couple of weeks later the Tour would have been practically impossible, when France was swept by the most extreme heatwave for decades, in which many thousands of elderly people died. Beloki’s fate was less grim, but bad enough. He hit a patch of road that had actually melted in the heat, the tarmac turned to treacle. His front tyre was ripped off and his bike threw him ferociously forward. Just in time to avoid colliding, Armstrong behind him tried to brake but felt his wheel locking up and chose the alternative of swerving into the field. Despite bouncing over furrows and stubble, he emerged unscathed, unlike Beloki who broke several bones.
There were few changes in the order before the first individual time trial near Toulouse on the second Friday, where Ullrich struck. By the last Monday morning he was only 15 seconds behind Armstrong. But no one could possibly have foreseen how that stage that day from Bagnères-de-Bigorre to Luz-Ardiden would capture many hearts, at the time. Over the Tourmalet, Ullrich dropped Armstrong but was then caught by him before Armstrong passed Mayo on the last climb up to the finish, and then crashed. It was an absurd incident. The over-enthusiastic Basque crowd were rabbling Armstrong but he managed to avoid them, until he caught his handlebars in a little bag carried by a spectator and came down. For a moment it looked as though it was all over for him, but although Armstrong was winded, he was soon up and riding again, now behind Ullrich and Hamilton. It was, of all people, Hamilton, still there, still in pain, still near the lead after two weeks, who waved to the others to follow tradition and wait for the yellow jersey who had been in trouble, and so they did.
Within minutes, Armstrong had caught the leaders and then, scarcely believably, he passed them, ‘fuelled by residual fright and rage from the crash,’ he said, though of course fuelled by more than those. ‘And by pent-up resentment from weeks of crashes and ordeals, and doubts.’ He crossed the line 67 seconds ahead in the GC. When the rest of the Posties finished they were taken away in the team bus, but Armstrong wanted to see them and jumped into the car of Johan Bruyneel, the Posties’ directeur sportif, which the boss drove as fast as he could to catch up. The bus pulled over, Armstrong jumped aboard, stood in the aisle, and roared at his comrades, ‘How do you like me now? How do you fucking like me now?’ They liked him all the more, of course, because of his help with Edgar.
After a rest day, a last Pyrenean stage went from Pau to Bayonne. As if we hadn’t seen enough heroics, who should win it but Hamilton, visibly in tears of pain on the climbs. ‘Today’s made up for everything,’ he said. Armstrong applauded as he crossed the line and embraced his old colleague Tyler, as the charade continued: Hamilton’s chivalry and courage would be seen in a very different light when he finally told the truth. On pancake-flat stages from Dax to Bordeaux to Saint-Maixent-l’Ecole, the times were very fast – Spaniard Pablo Lastras of iBanesto was more than half an hour faster than the quickest time estimated by the Tour in its ‘Livre de Route’ and averaged an astonishing 50.185 k.p.h. – just as they had been in some previous stages. This caused speculation in the French press about just what might lie behind these startling improvements, but really far too few questions were being asked about the steadily rising speed at which the Tour was being ridden. A time trial on the penultimate day saw Ullrich crash on a wet road and the following day was the coronation in Paris: Armstrong won by 61 seconds from Ullrich, with Vinokourov in third and, most miraculous of all, Hamilton in fourth, at only 6'17". Baden Cooke took the green jersey prize, which had been contested till near the end, and Denis Menchov was best youngest. It was Armstrong’s fifth ostensible Tour victory.
The next three runnings of the race brought Armstrong two more ‘victories’; it saw him succeeded on the winner’s podium by another American; and it saw the Tour engulfed by wave after wave of scandal which almost threatened to submerge the great race for ever. The point could not have been made more cruelly as 2004 began. In February, Marco Pantani was found dead in his flat in Rimini. The winner of the 1998 ‘Tour de Farce’ had been discounted at the time, overshadowed as his victory was by the Festina scandal. His moment of muted glory, the Giro–Tour double that year, proved to be a peak from which it was then downhill all the way. He was easily leading in the 1999 Giro, with only one mountain stage left, when he showed up with an excessive haemocrit count – for red cells and thus EPO – and was ejected. He raced only a little in 2001 and 2002, and by June 2003 he was in a drug clinic suffering from depression. As his death showed, any treatment hadn’t worked: the autopsy found acute cocaine poisoning.
Days before the 2004 Tour began, David Millar was arrested by three plain-clothes policemen of the Paris drug squad. They took him back to his flat where they found empty phials of Eprex, a brand of EPO, and two used syringes. Millar would confess all, and later attempt redemption, but this was yet another dark day for the sport just before the Tour Prologue in Liège, which was won by Jaan Kirsippu. The race made its way through north-eastern France and Belgium, past the sombre names of Namur and Waterloo, before turning west. Thor Hushovd took over the yellow jersey, then Jean-Pierre Nazon and then Robbie McEwen before the team trial in which another too-good-to-be-true performance by Armstrong’s team put him in yellow. On the fifth stage to Chartres, the GC lead was taken and held for days by Thomas Voeckler – ‘Tit-blan’ to friends and fans, from the dialect for ‘little white boy’ in Martinique, where he had grown up. While Virenque again moved into a commanding position for the Mountains Prize, Voeckler kept the yellow jersey for a remarkable nine days, the longest any Frenchman had worn it for many years.
His streak lasted only until the Pyrenees. By La Mongie, Armstrong’s juiced-up team helped him beat Ivan Basso at the finish. There were two individual time trials both scheduled in the last week, one of them the 15.5-kilometres, twenty-one hairpin bends of l’Alpe d’Huez, which in this year was dedicated to Pantani, with unconscious irony. The problem for Armstrong, and for the other riders, was the crowds lining the road, who were unruly and in some cases hostile. And so to the foregone triumph in Paris.
And yet the most riveting moment of the race wasn’t any time trial or climb, it was an incident on the eighteenth stage, an otherwise uneventful ramble from Annemasse to Le Grand-Bornand to Lons-le-Saunier, with Armstrong unassailably in the lead. After about 32 kilometres Filippo Simeoni of Domina Vacanze took off from the peloton, trying to join a six-man breakaway. Suddenly another rider was alongside him, chasing him down and instructing him to fall back with some frank but well-chosen words: none other than Armstrong himself. When a minor rider – and poor ‘Pippo’ Simeoni was distinctly minor, at the time in 144th place, 2 hours 42'55" off the lead – from a minor team makes an escape he is usually ignored; if a breakaway does have to be chased down, this is always the work of domestiques from the big teams – never, ever the yellow jersey himself. The explanation was painfully simple: in the course of all the to-and-fro over doping, many accusations and recriminations, Simeoni had given evidence against Dr Michele Ferrari, whose services he had once used. Armstrong had called him a liar, and in return Simeoni was now suing the champion for defamation.
‘I was the victim of a big injustice today,’ Simeoni said. ‘It wasn’t possible for Armstrong to let a little rider like me have a chance for a little glory in the Tour de France. That’s a sin.’ Bruyneel agreed that ‘it was something to do with what happened in the past’, while Armstrong claimed that he was merely ‘protecting the interests of the peloton’. ‘He isn’t a rider that the peloton wants to be up front,’ he went on, ‘because all he does is attack the peloton and say bad things about the other riders. All he wants to do is destroy cycling and the sport that pays him. To me, that’s not correct.’ This should have told us all we needed to know about Armstrong’s character: the domineering manner, the bullying, the defiance in the face of accusations, the determination to silence critics by whatever means. Indeed, the fact, which he did not deny, that he was working with Ferrari, who notoriously provided cyclists with drugs, should have answered all questions about Armstrong for good.
If he thought that he could bully away all suspicions about him and the sport, he was soon disabused. The month following the 2004 Tour, Tyler Hamilton, so much the hero of the centennial Tour, as we thought, won a gold medal at the Athens Olympics. And the month after that, he was accused of blood doping at the Games, transfusing his or someone else’s blood, on the strength of his A sample. There was an absurd confusion when the lab managed to spoil his B sample, and he protested his innocence, but at the end of a long story he was suspended for two years, one more great name sullied.
As for Armstrong, with all his hubris, his nemesis loomed. Walsh had found an ally in Pierre Ballester, a journalist on the Équipe until he was sacked because he insisted, rightly, that doping was the central sports story of the age. Sport by now was ‘like theatre’ Ballester said, ‘but I prefer theatre because the relationship between actor and spectator is clear. In sport’s theatre both are still pretending it’s real.’ He and Walsh collaborated on a book that used a whole array of evidence from witnesses such as Emma O’Reilly, a former masseuse with Armstrong’s team, to indict Armstrong. But L.A. Confidentiel was published only in French; dozens of London publishers turned it down, having been threatened by Schillings.
This firm of solicitors boasts that ‘We use the laws of defamation, privacy and copyright to protect the reputations, privacy and confidentiality of our clients, helping them and their advisers to manage what is published and broadcast about them.’ And they are not exaggerating. When the Sunday Times published a long and well-informed piece about Armstrong, he joined the illustrious line – the late Robert Maxwell, the Bank of Credit and Commerce International, Jeffrey Archer – of those who have used the London courts and our libel laws to ‘manage what is published about them’. They eventually helped Armstrong win £300,000 from the Sunday Times, which had to pay at least as much again for its own legal costs.
By 2005 the United States Post Office had finally returned to its business of attempting to deliver mail and had been replaced as sponsor by the Discovery Channel, but not until February did Armstrong confirm that he would take part in one last Tour. The race began not with a Prologue but a short time trial of 19 kilometres on the coast of the Vendée, crossing a long causeway to Noirmoutier en l’Ile, past salt flats and oyster beds. On Friday, the last training day, Ullrich and his team were riding the course when the team car stopped dead and Ullrich ran into the back of the car, hurtling through the back window, though with no serious ill effects. David Zabriskie, an American rider with CSC, took the lead that first day and kept it for three days, but he lost it dramatically in the Tuesday team time trial, from Tours to the lovely city of Blois. The previous day had offered a little comic relief when Robbie McEwen appeared to head-butt Stuart O’Grady close to the line in some quaint Australian duel. Although McEwen crossed the line third, the judges knocked him to the back of the main pack, dealing quite a blow to his hopes of a fourth green jersey.
There was a bizarre interlude in the Alps when the start was held up for forty minutes by protesting farmers. In France, farmers usually have something to protest about, but not often something as esoteric as a plan by ecologically over-eager enthusiasts to reintroduce wolves to the Alps. The next day started badly. Dario Frigo, an Italian who had won the 2001 Paris–Nice, was slung out when EPO was found in his wife’s car. Yevgeni Petrov had already been disqualified for failing a test. And the day after that was the quatorze juillet, when Moncoutié enjoyed a French victory, but he pooped his own party. Referring darkly to the startlingly fast times being recorded in the race, he said, ‘You can draw your own conclusions.’
After the Alps, the Tour crossed the Midi clockwise before entering the Pyrenees. And there, instead of wolves, the slogans plastering the roads read ‘Mort aux ours,’ death to the bears, which another group of crazed environmentalists were bringing back to the mountains. Cadel Evans showed Aussie grit crossing the Col d’Aubisque four years after he had fallen and broken his collarbone on the same great climb. But it was Armstrong who now had the race in his own bear hug. So it went north-east to Albi, Issoire, Le-Puy-en-Veley (where the press were given as many of the town’s famous green lentils as they could carry away) and a final time trial at Saint-Étienne.
As that day began Michael Rasmussen was lying second to Armstrong, but he slipped and fell after four kilometres, was given a new bike, but seemed to panic, and on a tricky descent he ended up in a ditch, and finished bedraggled after changing his bike and his wheels twice. Armstrong won the day with Ullrich at 23" and Vinokourov at 1'17". In Paris the next day the jury invoked the ‘rain rule’ so that Armstrong won the Tour the first time he passed the finish line, rather than on the eighth time round. And so Armstrong made his seventh and last appearance on the winner’s podium.
Four weeks later an astonishing story broke in the Équipe. Samples taken from Armstrong during the very first of those victorious Tours, in 1999, had been frozen in a lab. At the time they were taken there was no reliable test for EPO, but one had since been developed and had been belatedly used on the samples, which had apparently tested positive. ‘The witch-hunt continues,’ was all Armstrong could say, but the pressure was building on him, and the Tour. In September, Roberto Heras set a record of his own by winning the Vuelta for a fourth time, including a crushing and frankly surprising victory in the last time trial. Weeks later came the news that, on that very day of the last time trial, he had tested positive for EPO. While he protested his innocence and vowed to clear his name, he was stripped of his title, an unprecedented shame for the sport which didn’t think it could take much more scandal or disgrace. But more was exactly what was coming.