From lance to landis, p.19
From Lance to Landis, page 19
His victory transcended bicycling, even sport itself. It was a story of hope for those with no interest in the Tour de France. Not everyone understands what it takes to win the Tour, but there is universal understanding of cancer’s deadly powers and eternal admiration for those who survive the disease. Armstrong’s triumph proved not only that there was life after cancer but that it could be greater than the life that preceded the illness. His story crossed all frontiers and touched millions. The brash kid who turned up in Europe in the early nineties with his own business card and branded baseball caps was ready for the avalanche of opportunities. TV ads, multimillion-dollar sponsors, endless television coverage, a bestselling autobiography, and—overnight, it seemed—Lance Armstrong became an icon. Bill Stapleton, his manager and friend, articulated the impact of the ’99 Tour victory in an interview with Mike Hall, writing for the magazine Texas Monthly in June 2001. “In the beginning we had this brand of brash Texan, interesting European sport, a phenomenon,” said Stapleton. “Then you layered in cancer survivor, which broadened and deepened the brand. But even in 1998 there was very little corporate interest in Lance. And then he won the Tour de France in 1999 and the brand was complete. You layered in family man, hero, comeback of the century, all these things. And then everybody wanted him.”
Yet it would be wrong to say the acclamation was unqualified. The drug scandal of 1998 tempered some reactions to Armstrong’s victory in 1999 and the closer one got to the heartland of European cycling, the more one found pockets of skepticism. Tour de France chief Jean-Marie Leblanc wanted the 1999 race to be a fresh start and called it the Tour of Renewal, hoping the illumination of cycling’s dark secret in 1998 would lead to moral regeneration. Before the ’99 race reached halfway, Leblanc lowered his sights and talked of a Tour of Transition. He knew the doping problem had not gone away, but by the end, he said he believed Armstrong was a worthy champion. Others weren’t so sure.
Two of the more serious French newspapers, Le Monde and Libération, came to the same conclusion as Frankie Andreu and Christophe Bassons: in cycling nothing had changed. Writing in Libération, the philosopher and author Robert Redeker lamented the Tour no longer tugged at childhood dreams. “We now think of the Tour de France as a paradise lost, like the tales of a grandmother around the fireplace or at the foot of a bed…. A huge gulf exists between the race and the racers, who have mutated into PlayStation characters, while the public, the ones at the folding tables and the tents, drinking pastis and fresh rose du pays, are still real. This chasm, harbinger of the death of the Tour as we have known it, highlights the difference between the athletic types promoted by today’s race and the people’s men of the past, born of toil, hardened to pain, adept at surpassing themselves (Gino Bartali, Jean Robic, Fausto Coppi, Louison Bobet) who have been replaced by Robocop on wheels, pharmaceutically manufactured men, to whom no fan can relate.”
For evidence of change, one looked at the average speed of the 1999 Tour. Jean-Marie Leblanc said he would not be displeased if there was a slowing down, reasoning that with r-EPO less in use, the speed had to fall. The ’99 Tour ended up being the fastest in history. Others looked at Armstrong’s record in the Tour de France before testicular cancer, where his only finish from four starts was a modest thirty-sixth, and found it hard to believe the same rider could be so dominant in ’99. Armstrong sensed the skepticism and offered a vigorous defense. He said he was “one of the most tested athletes in the world” and he reminded people he had been a winner from the moment he began competing in the sport. The difficulty was that passing drug tests was not proof of innocence, as the Festina riders proved. They were part of a systemic doping program without anyone failing a drug test.
Those concerned about doping looked for other clues to the ethics of a team. In this respect, U.S. teams held an advantage precisely because of where they were coming from: America did not have a history of doping in the sport. 7-Eleven and Motorola, the first U.S. teams to campaign extensively in Europe, retained a distinctly American ethos by recruiting U.S. and other English-speaking riders. Mike Neel and Jim Ochowicz, both Americans, were the respective directeurs sportifs, and the team doctor was the English-speaking Americanized Italian, Max Testa. But the U.S. Postal Service team traveled a different road from their predecessors. They employed a European directeur sportif, a European doctor, and European soigneurs. Johan Bruyneel, Postal’s Belgian-born directeur sportif, spent much of his career with the Spanish ONCE team, who had been investigated on suspicion of doping and whose longtime directeur sportif, Manolo Saiz, would be one of those arrested in the Spanish doping investigation, code-named Operation Puerto.
For those wishing to understand Bruyneel’s attitude toward doping, there was a revealing interview with Samuel Abt in the International Herald Tribune four weeks before the start of the 1999 Tour. At one point in the interview, Abt referred to cycling’s image as a doped-up sport.
Abt: This is not a good time for the sport, is it?
Bruyneel: For me, the situation is very simple: Cycling is a sport in a very bad light, and the reason we got there is the fact that, three years ago, the riders accepted too easily the fact that the authorities could install blood controls. Having these controls would have been a very good thing if it had not been done only in cycling. Now there are more and more controls and the image of cycling is worse and worse. And I have no reason to believe that other sports are cleaner than cycling. Tell me one sport where the drug test is better.
Abt: But the riders, led by the Italians, proposed the blood controls themselves, didn’t they?
Bruyneel: Yes, but who were those riders? They were riders near the end of their careers.
Further on in the interview, Bruyneel questioned the motives of those investigating doping in cycling. “One problem has been that people in the police and justice system have seen that by opening a case, they can have a lot of publicity for themselves.” Abt pointed out that the prosecuting magistrate in the Festina affair, Patrick Keil, refused to grant any interviews and had not allowed himself to be photographed. “Yes,” replied Bruyneel. “He’s a well-known person now. Before he was nobody.” The blood tests that the Postal directeur sport if believes should have been resisted showed cyclists had elevated hematocrit levels and dangerously high iron stores, both indicative of widespread r-EPO abuse. The investigations were opened because police in France and Italy found illegal performance-enhancing drugs wherever they looked.
At first Armstrong reacted with hostility to the questions and the skepticism. How dare they? When Le Monde investigated his positive test for cortisone at the 1999 Tour, he said the newspaper was “the gutter press.” Perhaps in the United States, where one French newspaper might not appear that different from another, he could get away with that dismissal, but in Europe, the accusation was laughable. Le Monde is arguably the most highbrow and high-minded newspaper on the continent. His bullying of Christophe Bassons on the Alpe d’Huez stage of the 1999 Tour also raised questions, not the least of which was this: if Armstrong was anti-doping, why did he feel such antipathy toward a young cyclist who was clearly and passionately crusading for his sport to be drug-free, a young rider who was prepared to sacrifice his career rather than surrender to the sport’s drug culture?
In 2000, Armstrong won his second Tour, but rather than go away, the doubters grew more numerous. This was partially in response to a judicial inquiry into the U.S. Postal Service team, opened by the French police in November 2000, following the dumping of medical waste by two Postal team members during the Tour de France four months before. Hugues Huet, a news journalist with France 3 television, was one of those who felt doping was still rife in cycling, and midway through the 2000 Tour, he decided to stake out the hotels used by the Postal team. With a cameraman and a soundman, he set up his covert operation close to the hotels used by Postal. On the first morning they watched as two team employees walked to a Volkswagen Passat TDI in the hotel parking lot, each taking a plastic trash bag out of a backpack and throwing it into the trunk of the car. They recognized the men as Postal team doctor Luis Del Moral and the team’s chiropractor, Jeff Spencer. After the Postal men drove away, the journalists followed, tailing them until the autoroute but losing them shortly afterward.
Three days later, on the morning of the Alpine stage from Courchevel to Morzine, Del Moral and Spencer set off in their Passat on a route to Morzine that avoided the traffic congestion caused by the Tour cavalcade. This time Huet used three cars in the tailing operation, and after driving for more than an hour and a half, they filmed Del Moral and Spencer dumping their trash bags at a roadside rest area near the town of Sallanches. After the Postal staffers moved on, Huet and his team recovered the trash bags and examined their contents. Mostly what they found were legal recovery products, but they also found 160 used syringes, many blood-soaked compresses, used IV equipment, and a questionable product, Actovegin. “One hundred and sixty syringes,” said the ex-Festina soigneur Willy Voet, “corresponds to four or five days’ usage. Each rider would receive four to six injections daily.”
The judicial investigation opened in November 2000 and was finally closed in August 2002. Twenty-one months of inquiry raised many questions but produced no answers, and in the end, the police couldn’t produce evidence of wrongdoing and the case was closed. But the team’s reputation was damaged and in the months following the opening of the inquiry, Armstrong tried to be more conciliatory in his response to those skeptical about his and the team’s success. In April 2001 Bill Stapleton telephoned the author of this book and offered an interview with Armstrong that could deal with whatever questions there were. We met at a hotel in the southwest of France a week later, our first one-on-one interview since the 1993 Tour de France, eight years before. Armstrong asked if Stapleton could sit in on the interview and the attorney did, only once interjecting to clarify a not-very-significant point. The interview dealt almost exclusively with doping.
Q: Cycling is a sport with a doping subculture. When did you start to become aware of that?
A: If you’re asking when was the first day that I realized that perhaps this exists in our sport, I don’t know the answer because Motorola was white as snow and I was there all the way through ’96. Riders like Steve Bauer and Andy Hampsten, these guys were very admirable professional, clean riders.
Q: What about the 1994 Flèche Wallonne race, when the Gewiss riders finished first, second, and third? Not everyone thought that was normal. How did you feel about it?
A: At the time, I was frustrated because I was in the rainbow jersey [denoting world champion] and I was close to making that move. Teams have an ability to ride. They [Gewiss] already had had a phenomenal spring, so things had been growing, growing, growing. Once a team starts winning—you see it every year, there’s always a team that comes out and they get a couple of wins early on and then they get a couple of big wins and the next thing you know, they’re on top of the world, and I believe in that momentum.
Q: Are you saying on the morning after that race, you were 100 percent a believer they had done it clean?
A: The next morning there was obviously articles and people said certain things. If I have to look at that guy and say, “They’re cheaters, he’s a cheater, the team’s a cheater,” how could I get up every day and go do my job?
Q: Their doctor, Michele Ferrari, made his famous statement on the evening of that race about r-EPO being no more dangerous than orange juice. Do you remember your reaction to that?
A: (Long pause) Ahmm, no.
Q: You didn’t wonder what r-EPO was?
A: I think that sometimes quotes can get taken out of context and I think even at that time I recognized that.
Q: Ferrari didn’t come along afterwards and say, “I never mentioned this drug.” [The doctor actually said he had been quoted accurately in L’Equipe.] Had you been aware of r-EPO?
A: Here we’re talking seven years ago. Had I heard of it? Probably.
Q: Ferrari was, in effect, saying he gave it to his guys?
A: I didn’t read the article, I don’t know.
Q: It is obvious to everybody r-EPO use became a big thing in cycling in ’95 and ’96. How conscious were you guys in Motorola that r-EPO had become a factor in race results?
A: We didn’t think about it. It wasn’t an issue for us. It wasn’t an option. Jim Ochowicz ran the program that he set out to run, a clean program. Max Testa, the doctor, set out to run a clean program, and that wasn’t part of our medical program.
Q: You must have been frustrated at the thought that these guys were using a substance which Ferrari had talked about?
A: There’s no proof of that. I wasn’t going to sit around and talk about it. This is ages ago for me; that part of my career, that part of my life is finished.
Q: Did you know that Kevin [Livingston, fellow U.S. Postal Service rider] was linked with the [police] investigation into Michele Ferrari in Italy?
A: Yes.
Q: Did you discuss it with him?
A: No.
Q: Never?
A: (Nods his head.)
Q: Even though you would have known he was a rider who was on Ferrari’s books, that was printed in loads of newspapers?
A: You keep coming up with these side stories. I can only comment on Lance Armstrong. I don’t want to speak for others. I don’t meddle in [other] people’s business.
Q: A guy who is your best friend?
A: In an indirect way, you are trying to implicate our sport again.
Q: I would have thought it natural you would say, “Kevin, what’s this about? Did you go to Ferrari? Is this being made up, did he put your name in his files when you never visited?” You never discussed it, ever?
A: No.
Q: Would it shock you to realize that there are Ferrari files on Kevin that indicate he was using r-EPO?
A: I wouldn’t believe that.
Q: Even if you saw the files?
A: I wouldn’t believe that.
Q: There are files I have seen where Kevin’s hematocrit is listed for July 1998 at 49.7. The previous December it is listed at 41.2. Most medical people say a near nine-point difference in a hematocrit level in a six-month period is highly unusual.
A: I haven’t seen the files. I don’t know.
Q: Did you ever visit Michele Ferrari?
A: I did know Michele Ferrari.
Q: How did you get to know him?
A: In cycling when you go to races, you see people. There’s trainers, doctors, I know every team’s doctor. It’s a small community.
Q: Did you ever visit him?
A: Have I been tested by him, gone and been there and consulted on certain things? Perhaps.
Q: You did?
A: (Nods in affirmative.)
Q: He’s going to be tried for criminal conspiracy.
A: I think the prosecutors and judges should pursue everybody, regardless of who it is. It is their job to do that.
At another point in the interview, the involvement of Armstrong’s longtime trainer and friend Chris Carmichael in Greg Strock’s case against USA Cycling and his former coach, René Wenzel, was discussed. Though named in Strock’s original complaint, Carmichael was excluded from the amended version of his statement. In that first document, Strock described a scene at a race in Spokane, Washington, in which he was taken by Wenzel to Carmichael’s bedroom and injected with what he says was called “extract of cortisone.” The amended court document described the same incident but without identifying “the other coach” as Carmichael.
Q: If this coach is Chris Carmichael, it obviously has a relevance for you?
A: Absolutely.
Q: Because you worked with Chris all the time?
A: Sure.
Q: Have you spoken to Chris about this?
A: I talked to Chris. I mean, Chris is still my main adviser, I talk to him all the time.
Q: Has Chris said to you he definitely wasn’t that coach?
A: What’s interesting to me is that you’re sort of building this up and dramatizing this thing as if he came in and injected the kid with r-EPO.
Q: No, extract of cortisone is what Greg Strock believed it was.
A: There’s a very big difference between what he believed it was and what it was. What if it’s a B-shot [vitamin B]?
Q: What has Chris said? Have you spoken to him about it?
A: Oh, Chris is absolutely innocent. Chris Carmichael is way too smart and way too aware to give a junior cortisone. I believe that 100 percent. I will believe that till the day I die.
Q: If Chris gave Greg Strock at age seventeen any kind of injection, he was breaking the law.
A: Even a B-shot?
Q: Yes.
A: I’m not aware of that.
Q: It’s a question of a man without medical training giving injections to a minor.
A: But what age was Greg Strock in 1991? [The incident actually took place in 1990.] He was eighteen. Therefore he was an adult. Let’s get the facts straight. I’m not stupid.
Q: Why do you think Chris wasn’t mentioned in the [amended] formal complaint, given the other coach was?
A: You will have to ask Chris or Greg Strock. I’m not their adviser. I’m not anybody’s attorney. I don’t know.
Q: It’s my information Chris has made a settlement with Greg Strock and his legal team. That’s why his name wasn’t mentioned.
