Seven Deadly Sins: My Pursuit of Lance Armstrong (19 page)

‘You wanna drive?’ she asked.

‘Yeah, I’ll drive.’

Then his phone rang.

‘Greg, this is Lance.’

‘Hi Lance. What are you doing?’

‘I’m in New York.’

‘Ah, okay.’

‘Greg, I thought we were friends. Why did you say what you said?’

‘About Ferrari? Well, I have a problem with Ferrari. I’m disappointed you are seeing someone like Ferrari. I have a personal issue with Ferrari and doctors like him. I feel my career was cut short. I saw a teammate die. I saw the devastation of innocent riders losing their careers. I don’t like what has become of our sport.’

‘Oh, come on now. You’re telling me you’ve never done EPO?’

‘Why would you say I did EPO?’

‘Come on, everyone’s done EPO.’

‘Why do you think I did it?’

‘Well, your comeback in eighty-nine was so spectacular. Mine was a miracle, yours was a miracle. You couldn’t have been as strong as you were in eighty-nine without EPO.’
³²

‘Listen, Lance, before EPO was ever in cycling I won the Tour de France. First time I was in the Tour I was third [in 1984]; the second time I should have won but was held back by my team [second in 1985 behind teammate Bernard Hinault]. Third time I won it [1986]. It is not because of EPO that I won the Tour – my haematocrit was never more than forty-five – because I had a VO2 Max of ninety-five. Yours was eighty-two. Tell me one person who said I did EPO.’

‘Everyone knows it.’

‘Are you threatening me?’

‘If you want to throw stones, I will throw stones.’

‘So you are threatening me? Listen, Lance. I know a lot about physiology; no amount of training can transform an athlete with a VO2 Max of eighty-two into one with a VO2 Max of nine-five, and you have ridden faster than I did.’

‘I could find at least ten people who will say you did EPO. Ten people who would come forward.’

‘That’s impossible. I know I never did that. Nobody can say I have. If I had taken EPO, my haematocrit value would have exceeded forty-five. It never did. I could produce all my blood parameters to prove my haematocrit level never rose above forty-five. And if I have this accusation levelled against me, I will know it came from you.’

‘You shouldn’t have said what you did. It wasn’t right.’

‘I try to avoid speaking to journalists. David Walsh called me. He knew about your relations with Ferrari. What should I have said? No comment? I’m not that sort of person. Then a journalist from
Sports Illustrated
called me. I’ve spoken to two journalists in total. Maybe I shouldn’t have spoken to them, but I only told them the truth.’

‘I thought there was respect between us.’

‘So did I. Listen, Lance, I tried to warn you about Ferrari. This guy’s trial is opening in September. What he did in the nineties changed riders. You should get away from him. How do you think I should have reacted?’

That conversation finished Lance with Greg. No more Christmas cards.

It was time to make LeMond toe the line. The first call came from Thom Weisel, the west-coast entrepreneur whose vision created the US Postal team and who has made a small fortune in providing financial services. He gently told Greg it wasn’t good for him to say those things about Lance. After Weisel came Terry Lee, CEO of Bell Helmets, a cycle accessories company, and he too was conciliatory.

‘If it was me in your position, Greg, I wouldn’t do it.’

After Lee came a call from John Bucksbaum, chief executive of a real estate company, and another businessman who was in the Lance camp. He was calling, of course, as a friend. The full-court press went on. At the end of that week, Greg got a message to call John Burke, chief executive officer of Trek, the company that had a licensing agreement with LeMond to manufacture, market and distribute LeMond bicycles.

Burke told LeMond he was in a difficult position because his company also sponsored Lance and he needed Greg to publicly retract his statement about Ferrari and Lance. Only if that happened would Trek be able to continue its relationship with LeMond.

‘It was like the troops were mobilised to shut Greg up,’ said Kathy LeMond.

I spoke with Greg a lot during these difficulties with Trek and the pressure to which he was subjected by the group of high-powered businessmen in Lance’s corner. He resisted for a time, but the endless conversations with his lawyer and the anxiety over what Trek were going to do with his business took their toll. He told his lawyer to do what was necessary to bring about some kind of closure because he wanted to extricate himself from all of this.

A little over two weeks after the fractious conversation with Lance had happened, Greg’s apology appeared in
USA Today
:

I sincerely regret that some of my remarks seemed to question the veracity of Lance’s performances. I want to be clear that I believe Lance to be a great champion and I do not believe, in any way, that he has ever used any performance-enhancing substances. I believe his performances are the result of the same hard work, dedication and focus that were mine ten years before.

Sal Ruibal, a writer who was staunchly supportive of Lance through the early years, was rewarded for his work by being given the statement and Lance’s gracious response to it.

‘It is nice,’ Armstrong said, ‘to hear there was a clarification. I’ve always had a lot of respect for Greg as a rider and for what he’s done for our sport. I respect and appreciate him even more for going out of his way to say that. I didn’t have hard feelings before he made the statement and don’t have them now.’

LeMond first saw that statement on the sport pages of
USA Today
. It sickened him. Not just because the statement did not represent how he felt about Armstrong’s success but more because he had allowed himself to be browbeaten by men in powerful positions. It had happened once, LeMond told himself, but it would never happen again.

10

‘Are we supposed to believe anything Betsy Andreu says?’

Lance Armstrong

Here’s Betsy Andreu. Small, dark and wired. Implacable. From the moment you meet her you know that she is as tough and scrappy as a honey badger. If Lance Armstrong was any judge of character, he would have shut up the medicine shop the moment he met her. Nope. Here’s Betsy Andreu. She was on the inside. Now she’s on my side.

The downside of having broken the Ferrari story in 2001 was a falling off in the number of Christmas cards I received and the knowledge that my take on cancer’s most famous survivor placed me out of the running for Humanitarian of the Year. Again.

One of the many advantages was that it put me on the radar of the other poor souls out there who cared about such things.

James Startt was an American photo-journalist for
Bicycling
who lived in Paris. He’d come to Europe to work and he’d got to know a number of the American riders. I’d met James on the Tour. Liked him. He knew Frankie Andreu. If you knew Frankie, you would know his wife Betsy. If you knew Betsy for any length of time, you got to know her views on the talented Mr Armstrong.

At some point either in person or on the phone Betsy, one of life’s natural networkers, had asked James if she knew this guy David Walsh. As it happened James did know David Walsh and he was prepared to admit it.

‘Tell him to call me.’

‘Yes, Betsy.’

James duly passed on the message.

‘She says she knows some things that you should know.’

I dialled the number straight away. In Dearborn, Michigan, US of A, somebody answered straight away. Betsy Andreu.

Sources are like blind dates. You meet a lot of duds before you talk to one that’s worth the trouble. Sometimes, though, you just know when you have found the right person. The voice coming down the phone suggested intelligence and a fierce morality. Nothing I have learned about Betsy Andreu in the many years since has changed that first impression.

With Betsy, you didn’t have to tip-toe around the subject of Lance Armstrong. Our first proper conversation was on a Friday evening. I’d flown into Heathrow from an assignment and had to drive cross-country to Cardiff for a rugby game which was happening the following afternoon. We started talking as I was leaving Heathrow. We were still talking as I pulled into my hotel in Cardiff. It says something for the support of my employers at the
Sunday Times
that the mobile phone bill was paid without demur, and if Vodafone had sponsored the journalist awards that year, I’d have got a prize.

Within minutes of me hitting the M4, Betsy was offering (to use a phrase of Lance’s) liquid gold. She took me back to the gathering inside a consulting room at Indiana University Hospital in October 1996. Something about Frankie’s combative and switched-on nature had earned him Lance’s respect back in Europe. They were friends. When the news came of Armstrong’s cancer in October 1996, it had hit Betsy and Frankie hard. They were six weeks away from a wedding and now their friend had cancer. Life was random and life was cruel.

They headed to Indianapolis for a few days intending to spend every spare minute keeping their friend company. Now the room with the bed in it had become too crowded and they had moved to a hospital common room, Lance clutching his IV as they went.

The Dallas Cowboys were on the television. The small group of friends and acquaintances watched with various levels of interest. In the room were Betsy Andreu, Frankie Andreu, Lance’s coach Chris Carmichael and his wife Paige, Lance’s then girlfriend, Lisa Shiels, and a woman called Stephanie McIlvain who worked as liaison with Oakley, who were Lance’s sunglasses sponsor.

Two doctors now entered the room. They had questions for the patient. Necessary questions.

‘We should leave now,’ Betsy said, as the doctors began their checklist.

‘It’s okay,’ said Armstrong. ‘You can stay.’

And then Betsy heard the conversation that would change her life and make her life and Lance Armstrong’s life very difficult.

‘Have you used performance-enhancing drugs?’ asked one doctor.

Matter-of-factly, Armstrong listed them: ‘EPO, testosterone, growth hormone, cortisone and steroids.’

Betsy was stunned. The message to Frankie Andreu, her fiancé, was flashed with her eyes: ‘You and me, we gotta speak outside. Now.’

Frankie knew enough to sense that this wasn’t good. He’d better follow. ‘If you’re fucking doing that shit, I’m not marrying you,’ she said.

Frankie was a tough man of the roads. He learned bike racing in harum-scarum rides around the Dearborn Towers near home, at hard races in little-sung placers like Downers Grove. And he kept getting better. That summer he had been fourth in the road race at the Atlanta Olympics. This time, however, he was in trouble.

When Armstrong asked Frankie a while later how Betsy had reacted to his disclosure, two words sufficed: ‘Not good.’

Over the years, Betsy stuck to her account of what had happened in that room. In the days after, she had called friends Dawn Polay, Piero Boccarossa and Lory Testasecca and spoke to them about what had been said. She was still shocked and upset. Could she marry Frankie after what she had heard? Should she? The advice that came back was to talk it out long and hard. They did.

Frankie promised to be clean. Betsy Kramar became Betsy Andreu when the pair got married just over two months later on New Year’s Eve 1996.

It was a lonely road, though. Never for a second did Betsy understand why she should lie and cover for Lance Armstrong. When her view became known, when people learned that she was slurring an American icon, she had only the support of her friends, her mom and a few others to fall back on. From the world in which her husband lived and worked, only Greg LeMond, his wife Kathy, Jonathan Vaughters, an old teammate of Frankie’s, and James Startt were supportive; and, for a long time, so too was Stephanie McIlvain. But Betsy didn’t care. Honesty needs no approval.

When she first told me the hospital-room story, so early in our relationship, it stunned me. It was such a small human thing for Lance Armstrong to do. He assumed so much of people. Later, people would say: surely he would never have admitted taking performance-enhancing drugs in front of six friends?

Betsy and Frankie talked about this. ‘Frankie, why would he be so indiscreet?’

‘Honey,’ Frankie said, ‘the previous day he’d had lesions removed from his brain. He wasn’t sure he was going to live. Right then performance-enhancing drugs weren’t the biggest thing on his mind.’

And this room in Indiana, where the disease eating his body changed the context of everything, this room far away from pesky testers and shifty Europeans, this room with its poorly drawn borders of confidentiality, this was where it happened.

A small human thing, but Betsy’s account was utterly believable. Lance was comfortable being surrounded by people who all had a stake in him one way or another. He misread the terrain. He didn’t ever think it would matter. He never understood that Betsy’s concern would be for the man she was due to marry, for his honour and health.

The clincher was Betsy hauling Frankie outside for the most frightening random test of his career. ‘
You and me gotta talk
.’ Lance Armstrong, even the Lance of 1996, couldn’t imagine that he would be such a bit player in the drama of that conversation.

Betsy told me that story and, like everybody she has told it to before or since, I believed her. It wasn’t proof. It wasn’t the smoking gun. For journalists in doping cases there is no such thing. I remember in Atlanta in 1996 meeting a prominent American journalist who told me about a lengthy investigation he had carried out into the drug practices of a hugely admired American athlete. Finally, after a drip feed of damaging stories, the athlete had let loose his lawyers and a meeting was called between the journalist, his employers, the athlete and his lawyers.