Seven Deadly Sins: My Pursuit of Lance Armstrong (20 page)

The paper, unnerved, either by celebrity or by the sight of so many assassins in fine suits, just caved in. It was agreed the reputation of this fine man was being impugned and the paper assured the lawyers that it would all stop. Everybody got up and shook hands. Very civil and cordial. The last shake was between my friend the journalist and his quarry, the athlete. Eye contact and an aggressively firm shake. The athlete left with a backward glance and the smile for which he was famous.

My friend looked down at his palm. Pressed into the skin was a small dianabol pill.

‘Fuck.’

He showed it to his bosses with whom he was already very displeased. Wow, they said. Look at that. You were right. But, listen: that proves nothing. You can’t even write it because of what it would imply.

Betsy’s story was a little blue pill in my palm. And luckily it had come to me without the hindrance of lawyers or injunctions. It wasn’t proof because for years it would be a he said-she said debate. For me, though, it was confirmation. Reassurance. Keep going. Keep looking. Keep talking to people. Keep asking the questions. Keep writing. It was an irony Lance wouldn’t enjoy, but I found Betsy’s information to be performance enhancing.

For her part, she always asked at least as many questions as she would answer. ‘What do you know? How do you know? Have you put that to him? What did he say?’ A sports editor like her and I’d have burned out years ago. She scanned the newspapers around the world and knew which writers were taking which positions. Those without a spine she wanted me to get phone numbers for so she could call them and ask what had happened to their self-respect.

Betsy is a one-off. Her humanity and her morality made her instantly believable. The daughter of a Serbian jeweller and a Slovakian librarian, Betsy grew up as a devout catholic in Dearborn, Michigan, graduated from University of Michigan and met Frankie in April 1994 in a pizza joint. He was a stringy professional cyclist with a blue-collar work ethic and a flashing smile. When they met, Betsy was just getting ready to open an Italian-themed coffee shop.

Italy! Frankie lived a world away in Como, Italy. He hung with a loose and lively cycling community with a strong constituency of ambitious Americans. Frankie was a flatmate of Lance Armstrong’s and the two seemed close; neighbours included guys like Kevin Livingston, Jeff Pierce and Bob Roll, all of whom had found their way to the area.

Frankie had been cut up by the death of their teammate Fabio Casartelli on the 1995 Tour. Fabio died descending Col de Portet d’Aspet. Betsy had seen the pictures. Blood on the road. Frankie and Lance hurting during a minute’s silence in the aftermath. Black armbands. Frankie with a pair of wraparound shades hiding his pain. Lance just weeping. They were brothers of the road, living life and learning.

Cycling, which for the amateur seems like the most pure of endeavours, was making itself known to the Americans in the hard, professional sense. They watched in awe and bemusement as riders like Mario Cipollini came to early-season races and devoured the climbs. WTF, man? Rumours were everywhere. People talking about r-EPO, comparing their haematocrit levels, the sound of ice rattling in a thermos, a necessary prop for a drug that needed to be chilled.

There were spooky stories of riders who were so hopped up on this stuff that their levels were up above 60 per cent. They had to wear pulse meters at night so that when their pulse rate dipped below a certain point an alarm would sound and they would get up and exercise furiously before their blood turned to treacle. This was the shit that killed eighteen or so Belgian and Dutch cyclists in the nineties? And it works?

But Betsy Andreu didn’t care what races Frankie won or how much he earned, if the means to the end was cheating and endangering his health. EPO was meant for sick people, right? Some wives and partners were like Betsy, but others saw doping as part of the deal and even assisted in their partners’ wrongdoing.

The doors were opening to a world that Frankie didn’t much like. He was a good professional, a cool and able strategist on the road, and he had a natural abrasiveness which earned respect among his peers. He hadn’t gone into professional cycling to start messing with drugs, but all these rumours and the talk were a dust cloud which was about to float over his life. He didn’t know how he would square any of it with his future wife’s black-and-white sense of right and wrong.

What I remember most vividly about so many conversations with Betsy Andreu is that they seemed to pass in a flash, yet I would come away with an almost cinematic memory of whatever she had been describing. The stories never wanted for detail or consistency. Bill Clinton used to tell people that he could feel their pain. If he’d met Betsy he could have felt her pain, her frustration, her anger, her humour, her loyalty. She put it all out there. When she’d describe a row with Frankie, no shrinking violet himself but the man on the frontline of the old dilemma about whether to go along or get along, I would agree with Betsy’s point of view but feel sorry for Frankie. He was facing into a force of nature.

Frankie knew he’d got lucky, though. As I was to find out, it was good to have this particular force of nature as an ally. Asking questions about Lance Armstrong, sporting hero and pioneer in the fight against cancer, could make you feel like something of a cancer yourself. And if you didn’t feel that, there were people willing to help.

One of the early letters to the
Sunday Times
came from a reader, Keith Miller, who hadn’t been impressed by my scepticism. ‘I believe Armstrong’s victory was amazing, a triumph in sport and life. I believe he sets a good example for all of us. I believe in sport, in life, and in humanity . . . Sometimes we refuse to believe for whatever reason. Sometimes people get a cancer of the spirit. And maybe that says a lot about them.’

‘Betsy, let me tell you what this guy said in a letter . . .’

And here on the phone from Michigan, she was listening, somebody who would be a companion on the road ahead. ‘I told Frankie, I ain’t lying for Lance.’

If people around me were bored of me teasing out the details of the story in their presence, there was somebody a phone call away who never got bored with the topic. Betsy was in this for the long haul and she would suffer as much abuse as anybody, and she would take it without flinching.

After they had got married, Frankie and Betsy lived together in Europe for a while. Frankie had raced with Lance in his pre-cancer days at Motorola, and when Lance recovered and signed for US Postal, Frankie followed. Armstrong continued to be a part of their lives.

The conversation in the hospital room in Indianapolis was not forgotten. Betsy had married Frankie with love and a few caveats. She decided, though, that perhaps the drugs trail began and ended with Lance. Frankie was different. He didn’t have the assassin’s cold remove, the same driven ruthlessness. Lance could live his life. Betsy and Frankie would live theirs. That was okay.

There were tensions. Life is that way when you live in the shadow of a volcano. Frankie and Lance were pulling in different directions.

Back in 1998, when Willy Voet was caught driving his little shop of horrors, Frankie thought out loud on the team bus after the prologue in Dublin. He had some sympathy for Willy but he hoped that this was the beginning of the end of the doping culture in the Tour. He hated it and hated the pressure and hated that Betsy worried over it. And above all it wasn’t fair, he said. When he’d come into the Tour you could ride the three weeks on spaghetti and water. Now?

Frankie had joined French team Cofidis before Lance’s illness in the expectation that his old friend would be at his side. Instead he rode the 1998 Tour for the French team while Lance was elsewhere, rebooting himself.

Betsy travelled to the Tour that year with Kevin Livingston’s wife Becky. As the scandal unfolded with police raids, and teams ducking for cover and withdrawals and sit-down protests, many around the world of pro cycling felt that things had gotten out of hand. Frank was a little ambivalent. He hoped this would be the watershed, the end of the pressure he felt to dope. But, hey, the police didn’t have to be so heavy-handed. No way. Betsy’s reaction was distinctive as usual. If the riders were that upset they must have plenty to hide. End of story.

Funny, Betsy’s problem was never really with Kristin Armstrong. When Kristin was pregnant in the spring of 1999 Betsy and her fell into a conversation on the subject of hiring nannies. They were in the car on the way to the Milan–San Remo classic. Betsy felt that if you had a child and could be there for it then a nanny was unnecessary. Kristin agreed. Sometime later Betsy was trawling a cycling forum and came upon a discussion of Kristin’s pregnancy. Somebody speculated with a sneer that the Armstrongs would be hiring a nanny. Betsy, ever the lioness, logged on and posted a reply that she knew Kristin and there would be no nanny, so put an end to the bullshit, please.

Next time she was talking to Kristin she happened to mention the online exchange, the nerve of somebody making a post like that. She told Kristin she had backed her up and put an end to it. To her surprise Kristin burst into tears. Inconsolable for a while, she later apologised. She was feeling very hormonal, she said. Betsy understood.

A day later, though, Kristin must have mentioned the whole business in innocence to Lance. Armstrong confronted Frankie, jabbing him in the chest: ‘Tell your fucking wife to get out of my wife’s face, you tell her to stop fucking upsetting Kik.’

Soon there was a full-scale shouting match between two of the tougher
hombres
in cycling, the boys butting heads like stags in the glen. Lance was unhappy anyway because Betsy had become close to Kevin Livingston’s wife Becky and they hung out together. Which meant that Kristin Armstrong was a little isolated and this annoyed Lance, who took it out on Frankie in the most crass of ways.
³³

Things cooled a little between Frankie and Lance by the summer of 1999. What happened didn’t destroy their friendship but it was never quite the same again. Betsy sent Lance an email pointing out to him that he didn’t treat people the way he would like to be treated, that he had a habit of walking all over anybody who got in his way.

And then there were good times. Breaks in the weather. Nights out drinking and plotting in Chez Wayne, their local in Nice; evenings when Betsy and Frankie would have the Armstrongs over and Lance would talk sweet to Betsy about the wonder which was her risotto. He’d go to the supermarket with her, she challenging his atheism, he arguing against her belief in God. They used to get along.

The best of times and not quite the worst of times. Lance had got better. Frankie and Lance had gone back to work. They had been flatmates in Como before the gang moved to Nice. That couldn’t be wiped. US Postal was a serious team, the best Frankie had worked for. Lance was becoming the star he had planned to be when he came to Europe. Good times again.

In July Lance duly won his first Tour de France with his team pushing him all the way. With Frankie busy, Betsy went back home to Dearborn and watched most of the race from there between visits to friends and family. She told me about that day to Sestriere, the first mountain stage. She had been at home looking on in alarm as she saw her husband drive the race up the early Alpine climbs on the way to Lance’s first win in the mountains. She knew Frankie Andreu like nobody else did. This wasn’t a recognisable version of her Frankie. She called up a friend in Paris, Becky Rast, who was married to James Startt, to see if Becky was seeing what she was seeing.

‘Isn’t it great?’

‘He isn’t a climber. What the hell is he doing pulling at the front on a first-category mountain? Frankie is about as much of a climber as the Pope is an atheist.’

Towards the end of the race, she flew to France with her two-month-old son Frankie. They joined the Tour at Carcassonne in the deep south, but it wasn’t the time or the place to confront her husband.

The boys went all the way to Paris with Lance in the lead. She watched her husband at the moment of his greatest triumph on the shoulder of the champion. The famous and giddy ride down the Rue de Rivoli, onto the Place de la Concorde and then up the Champs-Élysées. She let Frankie have his time.

That night she went to join the boys at the victory party in the Musée d’Orsay. The world wanted a part of this now. She thought of the Motorola years and the subdued Sunday nights they’d spent in Paris in other years. The mood here was jubilant and a little triumphalist. They had conquered Europe. By now, though, there was only one subplot which interested Betsy: drugs.

At the party she was expected to congratulate Lance Armstrong, to take her place in the line and kiss his ass like everyone else.

‘Did you shake hands and congratulate Lance?’ said Frankie, when she caught up with him.

‘No.’

‘You gotta shake his hand. It’ll look bad.’

‘I don’t care. I want to talk to you about EPO.’

When Betsy told me this story, I smiled. By now we were talking every day, sometimes twice a day. People warmed to her because of her passion for the truth. Even though it was clear to everyone she was a non-believer in The Legend of Lance, she had regular conversations with a member of Lance’s extended family, she spoke with someone very close to Bill Stapleton and she knew far, far more than the libel laws would allow me to print.

She would track down stories and reports and pass them on. Two, three, four emails, with links to Lance stories. ‘See what this idiot wrote,’ she’d say. I couldn’t help, though, imagining tough Frankie Andreu having ridden through three weeks of hell getting to the victory party only to face his biggest challenge.

‘By the way, Betsy, did you shake Lance’s hand in the end?’ I asked her much later.

‘I thank God for giving me the strength not to shake the hand of that asshole.’

A short time after that first Lance Tour, Betsy found a thermos with EPO in Frankie’s fridge at their flat in Nice. It brought things home in a harsher light than just seeing him lead the way to Sestriere. This stuff was in their home. After all the conversations that followed the hospital visit in 1996, all the reassurances and promises, it felt like a betrayal. Betsy confronted her husband.