Lance Armstrong, a decade on from disgrace: How Tour de France cheat’s downfall was sealed

Out in Dockyard, on the northern tip of Bermuda’s Great Sound, I sat at a table on King’s Wharf as a Norwegian ocean liner discharged its human load. They’d come from Toronto and from the mass of those trooping down the ramp, one voice rang out, “Hey,” he called, looking towards me, “are you the Armstrong guy?”

You could say that.

Lance Armstrong and I first met in the garden of the Chateau Hotel de la Commanderie, south of Grenoble. It was July 13, the first rest day of the 1993 Tour de France. Three years before he got cancer, six years before he won his first Tour, 19 years before he got busted. That afternoon, we shot the breeze for three hours. I warmed to him. It was the start of a relationship that for more than a decade dominated my working life.

The music stopped in 2012 and Armstrong couldn’t get to a chair. Last Monday was ten years to the day that the United States Anti-Doping Agency (USADA) released its damning report. Ten former teammates, including his close friend George Hincapie, had all signed affidavits detailing their doping and his. Hundreds upon hundreds of pages, all telling the same story. “The most sophisticated doping programme in history,” Travis Tygart, USADA’s chief executive, said.

So, I began to go through the books: Juliet Macur’s Cycle of Lies, Reed Albergotti and Vanessa O’Connell’s Wheelmen, Tyler Hamilton’s The Secret Race. Ten years on, did the story seem different? Less or more riveting? Was there something we didn’t get while it was being played out?

The answer to the latter question is an emphatic “yes”. At the time I hadn’t appreciated the ruthlessness with which USADA exposed Armstrong as a cheat, nor grasped the severity of the punishment. They stripped him of his seven Tour de France victories and banned him for life. For the same offence, his teammates got six months. They’d co-operated. He hadn’t.

Try to imagine how it was inside Armstrong’s camp during the months leading to the fall. For two years he had been under investigation and his people knew that Jeff Novitzky, a federal agent with the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), had gathered a lot of evidence. This was passed on to US attorneys in the Central District of California. The agents and the attorneys were sure they could convict Armstrong for drug distribution, mail fraud, wire fraud and witness tampering.

One of Armstrong’s lawyers, John Keker, spoke with California state attorney Andre Birotte Jr, who led the prosecution, and on the Friday afternoon of the 2012 Super Bowl weekend, the case was dropped. There was no explanation and no understanding of why. Novitzky was devastated. Tygart said he and his team would pick up the baton. Having seen off the Federal investigation, Armstrong and his lawyers weren’t that concerned about the anti-doping agency.

One by one, Armstrong’s teammates were persuaded to speak to Tygart. By June 2012, USADA had enough on Armstrong to send him a letter telling him he needed to disclose all that he knew. The response came from Robert Luskin, a high-powered Washington DC lawyer acting for the former cyclist. He said the investigation was “a vendetta which has nothing to do with learning the truth, and everything to do with settling a score and getting publicity at Lance’s expense … We will not be party to this charade”.

Ten years on, it feels like Armstrong walked eyes-open into an ambush. USADA had their guns in position, they lured him into the canyon and dared him to try to blast his way out. His lawyers filed an 80-page lawsuit that said Usada’s case violated their client’s constitutional rights. The District Court judge Sam Sparks dismissed that. The appeal was also thrown out. The shoot-out had begun.

The agency was obliged to send its report to cycling’s governing body, the Union Cycliste Internationale (UCI) who’d always had Armstrong’s back. They still believed they could protect him. First they needed to see the report. On the afternoon of October 10, the UCI lawyer Philippe Verbiest pressed Usada’s general counsel Bill Bock to email him the report. “Well, we can send it to you,” Bock replied, “or you can just get it when it goes online in an hour.”

From the other end of the line, there wasn’t a word. Eventually Bock asked: “You still there?”

The silence continued until, eventually, Verbiest said, “What? You can’t do that!”

The UCI got in touch with Armstrong’s lawyers. This was the moment they knew they’d lost. For years Armstrong was untouchable in the court of public opinion but now that the public would see every detail of the case, the game was about to change. Tim Herman, the lawyer closest to Armstrong, told him the news. “Are you f--king serious?” Armstrong asked. “How the f--k did we let that happen?”

The report ran to 202 pages. There were more than 1,000 pages of supporting evidence. Four months earlier, Armstrong could have told his story to Wada. In return he would have given back two of his seven Tours and received a two or four-year ban. With five Tours still to his name, he would have been on the same level as the greatest Tour riders: Jacques Anquetil, Eddy Merckx, Bernard Hinault and Miguel Indurain. Refusing to co-operate with USADA was his greatest mistake.

Two months after the report, Armstrong had another opportunity to cut some kind of deal with USADA. He met with Tygart and Bock at the offices of the former governor of Colorado, Bill Ritter, in Denver. Armstrong admitted he knew where bodies were buried. Tygart said this information might get his ban reduced from life to eight years, Armstrong wanted it reduced to the six months given to his teammates or, maximum, two years.

The thought of giving up former associates in return for an eight-year ban was anathema to Armstrong. USADA got no new names. He got no reduction.

The next month he did Oprah Winfrey, believing he could convince the public that he was as much victim as sinner, that he hadn’t really cheated, just played by cycling’s twisted rules. His version of the truth didn’t cut it; not with Winfrey and not with the public. The next day, he asked his friend John Korioth what he’d made of the performance. “I got to tell you, watching that interview, you are a really good liar but you’re horrible at telling the truth,” he replied.

That first encounter at the Chateau de la Commanderie in 1993 was the high point in our relationship. Six years later our paths crossed again, this time at the 1999 Tour. It was the first of his seven victories and by the end of the first week, I’d come to believe that he and many others were doping.

On the Wednesday of the final week, I stood high up on the Col de Mente in the Pyrenees waiting for the racers to come into view. Local people picnicked by a stone wall, a point in the road where they could see for miles below. Then the sound of the race helicopters announced the coming of the peloton. Soon came the police outriders on their motorcycles until, finally, the riders appeared as moving dots on the mountain far below.

It is impossible to witness this and not be moved by it – at least until you realise that it’s a caricature of sporting competition and the best may just be the most doped.

That week’s Tour de France story in The Sunday Times advised against acclaiming the new champion. The story was called “Flawed Fairytale” – as much a declaration of war as a headline. Not all of our readers were supportive. Keith Miller, from Glasgow, wrote the following: “I believe his [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.”

Cancer of the spirit?

Five months later, I reported that Armstrong’s best friend and teammate Kevin Livingston had been implicated in an Italian doping investigation. It was the first of many such stories and the beginning of a different kind of relationship with Armstrong. He read every line that related to him and took offence at anything he didn’t like.

After a series of pieces that questioned his right to be seen as a champion, I got an invitation to interview him at a hotel in the south of France. What charm offensive he had in mind was shelved the moment I said doping was all I wished to talk about. He lied his way through the interview and, as Korioth would later say, he was a convincing liar. After that interview, Armstrong’s misgivings about me morphed into downright hatred. I became “the little f--king troll”.

I could never feel the same antipathy but it felt as though I needed to expose him as a cheat as much as he needed to continue winning. Jonathan Vaughters, a teammate of Armstrong’s from the 1999 Tour, spoke with the journalist Daniel Coyle in 2004, saying that I was “a stubborn person who won’t back down. In some ways, he reminds me a lot of Lance.”

I’d laughed when first reading that. Now, I’m not so sure. Armstrong himself said something similar during a podcast with Ben Foster, the actor who played him in the film The Program: “I’m going to say something that might shock you and might shock a lot of people. David Walsh and I are very similar. We’re both extremely competitive, we’re both win-at-all-costs.” Then, in a reference to my attitude during our fraught 2001 interview in the south of France, he told Foster: “I sensed a real competitiveness and a ruthlessness. I respect that in him.”

Armstrong has rebuilt his life and is now a successful podcaster. The show he hosts during the Tour de France is hugely popular. Within the official world of the Tour, he remains persona non-grata, which is laughable given how many former dopers have been welcomed back.

Compared to all of the others, his punishment was draconian and probably excessive. But that was on him.

The bloody-mindedness that underpinned his seven Tour victories was the same bloody-mindedness that led to the loss of all those Tours and the lifetime ban. What worked in victory was disastrous in defeat.

*****

This photo was taken in Mallorca last month and shows the following:
1. Lance Armstrong: Banned from cycling for life and stripped of his seven Tour de France titles in 2012
2. George Hincapie: US Postal teammate of Armstrong who admitted in 2012 that he had used banned substances
3. Mark Cavendish: British cyclist who has won 34 individual stages at the Tour de France and was world road race champion in 2011
4. Bradley Wiggins: British cyclist who won Tour de France and Olympic time trial gold in 2012
5. Jan Ullrich: Won the 1997 Tour de France but was found guilty of doping in 2012 and a year later admitted to blood doping
6. Johan Bruyneel: Team director of US Postal when Armstrong was riding for them. He is serving a lifetime ban for having been at the apex of a conspiracy to commit widespread doping spanning many years and many riders.

– The Sunday Times