Lanced: The Shaming of Lance Armstrong (11 page)

The case against Ferrari opened on September 20, 2001. He was charged with prescribing doping products. Although many riders had worked with Ferrari, only two were willing to testify against him. Simeoni was one of the two. On February 12, 2002, he gave his evidence to the Bologna court.

"From November 1996 to November 1997 I was treated by Ferrari," he said. "Even before that, I had taken doping products. Ferrari gave me a work schedule of increasing toughness. EPO was spoken of from the first moment. That year, effectively, I was taking EPO on his instructions. Later, in March and April, Andriol was spoken of. I needed to take it after intense training sessions.

"Ferrari also told me to be careful about not taking testosterone too close to competitions, due to the risk of being tested positive. I have never been tested positive. To avoid anti-doping problems, Ferrari told me to use emagel on the mornings of tests and to use another product the night before to lower my haematocrit level."

Two riders, Claudio Chiappucci and Gianluca Bortolami, incriminated Ferrari in interviews with the police but told different stories under oath. One other rider, Fabrizio Convalle, testified that Ferrari had helped him to dope, but the most damning evidence had come from Simeoni. The Ferrari trial is expected to end this autumn. Ferrari has always strenuously denied the charges.

Soon after his appearance in court, Simeoni was called "a liar" by Armstrong, who has worked with Ferrari since the end of 1995. Armstrong pointed to inconsistencies in the stories the rider had first given to the police and later to the judge. Simeoni countered by saying there was a logical reason for the differences. "When I was first interviewed by the police, I wanted to help them, but I didn't tell them the whole truth," he said. "Going to the courtroom, I knew there was no point in holding anything back, and decided I would tell everything when speaking under oath. That's the reason for the difference."

Simeoni was enraged by Armstrong's calling him a liar, an accusation that appeared in a number of newspapers. He confirmed during this year's Tour that he intends to sue the American for defamation. Personal squabbles such as this often disappear over time, but by bringing it into the Tour de France, Armstrong magnified it and invited us again to consider its significance.

According to those involved, when Simeoni and Armstrong joined the six riders at the front, the race leader made it clear that the peloton would not allow the breakaway to go on if it contained Simeoni. Two of the six suggested to Simeoni that it would be better if he dropped back. Not wanting to destroy the chances of the six, the Italian agreed.

Armstrong claims that when he and Simeoni returned to the pack, other riders patted him on the back and congratulated him on a job well done. Simeoni admits he got a hard time from a few riders. He also says Armstrong revealed his true self in the way he chased him down. Standing on the side of the road or sitting before our television sets, the salient point for us was that the peloton was supportive of Armstrong's action.

Armstrong was unrepentant, claiming that Simeoni was trying to destroy cycling.

"Simeoni is not a rider that the peloton wants to see in the front group," he said. "All he wants to do is to destroy cycling, to destroy the sport that pays him."

How has he tried to destroy the sport? By coming forward and admitting that while he worked with Ferrari, he doped, and, according to his sworn testimony, did so under the guidance of the doctor? The police and the prosecutor in the Ferrari trial, Giovanni Spinosa, believe Simeoni has told the truth.

Simeoni suffers now as Christophe Bassons did in 1999. The courageous young Frenchman dared to offer the opinion that after the Festina scandal in 1998, cycling had still not addressed its doping problem. He also said he didn't think a clean rider could finish in the top 10 of that year's Tour. For such honesty, he too was not wanted "in the front group" and was driven from the race, eventually from the sport. Bassons now teaches sport to children in Bordeaux, earning far less than he did as a cyclist but enjoying what he regards as a much richer life.

The evolution of the Tour de France is mirrored in other professional sports: performers in a glass bubble, content in a jurisdiction that exists above and beyond ordinary society and its laws. Within this world, the dominant feeling is entitlement. On the roadside, we watch the stars pass by and know not how to feel.

We grew to love the Tour de France because in the inhumanity of the challenge, man's humanity vividly expressed itself. The vacant expressions, the haggard appearances and the undying determination spoke of nobility. The irony in the turnaround of the past decade has been unmistakable. The route has been shortened, the road surface smoothened, and, happily, the challenge can no longer be described as inhuman. Sadly, the inhumanity is now expressed a different way.

Three years ago Redeker posed the question: "What is the direction of the hurricane that is carrying cycling towards such an improbable future?" The answer is that only God knows.

Champ or cheat?

David Walsh

August 28, 2005

"

Armstrong’s reply was short and to the point. “Extraordinary allegations,” he said, “demand extraordinary proof"

"

If it was the boldness of the headline -"The Armstrong Lie" - that made the immediate impact, it was the paragraph inset on the front page alongside a photograph of the American that summarised one of the most sensational stories that L'Equipe, the French sports daily, would ever tell.

It read: "L'Equipe has received the results of scientific analyses that took place at the national anti-doping laboratory at Chatenay-Malabry, backed up by official documentation. Our investigation shows Lance Armstrong used EPO (the blood-boosting drug) in winning his first Tour de France in 1999, contrary to everything he has said."

A year before, at a Tour de France press conference in Liege, Belgium, Armstrong was asked about accusations made against him in the book LA Confidentiel -Les Secrets De Lance Armstrong, which I co-wrote with Pierre Ballester. His reply was short and to the point. "Extraordinary allegations," he said, "demand extraordinary proof."

The unqualified accusation of doping by L'Equipe went further than anything printed or broadcast about Armstrong previously. In that sense, it was extraordinary. The newspaper tried to contact Armstrong on the evening before running its story and learnt from his lawyer, Donald Manasse, that he did not want to comment. "For us, these are allegations," said Manasse. "As we have not examined what is going to be in your newspaper, it is not possible to comment. We will see tomorrow if a response is necessary."

A response was necessary. It first appeared on Armstrong's website. "I will simply restate what I have said many times: I have never taken performance-enhancing drugs. Unfortunately the witch hunt continues and the article is nothing short of tabloid journalism. The paper even admits in its own article that the science in question here is faulty and that I have no way to defend myself."

The L'Equipe piece did not say the science was faulty but pointed out that because the tests were carried out on B samples of urine originally taken six years before, another test to confirm the veracity of the B sample results would not be possible. When the A sample was originally examined in 1999, there was no test for EPO.

One scientific option is open to Armstrong. In at least two of his six samples that contained synthetic EPO, there is enough urine left over (20ml) for him to have it DNA-tested to confirm that it is in fact his. So far there has been no indication that he will have this done.

Armstrong has been busy defending himself in America. On Wednesday he spoke to journalists on a video link-up from Washington. On Thursday he appeared on CNN's Larry King Live. King immediately confronted him with a quote from Jean-Marie Leblanc, the race director of the Tour de France.

"For the first time," Leblanc had said, "these are no longer rumours or insinuations, these are proven scientific facts ... He owes explanations to us, to everyone who followed the Tour. L'Equipe have shown that I was fooled, we were all fooled."

Armstrong said he was shocked by Leblanc's comments and told how the two men had spoken over the telephone. According to Armstrong, Leblanc just hemmed and hawed, and said he was surprised but didn't spell out his disappointment.

Asked why he should be the target of continual doping allegations, Armstrong looked beyond cycling. "If we consider the landscape between Americans and the French right now, obviously relations are strained. But this has been going on for seven years."

He also offered the view that the French were sore losers. "Couple that (US-French relations) with the fact that French cycling is in one of its biggest lulls it has ever been. I don't know, I think it's been 20 or 25 years since they won the Tour de France."

In every interview he has done since the story broke on Tuesday, Armstrong was asked if he would sue L'Equipe: "It's a possibility ... You know, lawsuits are two things: they're very costly and they're very time-consuming."

After the publication of LA Confidentiel, Armstrong sued The Sunday Times for an article relating to the book, he sued the French publishers, La Martiniere, the authors and L'Express magazine for publishing extracts.

The apparent finding of EPO in six of Armstrong's samples from the 1999 Tour de France occurred quite by chance. It was December last year and Professor Jacques de Ceaurriz, head of the French national laboratory, and his colleague Dr Francoise Lasne had been working to improve the EPO test developed at Chatenay- Malabry in the late 1990s and approved for use at the Sydney Olympics in 2000.

Their aim last December was to find synthetic EPO in urine by three distinct methods. They used the 1999 Tour de France samples, which had been kept frozen at the laboratory, for a simple reason: they knew that many cyclists used EPO freely through the 1990s as there was no means of detecting it. From the samples, they found 12 that contained EPO.

For the scientists, the discovery of EPO was not important. Their objective was solely to measure the veracity of their refined test. They did not plan to make public the results and even if anybody at the laboratory had wanted to name the riders with EPO in their urine, they could not have done so. The laboratory worked only with anonymous numbers.

Somewhere during this process, L'Equipe journalist Damien Ressiot learnt these tests had been carried out and that there were 12 positives. Through sources at the laboratory, he received the documentation for each positive test with the number relating to each rider who had provided the sample.

Ressiot's task was at once straightforward and formidable. He had to find the documentation that showed both the name of the rider and his number for each sample. Three agencies -the Union Cycliste Internationale (UCI), the French Cycling Federation and the French sports ministry -had all received copies of that documentation.

From documents reproduced in L'Equipe, it is clear that Ressiot obtained the UCI's copies of these documents. This is ironic because of the speculation in the US about a French conspiracy to bring down the American champion. The UCI is based in Lausanne, Switzerland.

Once Ressiot received these documents, he cross-checked them against the laboratory documentation. He then knew he had a sensational story on his hands.

The investigation, lasting four months, had reached an end and resulted in L'Equipe devoting four pages to the story on Tuesday and 3A pages to its follow-up on Wednesday.

But questions remain. L'Equipe has not convincingly explained why it took so long to get the story into print: the tests were done in December, the story appeared eight months later. Had the story been published two months earlier, shortly before the start of the Tour de France, it would have greatly damaged the race. L'Equipe and the Tour are both part of the Amaury group of companies.

Neither has the newspaper explained why the riders who produced the other six positives found at Chatenay-Malabry from the 1999 samples have not been named.

Sources say the paper does not have those names. This raises the possibility that the leaked documents from the UCI were specifically designed to bring down Armstrong.

Previous allegations against Armstrong mostly involved testimony of former employees, teammates and others involved in the sport of cycling. Although they cannot be easily dismissed, they lacked the documented evidence in L'Equipe's story. "I've dealt with it for seven years," Armstrong told Larry King. "This is perhaps the worst of it."

Because of his inspirational comeback from cancer and his athletic prowess, he remains an iconic figure to many Americans. His is a story that millions of them want to believe. Many still do, but not all. Following L'Equipe's story, many American commentators have openly expressed doubt.

In the San Francisco Chronicle on Wednesday, Gwen Knapp compared Armstrong to baseball's Barry Bonds, the record-setting hitter who has been linked to the Bay Area Laboratory Co-operative (Balco), the California steroid factory. She wrote that Bond's disgraced trainer, Greg Anderson, who has pleaded guilty to two federal charges in the Balco case, is not much different from Armstrong's former trainer Dr Michele Ferrari, who has been convicted on doping charges in an Italian court.

"Both athletes can say they have never tested positive," wrote Knapp, "although Bonds can say it more convincingly. Traces of a banned corticosteroid turned up in Armstrong's 1999 tests. He then produced a medical certificate, saying that he was allowed to use the substance to treat saddle sores ...

"The thing that definitely separates Armstrong and Bonds has nothing to do with science or law. It's a popularity contest and Armstrong can't lose. As the cancer survivor who launched 50m yellow bracelets, he has an aura that transcends sports.