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  It could have been so different. Maybe the team could have carried on racing at home, as a low-key British-based operation. ‘I could have stayed a big fish in a small pond and earned a fair amount of money out of it,’ he reasons.

  But he doesn’t really believe that any major sponsor would have supported a UK-based team. ‘How can you ever take a sponsor to a British race?’ he asks. ‘You can’t – not one race. There’s nobody there. And anyone who is there, is out of the ark.’

  Julian maintains that if Jacob’s Creek had taken the team on, if Heinz had committed, and if Neil Stephens had been able to escape the ghosts of his past, then maybe the Linda McCartney team would still be going. ‘I really wanted the team to succeed. We knew that there was a short window of publicity because of the McCartney name and that was only going to last a little while before we were going to need results. It became very quickly apparent that there was no chance of getting results in Europe, unless they were doing what the others were doing. No question …’

  You mean doping? I say.

  Julian nods.

  Julian Clark still loves cycling. He spent most of the summer of 2006 racing in the Surrey League series. He ended up winning his age group – ‘clean, of course,’ he points out.

  The simplicity and innocence of the British club scene appeals to him. ‘It’s nice. I’ll ride out to local races from home, have a chat in the changing rooms, race hard all day. And they’re all clean.’

  Julian couldn’t quite believe, after all the years ducking and diving, trying to get into the Tour de France, that the Tour de France came to him; the first road stage of the 2007 Tour, which started in central London, passed his front door in Kent. Unsurprisingly, the irony tickled him. He fired up his barbecue, invited some friends over and watched the race go past.

  And after the Tour had gone, Julian gathered up the empties, packed away the charcoal, went back indoors and got on with his life.

  THE ENTOURAGE

  MY PHONE BEEPS. Perhaps not for the first time in his life, Alastair Campbell is feeling rather pleased with himself.

  ‘Meeting Lance was great. If there’s anything I can ever do, let me know,’ he texted. I gazed out of the window at the north London drizzle and pondered the prospect of Tony Blair’s legendary spin doctor becoming my own personal fixer. No letters ever, ever again from the Inland Revenue? A pledge to desist from his ‘Evening With …’ tours around Britain? Most importantly of all, a promise to steer clear of any future British Lions tours?

  In the spring of 2004, The Times sports desk called asking if I could finesse an introduction to Lance Armstrong on behalf of Campbell. After exiting Number 10 in wake of the ‘dodgy dossier’ farrago that had polarised opinion on the wisdom of the war in Iraq, Campbell had returned to journalism. He was compiling a list of his greatest athletes. Armstrong was among them.

  By the time Lance had won his fifth Tour in 2003, with a display of tenacity and rage that shocked even those who knew him well, he had become a people’s hero. His charitable deeds, his books – the first of which, It’s Not About the Bike, had become a global bestseller – had given him a profile which transcended his sport. He was somebody in Hollywood, a regular on Letterman and Leno – able to count Bono, George Bush, Sandra Bullock, Matthew McConaughey, Robin Williams and Sheryl Crow among his best friends.

  It’s Not About the Bike is a powerfully told story, expertly turned by ghostwriter Sally Jenkins. It develops the notion of Lance as an avenging angel – and the idea that somehow each Tour win further righted the wrongs and slights committed against the sick and helpless. This had real resonance in the United States, particularly in the post-9/11 era and the build-up to the invasion of Iraq, when America grew more isolated from the rest of the world. When Lance spoke of overcoming cancer and fighting against the odds to audiences at fundraising events, many listening would be moved to tears.

  By this time Lance had transcended his sport to become a highly paid motivational guru in a sharp suit. The baseball-cap-wearing, sweatshirted, bullshit-free redneck that I had first met in Leeds was now unrecognisable. On his last couple of Tours, I had struggled to convince myself that it was actually him out there in Lycra, pedalling and jostling, cursing and spitting, getting sweaty and tired, sore-arsed and fly-spattered. Didn’t he have somebody else to do this stuff? I’d take a stroll down to the team bus at the start village in the mornings, just to check it was really him. And yes – I can confirm that it genuinely was Lance Armstrong who rode all of those seven triumphant Tours.

  The US Postal team bus was the hub of Lancemania. Bodyguards, camera crews, fans and groupies milled around. If you were lucky you might get a word with Sheryl or Robin. There was one band of stateside fans, ‘The Cutters’, who hung out by the bus, whooping things up every morning with ‘Yewdamaaan!’-style hollering. ‘The Cutters’ were modelled on the wrong-side-of-the-tracks kids in the movie Breaking Away. The first year they showed up on the Tour, I ran into them late one night in a pizzeria in the Pyrenees, sunburnt, exhausted and scraping together enough loose change to pay the bill. Within a couple of years they were transformed into official Lance cheerleaders, with endorsement contracts of their own.

  It’s Not About the Bike won the William Hill Sports Book of the Year award in Britain and had become something of a self-help bible. It had an enormous impact, perhaps even a greater impact than his Tour wins. Around the dinner table, people would say that they didn’t really like cycling, but they ‘loved Lance’s amazing book’.

  Armstrong and his agent, Bill Stapleton, had realised their dream. In the five years since making his comeback, Lance had become an icon. Stapleton told me after Lance’s second Tour win that the ‘brand was more mature’. By 2004, it was more than mature – it was global.

  It was more than a brand to those who were close to Armstrong: it was a gravy train. The longer he maintained his position at the top of the sport, the richer they all became. And the more global the Lance brand became, the more distant he grew. My own relationship with him was virtually non-existent by this time, partly because direct contact with him was blocked by The Entourage, partly because there was no ‘exclusive’ time to be had any more, and partly because he had taken umbrage at my criticism of his ongoing relationship with Michele Ferrari. ‘I can choose who I talk to and I chose not to talk to him,’ Lance told Stapleton in an email that his agent then forwarded to me. It ended: ‘I actually think he’s an OK guy.’ But that didn’t tally with other accounts. The garrulous, sometimes indiscreet, Texan journalist, Suzanne Halliburton had revealed that Lance had described me to her as ‘a snake with arms’.

  When I heard that, I was, as they say, pretty pissed, but even then it made me smile and think of him with a flicker of grudging affection. The insult carried a characteristic touch of paranoia as if I had somehow betrayed him, slithering into his inner circle, before turning it to my advantage. The ‘snake with arms’ – maybe it was a mythical backwoods creature from the Texas Hill Country, maybe it was the ultimate Austin insult. Maybe it was a bumper sticker – ‘Don’t Mess With The Snake With Arms.’

  I’m not really sure where Lance and I parted company. It was a gradual freezing out, but even at the end of the 1999 Tour, it was clear that things were changing. As the race headed for Paris, I had called him. We chatted about his victory as he sat in the back of a team car wending its way down the hairpins from Alpe d’Huez to Bourg d’Oisans. We finished the conversation remembering how frail he had been during the mid-chemo visit to the house on Lake Austin.

  ‘I feel like I made a part of the journey with you,’ I said.

  ‘That’s right,’ he responded, ‘you did.’

  When I tried to call him a few weeks later, his cellphone was unattainable. I called the office in Austin. Access was denied. I’d have to talk to Stapleton and book a time to speak to Lance. They weren’t giving out his number to anybody – not anybody. Now it was my turn to be paranoid: with the big American networks and
Sports Illustrated beating a path to his door, I wondered if I had served my purpose.

  The distance between us grew.

  It became a divide during the 2001 Tour, when Armstrong and David Walsh of the Sunday Times went head to head in an electrifying press conference at the Palais des Congrès in Pau over the Texan’s relationship with Michele Ferrari. The Italian was facing a trial in Italy on doping charges. Walsh, following a series of vitriolic articles that had pursued Armstrong over his credibility, scented blood. Almost a decade earlier, the pair had struck up a rapport when Walsh had met the American and been impressed, like me, by his brazen charm and youthful directness.

  But Armstrong, vintage 2001, was more complex.

  On the road his mastery was complete; off the road he sometimes needed a little help from his friends in the press. For most of the Tour, he had deflected the endless questions over his contacts with Ferrari, which climaxed in the head to head with Walsh in Pau, using subtle sledging towards his rivals, and vague accusations of unprofessionalism.

  Prior to the final Tour time trial in 2001, he was scathing about Jan Ullrich’s level of pre-Tour preparation. ‘Where was Ullrich when I was here in April, in the pissing rain, riding the time-trial course?’

  But then the Armstrong-Ferrari-Bruyneel combination always went to extraordinary lengths to defend their supremacy. Nothing was left to chance. Forget the allegations of doping (always fiercely denied, and backed up by countless negative dope tests): there were other incidents that summed up their collective attitude towards the spirit of fair play.

  Armstrong understood that Ferrari was notoriously indiscreet. As the mystery about him grew, the tales about him achieved the status of urban myths. He was once supposedly spotted racing in a triathlon in Lavarone, wearing a fake race number, illegally ‘pacing’ his daughter, Sara, while she competed for the Italian national team.

  Despite his unassuming appearance, Ferrari’s ego demanded recognition. Among his most famous gaffes, was his own revelation that he would ‘talk’ Armstrong through the Tour, simply by watching the race on TV. ‘Lance calls me from his bike,’ Ferrari told Danish newspaper Ekstra Bladet.

  During the Alpine stages of the 2000 Tour, as Marco Pantani did his damnedest to dethrone the champion, Ferrari advised the American via a link from Bruyneel’s mobile phone to Armstrong’s in-race radio earpiece. When Pantani attacked, Ferrari, watching in front of his TV screen at home in Italy, told Armstrong to remain calm and not to waste energy, because he believed that the Italian had overreached himself. And Ferrari was proved right.

  ‘Obviously it wasn’t good to let Pantani go,’ recalled Armstrong. ‘But how fast was he really going? How long could he sustain that? And Ferrari would know the answer to that, because he is above all a mathematician. A brilliant mathematician with a ton of experience.’

  This was the Tour de France by remote control.

  If Greg LeMond’s interpretation was that the Italian was a ‘crazed scientist’, Armstrong preferred to call Ferrari ‘misunderstood’.

  He described Ferrari as ‘very, very smart’, but also acknowledged that he was prone to painful gaffes. Ferrari, Lance said, had ‘made some incredibly bad mistakes in terms of press and interviews, and the way he reacted to certain questions. I’ve known him for a long time and … we’ve known him to be fair and honest and correct and ethical, so we cannot punish the guy, because that’s the person we see.’

  The Italian case against Ferrari over doping offences was, Armstrong said, trumped up. ‘It wouldn’t make it through the first five minutes in a court in the United States of America, where you have ethics and you have codes, and you have laws and you have judges that are unbiased … Ferrari’s not getting a fair shake.’

  Lance later used similar language when, in 2005, L’Equipe published allegations – which Lance fiercely denied – that EPO had been present in his urine samples during the 1999 Tour. After this, would he ever return to France? he was asked: ‘No way. I wouldn’t get a fair shake in France on the roadside, in the doping controls, or in the lab.’ Yet Armstrong had praised the same French anti-doping laboratory, at Châtenay-Malabry in Paris, in 2004 and described it as having ‘an excellent reputation’.

  In Pau on that July afternoon in 2001, Walsh and Armstrong linked their fates, like a latter day Captain Ahab and Moby Dick. The press conference had begun amiably enough, an American journalist asking Lance about chateaux and wine, the German media asking him for an assessment of Jan Ullrich. Then Armstrong looked up to see that Walsh was the next questioner.

  ‘Glad you could make it, David,’ growled Lance.

  It was an extraordinary encounter, Walsh on the offensive, Lance maintaining his cool, their positions entrenched by mutual loathing. The Irishman appeared willing to stake his reputation on his ability to topple the icon, to force him into submission. But Armstrong was too tough to fold in front of us all and gladly locked horns with him.

  He defended the Italian: ‘I’ve never denied the relationship. I believe Dr Ferrari’s an honest man. Until somebody’s proven guilty, then I see them as innocent. If there’s a conviction then we will re-evaluate the relationship.’

  In response, Walsh raged at Armstrong, like a demented Catholic priest – ‘Yew preeesent yerself as the cleaaanest of the cleaaan!’ he bellowed in his high brogue – but the Texan didn’t buckle. The confrontation was a tie. When it was over, Lance strode out into the afternoon sunshine, Stapleton and The Entourage – PR men, brand managers, personal assistants, bodyguards and sunglasses reps – hot on his heels. He stepped into a US Postal Service team car, no doubt turning the air blue as he was sped away. After that, every Armstrong press conference was strictly controlled.

  Nonetheless, Walsh’s tirade had gained him some support. Allied to Ferrari’s long-standing ambivalence over doping, Armstrong’s admissions of regular contacts with the Italian and his refusal to distance himself from him during the doping trial all provoked debate.

  Lance had constantly played down the Ferrari connection, yet seemed prepared to risk his image over the relationship. Was Walsh a fantasist? Was Greg LeMond simply as bitter as some said?

  And even then, even if they were both as wrong as The Entourage insisted they were, why wouldn’t Lance and Stapleton, now so focussed on the global appeal of the Armstrong brand, ditch Ferrari until the court case was over? Why was Lance so fiercely loyal to him?

  I watched the camera crews film Armstrong’s departure, turned back to see Walsh holding court in a huddle of journalists with notebooks, and realised that I would soon have to choose sides.

  Alastair Campbell and Lance Armstrong had some similarities. Both had undergone a rebirth of sorts. An evangelical chord had been struck between them; Campbell, once a hard-drinking, stressed-out hack but now a born-again athlete, had, like so many, been smitten with the recovered, near-evangelical cancer victim and had seen a parallel in his own battle for redemption and understanding.

  There was another strand of empathy between them. Both believed themselves to be misunderstood and misrepresented.

  They loathed journalists and the mainstream media, particularly when they strayed off message. As Campbell wrote, a little pompously, in his Times piece: ‘Armstrong was attracted to meeting someone who feels even more deeply about the press and its misrepresentations than he does.’

  It was ironic, then, given that Campbell was writing for The Times, that Armstrong’s media nemesis was Walsh, chief sports writer on the Sunday Times.

  I pondered on whether it was legitimate to use Campbell’s interest in Armstrong to my own advantage. But, ostracised by The Entourage, I didn’t ponder for long. So I called him.

  I told Campbell about Lance’s professionalism, his frightening focus, about how he’d taken cycling to a whole new level of wealth and prestige. With a lot of British media outlets now shunned by Armstrong in the aftermath of the Walsh confrontation, I told him that, yes, I was sure Lance would love to meet Tony Blair’s fo
rmer right-hand man, but that things with the British media were delicately poised.

  But I also knew that Lance, friend and Texan neighbour to ‘Dubya’, would respond positively to an invitation from somebody so close to Blair. This way he would have both sides of the transatlantic alliance covered – an ‘in’ with both the White House and Number 10.

  Stapleton soon warmed to Campbell’s interest in Lance. Earlier when I’d embarked on a charm offensive it had taken days to get a reply. Not this time. A few hours later Armstrong’s agent responded: ‘Lance would be happy to do this.’

  Campbell and Armstrong finally got together in Lance’s apartment in Girona in north-east Spain. He had moved there with Kristin and the kids after the atmosphere towards him in France, both from the media and the public, had become overwhelmingly hostile. But now his wife and three children were long gone, and when Campbell turned up, Sheryl Crow was at Armstrong’s side. I had negotiated access for a photographer, a rare privilege, but The Times ran only a couple of images. In contrast, procycling published almost a dozen. Lance, a confirmed atheist, posed a little eerily in front of the chapel he’d created for his Catholic ex-wife. This was the king in his castle.

  ‘Losing and dying,’ he told Campbell at one point. ‘It’s the same thing.’

  The pictures showed Campbell and Crow sipping coffee and Lance and Alastair pottering in his bike workshop. Lance, prompted by Sheryl, ribbed Campbell about those weapons of mass destruction. Campbell defended himself and Blair. Lance, Sheryl and Alastair all agreed that President Bush was actually quite a bright guy and not at all like his public image.

  Campbell did pause on Armstrong’s fight to clear his name against the rumours of doping, and Lance trotted out the usual defences. He was the most tested athlete on the planet and he’d never tested positive. It was a French conspiracy, he said, a witch-hunt. The French media were anti-American, even more so in the aftermath of the Iraq war. They were bitter after losing the Tour for so many years and were now so cynical that they couldn’t believe his story. Campbell wrote: ‘I’m not bad at reading people and either he’s a good liar or telling the truth.’