Bad Blood Page 13

  At the same time, Muller blithely continued his own business association with Michele Ferrari, even after the Italian was convicted of doping offences (although Ferrari was later acquitted following an appeal). Muller, while blocking yet another interview request with Armstrong, would at the same time use his contacts with the media to promote the website 53x12.com – an online training consultancy he had set up with Ferrari.

  ‘Sorry,’ he’d say. ‘Lance is not available – but can I send you an email about my new website?’ Muller unashamedly publicised his relationship with the Italian even as Armstrong again defended himself against allegations of doping. Given that he was responsible for Armstrong’s relationship with the press, it was bizarre behaviour.

  The Swiss-German also led the increasingly creative badmouthing of those who spoke out against Armstrong. He had strong support from Armstrong’s two press-room stooges, whose meal ticket was their ‘special’ relationship with the Tour champion. The pair would squabble over which of them was closest to the Texan. I have always had a sneaking feeling that Lance secretly enjoyed this. Conversations with the stooges debating the merits of the latest allegations against Armstrong invariably ended the same way. One by one, they would shoot down Lance’s critics. The French? ‘They’re lazy.’ David Walsh? ‘He’s a crazy obsessive!’ Greg LeMond? ‘He’s washed-up and jealous!’ Filippo Simeoni? ‘A liar and a proven drugs cheat.’

  It was remarkably easy to fuel the galloping paranoia of The Entourage. In the aftermath of David Millar’s two-year ban, I asked Johan Bruyneel if – given that Dave’s old mate Lance had been such a shoulder to cry on during the dark days of his drugs bust – the Belgian and his Texan team leader might consider signing Millar for US Postal once his ban had been served.

  Bruyneel frowned. ‘Yes, somebody told me you’d started that rumour,’ he said.

  I laughed in disbelief. ‘Maybe you shouldn’t believe all the gossip you hear, Johan,’ I said. Two years later, Bruyneel was scrabbling to sign Ivan Basso.

  Exchanges like this guaranteed my place on the blacklist. But then by 2005, more of us were on it than not. Bruyneel, Muller and Armstrong had become so despised for their hostility towards the press that we wore blacklist status like a badge of honour.

  Ultimately, Armstrong’s never-ending suspicions became a self-fulfilling prophecy. By the time he had won his final Tour, he certainly had enemies. After half a decade spent defending himself, he was so paranoid that every encounter became claustrophobic, heavy with suspicion. But then my feeling was that, isolated in his control tower, he wouldn’t have wanted it any other way. There was now a stream of ostracised confidants; the journalists were bad enough, but then there were the embittered and resentful ex-pros queuing up to knife him, the former personal assistants demanding money, as well as – with breathtaking hypocrisy – the Tour de France directors who had fallen at his feet as the dollars rolled in.

  By the end of the seven-year reign, it wasn’t just the French who felt that Armstrong had long outstayed his welcome. The notion, so eloquently expressed in Daniel Coyle’s excellent book, Lance Armstrong: Tour de Force, that despite all the money, cars, women and houses, Lance was secretly lonely and isolated, took root as his ‘friends’ turned on him. It was time for him to climb out of the bear pit.

  PROTECTING THE INTERESTS OF THE PELOTON

  THE 2004 TOUR de France is one day away from the Champs-Elysées.

  Lance Armstrong, taut and lean in the yellow jersey, strides down the central aisle of the Besançon media centre into the Tour winner’s press conference. A ripple of applause splutters into life, initiated by the American media contingent. When it is not picked up by the Europeans present, it fades away.

  Armstrong, followed by The Entourage, strides purposefully towards the platform and the waiting bank of microphones and cassette recorders. Cameras flash, tapes whirr. He sits down. The questions begin.

  Lance’s drawl booms out of the PA, easy, relaxed and assured. There is no Kimmage or Walsh out there, no inquisitor to face. He had dominated the Tour to secure his sixth win. Once again he has put them all in their place. The naysayers and sceptics among the media and his rivals – where are they now? After six years, Armstrong’s supremacy was complete. His multimillion dollar fund-raising efforts through his cancer foundation, the sweeping success of the Livestrong wristbands, his celebrity profile and the successful rebuttal of any attacks on his reputation, had made him appear almost untouchable. Even his bitterest critics had to admit that he was an extraordinary human being. Lance’s legendary status now transcended his sport: for many people, his good deeds – the fund-raising, the campaigning for better cancer treatment, the hope he offered the hopeless – nullified any concerns there may have been over his effect on his sport. How could somebody who had done so much for others be anything but a force for good?

  So as he sits down in Besançon, there is a stalemate, a predictability, in the air. Nonetheless, my tape recorder runs, just in case. I stand up, stretch my legs and stroll around to the side of the low stage. The questions continue; he smiles, shrugs, jokes, bats them back. I walk around to the rear of the stage. Double doors are open to the car park and a warm breeze wafts in. The US Postal liveried station wagon with blacked-out windows is parked beyond the threshold.

  Lance’s bodyguard stands there in the doorway, waiting.

  ‘Last question please,’ says US Postal’s press attaché, Dan Osipow. His master’s voice echoes once more around the hall. Then, job done, Lance is on his feet, making his way through the tangle of wires and speakers. He steps down from the back of the stage for the short walk to the waiting car. His minders are lagging behind as he strides towards the doors.

  From under the brim of his baseball cap, he clocks me. I see a flicker of recognition but he keeps walking, keeps looking straight ahead. I take a step forward. He adjusts his cap.

  Before I realise it’s happened, he’s past me and out through the doors, into the evening sunshine and a throng of adulation.

  In the 2004 Tour, Armstrong was more dominant than he had ever been. He won by six minutes, he won six stages, he sneered at the boo boys, he hobnobbed with George W. Bush and John Kerry. He kissed Sheryl Crow. He drank Château de Fieuzal 1998 when victory was assured. He flung his supremacy in the face of his critics. Even as the doping scandals clouding the achievements of lesser riders multiplied, he remained the Tour’s feudal king.

  There was, however, one thing that displeased him: an Italian rider, Filippo Simeoni, who had testified against Michele Ferrari in an Italian courtroom and who continued to speak out against doping. Armstrong brushed him aside. ‘He is like a child killing ants,’ observed former French professional Laurent Jalabert, during the Tour. And it wasn’t the first time that Armstrong had invoked the power of the omerta to assert his authority.

  During the 1999 Tour, French professional Christophe Bassons had endured a brief feud with Armstrong. The Frenchman, then twenty-five, was riding for the La Française des Jeux team, a contract he’d secured after leaving the Festina team. When Festina had crashed and burned twelve months earlier, even his shamed teammates had universally acknowledged that Bassons was an intransigent non-doper.

  That status ensured his notoriety. In a column he was writing for Le Parisien, in July 1999, Bassons questioned the ethics of the peloton and insisted that doping was still a significant problem. When he heard what Bassons had said, Armstrong, heading towards his remarkable first victory, sought him out. Armstrong later confirmed that, in a brief mid-race conversation, he had told Bassons that what he was saying was not good for the sport and that maybe, if he was so disenchanted with cycling, he should seek another profession. Bassons agrees with the gist of this account, but his version of the exchange is more blunt.

  ‘Lance said, “Why don’t you fuck off?”’ Bassons recalled.

  The encounter with Armstrong proved catastrophic for Bassons’ career. Within hours some colleagues were ignoring him, w
hile others implored him to keep his mouth shut. Even his own team manager, Marc Madiot, these days a voluble proponent of clean sport and leading light in the Movement for Credible Cycling, rounded on him. It was too much for Bassons and he quit the Tour in a shattered and distraught state. His career never truly recovered. Bassons moved to Bordeaux to work for the French Ministry for Sport and Culture.

  Six years later, history repeated itself. At the 2004 Tour, Lance tackled a second whistle-blower.

  Filippo Simeoni was a lowly Italian rider, best known for a stage win in the Tour of Spain, at which his maverick streak had first showed itself. As he rode towards victory and entered the final hundred metres, he stopped short of the finish and then walked across the line, triumphantly carrying his bike above his head. Later, he claimed this gesture was in tribute to the victims of the 9/11 terrorist attacks and in support of world peace. Showing their usual indulgence of rider eccentricities, the UCI fined him heavily.

  Simeoni’s unconventional behaviour was long forgotten by July 2004 when he raced in the Tour de France for the Domina Vacanze team. Established as a very able domestique, his presence at the Tour, riding in the same peloton as Armstrong, created a stir among the riders. He wasn’t seen as a joke any more, but more as a loose cannon. He had spat in the soup in an Italian courtroom. He had broken the omerta.

  Questioned by the Italian police as part of a detailed and comprehensive investigation into Michele Ferrari, Simeoni had agreed to testify. As Armstrong vigorously defended his relationship with Ferrari, Simeoni told the investigating judge that Ferrari had advised him on the use of banned substances, including EPO. He also confessed to doping himself.

  Armstrong was enraged. Simeoni, he said, was not a credible witness. He described him as an ‘absolute liar’ in an interview in Le Monde. Few had imagined, however, that this bitter feud would be so publicly played out on the road during the Tour de France.

  At first nothing happened. As he and Simeoni rode side by side in the peloton, Armstrong was at first merely dismissive towards the Italian, feigning a lack of interest in his presence. Then when Simeoni made plain his intention to win a stage, things got personal.

  Simeoni escaped into a two-man breakaway on the ninth stage to Gueret: Armstrong and his team drove the pursuit. Simeoni and his breakaway companion, Inigo Landaluze, were overtaken by the main field just sixty metres from the finish line.

  ‘We rode really strongly, really hard. It was amazing we got caught,’ the Italian said afterwards.

  He added that there were ‘strange conversations’ going on among the team cars, hinting that, even though they had no tactical interest in chasing Simeoni, Armstrong’s US Postal team may have asked other team managers to get their riders to assist in the pursuit. Such an alliance would be usual if a contender for overall victory had been in the breakaway, or if Armstrong had suddenly become a top sprinter. Neither was the case.

  For the next ten days, there was a truce: Simeoni did his job fetching and carrying for his team in the mountain stages, watching from a distance as Armstrong wrapped up another Tour win.

  But when, on the humdrum eighteenth stage that began the journey north from the Alps towards Paris, Simeoni stole into another breakaway with five riders, the unthinkable happened: Armstrong, leading the Tour by a street, set off in lone pursuit. Once again, there was no tactical rationale to the American’s behaviour. At that moment in the 2004 Tour, Lance had the race won and the Italian posed no threat to anyone – or so it seemed.

  When he set off alone, in fierce pursuit of Simeoni, Armstrong was assured of final victory in the 2004 Tour. The Italian was languishing in 113th place, two hours and forty-two minutes behind him. But a stage win was up for grabs and like all the other domestiques in the race, with the Eiffel Tower looming on the horizon, Simeoni was desperate to bag one.

  Armstrong, however, was not having it. He could see the headlines, the Ferrari questions in the press conference, the sudden renewal of interest in Simeoni’s views on doping – always doping. So he slammed his feet down on the pedals and gave chase, hell-bent on stopping him.

  If the main peloton was stunned by Armstrong’s pursuit of Simeoni, the breakaway sextet were equally bemused when they saw the pair closing in on them. But they quickly realised that their hopes of staying clear to the finish were doomed with the maillot jaune in their number and the peloton obliged to chase. Unfortunately for Filippo, none of them had the courage to tell Lance to back off; instead, realising that the American had joined them seeking only to poison Simeoni’s chances of a stage win, they turned on the Italian.

  That afternoon, Filippo found himself shot by both sides; damned if he did, damned if he didn’t. It was a defining moment both for him and for Armstrong. The Italian realised that he was now forever tainted as a professional cyclist, while the darker side of Lance’s personality was revealed for all to see. Another rider might have told the Texan where to go and then ridden on regardless, but like Christophe Bassons before him, Filippo hesitated. Then, as peer pressure mounted, his resolve crumbled. Out of respect to the leading quartet, who after all, were seeking only to snatch some crumbs from the king’s table, the Italian backed off.

  Armstrong had achieved his goal. He had made it plain to his peers that Simeoni’s decision to testify against Ferrari had made him persona non grata in professional cycling. The Italian could only watch despairingly as the breakaways powered ahead. Alone together in no-man’s-land, as he and Lance freewheeled, waiting to be swallowed up by the chasing peloton, words were exchanged. Television cameras captured the moment, but remained out of earshot. Later, Simeoni alleged that Armstrong had issued threats and told him that it was a mistake to testify against Ferrari. Armstrong, he claimed, had told him, ‘I have lots of time and lots of money. I will destroy you.’

  A year later Armstrong expressed some regret. ‘I made a mistake to go after him that day, but I never said the things he said I did.’ But his words came too late to salvage Simeoni’s career. When the main field did catch up to the pair, Simeoni endured a volley of abuse as rider after rider, including his Italian compatriots, taunted him. He slipped to the back of the field, fighting back tears. Armstrong claimed that several riders had congratulated him on his actions.

  In a frank interview with journalist Daniel Friebe in 2004, Simeoni claimed that Daniele Nardello, a former Italian national champion, told him, ‘You’re a disgrace – you’re spitting in the bowl you’re eating from.’ He claimed that other Italian riders – Filippo Pozzato, Andrea Peron and Giuseppe Guerini – picked up on that theme and also abused him.

  After the stage finish, in Lons-le-Saunier, both Simeoni and Armstrong were interviewed live on French television.

  Simeoni was tearful with rage. ‘He showed today in front of the whole world what kind of person he is,’ he said. ‘It’s a sin.’

  Lance’s response was enigmatic. ‘I was protecting the interests of the peloton,’ he said. ‘All Simeoni wants to do is to destroy cycling and that’s not correct. When I went back to the group they said “chapeau” – that’s because they understand that this is their job and that they absolutely love it and they’re committed to it and don’t want somebody within their sport destroying it.’ Simeoni was not to be allowed the oxygen of publicity that is the stage-winner’s due.

  That was not the end of it. On the final day of the race as the riders neared the Parisian suburbs, the feud resumed. Simeoni had been simmering with anger since the first confrontation. So he attacked again, this time deliberately, vengefully, raining on Lance’s victory parade.

  The opening kilometres of each Tour’s final stage are a celebratory procession, given over to photo opportunities and mugging for the cameras. Riders swap bikes and parking cones are worn as hats – this kind of weary student jape passes for wit in the final hours of the Tour. In another clichéd tradition, the film crews and photographers mass around the winner as he poses with his teammates, holding aloft brimming champagne flute
s.

  But in 2004, just as Lance and his US Postal boys manoeuvred into position, fizz in hand, ready to pose for the cameras and toast a sixth successive victory, Filippo Simeoni decided to attack.

  ‘I was so angry,’ he said. ‘Had I not done it, I couldn’t have lived with myself. I thought: “I’ll show you the victory parade to Paris.” I waited until all of the photographers went to take Armstrong’s photo and then – boom!’

  Simeoni’s bravado had a spectacular effect. To a chorus of shouting and swearing, half-empty champagne flutes were tossed away, motorbikes careered across the road in panic and shutters clicked manically as Armstrong and his team sprinted into action and gave pursuit. The attack did not last long but even then, perhaps because he realised that he would never get such an opportunity again, Simeoni had still not finished messing with Texas. Maybe he’d never seen the bumper stickers.

  There was a lull. Then the Italian attacked again. In the press room, we laughed in disbelief and then cheered as the punch-drunk underdog, Simeoni, refused to stay down. He got back to his feet, ready to take more punishment.

  But the final knockout was coming. Incredulous at the Italian’s nerve, Lance and his ‘blue train’ saw red again – faces contorted with rage, they sped after him in muscular pursuit.

  Metre by metre, Armstrong’s team reeled Simeoni in as the convoy neared rue de Rivoli. When the peloton drew alongside, a shower of phlegm arched through the air towards him. It ran down his tanned legs as the peloton roared past. Simeoni – brave, naive … stupid, stupid, Filippo – was swallowed back into the field, only to be insulted once more by those whose dignity he was trying to defend.

  This was cycling’s law of silence – the hateful, oppressive omerta – made flesh.