How I Won the Yellow Jumper Page 21

  In this way, the Tour was winding down before a rest day. A chill was closing in on the mountaintop as Woody, Liam and I snaked our way down through the dregs of the afternoon’s entertainment. Hordes of Danish and Norwegian bike fans in their early twenties stumbled around the place in various states of disarray and undress, bellowing ribald songs in Scandinavian tongues, which sounded belligerent but which were almost certainly charmingly innocent. One of them, an ear-splitting chorus in support of Thor Hoshovd’s campaign for the green jersey, ended with the stirring refrain, ‘Mark Cavendish is a fish.’ It was passionate stuff.

  Cavendish himself was spotted walking back up the mountain from their hotel arm in arm with his freshly acquired girlfriend, Fiorella Migliore, former Miss Italy. He was dressed, as riders are contractually obliged to do, even when not on active duty, in the team’s liveried shell suit. He looked like he’d just finished a shift at the local leisure centre. But he smiled the relaxed smile of a man whose life was getting better by the hour. George Hincapie, in the role of gooseberry that night, walked alongside them, towering above the young couple and looking three times as old.

  We had eaten somewhere forgettable, played pool somewhere irritating, and were now looking to join up with our friends from the Organisation. The urbane and charming Olivier, and the unreconstructed stubbled, chain-smoking Mathieu, had vaguely indicated that we should meet them at the only bar still open in town. A place with an uber-prosaic name, such as The Room, or The Place, I forget.

  Inside, the pub was heaving. Euro beats kept everybody pinned to their seats or against the wall of the stifling cellar. People stood three deep at the bar. I volunteered to get the beers. After a twenty-minute wait to get served, I was to be next. I watched as the man in front of me, an olive-skinned young hedge-fund manager with a jumper over his shoulders, ordered precisely what I was about to order.

  ‘I’ll get three beers.’ It was more of a statement than a request.

  They were plonked in front of him, the tops flipped off by expert Swiss hands, ‘OK, that’s twenty-five francs.’

  I could see the mental arithmetic pass over my neighbour at the bar like a cloud. Why, that was about fifteen pounds for three small bottles of Becks. Oh well, so be it.

  He passed over a luridly coloured note. The hand remained outstretched. ‘Each. They’re twenty-five each.’

  He turned and left. So did I.

  I later established that the queue for the bar consisted entirely of people like us; an endless procession of drinkers reaching the front, and turning straight around, beerless. Within fifteen minutes I was tucked up in bed, back in my chalet.

  Woody and Liam had less luck. They stayed a little longer out of politeness, but then, on their way back up the hill, they had the great misfortune to stumble across a 200-Swiss-franc note lying in the street. Presumably it’d been dropped by someone rifling through their chinos in search of their BlackBerry. My colleagues were soon bounding happily back to the bar, fully intending to hand the lost money straight in to the nearest barman. Which is what they did, in exchange for beer. They returned very late indeed.

  The Verbier rest day dawned along with the realisation that Bradley Wiggins, who had just ridden himself into a podium position, had decided to hold a press conference. We should probably cover it, even though it was technically our day off too. He was staying some sixty kilometres away, down in the valley below. Wearily, Liam and I drove to Wiggins’s hotel, only to find out that he’d taken a helicopter to Lake Annecy to ride a bit of the time trial course. But he would indeed be back later to hold a press conference in the early afternoon.

  We returned to Verbier, irritated beyond measure by the sudden removal of the word Rest from our Rest Day. We just had time to dump our stinking washing at the World’s Most Expensive Launderette for a service wash, where the lady behind the counter nearly called the police at the sight of Liam’s favourite pale blue Fred Perry polo.

  She had a point. The smell released when Tour bags are peeled open is indescribably bad. On the 2010 Tour we arrived in the most beautiful little boutique hotel in Bagnères-de-Bigorre on a rest day. After a string of soulless chain hotels in industrial estates, this was a place so immaculate, tasteful and welcoming that it made us want to weep.

  But instead of crying, we unzipped our suitcases in the perfect sweet-smelling foyer and began to stuff dirty washing into black plastic bags to take to the launderette. We could have done this in the privacy of our own rooms, but instead chose to transfer our washing in full view of the charming lady who owned and designed this jewel of a hotel. Our hostess, still holding on to her smile of welcome, backed off visibly and, with one deft movement, opened a set of French doors at the back to allow the smell to dissipate a little. I hope we had the good grace to blush. I think we did.

  Back in Verbier though, our washing safely under way, we had an issue to grapple with.

  I had failed to mention to Woody the possibility that we might have to work on our rest day. So he’d taken advantage of the chance of a proper lie-in, by getting to bed at 6.30 a.m., about 100,000 Swiss francs worse off, no doubt. The trouble was, we needed him to come with us to the press conference. It was already midday.

  We needed him to wake up. We had to wake him. Liam had to wake him.

  I waited in the car outside the chalet, the kit loaded up, and ready to go. Liam reappeared to tell me how badly the news had been received. It seems I was not popular. It was just as he was relaying the extent and exact nature of the abuse heaped on my head by my loyal friend and sound recordist that we caught sight of a figure pressed up against a window on the third floor. Woody, it seemed, quite unaware that his shower looked directly over the street, was scrubbing himself into life under the running water, quite naked, and quite visible to anyone walking by.

  Wonderfully, the shower seemed to last for ever. After three or four minutes, I had stopped crying with laughter, and simply sat gazing up at the window in delight.

  He appeared a little while later, clutching his sound kit, and shades on. The act of telling him what we’d seen from the street set us off laughing again. Woody, it has to be said, didn’t enjoy the joke.

  ‘Let’s go.’ We drove the rest of the way in silence.

  One of these days he’ll see the funny side of it. Probably when he reads this book and sees that I’ve included the picture.

  CONCLUDING ARMSTRONG

  I went to a branch of Radio Shack last July, mysteriously drawn in by the logo, the big round ‘R’.

  Radio Shack, the US equivalent of Tandy, was the headline sponsor for Lance Armstrong’s last ever team. But to me, and to millions around the world, the big round ‘R’ was simply a visual shorthand for Armstrong.

  I have a curious response to ‘out of context’ sightings of things I associate with the Tour de France. For example, recently I was thrilled to discover how many UK hardware retailers now stock Quick Step laminate flooring, the main sponsor of the Belgian national team. Each time I come across it in a store, I stop momentarily and consider laying some parquet wholly unnecessarily over my floorboards at home. I gravitate needlessly to branches of Caisse d’Epargne to withdraw money in France, and I would always favour Liquigas for all my Italian-based propane needs.

  All right, I might have made that last one up, but the sight of a Norbert Dentressangle truck on the M40 is enough to send me careering into the central reservation. I simply forget that these products and services have a life outside their sponsorship of the Tour de France.

  The 2010 Tour was scarcely five days dead, and here I was, in a small ugly town called North Conway at the foot of the White Mountains of New Hampshire, staring at the bland exterior of a branch of America’s favourite electrical accessories retailer. I sat in my car, gazing at the store. What impulse had brought me here?

  Primarily it was the need to purchase an audio jack lead. But also, I was curious. My last meeting with Armstrong had not gone well. I felt like he and I had a little un
finished business to resolve.

  He would have been blissfully unaware of this, but as I sat and watched as the Radio Shack branch manager unlocked the doors at exactly nine o’clock (I was the first customer of the day), I was filled with the compulsion to make contact with him one more time, and settle so many conflicting issues once and for all. I guess a little bit of me hoped to find him there, beavering away in the storeroom, or dusting the digital camera display.

  I flipped back the days of the calendar, imagined my drive back to Boston. Mentally, I reboarded the plane, before arriving back at Heathrow the day after the Tour de France had finished. I rattled back in time on the Eurostar, chatting to Woody and Gary Imlach, before finding myself in the late warmth of an otherwise dull afternoon on the Champs-Elysées. The podium ceremonials were reaching their conclusion. I was waiting for a last chance to interview Lance Armstrong.

  The occasion was unusual from start to finish. Armstrong, who for so many years had annexed the top spot on the big yellow stage, and who only the previous year, 2009, had stood alongside Contador and Schleck in third place overall, had finished the Tour de France in twenty-third place. His presence on the podium was only required because his Radio Shack team had won the Overall Classification in the Teams Competition, a consolation prize so neglected, so meaningless in the grander schemes of the Tour de France, that even Armstrong looked a little sheepish in accepting it. He trudged off the stage one last time, and, allowing his teammates to slip ahead of him, turned to the waiting press cortege, and with a weary half-smile presented himself for his final duties; one last flourish in front of a cluster of microphones.

  As ever, it was Frankie Andreu, his former teammate, who led off the questioning. With the weight of corporate middle America bearing down on his network, and therefore on him, his questioning wasn’t exactly probing. ‘You gonna miss all this, Lance?’ was about the gist of it.

  I allowed for Andreu to get three questions away. Then I threw one in.

  I wanted to know if his head had been right. It was plain to see that his body was no longer willing. I wanted to find out from Armstrong if he had been distracted by the growing threat from the FBI investigation into doping on his former team. It sounded implausibly melodramatic, but that was the sub-story. That summer they were after him. The stakes got higher every day.

  ‘Lance . . . !’

  He turned ninety degrees and looked. He narrowed his light blue eyes minutely: a glance that I knew well, a balance of anger and disappointment. A muscle flinched at the base of his jaw as he clamped his mouth tight shut. Then he turned through ninety more, and was gone.

  I watched him go. He looked old to me. I have always been appalled and amazed that I am a couple of years his senior. He seems old enough to be my dad.

  He walked barely five paces before he disappeared from view and was engulfed by a wave of The Accredited, those myriad officials whose function on the Tour is indeterminate but whose presence in large numbers always suggests the proximity of Armstrong. A flash of yellow on the trim of his cycling jersey, and he was gone from the Tour.

  I dropped my microphone down by my side. That was it then. The closest I would get to him now, and for the rest of time, would be Twitter.

  Ever since Lance Armstrong started to ‘tweet’, he’s been a mild disappointment to me. A man who used to inspire with his mental acuity, resolve and finesse now seems to have revealed himself as a banal kind of bloke. On reading his postings, I am often left with a feeling of deflation on finding that a man whose feral intensity so defined his aura drinks lager, insults enemies, toadies up to friends, waves the Stars and Stripes, guzzles chilli con carne and claims that digitally remastered American rock ‘kicks ass’. It’s almost like a mid-life crisis hooked up to the World Wide Web.

  I need, then, to return to an age before Twitter, an innocent bygone age. I need to return to 2003 to recall my first impressions on being confronted by the rider whose myth was about to outgrow the race that had spawned it.

  Lance Armstrong’s name was the only one to have crossed the divide from the Initiated to the Ignorant. He had done it in a way that neither Indurain nor Hinault had managed before him. Perhaps only Eddy Merckx, in the modern era, had jumped out of the acres of newsprint in a similar fashion to emboss his name in the totality of public consciousness. In short, and it’s a test I often apply as a gauge of someone’s celebrity: My Mum Had Heard of Him.

  And so had I. I hold my colleague and friend Simon Brotherton responsible. Afternoons spent listening to BBC radio in July would be characterised by an interruption to the Wimbledon rain interruptions, so that we could cross over to some anonymous town in France for the ‘closing kilometres of today’s stage in the Tour de France’. Simon, in his excellent straightforward way, would then call home the winner of the day: Cipollini, Zabel, whoever, before briefly being invited to explain how come the stage winner of the day wasn’t going to win the overall race.

  Once that misconception had been dealt with, talk would inevitably turn to Lance Armstrong, and Simon would be forced for the umpteenth time that summer to trot out the barest bones of the man’s amazing biography; the Texan cancer survivor, now stamping all over the verge of greatness.

  I am dealing with the past. I return to the moment when I first saw him. A small man on a vast stage, his presence saturated with meaning and importance. To get there I have to peel away the layers of ambiguity that have settled on my understanding of Armstrong. I have observed him at close quarters at the height of his powers, and I am no clearer in what I understand him to be.

  I have been cynic and celebrant, sometimes both within the few seconds it takes to articulate a thought about Lance Armstrong. But, as sportsmen go, and they can be an appallingly anodyne bunch, his proximity, as an athlete and a spokesman for his own enterprise, is compelling. From my first encounters with him, he has drawn me in. When he talks, he has an extraordinary ability to listen carefully to the content of your question, grapple with the inevitable connotations, and shape it into a finely considered answer, full of nuance and conviction. In the midst of the chaos that accompanies the man through France he has the capacity to hone in on one point of focus.

  There are those who feel very differently. Paul Kimmage, for one. He is the author of the outstanding Rough Ride, a book that talks candidly about doping in the peloton during the early 1990s when Kimmage himself was a professional cyclist. Kimmage is a man with rock-solid convictions. He quite pointedly uses the word ‘cancer’ when describing the Texan’s influence on cycling. He has confronted Armstrong face to face, using just those terms. That takes some courage. For Kimmage, nothing moves independently of the Armstrong issue: it demands a resolution, and in so doing, it damns those who fail reach one. For Kimmage it is killing cycling.

  He may be right.

  There are others, too, who have soldiered on in search of the silver bullet, the single fact that will finally condemn Armstrong retrospectively in the analysis of history. David Walsh is one such man. The author of L.A. Confidentiel and From Lance to Landis has made it part of his life’s work to accumulate evidence that will drag Armstrong down. It may be that British libel laws discourage its publication in the UK. In France, it sold a quarter of a million copies.

  Walsh and I met in Johannesburg, where we were both covering the 2010 World Cup; he for the Sunday Times, I for ITV. I told him that I wanted to write this book, and that it would include a chapter about Armstrong. His only advice was this: ‘Don’t regret what you write, Ned. Don’t look back at your words in later life, and regret the position you took.’

  I let the door slide open in front of me, and walked into ‘The Shack’. The air-conditioning nearly knocked me over, a frosty blast that made my eyes water. I made my way to an aisle filled to bursting with cables and leads, SCART, DIN, audio, mini-jacks, everything. I gazed blankly at them, as I listened to the hum of the air-conditioning housed somewhere in the rafters. I imagined the water draining off the unit into
some hot dusty gully round the back of the building.

  I thought about the hours of my life I had spent pressed up against the baking steel sides of Armstrong’s team bus, watching as the air-con unit dripped an unrelenting flow of water onto the gritty earth beneath it before it ran away in a trickle under the bus.

  Behind the tinted glass windows, of the bus I would imagine Armstrong sitting in super-cooled comfort, thinking about the race and drinking one last Coke before his shower. Perhaps he would have seen us outside, a phalanx of unmoving flesh, forced into a ridiculous tableau of clinches as our sweating bodies overlapped, and intertwined.

  He was always on the inside.

  I was on a beach when I heard the news that I assumed would wreck Lance Armstrong. It was the late summer of 2005. Just a few weeks earlier, he had won his seventh Tour and retired. I was staying in Valencia for Everton’s Champions League qualifier up the road against Villarreal. By some coincidence, Simon Brotherton, the BBC’s cycling commentator who also covers football, had joined me. Along with some football colleagues, we were enjoying an afternoon off on the beach, when I received a call from home.

  ‘Have you read it?’

  ‘Hello, Matt.’ It was Matt. ‘Read what?’

  ‘This changes everything. This is the biggest moment in cycling history.’ He went on to tell me of the headline in that day’s L’Equipe. ‘Le mensonge Armstrong.’ The Armstrong lie.

  L’Equipe had revealed that frozen urine samples, voluntarily given, from the 1999 Tour had been unfrozen and retrospectively tested for the presence of EPO, the blood-booster. Two of Armstrong’s had tested positive. These tests had been conducted for scientific research purposes, and not under the auspices of the anti-doping authorities. Nonetheless, this was the first time that EPO and Armstrong had appeared in the same sample. It felt important. Actually it felt like the point of no return.