Seven Deadly Sins: My Pursuit of Lance Armstrong (11 page)

In January 2000, separate investigations into doping in sport were taking place in the Italian cities of Turin, Bologna, Ferrara, Venice, Trento and Brescia. Two of the investigations involved athletes that interested me. In the inquiry into the Ferrara-based doctor, Professor Francesco Conconi, Ireland’s Tour de France winner Stephen Roche was listed among twenty-three riders in what would be called ‘the EPO file’.

Equally intriguing was Kevin Livingston’s involvement with another Ferrara-based doctor, Michele Ferrari, who was being investigated on suspicion of doping cyclists. Livingston was Lance Armstrong’s most trusted lieutenant on the US Postal team in the 1999 Tour and his involvement with Ferrari raised important questions.

The
Sunday Times
agreed I should go to Italy and see what I could find out. It was a good trip, made memorable by an interview with Fulvio Gori, a likeable Italian policeman who worked for NAS, the Italian anti-drug squad, in Florence. Gori sat behind a big desk in an office that was more like a small warehouse, with floors covered with boxes of files. He was a portly, amiable man who laughed at the slightest excuse and kept a photo on the wall of the amateur football team he coached. Trying to get a handle on doping in cycling was the worst part of his life.

‘In this investigation,’ he said, ‘I have interviewed almost thirty cyclists, brought them into this office, sat them down and not from one of them did I get co-operation. They tell nothing about what they do.’

In May 1996, the Carabinieri discovered that a pharmacy in Tuscany had been selling large quantities of EPO to professional cyclists. They didn’t need Sherlock Holmes to figure that the riders were re-stocking their supplies for the Giro d’Italia later in the month. So the Carabinieri in Florence decided they would pay a surprise visit to the Giro to see if they could find some of that EPO.

That year the Giro began in Greece, spent three days there before making a ferry crossing to Brindisi, and the police plan was to arrive as the team cars were coming off the ferry. ‘Here we were,’ said Gori, ‘driving from here to Brindisi, eight hundred kilometres. I am reading
La Gazzetta
, my feet up on the dashboard, and I come across a tiny story on one of the cycling pages. It says, “The police are planning a surprise visit to the race in Brindisi where they will check the team cars for drugs.” I struck the dashboard with my fist. I was so angry, angry, angry.

‘How did they know? Why was it printed in the newspaper? It made us more determined. I swore from then on we would never let them go.’

Knowing the Carabinieri were coming, some team cars came the long way home, overland through Albania, Montenegro and Croatia before re-entering Italy from the north. Other teams opted to dump their stashes of drugs into the sea. After Gori and his partner made the long journey back to Florence, not having found even a trace of a banned substance anywhere, their office-bound colleagues were waiting for them: ‘We hear there are enormously big fish, with great stamina, swimming across the Adriatic Sea.’ Gori wasn’t amused.

Bike riders not telling journalists about their doping is to be expected, but it was a surprise to learn from Gori that the Italian riders felt they could bring their
omerta
into a Florence police station. At the time doping was not a crime in Italy and they could stonewall Gori and his colleagues with impunity. Somehow they had come to think of themselves and their secret culture as separate from the outside world, beyond the reach of the law.

Rather than be mindful that the doctors who advised them to take banned substances and the pharmacies who sold them were both breaking the law, they felt honour-bound to protect their suppliers.

Fulvio Gori was a relatively young man, early 40s, married, no kids. Thirteen months later he died from cancer. Partly because he was taken so prematurely, the time spent with him remains a vivid memory.

Stephen Roche’s involvement with Conconi was a difficult story as Roche and I went back a long way. He’d retired six years before but the files related to the last two years of his career. He was in the file under his own name but also under aliases, two of which were Rocchi and Roncati.

Roche’s career had been highly successful and in 1987 he won the Giro d’Italia, Tour de France and World Championships, a treble previously achieved only by the legendary Eddy Merckx. Before this connection with Conconi, Roche had never been linked with doping. I had written his official autobiography,
The Agony and the Ecstasy
, in 1987, and though we were not close friends we had remained very friendly.

While writing his book, I had stayed at his home in Paris, and at his then in-laws’ holiday home in south-west France; we’d spent a lot of time in each other’s company. Ringing him about this story wasn’t an easy call. He was relatively calm: ‘I met Conconi once; after that I did all my blood tests for our team doctor, Giovanni Grazzi. I know Grazzi was based at the University of Ferrara [as was Conconi] and it’s possible that’s how we ended up in Conconi’s files.’

He was trying to say it was all a mix-up. ‘My haematocrit was forty-six or forty-seven when I raced; forty-four when I rested, and it never went above those levels,’ he said, perhaps unaware that haematocrit drops when one races, rises during periods of rest.

I asked Roche why Conconi had used aliases. ‘I asked Grazzi the same question and he told me it wasn’t that unusual for code-names to be used for high-profile athletes.’

But why?

As Roche had once been a national treasure in Ireland and remained a high-profile former champion, the story that he may have doped caused a stir. I knew there would be blowback. Just not how much.

Let me explain something.

There are only two types of people in Ireland, though at this stage it would be hard to tell which is in the minority. There are those who watch
The Late Late Show
. And there are those who have been on
The Late Late Show
. In 2002 I was promoted to the latter group.

The Late Late Show
has been the crucible for many of the debates which have shaped Irish society down through the years, but as the presenters have changed and become more wooden so the format has had to be adjusted to something more safe and predictable. Still, the programme has always retained some of the cachet of its heyday. It still tries to mix the responsibilities of being a national forum with the requirements of light entertainment. The show still has a ‘here comes everybody’ feel to it.

The call to appear on
The Late Late Show
isn’t unlike an invitation to Buckingham Palace. It is expected that you be undemanding and a little awestruck. You should dress nicely, arrive sober and try to fit in with the royals no matter what they suggest. Here was what
The Late Late Show
suggested to me as the format for a ‘debate’ with Stephen Roche on the issue of drugs following my disclosure of his name on the Conconi files. It would be a production starring Stephen Roche as the wronged party. Stephen would come out first to sit and be interviewed with respectful stiffness by our host Pat Kenny. After a while the subject of drugs would be introduced and, lo, the camera would swing around and there, sitting in the audience like a malevolent stalker, would be
me
.

And I would have to account for myself and the things that I had written about a man who wasn’t in the audience, a man who had attained sufficient celebrity within Irish society as to be an actual guest on
The Late Late Show
. And Pat Kenny and Stephen Roche would face me down and people in the seats either side of me would look uncomfortable being seen in the company of such a kook. So I declined that invitation.

Exasperated by my ingratitude,
The Late Late Show
conceded that I could sit on a grown-up’s chair beside Pat and Stephen for the debate, but I couldn’t come out and sit on the chair until Stephen had been given a good fifteen minutes’ headstart out there, doing a tender one-on-one with Pat. Stephen does beatific very well; he gives great piety. He would remind everybody that butter wouldn’t melt in his lycras. Then I’d come out. Boo!

I accepted the deal reluctantly. On the night, Stephen wore a dark suit, dark shirt and dark tie and slicked-back hair, and if it wasn’t for that madly camp half-French, half-Dublin accent of his, he could have passed for an unctuous undertaker to an accident-prone mafia family. He duly spoke with Pat Kenny about his life and career for fifteen minutes or so. Then with a shout of ‘unchain the gimp’ the journalist was sent in. The early exchanges were civil and a little on the dull side. We reassured everybody that there would be no bloodshed, that we had known each other for many years, and had the utmost respect for each other.

Stephen was doing his wounded soul routine. ‘Daveeed, I accept what you are zaying but I never told you a lie.’

I, like any experienced parent, was making the point that I wasn’t cross with Stephen about his name(s) turning up on the Conconi files; no, not cross, just a little disappointed. I was attempting to remain controlled and get my message across. Roche was unsure as to whether he could be seen to be trying to land a knockout punch, so he either acted baffled or was actually baffled by the evidence.

To demonstrate bafflement Stephen had brought with him a sheet that he held up to the camera. It listed the various aliases that Francesco Conconi had given him during tests carried out in Italy. There were all sorts of notations and great swathes of dayglo highlighter which made the document look like a schoolchild’s study schedule. The dates and the results of various tests sat alongside the letters s or n (for
sì
or
no
) which Conconi had filled in depending on what levels he found. It was all meaningless and there was enough bafflement for everyone in the audience.

When Stephen was asked if he had dealt with Conconi, he replied helpfully that Conconi wasn’t the team doctor, implying that he, Stephen, was strictly a one-doctor sort of guy. The debate was flagging, the details of the chart were confusing for everybody and the discussion was about to fizzle out when Pat Kenny produced his trump card.

In the audience, possibly in the seat once earmarked for myself, Pat had planted some help: Dr Bill ‘that’s entertainment’ Tormey from Beaumont Hospital in Dublin. Now in TV terms if you scrape the barrel long enough and then reach down for what is under the barrel and then go on some more you end up with Bill Tormey in your audience. He’s the man who once called a female hospital colleague a ‘right geebag’ and who would later become famous for his primitive views on gay marriage and for calling for missionaries returning from Africa to be Aids tested.

Now he was here to play to the gallery. And he felt the gallery should be grateful. To paraphrase Wilde: Bill, if you had to do it all again, would you still fall in love with yourself? He began by reciting a litany of Irish sporting stars and then announced that, ‘Stephen Roche is right up there.’

Without further ado he hopped to the science bit. Stop reading if you lack a Nobel Prize in either physics or chemistry. ‘Now, Pat, as you know, I am a cynic. The only reason I am out here tonight is because of what they are doing to this man. I wouldn’t come out otherwise, even though you’re a good bloke yourself [
crowd all cheer ecstatically
].

‘I tell you this. Stephen Roche is a great bloke. [
Shit. Pat and Stephen Roche are both blokes within the good to great range. I feel isolated and unworthy.
] To hammer a guy like Stephen Roche who, in 1987, won the Tour de France, the Giro d’Italia and the World Championship, and I am grateful to Jimmy Magee for actually showing it to us on TV [
for the uninitiated Jimmy Magee is a commentator, not an actual TV channel
] and I must say one thing about Stephen, to do that when EPO wasn’t even on the market? Everybody here should realise that you couldn’t inject EPO into yourself in 1987 because it wasn’t available in 1987. That’s the first thing. That’s very relevant. So Stephen won this stuff clean because at the time, if he was taking amphetamines, remember what happened to Tommy Simpson taking amphetamines [
he died, but, as Lance Armstrong himself has pointed out, he didn’t test positive
], Stephen would have been caught taking amphetamines, the only other thing that’s worth a damn in terms of endurance testing for something like cycling, to the best of my knowledge, anyway, at the moment . . .’

I was starting to think that this was actually a skit, a piece of light entertainment, the heavyweight expert as buffoon. Then Tormey inflated a little further and finally started speaking of himself in the third person. He addressed Stephen Roche personally, great bloke to great bloke.

‘I am going to assume that the hangman, judge and jury that is sitting up there beside you from the
Sunset Times
, Murdoch’s organ, is correct. Tormey is now the court of appeal judge and I am going to go through this . . .’

And he proceeded to demonstrate that he had not only the specific doping expertise of a bright seven-year-old but the legal knowledge of a dim six-year-old to boot. He held a little mock appeal hearing in monologue, and grandly pronounced a verdict of not proven for Roche. And to the stockade of shame for the
Sunset Times
(
comedy gold by the way! Sunset Times!
).

And then up on stage we went back to our chat for a few minutes, ploughing on to the end of the stage and an advertisement break: Bill Tormey and Pat Kenny drafting Stephen Roche all the way to the line; me a
domestique
in the media peloton suddenly realising what it must have felt like to be Christophe Bassons on a bad day.

On the way out of RTE’s television centre that night, one of the staffers at the station said they had taken almost 400 telephone calls from viewers and they had broken down evenly: half supported Stephen, half were for me. To me that sounded like a result.
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