How I Won the Yellow Jumper (35 page)

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.

Simon was wallowing in the waves, a little way out. I turned to my left and told the astounding news to the first person I could find. This person turned out to be Jim Beglin, ITV's football co-commentator and former Liverpool full-back. The politest man in television wasn't about to tell me he couldn't have cared less. But I could tell he couldn't have cared less.

I jogged down the beach, and swam out to where Simon was, unable to contain myself. I gabbled my news at him. He chose his words carefully.

‘Well, if it's true, it's not good. In fact, it's probably the end of our summers. Cycling is the Tour de France and the
Tour is Armstrong.' He stood up to reveal that the sea was actually only waist high.

Then, he concluded. ‘He'll say it's not true, though. You know that he reckons the French would do anything to ruin him.'

And so it came to pass. The
L'Equipe
warhead fell short, dropped into the sea detonating somewhere off the coast of Spain, and only splashed its intended target. Armstrong's denials stood up in court and against the scrutiny of public opinion, although that depends on which side of the Atlantic you draw your poll sample.

His defence seemed to amount, just as Simon Brotherton has presaged, to ‘probably not true, you know the French'. He accused the French laboratories of tampering with his samples. Armstrong's image remained intact, and international reaction amounted to little more than a raised eyebrow. What seemed at first a devastating accusation just melted away.

Besides, back in America, the man was about to file his application for sainthood. It was an application that had some merit. I do not have the facts and figures to hand, but the monies raised in his name, or rather, its catchily adapted cousin ‘Livestrong', are truly vast. His name and his cause now constitute a global phenomenon.

More pertinently, the inspiration (and that is not a word one uses lightly) of Armstrong's personal battle has helped countless cancer sufferers to fight their illness. That is a remarkable achievement, which, in the eyes of many, constricts the room for criticism.

I think of Geoff Thomas, the footballer, who I met briefly in 2001 at the fag end of his long and very accomplished playing career. A couple of years later I met him again, this time as he was recovering from leukaemia. His discovery was Armstrong's book. His passion became cycling. He rode the route of the Tour de France twice. He went on to set up his
own charity, which in turn has raised millions of pounds. Wonderfully, Geoff is now in roaring good health. Such things are not there to be sniffed at.

Yet, here's the thing, and it has to do with Venn diagrams.

For me, Armstrong has two sets. Set A: Lance, Seven Times Tour de France Winner. Set B: Lance, Cancer Survivor, Cancer Research Fundraiser.

In the minds of marketing men, the two sit on top of each other, to the extent that you are no longer sure which is a subset of which. They are inseparable.

Yet, that is not how it should be. While Set B can be enhanced and aided by Set A, the same should not apply in reverse. Armstrong's record as an athlete stands and falls by the things he did on a bike, and the things he did to win bike races. There is no subset. They exist independently of one another.

I was honing in now on what I wanted. I scrutinised the box. Audio cable. Mini-jack to mini-jack. Three-foot long. Perfect.

At the cash desk a man in his early sixties was already smiling as I approached from the far end of the store, and extending his hand to receive the goods.

‘How're you going?' he asked, with a pleasant, shy grin.

‘I'm very well, thanks' – I glanced at his name badge – ‘Mike.'

Then I was seized by a sudden idea. Perhaps Mike could help me clarify my thoughts about Armstrong. He might be able to sum it all up, to put an end to my feelings of ambivalence with a pithy one-liner.

‘Did you watch the Tour de France?' He looked up from the till. ‘I mean, you've got loads of TV sets here. Were you showing the cycling? Did you watch Team Radio Shack?'

‘Sure. We had it on most days. I guess I watched it pretty much all.'

‘And Armstrong?'

‘Well.' He handed me my cable. ‘He's kinda done, I guess. He looks cooked to me.'

I had to agree. I said goodbye to Mike, and walked back to my car, clutching my Radio Shack receipt.

There's a strange thing going on with cycling. It permeates the sport at all levels. And despite the best efforts of the big-brand, big-time marketers, it's never managed to shake off the inconvenient truth: it's actually just a bunch of blokes on their bikes. That's all.

There's no getting away from it. Despite the valour, and the mythology. Despite the global media frenzy, the heroism and the Wagnerian settings, cycling remains a sport which is contested by a bunch of blokes riding bikes really fast.

I used to ride my bike really fast, too. Well, ish. I think back to my blue Raleigh Olympus on which I used to trundle around Bedford, from the park to the school to the swimming pool. I am painfully reminded of my awkward twelve-year-old alter-ego. Pudding-bowled, in a blue zip-up pacamac, I was as dull and predictable as an episode of
Wogan
on a wet Tuesday night. But on my bike, I enacted a wordless and naïve narrative, which involved heroes and villains and derring-do, as well as plenty of kerb-jumping and the odd half-arsed wheelie. I was King. A Man among Men.

There was a particular fantasy, which I enacted, where I imagined that, in some bizarre and unspecified way, I was chauffeuring the Prime Minister around, on my Raleigh Olympus. I had been handpicked for the job clearly on the understanding that I was the best, the very best there was at negotiating the smoothest passage through the suburban streets of Bedford. I could provide a seamlessly gentle ride along Stanley Street, avoiding all the well-known potholes, as well as the more subtle variations in road surface of which a lesser rider might fail to be aware. I could negotiate passage through the pedestrianised area that linked Tavistock Road to Chandos Court. I drew praise for this ability from the highest quarters of government. I drew on the personal gratitude of the imaginary statesmen. I would chastise myself remorselessly for any unnecessary jolting, however accidental. At the end of each ride, I awarded myself points out of ten. It was never a perfect ten, but it was never much worse than a seven, either.

Of course this all neatly avoided the fact that actually it was the early eighties and I was an average sort of boy in an average sort of town. But my bike, at least to me, gave me my otherness. It bore me in vertiginous repeating figures of eight around the bandstand in the middle of the Bedford park. It fed my
imagination, and gave me the space to lose myself in fiercely real trains of thought, mind games for the mild-mannered.