How I Won the Yellow Jumper (9 page)

And so it was that we leapt on a little scandal which played itself out over the closing days of the 2004 Tour, a race that was decided even before Jean-Marie Leblanc had penned the word ‘Paris' on the route map. It was revealing, in that it threw Armstrong's true nature into sharp relief.

Filippo Simeoni was a rider with a problem. A tall, awkward, emotional man with a decent, albeit doping-tainted, career both behind and before him. He was riding out the end of an anonymous Tour in the garish colours of the completely underwhelming Domina Vacanze team. On Stage 18, he fancied a bit of the action.

Simeoni had previous form. After admitting to doping offences a couple of years prior to that, he had testified in an Italian court that Dr Michele Ferrari had, on a number of occasions, prescribed him EPO. Ferrari had worked closely with Lance Armstrong. This testimony naturally enough reflected badly on the Texan, who reportedly denounced Filippo as a liar. Simeoni promptly started proceedings against him for defamation. Brave, especially when you have to spend three weeks alongside the man, riding to the edge of collapse, up and down mountains in the searing summer sun. Armstrong
counter-sued but in the end both men withdrew their cases.

That day six riders broke away, not one a threat to Armstrong's lead. Nor was Simeoni when he attacked and rode across to the break. But the yellow jersey was enraged. He tore off the front of the bunch, hammered across to the breakaway, and informed them that he would stay there for as long as Simeoni was part of their number. Behind them on the road, T-Mobile, the team of Jan Ullrich, had to react and, unsure of how this might play out, they hit the front and started to bring the race back together again.

The original six pleaded with Simeoni to relent. Eventually, wordlessly, the Italian sat up, and dropped away, Armstrong alongside him. T-Mobile called the chase off, and as the bunch swallowed up the two riders, Simeoni fell back through the peloton and, it is said, was spat at repeatedly.

Nothing and no one moved in those years without Armstrong's say-so.

At the finish line, the story of what had happened was tearing through the media village. We were trying to get our accounts straight, each of us running through the dense undergrowth of high voltage cables coiled around the hundreds of broadcast vehicles, snatching a rumour from the Dutch, a fact from the Danes and a tip-off from the Italians. The chatter had thrown up a story, which, if confirmed, would give some more substance to the Simeoni feud.

Back in April of that year, it was rumoured, during the Tour of Georgia, Lance Armstrong's people had contacted Mario Cipollini, the pantomime-camp king, flamboyant sprinter and leader of the Domina Vacanze team, and asked him in no uncertain terms to make sure that Simeoni was not part of the Tour roster. This would have been a preposterous intervention. A grudge is one thing, but this would have taken it into very uncomfortable territory.

The reason that we, in the media, were drawn to this story
was simple enough. There was in those years an unspoken sense that we were all subject to the Armstrong Orthodoxy. He was big news. And as a result of his endeavours year on year, the Tour grew bigger. The bigger the Tour, the better our job prospects, our security. Why rock the boat?

This issue, though, enabled us to touch on controversy; to hint at a different way of reporting on Armstrong. We had bitten our lips, buried our more cynical instincts, but this suggestion of bully-boy tactics on the part of Armstrong worked as a pressure valve. We were letting out a little air, without running the risk of a full-blown puncture.

By now the breakaway had been whittled down to three riders who were passing under the flamme rouge, which signifies that a kilometre is left to go. They were sweeping towards the finish line near the Place de la Liberte in Lons-le-Saunier. A twenty-six-year-old Spanish domestique named Juan Miguel Mercado outmanoeuvred his nearest rivals to win the stage. To this day, that is the greatest result of his racing career. He sailed across the finish line, arms aloft, pursued by a camera team from RTB Belgian TV, but obdurately ignored by the rest of us who smiled apologetically at him before returning our attentions to the sinuous run-in, in the hope of snatching Armstrong the moment he arrived.

We waited for eleven minutes and twenty-nine seconds, the history books tell me, before Thor Hushovd announced the arrival of the main bunch by winning the sprint. Behind him, and flanked as ever by his guardsmen Hincapie and Beltran, came Armstrong, left leg extended on the pedals as he drifted in.

The scrum ensued. An undignified tangle of cables and lenses. Armstrong looked grim, as he studiously ignored us all, which wasn't hard since no one was actually addressing a question at him. Yes, microphones and cameras were thrust in his face as he jostled his way through us to the podium area,
but not a single question came his way. Instead, we fought among ourselves. I trod on the ankle of a French radio reporter; German TV tried to wheel the shopping trolley that houses the generator for their wireless TV signal through the pack of sweating and stressed journalists; Norwegian writers went elbow to elbow with a Basque snapper. It was laughable. Only the main man wasn't laughing.

He disappeared through a gap which appeared miraculously in the barriers, sending the whole ghastly entourage sprinting 150 metres round the outside of the compound to the official media area. All this was played out to the sarcastic applause of the watching public, whose scorn I understood. I would have laughed too. At the mixed zone we waited for his officially sanctioned appearance. This was in no doubt. The wearer of the yellow jersey, along with that day's stage winner and all the other jersey holders, are obliged by the Tour organisers to make themselves available for interview. Even Armstrong.

Most days he obliged us, and would only shirk his responsibilities when there really was nothing to say. This was his fourth day in yellow, having memorably loaned it out to Thomas Voeckler for ten days in the middle of the Tour. This close to the end of the Tour, and after relatively few days as wearer, the sense of routine had not yet settled in, and there was still much to talk about. Not least, of course, his extraordinary spat with Simeoni. Armstrong's not a shirker, we thought to ourselves. He would come.

He didn't. We waited till the protocol was done with. However, as the uninspiring strains of the Tour's ponderous anthem cranked up for the final time over the PA system to close out the ceremonials, we caught sight of the leader of the Tour de France hopping on his Trek bike and making for the exit to the compound. Like a plague of accredited locusts, we took flight and ran after him.

Yet Armstrong vanished. He was gone. We'd looked
everywhere for his team car. We'd considered all the avenues he could have turned into. We'd asked the right people and kept our eyes open, but we had drawn a blank.

Just as we turned and filed back towards the TV truck. Just as we were hatching a version of events that might explain, or even justify, the fact that the ‘Finish Line Crew' was returning to base without the big interview of the day, we ran into him.

He was at the centre of a small knot of cycling journalists. The guys from the press had trapped and encircled him with their Dictaphones. We joined the circle, our microphone suddenly swelling the numbers. I held back with the questions to gauge the tenor of the conversation.

There was a difficult balance to be struck. Lance had clearly been spotted and persuaded to talk by a pack of writers. I had to respect that fact. Understandably, perhaps, the written press have a high regard for what they do and a fairly obdurate disregard for the work of TV and radio. They resent our privileges. They resent our facile lines of questioning. They resent our demands for space (have you seen how big our cameras are?) and, frankly, they sometimes just resent us. Now they had cornered the main man on their own, it was made clear to me, from the scowls of disapproval, that he was theirs, and theirs alone.

I listened.

‘Lance, another day in yellow. How does it feel?'

‘Lance, talk us through the closing stages.'

Where was the question? Had I missed it? I could tell from the knitted brows of the writers that all the while they were holding their recorders close to Armstrong's lips, they weren't listening to a thing. They were formulating a plan of attack. They were scheming, manoeuvring the conversation to a point from which they could launch their attack and fire in the silver-bullet Simeoni question. Armstrong looked to me as if he was fully aware of what was going on, too. The unasked question
was the elephant in the huddle.

This was a rough-and-ready encounter, which was taking place in a public place on neutral ground. There were no chaperones or media officers. He was alone and so were we. There was no barrier to keep us apart. We were face to face and inches apart. This type of confrontation, when it comes to it, is not without its tensions. The Simeoni question would stir things up for Armstrong. It would invoke the spectre of his association with the wrong people.

‘What went on between you and Simeoni, today?' I could wait no longer. And in an instant, I knew for certain that no one had asked him that question yet. Their microphones all inched forward a notch. We were bunched together so tightly now, that we might have been rehearsing a world record attempt to see how many people you could fit in a telephone box, only without the telephone box.

He looked right at me. Very close. ‘I just follow on the wheels.'

And with that, he broke into the broadest of smiles. He seemed pleased with the joke, and enjoyed a little ripple of sympathetic laughter from some of the onlookers. Then he
turned half away from me, a dismissive gesture designed to close the chapter. His smile appealed to the other guys to chip in with a different line of enquiry. I knew he didn't want to hear my voice again, but that if I hesitated for a fraction, he would take that as a sign of weakness and ride off.

‘There is a rumour that you asked Mario Cipollini that he shouldn't be selected . . .'

He'd turned back to me now, and he didn't wait for me to finish my question. ‘That's absolutely not true.'

‘Not true?'

Filming to my left, I found out when I reviewed the footage later, John had started a slow zoom, ever tightening into Armstrong's taut features. ‘One hundred per cent not true. Absolutely not true. How can I ask a team who to take? I can barely control that on my own team.'

Our encounter was finished. For once, I felt, it had been a score draw. In his long and winning Tour career, Armstrong had enjoyed many great days. This wasn't one of them. I rushed back to the truck, with the tape. My throat was dry.

Elsewhere, amidst the debris of the splintered peloton, Matt
had cornered Simeoni.

‘Yes, it's true. Cipollini did everything to keep me out of the Tour team.' He looked bruised, but coherent. ‘Armstrong showed what sort of person he is today.'

We ran both interviews in full. Gary Imlach's carefully chosen words that closed the programme that night were among the best I have ever heard in a sports programme. He touched on Armstrong's greatness before going on to say, ‘Armstrong needs grudges the way that the
Flying Scotsman
needs a steady supply of coal.' He continued, ‘What we saw on the road today was the most powerful cyclist in the world using his status to take revenge on a man who won't make in his career what Lance is going to make this month.'

It was the tail end of only my second Tour, and I was now recognisable to Armstrong. Up to this point, I had really only had cause to celebrate the man. Now I had been brought face to face, literally, with something different: Armstrong continuing his battles off the bike. From that moment on it's possible that he became more aware of me in the press pack. I certainly felt that the ground had shifted a little, and that our subsequent encounters were defined by the lines we had drawn that day. As a journalist, the taped encounter left me a little exhilarated, but, in equal measure, uncertain.