Lance Armstrong: the whistleblowers
Three witnesses – who could have provided vital evidence if Lance Armstrong had mounted a defence – speak out
Lance Armstrong's detractors were silenced or sued. Photograph: Srdjan Suki/EPA
The journalist
"I wrote four books about the guy. All the evidence was out there since 2004 and people will still say there is no evidence. To me there was a wilful conspiracy on the part of sporting officials, journalists, broadcasters, everybody. Now we see the fruits of it: high-level cycling has been destroyed by corruption.
"I would have preferred it if Lance Armstrong had gone to a tribunal and we would have had all the evidence out there. But he has decided to accept these charges because it was the lesser of two evils from his perspective.
"It is not good for him because he has been stripped of his seven Tour de France titles and has been given a lifetime ban. He has lost every victory he has had since 1998, but the alternative was even worse – to have a tribunal in which the evidence from 10 former team-mates who all say they saw him doping would have been aired in graphic detail.
"That detail would have portrayed Lance Armstrong as a doper. It would have opened the eyes of the public to what the US Anti-Doping Agency believe was one of the greatest, most sophisticated doping conspiracies in the history of sport."How did Armstrong get away with this for all these years? Who was complicit in helping him avoid detection? Because there is one certainty – he did not do this without help.
"Bradley Wiggins is the patron of the Tour and the whole sport. As the winner, he is the spiritual and almost moral leader of the peloton. As an anti-doping Tour winner, I would expect Bradley to say this is good for the sport … we want the guys who cheated to be outed, but there is not a lot of that coming from the sport and that makes me wonder if they are truly committed to cleaning themselves up."
David Walsh, author and sportswriter on the Sunday Times, has written four books on Lance Armstrong. He was speaking to BBC Radio 5 on Friday
The masseuse
As Lance Armstrong's masseuse, Emma O' Reilly saw much of the cyclist's body and spent a lot of time with him after his races. She was also a key member of the US Postal cycling team during the 1999 Tour de France and was given important tasks.O'Reilly was a source for David Walsh's book about Armstrong, LA Confidentiel. According to the book, O'Reilly said she heard team officials worrying about Armstrong's positive test for steroids during the Tour. She said: "They were in a panic, saying: 'What are we going to do? What are we going to do?' "
Their solution was to get one of their compliant doctors to issue a pre-dated prescription for a steroid-based ointment to combat saddle sores. O'Reilly said she would have known if Armstrong had saddle sores as she would have administered any treatment for it.
O'Reilly said that Armstrong told her: "Now, Emma, you know enough to bring me down." O'Reilly said on other occasions she was asked to dispose of used syringes for Armstrong and pick up strange parcels for the team.
In a letter to Bill Strickland, a Bicycling magazine correspondent, last year, O'Reilly described her experience. "Since I spoke to David Walsh, I have received so many subpoenas that the policewoman who brought them got friendly enough with my boyfriend that she would call before coming and he'd put the kettle on for her.
"If my word is so worthless, why did I go to France and testify to the French drug squad? I worked the '98 Tour de France, and I know how scary these guys can be, yet I was prepared to go to France, to their territory. I went because I was telling the truth, and also because a certain Mr Armstrong sued me for a million euros because of my interview with David … why did Lance feel the need to terrorise me for more than two years? Why did Lance feel the need to try to break me?"
The cyclist
Christophe Bassons became an accidental star of road cycling when he was the only member of the notorious Festina team who was not implicated in drug-taking. His reputation as an honest cyclist made it impossible for him to prosper in the world of professional cycling in the 1990s.Festina was immersed in scandal in 1998 when a carload of drugs for the team was discovered. In the subsequent police investigation, Bassons was the one rider who emerged with his character enhanced after his team-mates told police that he was the only cyclist who did not take drugs.
From obscurity, Bassons emerged as one of the few cyclists who would criticise drug-taking in the sport. He spoke for many when he complained that the sport had "two speeds", one for the drug-takers and one for people like who him who did not cheat.
During the 1999 Tour de France Bassons was asked to write a column for the newspaper, Le Parisen. The Tour featured the return of Lance Armstrong after his battle with cancer. Basson wrote that the riders were shocked by the speed of Armstrong. Armstrong later cycled up to Bassons to remonstrate with him and encouraged him to leave the Tour. Later on French TV, Armstrong admitted the conversation. "His accusations aren't good for cycling, for his team, for me, for anybody. If he thinks cycling works like that, he's wrong and he would be better off going home," he said.
Other riders threatened him and most ignored him. Bassons could not take the pressure and left the Tour.
Bassons tried to race elsewhere but his reputation preceded him and he gave up in 2001. The cyclist had been a very successful amateur rider but his professional career was overshadowed by his refusal to take drugs and remain quiet about it. He now works for the French ministry of sports and youth, with responsibility for drug testing.
Was Lance Armstrong protected by a culture of bullying and secrecy?
The rumours circulated for years. But even allegations about drug use made by team-mates failed to topple the seven-times Tour de France winner. Now, as Armstrong finally abandons his defence, a new set of questions arises
Peter Beaumont
The Observer,
Lance Armstrong bleeding from a cut during the Tour of California in 2010. Photograph: Marcio Jose Sanchez/Associated Press
Identifying the precise moment when the fall from grace began for Lance Armstrong, once the world's greatest cyclist, is not easy.
Did the fatal moment occur two years ago, when Floyd Landis – disgraced 2006 Tour de France winner and Armstrong's former team-mate – met a special agent of the US Food and Drugs Administration, Jeff Novitzky, to describe how he had seen the seven-times Tour champion doping in his own apartment?
Or were the seeds of his downfall sown far earlier than that – in 1999, the year of Armstrong's first Tour win, when he is said to have "bullied" a young French cyclist, Christophe Bassons, telling him "he would be better off going home" after Bassons criticised doping on the Tour, effectively ending his career?
Or was it eight years ago, when the French anti-doping laboratory decided to conduct retrospective research using its new test for the blood agent erythropoietin (EPO) on samples taken from riders during the 1999 Tour? The lab identified six positive results from a batch of 15 that the sports newspaper L'Equipe matched to blood-sample records Armstrong and the world cycling federation had agreed to supply to the newspaper.
Its subsequent article – "The Armstrong Lie" – would set in train a sequence of events that culminated on Friday with the decision by the United States Anti-Doping Agency (USADA) to ban the Texan for life and recommend the stripping of all his awards, after Armstrong refused to defend himself against allegations of cheating.
Armstrong explained his decision himself thus: "Over the past three years, I have been subjected to a two-year federal criminal investigation followed by Travis Tygart's unconstitional witch hunt … It's an unfair approach, applied selctively, in opposition to all the rules. It's just not right."The suspicion had always been there – alluded to in the French media, and made explicit by Pierre Ballester and David Walsh in their French-published book LA Confidentiel, which baldly asserted that Armstrong was a cheat.
Now Armstrong has been found guilty by virtue of a "non-analytical positive" – not a blood test, but the testimony of witnesses: the same way that former US sprint champion Marion Jones was stripped of her of her medals.
Now a competition that, through its long history, has been tainted with substance-abuse scandals – from the brandy and strychnine taken by early riders to the steroids and complex compounds of later times – is in the spotlight again.
Since the scandalous 2007 Tour, the UCI, cycling's ruling body, has made stronger efforts to tackle drugs cheats. That year saw the entire Astana and Cofidis teams withdraw after pre-race favourite Alexander Vinokourov was caught blood doping, and Bradley Wiggins's Italian teammate Cristian Moreni was arrested after testing positive for elevated levels of testosterone. And despite Armstrong's repeated claims of innocence, it was during the 1990s and 2000s – the most notorious doping – that he ruled the sport.
The reality – as Walsh told the BBC in an interview last week– is that many had suspected for years that something was rotten at the very heart of cycling: a rottenness in which not only cyclists and team managers were complicit, but the administrators themselves.
In the end, it appears the unravelling of the Armstrong myth, and the uncovering of what some have called the greatest doping conspiracy in sport, occurred because USADA had accumulated so much testimony – including from 10 former team-mates, some unsullied by accusations of cheating.
The extent of Armstrong's surrender is underlined by the knowledge of what he has previously said about the "guiding principles" taught to him by his single mother Linda: that "to give up was to give in". Armstrong reiterated that view in his first autobiography, It's Not About the Bike, written in 2000. "Pain is temporary," he wrote then. "If I quit, however, it lasts forever." And quit is what Armstrong did on Friday.
As World Anti-Doping Agency chief John Fahey said on the day it happened, Armstrong's decision added up to nothing less than an admission of guilt.
While it is not clear what pressure was brought to bear on those former teammates who gave evidence to USADA investigators – after a US federal case examining whether Armstrong's US Postal Service (USPS) team had "misused federal funds" was dropped – it has been suggested that some faced threats of perjury proceedings if they did not speak.
Perhaps what has been most extraordinary about the whole saga is the extent to which suspicions about the American champion had been documented for so long yet never properly investigated, as Armstrong used the force of his personality – and legal challenges – to shut down all criticism.
That included even the testimony of those such as Armstrong's team masseuse – a woman with no real axe to grind – who insisted that she had heard team officials discussing how to get round Armstrong's positive test for steroids, and described how she was asked to travel to Spain to deliver "material" across the French border.
But it has been the USADA finding that has been the most damaging, not least because it stands unchallenged by a man who has long insisted that he is the victim of a witch-hunt.
USADA said its evidence came from more than a dozen witnesses "who agreed to testify and provide evidence about their first-hand experience and/or knowledge of the doping activity of those involved in the USPS conspiracy".
The unidentified witnesses said they knew or had been told by Armstrong himself that he had "used EPO, blood transfusions, testosterone and cortisone" from before 1998 until 2005, the year of his seventh Tour victory, and that he had previously used EPO, testosterone and human growth hormone until 1996, USADA said. Armstrong also allegedly handed out doping products, encouraged banned methods – and, USADA says, even used "blood manipulation including EPO or blood transfusions" during his 2009 Tour comeback.
For his part, Armstrong has tried to characterise the investigative process against him as tantamount to bribery – offering those willing to give evidence the promise of more lenient sanctions if they admitted their part.Certainly in the last two years the net has tightened very quickly around Armstrong. After Landis's meeting with federal investigators, they spoke to Tyler Hamilton, another former teammate, who has admitted to doping.
"It really wasn't until the last few months [that] we were able to reach out to all the witnesses we believed had information," said Travis Tygart, USADA's chief executive. "They all agreed to testify truthfully."
In a separate interview, Tygart added: "I think Mr Armstrong also knows the truth and decided that instead of a fact-by-fact, piece-by-piece coming-out in open court under oath, he decided his better move at this stage was just not to contest and hold on to baseless soundbites about witch hunts and vendettas."
All of which leaves some serious questions still unanswered: such as whether cycling's administrators turned a blind eye to Armstrong's behaviour, particularly when he was patron of the Tour, its leader by virtue of his victories.
That is the view of Italian rider Filippo Simeoni, who clashed with Armstrong in the 2004 Tour after giving evidence in an Italian court that Armstrong's trainer, Dr Michele Ferrari – also named in the USADA doping allegations – had advised the Italian to take EPO and testosterone in the late 1990s.
"When I protested, [Armstrong] was in charge of cycling and nothing was done," he told an Italian radio station. "I paid for things that weren't just. I only told the truth."
There will be more fights and scandal ahead. Others accused in the affair have opted – unlike Armstrong – to fight their case in the Court of Arbitration for Sport. The UCI has also not yet accepted USADA's judgment, and its own officials may take up cudgels for Armstrong's cries of "injustice".
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