Free Seven Deadly Sins: My Pursuit of Lance Armstrong by David Walsh Page A

logic,’ Charles said, ‘but I find it really hard to believe that a guy who has had cancer, pretty serious cancer too, would come back and put that shit in his body.’
    ‘I know, that’s the bit that’s hard to believe. But, on the other hand, what drug do they give you when you’re recovering from cancer? EPO. Side-effects? Seemingly far less than for most drugs. The bottom line is that you can’t go faster without EPO than with it, and we’re being asked to believe you can.’
    I had shared a car with John as far back as the Tour of 1984, but Sestriere was the fork in our relationship. He couldn’t live on this race without access to certain riders; namely the top Americans and Lance. He would do the bread-and-butter job of reporting better than most, but for him the cream came in the team hotel in the evening, when you might snatch a fifteen- or twenty-minute interview with one of your favourites.
    His enthusiasm for the company of the stars irked me, because it was never balanced by any expression of concern for the lesser-known riders who might be having their careers destroyed by the doping of others. I never heard him wonder about Christophe Bassons and the possibility that he was having his career stolen. Just as I never heard him empathise with the injustice Paul had exposed in his book Rough Ride .
    And I was tired of the duplicity. The tests were useless because there was no test for the drug of choice, EPO. Instead the UCI tried to control its abuse by withdrawing from races those riders whose haematocrit exceeded 50, which was considered dangerous to a rider’s health but not proof of doping. It wasn’t proof but everyone knew that haematrocrits generally got to 50 because of EPO abuse.
    Charles was curious and spoke to Dr Leon Schattenberg, who was on UCI’s medical committee and believed the haematocrit limit ensured those riding clean didn’t have to compete against riders with ridiculously high haematocrits, and that this was better than nothing. Encouraged by Charles’ industry, I too spoke with Schattenberg.
    ‘From the blood tests you do, you know the haematocrit of every rider in the Tour de France?’
    ‘That’s right,’ he said.
    ‘I’m not going to ask for the haematocrits of each rider because I know you will say that is private medical information. I’m not going to ask for the average for each team, but can you say what, according to your blood tests, is the average haematocrit for riders in the Tour de France this year? No names, just the overall average?’
    ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, ‘I can’t give you that information.’
    ‘Why not?’
    ‘Because it is not information I am allowed to give.’
    ‘The reason you don’t give out this information is that if you did the public would see the average was much higher than it should be, and realise a lot of guys in this race are using EPO.’
    Schattenberg wasn’t responsible for what was effectively a cover-up and the UCI would argue that without a test for EPO their hands were tied. But they could have done more, even if it was to publicly say that haematocrits were unusually high (especially in some teams), because the governing body was well aware that it wasn’t a clean Tour. 11
    Some of the more thoughtful practitioners of our trade like to say that if you are to be a sportswriter it’s better to love the writing more than the sport. I loved the sport. I loved the role that sportswriters could play in sport: afflicting the comfortable, comforting the afflicted, as news reporters used to say. No longer did I see it as our role to smile up at the dais for a press conference, reassuring the organisers and competitors that ‘there ain’t nobody here but us chickens’.
    French police and customs had forced us to open our eyes in ’98 and I wasn’t going to close them again. I didn’t want to be a fool just because of my love for sport. And I didn’t want to act as an agent in making fools of readers and fans on