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

behalf of the UCI. This was supposed to be the Tour of Renewal! So far there were plenty of questions but no answers.
    Two days after Armstrong’s dominant performance at Sestriere I wandered through the salle de presse feeling nothing but sadness at the unfolding story. The scepticism felt by many as he soared like an eagle on that first mountain stage was less apparent now as the realisation dawned that Armstrong was going to win, and it was better to accept, even embrace, his performance.
    There were a few whom I knew would not be so easily turned, guys who didn’t want to be peddling the fantasy. There was Philippe Bouvet, now the chief cycling writer at L’Équipe , the son of a former professional and a man who had grown up with the sport. Philippe had written questioningly of Armstrong and the sport through the first two weeks.
    He believed the Tour was racing at ‘ deux vitesses ’ [two speeds], caused by the fact of many but not all riders using EPO. Armstrong, he described as ‘an extraterrestrial’. It didn’t take genius to work out where exactly Philippe was coming from, and it wasn’t from the same upbeat rose-tinted place that the organisers wished him to be.
    ‘What do you make of it?’ I asked.
    ‘There is a new kind of cycling,’ he replied. ‘You see things you don’t understand. Doping is an old story in cycling, but over the past few years the manipulation of riders’ blood has changed the nature of competition. What we are getting is a caricature of competition. It is killing the sport. I can still write about cycling, but not in the same way, not with the old passion. Cycling has to change.’
    Philippe’s belief about EPO killing the sport is important. Almost always the first line of the dopers’ defence, when a question is asked about their affairs, is to point out that to pose the question is to hurt the sport. For many years the former president of the UCI, Hein Verbruggen, would berate journalists for ‘talking too much about doping’.
    Through the eyes of too many riders and administrators, doping was always yesterday’s problem. ‘Perhaps there was a problem . . . I hope cycling renews itself and we should start now,’ Armstrong had said on the first day. He wanted us to forget when the imperative was not to forget. In fact the first task of anybody who cared about the sport, let alone dusty abstracts like journalism and truth, was to be standing up and shouting, ‘Stop!’
    Among the journalists who cared for the sport more than a three-week carnival around France in July, it was common to find sadness and a reluctance to celebrate. Jean-Michel Rouet’s daily column in L’Équipe expressed disbelief at Armstrong’s resurgence and the idea of this as a Tour of Renewal. His approach was based on bitter experience. ‘What we learned last year was that everybody in this sport can fuck us,’ he said.
    Rouet held onto his disbelief, as did another strong-minded French journalist, Jean-François Quénet, writing then for Ouest-France . ‘I haven’t written an enthusiastic line about Armstrong,’ he said to me. ‘They told us cycling would change but it hasn’t. After all the drugs last year, they said this would be slower because there would be no dope. This year’s race will be the fastest in history.’
    Professional cycling has always exercised an omerta and it has played a significant role in the endurance of a drug culture. But more than a code of silence is at work here and it is not coincidental that the Sicilian word has become so associated with the peloton, because when a rider breaks the code, he can expect a mafia-like response.
    After his individual time trial at Metz earlier in the day, Christophe Bassons watched television coverage of the leaders in his hotel room. They travelled at a speed he couldn’t believe, for the race against the clock had once been his own speciality. He was especially interested in Armstrong’s performance because their