Giant finally wakes up and smells the coffee

LOCKER ROOM:Last week Sports Illustratedpresented the case against Lance Armstrong, writes TOM HUMPHRIES

THERE IS a familiar pattern to the manner in which the media reports on the rise and fall of local heroes who they come to suspect as drug cheats.

First there is the hero worship. The godding up, as Jimmy Cannon used to call it on the back pages of long ago.

Then there is the xenophobia, the reports of what nasty, jealous foreigners are saying about the hero. Finally there is the alarm call and the waft of coffee in the nostrils. This could be true. Here is the case against . . .

Last week Sports Illustrated, the giant American sports magazine, woke up to the aroma that has been percolating around cycling for over a decade. Over the course of 5,700 words (sportsillustrated.cnn.com) the magazine presented the case against Lance Armstrong, the reasons to suspect that a man who has presented himself as the inspiration to millions (who needed that inspiration) has a serious case to answer. Sports Illustrated's Sports Person of the Year in 2002 was pushed into the dock.

Sports Illustratedof course isn't (by a long chalk) the first media organisation to question Lance Armstrong. In the rest of the English-speaking world he has been widely questioned; among the French, the practice of Lance Doubting is a widespread form of personal expression. Sports Illustrated's awakening from years of passivity is a hugely significant tipping point, however.

The magazine has 3.5 million subscribers in the US and 23 million readers each week. That’s a lot of patriots, a lot of hard core people who believe in the sanctity of Lance and the gleaming crystal purity of every sample he has offered up.

Those folks sat down to read that Lance may very soon be facing a Grand Jury which has been hearing evidence from a long list of witnesses.

He will be asked if in the late 1990s, he gained access to a drug developed by Baxter Healthcare Corp, which was then in clinical trials. Hem Assist, like many drugs which have been used to destroy cycling and athletics down the years, was intended for more benign use, to aid patients in cases of extreme blood loss. Lab studies showed that Hem Assist boosted the blood’s oxygen-carrying capacity. Which is very useful when cycling over mountains. And it didn’t have the nasty side effects of EPO, like the risk of your blood turning to sludge.

And Lance will be asked about what Italian police and customs officials found when they raided the home of team-mate Yarolslav Popovych last November. Documents, drugs and texts and e-mails, all of which connected Lance’s team to Michele Ferrari as recently as 2009. Ferrari is a controversial shadow in the cycling world. He was convicted in Italian courts of misconduct partly on the evidence of cyclist Filippo Simeoni.

Armstrong has always said he cut ties with Ferrari in 2004. During the Tour de France of that year Armstrong conducted what is well documented as a virtual blood feud against Simeoni.

There will be many queries sparked by the evidence of Floyd Landis, the former team-mate of Armstrong’s, who has been singing like a canary. Among the allegations made to Sports Illustrated is the story of arriving in Switzerland on a private plane with Armstrong in 2003. Customs officials requested that the team open their duffel bags to be searched. “Lance had a bag of drugs and s***,” Landis says. The officials rummaging through the bag found syringes and drugs with labels written in Spanish. Armstrong got a member of the team to vouch that the syringes were for vitamin injections.

Questions will be asked about the remarkable concession by Don Catlin, one of the US’s most reputable anti-drugs policemen that between 1993 and 1996 Armstrong returned samples with abnormally high testosterone to epitestosterone levels. Most of us have a ratio of 1:1. The legal limit for sports people until 2005 was a generous 6:1 and has since been reduced to 4:1. In June of 1993 Armstrong provided a sample with a ratio of 9:1.

In 1999 when US Cycling asked for a list of samples from a cyclist identified only by his testing code numbers Catlin couldn’t recover five of the tests and of the three tests with abnormal ratios he said that the date could not be confirmed by the B samples.

Catlin admitted to SI that the data was “disturbing” and that a failed confirmation would be a ”once in a blue moon “ occurrence.

What of the evidence of Mark Anderson, team mechanic, who opened Armstrong’s bathroom cabinet to find a box marked ANDRO facing him from the shelf? What of the evidence of Stephen Swart, a former team-mate who says that the EPO-fuelled team had their own small portable machine for testing their haematocrit levels?

Or of Frankie and Betsy Andreu who were in a hospital room with Armstrong in 1996 when he was asked if he had ever used performance enhancing drugs and heard Armstrong provide a list of his little helpers? What of the previously documented claims by Emma O’Reilly, the Irish masseuse, that Armstrong asked her to dispose of syringes for him?

On it goes. Questions. Questions. Questions. For every whistle that gets blown Armstrong has a story which explains the motivation of the whisteblower. The list gets longer and longer, though, and the ranks of the unbelievers are swollen all the time.

The unfolding mess has interesting implications and ramifications in the world of sponsorship. Some journalists have long suspected that Sports Illustrated's soft approach on Armstrong was due to Time Warner (who own the magazine) having an interest in the success of the Discovery Channelwho took up the sponsorship of Armstrong's team shortly before the 2004 Tour de France. The following summer Sports Illustrated produced an 80 page commemorative tribute edition to Armstrong gathering together all the complimentary coverage of his career and featuring on the cover a picture of Lance leaning over his handlebars sporting the Discovery Channel jersey.

All innocent enough probably but awkward in terms of appearances when so many other outlets were asking hard questions. More interesting, though, is the part played by Armstrong’s preceding sponsor, the US Postal Service. There is a thin fog over the figures which US Postal spent on Armstrong’s team but the evidence suggests it amounted to as much as $40 million (€29.4 million)in the years from 2001 to 2004 and up to $50 million (€36.8 million) over the period from when Armstrong joined the team before the 1998 season and the end of the sponsorship deal.

That is $50 million belonging to a US government agency. If Armstrong winds up with a guilty verdict what are the implications in terms of fraud? Many would say US Postal has just as many questions to answer. When it came to renewing the contract in 2000 the smell from the team was so distinct the contract stipulated a “morals turpitude and drug clause”. The clause noted “inappropriate drug conduct prejudicial to the team” or “failure to pass drug or medical tests” among grounds to suspend or fire riders. The deal went ahead, though.

And what of the 70 million people who bought those yellow Live Strong bracelets, did they buy the entire story? Do they see themselves now as victims of the greatest fraud in sporting history or disciples of a man who performs miracles?

What a blessing to live in interesting times.