Lance and I had met at the Interbike trade show in Las Vegas in September 2008. Introduced by George Hincapie, once Lance’s domestique de luxe and then mine, we had instantly struck up a rapport. There was something mesmeric about Lance.
That’s something that people often say about so-called ‘celebrities’, but not until I spent an hour or two with Lance did I fully appreciate what it meant.
There was a buzz, an electricity that seemed to take hold of the room. The energy that he radiated seemed to hang everywhere, yet when Lance spoke the space suddenly emptied to leave just you and him.
His eyes were like strobe lights, burning through you. He inserted your name into every sentence, paid attention to everything you did, remembered everything that you said.
It was hard, as a 23-year-old who had watched him win seven Tour de France, goggle-eyed, not to be impressed or at least intrigued. A couple of nights out in Las Vegas hadn’t suddenly made us close friends and we had no contact until a congratulatory text message after my victory in Milan – San Remo in March 2009.
For the next couple of months after this George would tell Lance that I’d bought an expensive watch, or a sports car, and I’d get a text from Lance: ‘Cav! Don’t waste your money on watches! What did I tell you? Save it. Be smart with it.’ In Vegas he never tired of repeating it. Perhaps I was under his spell, but when it came to giving me advice he appeared both genuine and generous.
Like everyone else, I was well aware of the doping rumours that had swirled around Lance, but never dwelled on them: firstly because I hadn’t been competing against him between 1999 and 2005; and, secondly, I had gathered from riders who had competed in that era that doping had been widespread if not endemic.
In 2009 and even on the eve of the 2010 Tour, when the Wall Street Journal published allegations aimed at Lance by his old team-mate Floyd Landis, I’d paid very little attention to the low, slow drumroll of controversy.
Now, though, the idea that Lance had doped to ride that 2009 Tour in which I’d won six stages switched something in me. If the suffering that we sometimes endure in races is hard to convey to the ordinary punter, it’s even more difficult to describe the bitterness of knowing the pain was made even worse by other riders cheating.
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