Armstrong Aide Talks of Doping and Price Paid
|
Version 0 of 1. The job title is soigneur, an elegant sounding name for the person on a professional cycling team who is assigned some unglamorous work: massaging the muscles of the cyclists, laundering their clothes, booking their hotel rooms and preparing their food. Discretion and loyalty are also part of the job. For Emma O’Reilly, a young, onetime electrician from Dublin, the chance in 1996 to be a soigneur for the United States Postal Service cycling team was an extraordinary opportunity. She had raced some as a teenager in Ireland, and served as an assistant on that country’s national cycling team. But the Postal Service team was a rising power, with its sights set on the Tour de France. In short order, however, it became clear to Ms. O’Reilly that her tasks with the team would hardly be limited to kneading leg muscles and doing laundry. In an interview this week, Ms. O’Reilly said she became a regular player in the team’s doping program, one that investigators have charged took on its most sinister and far-reaching dimensions with the arrival of Lance Armstrong in 1998. Ms. O’Reilly, then not yet 30, said she wound up transporting doping material across borders, disposing of drugs and syringes when the authorities were lurking, and distributing performance-enhancing substances to the team’s riders whenever they needed them. Discretion and loyalty, she said she came to understand, were not just valued qualities. They were paramount. “It was prevalent, but discreet,” Ms. O’Reilly said of the team’s doping. “The drugs were just part and parcel of things. You didn’t analyze it at the time. It was just part of things.” And so, she said, she once traveled from France to Spain and back to pick up illegal pills for Mr. Armstrong and delivered them to him in a McDonald’s parking lot outside Nice. Another time, she said, she took a package of testosterone and got it in the hands of another rider. Ms. O’Reilly said she provided ice to the riders who had containers full of doping materials they needed to keep from spoiling. She spoke of using her talents with makeup to disguise bruising on the arms of the riders from needles. Some of it made her ashamed, she said, and all of it made her anxious. But the truly hard part was to come: talking about it publicly. “The traumatizing part,” she said in the telephone interview from Manchester, England, “was dealing with telling the truth.” Ms. O’Reilly first went public in 2003, when she was paid to cooperate on a book, “L.A. Confidentiel: Les Secrets de Lance Armstrong,” that sought to expose Mr. Armstrong as a drug cheat. Mr. Armstrong sued her for libel. Ms. O’Reilly said Mr. Armstrong demonized her as a prostitute with a drinking problem, and had her hauled into court in England. Ultimately, a legal settlement was reached, and Ms. O’Reilly tried to pick up her life, sometimes talking about Mr. Armstrong and drugs, but to little notice. Until now. This year Ms. O’Reilly, 42, gave a sworn account of her years with the Postal Service team to American doping investigators. Her testimony, along with that of more than two dozen others, including many of the cyclists Ms. O’Reilly worked with on the team, is at the heart of the United States Anti-Doping Agency’s formal case against Mr. Armstrong, one that seeks to bar him from the sport forever. “Talking about it made me feel like I was being disloyal in a sense, like I was breaking the code,” Ms. O’Reilly said of her early efforts to blow the whistle on Mr. Armstrong. “Lance tried to make my life a living hell.” Mr. Armstrong, over many years now, has steadfastly denied doping. Citing what he called a witch hunt by American doping authorities, he declined to defend himself against the formal charges that were made public this week. He has refused to comment on Usada’s case against him — a brief that includes hundreds of pages of accusations, sworn affidavits, medical records, test results and e-mail correspondence. “I have to admit,” Ms. O’Reilly said, “I didn’t think it would come out with so much detail like this.” It was Ms. O’Reilly’s brother who introduced her to cycling. In her spare time she began taking massage courses. “It was just a hobby, really,” Ms. O’Reilly said. “Then it just escalated and escalated.” Ms. O’Reilly worked with the Irish national team and later with an American-based cycling team. Then, the Postal Service team came knocking. She was initially hired on a contract basis, as one of the junior soigneurs. From the start, Ms. O’Reilly told investigators, it was apparent that the team was involved with doping. She said riders even complained that the team was not aggressive enough in its use of banned substances. She said she saw one rider fill a syringe from a vial of clear liquid. Another learned she was traveling to Belgium, she said, and asked her to pick up a package for him. She was told to bring the package directly to the rider, George Hincapie, and to avoid bringing it to the United States. “It is testosterone, and you do not want to transport it yourself,” she said she was told. Ms. O’Reilly said the use of the drugs was rarely, if ever, openly discussed by the riders themselves. And she said she tried to feign ignorance or indifference. And so, she said, she did not ask questions when pictures were removed from hotel room walls, taking it to mean that riders were using the hooks on the wall to hang their bags full of helpful blood. When riders worried about their telltale bruises, she said, she worked a little magic with makeup. And she tried to keep a sense of humor. Ms. O’Reilly testified that when the team was competing in the Tour de France one summer, and doping authorities were on the prowl, she learned that $25,000 worth of doping products had been flushed down the toilet of the Postal Service team’s bus and discharged into a field not far from a French village where a time trial was taking place. “I remember saying to one of the other staff members that $25,000 worth of doping products probably does not make very good fertilizer,” she said in her affidavit, “and that the team should come back to the field in a few years to check out the grass.” Ms. O’Reilly said she was once in a room giving Mr. Armstrong a massage when he and officials on the team fabricated a story to conceal a positive drug test result. Ms. O’Reilly said Mr. Armstrong told her, “You know enough to bring me down.” After resigning from the team in 2000, Ms. O’Reilly was contacted by journalists to talk about her experiences, requests she said she turned down for years because she was concerned about being perceived as disloyal and about the reactions of Mr. Armstrong and the team. But as the headlines about cycling and the deaths of riders increased, Ms. O’Reilly said she changed her mind. Contacted by David Walsh, a journalist, she spoke out. Her comments were published in “L.A. Confidentiel,” written by Mr. Walsh and Pierre Ballester. “By not saying anything, you’re part of the problem,” she said at the time. Ms. O’Reilly said she was slightly nervous before the publication of the interviews, but had no idea that the retaliation from Mr. Armstrong and others would be so strong. Mr. Armstrong sued Ms. O’Reilly and The Sunday Times of London, which had excerpted the book. The legal battle lasted three years. “He was suing me for more than I was worth,” Ms. O’Reilly said. “I was worried he would bankrupt me.” In the end, as part of a settlement, The Sunday Times wrote an apology. Ms. O’Reilly paid no money, she said. “Emma suffered from the lawsuit the most,” Mr. Walsh said in an interview this week. “This woman was an opponent of Lance Armstrong and was completely vilified. Now, everyone wants to know. But where were they in 2004?” Today, Ms. O’Reilly works as a massage therapist at a clinic in Manchester, England. “Cycling isn’t part of my life at all,” she said. Or it wasn’t until the investigators took her statement this year. The formal affidavit runs more than 20 pages. “Talking about it now opened the wound a bit,” she said. “But I think in the long run it will be good, because something needed to be done.” She added: “I wanted to clean up cycling. There was intimidation, bullying and stress. You try and get on with your life. I was only speaking the truth.” |