From Lance to Landis by David Walsh

Author:David Walsh
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780345503589
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2007-06-26T00:00:00+00:00

After her experience in the hospital room in Indiana in late October 1996, Betsy Andreu’s view of professional cycling changed. It was like her eyes had been opened, and thereafter, she couldn’t close them. As she told her then fiancé, she wasn’t prepared to marry or be married to a doper. Frankie convinced her he didn’t do performance-enhancing drugs and she felt he was almost as shocked as she had been when Armstrong made his admission in Indiana. She later asked her husband if Armstrong had subsequently spoken to him about the hospital room consultation. Andreu told her that he had. He said, “Lance wanted to know how you reacted. I told him, ‘Not good.’”

In 1998 Betsy Andreu traveled with Kevin Livingston’s wife, Becky, to the Tour de France at a time when riders were staging a sit-down strike at what they saw as the heavy-handed tactics of French police. She believed that if riders were that upset by the police searches, they must have had a lot to hide. She also believed clean riders would have welcomed police involvement. For the 1999 Tour, Betsy Andreu’s plan was to travel from her home in Dearborn, Michigan, to France for the final week of the race and to be on the Champs-Elysées on the final Sunday afternoon. Two months before the start of the Tour, little Frankie Andreu was born and Dad got to spend just a little time with him before he had to leave for France. Almost seven weeks passed before father and son were reunited.

Before departing for Europe, Betsy Andreu watched television coverage of the first two weeks of the race. “One stage in particular is embedded in my mind,” she said. “It was the first mountain stage, the one to Sestriere, and as they began the climb, Frankie was at the front of a big line of U.S. Postal Service riders, setting the tempo. Frankie is a domestique and about as much a climber as the Pope is an atheist. ‘What the hell is this about?’ I said to myself as I watched. I called up a friend of mine in Paris, Becky Rast, and asked if she was watching the Tour. ‘Yeah,’ she said, ‘isn’t Frankie doing great?’ I yelled back, ‘Frankie isn’t a climber. What the hell is he doing pulling at the front on a first category mountain?’”

If you are the wife of a domestique, or team rider, you don’t often get to see your man on television. For about a minute or so, at the beginning of the climb to Sestriere, Frankie Andreu dominated TV coverage of the race, and his wife, watching on the other side of the Atlantic, felt nothing but dread. What she saw convinced her Frankie had caved in to cycling’s doping culture. After he got back to the team hotel, Betsy called her husband. “So, how did you manage to be leading the peloton on a first category climb?” she asked, making no attempt to disguise her skepticism.

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