It’s closure-time for Anderson

THIS IS the beginning of the end.

Over the last nine years Mike Anderson has been used and abused by Lance Armstrong. The biggest cheat in sporting history has gone out of his way to wreck Anderson’s reputation, cost him thousands of dollars in legal fees and forced his family to relocate to the other side of the world. But, the book is finally closing. On the same day Armstrong eventually admitted to what some already knew, that he doped his way to seven hollow Tour de France victories, Anderson sat down with the Sunday Star-Times for his last-ever interview on Armstrong.

Walking into Anderson’s busy Upper Hutt bike shop, the man who has been dragged into the eye of a global news storm is on a video call from a flustered American reporter who is scrambling to extract a venomous sound-bite.

The last week has seen reporters from all over the world make more than 100 phone calls to Anderson’s shop. But the week’s events have also started to draw an elusive line under the experience of a lifetime.

Ending the American interview, Anderson kisses his wife, Allison, and leans over to pet Abby, the family jack russell, who bounds around blissfully unaware of Lance Armstrong.

‘‘Right, let’s take a son says.

Over the next three hours Anderson, who refused to watch Armstrong’s global confession or ‘‘Oprah’s TV circus’’, offers reaction to notes I’d scribbled down in an empty pub around the corner.

Some of the content, though certainly not Armstrong’s doping, comes as a surprise.

You can tell because Anderson’s lips quiver with what must be a mix of adrenaline and sheer anger.

The man who has punished Anderson, who sacked him and sued him for telling the truth after Anderson found a steroid box in Armstrong’s Spanish home in 2004, has finally come clean, albeit only skimming the surface.

‘‘This week has been the hardest. As much as I needed closure, dredging it all back up is not plea-

seat,’’ Ander- sant. It’s part of my life I would rather wipe,’’ Anderson says.

Perhaps the biggest shame in all this is that Anderson blames himself.

‘‘ Working for Lance is the poorest judgment I have ever, ever, ever exercised and I’m ashamed of it. Those are not the kinds of people that I want to associate with,’’ he says.

‘‘I feel guilty that Lance Armstrong is the centre, when there are countless, countless other things going on in the world that need attention.’’

Elaborating on previous phone calls, Anderson details what life with Armstrong was like and ‘‘the Lance I know’’. ‘‘I had a BlackBerry that he gave me in early 2003 – it was his previously, he’d upgraded to the new model. It had every celebrity’s number you could imagine,’’ he said.

‘‘I had [then-president] George Bush’s telephone number. Bono, Tiger Woods, the list went on and on and on.’’

And ultimately, we’d get to fateful Spanish day in 2004.

‘‘It’s a very, very beautiful old apartment in Girona and his marriage [ with Kristin] had broken up,’’ he said.

‘‘ He was coming over with Sheryl Crow and naturally, it would have been a bit uncomfortable for her to arrive in a flat with mementos of a previous marriage and Kristin’s clothes. It was a full home.

‘‘He said ‘can you

that

de-Kik it?’

‘‘So Allison and I had the rather unpleasant task of arriving a few days before and, as per his instructions, chucking out all of her stuff.

‘‘These were wealthy people, we were putting out to the kerb tens of thousands of dollars worth of stuff. We were putting Chanel stuff out on the kerb in plastic bags.

‘‘In the process I went in to clean the closets and bathroom.

‘‘There was a large his-and-hers vanity and I was getting all her cosmetics out. ‘‘Then I opened up his and saw box, among other things, and I

a immediately knew maceutical.

‘‘My heart just sank. I knew what it was, anything that has ‘andro’ is a steroid.

‘‘That was the first time I was suspicious of cheating. It was a disappointing view of who he was following his treatment of Kristin.

‘‘I took the box and went into the kitchen where the internet connection was and looked it up on the computer. I had to know I was wrong. I wanted to be wrong. ‘‘And there it was. ‘‘So I put it back.

it

was

a phar-

‘‘I imagine what he did was walk in, saw it there, saw that everything else had been removed and he would have known. He would have known ‘now Mike knows’.’’

‘‘It went from ‘Mike my buddy who is here to help me out’ to ‘Mike, my employee.’

‘‘It was the friendliest mate-ship that could happen. But from then on it was cold. Allison noticed it.

‘‘We carried on because he was my friend.

‘‘I’ll never get over the anger I have for him, for the way he treated me, for the way he treated my wife.

‘‘ What could possibly be said that would help the situation?’’

But somehow, it seems Anderson has found a lid to all this.

That night, the man whose Twitter handle ‘‘@ Andersatan’’ is a tongue-in-cheek reference to his scrap with Armstrong, would reply to a tweet asking how the day’s inevitable interviews have gone.

‘‘Very very stressful except for the last one with Simon Plumb who unknowingly gave me the key to closure. Good from bad,’’ he said.

He’s right. I have absolutely no idea where that key came from.

Perhaps it’s right only Anderson should know.

‘‘Closure was completely out of reach until today,’’ he says, and on that, we shake hands.

‘‘It’s done. This will be my last interview.’’