Lance Armstrong Slams French Hotel Accommodation During the Tour

August 11, 2010. Speaking at a National Business Travel Association conference in Houston, Texas, Lance Armstrong delivered his stock cancer survival and triumph speech to the audience of more than 1,000 delegates. Then during the Q & A session that followed, Armstrong delivered a stinging rebuke of the quality of French hotels allocated to the teams participating in the Tour de France. He was responding to a question by the moderator who works for a company that runs French hotels.

"Most of my travel — at least in Europe — was in France, staying in these ... (pause or something deleted, hotels). You're competing in the biggest race in the world and you're stuck staying in these horrible hotels."

Then in an attempt at some humour, he asked "There are no French hotel owners in here, are there?" Instead of a laugh, the crowd responded with a murmur. The moderator responded with, "I'm going to have to disagree."

Armstrong is reported to have named the hotels he considered "horrible". While we don't have a quote, there’s a fair chance that hotels that are part the chain owned by France-based hotelier Accor made Armstrong's list. Accor is the biggest hotel operator in France and has 4,000 hotels worldwide, nearly a quarter of them in the United States. It's French hotel groups include the Mercure, Ibis, Formule 1 and Novotel, hotels. In addition, Accor's Etap brand also acts as an official supplier to the Tour with advertisements featured on the pre-race publicity caravan.

Hotel accommodation for teams competing in the Tour de France are booked and allocated by Amaury Sport Organisation (ASO). Teams are obliged to stay at these hotels and cannot make their own reservations.  Article 9 of the Tour de France rules stipulates that those taking part in the race and their team managers must sleep and take their meals 'in the premises designated for this purpose by the organisation, to the exclusion of any other.'

Faced with the task of finding say 500 rooms of a similar standard, sometimes in remote towns and villages, ASO tries to ensure that each team gets its share of the better hotels.

Being a millionaire and a sports star, Armstrong may expect the best accommodation available, but in reading the report from the conference, even though the moderator offered to set him up at plush hotels he wouldn't be disappointed with during his next trip to France, Armstrong wasn't about to voluntarily go back to France.

Former Team-mate Comes to Lance Armstrong's Defence

Lance Armstrong (second rider) in the
black and red RadioShack team colours

On August 11, 2010, in an interview with Fox Sports, a former U.S. Postal Service team-mate of Lance Armstrong, Patrick Jonker (who now manages the Australian-based Virgin Blue/RBS Morgan team), dismissed the allegations of drug cheating levied against Armstrong.

Jonker told Fox Sports, "I didn’t see anything. If I was subpoenaed to go to court and put my hand on the Bible, I’d go. This is not a game, it’s very serious."

Jonker also told Fox Sports that he was willing to undergo a lie detector test and that he had known Armstrong since he was the "big Texan triathlete" who "kicked our arse" when racing against an Australian bike team in the 1992 Barcelona Olympics. Apparently, the two shared a hotel room while training with their respective national teams. Moreover, Jonker claims a very close acquaintance with Armstrong telling Fox "Some years, he spent more time with me than his wife!"

In the interview, Jonker went on to describe Lance Armstrong as a "freak of nature" with an "amazing" heart and lung capacity and tolerance to lactic acid.

However, while Jonker rode the Tour de France five times between 1994-99, a toe injury caused Jonker to miss the Tour in 2000 - his one and only year with US Postal team. Nobody doubts that Lance Armstrong was an exceptional and winning bike rider. It is with regard to winning the Tour de France an unprecedented seven times during early to mid-2000s, that the main allegations regarding illegal performance enhancement have arisen.

It is one thing for a loyal team-mate to say they have no knowledge of the cheating and quite another to categorically say that Armstrong never cheated in preparation for, or while racing the Tour. It will be interesting to hear what Jonker has to say about alleged cheating during the early to mid-2000 and whether he was so closely associated with Armstrong during that time that the investigators can effectively rule out any doping or drug use.