Cycle of Lies: The Fall of Lance Armstrong (13 page)

He hit the rocks along the road so hard that he was knocked out. He opened his eyes to see a woman, screaming. Blood poured from his face. Yet he climbed back onto his bike and rode gingerly down the course, alone and pensive.

He had taken a shot of EPO in Spain just before the plane’s door closed on his way to the Tour. Because of that he had nearly gone over the hematocrit limit during the UCI’s testing. Now he worried that he would break the limit if he was tested again because his body was so sensitive to EPO. The more he thought about it, the more nervous he became and the slower he rode.

Vaughters took his crash as a sign to stop doping. Nothing good could come of it. He stopped pedaling, and waited for the ambulance behind him.

“I’m never, ever going to dope again,” he said, to no one in particular.

Riders like Vaughters and Hincapie watched Armstrong from afar, thankful that it was Armstrong—not them—who had to lie for the entire sport.

“What can I do, I’ve been on my deathbed and I’m not stupid,” Armstrong told reporters at that 1999 Tour. “I’ve never tested positive.”

In one poststage television interview, he said, “I can emphatically say I’m not on drugs. I’m sure that there’s been some looking and prying and digging . . . You’re not going to find anything. If it’s
L’Equipe
, if it’s Channel 4 or if it’s a Spanish paper, Belgian paper, Dutch paper, there’s nothing to find. And I think once everybody gets done doing their due diligence, everybody realizes that they’ve got to be professional and can’t print a bunch of crap, then they’ll realize that they’re dealing with a clean guy.”

In an interview with Australia’s SBS television, he was blunt, saying, “There’s no secret here. We have the oldest secret in the book—hard work.”

He denied doping in dozens of ways, insisting that he wasn’t suddenly the “new rider” some journalists had suggested. Those reporters pointed out that the best he had done in the Tour before his cancer was 36th. Armstrong explained that if there was something he needed to hide, he wouldn’t be living, training and racing in France, which has such strict antidoping laws.

When a
Le Monde
reporter asked why Armstrong initially denied presenting the UCI with a prescription for the cortisone to justify its use, Armstrong shot back, “Monsieur Le Monde, are you calling me a doper or a liar?” The question went unanswered. None of the other journalists in the room chimed in.

Armstrong used his survivor’s story to gain sympathy, something his critics would eventually dub his “cancer shield.” He said, “They say stress causes cancer so if you want to avoid cancer, don’t come to the Tour de France and wear the yellow jersey.”

While European writers remained critical of Armstrong, most of the American press defended him. Reporters from the United States were streaming into the Tour to write about the new American hero who had rescued cycling from drug use. Almost a thousand journalists were accredited for the race, two hundred more than usual. Lost amid the hoopla was the Tour’s long history of doping.

USA Today
said Armstrong couldn’t enjoy his success and blamed the French media. “He’s understandably upset about their brand of shoddy, jealous and jingoistic journalism.”

The
Philadelphia Inquirer
said that the Tour de France had found “its healer after last year’s drug scandal.” “The French press, in which objectivity is scant, has hinted cynically, through ambiguous headlines and quotes from unnamed doctors, that no mortal could rise so phoenix-like without artificial help.”

The
Detroit News
wrote that Armstrong was “doing his best to ignore the silly whispers among the French press corps,” and that many journalists who’d never covered cycling were continuing to “search for another doping scandal such as the one that rocked the Tour last summer.”

The
Washington Post
dubbed him “a cancer survivor and a man who almost single-handedly has revived a sport tarnished by widespread doping.” It also called the French media “prickly.”

The
New York Times
wrote that Armstrong was “an outspoken opponent of the use of performance-enhancing drugs in the sport” who has given the Tour “a resoundingly positive image” and has “provided an inspirational, feel-good story.”

Americans were inundated with pro-Armstrong propaganda. Phil Liggett, the Tour commentator for ABC television, pointed out that the French were having their worst showing at the Tour since 1926 and were just envious of Armstrong’s success. “No way he’s taking drugs,” he said. “They’re just knifing him over there.”

Even Armstrong’s cancer doctors piped up. “This guy is so clean-living you wouldn’t believe it,” Dr. Lawrence Einhorn of Indiana University Cancer Center told the Associated Press.

People who pay attention to sports—journalists included—want to believe in the miracles of athletic competition. Reporters wrote what they were told by the Postal Service team, by Armstrong and his agent, Stapleton. Gorski, the business manager, said that because of the Festina scandal, clean riders like Armstrong finally had the chance to make it to the top. “It’s like a miracle!” he said.

They explained how Armstrong became a three-week stage-race rider after years of being a cyclist whose strength was one-day events. It was the cancer. It caused him to shed fifteen pounds from his 5-foot-9 frame—though some news outlets reported it to be ten pounds, and yet another, ten kilos (22.2 pounds). His weight loss became his defense: With fewer pounds on his body, it was so much easier for him to propel himself up steep mountains.

The American press also gave credit to Armstrong’s “coach,” Chris Carmichael, who was in essence a prop to cover Armstrong’s involvement with Ferrari’s drug program. According to
USA Today
, Carmichael helped Armstrong by using “cutting-edge techniques to develop tremendous aerobic capacity and pedaling efficiencies.” The
Washington Post
said Carmichael’s techniques used “more revolutions at a lower gear speed instead of power riding at a higher gear.” Carmichael once boasted that Armstrong’s training results were “even better than if he had used EPO.”

Betsy Andreu was at home in Dearborn, Michigan, with her two-month-old son, Frankie, watching Armstrong’s phenomenal stage to the mountaintop of Sestriere. She was aware that doping existed in the
peloton
, but thought her husband was clean, considering he had told her so that day in 1996 when the two of them had overheard Armstrong’s drug confession to his doctors in Indianapolis. But as the Sestriere stage unfolded on her television, the truth dawned on her.

Not only was Armstrong chugging up the mountain like a train, her husband was out in front, too, pulling Armstrong up some of the toughest climbs in the Alps. She called her friend Becky Rast, the wife of cycling journalist and photographer James Startt.

Becky Rast thought Betsy was calling to preen over her husband’s accomplishments. She said, “Oh my God, Betsy, Frankie’s doing it! He’s going so great!”

“Great, my ass,” Andreu said. “What the hell is he doing pulling? He’s not a climber! He should be just trying to make the time cut.”

Betsy Andreu knew that her tall, lanky husband was a born sprinter, made to go fast and use his power over short distances. She was seeing something that was not physically possible. She had left Europe at the end of March to settle in back home to have her first baby, and had seen Frankie only briefly for the birth. In their entire time together, she had seen him inject himself with something only once, and he said that had been a vitamin B12 shot. Now it seemed obvious he had been doing some type of drug in her absence.

When she called him later that day, she skipped the pleasantries.

“What the hell was that?” she said.

By the 1999 Tour, Betsy had already begun to suspect that their good friend Lance was cheating in more ways than one. When Betsy talked to Armstrong one morning before she left Europe that spring, it only complicated her image of him. They had seen each other the night before at a party at Armstrong’s house in Nice, France. He called Betsy upon waking up and told her he had found a woman’s clothes and jewelry strewn next to his pool.

“Who’d I end up with?” Armstrong asked.

“You have to be kidding me. You have a pregnant wife at home [in the United States]! How could you?”

In a lather, she called Kevin Livingston’s wife, Becky, who said she was the one who had left her clothes and jewelry at Armstrong’s pool after changing into her bathing suit. She said nothing had happened between them. Still, Andreu decided Armstrong had “no moral compass.”

For years, she told only family and friends about Armstrong’s doping confession in the hospital room, but never went public with it because the cycling family protected its own. Frankie didn’t have a college degree and needed to work in cycling because he felt, like Hincapie and many others, that it was his only way to make a living. So Betsy kept her counsel, believing Armstrong’s confession “exposes cycling to a certain extent. It was a secret we all had to keep quiet about.”

Armstrong was confident that she would keep his secret. On one training ride the year after the Andreus overheard his doping confession in the Indianapolis hospital, he asked Frankie about Betsy’s reaction to it.

“Did she say anything about it?”

“She freaked out a little bit, and, you know, we got into a couple of arguments. But then it kind of went away.”

“Good, good, we don’t want anyone asking too many questions.”

Armstrong rode on, unconcerned and comfortable with his buddy’s assurance that it kind of went away.

On the final ride in the 1999 Tour de France, Armstrong and his Postal Service team led the
peloton
into Paris, a red, white and blue blur as they whooshed to the finish line in the fastest time ever recorded—better than 25 miles an hour. En route to completing the 2,404-mile odyssey, they posed for photos and drank champagne. After three weeks of eating right, Armstrong ravenously licked an ice cream cone.

The streets were lined with nearly 500,000 fans, including a bigger-than-ever contingent from the United States. Armstrong rode imperiously beneath American and Texas flags as he became only the second American—Greg LeMond was the first—to win cycling’s crown jewel.

Standing atop the podium, with the Arc de Triomphe as a backdrop, Armstrong listened to the “Star-Spangled Banner” play as he held his right hand over his heart. His pregnant wife stood to the side, and he stepped over to her for a moment to wipe tears from her eyes. He said, “I’m in shock, I’m in shock, I’m in shock.”

He said he hoped his victory inspired those fighting cancer: “We can return to what we were before—and even better.” Then he gave credit to those who helped him achieve a previously unthinkable goal.

“Fifty percent of this is for the cancer community—the doctors, the nurses, patients, their families, the survivors and those unfortunate ones who haven’t made it,” he said. “Twenty-five percent was for myself, my team. And the other twenty-five percent was for the people who did not believe in me.”

George W. Bush, then Texas governor, called Armstrong’s cell phone and said, “We’re so proud of you. It’s unbelievable.”

Kirk Watson, the mayor of Austin and a testicular cancer survivor, was in the process of arranging a parade and a festival back home in Armstrong’s honor.

Armstrong’s oncologists boasted. Dr. Einhorn, one of his doctors in Indianapolis, said, “If Hollywood makes a movie of this, most people will leave the theater shaking their head with incredulity. Even the name, ‘Lance Armstrong,’ it just sounds too good to be true.”

Armstrong’s march to victory immediately ignited the sport’s popularity in the United States—TV ratings for the Tour’s final day had jumped by 80 percent over the prior year. Viewers got their first glimpse of Armstrong as a Nike spokesman as he starred in one of the company’s “Just Do It” commercials. The company cast him as the first dead man to ride the Tour: “According to the latest cancer survival rates, Lance Armstrong is neither alive nor is he racing in the Tour de France.”

One Chicago sports columnist, Bernie Lincicome, said fans should not feel guilty about cheering for Armstrong in the wake of the drug insinuations, which he called “petty slander” created by jealous journalists. Followers should believe that Armstrong is an inspiration and an honest athlete, he said in his column.

“I mean, a guy beats cancer and the Alps,” he said. “Did they give Hannibal a drug test?” He continued, “We have every right to feel good about it, about him and his place at the top of the American summer.”

An army of people rallied to Armstrong’s side because of his victory. Fans who had considered bike racing an exotic, niche sport and who never even knew there was a big race in France every summer—much less nearly every summer for the past ninety-six years—bought bikes and looked to Armstrong for motivation. Trek promised its dealers a signature Armstrong bike by Christmas. One shop owner in suburban Dallas said she couldn’t keep Postal Service jerseys on the shelves because they were selling so fast, at $70 each.

Armstrong would soon be on the cover of not one, but two Wheaties boxes, and General Mills said those boxes outsold others by about 10 percent, meaning millions of dollars in extra sales. The Postal Service said it won “millions and millions” of dollars of business from its rivals because of its relationship with Armstrong.

Some marketing experts, like David Carter and Rick Burton, told
USA Today
that Armstrong could be as big an American sports star as Michael Jordan and Tiger Woods.

Carter called Armstrong an “all-American, Norman Rockwell-like embodiment of what people want their heroes to be.” Burton said, “He’s the kind of guy you want your son to become—or your daughter to marry.”

Armstrong, in turn, was about to become very rich as the new American sports hero. His agent, Bill Stapleton, had already negotiated a book deal with $400,000 in guaranteed money for Armstrong, and two movie deals were in the works. Stapleton said Armstrong had signed close to $1 million worth of new sponsorship deals before the Tour was even over. “And we haven’t even started hearing from the soft drink and fast-food companies,” he said.