Cycle of Lies: The Fall of Lance Armstrong (14 page)

Bristol-Myers Squibb, the company that manufactured Armstrong’s chemotherapy drugs, had signed him to a $250,000 endorsement contract. The Postal Service boosted his salary to $2 million. His public speaking fee increased from $30,000 to $70,000, plus first-class expenses for two.

He would go on to write a best-selling autobiography,
It’s Not About the Bike
, in which he told his story of surviving cancer and winning the Tour against all odds. Of performance-enhancing drug use, he said in the book, “Doping is an unfortunate fact of life in cycling, or any other endurance sport for that matter. Inevitably, some teams and riders feel it’s like nuclear weapons—that they have to do it to stay competitive within the
peloton
. I never felt that way, and certainly after chemo the idea of putting anything foreign in my body was especially repulsive.”

The book launched him into another stratosphere altogether when it came to marketing. For the year 2000, he would make $5 million in endorsements, plus a $2 million salary, which put him on the level of top NFL football players—those athletes once revered by his classmates back in Texas.

In the days after the 1999 Tour, Armstrong flew on Nike’s jet to New York City, where he hit all the morning and talk shows, including
The Late Show with David Letterman
, during which Letterman called the European press “idiots” and said their doping accusations were “just crap.” Armstrong’s next stops included the White House, where he presented President Bill Clinton with a bike.

Armstrong and Stapleton were right: Armstrong’s cancer was the best thing to ever happen to him, marketing-wise. He was turning down offers of endorsement deals that were for less than $1 million. Armstrong said he was now “a business entity, instead of a person.”

But on that final day of the Tour, Armstrong had a moment to savor his triumph, and all that it would mean to him. After stepping off the podium, he grabbed a giant American flag and rested its pole against his shoulder as he and his teammates climbed onto their bikes. A team Armstrong had dubbed “The Bad News Bears” rode up the Champs-Élysées for the honorary lap around the Arc de Triomphe. Seven of the nine riders were American, and the team had done what it needed to do to succeed in an unscrupulous sport.

During the ride, a French journalist pulled beside Armstrong on a motorcycle and asked him what he thought of his achievement.

“If you ever get a second chance in life,” Armstrong said, “go all the way!”

CHAPTER 11

I
n preparation for the 2000 tour, Armstrong, Hamilton and Livingston flew by private jet from Nice to Valencia, Spain. Three weeks later, Armstrong would try to win his second straight Tour. But one important task had to be completed first.

There in Valencia, in a deserted luxury beach hotel, Bruyneel and Martí watched as del Moral slid wide-gauge needles into the veins of the Postal Service stars. In just fifteen or twenty minutes, 500 ccs of blood from each rider had flowed through tiny tubes into plastic IV bags atop a white towel on the floor. The blood bags were then stored in a blue cooler.

The next month, two days before the Tour’s hellish Mont Ventoux climb, those blood bags reemerged just when the riders needed them most. As the riders lay on beds in a spacious suite at the Postal Service team’s hotel, the blood bags were affixed to the wall above them with athletic tape. Out came the wide-gauge needles and IV tubing. The riders shivered as the chilled blood dripped into their veins.

Riders had heard that the Tour might be using a newly developed test for EPO, so the Postal Service team fell back on the old-school technique of blood transfusions. No test could determine whether riders had transfused their own blood. The UCI still measured each rider’s hematocrit level to ensure it was below 50 percent, but now the riders were raising their hematocrit with transfusions instead of with a drug.

The process was “Frankenstein-ish,” Hamilton said later, “something for Iron Curtain Olympic androids in the ’80s.” He also thought it smacked of “a junior-high science experiment.”

By the time the riders put the blood from those bags back into themselves at the 2000 Tour, Armstrong was already wearing the leader’s yellow jersey. He had made his move on Stage 10, going from 16th place to first, gaining an improbable ten minutes on his competition. Hamilton, Livingston and Russian teammate Viatcheslav Ekimov had ushered Armstrong to the final climb of the stage. With about eight miles to go, Armstrong took off on his own, ascending with such speed that rivals called his efforts “otherworldly,” as if his bike had a hidden motor.

Armstrong extended his overall lead with a swift climb up Mont Ventoux. He bolted up the mountain to finish inches behind the stage winner, Marco Pantani, a skinny, compact Italian, one of the era’s best climbers. In the media room, reporters gasped.

Aside from some French fans yelling, “Doper! Doper!” as he pedaled past them, Armstrong won the 2000 Tour without being thwarted by controversy.

Only later that year did he learn he was in trouble again.

Hugues Huet, a journalist from the state-sponsored television station France 3, had followed an unmarked Postal Service team car for more than a hundred miles. At one stop, two team staff members had tossed trash bags into a Dumpster. Huet filmed them doing it, then later looked inside the bags and found used syringes, bloody gauze and empty boxes of medical products, including Actovegin. The drug wasn’t a banned doping product, but antidoping experts said the calf’s blood derivative could improve the performance-enhancing effects of blood transfusions or EPO.

The footage of the team staffers throwing out that trash would make it into a France 3 documentary. But even before that film appeared, the Paris prosecutor’s office opened an inquiry into whether Armstrong’s Postal Service team had broken antidoping laws in France.

Armstrong and his team acted surprised by the investigation. Dan Osipow, a Postal Service spokesman, said the squad had a zero-tolerance policy regarding doping. Armstrong was so upset that he threatened to boycott the 2001 Tour and not defend his back-to-back titles.

“The substances on people’s minds—Activ-o-something is new to me,” Armstrong said. “Before this ordeal, I had never heard of it, nor had my teammates.”

He said he was innocent, his team was clean, no one on his team had tested positive. Later, he said the doping charge could have been devastating for his reputation and his family if it had stuck.

“Everything I had worked so hard for, my career, my reputation, what I’d done as an athlete, everybody I had could go away, all the things you lose when people don’t think you’re a good guy,” he wrote in one of his books.

Eventually, Armstrong allowed that the team had kept Actovegin so the team doctor could treat road rash. Then he claimed the drug was for a staff member who was diabetic. Gorski insisted that none of the team’s nine riders had taken it.

Vaughters was at home in Denver during the off-season when he heard about the French criminal investigation. Out of curiosity, he researched the drug on the Internet and surmised that it was the same one del Moral had injected him with at the 1999 Tour.
Extract of calf’s blood?
He felt like vomiting.

His first wife, Alisa, came home to find her husband balled up on the floor in the foyer, clutching his knees and crying.

“I didn’t know what it was,” he said. “They wouldn’t tell me.” He spat out the words as he sobbed. “And now, what if I have mad cow disease? What have I done? What have I done?”

Alisa Vaughters had heard her husband cry only once before, and that was after he had cheated with EPO to set the course record on Mont Ventoux in the Dauphiné. But mad cow disease? People had died of it in France. She worried about her husband, the father of their infant boy, Charlie.

Unlike Betsy Andreu, who was duped by her husband during that 1999 Tour when he had used EPO to help Armstrong win, Alisa Vaughters knew her husband had been doping. She was shocked by the suggestion that any of the wives or girlfriends didn’t—they had to know if their men were using EPO. Her husband kept EPO in the refrigerator, same as Armstrong. “You’d have to be pretty dumb not to know,” Alisa said.

When Alisa had met Jonathan, he had been open about his drug use and seemed educated about the possible side effects. Later, he told her that some wives helped their husbands dope, but—to her relief—he said he didn’t want her to do that.

She wasn’t like Kristin Armstrong, who casually referred to EPO as “butter” and handed out cortisone to riders at the 1998 worlds like bottles of Gatorade. And she wasn’t like Haven Hamilton, who many on the Postal team noticed seemed ultra-involved with her husband’s career and just as invested as he was in his success. As Tyler Hamilton trained for hours every day on the roads of Spain, his wife often drove a pace car. (Tyler would later admit that Haven was “a team player,” at times ensuring that his blood stayed cool in their refrigerator, where they stored it in a soy milk container.) No, Alisa Vaughters was a flight attendant, rarely available for such training support and not interested in it anyway.

The first time she spoke about doping with another wife was in 2002, at a bachelorette party for Christian Vande Velde’s soon-to-be-wife, Leah, who fought constantly with Christian about the presence of needles in their house. (Vande Velde had become a client of Ferrari’s in late 2000.) He hid the injections from her by taking them in the bathroom with the door closed, but she’d find stray evidence anyway and blow up. She worried about drug use affecting his ability to have children. Finally, at her bachelorette party in Boulder, Colorado, Leah turned to Alisa with tears in her eyes.

Above the heavy beat of the dance-floor music, and after several drinks had lowered inhibitions, Leah shouted, “It’s just so hard! All the needles! It’s just so hard!”

Alisa yelled back, “I know!” They hugged. Both cried. They felt relieved that they could finally commiserate with another wife about the doping. Both felt helplessly entangled in the sport’s lies.

Like Mafia wives who enjoy the spoils of the business but never discuss their husbands’ dirty work, the two women had never before even broached the subject of doping. Like other riders’ wives, they would gather for lunches in Girona or meet for coffee. They would spend hours together, weeks together, turning to each other for support in a foreign country when their husbands were on five-hour training rides or at weeklong races. While their husbands spoke freely among themselves about their doping regimens, wives like Leah and Alisa remained awkwardly silent.

Once the bachelorette party was over, the two friends went back to their old ways. They never mentioned the subject of doping again.

It seemed implausible to Betsy Andreu that Armstrong could use drugs after nearly dying of cancer. She couldn’t understand how Armstrong’s wife, Kristin, and other wives accepted their husbands’ doping regimes. She would confide in Angela Julich, the wife of Bobby Julich, an American rider who had competed with Armstrong on the junior national team and had finished third in the 1998 Tour. When she told Angela about Armstrong’s confession in the hospital room, Julich replied, “I’m not surprised.”

The two hated the doping, but could prove nothing. They did know, however, that Armstrong, Hamilton, Livingston and Axel Merckx were clients of Ferrari, then under investigation in Italy. Betsy Andreu considered that connection to be evidence enough for what was going on with the Postal Service team.

“If your husband comes out of a hotel room wearing only his underwear and there’s another woman inside the room in bed, do you need more proof to know that he’s cheating on you?” she said. “I’m not stupid, you know.”

She asked Haven Hamilton about doping and heard Tyler’s wife say, “I don’t want to hear about it.” Andreu dreaded bringing it up with Livingston’s wife, Becky, because Becky seemed too naive. The way she talked about Ferrari made it seem as if she really thought her husband would drive all the way to the doctor’s office in Bologna, Italy, to get stretched out or massaged. When Andreu told her that she once overheard Armstrong admit his drug use, Becky Livingston grew sheepish. “Wow,” she said in almost a whisper. “Wow.”

But Andreu was most annoyed by Kristin Armstrong, partly for her Gucci-wearing, Louis Vuitton–toting, condescending snobbery, but mostly because she so casually accepted the doping. “It was kind of like a necessary evil,” Kristin Armstrong told her when Andreu asked her about EPO.

Just the thought of EPO made Andreu upset. In early 1999, she recalled, she was at dinner in Nice with the Armstrongs and Livingstons when Pepe Martí, the trainer/drug courier, arrived late. He had driven from Spain, crossing the border at night, to deliver EPO to Armstrong. As Armstrong took the drug from Martí, he said, “Liquid gold!”

Weeks later, Betsy and Frankie Andreu drove to the Milan-San Remo race with the Armstrongs. They made an unusual pit stop in a parking lot of an Agip gas station just off the highway, on the outskirts of Milan, so Armstrong could meet Ferrari in a camper van parked in the lot.

Betsy asked Armstrong, “Why are we stopping here? Isn’t it weird that you’re seeing a doctor in a parking lot?”

“It’s so the fucking press doesn’t hound him,” Lance said, referring to reporters who wanted to ask Ferrari about his involvement in doping riders.

Waiting for Armstrong that day, Betsy Andreu said, felt like she had fallen into a spy movie. An hour or so later, Armstrong bounded out of the doctor’s camper, saying, “My numbers are great!” Back on the highway, Armstrong told Frankie Andreu he would get better results himself if he weren’t too cheap to use Ferrari.

Frankie had told Betsy, “Sure I don’t want to spend the money, but I don’t want that shit in my body.” He told her about Ferrari’s fee, 10 to 20 percent of a rider’s salary, way too much for him. Armstrong had also been pressuring him to “get serious” about his training, which he took to mean he should use EPO regularly.

With all that in mind, Betsy Andreu had shown up at the very end of the 1999 Tour de France on a mission to find out what drugs her husband had taken to climb so fast during the mountain stages. Their first time alone was the night of the Postal team’s lavish post-Tour celebration party, held on the banks of Paris’s Seine River, inside the Musée d’Orsay. She wanted to talk about the doping. He didn’t. He begged her to shake Armstrong’s hand and congratulate him on the victory. She wouldn’t.

“I want to know what in the hell you did,” she said. “Why did you climb the way you did? There’s no way that Lance won this thing clean.”

“Please go shake his hand, Betsy, please.”

“No.”

“Please, for me?”

“No. Get it through your head—I’m not doing it.”

It took a trip back to their home in Nice to finally get Frankie talking about his drug use. Betsy found a thermos and a thermometer in their refrigerator, telltale signs her husband had been using EPO.

“You don’t understand—I can’t even keep up if I don’t use EPO,” he said. “The speeds are so fast that I wouldn’t even make the time cut.”

“You can’t tell me that everybody is doing something, Frankie. You know that’s not true. But I don’t care what other people are doing. If you need to use EPO to stay on Postal, then I want you off of Lance’s team. Get off the team, Frankie; we don’t need to deal with this shit.”

Frankie Andreu remained on the team for the 2000 season, but told me he didn’t participate in the team’s new blood doping scheme. He said he rode the Tour clean. His contract was not renewed. He would never again compete in the sport.

For Postal Service’s top riders—Armstrong, Hamilton and Livingston—duplicity and secrecy were part of the game they played with the public. What began as an innocent love of riding bicycles became a life of code words, clandestine meetings and furtive conversations. They received their drug cocktails in white paper bags, like packed lunches, and each had a secret, presumably untraceable cell phone, which they used to discuss their doping and plans to avoid drug testers. To avoid being heard talking about doping, they often referred to EPO as “Edgar Allan Poe,” or just “Poe.” They flew to races on Armstrong’s private plane, to avoid nosy airport security agents.

Once, on a training ride in Girona, Vaughters heard Armstrong say into his cell phone, “I had an ice cream with sprinkles.”

“Who was that?” Vaughters asked.

“None of your business,” came the reply.

To Vaughters, exchanges like that made it evident that Armstrong enjoyed “the cloak and dagger” part of doping. It was just another way of competing.