Cycle of Lies: The Fall of Lance Armstrong (21 page)

CHAPTER 16

T
yler Hamilton had created a good life for himself. He and his wife, Haven, lived in a palatial house set on the edge of a canyon in Boulder, Colorado. The home’s rear windows framed a breathtaking landscape of rolling hills covered with evergreens reaching to the snow-capped mountains of the Continental Divide.

In the living room, his Olympic gold medal hung around the neck of a wooden moose with a grin on its face. Near the moose, there was a box containing the ashes of his dog, Tugboat, a lock of the retriever’s pale tail affixed to the lid. Two months after Hamilton tested positive for blood doping with someone else’s blood, he said, “This is the lowest point of my whole life. I could lose all of this.”

While the Postal Service team geared up for Armstrong’s push to win a record seventh Tour before retiring, Hamilton fought to get his good name back. He insisted he would never have transfused someone else’s blood. He told me it was a ridiculous notion because he was afraid of getting AIDS and spreading the disease to his wife.

Haven Hamilton, in a blog posted on the Web site www.believetyler.org shortly after her husband’s positive test, called the result a mistake. She said both of them had an aversion to transfusions after Tugboat’s experience before the Olympics that summer. Internal bleeding caused the dog to lose more than half of his blood, and the second of two transfusions left Tugboat paralyzed on one side of his face before he finally died.

“With the dangers of transfusing blood so fresh in our minds, it is ridiculous to think Tyler would consider taking another person’s blood,” she wrote.

Part of what Tyler Hamilton said was true. He hadn’t used someone’s blood, he’d used his own, but Fuentes or someone in the doctor’s office had mixed up the blood bags. Compared with the Postal Service program, it seemed like an organization run by the Keystone Cops.

Armstrong demanded the best and Postal had given the team the money to provide it. Riders were monitored by doctors who were experts in doping, beginning with del Moral and Ferrari. The team’s cyclists also flew to Belgium to Dr. Dag Van Elsland—a doping control officer in the Flemish region during the 1990s through 2004—so he could remove their blood and store it.

The team had lucrative sponsorship contracts, and, according to Landis, generated the necessary cash to pay for the doping regimens by selling bikes.

He learned about the bikes-for-cash deal in 2004. In March that year, his bike frame snapped just as he was in position to win a stage of an eight-day race in France. When he asked Bruyneel for a new bike, Bruyneel told him the team didn’t have enough money to outfit riders with new equipment. Landis wondered why riders didn’t get new equipment on a consistent basis, when Armstrong was able to ride on a private jet.

Incredulous, Landis called several sponsors, asking how much equipment they provided because the equipment they used was either not enough to go around to all the riders, or was badly worn. When he called Trek, the bicycle company told him that the team should have enough bikes and components for 120 new bikes a year. In 2004 alone, then, Landis figured that 60 bikes had gone missing. At maybe $3,000 each, that would generate $180,000 in cash. He had an epiphany:
So, that’s how the team pays for its doping.
He discovered that the sponsors were, in a very roundabout manner, paying for the team’s drugs.

Bruyneel was furious when he learned of Landis’s calls. Landis had gone over the manager’s head. He had asked too many questions. By making sponsors wonder where their equipment was going if not to the team, Landis had come very close to breaching the unspoken code of silence that protected cycling’s doping programs from the outside world.

To punish him for not being a good, quiet soldier, at that year’s Tour Bruyneel and Armstrong dumped one of Landis’s blood bags down the toilet. Despite that, Landis helped Armstrong win his sixth Tour de France. But he never rode for Postal Service again.

While Hamilton was entrenched in a two-year legal battle with USADA, Landis took his spot with the Phonak team. He had finally become the lead rider he thought he deserved to be.

But Phonak did not have a safe, team-run doping program; Hamilton’s use of the Spanish doping doctor Fuentes had proven that. Landis, however, didn’t care. He thought he could be the exception to the many expatriate Postal riders who had left Armstrong’s side only to become mired in mediocrity or, worse, test positive. Landis thought he could win the Tour clean.

An early backer was the Saris Cycling Group, the company that manufactured the electronic device many riders used on their bikes to measure their power output. To help Landis navigate the cycling world without the riches and savvy of the Postal Service team, Saris hired Allen Lim, a Ph.D. student in exercise science at the University of Colorado in Boulder, to work with him as a physiologist.

Lim, a former competitive bike racer, had used Saris’s power meter in his doctoral research and was eager to transfer his academic work into on-the-road experience. Now he could analyze the power profiles and energy expenditure of one of the world’s great cyclists throughout the three weeks of the Tour. To his knowledge, no one had ever done that before.

Lim, a self-described “nerdy, scrawny Chinese kid from the Philippines,” had immigrated to Los Angeles with his parents just before he turned two. As he pursued the education that the U.S. provided, he endured two tragedies. His father died after choking during a meal. A very close friend, while visiting Brazil, was raped, and returned to Boulder with a cocaine addiction.

Lim first spoke to Landis in depth about racing in January 2005 when they met at Landis’s home in Temecula, California.

Landis asked Lim a question.

“What do you think about my chances in the Tour this year?” he said.

“Um, well, you know, based on what you did last year and your performance, and now you’re the captain . . .” Caught off-guard by the question, Lim paused to collect his thoughts. He felt Landis staring through him. “It would be really amazing if you got top five at the Tour. That would be a good goal to shoot for.”

Landis snapped at him. “Fuck, dude, if you don’t fucking believe I’m going to win the fucking Tour de France, then just get the fuck out of here. Because I’m going to fucking win the Tour.”

Lim was shocked into silence. But Landis calmed down as quickly as he had exploded, one of the dramatic, out-of-left-field mood swings Lim would see many times. More calmly, Landis added, “Cuz, look, if we don’t train and work like we’re going to win the Tour, then we’re never going to learn how to win the Tour.”

“OK, OK,” Lim said, “I think you can win the Tour.”

“Good, dude, that’s what I wanted to hear.”

The Mennonite church had asked the young Landis to accept the church’s teachings on faith alone, and he had refused. But now, unwittingly, Landis had practiced what his church had preached so long ago. He’d asked Allen Lim to
just fucking believe
.

The first week of May 2005—two months before the Tour de France—Lim flew to Girona to begin working with Landis. They lived together and became a tight-knit team. Early on, though, Landis asked Lim, “Do you think altitude training can work as well as blood doping?”

Lim thought Landis had always ridden clean. But the question made him curious.
Why would Landis care about finding a method that would be “as good as blood doping”? Had he blood-doped before?

In time, Landis admitted to Lim that he took part in Postal Service’s doping program. Landis told him how Armstrong had persuaded him. On a training ride, Landis could barely keep up with Armstrong, prompting Armstrong to say, “You don’t have to suffer like you do. I can help take your pain away.”

After telling the story, Landis turned to Lim.

“Lance has all these guys looking after his program,” he said. “All I have is you.”

Until then, Lim had no real idea of doping’s presence in cycling. Now he’d heard Landis say that anyone who succeeded was probably dirty.

“There’s a system that’s in place, but I don’t need any of it,” Landis said. “I’m better than that, I don’t need the stuff. I can win clean.”

Landis told Lim about an irate Bruyneel flushing his blood down a toilet at the 2004 Tour to get back at Landis for his constant insubordination. Landis had still finished a respectable 23rd. Lim was encouraged that Landis had done so well without doping.

Landis also told Lim about the time the team doctor gave him a special pill. After ingesting it, he had a great ride. So when the doctor gave him another one of those pills the next day, Landis kept it without ingesting it. He had a brilliant idea. He would bring the pill home and have its ingredients identified. He would then make the pills himself. He would sell the powerful stuff. He would make millions of dollars and probably win the Tour every year for the rest of his life.

But the testing turned up only one ingredient. Sugar. The pill was a placebo.

Landis told Lim he wasn’t sure what had made him more upset—that he had been given a sugar pill when a real doping product could have helped him win more money, or that he couldn’t reproduce the pill and become even richer.

In Landis’s crazy stories, Lim tried to find a positive lining. He was encouraged that Landis had been truthful about his experience on Armstrong’s team. He also was happy to hear Landis asking questions about legal, natural methods that could improve his performance, even if he always seemed to return to doping.

On May 26, Landis asked “the Chinaman”—his crude nickname for the physiologist—to drive him the 275 miles from Girona to Valencia for an appointment. Lim, who had never been to Europe until that month, was gung ho. “Oh, great, we’re going to Valencia!” he said. “Valencia, I’ve never been to Valencia before. Do they really have oranges down there? Ha, ha!”

In Valencia, Lim saw only a small sports clinic. Landis had him park in an adjacent lot and wait. In less than an hour, Landis reappeared with a Band-Aid in the crook of an arm. Lim didn’t like the looks of it.

“What’s that, what the hell is going on?” Lim asked.

A nervous and fearful Landis paused. Lim could tell he felt guilty about something.

A minute later, Landis admitted that he had visited del Moral, the former Postal Service doctor, and had his blood withdrawn and stored in del Moral’s clinic for future use at the Tour.

The plan was for Landis to pick up the blood just before the Tour and take it to Grenoble, France, where his father-in-law, David Witt, would store it until the Tour went through town. There, the blood would be reinfused into Landis, the day before the race headed into the Alps. The extra blood would give him a huge boost.

Landis told Lim the blood doping was a last-minute idea. He had planned to ride that Tour without drugs or extra blood, but there was too much at stake to race without doping. He blamed it on Armstrong.

He followed up with a three-hour explanation of why he needed to dope to beat Armstrong.

Armstrong’s doping had begun an arms race among top-level riders in Europe, Landis said. Every team knew Armstrong took a cornucopia of drugs to boost his endurance and dull his pain. They also knew he was blood-doping. Landis said he had a responsibility to himself and to the team to level the playing field, to wipe out Armstrong’s medical edge.

Still, Lim and Landis debated whether doping was necessary. Lim said Landis’s physiology was so superior that, with his talent, he could win clean and shouldn’t stoop to the Postal Service team’s level and cheat.

The problem with Lim’s argument was the word “cheat.” Professional cyclists believed that doping was not cheating as long as everyone did it. And everyone did it, in part because Lance Armstrong did it so well.

To back up his argument, Landis told Lim the history of Armstrong’s doping for Postal Service, as he knew it. Armstrong had doped in 1999 to win the Tour for the first time, and he’d never stopped. Landis said it was unfair to riders like him who were exceptional naturally.

Maybe because of all the sermons Landis had heard in his church—twice on Sundays, once during the week—he often came off as a charismatic preacher. He likened his need to dope to a religious battle waged against Armstrong. While he was the Christian saint, Armstrong and Bruyneel were devils tempting riders into evil.

“Sometimes to beat the devil, you have to drink his blood,” Landis said.

With tears in his eyes, Landis told Lim how his father made him stand for hours in the sludge of their home’s septic tank, in sneakers, and shovel the stuff out. He said he had trained on his bike in the dead of night so his parents wouldn’t find out. Later, when he’d train or race in the daytime, he wore baggy sweatpants, because Mennonites thought it immoral for a man to show his legs.

Landis believed that such a rider, someone who had grown up so simply, with so little, deserved a chance to beat the great cheater, Armstrong. He believed cycling’s pandemic of doping could be traced to the Postal Service team’s band of Mafia-esque enablers—teammates, officials and corporate sponsors who turned a blind eye to it all.

“Hey, Al, you’re not changing this, and I’m not changing this,” Landis said on the car ride from Valencia back to Girona. He believed it was his moral duty to do the immoral thing and cheat if cheating was what it took to beat the really immoral guys whom Armstrong led.

Lim walked away with his head spinning. He wanted to fly home immediately, but was worried about what would happen if he left Landis alone. He believed that Landis had been talking so irrationally about doping that he might try something dangerous to gain an edge.

For advice on what to do next, Lim e-mailed Prentice Steffen, a former Postal Service doctor who had worked with Landis on the Mercury team from 1998 to 2001. He knew Steffen had claimed that the Postal Service team had replaced him with a Spanish doctor because the team wanted to start a doping program. Lim thought that Landis and Steffen could work together to out Armstrong as a doper. He also looked for help from the doctor on how to deal with Landis’s erratic behavior.