Cycle of Lies: The Fall of Lance Armstrong (22 page)

Steffen told Lim that Landis didn’t have to dope to level the playing field. He had another option: File suit against Armstrong in federal court. The doctor had tried to convince others connected to the team—Hamilton, O’Reilly—to join him as plaintiffs in a federal whistle-blower lawsuit. He had contacted a San Francisco lawyer who specializes in those suits, which are filed under the False Claims Act, giving citizens the right and financial incentive to bring suits on the government’s behalf.

Steffen said the suit would claim that Armstrong and the team’s management company, Tailwind Sports, were aware of the doping when they entered into a sponsorship agreement with the United States Postal Service. That knowledge of the doping constituted fraud, the suit would say. But Steffen needed someone with firsthand knowledge to join him.

When Lim spoke to Landis about the whistle-blower lawsuit, Landis said, “That’s the stupidest thing I ever heard.”

Lim also asked Steffen about Landis’s emotional well-being. Landis was still depressed, as he was in 2002 when he joined the Postal Service team and was living with David Zabriskie. His instability made Lim nervous.

He worried that Landis, who seemed to be struggling with an inexplicable sadness, might hurt himself. “Dude, I think Floyd’s crazy,” Lim said. “I think he needs real professional help.” To Steffen, that was old news. He told Lim that other Mercury staffers once had a rolling pool as to when Landis might kill himself.

Landis woke up after 4 p.m. following the Valencia-Girona blood doping trip, still groggy from the daylong nap. At Lim’s urging, he talked about his depression. He showed Lim a neurophysiology textbook and told him that reading about the brain was helpful in understanding his extreme emotional highs and lows.

“Basically, you’re here to keep me alive,” Landis said. It was a joke, but Lim was terrified.

The next day, Landis trained on his bike while Lim monitored his power output. Less than twenty-four hours after having had a bag of blood withdrawn, Landis should have been weak. Instead, he put up fantastic numbers that, in Lim’s estimation, showed he was a strong enough rider that he didn’t need those extra red blood cells anyway.

Several days later, though, Lim walked into their apartment, opened the kitchen door and saw Landis injecting himself with EPO. Lim had never seen the act performed.

“I’m sorry,” Lim said. “I can’t be a part of this. I’m leaving.”

“No, stay,” Landis said. “Look, if I’m deciding to dope, what you do for me is still the most important thing. I still cannot do this without you.”

He wanted Lim to believe that a rider’s training meant more than his doping, that doping was a small part of the preparation. The difference was, Landis said, Armstrong had ten times as many people helping him get ready for the Tour.

“If you leave, it would mean that I have nothing,” he said.

Despite Landis’s plea, Lim flew home the next day. It was all too weird and creepy. He wanted to tell USADA the story, about Landis, Armstrong and the whole sport. But Landis scared him, and he suspected that no one at the antidoping agency would be brave enough to investigate doping allegations involving one of the nation’s most revered athletes. He had seen Armstrong publicly crush people—Bassons, Simeoni, O’Reilly, Walsh—who dared speak out about his doping.

So Lim told no one what he had learned.

Back in Boulder, Lim was angry at Landis, distraught over his father’s death and his mother’s resulting depression and heartbroken by his close friend’s cocaine addiction. Though he had earned his Ph.D., Lim was forced to borrow money from family and friends for rent, not exactly the proper ending to the job of his dreams.

Then a check for $7,000 arrived in the mail. It came from Amber Landis, the rider’s wife. Lim felt torn. It wasn’t much money; just a good-faith gesture by Landis. But it got Lim thinking.

The chance to train a world-class cyclist didn’t come along often for an immigrant kid like Lim. He also felt guilty about leaving Landis.
What if something bad happened to him because I wasn’t there to watch over him?
Already, Lim felt terrible that his close friend who was raped had turned to drugs in his absence.

So he cashed the check, paid some bills and bought an airplane ticket to Europe. Less than two weeks after he’d left, he returned to Girona. It was mid-June, with just a few weeks to go before the 2005 Tour. Landis was stranger than ever. One moment he was edgy and upset, the next charismatic, sincere and cracking jokes.

“He was now clearly exhibiting signs of someone with bipolar disorder,” Lim told me. “Suddenly, my concerns had little to do with doping.” It was as if Landis needed to win the Tour to stay alive.

This time, instead of running away, Lim burrowed in. He wanted to know everything that Landis was up to. Landis told him: While Lim was in Colorado, Landis had decided to become a blood doping expert. He joked that “Dr. Landis” would withdraw blood from himself and do it better than any MD ever had.

Landis said he needed to become an expert because he had doubts about using the blood he had stored with del Moral.

“I can’t believe I just made a deal with this guy who is still probably working for Lance,” he told Lim. “Stupid, stupid.”

He worried that del Moral might tell Armstrong about his plan and that Armstrong would do something to subvert it. So he decided that he would return to del Moral’s clinic and have the doctor reinfuse him right then and there. After learning that Levi Leipheimer, another American who had ridden on the Postal Service team, also had deposited a bag of blood with del Moral, Landis convinced him to retrieve his blood bag as well.

Before making the trip to del Moral, Landis removed an entire bag of blood from his body without anybody’s help. He would need it to replace the blood he’d stored with del Moral.

Lim walked in while Landis was finishing up the transfusion, and watched him panic as he tried to figure out where to store the blood he had just removed. He couldn’t keep his blood bag in the refrigerator. Landis’s wife and young stepdaughter were arriving from the United States the next day. So Landis bought a cooler, an electronic thermometer, ice and a box of orange juice. He cut the top off the juice carton, slipped the bag of blood inside, then placed the carton into the cooler with ice. He also put the thermometer inside a Ziploc bag and into the cooler. Now his replacement bag for the del Moral blood bag was good and ready.

The presence of Landis’s family only added to the household stress. Days and nights were filled with his shouting matches with his wife. At those moments, Lim took their elementary-school-age daughter, little Ryan Landis, for walks in town. Lim’s mantra became “Keep my mouth shut, don’t piss Floyd off, get through the Tour and be done with it.”

Landis soon took on a new project: He would help Leipheimer, who was riding for the German Gerolsteiner team, blood-dope for the Tour. The two of them would undergo blood transfusions together when the Tour passed through Montpellier, France. Instead of blood-doping in Grenoble for a boost in the Alps with the blood from del Moral, Landis had opted for Montpellier and a boost in the Pyrenees using the blood he had taken from himself.

So Landis and Leipheimer became partners in blood doping, but without anywhere near the Armstrong level of sophistication.

About ten days before the Tour started, Lim drove them to Montpellier. They were greeted by Landis’s in-laws, David and Rose Witt, and David was part of the team that would carry out the plan. While Lim went for a walk with Landis’s mother-in-law, the other men went to work. “Dr. Landis” took 500 ccs of blood—a single bag—from Leipheimer. When Lim returned, Landis placed Leipheimer’s blood bag inside an orange juice container, then put the container in a cooler packed with ice. Leipheimer’s blood bag would then be stored in the hotel room’s mini-fridge. Landis’s in-laws would drive to Girona to pick up the blood that Landis had removed from himself and drive back to Montpellier to store it alongside Leipheimer’s. Landis’s grand plan to dope at the Tour was finally falling into place.

But Landis had forgotten one important item: a Ziploc bag for a thermometer. They needed it because the thermometer was electronic and not waterproof, and it needed to stay dry. Lim drove his two friends to store after store as Landis and Leipheimer asked for Ziploc bags in bad French accents that sounded like
The
Pink Panther
’s Inspector Clouseau.

“Est-ce que vous avez un sachet du Ziploc? Ziploc sac? Sac du Ziploc? Avez-vous?”
They became so desperate that once, stuck in traffic, Leipheimer rolled down the car window to stop a passerby. “
Excusez-moi, où est une supermarché? Je cherche pour un sachet Ziploc
.” As Lim giggled, he realized that, like his companions, he was veering into madness. They found the Ziploc and drove back to Girona that night.

Three days later, Landis flew to Valencia to reclaim the blood that he had deposited with del Moral. His plan went awry. Lim saw him afterward and quickly noticed that Landis looked pale and sickly. Landis’s temperature soared. He was nauseated. He and Lim suspected that the blood transfusion was the culprit and that the blood had gone bad. They both knew the worst-case scenario: Landis could die.

“We need you to get to an ER,” Lim said. “A doctor needs to look at you—and now!”

Landis refused. He didn’t want anything to thwart his Tour chances, and especially didn’t want the news coming out that blood doping had possibly made him ill. The race was one week away.

After two long days had passed, Landis recovered. But he knew he was in trouble. With the bad blood in him, his hematocrit level had plummeted, meaning he would start the Tour at a deficit. He had one choice—and that was to boost his level back to normal by using the blood that was supposed to dope him for the Tour. His in-laws hadn’t taken it to Montpellier yet.

Landis took that blood bag and disappeared into his room alone. He left the door ajar. Lim walked past the room to see Landis crouched in a corner with the blood bag taped to a wall and a needle in his arm. His blood was going back where it came from.

Now, though, he had zero bags of blood to use at the Tour. Dr. Landis was having a tough time—both of his plans to blood-dope at the Tour had failed.

The first aborted attempt had been with del Moral, when Landis balked because of the doctor’s relationship with Armstrong. He had reinfused that blood and gotten sick. The second attempt backfired because Landis needed new blood in him after the bad del Moral blood bag had made him so weak. Landis used that second bag of blood to boost his red blood cell count even before the Tour began.

Oddly, Landis seemed happier. Later that morning after his transfusion, he pounded out his workout in the mud and rain, and came to a stop alongside a deep canyon overlooking farms and vineyards. As Lim watched, Landis took off his clothes, piece by piece, and wadded them all into a ball that he tossed into the canyon.

There he stood, naked, and let out a series of screams so primal they raised the hair on Lim’s arms.

“How’d Grenoble work out for you?” Armstrong said.

During the 2005 Tour’s first mountain stage—after the Tour had passed through Grenoble—Armstrong rode alongside Landis to drop a hint that, yes, he knew of Landis’s initial plan to blood-dope in Grenoble. Landis surmised that del Moral had told him.

Now it all fit together. Landis was so paranoid that he thought Armstrong might have convinced del Moral to mishandle Landis’s blood.

“Holy shit, remember when I got sick?” he told Lim at a stage finish. “What if I got sick because Lance fucked with my blood?”

Would Armstrong do anything to physically harm Landis? Lim didn’t know, but believed Landis believed it. In late 2013, Landis told me he had reacted badly just once after receiving blood from del Moral, but that he didn’t know why. For Lim, though, the possibility of Armstrong’s having a hand in that incident confirmed his opinion of him: Landis considered Armstrong the enemy.

A few days later, Lim bumped into Vaughters, who was working as a guide for a bike tour company. Landis had been talking to Vaughters about taking a job with Vaughters’s new development team, called TIAA-CREF. Lim was relieved to see a familiar face, someone he could talk to.

“Jonathan, this sport is a fucking mess,” he said. “Let me just tell you what happened to me in the last two weeks.”

Vaughters wanted to know if the sport had cleaned up since 2002, when he retired from racing in Europe. Lim told him, “Not a chance—it’s even worse.”

“It’s horrible; it’s like a nuclear arms race, but the two superpowers can’t control it anymore. Doping is so commonplace that individual riders are like kids making their own atomic bombs. They are like little terrorists, with no formal training, but with access to plutonium.”

Lim told Vaughters many stories that Landis had told him about doping on the Postal team—how the doping had grown complex during Landis’s time there.

He said that Armstrong’s team used a motorcycle courier—and sometimes their team chef—to transport blood to riders. The blood was kept cold by the motorcycle’s refrigerated panniers, and Landis had photos of them.

Lim said the doping culture was so competitive that Landis believed Armstrong’s line—“How’d Grenoble work out for you?”—meant Armstrong knew Landis had received tainted blood.

Vaughters thought, “This is crazy.”

Two days after the Tour, Vaughters (“Cyclevaughters”) sent an AOL instant message to Frankie Andreu (“Fdreu”). Vaughters was relaying to Andreu what Lim had told him.

It began a string of eighty-three messages, mostly about Armstrong and the Postal Service squad, some specifically addressing the doping.

CYCLEVAUGHTERS:
anyhow, i never can quite figure out why I don’t just play along with the lance crowd—i mean shit it would make my life easier, eh? it’s not like I never played with the hotsauce, eh?

FDREU:
I play along, my wife does not, and Lance hates us both

FDREU:
it’s a no win situation, you know how he is. Once you leave the team or do something wrong, you are forever banned