Cycle of Lies: The Fall of Lance Armstrong (23 page)

Vaughters wrote that when he went to the Crédit Agricole team, he saw that not “all the teams got 25 injections every day” and said he “felt guilty” for what he had done on Postal Service. On Crédit Agricole, he said, riders received no injections. He wrote, “So, I realized lance was full of shit when he’d say everyone was doing it.”

Vaughters and Andreu commented on Hincapie’s unexpected success in the mountains at that 2005 Tour. He was a specialist at one-day classic races. Yet he had won the Tour’s hardest stage. It was a six-mountain odyssey that only the best climbers handled at great speeds. Hincapie’s victory was the perfect example of how blood-doping changed the sport. That victory was as improbable as a 100-meter sprinter winning a marathon.

FDREU:
explain that, classics to climber

CYCLEVAUGHTERS:
i don’t know—i want to trust George

CYCLEVAUGHTERS:
but the thing is on that team, you think it’s normal

Vaughters told Andreu that Armstrong and Bruyneel “dumped Floyd’s rest day blood refill down the toilet in front of him in last yrs tour to make him ride bad,” and that Landis had photos of the refrigerated panniers on the motorcycle that transported riders’ blood to the Tour.

FDREU:
crazy! It’s just keep going to new levels

CYCLEVAUGHTERS:
yeah, its complicated, but with enough money you can do it.

Vaughters told Andreu that he could “explain the whole way lance dupes everyone, that it’s very complex how they avoid all the controls now, but it’s not any new drug or anything, just the resources and planning to pull off a well devised plan.” He repeated what Lim had told him: that riders on Armstrong’s team in 2004 had their blood removed before the Dauphiné, which is held in June. A man on a motorcycle would bring them the blood on the Tour’s rest day. They would refuel and take off together on the next mountain stage.

FDREU:
I know, I get tired of hearing how great Lance is, what a super person, etc. It’s crazy and it’s hard to not just tell people he is a cheat and asshole

Landis finished ninth in that 2005 Tour without blood-doping—an amazing feat. Leipheimer, who had transfused blood with Landis’s help during the race, finished sixth. Collectively, American riders had their best showing in years.

But, as always, Armstrong was the main attraction. He had won a record seventh Tour de France in the fastest average time in history—26.8 miles an hour. He had a rock star girlfriend in Sheryl Crow. His cell phone’s contact list included Bill Clinton and U2’s Bono.

His foundation, which would become known as Livestrong, was booming. What started out as just a bicycle ride in Austin for nearly three thousand people had become a brilliant story of philanthropic branding. From 2002 to 2005, the foundation’s revenue grew nearly eight times, propelled to over $63 million. By the time Armstrong won that final Tour, the foundation had sold nearly 53 million little yellow Livestrong wristbands at a dollar each. Donations rose by about $10 million in the year after the bracelets were introduced.

Many people said the bracelet meant more than a connection with Armstrong. Buddy Boren, a sixty-one-year-old Dallas cyclist and cancer survivor, wore his bracelet in 2005 as he cycled the perimeter of Texas to raise money for cancer. “People say, I see you’re wearing your Lance Armstrong bracelet,” he told the
Dallas Morning News
. “I say, ‘It’s not just a Lance Armstrong bracelet.’ I tell them it’s a Livestrong bracelet—and I’m going to live my life strong.”

Each year, Nike gave the foundation $7.5 million, including $2.5 million specifically to Armstrong for his endorsement of its products. In 2005, Nike branched out from marketing just the Livestrong bracelets to selling a line of Livestrong gear—jerseys, shorts, vests and other items marking the date Armstrong was diagnosed with cancer, 10/2. Nike called it “his carpe diem day, a day to overcome adversity and reaffirm life.”

Stores were requesting so much Livestrong gear from Nike that the company was worried that its other departments—like Nike basketball and Nike running—would suffer because stores wanted to sell Armstrong’s gear rather than merchandise from Nike’s other lines.

In its first eight years, Livestrong raised $85 million for cancer research, cancer awareness and programs to help people with the disease navigate the cancer-treatment bureaucracy. It had supplied more than $15 million in grants.

At the 2004 Ride for the Roses, 6,500 cyclists raised $6 million for the foundation in a day. Other Livestrong athletic events—more bike races, run/walk events and triathlons—popped up across the nation. The watchdog group Charity Navigator gave the organization its highest rating, four stars.

For many people, the money raised was the least of Armstrong’s impact on the cancer community. Cancer once came with a stigma. It was the “C-word” because people were afraid to even say it out loud. Armstrong and Livestrong helped change that. He made it fashionable to wear a yellow wristband identifying you as part of a club of cancer survivors or those affected by a loved one’s battle. Presidential candidate John Kerry even wore one on his campaign trail, and photos spread of that little yellow bracelet hanging from his wrist. Armstrong was the leader of the “Livestrong Army,” bringing together people from all over the world.

He was a member of the President’s Cancer Panel. Though he’d hated public speaking at first and was raw at it, he agreed to be trained by the best—including high-powered political consultant Mark McKinnon, a board member of Armstrong’s foundation. Armstrong became a polished orator. When he spoke, even powerful people listened. And, McKinnon said, “When he wanted to turn it on, he could be very good.” Armstrong toyed with running for governor of Texas.

Senators John Kerry and John McCain, both cancer survivors and influential lawmakers in Washington, listened to Armstrong’s impassioned speeches. The summer of Armstrong’s seventh Tour victory, the senators shared their survivor stories on Livestrong’s Web site.

“Lance Armstrong has been instrumental in demonstrating to people affected by cancer that fighting not just the disease but the fear and isolation is paramount,” McCain said. “When people realize they are not alone, they gain the strength to handle obstacles they face when their lives are affected by cancer. That sense of unity is a powerful tool.”

People in the cancer community read Armstrong’s autobiography,
It’s Not About the Bike
, and for some it became their bible, a handbook of hope and perseverance.

“I don’t think there’s anybody involved who would say the foundation would be what it is today if it wasn’t for Lance Armstrong,” McKinnon said. “But not just because Lance Armstrong gave us the equity and the interest. He put sweat equity into it. He put a lot of time and energy and thinking. And what Lance does well is drive an organization. He drove an organization like he drove the bike team.”

Armstrong’s involvement came with a personal touch as well. He visited cancer wards and children’s hospitals to hear people’s stories. He often was eager to call or e-mail a cancer patient if someone asked him to. “There’s not a whole lot of things more powerful than life,” McKinnon said. “He was telling people, you can live.”

One note sent to the foundation in 2005 came from a ten-year-old girl who had survived cancer. She said, “Thank you Lance for being strong. I was strong, too.”

His impact on cycling was unparalleled. The number of riders with official USA Cycling licenses rose 21 percent from 2001 to 2005. Trek Bicycle Corporation’s sales had doubled since 1998, the year it signed him. “If not for Lance, we wouldn’t be expanding our factory and we wouldn’t have new offices with carpeting and windows and a gym,” said Zap Espinoza, a company spokesman. Everything Armstrong had touched in the sport seemed to flourish. People called it the “Lance Effect.”

By the time he won his seventh Tour, he was one of the world’s megastars. To reach that status, he had survived not only cancer but years of scrutiny about the legitimacy of his athletic achievements.

The French government had failed to prove he used performance-enhancing drugs. He’d brushed off accusations by his former
soigneur
Emma O’Reilly. He’d emerged relatively unscathed from an investigative book by David Walsh and Pierre Ballester. Journalists had asked him repeatedly if he doped, and he’d always rebutted them with such conviction that it seemed impossible he was lying.

As Armstrong became more successful, he became even more defiant. On a July day in 2005, he stood atop the podium at the Tour de France after winning the race for an unimaginable seventh straight year. There he heard the cheers from the thousands of people lining both sides of Paris’s grand boulevard, the Champs-Élysées. Smiling alongside him were his children—five-year-old Luke and the three-year-old twins, Grace and Isabelle. The girls wore sunflower yellow dresses that matched the iridescently bright leader’s jersey worn by their father.

As he looked out onto the crowd, Armstrong said, “Finally, the last thing I’ll say to the people who don’t believe in cycling, the cynics and the skeptics, I’m sorry for you, I’m sorry that you can’t dream big. I’m sorry you don’t believe in miracles.

“But this is one hell of a race. This is a great sporting event and you should stand around and believe it. You should believe in these athletes, and you should believe in these people. I’ll be a fan of the Tour de France for as long as I live. And there are no secrets—this is a hard sporting event and hard work wins it. Vive Le Tour.”

It was over for Armstrong. He would retire from racing. There was nothing more to do. He had beaten the Eurobastards, the gendarmes, the trolls, the Alps, the Pyrenees. He had beaten them all.

Or so he thought.

CHAPTER 17

A
t a glance, nothing about Bob Hamman suggested he would become one of Armstrong’s greatest enemies. He wasn’t an incredible, volatile athlete—a Floyd Landis—driven by vengeance and envy. Nor was he a single-minded spitfire—a Betsy Andreu—motivated to expose what he saw as moral turpitude.

When Armstrong won his seventh and final Tour de France, Hamman was sixty-six years old, a portly, white-haired bridge champion. But he did have one thing in common with Landis and Andreu: He didn’t want to be cheated. In his case, he didn’t want Armstrong to cheat him out of millions of dollars.

Hamman and his Dallas-based insurance company, SCA Promotions, had entered into a contract in 2001 with Armstrong and Tailwind Sports, the company that managed the Postal Service/Discovery Channel cycling teams. SCA would pay Armstrong a bonus for winning his fourth, fifth and sixth Tours. The company paid $1.5 million for his fourth and $3 million for his fifth. But it balked at paying $5 million for his sixth.

SCA balked after Hamman read David Walsh’s book
L.A. Confidentiel
. He decided SCA wasn’t paying Armstrong a penny until he personally investigated Walsh’s claims. If Armstrong really did dope, Hamman felt that he didn’t need to pay him. News of Hamman’s withholding the bonus got out in the fall of 2004. Armstrong retaliated by doing what had become a habit: He filed a lawsuit.

Armstrong was outraged that someone would challenge him in front of the American public. Such attacks usually came from the French, or maybe from Brits like Walsh, but certainly not from a fellow Texan. Hamman’s office was in Dallas, just down the street from Armstrong’s boyhood home.

Bill Stapleton, Armstrong’s agent, went right to work. First, he hammered at Hamman’s credibility with a full-page ad in
Sports Business Journal
. It touted Armstrong’s Tour wins as an achievement that, “along with his inspirational story of cancer survivorship, has made his story transcend sport and culture.” The ad claimed that SCA didn’t live up to its contract and was trying to change “the rules when it is time to fulfill its obligation.”

Stapleton’s ad signaled to SCA that the fight would be dirty. Hamman’s son, Chris, told Hamman to back down, saying, “Their PR machine is too big.” But Bob Hamman wouldn’t quit. He wanted to keep his company’s $5 million, but he also wanted to stand up for his company’s integrity. Armstrong and Stapleton should have known Hamman was a fierce competitor—he was arguably the best bridge player in history, a twelve-time world champion, the Michael Jordan of a complex, challenging game mastered only by players who, in Hamman’s words, “hate their opponents and who want to win, win, win.”

SCA Promotions underwrote the risk companies took when they held special promotions and events, such as a million-dollar prize for a half-court basketball shot or a new car for a hole-in-one. SCA had accepted propositions of all kinds. Would a frog do a world-record jump? (The eventual outcome was no.) Could a farmer grow a pumpkin that weighed more than 1,000 pounds? (Outcome: yes. It grew to the size of a Volkswagen.) Could someone find a cockroach set loose in Houston bearing a numbered tag? (The roach disappeared forever.)

SCA also took on risks in sports. Could Ernie Els win the British Open when the bookmakers had the odds at 470-1? (SCA lost that one.) Could Armstrong win a fourth, fifth and sixth Tour in a row? (Hamman thought no. Wrong again.)

Though Hamman had heard the doping accusations that followed Armstrong, he sold Tailwind Sports the $420,000 insurance contract—a legal way of gambling, really—because he believed no cancer survivor would use drugs after nearly dying. It was an educated guess by a man who spent much of his life calculating other people’s moves.

Hamman had dropped out of college to compete in professional bridge, a game he had played since the age of six or seven. He has won more than fifty North American championships and was the top-ranked player in the world for twenty straight years, until 2004.

He told me it angered him that he had made the Armstrong deal based on the fundamental premise that cycling would enforce its rules. He had no idea that Armstrong and Stapleton were so cozy with the sport’s ruling body, the UCI.

Throughout Armstrong’s reign, Stapleton frequently made trips to the UCI’s headquarters in Switzerland to visit Hein Verbruggen, the UCI president from 1991 to 2005. Part of Stapleton’s dealings with Verbruggen focused on money. In 2006, Stapleton told me that Armstrong had donated $100,000 to the UCI’s antidoping program. Later, he said he’d gotten the numbers mixed up, that the donation was only $25,000. Pat McQuaid, Verbruggen’s successor, said in 2006 that he couldn’t remember any donation from Armstrong.

It all mystified Sylvia Schenk. Once president of the German Cycling Federation and a former member of the UCI management committee, Schenk told me in 2005 that the Armstrong donation was more like $500,000 and that it smacked of impropriety. Neither Verbruggen nor McQuaid ever explained to Schenk or the rest of the management committee the purpose for that donation, or how the UCI used that money. “It was kept secret,” she told me. “Armstrong was always getting special treatment from the UCI. How much, we will never know because Hein Verbruggen and Pat McQuaid wouldn’t address it.”

Years later, McQuaid said that in 2002 Armstrong and his wife had given a personal check for $25,000 to the UCI and that Stapleton’s company sent $100,000 to the cycling union in 2005. The money was used to purchase the UCI’s blood analysis machine to help in the fight against doping.

Those donations—whenever they were made and however much they were for—were only a part of the financial ties Armstrong and USA Cycling had with Verbruggen and the UCI. For example, part of Verbruggen’s financial portfolio was managed by the investment bank owned by Thomas Weisel, the same man who owned Armstrong’s cycling team. The broker on the account was Jim Ochowicz, Armstrong’s former team manager and close friend, and the president of USA Cycling’s board of directors from 2002 to 2006. Travis Tygart of USADA said those ties “stink to high heaven” because of the conflicts of interest.

For his part, Hamman learned about those donations only during the arbitration of Armstrong’s lawsuit.

Hamman’s first problem had been finding a lawyer. Dallas loves its sports heroes: its Cowboys, its high school football players and, yes, Lance Armstrong, a Texan once considered an outsider by classmates who called him “a sissy who wears tights.” Hamman said several law firms turned him down because they didn’t want to be seen attacking the hometown hero Armstrong.

So Hamman ended up at Jeff Tillotson’s door. Tillotson, a partner at Lynn Tillotson Pinker & Cox, was initially reluctant, but felt obliged to take the case because no one else wanted it. His mother had survived lymphoma and was part of Armstrong’s cheering section. When she learned her son was representing Hamman, she said, “I’m so embarrassed. I read his book and it motivated me to survive.” It got worse for Tillotson.

“As soon as we were publicly identified,” the lawyer told me, “I probably got a hundred fifty e-mails within the first few days, saying you’re a shithead, you’re a liar, I hope your firm goes under.”

As part of his case strategy, Tillotson wanted the public to know the doping accusations in the Walsh-Ballester book. He sent the book to U.S. publishers and offered his legal services for free if Armstrong sued for libel after the book was published in the United States. But there were no takers.

Then came a huge break. On August 23, 2005—three days after Armstrong spent the day riding bikes with George W. Bush on the president’s Texas ranch—the influential French sports newspaper
L’Equipe
ran a big headline across its front page: “LE MENSONGE ARMSTRONG” (“THE ARMSTRONG LIE”).

The story claimed that Armstrong’s remaining backup urine samples from the 1999 Tour had been retroactively tested for EPO. Six came back positive for the banned endurance-boosting drug. “The extraordinary champion, the escape from cancer, has become a legend by means of a lie,” wrote Damien Ressiot, the
L’Equipe
reporter.

Ressiot landed his scoop by figuring out which of the tested urine samples were Armstrong’s. (Samples are identified only by numbers.) By antidoping rules, however, the six positives for EPO were not official because the tests had been conducted for research purposes only.

Quickly, Armstrong claimed that the scientists had not followed proper testing procedures and, because of that, the test results could not be trusted. No, he had not tested positive six times, he said, though
L’Equipe
and the lab insisted that he did. Armstrong said he was innocent.

Several cycling and Olympic officials defended Armstrong. Gerard Bisceglia, USA Cycling’s chief executive, called
L’Equipe
’s accusations “preposterous” because only Armstrong’s backup samples had been tested. For a test to be officially positive, both the athlete’s initial and backup sample must test positive. Sergey Bubka, chairman of the athletes’ commission of the International Olympic Committee, called for the French lab to be suspended because it had breached antidoping rules.

Broken rules or not, the damage to Armstrong was already done. Dick Pound, the head of the World Anti-Doping Agency, publicly said the case was finally “not a he said-she said scenario” and that scientific research proved something was awry with Armstrong’s urine samples. “Unless the documents are forgeries or manipulations of them, it’s a case that has to be answered.”

Pound said he heard from Armstrong first in a series of e-mails, one with the word
Livestrong
written three times in capital letters and underlined, in the signature section of the note. Then Pound said he received what he called a “Kafkaesque phone call” from Armstrong, in which Armstrong told him again and again, “I love my sport.” The WADA boss took that to mean Armstrong would fight his innocence to the end, no matter what the cost, so Pound had better lay off him. After that call, without any warning, Armstrong sent a letter to the president of the IOC asking that Pound be expelled from the organization because he was “a recidivist violator of ethical standards.”

Some other officials took the EPO positives as proof that Armstrong had cheated. Tour director Jean-Marie Leblanc, the same man who said Armstrong had saved the sport by winning the 1999 Tour of Redemption, said
L’Equipe
’s allegations were the first “proven scientific facts” that Armstrong had doped.

“He owes explanations to us, to everyone who followed the Tour,” Leblanc said. “Today what
L’Equipe
revealed shows me that I was fooled and we were all fooled.”

Leblanc wanted an explanation from Armstrong, and he got it. The day of the
L’Equipe
story, Armstrong called Bob Costas, the sportscaster then working as a cohost on the television talk show
Larry King Live
. He asked to go on the show for a full hour to refute the allegations. Of course, Costas said.

Armstrong tried to blame
L’Equipe
’s accusations on the tense USA-France relationship. (France refused to join the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003.) He also said that the day before the 2005 Tour, the French minister of sport took two urine samples and two blood samples from him, but from no other riders.

“I can’t say ‘witch hunt’ loud enough,” Armstrong said. “This thing stinks. I’ve said it for longer than seven years: I have never doped. I can say it again. But I’ve said it for seven years. It doesn’t help. But the fact of the matter is I haven’t.”

He told Costas, “If you consider my situation, a guy who comes back from arguably, you know, a death sentence, why would I then enter into a sport and dope myself up and risk my life again? That’s crazy. I would never do that. No. No way.”

Costas said, “There’s no way they could have found EPO in your urine because you’re flatly saying you never used it?”

“When I peed in that bottle, there wasn’t EPO in it. No way.”

Costas asked if Armstrong planned to sue over the accusations. Armstrong said yes, possibly, but he didn’t know where to start. The French lab?
L’Equipe
? The French sports minister? The World Anti-Doping Agency? “All of these people violated a serious code of ethics,” Armstrong said.

Costas then said to Armstrong what millions of the rider’s fans likely thought: “Here in the United States you are one of the most admired athletes of—of all time. People do not want to believe this of Lance Armstrong.”

Armstrong: “Right.”

Armstrong ended the interview by reminding viewers why they would want to believe that he was clean: because he was a celebrity hero. He talked about his cancer work with Livestrong. Larry King asked if he was going to marry Sheryl Crow, causing Costas to pipe up, “You know, that’s why Larry’s here, Lance. I wouldn’t have asked that.” He seemed irritated that King had veered from the very serious subject of Armstrong’s possible doping.

Armstrong provided no real answer to the question about his love life, either, and the show ended awkwardly, with plastic smiles all around.

Within two weeks of
L’Equipe
’s story, and soon after the damage control accomplished with the help of Costas and King, Armstrong shared with the American public his personal happy news. Two and a half years after he told Kristin Armstrong that he’d had enough of their perfect-on-the-outside marriage, he had, in fact, proposed marriage to Crow. The tabloids ate it up.

Hamman and his lawyers knew they needed an airtight case to beat this Houdini who’d escaped from every perilous situation in his career. Now, on national television with Costas and King, Armstrong had wriggled out of an accusation that he had tested positive for EPO
six times
.

“You’re swinging for the fences with these guys, because they have celebrity wattage,” Tillotson said. “All Lance had to do was pick up the phone and he was on a talk show bashing us, denying the allegations on TV.”

Hamman, the master bridge player, reckoned he had a losing hand. So he came up with a Plan B that was devilish in its conception.