Cycle of Lies: The Fall of Lance Armstrong (25 page)

During the week I visited them in August 2006, Betsy and Frankie argued about my presence. From the next room, I heard them bickering in the kitchen.

“Why is she here?” Frankie said.

“We need to talk to her, Frankie. C’mon,
please
!”

It was a surprise, then, when Frankie talked with me for two hours, and answered one question I never thought he would: “Did you ever dope?”

He sighed, bowed his head and said, “No one has ever asked me that. I don’t want to answer.”

“Does that mean yes?” I said.

He said, “I tried my best never to use performance-enhancing drugs. I did make a couple of bad choices, but that was a long, long time ago. It’s not something to be proud of. I did use EPO, but only for a couple of races.”

I was stunned.

“Sorry, did you say that you used EPO?” I asked.

“Yes, I’m not gonna lie. That’s what I said.”

He then made a distinction I had never heard before. “There are two levels of guys. You got the guys that cheat [to win] and the guys that are just trying to survive [by cheating].”

But he said he felt guilty and couldn’t keep his secret any longer. If riders kept lying about doping, he said, sponsors and fans would be scared away from the sport for good.

Later, when Frankie was out of the room, Betsy said, “It was all for Lance. Everything those teammates did was for the glory of Lance.”

I called all seven other riders who supported Armstrong on that 1999 Postal Service team and asked if they, too, had doped, and if they had seen any doping on the team. Both Europeans on the squad—Peter Meinert-Nielsen and Pascal Deramé—said they did not dope, would never dope and had never seen doping in the sport.

Only one of the riders agreed to be interviewed, Jonathan Vaughters, said something different. We had talked many times since the SCA testimony was leaked to reporters. I tried to get him to go on the record with what he knew about Armstrong. I told him that one rider—I didn’t name Andreu yet—on the 1999 Tour team had said he had doped. I was looking for others to confirm that there had been doping on Armstrong’s squad that year.
Did you dope for that Tour?
Vaughters said to answer would be to commit career suicide. Initially, he warned me not to quote him: “Just so you know, my father is a lawyer.” But days later, when I told him that none of his 1999 American teammates would even call me back, he agreed to go on the record, albeit anonymously.

I then told him the other rider was Andreu.

“I’m not going to leave Frankie out there by himself, just hanging there,” Vaughters said. “Somebody has to back him up.”

Both he and Andreu echoed Betsy. They said they felt pressure to use EPO if they wanted to make that 1999 Tour team. “The environment was certainly one of, to be accepted, you had to use doping products,” Vaughters said. “There was very high pressure to be one of the cool kids.”

Neither Andreu nor Vaughters would say they had seen Armstrong dope. Both said they had no firsthand knowledge of his ever doing so.

The story ran on the front page of the
New York Times
on September 12, 2006. At last, Armstrong’s teammates—two brave ones—had told the truth about doping on the Postal Service squad.

Though the story didn’t accuse Armstrong of doping, his “mafia” saw it as an attack. His agent, Stapleton, called me “the worst journalist in history” and threatened a lawsuit. “You must have fucking failed journalism school.”

Armstrong told the Associated Press that the story was “a hatchet job . . . to link me to doping through somebody else’s admission.” He told
USA Today
that the
Times
had displayed “a severe lack of journalistic ethics by linking an admission by Frankie Andreu to me.” He was just as angry with the Andreus. He and team manager Johan Bruyneel called upon the Postal Service/Discovery Channel team and cycling authorities to look into stripping Frankie of his race results and asking him to pay back prize money. (There is irony in that proposal, as time would tell.)

Armstrong also e-mailed a statement calling the article “categorically false and distorted sensationalism . . . My cycling victories are untainted. I didn’t take performance-enhancing drugs, I didn’t ask anyone else to take them and I didn’t condone or encourage anyone else to take them. I won clean.”

In what was now old hat, he concluded his statement with a plea to his base: “I want the millions of cancer patients and survivors with whom I battle cancer to know that these allegations are still untrue and to be assured that my victories were untainted and that they, too, have reason to hope for a full, healthy and productive future.”

After Travis Tygart read my
New York Times
story on Frankie Andreu, he called the Andreus at home in Michigan.

He asked Betsy, “Could Frankie come to the phone?”

Betsy thought to have fun with Tygart. “What are you gonna do, sanction Frankie or something?”

He told her that Frankie had, after all, admitted to using EPO for the ’99 Tour and a confession was a confession. And at seven years and two months, it was a confession that fell within the World Anti-Doping Code’s eight-year statute of limitations.

So, to Betsy’s question of sanctions, Tygart said, “Well, that’s what we’ve had to consider.”

“Are you fucking kidding me?” she said to Tygart. “You have Lance, the biggest fraud, the biggest cheat in the history of sport still out there, and you’re coming after us? Frankie was fired. You’re telling me you’re going to go after a small guy like him because he refused to go on a doping program with Lance? Fuck you and fuck off!”

The next sound Tygart heard was the infinite hum of the dead line at the other end. It was the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

David Zabriskie, Landis’s closest buddy, said he cried for hours, unable to leave his bathtub, after hearing that Landis had tested positive. He had last seen him in a sublime Parisian hotel suite, the Tour winner living large.

Zabriskie knew Landis had it coming: He had doped with Landis in the off-season before that Tour. Landis also had supplied Zabriskie with growth hormone, testosterone patches and EPO that made up his training regimen. Without Landis’s access to drugs, Zabriskie said he would have had no way to obtain those pharmaceuticals. Both men felt pressure to perform well at the Tour, the only race most Americans paid attention to—if they paid attention at all.

To hard-core cycling fans who knew about the sport’s history with doping, Landis had become just the latest cheater in a sport of cheaters. Zabriskie had gone from feeling happy for his friend’s success to sympathizing with his downfall. He knew the pain Landis had endured—and it was more than just the ritual disgrace of the failed test.

On August 15, 2006, a month after the Tour, Landis’s father-in-law—and best friend—committed suicide. David Witt was found dead in a parking garage in San Diego. He’d shot himself in the head.

Landis had told Zabriskie that Witt was his source for testosterone patches—they had come by way of a rejuvenation clinic Witt visited in Southern California—and that Witt had sometimes watched over his blood during the Tour.

It all left Zabriskie confused. Soon after the Andreu/Vaughters admissions, he once again explained his feelings about the Postal Service team’s doping to Steve Johnson, who recently had been named chief executive of USA Cycling. He wanted help from one of the most powerful men in American cycling—a man who once had been his mentor. Instead, Johnson said Andreu never should have gone public. Then he told Zabriskie, “If you ever do drugs, I’ll kill you.”

Already depressed by Landis’s positive test, Zabriskie was dismayed to hear Johnson’s criticism of Andreu. Nor did he understand Johnson’s admonition.

“Uh, Steve,” he said, “I already told you that I have used drugs, that the guys on Postal were injecting me with all sorts of stuff. Remember at worlds two years ago? I told you that they were doing drugs on that team.”

Zabriskie’s best guess was that Johnson simply didn’t want to hear it. As he did at the world championships two years earlier, the cycling boss looked at Zabriskie like he was speaking in tongues. Johnson just sat there, saying nothing until his wife walked into the room and gave him a chance to change the subject.

Zabriskie thought, “I already told him
twice
that the Postal team was doping. He didn’t do anything about it then, and he’s not going to do anything about it now . . . Ugh, he must know everything.”

Confrontation was not Zabriskie’s thing. He’d never had the courage to take on his alcoholic father. Now, rather than risk his riding career, he would not join Andreu and Vaughters in their public confession. He was embarrassed by his weakness.

Allen Lim’s good-bye to Floyd Landis in Paris in 2006 was just one of their many farewells.

The first had come a year before.

After the 2005 Tour de France, Lim promised to babysit a bag of blood in Landis’s apartment during the Vuelta a España and deliver it on a rest day.

At the time, Lim was contemplating working with young men riding clean for Vaughters, on a development team for riders under twenty-three that Vaughters had started in 2003. “Those young kids are not like Floyd, they are not like Lance, they are good kids,” Lim told me later. “I don’t ever want to see them go through this.”

He spent an afternoon with those kids in Girona. Then, instead of delivering the blood bag to Landis, he took it out of the refrigerator, placed it in the kitchen sink and stabbed it with a knife again and again.

Days later, Landis called. “How’s everything going?”

“It’s not going so well,” Lim said. “You don’t have a bag of blood anymore. It went down the drain.”

Lim expected Landis’s rage.

Instead, the rider said, “Shit, well, I guess it’s time to go home then, isn’t it?”

Lim thought he heard in Landis’s voice a tone of regret that he had dragged his friend back into doping.

“Yeah, Floyd, it’s time to go home,” Lim said. “It’s over.”

CHAPTER 19

L
ance Armstrong’s power had long ago transcended what it meant to be a famous cyclist. In 2007, he was the public face of a political effort in Texas to secure $3 billion for cancer research. He traveled the state on something of a campaign bus to speak to voters. Speaking for an hour to various members of the Texas House of Representatives, he won 65 votes out of the 100 necessary for a proposed constitutional amendment to be placed on a ballot. Waiting for the final tally, Armstrong said, “It’s only fun if you win.” It passed.

In a
Vanity Fair
profile written by the historian and journalist Douglas Brinkley that dealt with both the prospect of Armstrong’s future career in politics and his cancer work, Brinkley called him “a regular 365-days-a-year walking-talking Jerry Lewis Telethon.” As for the gubernatorial run, Armstrong answered, “Probably.” Then he dropped a bombshell: He wanted to win an eighth Tour de France.

In the months that followed, many friends argued against it. They were happy he had escaped intact from years of doping allegations.

“Man, I don’t know about this,” John Korioth, his closest friend, said. “Pigs get fat, hogs get slaughtered.”

Armstrong wasn’t hearing anyone’s sermons. His nightlife already had become tabloid fodder. He was out and about with the actor Matthew McConaughey so much that they were dubbed Siamese twins. After leaving Sheryl Crow, he spent time on both coasts with other blondes: the clothing designer Tory Burch, the young, elfin actress Ashley Olsen and the movie star Kate Hudson.

Korioth warned the thirty-six-year-old father of three that his May-December romance with Olsen could damage his cancer work. “Whoa, dude, bad idea,” Korioth said. “You’ve got to put a stop to this right now. ”

“She’s twenty-one,” Armstrong answered. “Fuck you.”

Armstrong had watched the 2008 Tour in a state of jealousy and anger. Carlos Sastre, the tiny, quiet Spanish climber, had won the race, to Armstrong’s dismay. Sastre, really? Christian Vande Velde, his former
domestique
, the kid who once had fetched him water bottles and cortisone pills, finished fifth.

“The Tour was a bit of a joke this year,” Armstrong told a British reporter, John Wilcockson. “I’ve got nothing against Sastre . . . or Christian Vande Velde. Christian’s a nice guy, but finishing fifth in the Tour de France? Come on!”

He hated it, too, that the ’08 Tour had been called the cleanest ever. If so, all other Tours—including the seven he won—were deemed to be dirty. Even in retirement, Armstrong felt the sting of doping accusations. His answer, as always, was to ride.

Vaughters and Lim, meanwhile, were working together and had become antidoping crusaders while leading Vaughters’s TIAA-CREF under-twenty-three development team. Lim never wanted to see another rider tortured as he’d seen Floyd Landis punish himself. Searching for a way to scare athletes straight, Lim found an answer while reading
Outside
magazine.

Don Catlin had proposed a new antidoping system. He was the scientist who investigated cycling’s EPO-related deaths in the late 1980s and helped break the BALCO steroids scandal. “Athletes still get away with stuff,” Catlin told
Outside
, “and I maintain you can get away with stuff with everybody looking right at you.”

He proposed that athletes submit urine and blood samples to create biological profiles. Biomarkers, like each rider’s hematocrit, hemoglobin and testosterone levels, would be monitored. Any variations would suggest doping.

Lim took Catlin’s idea to Vaughters. “We should do something like this with the young guys,” he said. Catlin told Lim the effort would be “brave.”

With Catlin’s help, Lim and Vaughters worked out the details for their development team, then for the professionals who would join their team in 2008. The new team initially was called Slipstream Sports. The 2008 Tour accepted Vaughters’s “Clean Team” as a wild-card entry into the race partly for its drug-free image.

Armstrong disliked both the idea of the team and its creator, Vaughters. He said as much to Vande Velde, who took it as a warning to Vaughters and asked Vaughters’s co-owner, Doug Ellis, to sweet-talk Armstrong. Vande Velde was afraid of what Armstrong could do to the team if he continued to despise it.

Ellis was a private investor from New York City. He went to Armstrong’s penthouse apartment on Central Park South. Engaging and bright, as he could be, Armstrong impressed Ellis with his knowledge of the inner workings of the Slipstream squad. He certainly knew that Ellis had invested millions in Vaughters’s fledgling team. For the 2008 season, Slipstream had hired top-notch riders—the ex-dopers Vande Velde and Zabriskie (who said they stopped doping in 2006, scared straight after Landis’s positive test), and the Brit David Millar, another convert. Millar had served a two-year EPO suspension. The team became a safe haven for reformed cheaters and former Postal Service riders.

Armstrong got down to business.

“You don’t have the right guys on the bus,” Armstrong told Ellis.

“What do you mean?”

“You’re spending all this money on the team, and it’s not exactly working out, is it? JV, he’s not the kind of guy you want to bet on.”

Slipstream, he suggested, was a team of losers, including its manager, Johnny Weltz, whom Armstrong had long ago replaced with Bruyneel. Ellis, though, didn’t care about the winning and losing like Thomas Weisel did; he was not a guy who went on training rides with the pros as if he were one. Ellis funded Slipstream because he, like Vaughters, wanted to save cycling from itself. He’d expected Armstrong to disagree with him. That’s how he’d know he was doing something right.

Armstrong once said he came back to “raise awareness of the global cancer burden,” a sentiment that makes Korioth roll his eyes. “Please,” he said to me, “he came back because he thought he could still kick everybody’s ass.”

Armstrong made a deal to reunite with Bruyneel on the Kazakh cycling team Astana. He’d be riding in a new world. Though Armstrong had been gone only three and a half years, doping tests were more advanced and done more frequently. The French national antidoping lab that had declared six of his 1999 urine samples to be positive for EPO was eager to have another crack at him. Pierre Bordry, the head of the lab, told colleagues that he couldn’t wait for Armstrong to be tested again on French soil. Tygart and other USADA officials were anxious to see if Armstrong could withstand the new system of antidoping. The circumstantial evidence against Armstrong had grown and grown, but a black-and-white positive was something that would be much harder for him to wriggle out of.

Armstrong did what he had to do to make it seem like he was clean: He hired Don Catlin to basically act as a PR man to build his reputation as an antidoping advocate. The scientist who once said “to ride the Tour, you have to be doping” would now run a program consisting of Armstrong alone. He would test Armstrong as often as he wanted. He would take urine and blood samples to compile a biological baseline and would analyze those levels to see if Armstrong was breaking the rules. The terms of the agreement were still being discussed, but Catlin wanted to get approval to publish the results.

Armstrong held the first news conference regarding his comeback in September 2008, in conjunction with the Clinton Global Initiative, a group of world leaders, philanthropists, entrepreneurs and corporate types gathered to talk about the world’s problems. Armstrong was one of the main speakers at the event, held at the Sheraton New York Hotel near Times Square in Manhattan.

Just after Armstrong finished sharing a main stage with New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg and former president Bill Clinton—whom he called “two of the most powerful men in the world”—he climbed onto a small makeshift stage in one of the adjacent ballrooms. Catlin, wearing a Livestrong bracelet, took his place on Armstrong’s right. Taylor Phinney, a future star whom Armstrong had poached from Jonathan Vaughters’s under-twenty-three team, stood at Armstrong’s left. He also was wearing a Livestrong wristband.

Vaughters had groomed the prodigy for years, and Phinney had promised to return to JV’s team the next season. But within weeks of Armstrong’s comeback announcement, Phinney’s parents—Olympians Connie Carpenter and Davis Phinney—stopped returning Vaughters’s calls. Vaughters soon heard that Phinney was training with Armstrong in Aspen, Colorado. Next thing he knew, Armstrong was starting an under-twenty-three team to showcase Phinney. Vaughters wanted to tell him, “You stole him just to fuck with us.”

Landis, who knew about Armstrong’s new development team, was even more incredulous. After losing his long, acrimonious and very public fight with USADA, Landis had been serving a two-year doping ban for testing positive at the 2006 Tour, and that ban was set to expire on January 30, 2009. He and Armstrong had talked about Landis’s possibly becoming the director of Armstrong’s new team for young riders—an offer that never materialized. Instead, Armstrong hired the Belgian and former Motorola rider Axel Merckx for the yet-to-be development team. He told Landis that his team couldn’t be involved with someone with a doping past.

Hiring Landis would have kept him quiet. Armstrong had hushed up his former Postal Service lieutenant, Kevin Livingston, by letting him base his personal training business out of his Mellow Johnny’s bike shop in Austin. But when Armstrong refused Landis a job as a team manager, then as a bike racer on Armstrong’s pro teams, it was the biggest mistake he’d ever make.

Nike was all in. Scott MacEachern, Armstrong’s longtime Nike representative, was giddy when he had heard the comeback news. With Armstrong, his career had soared. His wife, Ashley, had even written a children’s book about Armstrong in 2008.

Nike executives were thrilled because Armstrong’s return was bound to be a marketing boon for the company as he rode back into the public consciousness as a cancer-fighting cycling superhero. They’d seen it before: His name alone could bring consumers to the Nike section of a sports store and could spark a lifelong loyalty to the company.

So Armstrong’s team at Nike hunkered down to generate ideas to bring the Livestrong brand—and the Nike swoosh—into living rooms all over the world, more than ever before. In advance of the Tour, the company announced that it was launching a Livestrong “Hope Rides Again” line of apparel and footwear to commemorate Armstrong’s return to the sport. (All proceeds, after expenses, went to the Lance Armstrong Foundation, as did all the proceeds from the Livestrong collection.) There was also a Nike-sponsored touring art exhibition, headlined by big names like Shepard Fairey and Damien Hirst, which also made money for Livestrong. The tour featured its own exclusive collection of Nike/Livestrong gear.

Nike, as it had done before, capitalized on Armstrong’s infamy. A TV spot showed Armstrong training alone on his bike, the ride intercut with scenes of recovering cancer patients. Over dramatic music, Armstrong says, “The critics say I’m arrogant. A doper. Washed up. A fraud. That I couldn’t let it go. They can say whatever they want. I’m not back on my bike for them.”

In October 2008, while sitting at a west Texas café with his newest girlfriend, a mountain biker named Anna Hansen, Armstrong read a story by the French news service Agence France-Presse that addressed his comeback. The article referenced an editorial written by Jean-Marie Leblanc, the former Tour de France race director. Why, Leblanc asked, would Armstrong subject cycling to the questions certain to come with his return?

“Us former riders generally have respect for winners, but that’s not always the case with the public, above all the media, who have heavy suspicions about you . . . The hounds will be let loose, column inches will be written, images repeated and debate sparked about the one word which has petrified our passion over the past ten years: doping.”

Armstrong’s heart fell. Leblanc was basically telling him that a comeback would be a disastrous move. Armstrong thought: “
Do I want to face all the scrutiny again? Do I want to test fate?
” Sure, he had thought of those downsides before, but Leblanc’s words for some reason had gotten through to him. Since announcing his comeback, he had only been tested once by USADA, but his instincts told him to be careful, that he might really be pushing his luck, like Korioth had warned him. It dawned on him: “There are people who will not rest until I am cooked.”

He turned to Hansen: “I got to get out of this.”

They had just started dating. She hadn’t a clue what he was talking about.

“Get out of what?”

Armstrong explained the situation to her and stewed about it. He began thinking up excuses to back out, like, “I blew out my knee.” Or “My knee hurts.” Or “I woke up this morning and my kids said, ‘Don’t do it.’ ”

But Nike’s exclusive Livestrong apparel and footwear lines were already moving forward, and his charity was jazzed that millions of dollars more than usual were likely going to roll in. Fans from all over the world were sending him notes that praised him for his comeback and his publicly stated goal of taking his message of cancer awareness to a global stage. He wouldn’t just race in France. He’d race in Australia, South Africa, Ireland.

He told me later that this new chapter of his life was rolling and gaining speed, and that he just couldn’t make himself jump off the ride, because everyone was watching.

“I didn’t have the courage,” he said.

At a news conference attended by hundreds of journalists before the 2009 Tour of California—the first American race of Armstrong’s comeback—he was as defiant as he’d been on the Champs-Élysées in 2005 when he said he felt sorry for anyone who didn’t believe in cycling.

He had been chastised by reporters for failing to participate in USADA’s out-of-competition testing program for six months before he could race. When he had competed at the Tour Down Under that January, he had been less than a month short, but the UCI let him compete anyway.

He was criticized for touting the virtues of his independent testing program, the one run by the antidoping scientist Catlin, when that program hadn’t even gotten off the ground. Catlin told me that Armstrong had balked at the logistics and cost of it.