Cycle of Lies: The Fall of Lance Armstrong (30 page)

Birotte said the investigation into federal criminal conduct by members and associates of a professional bicycle racing team owned in part by Lance Armstrong had been concluded. No explanation followed. Birotte told one investigator that the decision to close the investigation was his and his only, and that there would be no discussion on the matter.

Novitzky was inconsolable. Prosecutors Doug Miller and Mark Williams, the main lawyers on the case, were speechless. Several investigators thought Birotte dropped the case because Armstrong’s powerful buddies in politics had pressured him. The Justice Department had received three letters totaling more than twenty pages from members of Congress regarding the investigation. None of the letters were released to the public.

As soon as Armstrong heard the good news, he exhaled.
Whew, close one!
He had escaped from yet another tight spot. His lawyers called to congratulate him. His friends called to tell him how happy they were for him. He and his girlfriend, Anna, popped open a bottle of wine and toasted their good luck. But their celebration was premature.

Minutes later, a press release appeared on USADA’s Web site.

It was a statement from Tygart: “Unlike the U.S. Attorney, USADA’s job is to protect clean sport rather than enforce specific criminal laws. Our investigation into doping in the sport of cycling is continuing and we look forward to obtaining the information developed during the federal investigation.”

The federal investigation was over, but USADA’s was only beginning.

CHAPTER 23

C
ompared with the federal case against Armstrong, USADA’s seemed puny. The agency, which has fewer than fifty full-time employees at its headquarters, had a fraction of the people and funding that had been brought to bear in the federal case. It was David versus Goliath.

Armstrong had armed himself with a legal team of more than half a dozen high-powered litigators, many with Yale, Princeton and Harvard pedigrees. Even Armstrong’s spokesman, Fabiani, came from Harvard Law.

At USADA, Tygart was working with just two other main lawyers and one who was relatively new to the agency. One was Bill Bock, the agency’s general counsel. He was a father of five and earned his undergraduate degree at Oral Roberts University and his law degree at Michigan. The other was Rich Young, an outside counsel and Stanford grad who had been the primary author of the World Anti-Doping Code. USADA’s legal affairs director, Onye Ikwuakor, who’d been co-president of his graduating class at Stanford Law, was the newcomer. They didn’t bill at $1,000 an hour, as some of Armstrong’s lawyers did, but they were resourceful, plucky and on a mission.

In early 2012, USADA’s board, led by Olympic hurdling champion Edwin Moses, approved USADA’s move against Armstrong. Tygart would have picked up where the federal case ended, but the feds wouldn’t hand over their case files. The civil division of the Justice Department was still considering joining Landis as plaintiffs in a whistle-blower suit. They didn’t want to risk the testimonies they had gathered for the criminal case becoming public and tainting a civil case that could be worth more than $100 million to the government.

At the end of April 2012—nearly three months after it reopened its Armstrong inquiry—USADA had done only two new interviews, with Betsy and Frankie Andreu. Tygart already had Landis in hand, though the Landis testimony was corrupted by both his own lies and his public hatred of Armstrong.

Tygart needed to start gathering witnesses who were more believable than Landis—not a hard task, really—but they also needed to have firsthand evidence of Armstrong’s doping. It was a huge coup for Tygart, then, when Tyler Hamilton decided to cooperate with USADA’s investigation.

A few weeks before the
60 Minutes
interview, in the spring of 2011, Tygart and Hamilton met secretly in Denver. For the first time since Landis, Tygart heard a rich, textured story of the Armstrong doping program from someone who’d been very close to Armstrong.

Tygart heard about the double lives built around PEDs and little red capsules of testosterone oil. Hamilton said team doctors handed white paper lunch bags to riders, filled not with sandwiches and juice boxes but with EPO, growth hormone and testosterone. When riders feared being overheard, they didn’t ask for EPO, they asked about “Edgar” or “Poe,” as in the poet Edgar Allan Poe.

Hamilton’s lawyer, Manderson, said that throughout the meeting, Tygart’s expression seldom changed but that he grew pale. He looked like a guy who had spent years trying to track down Bigfoot, only to have the big guy show up at his front door.

Still, Tygart needed more than Landis and Hamilton. So he did what he had to do to get others to talk: He cut some deals.

Vaughters had already guaranteed the cooperation of his riders, though they were reluctant. They didn’t want to be labeled dopers or be known as the riders who took down Armstrong.

Tygart threw in an incentive. Because those riders had volunteered to confess their doping to the federal investigators, USADA would go easy on them. He was even willing to bend the rules. The World Anti-Doping Code says that an athlete who provides “substantial assistance” in a doping investigation could have his sanction reduced by up to 75 percent. In this case, that would have meant a six-month ban. Instead, Tygart went one better: no ban at all.

Vaughters, Zabriskie, Danielson and Vande Velde testified. All were told they would not be penalized—on the condition that they remove their names from consideration for the 2012 Olympics. If the Armstrong case went public, their doping past could embarrass the U.S. team.

When Tygart had trouble convincing Hincapie and Leipheimer to come forward, he talked to their lawyers. He said, “Look, the system of doping in the sport is coming down, and all the riders, including Lance Armstrong, are going to be given the opportunity to get on the lifeboat. Are you on it?”

Leipheimer was looking at a minimum two-year ban. That would end his career and forever label him as a doper. By “lifeboat,” Tygart meant a mitigated sanction. Leipheimer hopped on.

For Hincapie, it was a more difficult decision. He still considered himself one of Armstrong’s best friends and had built his reputation on being Armstrong’s loyal sidekick.

Armstrong wrote in his second book,
Every Second Counts
: “There have been times when I’ve practically lived out of the same suitcase with George Hincapie. In cycling, we’re on the side of a mountain for weeks, in small hotel rooms, sharing every ache, and pain, and meal. You get to know everything about each other, including things you’d rather not.” Hincapie did not relish having ratted on his good buddy, and he did not particularly like the idea of doing it all over again to a new pair of ears.

USADA needed Hincapie. He was credible. He had never tested positive. He had never been linked to doping, save for Landis’s accusation. The public loved him and trusted him as the humble Big George who sacrificed himself for Armstrong Tour after Tour, the loyal lieutenant who would never let the general down. He was likely to know more about the behind-the-scenes activity on Armstrong’s squads than any other rider. (And that may be the case. For instance, he told me that Armstrong and the team’s climbers once brazenly received blood transfusions while the team bus was still parked at the finish line of one Tour.)

He would be the linchpin of USADA’s case.

If Hincapie spoke out against Armstrong, people would listen. “You’re talking about the most liked and respected American cyclist, maybe ever,” said Bob Stapleton, who owned Hincapie’s former team, HTC-Highroad. “We called him Captain America, for all the good reasons.”

With Big George’s testimony, USADA could convince the public that Armstrong was no hero, that he was a cheater and a liar, the biggest cheater and liar on the Postal Service team. But they needed Big George to say it.

Big George didn’t want to say it. USADA called his lawyer, David Anders—whose services Hincapie had secured for virtually nothing, thanks again to the Wall Street bigwig Tiger Williams, who was also advising Landis.

USADA asked if Hincapie would provide testimony against Armstrong. Hincapie said, “Hell no.”

Tygart came back with an ultimatum: Talk, or be banned for life. Tygart said USADA was prepared to charge Armstrong, Bruyneel, the trainer Pepe Martí and Drs. Pedro Celaya and Michele Ferrari with major doping violations because of their involvement in the Postal Service’s program. Did Hincapie want to join them?

“You need to tell us everything that happened,” Tygart said.

In exchange for his testimony, Hincapie would get a six-month ban.

“They said they had enough on Lance and are going to take him down anyway,” Hincapie told me. “It was, ‘Either join us or be taken down also.’ Those were my options. They certainly took advantage of my relationship with Lance, for sure. They knew that it was going to be the groundbreaker.”

He was seething. It wasn’t fair. He said he had stopped doping in 2006 and joined a “clean team” in HTC-Highroad. There, he said, he tried to convince younger riders that doping wasn’t the way to go, that the dirty past needed to be forgotten. But a lifetime ban would’ve negated that work, in addition to ruining his reputation, his career and maybe his company, Hincapie Sports.

He was so angry that he considered coming clean publicly. He told his lawyer, “Fuck it, I doped and I will not cooperate with them. I’ll come out and say, ‘Look, I’ve made these mistakes and look what I’ve done since.’ ”

But he knew if he did that, USADA would have banned him then and there. It would have ended his career, and he didn’t want that to happen. He wanted to ride again in the Tour and extend his record to seventeen Tour starts. He would talk, but just not yet. As a sign of his good intentions, Hincapie’s lawyer sent Tygart his notes from Hincapie’s interview with the federal prosecutors in 2010. With that information as a starting point, USADA allowed Hincapie to ride in the 2012 Tour, where he commiserated with the members of Vaughters’s team who also were testifying against Armstrong.

The day of the fifth stage of the 2012 Tour, a news report from the Dutch newspaper
De Telegraaf
said Hincapie, Zabriskie, Vande Velde and Leipheimer would receive delayed six-month bans for testifying against Armstrong in USADA’s case. The news was the main subject that day at the Tour as reporters rushed to confirm that the story was true.

On the miles of rolling roads in northern France, between the towns of Rouen and Saint Quentin, the riders chatted about it, too. At one point, Hincapie rode alongside Danielson and Vande Velde during their 122-mile workout on roadways that cut through green fields and hugged canals.

“Can you believe all this shit? It’s not even true,” Danielson told Hincapie. “We’re not getting suspended.”

“Really?” Hincapie said. “Um, that’s fucked up. I’m getting suspended.”

As soon as the stage ended, he was on the phone to his lawyer. He told Anders that it wasn’t fair that he was being suspended for six months, while Vaughters and his riders were getting off without any penalty whatsoever. He complained that Vaughters was getting special treatment from USADA because he was just a kiss-up and that he obviously had been talking to USADA for years to paint himself as a good guy. After a multitude of phone calls back and forth between Hincapie’s lawyer and USADA’s lawyers, USADA decided to back down and dole out penalties that were equal.

After the Tour, Tygart contacted Vaughters with bad news: The immunity deal was off. His riders would be suspended for six months, starting at the end of that season. Tygart said he and his colleagues had discussed it, and they were taking too much of a chance by granting immunity to some riders but not others. Bending the World Anti-Doping Code like that would require the blessing of the World Anti-Doping Agency, and also the UCI, an institution that seemed to be allied with Armstrong. And if the UCI appealed the riders’ sanctions, every one of them could end up with two-year sanctions instead.

Zabriskie, Danielson and Vande Velde had no choice but to say yes to the six-month ban. They felt let down and duped. But there was no use in their griping about it now. USADA and Tygart were on a roll.

Armstrong’s lawyer, Tim Herman, received a letter from USADA on June 4, 2012. It asked Armstrong to disclose everything he knew about doping in cycling. Or else. Armstrong didn’t think much of USADA. How could it catch him when even Novitzky and the federal government hadn’t been able to?

Herman didn’t know much about how USADA worked and wasn’t familiar with the nuances of the World Anti-Doping Agency’s set of rules. He handed off the request to another lawyer on Armstrong’s team.

Armstrong’s response came from Robert Luskin, a Washington, D.C., white-collar defense lawyer who had represented Karl Rove in the CIA leak case in 2006. He said USADA’s request to talk to Armstrong was “a vendetta, which has nothing to do with learning the truth, and everything to do with settling a score and garnering publicity at Lance’s expense.”

“We will not be a party to this charade,” he wrote to USADA. He said the antidoping agency was vilifying Armstrong and trying to lynch him, and warned that if the agency continued to do so, “We will not hesitate to expose your motives and your methods.” He claimed that USADA had “bought and paid for” witnesses’ testimony in the case against his client.

When Armstrong refused to confess, USADA said it would seek to charge him with a doping violation. The agency’s three-man review board, which determines if there is enough evidence for USADA to move forward with a doping case, began compiling a report.

On June 28—after calling USADA’s case against him “unconstitutional” and “a witch hunt”—Armstrong received a fifteen-page letter from the antidoping agency. He was in France preparing for a full-length Ironman triathlon—the sport that had become his new career. He had already won several half-distance Ironmans, and his goal was to qualify for the Ironman World Championship in Kona, Hawaii. NBC had bought rights to broadcast a two-hour special of that race, just because Armstrong was going to be in it.

If Armstrong’s lawyers had thought they could bully USADA into backing down, they were mistaken. USADA’s review board had found enough evidence to charge Armstrong with a doping violation and the agency moved forward with a case against Armstrong, Bruyneel, Martí and Drs. Ferrari, del Moral and Celaya.

More gravely, it claimed that Armstrong was at the center of a doping ring on his teams, and that he had broken antidoping rules by using EPO, blood transfusions, testosterone, cortisone and saline infusions. The charges against him weren’t focused only on his Tour-winning years, either. They spread from 1996 through 2010, meaning they included the two years of his comeback. USADA claimed that Armstrong’s blood records from those seasons were “fully consistent with blood manipulation.”

Armstrong only needed to read the second paragraph to know he was in big trouble: “The witnesses to the conduct described in this letter include more than ten (10) cyclists as well as cycling team employees.” Tucked into the letter’s second-to-last page, Armstrong saw a line even more chilling:
lifetime ban from Olympic sports.

That meant if he lost the case, he wouldn’t be allowed to compete in any sport that followed the World Anti-Doping Code—which is basically every sport he’d ever want to compete in. Cycling. Triathlons. Marathons. Swimming meets. Not even just the Olympic-level ones, either. Smaller events, like a 10-kilometer race to raise money for cancer, are usually sanctioned by the sport’s national federation. And national federations of sports that are in the Olympics follow the WADA code.