Cycle of Lies: The Fall of Lance Armstrong (31 page)

Longtime friend Dan Empfield, who had met a young Armstrong during his early triathlon days, told me that a lifetime ban for Armstrong would be “very painful for him, very painful, big-time painful” because Armstrong is an “eating, breathing, sleeping athletic machine . . . It’d be like ripping an organ out of your body.”

The week in June leading up to USADA’s charges would have been even more painful for Armstrong if he had cared at all about his biological father, Eddie Gunderson.

The ever-stubborn Gunderson had been pulling up wet carpet from the screened-in porch of his mother’s house in Tool, Texas—home to the brown recluse spider, a poisonous arachnid that happens to find wet carpet an ideal place to live. Gunderson should’ve been wearing long pants, and he knew it. As he’d worked, he felt a stabbing pain in his shin and saw a spider scurrying away. Damn thing had bitten him.

He waited two days before going to a hospital. He’d never liked going to the doctor. Months before, Gunderson’s legs had swollen so much that they looked like overinflated balloons, a common side effect of liver failure. A doctor had told Gunderson he would treat him, but only if he could stop drinking for at least six months.

“I can’t assure you that, so I don’t want to take up your time,” he told the doctor. His inflexibility doomed him. He should have gone to the hospital right after the spider bit him. Instead, precious time had elapsed by the time he made it to Methodist Hospital in Dallas, the same hospital in which Armstrong was born. His kidneys and liver gave out. His heart was working so hard to make up for the deficit of the other organs that it went into cardiac arrest.

On June 25, 2012, Eddie Charles Gunderson, the man whose family called him “Sonny,” died. His funeral was held three days later, the day USADA officially charged Armstrong with being the kingpin of a sophisticated doping program on his Tour-winning teams. Armstrong used EPO. He received blood transfusions. He forced other teammates to dope and even gave them drugs, to give himself a better chance at winning and glory. In short, he was a lying, cheating bully. Nothing like the Lance that the Gunderson family remembered.

Micki Rawlings delivered the eulogy for her brother. Looking into the crowd gathered inside the Eubank Cedar Creek Funeral Home south of Dallas, she said her brother was loud, proud, stubborn, opinionated, obnoxious, sarcastic, bombastic.

“Sonny was his father’s son,” she said. “He loved fast cars, fast motorcycles, fast times. He loved family, music, sports, a good fight now and then and a cold beer. He was his mother’s son. He had a huge, loving heart. He had caring and kindness to spare.”

She said her brother had lived a wonderful life full of family who loved him. He had a wonderful wife and two wonderful children who adored him and “a son, Lance, who will never know how much he missed and how much he
was
missed.”

Armstrong was not at the funeral.

The next month, Doug Ulman, the chief executive of the Lance Armstrong Foundation, met lawmakers on Capitol Hill. He and a lobbyist from the powerful law firm Patton Boggs were to speak about the foundation, cancer care and cancer awareness.

On the unwritten agenda: how USADA’s investigation would negatively affect the foundation’s mission.

Armstrong’s efforts to reach lawmakers and raise concerns about Jeff Novitzky and his investigation never materialized, a lobbyist involved in the effort said. But that didn’t stop Armstrong or his supporters from again trying to enlist Congress’s help.

Ulman chatted with Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison, a Republican from Texas, about the consequences the foundation would face in light of USADA’s inquiry. Among his next several stops was Representative Jose Serrano (D-N.Y.), the ranking Democrat on the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Financial Services and General Government, which oversees how much the government will give to USADA each year. That conversation was “substantially if not all about USADA and Livestrong’s concerns about the process that Lance Armstrong is being put through,” said Philip Schmidt, the congressman’s spokesman.

When the Livestrong representatives left Serrano’s office, Serrano’s staff members talked about how bold and inappropriate the meeting had been. “Livestrong was supposed to promote cancer awareness—right?—not spend its time and money trying to protect Lance Armstrong,” a staffer said. “Totally inappropriate.”

In July, F. James Sensenbrenner, a senator from Wisconsin whose district includes the home base of Trek Bicycle Corporation, Armstrong’s longtime sponsor, sent a letter to the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy, which gives $9 million a year to USADA—most of USADA’s $13.7 million annual budget. In questioning USADA’s investigation of Armstrong, the senator relied on arguments identical to those used by Armstrong’s legal team.

He said USADA was depriving Armstrong of his basic due process and that “USADA’s authority over Armstrong is strained, at best.” He called USADA’s case “a novel conspiracy theory” and said that Armstrong had been tested “over five hundred times” without ever testing positive. (A theme Armstrong had fallen back on for years, though the number of times he had been tested was less than three hundred, according to the UCI.)

Tygart was called in to talk to Sensenbrenner and his staff several times. The gist of the conversations went like this:

SENSENBRENNER:
What in the hell are you doing to a national treasure?

TYGART:
I’m doing my job.

In the meantime, Armstrong and his team were working to discredit USADA, convince the government to cut the agency’s funding and discourage the agency from continuing the case. Armstrong posted on his Twitter account that USADA review board member Clark Griffith had been charged earlier in the year with exposing himself to a young law student and telling her to fondle him.

“Wow. @usantidoping can pick em,” Armstrong wrote. He marked the tweet with “#protectingcleanathletesandpervs.”

Stapleton asked USOC officials for help in getting USADA to back down. His argument raised eyebrows, because Stapleton had been part of the group that drafted USADA’s original rules.

Armstrong then sued USADA and Tygart in federal court, asking the court to end USADA’s investigation on the grounds it was unconstitutional. The lawsuit ran to eighty pages and alleged that USADA had violated Armstrong’s right to due process and was prosecuting a “big fish” to justify its existence.

In a swift smack-down rarely seen in federal court, United States District Court Judge Sam Sparks dismissed the lawsuit only hours later. He said Armstrong’s unnecessarily lengthy allegations “were included solely to increase media coverage of this case, and to incite public opinion against” USADA and Tygart.

Armstrong’s lawyers tried again, this time filing a shorter lawsuit and asking the court to stop USADA’s prosecution of Armstrong. They argued that USADA was depriving him of his due process and didn’t have jurisdiction over him anyway—that the UCI did. Though Pat McQuaid at the UCI initially said the case was USADA’s to handle, he did a quick about-face—without explanation—and said that the UCI alone should deal with Armstrong.

Judge Sparks again ruled against Armstrong, allowing USADA’s case to continue. He said USADA’s arbitration rules were robust enough to deal with the matter and that the federal courts should stay out of the dispute. “To hold otherwise would be to turn federal judges into referees for a game in which they have no place, and about which they know little.”

Tygart had won in federal court.

The fight was on.

It ended quickly.

Three days later, Armstrong did something he never had before: He stopped fighting.

“There comes a point in every man’s life when he has to say, ‘Enough is enough.’ For me that time is now,” he said in a statement.

Upon advice from Washington lawyer Mark Levinstein—who said never go to arbitration with USADA because athletes never win—Armstrong accepted USADA’s charges and agreed to a lifetime ban from Olympic sports. His seven Tour titles would be stripped from him. Gone, too, would be the bronze medal he won at the 2000 Olympics, along with all other titles, awards and money he’d won from August 1998 forward. But Armstrong had a hard time accepting the implications.

“Regardless of what Travis Tygart says, there is zero physical evidence to support his outlandish and heinous claims,” he said. “The only physical evidence here is the hundreds of controls I have passed with flying colors.”

CHAPTER 24

L
ance Armstrong had once known what to expect: nothing more than the usual letter from the United States Anti-Doping Agency informing an athlete why sanctions had been levied against him. Maybe a page or two of bullet points, outlining the evidence USADA had gathered in the case. But this report from the antidoping agency was different in an important, unprecedented way. This time, USADA would issue much more than a private letter of explanation to an athlete. It would be an open letter to the world. It would include every piece of evidence, every document, every bit of testimony from Armstrong’s teammates who cooperated with USADA.

On October 10, 2012, in a conversation between USADA’s Bill Bock and Philippe Verbiest, the main lawyer for the UCI, Verbiest asked Bock when the UCI would see the report. The cycling union had been publicly chastising USADA for taking so long to generate the document.

UCI officials were anxious to review the evidence USADA had gathered in its investigation of Armstrong, to determine if the cycling union would appeal the matter—but more so to see if they had been implicated in any wrongdoing. They expected a bit of professional, confidential decorum between the agencies.

When Verbiest asked for the report for what seemed like the hundredth time, Bock gladly revealed USADA’s plans.

“Well, we can send it to you,” Bock said, “or you can just get it when it goes online in an hour.”

Verbiest fell silent.

“You still there?” Bock said.

Silence.

Finally, incredulous, Verbiest said, “What? You can’t do that!”

Armstrong’s attorneys were aghast when they heard the news from Verbiest. They thought releasing the report would be tantamount to a prosecutor’s making public the government’s evidence against a defendant before a trial. Herman, Armstrong’s Austin lawyer, thought USADA’s decision to go public would unfairly prejudice any juror—in this case, the public at large.

The Armstrong team was in disarray.
The evidence was going online? In an hour!

Fabiani, the spokesman, blamed Herman for not anticipating USADA’s move. Herman in turn thought the beginnings of the whole mess could be laid at the feet of Levinstein, who had convinced Armstrong to accept USADA’s sanction in the first place. Now, USADA had risen to the challenge with a vengeance.

Armstrong had always beaten the system. He had outsmarted, outlasted, outmaneuvered and/or outspent all the critics. Even the United States government had failed in an attempt to indict him. He thought he could fight anything USADA threw at him. As always, he would use his extraordinary life story—cancer survivor, winner of seven Tour de France titles—as both shield and weapon.

“Are you fucking serious?” Armstrong said when Herman told him about USADA’s plan to go public. “How the fuck did we let this happen?”

Tygart knew that if they failed to bring down Armstrong their mission would be irreparably damaged. USADA’s funding could be cut, something he had inferred from his meetings on Capitol Hill about the Armstrong case. Top athletes with money would be inspired to challenge the system because Armstrong would be proof that those athletes could win. Losing the Armstrong case might become USADA’s death knell.

One or two eyewitnesses to his doping and the doping on the Postal Service team weren’t enough—they needed nearly a dozen. A couple documents that confirmed Armstrong had consulted with an infamous Italian doping doctor—even in the years he wasn’t competing in the Tour but was running marathons and doing triathlons—wasn’t enough. They wanted reams.

And reams they had—in addition to e-mails, photos, videos and even the Web diary of Armstrong’s first wife, Kristin.

Rich Young, USADA’s outside counsel, said it best. “It’s the kind of thing where if you’re hunting elephants and you’re up against a great, big elephant, you damn well better kill it, or you’re going to get trampled.”

Tygart was aware that USADA wasn’t up against just Armstrong. It was also up against his millions of fans. For the agency to bring down Armstrong, it would need to convince the public—all those jurors sitting in judgment—that Armstrong had been someone other than his packaged image all those years.

To accomplish that, the three main lawyers working on the report—Tygart at USADA, Young at his Colorado Springs law office and Bock in Indianapolis—pulled all-nighters and circulated electronic drafts every twelve hours. They wrote and rewrote the text until the report took on a character they hadn’t really expected. It had begun as a report on a sports hero’s misdeeds. It wound up sounding like a script for a mobster movie.

Tygart suggested, in a late-night joke, that the Mafia’s wise guys fled Las Vegas and ended up working on Armstrong’s team. Young congratulated Bock, the primary author, for turning the usual dry legal document into a suspenseful crime novel.

They wanted to make the report simple yet dramatic, so the public would read it from cover to cover and understand, once and for all, who Lance Armstrong really was: a pathological liar who had set an example of doping, not only on his team, but for the entire sport. He was the despot of cycling who had no qualms about crushing those who dared to question him. He was the boss of bosses in a corrupt organization, the undisputed champion of a sport built on lies.

Tygart no longer cared what Armstrong thought. He and his team had outmaneuvered the champion who smugly asked, “What are you on?” in the poster that had hung above Tygart’s desk at USADA before the agency moved across town. Armstrong could make his threats. He could smear USADA. He could play the victim card as well as he ever had. But this time all the evidence would be on the Web, there for everyone around the world to see.

Early in USADA’s investigation, Armstrong told me that he was concerned about Tygart’s motivations. “I don’t know his agenda, or if he’s got other ambitions, but these guys are not honest and are not straight shooters. They are not out for the integrity of cycling or the integrity of the sport. He’s just out to screw one guy and make an example out of him.”

Armstrong believed USADA wanted to bring him down for its own glorification. “C’mon, this is what our taxpayer dollars are funding, a witch hunt?” Armstrong asked me. “They’re just out to get me because they want to get a big celebrity so they can justify their existence. Listen, it’s bullshit. Total lies. Total lies.”

Among his dwindling circle of friends and colleagues—he was no longer talking to his close friend and “coach” Chris Carmichael because Carmichael had turned his back on him—Armstrong was less confident. He knew that Floyd Landis and Tyler Hamilton were among the riders who had crossed him. Both had spoken publicly. They didn’t worry him. He could impugn their credibility because they had lied for so long about their own doping.

Other witnesses, however, were riders with clean reputations, good guys such as fellow American riders David Zabriskie and Christian Vande Velde. Armstrong was most worried about George Hincapie—Big George, his most trusted partner on two wheels. In the weeks leading up to the morning of October 10, 2012, Armstrong and his lawyers had learned that Hincapie had talked to USADA. And while they had no idea what he had said, they wanted no one else to hear it, either.

Several months earlier, they had designed a plan to keep any confessions from going public. The key to that strategy was to accept USADA’s sanctions.

By accepting them, Armstrong would forgo his right to an arbitration hearing—but that was part of the plan. At such a hearing, all of USADA’s evidence—including teammates’ testimonies—might be aired publicly. Without a hearing, Armstrong and his lawyers thought, USADA’s evidence would remain confidential, and the bomb would stop ticking right then and there.

Armstrong and his team quietly convinced the UCI not to appeal USADA’s sanction. The cycling union would claim publicly that USADA’s sanction was unfair and its findings unsound, and that the process was so biased against Armstrong that an appeal wasn’t worth the trouble. That would give Armstrong enough plausible deniability to persuade his legion of fans that, yes, once again he had been the victim, not the perpetrator.

But Armstrong and his lawyers had underestimated Travis Tygart’s resolve to tell the world what he had learned about Lance Armstrong.

Tygart had hired a private security company after receiving three death threats, including one by someone who wanted to “put a bullet” in Tygart’s head and another that said, “Hope you have a bodyguard and a bulletproof vest. Your [
sic
] a dead man motherfucker. You just don’t know what you’ve done.” Tygart had thought of putting all of his assets in his wife’s name. Thousands of e-mails from Armstrong’s fans streamed into USADA’s office. An agency spokeswoman, Annie Skinner, received one wishing she’d get “ass cancer.”

In advance of the report, Armstrong lawyers Tim Herman and Sean Breen rushed out a response.

“We have seen the press release from USADA touting the upcoming release today of its ‘reasoned decision,’ ” Breen said, calling the report “a one-sided hatchet job—a taxpayer-funded tabloid piece rehashing old, disproved, unreliable allegations based largely on axe-grinders, serial perjurers, coerced testimony, sweetheart deals and threat-induced stories.

“USADA has continued its government-funded witch hunt of only Mr. Armstrong, a retired cyclist, in violation of its own rules and due process, in spite of USADA’s lack of jurisdiction, in blatant violation of the statute of limitations.”

At his computer at 10 a.m., Armstrong posted a message on Twitter, saying, “Heroes in combat and beyond, #SemperFi.” He included a link to a story about a Marine in Pensacola, Florida, who had carried an eleven-year-old boy across the finish line of a triathlon. That boy had lost his right leg to bone cancer.

One of Armstrong’s 3 million-plus Twitter followers posted an ominous response to that message: He referenced the scene in the movie
Jaws
in which the protagonists realize that the great white shark they are trying to capture is much bigger than they expected.

The Tweet said: “You know that line in
Jaws
, ‘We’re going to need a bigger boat’? Well, today, you’re going to need a bigger boat.”

Inside a squat, rose-colored office building in Colorado Springs, Colorado, across the street from the Pro Rodeo Hall of Fame, Tygart was at once giddy and anxious. He drove from his office to a local television station. There he would go live on ESPN’s
Outside the Lines
. The plan was to appear on national television moments after USADA’s report went live on the Internet. His staff had worked for days preparing the case file for publication. To finally publish the report, all they needed was a final blessing from the boss.

Just before 2 p.m. Eastern time, he called his office from his cell phone and gave the go-ahead.

“Let’s do it,” he said.

About 870 miles southeast, the report popped up on Armstrong’s laptop. On the right side of the home page of USADA’s Web site, there appeared a 2-by-2-inch sky blue box with the words “Pro Cycling Investigation Reasoned Decision and Supporting Materials.” An arrow pointing to the box invited all users, “Click to view information.”

Armstrong clicked.

The report portrayed Armstrong as an infamous cheat, a defiant liar and a bully who pushed others to cheat with him—join him, or be gone. USADA called the doping on Armstrong’s United States Postal Service team “the most sophisticated, professionalized and successful doping program that sport has ever seen.”

The evidence of Armstrong’s doping was overwhelming. More than two dozen witnesses. Eleven former teammates, including the venerable Big George. Blood test results that experts said proved that during his comeback Armstrong had manipulated his blood for an edge in endurance. Banking and accounting records showing payments to EPO master doctor Michele Ferrari, including one payment that appeared to come from a bank account Armstrong shared with his mother. USADA had included proof of more than $1 million in payments to Ferrari, including at least $210,000 in payments after 2004, when Armstrong said he had severed his working relationship with the doctor.

The report ran 202 pages. With the supporting materials, there were more than 1,000 pages of information. It was all there, even George Hincapie’s question to Armstrong, “Any EPO I could borrow?” and Armstrong’s answer, “Yes.”

Some friends and others close to Armstrong said that once he clicked on the report, he read it all and even memorized parts of it.

Yet he insisted to me that, in fact, he had not read a single word.