Cycle of Lies: The Fall of Lance Armstrong (32 page)

CHAPTER 25

O
ne month before the USADA report was made public, Armstrong unexpectedly had learned about some evidence the antidoping agency would use against him. Those sordid details were in Tyler Hamilton’s tell-all book,
The Secret Race
, which was published in September 2012.

Early in 2011, an entire year before the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Los Angeles would drop its criminal investigation of him, Armstrong heard rumors that Hamilton was working on a book with author Daniel Coyle, who in 2005 had written an in-depth book about Armstrong—minus his doping, of course. One of Armstrong’s lawyers called Hamilton’s lawyer to find out if a Hamilton tell-all was in the works.

There was never official confirmation, but Armstrong braced himself for months and months as he waited to read what Hamilton might write. He was incensed that Hamilton, the former teammate Armstrong called “the dirtiest fucking rider,” would violate the omertà—and would make money off of it.

Hamilton’s
60 Minutes
interview in May 2011 gave a hint about what the book contained. He cracked open the inner workings of cycling—the doping, the lies—but focused on the Postal Service team’s doping program. He told of Armstrong and the team using testosterone, “Poe” and blood transfusions. He said it had been a proud moment for him to receive from the team a white paper bag that contained performance-enhancing drugs because it symbolized his success: Finally, he was being given the chance to do what Armstrong was doing to get ahead.

Mark McKinnon, the board member and political consultant, thought Hamilton looked “weird” and “suspicious” on
60 Minutes
. “It was very halting. It came across as a guy who didn’t really believe what he was saying.” Because of that, McKinnon—who for years had resisted the truth about Armstrong—wasn’t worried that his accusations would harm Armstrong or the foundation.

McKinnon changed his mind sixteen months later when Hamilton’s book showed up on his doorstep. He lived in Austin with his longtime wife, Annie, a cancer survivor inspired by Armstrong.

He read the book in one day. With each page, his anxiety grew. He thought back to 2011 and remembered reports that Hincapie had spoken to the grand jury. (He actually volunteered to give statements to the feds.) Hincapie’s testimony plus the accusations against Armstrong in Hamilton’s book meant big trouble for the foundation built on Armstrong’s good name.

McKinnon felt that the proof that Armstrong had cheated “was incontrovertible.” His first thought: Armstrong needs to go. The next day he was on the phone with other board members at the foundation: “You’ve got to read Tyler’s book. It’s going to be a major crisis.” He found an early ally in Jeff Garvey, the former Livestrong chairman of the board. Garvey also thought that Armstrong had to disassociate himself from the foundation if it was to continue thriving. It was an idea that McKinnon, Garvey and the rest of Livestrong’s board of directors nursed for weeks, until they finally ran out of time.

When USADA’s report came out, a majority of the board members worked to protect the foundation, without Armstrong’s knowledge. They held an emergency conference call and decided that Armstrong had to step down as chairman of the board. He agreed to step down, reluctantly. At least he could remain on the board of directors, he told the foundation’s president, Doug Ulman, so it wasn’t a complete disaster, right? He could always take over as chairman later, once the rumblings about his doping past settle down.

So, a week after the USADA report, Armstrong announced that he’d stepped down as chairman of Livestrong’s board to protect the charity from negative publicity. But it signaled much more than that. His stepping down sparked the most precipitous, unceremonious fall of any professional athlete in modern times.

Within hours, Armstrong’s sponsors jumped ship. Nike was gone. Trek Bicycle Corporation. Oakley. Giro. RadioShack. Anheuser-Busch. FRS, a sports drink maker. Honey Stinger, an energy bar maker.

Nike released a statement all but accusing Armstrong of hiding information from the company: “Due to the seemingly insurmountable evidence that Lance Armstrong participated in doping and misled Nike for more than a decade, it is with great sadness that we have terminated our contract with him.”

Of course, Nike had heard suggestions of Armstrong’s doping along with everyone else—his cortisone positive at the 1999 Tour, the six positive EPO samples from that Tour, the testimony of teammates Stephen Swart and Frankie Andreu. Together, Nike, advertising companies and Armstrong had buried that evidence under brilliant marketing strategies that made him one of the world’s most recognized athletes.

Now Nike was shocked—shocked!—that Armstrong had deceived them. It was as if one of the world’s most sophisticated sports companies knew nothing of doping’s history in cycling, though Tour winner after Tour winner had admitted to doping. (Most recently, in 2007, the 1996 winner Bjarne Riis confessed to doping to win the Tour.)

It was as if past cycling champions such as Belgium’s Eddy Merckx, France’s Jacques Anquetil and Italy’s Fausto Coppi, or perhaps most winners of this hundred-plus-year-old race, had not tested positive and/or admitted that doping was engrained in the sport. (Merckx publicly claimed he was disappointed in Armstrong, though he was the person who introduced Armstrong to the doctor Michele Ferrari in the first place.)

Within two weeks of the USADA report, even Armstrong’s allies bailed. The UCI, the cycling federation that had long supported him, turned on him. Pat McQuaid said USADA’s report “sickened” him. “Lance Armstrong has no place in cycling. He deserves to be forgotten in cycling. Something like this must never happen again.” The UCI would not appeal USADA’s sanction against Armstrong.

McQuaid was hardly pure. He had been barred from the 1976 Olympics after using an assumed name to race in South Africa in violation of an international antiapartheid sporting boycott. He and his predecessor, Hein Verbruggen, had overseen cycling in its darkest days of doping. But it was Armstrong in the public eye, taking the hit for all the sport’s sins.

Several weeks later, on November 10, 2012, Armstrong posted a photo on his Twitter page, trying to show that he could not be defeated. It showed him at home lounging on a couch beneath his seven framed yellow Tour jerseys. It came with the comment, “Back in Austin and just layin’ around.” No matter what USADA could do to him, he would not let himself be humbled. Not that other people didn’t try to do it for him.

In early November 2012, foundation board members who had formed a cabal against Armstrong talked to Ulman about a way to completely extricate Armstrong from his own organization. Outing Armstrong as board chairman hadn’t been enough. The board realized that Armstrong needed to cut all ties.

The decision wasn’t simple to make. Armstrong had accomplished a lot with the Livestrong Foundation. He made it cool to survive cancer, and removed a stigma from those who had gone through months and years of pain and hospitalization. He personally donated $7 million, and the foundation raised a total of $500 million to help families touched by cancer. Without him, Nike would never have cobranded all those yellow bracelets or the entire Livestrong sportswear collection, which included things like sneakers, shirts, hats, etc.

Now, though, the foundation had evolved out of his hands. Actually, it was taken out of his hands.

Those board members gave Ulman an ultimatum: “If Lance doesn’t leave, then we’re leaving.”

About a month after the USADA report was published, Ulman told Armstrong that most of the board members wanted him to step down as chairman. Armstrong blew up. First he blamed Ulman for betraying his loyalty. Then the man with a quick temper and no impulse control went to his laptop. He wrote a scathing e-mail to board members. He reminded them he had built the foundation from scratch and that the charity would be nowhere without him. He called them “cowards” for not sticking by his side. McKinnon said Armstrong’s e-mail showed “a lack of remorse or any notion that he has to serve a cause greater than himself.”

Though he apologized the next day for his language in the e-mail, the board members weren’t about to change their minds. So Armstrong abandoned the organization.

Two days later, the Lance Armstrong Foundation officially was renamed “Livestrong,” as the organization began to scrub itself of its founder. The charity no longer displayed a duplicate set of Armstrong’s seven yellow jerseys in its lobby.

Armstrong stopped talking to the board members, including some, like Garvey, who had been personally close to him. He removed more than a dozen pieces of his art collection from the foundation’s headquarters, leaving large rectangles of blank space on the walls.

He felt hurt that his own charity had forsaken him. But if Livestrong didn’t want him, he didn’t want Livestrong, either.

Betsy Andreu was at home in Michigan waiting for the USADA report. When it went live, she took her laptop and clicked to the page listing which riders and other witnesses had submitted affidavits for the prosecution.

As she saw the names on sworn affidavits from eleven of Armstrong’s former teammates, she said, “Oh, my God. Oh, my God.” She called across the room to Frankie and said, “All of our work paid off!”

For more than a decade, Betsy had called reporters, antidoping officials and federal investigators with tips. Check out these documents, she’d say. Call this cyclist, call that lawyer. During that time, I estimate, we easily spoke more than two hundred times, mostly after she sent me a link to a story about Armstrong or doping, or both. She always told me, “Don’t tell anyone I told you this,” and wanted me to chase every one of her leads in the hopes it would prove Armstrong had doped. It was clear that on some days she spoke to reporters nearly nonstop because while we were speaking on her home phone, her cell phone would ring and ring, as if she were a switchboard operator.

All good, Frankie agreed. But he was less than happy. So what, he asked his wife, if ten other riders had admitted to doping and had testified against Armstrong? While he’d been shunted aside, other guys still rode. “Yeah, yeah, but every one of those guys still has their money, and where does that leave us?” he said.

The Andreus weren’t millionaires, like some of the riders. They didn’t have a a $105,000-plus Maserati parked in their driveway or own a boutique hotel, like Hincapie did. Nor did Frankie Andreu ever own a Corvette and eight acres of land outside of Chicago, like Vande Velde did. He never made upward of a half-million dollars a year, like most top Postal Service riders eventually did.

But after the USADA report, Betsy Andreu was rewarded with intangibles. She had regained her dignity. She was no longer the “crazy bitch,” as Armstrong had told so many reporters. In tears, she told her children, “Mom stood up to the bully. Always stand up to the bully.”

In the weeks after his fall, Armstrong went into seclusion on the Big Island of Hawaii. He let his closely shorn hair grow into a wild mess. He stopped shaving. He looked lonely and, truth be told, like a man who didn’t care about anything anymore.

As the federal whistle-blower case creeped ever forward, Armstrong worried what it could cost him. If he was found guilty, it could mean that he’d have to pay the Postal Service $120 million out of his pocket.

Bad enough, the money. Worse, the lifetime ban from sports. He had expected to start a second career in triathlons, but USADA’s order made that impossible. He wanted to get the ban lifted or at least mitigated. His complaint to anyone who would listen:
Why should teammates like Vande Velde and Hincapie get six months while I get the death sentence?

Tygart said USADA might reduce the ban in exchange for information about people in cycling who facilitated or condoned his doping. From USADA’s perspective, Armstrong would have to give up big names that the antidoping agency suspected were involved in his doping scheme: Verbruggen and McQuaid at the UCI, Bruyneel, Stapleton, the team owner Thomas Weisel and others involved with USA Cycling. As Armstrong hesitated, at least one advisor told him to come clean for the simplest of reasons: Americans were a forgiving bunch.

That man was Steven Ungerleider, a visiting scholar at the University of Texas, a sports psychologist and an antidoping expert who had written a book on the East German doping machine,
Faust’s Gold
. Ungerleider had met Armstrong through a friend, Armstrong’s lawyer Tim Herman.

Herman had enlisted Ungerleider, who had extensive experience working with Olympic athletes, to be a volunteer consultant in the matter and help talk to Armstrong about coming clean. Ungerleider spoke with Armstrong about how his confession would unburden him and how it would be beneficial for his children in the long run. He suggested that he look the public straight in the eye and say, “Look, I really fucked up. Please don’t hurt my foundation.”

Armstrong wanted to know two things—how he could rebuild his reputation and how he could mitigate his lifetime ban from Olympic sports. Ungerleider told him that he could turn around his reputation in a second if he came clean. Telling USADA everything should be a part of that deal, he said.

If Armstrong confessed to the antidoping agency, it could help the sport of cycling and USADA might reduce Armstrong’s suspension. It would be good for both parties, Ungerleider said. Armstrong could set an example for other riders to come forward with their own doping tales. The entire sport would come clean and start anew.

They went back and forth for days. Armstrong: “Oh no, these motherfuckers are out to destroy me. They are sleazebags out to destroy me, my home and my children.”

UNGERLEIDER:
“You need to trust the system.”

ARMSTRONG:
“Why did they break out that report on me? It just ruined me.”

UNGERLEIDER:
“You left them no choice. If you had come forward in June, it would have been another story.”

ARMSTRONG:
“Screw them.”