Cycle of Lies: The Fall of Lance Armstrong (33 page)

UNGERLEIDER:
“You should give back your Olympic bronze medal. It would be a gesture of good faith.”

ARMSTRONG:
“Fuck you, I’m keeping it.”

In the end, Ungerleider helped broker a meeting between Armstrong and Tygart. They met on Friday, December 14, 2012, at noon, at the former Colorado governor Bill Ritter’s office in downtown Denver. Ritter agreed to host the gathering because he was a cycling fan who years before had befriended Armstrong.

They gathered in a conference room on a quiet floor of the building. Armstrong was late, worrying everyone that he wouldn’t show. When he finally walked through the door, he looked unkempt and unshowered. He looked like “Robinson Crusoe,” one person said. No wonder his close friends had been worried about how he was handling the aftermath of the USADA report. Those friends saw that Armstrong was depressed and that he had turned to alcohol for solace. Even USADA was nervous that he’d do something to hurt himself, based on how quickly his kingdom had collapsed and how quickly the public had turned on him.

Herman, Armstrong’s lawyer, was there to help Armstrong navigate the situation. Tygart was there with his colleague, Bill Bock. Ungerleider was there as someone who had been authorized to speak on Armstrong’s behalf. Ritter were there acting as a neutral party, though everyone knew he was buddies with Armstrong.

For a few minutes, everyone exchanged pleasantries.
How was your flight? Did you find the building OK? Anyone want coffee?
But Armstrong couldn’t remain civil. He was face-to-face with Tygart, his nemesis, for the first time.

“Travis, you’re a motherfucker,” he said. “I can’t believe that shit you put in that report. You know that’s all garbage. You called me the Bernie Madoff of sports? [Which he hadn’t, actually.] You’re putting me in the same category as that motherfucker! He ruined and destroyed lives! He’s like Adolf Hilter!”

He began to cite certain points in the USADA report with which he disagreed, speaking as if he had committed them to memory. He mentioned that the report had called his doping program “the most sophisticated and professionalized” in sports history. “It’s the most sophisticated doping program ever? C’mon, how about the East Germans?” He pointed to Ungerleider’s book on the East German doping machine, which Ungerleider had placed in front of him. “Fuck, they were doping
children
! They were
real
criminals doing real harmful things to people! That’s not at all what we were doing!”

To Herman, who had grown close to the troubled star, Armstrong was both a client and a de facto son. He grabbed Armstrong’s arm and said, as if talking to a toddler, “Lance, remember we talked? You have to be nice.” Herman smiled. “All right, Lance, you feel better now? Are you OK, buddy?”

Bock interrupted. “Lance, we just want to tell you how much we appreciate your coming here. It took a lot of courage for you to come. We’re here to help you and help you restore yourself in the community. We don’t know what we’re capable of doing about your lifetime ban, but we’re here to start the conversation.”

“What kind of promises can you make?” Armstrong asked.

Tygart answered, “None, right now, but we need to take baby steps.”

Armstrong was set off again, “Why the fuck am I here? This is fucking bullshit! I knew Travis would do this!”

Herman put a hand on his shoulder, telling him he should just let it all out, if he wanted to. Embarrassed, Armstrong fell quiet.

In the next several hours of the meeting, they discussed how Armstrong could rid himself of his lifetime ban. He wanted to, he needed to, get back into triathlons and bike races, and to race in running events like the Chicago Marathon. (Three months before, he had been denied entry into that marathon because of his suspension.)

Tygart said he could possibly lower Armstrong’s suspension to eight years, if Armstrong gave USADA enough information about the people who’d helped him dope and helped him avoid detection. Tygart said the ban could be even less, maybe four years, if he got the cooperation of the UCI and the World Anti-Doping Agency in determining his ban. He encouraged Armstrong to point fingers at those people who facilitated his doping. It was the perfect opportunity for him to give back to the sport he loved, to leave a positive legacy and start changing the public’s perception of him, Tygart said.

Tygart said USADA worked closely with the Justice Department and could put in a good word for him in the whistle-blower case. Former governor Ritter mentioned the power in the room, including himself, and said they could help Armstrong, but only if he cooperated.

Armstrong grew introspective. He said he was unfairly blamed for a whole era of cheating in cycling. But he allowed that he was part of a toxic system and admitted that the culture needed to be dismantled. “At the end of the day,” he said, “I can get you skeletons and dead bodies. I know where all the bodies are buried.”

But if Armstrong was going to talk, he wanted a guarantee that he would receive a ban that was exactly the same ban his teammates had received for talking: six months. Worst-case scenario: two years.

When Tygart said that wasn’t really a possibility—that any sanctions which would vary from the World Anti-Doping Code needed to be approved by WADA and the UCI—Armstrong’s voice rose: “You don’t hold the key to my redemption.
There’s only one person who holds the key to my redemption, and that’s me!”

“I don’t need to work with you, I think I can do this on my own,” he said. “I’ll just go out and tell the public what I know, and that will pressure you guys to give me a lesser ban. I’m the only one who can clean up the sport!”

He mentioned that the UCI was going to form what was being called the “Truth and Reconciliation Commission,” a program that would allow riders to talk about all the doping they’d done and who’d helped them do it, in exchange for immunity from prosecution by antidoping authorities.
He would give his information to
them
and his ban would be lifted, right?
(Wrong: The UCI backed out of a commission, though in late 2013 there was talk to establish another one.) He didn’t need USADA—he was Lance Armstrong, for God’s sake, and he could fix things himself.

As the meeting went into its fifth hour, Armstrong seemed to realize that his aggressive posture was getting him nowhere. He softened and said that the ban would kill him. He wasn’t allowed to even run with his kids in USA Track & Field–sanctioned races in Austin. He was a man who thrived on testing himself against others in an athletic arena. Basically, he told USADA, the ban meant that he couldn’t be Lance Armstrong.

“I can’t get up in the morning without knowing that I have something to live for,” he said. “For me, that’s training and competition. I’m not training because I enjoy it—I’m training because I have to. I need to train more than just to stay in shape—I need to know that I’m going to compete. This has been my whole life. I’ve been a competitive athlete my whole life. I need to know that you will help me back into competition.”

For a moment, nobody said a word. Armstrong had just laid it out for them. He wasn’t just asking for a mitigated ban. He was begging for his self-esteem, his identity, his life.

Ungerleider, the psychologist, later told Tygart: “I hope you guys got that memo. What he’s trying to say is that you are taking away his coping mechanisms. This is who he is as a human being. Any way he can get back into it, with a 10k or a swimming race, that might be healthy and give him the skills to cope better in life. I’m not asking you to do anything, I just want you to be aware of that.”

With Armstrong seeming to lean toward confessing to USADA, the parties arranged another meeting in Austin for a week later. Armstrong went back to Texas to bide his time until then. When he did not receive a written guarantee that his ban would be reduced, he refused to meet again.

A little less than three months after the USADA report came out, Armstrong called his longtime friend Oprah Winfrey. Both were in Hawaii. Armstrong was there with his family during a self-imposed exile from the United States mainland.
Could he come over to her estate in Maui and have lunch?
He had a business proposal for her. She jumped at the chance.

Armstrong trusted Winfrey. She had been an admirer and had worn a Livestrong yellow band, had even sold the bands on her Web site. She had hosted the Armstrongs, including his mother, at her house for dinner. (Armstrong had grown closer to his mother since his divorce from Kristin in 2003, but their relationship, at times, was still strained.)

He and Sheryl Crow had gone on her talk show when they were still a couple in February 2005, and it had been nothing but positive. Winfrey asked Crow, “Is he a big romantic?” Oh, yes, she answered. Armstrong’s mother, Linda, appeared also, and Winfrey cooed, “The thing that I love about Linda is that she was a single mom.”

Weeks before their meeting on Maui, Winfrey had reached out to Armstrong to ask if she could interview him on her struggling Oprah Winfrey Network (OWN), and he declined.

But it got him thinking.

He was sick of listening to lawyers who told him to keep quiet about his past, sick of waiting to hear back from spin doctors trying to gauge what the public thought he should do next. Most of all, though, Armstrong couldn’t stand Tygart’s wielding so much power over him: There would be no mitigated lifetime ban unless Armstrong came clean to USADA.

He knew he’d eventually have to tell the federal prosecutors in the whistle-blower case about his doping. But he hated the fact that some no-name prosecutor desperate for fame would get the glory for outing him. He wasn’t ready to give up that control. He wanted to confess on his own terms.

Besides, that fall Armstrong had had an upsetting experience with his teenage son, Luke. The boy had been teased at school for having a cheating, doping father, and then got into a fight at the bus stop defending him. Armstrong was shaken when Luke said, “So-and-so said this about you. Is it true?” The father wanted to set the story straight in the eyes of the public.

So, he told his old friend Oprah:
I want to come clean and I want to do it on your show, with you asking the questions and the whole world watching.

Armstrong’s handlers were in disbelief that he’d gone ahead and set up an interview with Winfrey without consulting them. But he was adamant that there was no turning back. So his PR and legal team, plus a psychiatrist, streamed into Austin to prepare him for the show.

The day of the taping, he made a special trip to Livestrong’s headquarters to apologize to the staff for what he had done and what he was about to do. “I’m sorry for everything that you’ve been through because of me.” He texted the
soigneur
Emma O’Reilly, hoping she would call him back so he could apologize for publicly vilifying her and calling her a whore. She didn’t.

He called Betsy and Frankie Andreu and said, “Look, I know I called you guys ugly liars forever, and I’m sorry about that.”

“How could you do this to us? We were friends. You ruined our lives!” Betsy Andreu said.

“I know, I’m sorry.”

Armstrong talked to Frankie for ten minutes. For another forty, he spoke to Betsy, only because she made him listen to her tirade against him. She cried. Then she laughed, then she cried—and then they promised to stay in touch by e-mail. After years of not speaking, years during which he wanted her dead if not worse—and vice versa—Armstrong had done the equivalent of climbing Mont Ventoux in eight turns of the pedals.

He had charmed Betsy Andreu.

“Yes or no, did you ever take banned substances to enhance your cycling performance?”

Sitting just feet away from Oprah Winfrey for a two-part blockbuster that had been billed as a “no holds barred” television interview, Armstrong took a breath in front of 4.3 million people.

“Yes.”

“Was one of those banned substances EPO?”

“Yes.”

“Did you ever blood-dope or use blood transfusions to enhance your cycling performance?”

“Yes.”

“Did you ever use any other banned substance such as testosterone, cortisone or human growth hormone?”

“Yes.”

“In all seven of your Tour de France victories, did you ever take banned substances or blood dope?”

“Yes.”

“Was it humanly possible to win the Tour de France without doping, seven times?”

“Not in my opinion.”

Armstrong met Oprah Winfrey halfway. He told his version of the truth. He neither shed the obligatory Winfrey tear nor offered the anticipated apology. He didn’t feel bad for cheating and, to prepare for the interview, had even looked up the word in the dictionary to make sure he understood it. “Cheating” meant gaining an unfair advantage over your competitors, and he didn’t think he ever did that. The doping program was “very conservative, very risk-averse” on his teams, he insisted. And, he said, it was so necessary that it was like “putting air in your tires.”

He confirmed Emma O’Reilly’s stories about the cover-up of his positive cortisone at the 1999 Tour. He apologized to her for what he’d put her through. He said he never tested positive for EPO at the 2001 Tour of Switzerland, as Landis and Hamilton suggested. No, he did not pay off the UCI to bury that supposed positive test. No, he never offered a bribe to USADA, either. He also said he was clean during his comeback in 2009 and 2010, which Tygart and prosecutors later said was just his way of protecting himself from criminal charges. He defended his former doctor Michele Ferrari. He admitted that he didn’t like the man he had become—a liar and a bully—and that he was the type of person who needed therapy.

When asked if he ever confessed to doctors in an Indianapolis hospital room that he doped—as Betsy and Frankie Andreu had asserted he did—he said he couldn’t answer that question. Then, in another awkward moment amid 180 minutes of discomfiting half-truths, he addressed Betsy directly, saying, with a smirk, “I called you crazy, I called you a bitch, I called you all those things, but I never called you fat.” He was trying to be funny—because Betsy is actually rail thin—but the sound of the joke falling flat echoed throughout the country, maybe even the world.