Cycle of Lies: The Fall of Lance Armstrong (6 page)

The mad scientist conjured up what he called “weird concoctions” of substances like ephedrine, nicotine, highly concentrated caffeine, drugs that widen blood vessels, blood thinners and testosterone, often trying to find creative ways to give riders an extra physical boost during a race. He’d pour the mix into tiny bottles and hand them to riders at the starting line. Other times, he’d inject them with it. He wasn’t alone in this endeavor.
Soigneurs
all across Europe made their own homemade blends of potentially dangerous mixes and first drank or injected those potions into themselves. They were their own lab rats.

Hendershot, who had no formal medical or scientific training, learned the art of doping riders by observing the effects on a human test subject—himself. He knew a formulation was way off when he felt his heart beating so fast and loud it sounded like a runaway freight train. That wouldn’t work for riders already under extreme physical stress. He wanted “amped up,” but not to the point of a heart attack.

If Hendershot was his own lab rat, it wasn’t long before he tried his potions and pills on the riders, including Armstrong. When Armstrong went professional after the 1992 Olympics, he signed a contract with Motorola, one of the two major American teams. Because Armstrong wanted the best
soigneur
, he was immediately paired with Hendershot. It was a match made in doping heaven. Both
soigneur
and rider were willing to go to the brink of safety.

“What we did was tread the fine line of dropping dead on your bike and winning,” Hendershot says.

Hendershot said the riders on his teams had a choice of whether to use drugs. They could “grab the ring or not.” He said he didn’t know a single professional cyclist who hadn’t at least dabbled. The sport was simply too difficult—and was many times impossible, as at the three-week-long Tour de France—for riders who didn’t rely on pharmaceutical help.

Hendershot believed cyclists had at most four years of clean riding before they could no longer remain in the sport. As a drugged-up
peloton
went faster, the clean riders could help the team leader for maybe the first week of a race, maybe by riding in front of the pack to set the pace or by delivering water bottles from the team car, but then would have to drop out from exhaustion. A career like that was short-lived.

When Armstrong arrived at Motorola in 1992, a system that facilitated riders’ drug use was firmly in place on the team—and likely in the entire sport. Hendershot said he would receive a list of drugs and prescriptions for them from the team doctor, Max Testa, an Italian who, as of December 2013, still worked in the sport and ran a sports medicine clinic in Utah. Hendershot would take that list to his local pharmacist in Hulste, Belgium, to get the prescriptions filled and obtain other drugs, too.

Cycling was always big in Belgium—for generations, it has been one of the country’s most popular sports—and the pharmacist didn’t question Hendershot about the request for such a massive amount of drugs. In exchange, Hendershot would give the pharmacist a signed team jersey or allow him to show up at big races, where he would be a VIP with an all-access pass. Then he would leave the drugstore with bags filled with EPO, human growth hormone, blood thinners, amphetamines, cortisone, painkillers and testosterone, a particularly popular drug he’d hand to riders “like candy.”

By 1993, Armstrong was using all of those substances—like almost everyone else on the team, Hendershot said. He remembered Armstrong’s attitude from the remark, “This is the stuff I take, this is part of what I do,” and that Armstrong joined the team’s program without hesitation because everyone was doing it.

“It was like eating team dinner,” Hendershot says. He believes that virtually everyone involved in the team knew about the doping—“doctors,
soigneurs
, riders, team managers, mechanics—everyone.” He called the drug use casual and said he never had to hide any of it. After injecting the riders at a team hotel, he’d toss a trash bag filled with syringes and empty drug vials right into the hotel’s garbage can.

While Hendershot never administered EPO or growth hormone to Armstrong, he did administer them to other riders on the team and was aware that Armstrong was using those drugs. Hendershot said his wife, Diann, in 1995 drove a stash of those two drugs from Belgium to the team’s traning camp in southern France.

Riders like Armstrong could get drugs in several different ways—from Hendershot, from their personal doctor or a team doctor, or by buying them over the counter themselves. Each rider would bring those drugs to Hendershot and he would administer them by injecting them into the rider, by mixing a potion of them for the rider to drink or inject, or by injecting them into IVs the rider would receive, based on the doctor’s instructions. Sometimes the drugs would also come in pill form, and Hendershot would dole those out, too.

In the early 1990s, by Hendershot’s estimation, less than half the teams in the pro
peloton
had a doctor on staff. Those teams were ahead of the curve. “Drugs level the playing field, but the better your doctor is, the better you are going to be,” Hendershot says, adding that he believes that almost all of the doctors were administering drugs to their riders.

He said he knew substances that Testa had given the riders, but didn’t want to name them because he believes that Testa—unlike other doctors in cycling—actually cared for the riders’ health, and cared less about winning or money. Testa told me in 2006 that he never administered drugs to his riders. Hendershot put it this way, though: A doctor who refused to give riders drugs wouldn’t last in the sport.

Hendershot was constantly worried that something he was giving the riders would hurt them—or even possibly kill them—especially when he was administering substances that riders had injected into the IV bags themselves or when the riders’ personal doctors would prepare concoctions for Hendershot to give. He was concerned that he would be culpable if anything ever went wrong, but was constantly rationalizing his actions. Even as he provided drugs to riders, Hendershot said, he told himself, “You’re not a drug dealer. This isn’t organized. This is no big deal.”

He knew he was lying.

He rationalized the lie by saying the process was overseen by Testa. If the drug use was not mandated by the team, it was at least quasi-official. Hendershot trusted Testa to make sure the drugs did nothing to hurt the riders.

Armstrong liked Testa so much that he moved to Italy to be near the doctor’s office in the little town of Como, north of Milan. Not long after joining Motorola, Armstrong began to live in Como during the racing season. He brought along his close friend Frankie Andreu, and in time several other riders joined them, including George Hincapie, a New Yorker, and Kevin Livingston, a Midwesterner. All became patients of Testa. All would later become riders on Armstrong’s United States Postal Service Tour de France winning teams.

Hendershot said all those riders likely believed they were doing no wrong by doping. The definition of cheating was flexible in a sport so replete with pharmacology: It’s not cheating if everybody is doing it. Armstrong believed that to be the dead-solid truth. For him, there was no hesitation, no second-guessing, no rationalizing. As Hendershot had done, Armstrong grabbed the ring.

April 20, 1994. Three riders from the Italy-based Gewiss-Ballan team stood atop the podium in their light blue, red and navy uniforms after dominating the Flèche Wallonne, a one-day race in Belgium’s hilly Ardennes region. Two held bouquets of flowers above their heads as they waved to the crowd. Armstrong seethed. The Gewiss riders were flaunting their success at his expense. He had finished 36th, fully 2 minutes and 32 seconds behind the leaders.

About fifty kilometers from the finish of that Flèche Wallonne, the Gewiss riders had broken away from the pack and, as Armstrong put it later, “demoralized everyone.” They pedaled faster as the
peloton
diminished into a tiny speck on the horizon behind them. They had raced along the narrow, dipping roads to the final climb up the Mur de Huy, a steep ascent with gradients as high as 26 percent. They rode up the Wall as if it were tabletop-flat. Moreno Argentin crossed the finish line first, while teammates Giorgio Furlan and Evgeni Berzin finished two-three.

It was there, in Belgium, in 1994, that the exhausted
peloton
realized the amazing power of EPO. The winning team’s doctor told them about it. In fact, he told the world. After the race, a reporter from the French sports newspaper
L’Equipe
, Jean-Michel Rouet, interviewed the doctor, Michele Ferrari, and asked him if his riders used EPO.

“I don’t prescribe this stuff,” Ferrari said. “But one can buy EPO in Switzerland, for example, without a prescription. And if a rider does that, don’t scandalize me. EPO doesn’t fundamentally change the performance of a racer.”

The reporter said, “In any case, it’s dangerous! Ten Dutch riders have died in the last few years.”

Then Ferrari, who has long denied doping any of his athletes, said something that would haunt him for years. “EPO is not dangerous, it’s the abuse that is. It’s also dangerous to drink ten liters of orange juice.”

In other words, it’s all part of a balanced breakfast.

But to the uninitiated, confusion reigned. Armstrong, Andreu, Hincapie and Livingston—four riders who would become the core of American cycling—threw questions at their own team doctor, Testa.
What does EPO do? Is it dangerous? Do you think other teams are using it? Can you help us use it?

Testa tried to convince them they didn’t need the drug. He said the riders’ natural abilities would be enough for them to succeed in the sport, and that it was just a rumor that all riders used EPO. “People are trying to make money off of this, you don’t need it. Studies show that it apparently doesn’t help very much.”

Still, Testa felt EPO use was inevitable. So he gave up trying to keep his riders from it. One day, he handed each rider an envelope containing studies about EPO and instructions on its use. He told the riders how much EPO to take and when to take it. “If you want to use a gun, you had better use a manual, rather than to ask a guy on the street,” he told me. While he facilitated the drug use, Testa denies ever dispensing any doping products.

The training ride was a leisurely spin during which the Motorola riders cruised along for hours, loosening their legs. It was March 18, 1995. The day before, on the way home from Milan-San Remo—where he finished 73rd—Armstrong grumbled to Hincapie, a longtime friend, “This is bullshit. People are using stuff. We’re getting killed.”

Armstrong pushed the issue while the team pedaled alongside Lake Como the next day. He was twenty-three and already a world champion, and had won a single stage of the 1993 Tour de France. But he considered that only the beginning. Growing brasher by the day, he wasn’t going to let a bunch of European pussies kick the crap out of him because they were using a wonder drug and he wasn’t.

Armstrong approached rider after rider. “I’m getting my ass kicked and we’ve got to do something about it. We need to get on a program.” They knew what he meant. They agreed it was time for EPO. The new drug was ubiquitous. Riders carried thermos jugs packed with ice and tiny EPO glass vials. Clink, clink, clink. You could hear the vials rattle against the ice. Clink, clink, clink. In this era of cycling, it was the sound track of the sport.

Armstrong might have chosen to use EPO on his own, but it wouldn’t have done him much good. Cycling, despite appearances, is a team sport. There is usually one leader on each team who sets the agenda and whom the other riders support. On Motorola, that man was Armstrong, arguably the best all-around rider.

The rest of the squad are
domestiques
—secondary riders.
Domestique
is the French word for “servant,” and those servants sacrifice themselves to help the leader win, partly with team tactics and partly with aerodynamics. They take turns with other
domestiques
and ride in front of their leader—or to the side, if there is a crosswind—to punch a hole in the air and allow the leader to tuck in behind and save energy. The leader is being swept along in their draft, and expends up to 40 percent less energy than he would riding alone.

The goal is to deliver the team leader as fresh as possible to the crucial point in the race. From there, he can take off and win the stage or take off and gain time on his competition in the overall race for the yellow leader’s jersey.

Eventually, though, the
domestiques
burn themselves out and often peel off from their leader before struggling to finish the stage. So the stronger a leader’s
domestiques
are, the better his chances to win because they will be able to hang on and help him as the finish line grows closer.

In 1995, Armstrong presented his
domestiques
with an ultimatum: If they wanted to be considered for the Tour team that year, they had to start using EPO. Don’t want to? Well, there’s the door. Armstrong was taking control. It was his success at stake. The Motorola program had been built around him. Finishing 73rd in a big race would not inspire sponsors to sign on. Motorola had already said it was ending its sponsorship at the end of the season. The pressure was on, then, to attract another sponsor to cover most of the team’s bills.

When Hendershot took over as Armstrong’s
soigneur
, J.T. Neal became Armstrong’s personal assistant. In Como, he ran errands and generally made life easier for Armstrong while he raced or trained. When Armstrong dropped out of the Tour de France early—in 1993, 1994 and 1996—Neal picked him up for the trip to Como. He moved Armstrong from apartment to apartment between seasons. He ran the household. He once paid the bill to get the apartment’s electricity turned on after Armstrong and Andreu had let a bill go unpaid. He repaired the clothes dryer.

When Armstrong arrived in Como after a Tour, Neal began massage sessions to prepare him for the fall’s world championships. The men stuck together. Neal introduced Armstrong to art in Milan’s museums. Sometimes, they simply sat outside Armstrong’s place overlooking Lake Como, sharing low-calorie meals like tuna with balsamic vinegar and olive oil.