Cycle of Lies: The Fall of Lance Armstrong (7 page)

A visit to Testa was often on the day’s to-do list. Though the
soigneur
Hendershot said he injected Armstrong with performance-enhancing drugs soon after Armstrong signed with Motorola in 1992, Armstrong himself claims he didn’t start doping until the 1993 world championships. He said Testa gave him Synacthen, a drug that stimulates the adrenal glands to secrete glucocorticoids. Riders say Synacthen makes them feel stronger and takes away some of the pain of a difficult ride. The drug was available on the Motorola team even before Armstrong pushed his teammates to use EPO. Hendershot said Armstrong was “as clean as he ever was” at those worlds.

Neal figured Testa’s job was to inject Armstrong with every needle within reach. Testa was constantly giving Armstrong IVs with substances the doctor called “liver cleansers.” Stephen Swart, a teammate from New Zealand who had first raced in Europe in 1987, didn’t live in Como and see Testa regularly like the American riders did, but had heard about Armstrong’s drug use because the sport was so insular and rumors—especially pertaining to doping—traveled fast.

Swart, a stern, strapping guy, thought Armstrong was mandating what the team’s directors wouldn’t. Jim Ochowicz, a two-time Olympian in track cycling who is considered the godfather of American cycling, had founded the 7-Eleven team, the first American team to race in Europe, and stayed with the team when Motorola came on as its sponsor. It was Ochowicz who first imagined Americans challenging the European old guard, and it was Ochowicz who had made it happen.

In 1986, 7-Eleven became the first U.S. team to compete in the Tour, and one of its riders, Davis Phinney, even won a stage. For years, Ochowicz was the point person in the U.S. for international cycling, the negotiator dealing with sponsors and the European race directors. With journalists, for some reason, he liked to play down his knowledge of the sport’s inner workings.

Often when Ochowicz was asked about Armstrong and EPO, or other performance-enhancing drugs, he took on a look as if to say, How could you even think such a thing? He would smile nervously and say, “I have no idea how to respond” (2005) or “I don’t know what the answer is” (2009) or “The answer is that I haven’t a clue” (2010). He has denied involvement or knowledge of any cheating on the team. Over the course of seven years, I would walk away time and again thinking Ochowicz was either a practiced liar or the most oblivious man ever to walk in cycling’s clink-clink world.

Swart and other riders and employees insist it was impossible for Ochowicz to be that naive. He was a man Armstrong professed to be his “surrogate father.” Ochowicz stood up for Armstrong at his wedding and is the godfather to his first son. Swart and others said Ochowicz would leave the room anytime the team talked about doping.

Hendershot said he felt the team managers, like Ochowicz, were the most unethical members of a team because often they turned a blind eye to the doping, and never seemed concerned about the safety of their riders. They relied on the doctors and
soigneurs
to make sure the cyclists didn’t overdose and drop dead, he said.

Armstrong said Motorola’s EPO use began in May 1995 at the Tour DuPont, America’s best-known multistage race. Armstrong, who had finished runner-up the previous two years, became the second American winner after Greg LeMond. With his victory came a big payday, $40,000. Including bonus money, Armstrong collected $51,000. He shared it with his teammates.

Swart said he received Testa’s EPO instructions in the spring of 1995 and that he and Andreu subsequently went to Switzerland to buy the drug. They used it for the Tour of Switzerland, which ran shortly before the Tour de France. Swart said he used EPO for the last time after the prologue of the 1995 Tour. Every morning and every night at that Tour, team employees showed up at the team hotel with bags of ice for riders’ thermoses, and were sometimes exhausted after an all-day hunt in countries that mostly serve their drinks at room temperature.

During one rest day of that 1995 Tour de France, Armstrong and his Motorola team gathered in Testa’s room. They found him using a small machine called a centrifuge. He asked each to stand in line so he could take a small blood sample and place it in the centrifuge, which spun the blood to separate it into three categories: plasma, red blood cells and white blood cells. His goal was to measure their hematocrit level. Too high a hematocrit level meant they had used too much EPO and might be placing themselves in danger of a heart attack. (Riders had heard stories of some cyclists setting alarms to wake up in the middle of the night to exercise, so that their EPO-thickened blood wouldn’t cause them to suffer cardiac arrest in their sleep.)

With half of the Tour and so many punishing miles behind them, the riders’ hematocrit levels should have dropped well below normal. With the EPO they had used, though, their bodies were making new red blood cells at that very moment. Their hematocrits soared, as if they had not pedaled a mile. They were fresh.

Swart saw that most of his teammates had hematocrits of more than 50. His, he recalled, was the lowest of everyone’s, at 47 percent. He remembered the others’ numbers: Andreu’s was at about 50. Andrea Peron, an Italian, had the highest, at 56. (There have been no conclusive findings that Peron ever doped.) Armstrong’s was either 52 or 54, at least ten percentage points above his norm. Even with that edge, Armstrong, the strong one-day racer, would go on to finish 36th in that Tour, nearly an hour and a half slower than Miguel Indurain, the winner.

The telephone call came to Kathy LeMond in the middle of the night. The wife of the American cycling star Greg LeMond heard screaming and crying when she picked up the receiver in their home in Belgium. Then she heard a voice say, “He’s dead! He’s dead! I tried to help him, but he’s already dead! I touched him—he’s cold! He’s dead!”

The voice was that of Annalisa Draaijer, the American wife of the twenty-six-year-old Dutch cyclist Johannes Draaijer. That night at the Draaijers’ home in Holland, three days after her husband had returned from a race, Annalisa heard Johannes make a gurgling sound as they lay in bed. She tried to wake him, but his body was limp. He had died beside her. She knew no one else to turn to.

Greg LeMond had raced with Draaijer on the Dutch team, PDM. Their wives bonded because both spoke English. Now their friend was dead. As soon as news of Draaijer’s death became public, there was speculation that EPO use had caused the cyclist’s blood to thicken into mud and cause a heart attack. No one ever proved Johannes Draaijer died because he was on EPO. But to Greg LeMond, nothing seemed more obvious.

“He died for what?” LeMond asks. “For nothing . . . Everybody knew what was going on, but nobody stopped it. Nobody.”

CHAPTER 5

I
n the fall of 1995, Lance Armstrong went in search of Dr. Michele Ferrari. He wanted to work with the man who had transformed the Gewiss-Ballan bikes at Flèche Wallonne into flying machines.

But Ferrari had become a kingmaker in cycling and had grown increasingly selective about his clientele. So even strong riders like Armstrong needed to undergo a physical before any deal was closed. Because he was afraid of going anywhere alone, Armstrong convinced his girlfriend, Monica Buck, a former Miss Hawaiian Tropic from Texas, and J.T. Neal to accompany him to Ferrari’s office in Bologna. They climbed into Armstrong’s car for the two-and-a-half-hour drive from Como on autostrada A1, due southeast.

It wasn’t the most comfortable ride. Neal didn’t want him to go, and was cross that he’d gone ahead and made the appointment. All he said, in his soft Southern drawl, was, “Lance, don’t get greedy now.”

Only twenty-four years old, Armstrong had nearly $750,000 in the bank. But Neal knew that Armstrong idolized people like Ochowicz, the Motorola team manager who ate at the best restaurants, stayed at five-star hotels and ordered only the priciest wines. Armstrong could see only one route to get there—and that was with Ferrari leading the way. He had asked Eddy Merckx, the five-time Tour champion from Belgium, to introduce him to the doctor, and Merckx obliged.

Buck, meanwhile, was a petite, voluptuous aspiring actress who had come from Texas to visit Armstrong. Neal worried about her. Lance had a way with women. He had dumped Buck’s predecessor, Danielle Overgaag, a top Dutch cyclist who had lived with him in Austin, because she’d been “too opinionated.” Neal had the feeling that Armstrong would never have gone to see Ferrari if Overgaag had still been in the picture. But at summer’s end, in 1995, Armstrong had Neal remove Overgaag’s belongings from the Como apartment to make room for Miss Hawaiian Tropic, who seemed already to be straining her welcome.

Ferrari’s office, in the basement of the doctor’s Bologna house, was a chaos of wires, tubes, bicycles and machines. Armstrong had heard about some of Ferrari’s clients, including Eddy Merckx’s son, Axel, and Max Sciandri, a Brit who had grown up in Italy and later denied seeing Ferrari. Both suddenly rode faster than ever, and Armstrong had asked them if they had a secret. Yes, they said.

Ferrari, the tall, thin Italian with a receding hairline and avian features, had studied at the University of Ferrara under Francesco Conconi, a scientist considered the grandmaster of Italian sports medicine. Conconi, a former member of the International Olympic Committee’s antidoping commission, knew his way around EPO. The IOC had paid him handsomely for his research into developing a test for it. But he was double-dealing. Even as the IOC paid him to develop the test, he delivered EPO to Italian skiers and cyclists.

Ferrari learned from Conconi. Now Armstrong wanted to be the hematocrit-rich Plato to Ferrari’s Socrates. After evaluating him, Ferrari praised Armstrong as “amazing, amazing, so amazing.” But he told him he could improve only if he followed his advice and his plan, never straying. “I will train you,” he said, “and together, we can do great things.”

Ferrari charged Armstrong $10,000 for the consultation and commanded 10 percent of his salary. Even Armstrong, who guarded money as if he were as penniless as his poor mother said she once was, thought the deal was worth it for what he could earn later, and agreed to it.

The doctor and rider had to keep their relationship secret because Ferrari was then under investigation by Italian authorities for sporting fraud and for doping his riders. He dealt in cash and wrote little down so that he would leave a minimal paper trail. Over time, though, Ferrari grew lax about his rules.

On Armstrong’s happy drive back to Como, he talked nonstop about how his career would skyrocket with Ferrari’s training and doping help. (Ferrari, however, denies doping any of his riders.) All Buck wanted to talk about was the two-hour shopping trip she and Neal took while waiting for Ferrari to be done with Armstrong. In a kind of lonely melancholy, Neal saw that Armstrong felt no guilt. Neal felt that Armstrong had forgotten the trip they’d taken to see the family of Fabio Casartelli, Armstrong’s teammate on Motorola who had been killed during the 1995 Tour. Armstrong had held Casartelli’s infant son in his arms and had embraced his widow.

During one stage of the Tour, Casartelli had crashed and hit his head on a cement block along the road. Testa, who had been overseeing the doping on the Motorola team, persuaded the forensic doctor in France not to conduct an autopsy because he said it was obvious how Casartelli had died.

Armstrong would eventually say that the day Casartelli died is the day he learned what it meant to ride the Tour. “It’s not about the bike,” Armstrong said. “The Tour is not just a bike race, not at all. It is a test. It tests you physically, it tests you mentally, it even tests you morally. I understood that now. There were no shortcuts, I realized.”

No shortcuts—unless you consider a secret deal with Europe’s most famous and infamous doping doctor a shortcut.

From Austin, Armstrong talked for hours by phone with Ferrari. He took training tips and grilled the doctor relentlessly. Once a week, in the middle of the night, the fax machine in Neal’s office would come alive with Ferrari’s training and doping calendars: when to take EPO, human growth hormone or testosterone so as to avoid testing positive.

Though much of the public thought Chris Carmichael was the coach solely responsible for preparing Armstrong, that relationship was just a cover. Not that Carmichael would admit it. In 2006, he told me he was Armstrong’s main coach, then more recently failed to return several of my phone calls and e-mails asking for comment.

As for getting the drugs, Armstrong had different methods. He could coax teammates into buying them for him from pharmacies in Switzerland, or buy them there himself. The
soigneur
Hendershot could procure drugs from his black market sources. Whatever they had to do, however much they had to risk, the winning would make it all worthwhile.

By 1995, Neal, Armstrong’s unofficial business manager, couldn’t handle Armstrong’s contracts alone. Companies wanted to produce Armstrong trading cards. Others wanted endorsements. Neal needed help. Keeping tabs on Armstrong was near impossible. That’s where Bill Stapleton came in.

Stapleton, a former Olympic swimmer who had competed at the University of Texas, had a fledgling sports practice at the Austin law firm Brown McCarroll and he needed clients. He needed Armstrong.

When Armstrong reached out in the spring of 1995, Stapleton promised he would shower him with personal attention. He offered a low commission rate: 15 percent of Armstrong’s marketing deals. Other agents, including the high-profile super-agent Leigh Steinberg, had asked for 20 percent.

He took Armstrong out for beers to woo him.

“You’ll be a big fish in a small pound,” Stapleton told him. “There will never be a time when your calls go unanswered. You will be what my world revolves around.”

“You’ll be there for anything, whenever I need you?” Armstrong said.

“Yes, for anything, all the time.”

“For anything?”

“Yes, absolutely anything.”

That was exactly what Armstrong wanted to hear. He loved being the most important person in the room.

Back home, Linda Armstrong’s third marriage was crumbling because her husband, John Walling, drank too much and was missing work, and Neal thought Armstrong should help his mother with money—a suggestion Armstrong refused.

For some reason unknown to Neal, Armstrong grew increasingly angry at his mother, long his greatest ally, the creator and perpetuator of the fantastic myth that the cycling world had come to embrace. Now he wanted nothing to do with her.

When Armstrong had bought his land in Austin in 1994 for about $240,000, he could have used his mother, a real estate agent, and spread some of the commission to her. But he didn’t. The mother-son relationship was so worrisome that Neal and Linda tried to convince him to see a sports psychologist and channel that anger into his riding. Again, Armstrong passed. This was an Armstrong that Neal didn’t know or like. He worried that Lance started every relationship thinking, “What can you do for me?”

The year before, Linda Armstrong and Neal had flown to Minneapolis to seek Greg and Kathy LeMond’s advice on negotiating Lance’s contracts. At the kitchen table in the LeMonds’ lakeside estate, they also asked how to rein in the kid’s ego.

“How do I get Lance to be less self-centered and actually care about other people during all this?” Linda asked.

The LeMonds didn’t know what to say. For a few awkward seconds, they sat speechless. Did they hear her right? Was Linda Armstrong telling them her son had no empathy? That he was out of control? They believed she was genuinely scared. They stuck to business advice—keep a close watch on him, don’t let him stray, carefully choose his partners.

Two years after the Gewiss team swept Flèche Wallonne and basically announced to the world that its riders were doping—and doing so under Ferrari’s watch as the team doctor—Armstrong took the top spot on that podium, the first American to win the famed spring race. That year, 1996, he also won the Tour duPont for the second year in a row. He was the runner-up at Paris-Nice, a one-week race, and his skills as a sprinter and time-trial rider were improving. All that was left to be considered a Tour contender was to boost his performance as a climber.

But as the summer of 1996 progressed, Armstrong could feel himself slow down. He dropped out of the Tour de France after just five days because of a sore throat and bronchitis. He told reporters, “I couldn’t breathe.”

Neal also hadn’t been feeling like himself. Soon, the reason became clear: Neal had cancer. He was diagnosed with multiple myeloma, a rare cancer of the plasma cells that inhibits the production of healthy blood cells. It hit Armstrong like a sinkhole in his path. Doctors gave Neal only two years to live.

Still, an exhausted Neal went to the 1996 Atlanta Olympics with Armstrong. An electric pump fed chemotherapy drugs into his chest. He slept on the floor of the house Armstrong rented for the Games.

“He needed it for privacy,” Neal said of the house. “He needed it for all the damn shots he was getting. You needed the privacy because the other players were not on the drug program. They were not getting shots. It looked like a pharmacy in the bedroom.”

Neal watched as Hendershot showed up with a bag filled with vials of liquid, syringes and IV bags and tended to Armstrong as if
he
were the cancer patient. He saw Hendershot give Armstrong an IV before and after the races. Armstrong was already using testosterone, growth hormone and EPO, but Neal wasn’t sure what substances Armstrong had received at those Summer Games. Whether he took banned drugs at those Olympics, or to prepare for them, Armstrong won’t say. When asked about it, Hendershot can’t remember the specific substances he gave Armstrong for those Summer Games, but said, “I would be totally surprised if he wasn’t” using banned drugs.

Hendershot told me that it was common to give riders different cocktails of steroids with EPO, and to give them aspirin or pharmaceutical-grade blood thinners to make sure their blood didn’t turn to sludge. But whatever Hendershot had given Armstrong at those Olympics, it produced no miracle rides. Armstrong finished 12th in the road race and 6th in the time trial, feeling inexplicably gassed as he struggled in each event.

Armstrong ended the professional season ranked seventh in the world, enough to secure a lucrative contract with the highly regarded French team Cofidis for the following two years. His salary: $2.5 million. He had even negotiated to bring Hendershot onto the team as his personal
soigneur
, a privilege granted to only the most elite riders.

By that time, Armstrong also had a stable of sponsors, including Nike, Giro, Oakley and Milton Bradley. His bank account overflowed. Stapleton said that Armstrong was a very wealthy young man who he estimated would make between $2 million and $3 million that year.

It was time for Armstrong to grow up. He finally moved out of the apartment he had rented from Neal for seven years and headed for a bachelor pad commensurate with his paycheck. Armstrong built a Mediterranean-style, 4,950-square-foot house on Lake Austin, with a pool, hot tub, two boat slips and twenty-nine palm trees. Gone was his beloved $70,000 NSX, replaced by a much cooler stable of toys: a $100,000 Porsche 911, a Harley-Davidson motorcycle, a Jet Ski and a powerboat. He threw himself a lavish twenty-fifth birthday party in his new mansion. But something was wrong.

He’d returned from Europe feeling weak, as if he had the flu. His headaches resisted even a handful of ibuprofen, and sometimes as many as three migraine pills. On his birthday, he blamed it on too many margaritas, but a few days later, he coughed up blood. His personal physician said it was likely that Armstrong’s sinuses were bleeding, from allergies.

On October 2, 1996, about 1 p.m., Armstrong and Neal had lunch at their usual haunt, The Tavern in Austin. Afterward, they headed to a mall to find a pair of shoes for Neal. This time Armstrong complained about a pain in his stomach.

“I’m having trouble walking,” Armstrong said, doubling over.

Neal told Armstrong that the first doctor’s assessment of an allergy attack didn’t seem right. He warned Armstrong that it could be serious, that he shouldn’t wait to see another doctor. He called one for him. Armstrong was in that doctor’s office before 3 p.m., as Neal waited nervously back home.

Doctors checked out Armstrong with an ultrasound, then a chest X ray, then gave him the bad news. “Well, this is a serious situation,” the doctor, Jim Reeves, said. “It looks like testicular cancer with a large metastasis to the lungs.”

Between 5:30 and 5:45 p.m., Neal’s cell phone rang. It was Armstrong.

“I have testicular cancer,” he said. “I don’t know what to do.”

Armstrong was distraught, Neal shocked. Now both of them had cancer.