Cycle of Lies: The Fall of Lance Armstrong Read online

  When it came to doping, Vaughters was pretty sure Armstrong got more out of it than he did. Vaughters had a naturally high hematocrit level, which fluctuated between 48 and 51 percent depending on whether he was at sea level or a high altitude. That meant his EPO doses had to be small or he would fail a new blood test implemented in the spring of 1997 by the International Cycling Union. (The organization goes by the initials UCI for its French acronym.)

  At that point, there was still no test for EPO—it would be four years before one was used at the Tour de France—so to try to limit the drug’s use in the sport, the UCI began taking blood samples from riders at races and testing their hematocrit levels. Any rider with a level of 50 percent or more would receive a fine and a fifteen-day suspension. Hein Verbruggen, the UCI’s president, called it a “health check” because it discouraged riders with dangerously high hematocrits (and thick blood) from competing and possibly risking their health.

  Under the new testing, Vaughters could use EPO to improve his hematocrit by only a few points, but Armstrong could gain a much bigger advantage because his normal hematocrit level was 42 or 43. Though each rider’s reaction to EPO was different—some were natural responders to the drug, while others didn’t respond to it at all, Armstrong could improve his level by at least 7 or 8 points, and likely more. That was much more than Vaughters could.

  Vaughters could raise his hematocrit with EPO to about 52—an improvement of 4 points at most—then he would temporarily lower it for UCI’s health check by infusing a bag of saline into his blood—a common practice among riders manipulating their blood with EPO. After using the drug, Vaughters saw the numbers tick upward on his power meter, the electronic machine affixed to his bike’s handlebars that measured a rider’s power output.

  Vaughters noticed that many times EPO would give him a 4 to 6 percent increase in power. That translated into a few percentage points of speed. That translated into better finishes.

  In time, Vaughters would become one of the best climbers in Europe.

  And all of that depressed him.

  At the 1998 “Festina” Tour de France, as gendarmes swarmed the race, one team hid its EPO in a vacuum cleaner. One rider had his family members smuggle it into his room at the team hotel. Late in the Tour, in an act of carelessness, a Postal rider left a thermos filled with vials of EPO in the refrigerator of the team bus. So much for a clean race.

  The Tour ended with only fourteen of the twenty-one teams that had started. Others had quit or been thrown out. Only 96 of the starting 189 riders finished.

  Bobby Julich, an American, finished third, the highlight of his career. He shared the podium with the Italian Marco Pantani, who had recently won the Giro d’Italia, one of cycling’s Grand Tours, and the German Jan Ullrich, who had won the Tour the year before. Years later, all three would either be implicated in doping scandals, test positive and/or admit doping. Julich seemed to know it was coming. After the race, he said, “Ten years down the line, you may see an asterisk” next to the 1998 finishes.

  Later that year, Armstrong and Vaughters rode in the Vuelta a España, a three-week race and Grand Tour. Armstrong and Vaughters knew each had pushed their hematocrits to the UCI limit by using EPO, but they didn’t talk about it.

  When Celaya checked each rider’s hematocrit to make sure none were going to fail the UCI’s blood test, he’d write the rider’s initials and hematocrit number on a paper napkin. Vaughters always peeked at those napkins. Armstrong made it his business to know everyone’s number.

  “Hey, 49, JV? Getting pretty close there, dude,” he’d say. If someone’s EPO was low, he would chastise him.

  Armstrong spoke freely about his doping back then. During that Vuelta he even asked Vaughters and Vande Velde to fetch him a cortisone pill. Near the end of a particularly difficult stage, he asked, “Can you get it from the car for me?”

  They looked at him like he’d lost his mind. He wanted cortisone? Right in the middle of a race? And we have to get it for him? But he was the boss, so they dropped back to the team car. The team director, Johnny Weltz, didn’t have cortisone. To keep the boss happy, he whittled down an aspirin pill, wrapped it in tinfoil and gave it to Vande Velde for Armstrong.

  When the race stopped in Andorra, the small principality in the Pyrenees, Vaughters needed to send an e-mail to his mother, so he went to Armstrong’s hotel room to borrow his laptop. Armstrong walked out of the bathroom shirtless, brushing his teeth with one hand and holding a tiny syringe in the other. With a deft wave of his hand, Armstrong grabbed a fold of his stomach and—click!—shot himself with EPO.

  “Now that you are doing EPO too, you can’t go write a book about it,” Armstrong said.

  PART THREE

  LIES OF THE MEDIA

  CHAPTER 10

  In the weeks before the 1999 Tour de France, Jean-Marie Leblanc, the Tour’s race director, made a pilgrimage to ask for a miracle. He went to Notre-Dame-des-Cyclistes—Our Lady of Cyclists—a tiny stone chapel in southwestern France that is considered the sport’s spiritual headquarters. It has ten wooden pews, five on either side of the aisle. Three rows of multicolored cycling jerseys, more than eight hundred in all, line its walls. Tucked in the back are cycling trophies and even bikes.

  Leblanc met with the parish priest and they prayed for the 86th running of the great national race. Leblanc needed more than just divine intervention—he needed the race to be clean. The Festina scandal still hung over the Tour. One newspaper in France called it “the Tour de Farce.” The French president, Jacques Chirac, had even asked if the race hadn’t become too difficult for a normal, nondoping human to endure.

  Leblanc promoted the 1999 race as the “Tour of Renewal.” Not that every fan, sponsor and journalist bought in. There had been clues that the label was wishful thinking. A month earlier, the 1998 Tour champion, Marco Pantani, had been ejected from the Giro d’Italia. His hematocrit level had reached 52, a number that suggested doping. Suspended for fifteen days, Pantani decided not to defend his Tour title.

  Into this drug-induced hellscape rode Lance Armstrong. He appeared on the first day of the Tour, in a theme park called Le Puy du Fou that is like Disneyland for history buffs, and established that his cancer was just a blip on the radar of his career. In an individual time trial held around the park, he won the 4.2-mile prologue, shocking the sport. In his broadcast, Phil Liggett, the longtime television commentator, was giddy: “What a way to make a return to big-time cycling after having had a near-death visit from the dreaded cancer!”

  Armstrong said he was surprised at how fast he had ridden—seven seconds ahead of the second-place man. “I gave everything and I felt good,” he said. He gave credit to his oncologists for saving his life and said it was amazing that he could even race. Addressing Festina, he said cycling fans shouldn’t worry about such a thing ever happening again. It was safe, he said, to fall in love with a man and his bike.

  The Postal Service team had a new doctor, a new team manager and a new way of thinking. To win cycling’s most prestigious race, it needed to be more aggressive than ever. Some teams might have been scared straight by the Festina scandal. But Armstrong saw an opportunity.

  When he won the prologue, he expected doping questions to follow. That was the price of being the team leader, that was the price of winning the yellow jersey in the first Tour post-Festina. While his teammates sat in the shadows, the man in front had to answer reporters’ questions every day.

  “It’s been a long year for cycling,” he said, “and as far as I’m concerned, it’s history. Perhaps there was a problem, but problems exist in every facet of life: sport, cycling, politics.”

  He continued, “You come to training camps to assume we are all doped. That’s bullshit. We’re not.”

  As Armstrong spoke to reporters after the prologue, his urine samples were en route to the French national antidoping laboratory in Paris to be analyzed for banned substances. For the first time, the drug testers at the Tour wou
ld look for corticosteroids—drugs that riders had long abused, primarily because they eased a rider’s pain. Cyclists were confident that the Tour didn’t test for them.

  Corticosteroids, according to Antoine Vayer, the head trainer of the infamous Festina team, were the drug of choice for most riders. He told David Walsh, a reporter for the Sunday Times in London, that cyclists had grown to rely on the drug as if they were addicted to it.

  “Riders take them when they are stressed, they take them when they are down, they take them if they mess up,” Vayer said. “For them, life must be without stress. It is a junkie mentality. Many of the best riders have become psychotic. They want to win money, to screw others because compared to them, everybody else is small. They want to have a nice house, a nice wife, a nice car and they will do whatever to get these things.”

  For the 1999 Postal Service team, the aggressive new doping program had begun with the team’s new doctor, Luís García del Moral. Del Moral, a balding, gruff chain smoker, ran a popular sports clinic in Valencia, Spain, and had replaced the soft-spoken Pedro Celaya as the team’s head physician. Celaya had given riders performance-enhancing drugs, but many felt he was dispensing the bare minimum. Some, like Vaughters, felt he was holding them back. Del Moral had the pedigree of having worked for the ONCE team, which had a reputation for being rife with doping.

  On the doctor’s suggestion, Armstrong and his teammates experimented with a plasma-expanding drug—none remember the name of it—made to boost their blood volume and, consequently, increase their endurance. The substance, normally used in patients who had lost blood after being burned or going into shock, was supposed to accomplish the same thing as a transfusion or EPO, only on a smaller scale and in a slightly different manner.

  “Um, I’m peeing purple,” Vaughters once told del Moral. “Are you sure this is OK?”

  Despite del Moral’s assurances, Vaughters felt an increasing anxiety about the new drugs. He had been using EPO and testosterone. But those were drugs he had researched. Now del Moral was introducing more and more unknowns as he expanded the team’s arsenal of pharmaceuticals. In addition to the plasma expander, he gave Vaughters a drug he said would increase circulation. Vaughters lost sleep imagining the imminent arrival of testers who would discover those new drugs, as well as the old standbys, in his system. But that was life on the new Postal Service team.

  It was part of the team’s preparation for the so-called Tour of Renewal. Armstrong later called the program “conservative.” With del Moral and the new team manager, Johan Bruyneel, in charge—Bruyneel had just retired from the ONCE team as a rider—the squad’s doping regime operated like a cold, hard business. While Bruyneel and del Moral say they were never involved in any sort of doping, Vaughters called the new drug program “no-holds-barred.” The drugs were supplied by the team and were free. The Italian doctor Ferrari watched over Armstrong and two of his top teammates, Tyler Hamilton and Kevin Livingston. The rest of the team was left to deal with the team’s new administration.

  “There was no moderating anyone’s drug use,” Vaughters said. “It was like a freakin’ flood of, ‘Hey, let’s do that. OK, let’s do that, too’; the more drugs the better.”

  While Celaya might have given Vaughters 6,000 international units of EPO for him to use over a two- or three-week period, del Moral gave him 15,000 to 20,000. “Yeah, just be a little careful. You don’t want to use it all or your hematocrit will be too high,” he would tell Vaughters, who was astonished at the doctor’s nonchalance.

  Organized and unemotional, del Moral kept everyone’s doping plan on a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet. He wasn’t interested in coming to riders’ homes to discuss how and when to use the drugs he had brought. In Vaughters’s case, del Moral usually dropped off drugs in Girona, Spain, when he was on his way to see Armstrong in Nice, France. He wouldn’t bother driving into town. He would meet Vaughters next to a tollbooth and make the handoff.

  Vaughters would ride his bike there and stuff the package of drug vials and syringes up his jersey for the ride home. Once, on his way back, he put his foot onto the road at a stop sign and the package inside his shirt crashed onto the pavement, vials and syringes flying everywhere, as a group of old ladies looked on. With del Moral in charge now, Vaughters was more stressed out than ever. One thing that bothered him was that the good doctor used preloaded syringes, leaving riders guessing what was inside because there was no label to inspect. When cyclists asked, “Hey, what’s that?” he’d say, “It’s a professional secret. Do you want it or don’t you?”

  Already numb to the doping in the sport, Vaughters always said yes. Getting injections, sometimes five in one sitting, had become part of the job—to ensure that Lance Armstrong won the Tour de France.

  Johan Bruyneel had worked with del Moral on the ONCE team. While Bruyneel had won two stages of the Tour de France, he was better known for riding off the side of a mountain in the 1996 Tour. (He was not injured and, muddy and shaken, got back on his bike.)

  Bruyneel and Armstrong had met at the Vuelta a España in 1998, the year Armstrong finished a surprising fourth after coming back from cancer. Bruyneel was a race commentator then, and there was an instant connection. Bruyneel suggested that Armstrong could be the kind of rider who could win the Tour someday, something no one had ever told him, and that belief in him piqued Armstrong’s interest. Bruyneel said he looked at Armstrong and that it “was like looking in a mirror.” The two men had the same single-minded will to win.

  Armstrong used his power on the team to arrange for Mark Gorski, the head of the Postal Service team’s business matters, to call Bruyneel and offer him a job as team manager. Bruyneel took the job and devised a plan.

  Armstrong would focus on just one race: the Tour de France. Forget the warm-up races beforehand—those would expose him to unnecessary drug testing. The International Cycling Union had no out-of-competition tests at that time, so he would be safe from testing positive while he used drugs to train harder.

  The difference between Bruyneel and the former team manager Johnny Weltz was that Bruyneel was obsessed with the nuances of doping and getting away with it. He kept tabs of every rider’s doping program and knew everyone’s hematocrit level. Once, when Vaughters had returned to Europe after spending time at home in the mile-high city of Denver, his hematocrit was 48 and Bruyneel laid into him.

  “You are doping on your own, aren’t you?” he said. When Vaughters said his hematocrit was just naturally that high at that altitude, Bruyneel didn’t believe him and stormed away. He wanted control over all the riders who would be escorting Armstrong, the team’s star, up and down the roads of France.

  On the more stringent doping program—in which the drugs came directly from the team and became necessary, like a bike part—Vaughters was going faster than ever. Before the Critérium du Dauphiné Libéré, one of the warm-up races to the Tour, he had used enough EPO to jack up his hematocrit to 53. A saline drip helped thin his blood for him to pass the UCI’s blood test.

  He won the Dauphiné’s uphill time trial that finished at the summit of Mont Ventoux, a mountain that soars above the Provence region of France and requires an impossible outlay of strength and endurance to reach the top. But Vaughters didn’t just win it, he won it in record time—56 minutes, 50 seconds—nearly 43 seconds ahead of the second-place finisher. Armstrong was fifth, about a minute back. It was the first time that Vaughters actually felt he had cheated. All those other times, he was using EPO just to keep up, to survive in a peloton that was racing at abnormal speeds. This time, after winning the glory and the prize money, he felt dirty.

  “I got to see the strings in the puppet show. OK, I get it now,” Vaughters told me nearly fourteen years after that victory. “My question was, am I really good enough to be the best in the world if I doped to the limit? The answer was yes. It was like the mystique was gone.”

  A few weeks after that, he won the Route du Sud, another big pre-Tour race. But out of fear that he
’d be caught doping, he began to dial back on his drug use. He couldn’t understand how Armstrong and his wife would live in Nice, when France’s antidoping laws were so strict. He asked Kristin Armstrong how she dealt with the daily possibility of police raiding their house when vials of EPO were chilling in the refrigerator next to the milk.

  “The code word is butter, as in, ‘Do you have any butter in the refrigerator?’ ” she told him.

  Vaughters also was starting to annoy Bruyneel because he kept asking him questions about how the doping would work at the Tour. He’d ask, “How is the team going to get drugs into France? Should we be afraid of testing positive? If we get caught there, it’s seven years in jail, don’t you know?”

  Bruyneel would answer, “Don’t worry, Jonathan. Everything is taken care of.”

  While Jean-Marie Leblanc prayed the morning of the 1999 Tour de France, the International Cycling Union did its usual dance to rid the race of anyone using EPO. It conducted a blood test on all of the riders to measure their hematocrit levels. Anyone whose level was over 50 percent—unless they, like Vaughters, had a dispensation from a doctor—would receive a two-week suspension right then and there. But, as it often is with drug users and their pursuers, the dopers were one step ahead.

  Vaughters remembers that eight of the team’s nine Tour riders were dangerously close to the UCI’s limit. They had del Moral and Ferrari to thank for it. Vaughters’s hematocrit was 0.001 away from being over. Hincapie, the sprinter, was also that close, with a level of 49.999. Armstrong’s was 49.4. “The whole team is ready,” Armstrong said.

  Just a few weeks before, at the Dauphiné, Armstrong’s hematocrit had been 41. He had told his soigneur, Emma O’Reilly, about it. When she asked him what he was going to do, he laughed and said, “You know, Emma. What everybody does.”