Cycle of Lies: The Fall of Lance Armstrong Page 15

  His teammates thought that was hilarious and ridiculous. They had never heard anything about Armstrong’s project, and joked that he probably never even rode on a velodrome.

  At the 2001 Tour, after Walsh’s story was published, Armstrong considered refuting Walsh’s accusations to a small group of trusted journalists. He asked for a meeting with those reporters, but canceled twenty minutes later and sent a statement instead.

  In it, he admitted seeing Ferrari and wrote that the doctor “has had a questionable public reputation, due to the irresponsible comments he made in 1994 regarding EPO” (when Ferrari said the drug was only as dangerous as drinking too much orange juice). “I have never denied my relationship with Michele Ferrari. On the other hand, I’ve never gone out of my way to publicize it.” He also said, “He has never discussed EPO with me and I have never used it.”

  Armstrong said Ferrari only gave him tips “on dieting, altitude preparation” and only used natural methods of improvement, like tweaking his form on the bike.

  Despite Armstrong’s denials, Walsh’s story spread through the sports pages, mostly in Europe, and jump-started the Armstrong PR machine. Stapleton was a big part of the effort. To defend his client, Stapleton also defended Ferrari. He told the New York Times that Ferrari “knows physiology, and when he discusses gearing, Lance listens.”

  “Dr. Ferrari is not a witch doctor,” Stapleton said.

  Nearly every day at the 2001 Tour, Armstrong was forced to defend his relationship with Ferrari. He told journalists he was “proud” to work with him “on a limited basis” and would rethink using the doctor if a criminal investigation in Italy that focused on Ferrari uncovered any wrongdoing.

  “People are not stupid,” he said about a week before the Tour finish. “They will look at the facts. They will say: Here’s Lance Armstrong. Here’s a relationship. Is it questionable? Perhaps. But people are smart. They will say: Has Lance Armstrong ever tested positive? No. Has Lance Armstrong ever been tested? A lot.”

  He and Stapleton were not alone in their fight. While Armstrong parried with journalists in France, Nike, one of his primary sponsors, took his case to the American people—to those who believed what they saw in television commercials, anyway. The company aired a new TV spot featuring Armstrong.

  Armstrong looked into the camera and said, “This is my body. And I can do whatever I want to it. I can push it, study it, tweak it, listen to it. Everybody wants to know what I’m on. What am I on? I’m on my bike, busting my ass six hours a day. What are you on?”

  Walsh had a hunch what he was on. And it certainly wasn’t only his bike. It was drugs. He just needed solid proof.

  For a subsequent story Walsh wrote about the Armstrong-Ferrari connection to kick off the 2001 Tour, Walsh spoke to Greg LeMond. After reading that Armstrong was working with Ferrari, LeMond said, he was devastated because he considered Armstrong to be both a great rider and an inspirational hero to cancer patients.

  “If Lance is clean, it is the greatest comeback in the history of sport,” he said. “If he isn’t, it would be the greatest fraud.”

  CHAPTER 12

  In the last two years of his life, from spring 2000 to the fall of 2002, in hopes of writing a book, J.T. Neal recorded twenty-six hours of audiotape. The tapes re-create and comment on the most exciting times of his life, primarily the years the young Texan Lance Edward Armstrong rose from obscurity to superstardom.

  Neal never finished the book. Long after his death, the tapes remained hidden in the bedroom closet of his son, Scott. Nobody in the family had listened to them, but I was given the tapes, along with permission to use Neal’s words in this book. While in Austin, to transcribe the recordings, I met with Armstrong and asked him about his former best friend.

  “J.T. Neal? Forget about that. Don’t go chasing that shit,” he told me.

  He dismissed Neal’s importance, saying Neal hadn’t known anything about his doping because the drugs came after the two of them had grown apart. Little did he know that in a matter of just a few hours, I’d be sitting in the Neal household, headphones on, laptop at the ready, listening to the first tape that Neal had recorded. It brought his voice to life: “Today is the twelfth of April, and this is the beginning of my recollections on Lance Armstrong . . .”

  In an attic above the carport at J.T. Neal’s house—the former church on a hill over Austin—three large boxes and two suitcases sit covered with the dust of more than a decade. The boxes are filled with documents, press clippings and posters featuring Armstrong as a young rider under Neal’s care. One of the suitcases, both marked with fading Motorola Cycling Team logos, belonged to Neal and the other to Armstrong, and contain not only old jerseys from the Tour de France, but ones with iron-on felt letters, from tiny local races that marked the beginning of Armstrong’s career.

  More and more, as Neal realized his death was imminent, Armstrong’s behavior upset him. Neal had seen the “What Am I On?” Nike ad. He also had heard Armstrong’s denials that he had hooked up with Ferrari and was doping. It was one thing for Armstrong to be a liar, but Neal thought he had gone beyond simply lying to living a life of deceit.

  “When he said, ‘I’ve never taken EPO,’ he sits up there and denies that he’s ever done it, I know he’s lying,” Neal said. “And I know that kids look up to him; they’ve always looked up to him.”

  He didn’t like the way Armstrong treated the former Postal Service rider Kevin Livingston, either. Armstrong had basically dumped him from the Postal team in exchange for some Spanish climbers. Livingston was the friend who had been by Armstrong’s side on the national team, then Motorola, and especially when Armstrong fought cancer. He was even there in the awkward moment when Armstrong had needed a ride to deposit his sperm in a sperm bank before his cancer treatments. He was there to slowly pedal beside Armstrong on rides when chemotherapy sapped him of his energy. Of all the good soldiers in Armstrong’s army, Livingston was as good as they came.

  He also had been there to dope with him. Both were Ferrari clients. Livingston, who in 2010 told me he had never doped, had followed Armstrong to the doctor’s door. Unfortunately for Livingston, Ferrari wasn’t meticulous about hiding the fact that Livingston had been his client. An Italian criminal investigation looking into Ferrari’s alleged doping uncovered documents that suggested Livingston had used EPO and a powerful steroid. Those documents were made public.

  About the same time Armstrong and Livingston parted ways, Armstrong also refused to help Frankie Andreu get a new deal with Postal Service. He told Hamilton that both Livingston and Andreu wanted too much money and were “not gonna get shit.”

  Betsy Andreu was convinced that Armstrong got rid of her husband because he refused to join Ferrari’s doping program. The way Neal saw it, Armstrong had made conscious decisions to turn his back on two of his most loyal teammates.

  Neal thought Armstrong was isolating himself from people who cared about him personally and was associating only with those who could help him win a bike race, become richer, or both. He said the only friends Armstrong had left were “twofold friends,” like Carmichael the coach, Ochowicz the former team manager and Stapleton the agent—friends only because he made them money. “I feel like in the long run, it’s going to be a disadvantage to Lance because he doesn’t have any other friends. He’s cast aside every friend he’s ever had,” Neal said. “Now all the people Armstrong has around him are yes-men and groupies, and if they don’t agree with him, he gets rid of them . . . It’s a sad state for him, because once all those go by, he’s not going to have anybody. He will be alone with his millions.”

  In the months after Armstrong’s first Tour win, in 1999, Carmichael founded Carmichael Training Systems—a Web-based coaching business with the promotional tag: “Lance Armstrong calls him coach. Now you can, too”—and wrote books based on his affiliation with the Tour de France champion. The first, The Lance Armstrong Performance Program: 7 Weeks to the Perfect Ride, was published in the
fall of 2000 and became an immediate best seller.

  The business started out of Carmichael’s home in Colorado Springs. In less than two years, by mid-2001, it had forty coaches, five hundred paying clients and revenues that had jumped 100 percent per year. By July 2002, the company had fifty employees, seventy-five coaches and a thousand subscribers. Like Armstrong, Carmichael had become a sought-after commodity. In newspaper and magazine reports, he described the miracle training program that had turned Armstrong into a Tour winner.

  He said he woke up one night and it hit him: Armstrong had been burning out his anaerobic energy system. The same physiological system that helped Armstrong win big one-day races was preventing him from winning three-week races. Carmichael said he had devised an idea that would mold Armstrong into a possible Tour contender. Armstrong would no longer ride in a big gear, but would pedal faster, at 85 to 95 revolutions per minute, to train his body to utilize more of his aerobic capacity and spare his anaerobic energy. His training would entail intervals of brief spurts of power. It was what Carmichael said was one of the keys to Armstrong’s success: He pedaled faster than everyone else!

  Neal considered it amazing that it took until 2001 for the public to divine that Carmichael might not be the force behind Armstrong. After all, Armstrong’s first trip to see Ferrari was way back in 1995, when Neal had accompanied him. Maybe the cash payments had hidden their association, or maybe it was the fact that both Ferrari and Armstrong had taken such care in keeping their relationship a secret.

  In November or December 1999, Ferrari visited Austin. He stayed at a home Armstrong owned outside of town. Neal assumed that many people in Armstrong’s entourage knew what was going on. Even Armstrong’s mother was tangentially involved. One wire transfer, dated July 24, 1996—back when she was in charge of paying her son’s bills—came from a bank account that appeared to have both her and her son’s name on it. The transfer showed that $42,082.33 had moved from their account to Ferrari’s.

  It is unclear whether Linda Armstrong—who went by Linda Walling then—knew that Ferrari was doping her son. On his audiotapes, Neal said he and Linda had “a laugh” about Chris Carmichael’s pretending that he contributed to Armstrong’s 1999 victory, suggesting that Armstrong’s mother knew that Carmichael was just a cover for Ferrari. What is clear about that time in Armstrong’s life, though, is that his relationship with his mother was on a downhill trajectory. Once he married Kristin in 1998, it took a sharp dive.

  “You know how that goes,” Armstrong told me, suggesting that his relationship with his mother had soured because of the tension brought on by the stereotypically tumultuous mother/daughter-in-law relationship. He said his mother felt that Kristin and her family looked at her as white trash, and that Kristin didn’t like his mother constantly doting on him. Making the situation even worse was that his mother’s third marriage was failing: She filed for divorce from John Walling in November 1998.

  Neal, one of Linda Armstrong’s closest friends, grew increasingly angry. She had told him that she had been supporting herself and Walling for two or three years by working at what she called “a corner office” global accounts manager job at the communications company Ericsson, and by selling real estate.

  After her marriage broke up, she told Neal that she had to sell the house she and Walling had lived in. She moved into a rented duplex in Plano. Most of her furniture was in storage because the new place was too small to hold it. A month after her divorce was final, Armstrong won his first Tour.

  In 1999, her company paid her airfare to the Tour de France, and Ochowicz put her up in a hotel so she could cheer on her son. She hardly spent any time with Lance after his victory. And even when she and Neal asked Armstrong for signed yellow jerseys, he wouldn’t immediately comply. The rift between Armstrong’s mother and Armstrong’s wife had torn mother and son apart. Kristin Armstrong urged her husband to cut his mother off so that she wouldn’t keep undermining their marriage. Armstrong felt obliged to do it to keep her happy.

  In 1993, when Armstrong won the world championships, the son had demanded that his mother come along when he met the king of Norway, saying, “No one checks my mother at the door.” In 1996, when he moved into his first house, he named it Casa Linda after her. Now he wouldn’t even return her phone calls.

  Neal finally asked Armstrong—pleaded with him—to give his mother some money, and tried to explain to him how important it was to take care of his own. Armstrong first told him that his accountant had advised against giving his mother any tax-free money, but Neal took that as a lie. He told Armstrong he should be ashamed that he wasn’t helping his mother. “I stood up to him because his mother had nothing and he had millions,” he said.

  To his wife’s dismay, Armstrong eventually listened to Neal and helped his mother to pay her divorce lawyer. But Neal was sure that Armstrong held his intervention against him and that he used it as an excuse to pull away from him.

  Neal sensed that Armstrong didn’t want to be told what to do anymore. He wanted the people around him to do what he wanted them to do. Some people in Austin who were close with both Armstrong and Neal said, however, that their relationship broke apart because Neal was not corporate enough for the rich venture capitalist guys Armstrong hung out with at Livestrong. Neal was the opposite of materialistic: Though he was wealthy, he often wore baggy, torn sweaters and khaki pants with holes in them.

  Neal knew he was dying and might not have much time left. He was on and off steroids for his illness, and they made him irritable and loquacious, eager to let his real feelings be known. He had come to the point that he was tired of giving everything he had to Armstrong without Armstrong ever giving back. It was too late to cry about it now, but Neal regretted that he had spent so much time with him and, at times, neglected his own children in doing so.

  Part of Neal was proud of what Armstrong had accomplished and was happy for him. It had felt so sweet for him and his wife, Frances, to hold Armstrong’s son, Luke, shortly after he was born. The Neals felt like they had raised Armstrong and considered Luke to be family.

  “If we had listened to the warning signs a little sooner, or if he hadn’t had drugs, he probably wouldn’t even have had the problems he has now,” Neal said. “But he gave his soul to Dr. Ferrari for the money. It’s a shame, because he could have gone on and not used drugs, not got everybody else on the program, and still would have been an excellent cyclist.”

  On September 24, 2001, Neal received an invitation in the mail to attend a party celebrating the fifth anniversary of Armstrong’s cancer diagnosis, which he called his “Carpe Diem” day. That Latin phrase means “Seize the day,” and Armstrong chose it because the diagnosis spurred him to overcome adversity and take charge of his life. A frail, ailing Neal subsequently had written Armstrong a note about the time in 1996 that they both learned they had cancer—Neal in the summer, Armstrong in the fall—a time in which he and Armstrong were inseparable. “It was only like yesterday when we had the first day of Carpe Diem.” He never received a response.

  Neal had bumped into Armstrong at a restaurant weeks before, when Neal was still recovering from a broken hip and a tumor that had forced him to endure more than a dozen radiation treatments. They hadn’t seen each other in a while and Armstrong had seemed excited about reconnecting. He said they needed to get together, and they exchanged cell phone numbers. But it was hard for Neal to tell if the gesture was genuine. “He said he was going to call me, but I haven’t heard back,” Neal said at the time. “I’m sure he’s really busy.”

  In his final days, Neal called Linda Armstrong. “Always have loved you and that boy of yours,” he said. She told him that he had done a fine job at being her son’s “surrogate mother” as he stood in for her when she lived three hours away. She wanted to know how he felt. Neal wouldn’t say. He hated being asked that.

  So, on October 1, 2002, even some people who had been close to him were surprised to hear that he likely would not make it to
the next morning. Armstrong’s mother had tried to call her son to tell him about Neal, whom she described as “one of the few people who really cared about him [Armstrong] without having anything to gain from it.” The story from there differs, depending on who tells it.

  Linda Armstrong said in her book that she called Armstrong at home once, but that the answering machine picked up. The next time she called, someone she didn’t know answered the phone. She could hear a party in the background.

  Her son had been celebrating the anniversary of his cancer diagnosis: It would be six years the next day, October 2. When she asked to talk to Lance, the person on the other line said, “He’s out swinging on the rope with Ethel,” his mother-in-law. Armstrong’s mother told the person it was urgent and that Lance needed to call her immediately.

  “Sure, no problem,” the person said.

  While Armstrong partied, Neal’s family and close friends gathered at Neal’s house to say good-bye. One of the athletes he had watched over drove straight from Dallas, more than two hundred miles away, doughnuts in hand. Another was out scouring stores for egg-crate foam to put on Neal’s bed, so he would feel more comfortable. Another was trying to control her emotions, but was sobbing.

  Two people who had been at Neal’s bedside said Armstrong had reached out to Neal that night by calling his cell phone. The person who answered the call said he turned to Neal and said, “It’s Lance.” But Neal, still deeply hurt, waved it off. “I’m not taking it,” he said.

  Armstrong and Doug Ulman, chief executive of Armstrong’s foundation, said they were together in a car en route to a Livestrong function the next day when Armstrong got the call to say Neal had died that morning. Ulman said that was one of the two times he had ever seen Armstrong cry.