Cycle of Lies: The Fall of Lance Armstrong Read online

  The Austin American-Statesman wrote a glowing obituary of Neal, with the headline, “Austin man was athletes’ best friend.” Neal, who was sixty, helped athletes “achieve health and greatness” without ever taking a penny for it, the story said. Josh Davis, a two-time Olympic swimmer, was quoted as saying, “J.T. was a great example of a true human being who was put on this earth not to take but to give.”

  Neal’s funeral was held in a church on the grounds of the University of Texas. Kevin Livingston and other athletes Neal had helped were among the pallbearers. According to Armstrong’s mother, Armstrong stood in the churchyard after the service and “looked shell-shocked and sorrowful.”

  Neal’s family and others at the funeral had different recollections.

  Armstrong and his wife had gone to the funeral straight from a photo shoot. He wore a T-shirt, a black leather blazer, jeans and flip-flops. She wore a white flowing shirt with eyelets.

  He didn’t look shell-shocked or sorrowful, they said. He seemed more dispassionate or irritated. When the service was over, he walked up to Neal’s daughter Caroline. Her heart fell when she saw him dressed so casually, but she was too distraught to criticize him.

  He told her, “I don’t do funerals.”

  She stood there for a second, amazed at his attitude and holding back tears.

  “Lance, what do you want me to say? This is not about you.”

  PART FOUR

  LIES OF THE BROTHERHOOD

  CHAPTER 13

  David Zabriskie wanted to get up from the table at the coffee shop in Girona, Spain. He wanted to push back his chair, stand tall and say, “No, thanks, drugs aren’t for me,” and walk away from Johan Bruyneel and Dr. Luís García del Moral. It was May 2003. Zabriskie was in his third year as a pro, and was the youngest member of the Postal Service team, a team he almost didn’t make in the first place because Armstrong thought he was, like Vaughters, too weird. He imagined striding away from that café with the swagger of a Western-movie gunslinger. But he didn’t move. He couldn’t.

  Instead, Zabriskie felt as if his hand were welded to the tiny espresso cup in front of him. He’d gone to the café with Postal Service teammate Michael Barry to pick up injectable vitamins—which the team called “recovery”—when Bruyneel had handed him much more than that.

  “We brought the recovery products for you, and some EPO,” Bruyneel said, as casually as one might ask a fellow diner to pass the salt.

  “Uh, what?” Zabriskie said. To buy time, he put questions to Bruyneel and the team doctor, del Moral.

  “If I take this, will I be able to have kids?”

  “Yes, you will, you can still have kids,” Bruyneel said.

  “Will they be retarded?” Zabriskie said.

  “No, they will not.”

  “Um, will my ears grow bigger?”

  “No, no they won’t,” Bruyneel said. “You know, you don’t have to take it.”

  Zabriskie was a skeletal figure atop his bike, all elbows and kneecaps. Six-foot and maybe 150 pounds. His haircuts alternated between rock-star shaggy and jarhead buzz cut. He’d once nurtured a brawny mustache that would have been too much even for Wild Bill. Many of his teammates found him odd, and not just because he had one green eye and one blue. He believed in, or at least talked about, certain conspiracy theories, such as the one that had the U.S. government creating processed foods to kill off its own people. He worried that his cell phone was giving him brain cancer. A shy man among strangers, Zabriskie was comfortable enough on the team bus to sing aloud, crack jokes and talk about the world-saving lineup of superhero statues that decorated his house.

  In 1998 Zabriskie, then an amateur, had been invited to Austin to ride with Armstrong and Livingston. He pedaled in their shadows while listening to Armstrong talk about his sexual exploits. Zabriskie was so intimidated that he didn’t say a word, at first. He finally accelerated to ride alongside them and show that he was a Casanova, too. Listen to this: He once met a girl in a 7-Eleven, “and, oh yeah, I banged her.” The story was a fabrication, Zabriskie’s sophomoric way of trying to be one of the guys.

  But it didn’t sit well with Armstrong. Years later, when Bruyneel considered bringing Zabriskie onto the Postal Service team, Armstrong recalled Zabriskie’s strange behavior that day. He told Bruyneel not to hire him. Zabriskie got the job only after several people connected to USA Cycling convinced Armstrong that Zabriskie wouldn’t be a distraction.

  Still, on that day in May 2003 at the Girona café, Zabriskie’s innate awkwardness presented itself when Bruyneel set down the package of EPO. Every top Postal Service rider had likely come to such a moment. With Zabriskie, though, it was different. He had never ridden for any other team and had no real knowledge of the drug culture. Of all the riders who went through Postal Service, none was more naive, none as trusting.

  So he was rattled by Bruyneel’s offer of EPO. Even the mention of drugs disturbed Zabriskie. He had grown up around drugs and learned to hate them. He had seen what drugs could do. He’d seen what they had done to his father.

  Michael H. Zabriskie’s obituary in the Salt Lake Tribune said he passed away peacefully on September 7, 2000, had “enjoyed music, fishing, sports, and he loved the Utah Jazz.” It was a kind remembrance of a man who had lived in darkness.

  He spent days in his basement, stoned and drunk, selling marijuana and cocaine from his La-Z-Boy recliner. He fought so much with his family that they often sought refuge in a bedroom, cowering as he tried to force his way in. He terrified his wife, Sheree, with threats of physical abuse. She believed her husband might try to kill her or her children someday. She had seen such horror before. Her father had killed her mother with a shotgun before turning the gun on himself.

  In defense, Sheree Zabriskie created a world for her children away from their father. She checked them into a hotel or took them camping. On better days, she took them to movies while her husband cooled off. It was the family’s version of normal.

  For Zabriskie, the symbol of the family’s dysfunction was his father’s old brown recliner. That chair. That worn-out, threadbare, dingy, godforsaken chair that sat in front of the television in the basement. Zabriskie’s father went through at least three of them. Zabriskie was sure that his father would die there, legs kicked out in front of him, the air thick with stale marijuana smoke, a glass of Lord Calvert whiskey swirling in one hand, TV remote control in the other.

  Zabriskie was in elementary school when his father told him he worked in construction. For a long time, Zabriskie didn’t know any better. He knew his dad stashed envelopes filled with $500 each into the tubing of a brass hat rack, and he knew that the basement smelled funny but didn’t know what the smell was. He started to suspect something wasn’t right while doing his seventh-grade homework one night on the bar in the basement, as his father watched a Larry King segment on medical marijuana.

  “Look, some guy’s lighting a joint on Larry King!” his father said to a friend on the phone. When Zabriskie heard his father speak about drug use so casually and use the word “joint,” like it was a staple of his vocabulary, it finally hit him: Oh my God, Dad is a drug dealer! After years of building up his courage, Zabriskie finally confronted his father. Michael Zabriskie explained that he had started to sell drugs as a young father who dropped out of school to support his family.

  That didn’t make Zabriskie feel any better, especially when his life was so tumultuous. Where his dad had punched holes in walls and threatened his family with violence, Zabriskie had become withdrawn and timid. He retreated to a basement room where he kept superhero statues of Batman, Spider-Man and He-Man. They were symbols of his yearning to protect his mother and sisters and save himself from torment. He was a non-Mormon in Salt Lake City, a city of Mormons, and more than once his schoolmates and neighbor kids told him he was bound for hell.

  He was a good student who received mostly As and Bs. Yet he ate his lunches alone in a nearby field and never went to school dances. He w
as an outcast. After school, he Rollerbladed on the parking lot of a Mormon church. There he tuned out the world, dancing on his wheels while the mix-tape in his Walkman played West Side Story, Camelot and The Who’s Tommy. He would stay for hours, singing the shows’ lyrics and dreaming about doing something—anything—that would make him famous. He didn’t want to be known forever as some ne’er-do-well devil kid from a bad family. Then he would skate home and be snapped back to the reality of his father, drunk and sprawled out on that miserable La-Z-Boy. He had begged his father to stop drinking, written him letters about how much he meant to him, but he had gone unheard.

  In eighth grade, a woman rang the doorbell at the Zabriskie house. She told David she had knocked the side-view mirror off the Zabriskies’ camper, parked on the street. She wanted to talk to his father about it, but Zabriskie couldn’t coax his father upstairs. Suddenly, the woman stepped aside and in stormed a SWAT team. A stream of officers rushed by in helmets and riot masks with their black automatic weapons at the ready. They shouted, Police! Police! They pushed the fourteen-year-old Zabriskie aside and raced toward the basement.

  His father was ushered out in handcuffs, quipping, What took you so long? David screamed at him through his tears, “This is all your fault!” The police had seized marijuana, cocaine and thousands of dollars in cash. Michael Zabriskie was off to the county jail for drug trafficking.

  When David Zabriskie returned home after the raid, he found the house torn apart. His mattress had been slashed and thrown askew on the floor. Earlier, when the police had asked him if there was any money stashed in the house, he was so nervous that he told them the truth. Yes, yes, he told them. It was Christmas money, and it was hidden inside his mattress. Under duress, whenever the pressure seemed unbearable, Zabriskie was unable to keep a secret.

  Cycling saved him. Zabriskie’s therapy was to race a mountain bike on the city streets. The faster he pedaled, the farther it took him from home. He used his rage to propel his bike up steep canyons. The more his legs and lungs hurt, the more he pushed himself. I’ll never be like my father. I’ll never be like my father.

  Eventually, when he felt he had become a pretty good rider, he attended a meeting at the Rocky Mountain Cycling Club. A local sports physiologist, Steve Johnson, spoke about race tactics and how cycling was far from an individual sport. Johnson moved paper clips around a projector to show how a team worked. One rider could lead the peloton, move and open the door for a rider behind. Another could shield a teammate from an attack. You need teammates, and they need you, he said, and that’s the only way to win. Zabriskie liked the sound of that.

  He showed up an hour early for his first group ride with the cycling club. His new clip-in shoes couldn’t help him on the sixty-mile ride. His seat was too low, and he hadn’t brought any water, only a pack of gum. Though he barely made it home, needing much encouragement from other riders, he’d relished every minute of the experience. On those roads, battling his own physical and psychological pain, he had finally found peace.

  After the ride, he fell into his bed and felt his heartbeat pulsating through his body. All he knew about cycling competition was the name of its biggest event, the Tour de France. He didn’t know it was a three-week ride, two thousand miles, climbing mountains, flying in sprints, all of it asking more of a body than most bodies can give. He didn’t know anything about it, really. But after that ride with the Rocky Mountain Cycling Club, he knew one thing for sure.

  There on his bed, the boy who wished he was a superhero told himself, “I just took the first step to the Tour.”

  Zabriskie was lanky and lean, perfect for cycling. At sixteen, he won his first national event, the Iron Horse Classic in Colorado, and later that year won the state championship for his age group. At seventeen, he won a junior race in Colorado named after Lance Armstrong, already a world champion. That victory qualified Zabriskie to train at the United States Olympic Training Center. The next year, he finished fourth in the individual time trial at the 1997 junior world championships and decided, with the guidance of Johnson, who had become his mentor, to forgo college for a shot at riding professionally.

  When the Festina scandal hit in 1998, it prompted Zabriskie and teammates on the junior national team to gossip about PED use. They thought they might have to use drugs to succeed. Zabriskie once asked Johnson about doping. “Don’t worry, you won’t have to dope,” his mentor said. “The sport is cleaner than ever.”

  “So, you think I should keep going?”

  “Yes. You will be fine, I promise.”

  Levi Leipheimer, who had attended the University of Utah and had known Zabriskie for years, told him it was a perfect time to turn pro because doping was on the way out.

  But then Zabriskie met Matt DeCanio, a professional rider, and took a long ride with him in Colorado Springs, Colorado, home of the Olympic Training Center. Zabriskie asked him what it was like to race in Europe, and if drugs were a problem there.

  “Oh man, it’s bad, really bad,” DeCanio said.

  “Like, how bad?”

  “Those guys are taking veterinary grade pills, horse pills, all kinds of pills.”

  For an hour and a half, DeCanio told so many wild tales of drug use in Europe that Zabriskie thought the veteran was playing with him, trying to scare him. In fact, DeCanio’s talk was Zabriskie’s first warning: Pro riders use drugs, and if you want to ride in the top levels, you will use them, too.

  It wasn’t as if Zabriskie could seek his father’s advice. When he left training camps and went home, he saw his father drinking more than ever. The week after he turned twenty-one, he decided he’d had enough.

  The breaking point came when he and his mother were on the phone to make a plane reservation for a trip to the national team’s training base in Europe. His father kept picking up the line in the basement, trying to disrupt the phone call; he had propped a bar stool against the basement door so no one could enter. David snapped. Screaming and cursing, he kicked the basement door off its hinges, charged his dad and ripped the phone from his hands and straight out of the wall. Never before had he challenged his father, and his aggression frightened both of them.

  Seven months later, Michael Zabriskie died. The barrels of Lord Calvert whiskey had ruined his liver and turned his skin yellow. David’s many pleas had been well founded—his father would not live to see his son become one of the world’s best cyclists. The drugs and the drinking had done it, David told himself. Those damn drugs.

  There had been no good-bye or reconciliation between David and his father. David had been indignant when he’d visited him in the hospital where he was being treated. He’d never dreamed it would be his last chance to make peace with him.

  He skipped the funeral to race in Europe, at the Grand Prix des Nations in France. At that race, his anger, resentment, regret and sadness coalesced with his talent to propel him past the physical pain. He won that race for riders under twenty-three, his first big European victory, while Armstrong won the professional race. The day would be remembered for something else, too. At the finish line, Zabriskie met a man who would, for the next several years, guide and mold him: Johan Bruyneel.

  Bruyneel was big-time, savvy and slick after leading Armstrong and the Postal Service team to two Tour victories. Zabriskie was impressed that such an important person could be so nice. Bruyneel told him how good he was, how good he could be and how he could be rich if he signed with the right team. Zabriskie needed no sales pitch. He wanted money and the independence it brought, and he wanted all of it now. So weeks later, in Izegem, Belgium, in a back room of a jewelry shop owned by Bruyneel’s brother, he signed with Postal Service for $40,000 a year. He was joining a team led by Lance Armstrong, already one of the most well known and popular athletes on earth.

  Right away, he learned that his world was not Armstrong’s. No private jets, no multimillion-dollar contracts, no screaming fans. Riders like Zabriskie were drones around the hive. Zabriskie started at a training ca
mp in Tucson, Arizona, during which the team celebrated his twenty-second birthday by buying him shots of vodka. He ended up room-spinning drunk, throwing up behind the bar. Hincapie snapped photos of him, while Bruyneel urged him to have one more shot, just one more.

  “Take it or I’ll fire you!” he said.

  Zabriskie wanted to say no, he couldn’t possibly have more alcohol. But it was Bruyneel, the top boss, the man who held his future in his hands and wielded his power within the team. So Zabriskie, as he had with his father, caved. At night’s end, after vomiting for hours and enduring violent diarrhea, he passed out in his hotel room bathtub.

  With that initiation, he had become part of a new family—one just as dysfunctional as his family back in Utah. Bruyneel, the father figure, was always off with Armstrong and ignoring the young riders. Zabriskie again felt lost. He also was homeless. Marty Jemison, a fellow Utahan, had asked Zabriskie if he wanted to take over the lease of his $400-a-month apartment in Girona, but Bruyneel said, “Don’t take that apartment, nobody is going to live in Girona anymore, I’ll help you find a place.”

  Zabriskie was temporarily dumped at the apartment of two older riders, Julian Dean and Matt White. The place was a mess, with food and clothes everywhere. The day Zabriskie arrived, the familiar scent of marijuana hung in the air. On a training ride that day, White told him he had taken “tons of human growth hormone” while riding for an Italian team and it made his feet several sizes bigger. It was sensory overload for Zabriskie, the new guy who was still exceedingly shy. He asked himself, “How did I end up with these delinquents?”

  Dean and White tried to help him find an apartment, but he saw only one dingy, huge building after another. Finally, he chose a one-bedroom apartment above a coffee shop in a town thirty miles away.