Cycle of Lies: The Fall of Lance Armstrong Read online

  The Postal Service enjoyed the PR boost Armstrong had given it, but was also wary of the doping allegations in the air since Armstrong’s return. When it renewed its sponsorship in 2000, it included in the four-year deal a “morals turpitude and drug clause” that said the Postal Service could suspend or fire any rider for failing drug tests or for inappropriate drug conduct prejudicial to the team or the government agency.

  Stapleton stayed in front of any suggestions that Armstrong cheated to win. He told one of the team’s sponsors, Coca-Cola, “Look, he doesn’t take drugs, OK? I will stake my entire career on it.”

  Armstrong began working on a sequel to his autobiography. The book, Every Second Counts, denounced all doping allegations. He wrote about the French government’s investigation into the medical waste Postal Service team members had tossed into a Dumpster at the 2000 Tour. The investigation had made his sponsors nervous, but Armstrong said he was bothered most by its effect on his reputation.

  He worried for his son, Luke. “Luke’s name is Armstrong and people know that name, and when he goes back to school I don’t want them to say, ‘Oh yeah, your dad’s the big fake, the doper.’ That would just kill me.”

  Armstrong and Kristin had put forth an image of having the perfect marriage: two beautiful people with money, fame and celebrity friends—kind of like the Kennedys’ Camelot, one pal said. But Armstrong wanted out. The two were on a beach in Santa Barbara, California, on Valentine’s Day when he told her he was leaving. He wanted a divorce.

  Kristin had signed a nondisclosure agreement that kept her from answering questions about her husband’s doping, a rule she followed even during legal proceedings. Later, she said she had become “a yes woman” who was just trying to keep herself happy at her own expense.

  Mike Anderson, who had taken a job as Armstrong’s bike mechanic/personal assistant in 2002, said Armstrong wanted out of the marriage because he wanted to enjoy all the spoils of being a celebrity—and that included the “countless girls who had knocked on the windows of the team bus.”

  Eventually, Armstrong would kick out Anderson, too. In 2004, Anderson found steroids in Armstrong’s medicine cabinet in Girona, and sensed that Armstrong was pulling away from him because he had stumbled upon Armstrong’s secret. Unexpectedly, he was fired.

  The two then butted heads in court. Anderson claimed that Armstrong backed out of a promise to finance a bike shop Anderson had wanted to open; Armstrong claimed Anderson was extorting him. They settled out of court.

  Anderson, an American who was married to a fellow American, couldn’t get away from Armstrong fast enough. Feeling harassed by Armstrong, he felt that he couldn’t flee far enough. He moved his family to New Zealand.

  The French dropped their investigation of Armstrong in late 2002. But a certain English journalist wasn’t as easy to shirk. Jonathan Vaughters first heard from David Walsh in the fall of 2003, more than a year after he had left the sport, presumably for good.

  Walsh—“that fucking little troll,” to quote Armstrong—wanted to meet with Vaughters in the United States for a book about cycling. Nothing on the record. Just for background. Vaughters, working as a real estate agent in Denver, agreed.

  Over burritos at a local Mexican restaurant, Walsh said he thought it curious that Vaughters had retired so suddenly, in his prime at the age of twenty-nine and with another year left on his contract with the French team Crédit Agricole. Walsh said the former Postal Service soigneur, Emma O’Reilly, told him Vaughters could be trusted and might have a story to tell.

  “I just want you to be honest with me,” Walsh told Vaughters. “I know you doped, but at the end of the day, I feel like you are one of the good guys. You left the sport at the peak of your career. I want to know why. And I want to know about the doping that happened on Postal. Tell me about Lance Armstrong.”

  Vaughters didn’t say a word. Walsh pressed him. It was time, he said, to end the lying and cheating that had begun in cycling a hundred years before. He said Armstrong needed to be stopped.

  “Jonathan, you’ve got a chance to stand up for your sport and make things right,” Walsh said.

  Vaughters was torn. After he’d left cycling, he wanted nothing more to do with it. He was sick of the lying and the cheating. He wanted to start a new life.

  After winning the time trial and setting the course record on Mont Ventoux in the 1999 Dauphiné, he promised himself that he’d never again use EPO. He didn’t keep the promise. He left Postal Service after that season, then doped occasionally, though without the success virtually guaranteed by his old team’s well-organized, centralized program.

  About a month before the 2002 Tour, Livingston—in his final year with Jan Ullrich’s Telekom team—suggested that Vaughters try a new drug called Albumin. It was a concentrate of plasma proteins from human blood and would increase a person’s hematocrit.

  Vaughters wasn’t sure if Livingston had ever used the drug, but he thought he’d give it a try after reading a pamphlet about it that he found on the Internet. He bought the Albumin from a pharmacy in Spain.

  Vaughters—and many other top riders in the peloton, for that matter—had to resort to using drugs like Albumin because they had no system in place to reinfuse their own blood at the Tour. There, Armstrong and Postal Service had a huge advantage. They had the funding to do what they wanted, and a plan in place that had been fine-tuned over years. If something went awry, they figured they had the protection of UCI officials like Verbruggen. The cycling union already had excused Armstrong’s positive cortisone test at the 1999 Tour. Deals had been made, precedents set.

  Teams that wanted to race clean, like Crédit Agricole, had no chance. Vaughters learned that firsthand. When he raced for that team in the 2001 Tour, he was stung in the face by a wasp or a bee during a training ride. His right eye swelled shut, yet he couldn’t take cortisone because he hadn’t declared it to the UCI before the race and couldn’t get an exemption to use it because it hadn’t been approved for an allergic reaction.

  He begged the team doctor to give him a cortisone shot and say it was for a knee injury, which would have been a lie but would have allowed him to continue racing. But the team manager, Roger Legeay, said no, because the team would be breaking the rules. Vaughters walked off in a huff, saying, “Screw this, this is hypocrisy from all angles.”

  He showed up at the stage start the next day, thinking that probably half the riders were taking cortisone against the rules, and Armstrong said, “What the fuck is wrong with your face?”

  “Bee sting.”

  “Why wouldn’t you take cortisone for that?”

  “Because it’s actually not allowed for an allergic reaction.”

  “You’re on the wrong team, dude.”

  In 2002, Vaughters regrouped for the Tour. While Armstrong had Bruyneel, del Moral, the team chef and Motoman working out the logistics of his doping, Vaughters was the mastermind of his own little plan. He would continue using testosterone patches and microdoses of EPO. But he would also use Albumin to dilute his blood before the UCI’s hematocrit screening. That way, it would look like his hematocrit was low, when it was actually well over the 50 percent limit.

  It seemed like a brilliant idea, until he looked again at the label a few days before the Tour. It said the drug carried a 1 percent risk of causing hepatitis C. He thought of his son, who was about two, and said enough is enough. He threw all his drugs into a garbage bag and tossed it in a Dumpster.

  Vaughters dropped out of the Tour about halfway through and told Legeay that night that he was quitting the sport to be with his family. He said the team didn’t have to pay him his salary—$350,000—for the remaining year of his contract. He just wanted out.

  Back in Girona, he left his apartment to head back to Colorado in such a rush that he forgot to discard the testosterone patches under the bed and the centrifuge in the living room.

  And now, Walsh was with him, looking him in the eyes, telling him he could see genui
ne goodness in him. No one does anything to clean up cycling, Walsh said, but Vaughters could be different. He could expose its secrets. Maybe young riders of the future wouldn’t have to face the decision that Vaughters once had to: dope or quit the sport.

  “Do we really have to do this?” Vaughters asked. “In all honesty, if you take down Lance, someone else will just take his place.”

  “Yes, Jonathan, but if you cut off the head, maybe the body will fall.”

  Vaughters paused, let out a huge sigh and said, “OK, OK, I’ll do it.”

  Betsy Andreu had put a dent in the shield around Armstrong’s secrets. She had contacted Walsh in 2001, after he had written about Armstrong’s involvement with Ferrari, and became one of Walsh’s best sources for information about doping in the sport.

  Now Vaughters shattered that shield by answering every question Walsh asked.

  After the interview, Vaughters realized what he had done. “Either I’m going to be pushed out of the sport,” he said, “or Lance is going to be.”

  The ninth stage of the 2003 Tour de France was run on a day so hot in southeastern France that the road’s asphalt bubbled. The Spaniard Joseba Beloki led Armstrong by three bike lengths down a steep descent toward a sharp right turn. Beloki’s rear wheel skidded from beneath him. He grabbed the brakes. His rear tire exploded and the bike collapsed. Beloki was thrown against the road. Medics found him in pieces, his right femur, elbow and wrist broken.

  And what did Armstrong do in the milliseconds between Beloki’s spill and his own certain disaster? If he flinched, no one saw it. He veered left of Beloki’s screams and headed off the road. Off the road? In the Tour de France? Only Lance Armstrong would fly past a startled gendarme at roadside and head into a farmer’s fallow field.

  Down the French farmland made hard by drought, Armstrong’s bike shook and rattled as if crossing the ties of a railroad track. He careened a hundred yards, perhaps, and at the bottom of the hill saw a ditch. So he hopped off his bike, picked it up, leaped with it in his hands across the ditch, then set it down.

  He remounted to cross the road ahead of the peloton bearing down on him. Former teammate Tyler Hamilton reached out to pat Armstrong’s shoulder, as if to say, “Cool, dude.” On television, one commentator shouted, “This is unbelievable! I’ve never seen this before. Armstrong went across the field. There, he’s back on the road. At four kilometers to go, what great reflexes from the man from Texas! That man was in complete control there. Oh, this is incredible!”

  Those seventeen seconds—from Beloki’s crash to Armstrong’s remount—tell you Lance Armstrong was born to be on a bike.

  He could have ridden straight into a wall of corn or sunflowers, or come to a full stop as the rider behind him did. He didn’t. His tires could have sunk into soft earth. They didn’t. If he considered all that, no one ever knew it. He simply rode into the unknown, and anyone who’d ever seen him at work could imagine those steel blue eyes narrowed into slits above cheekbones so sharp they could cut you. Watch the move often enough on YouTube and you might even see the bright cape of a superhero billowing from his shoulders.

  At the stage’s end, Armstrong told reporters, “I was very afraid, I was very lucky . . . I was lucky that the field could’ve been full of crops, it could’ve been a drop-off.”

  With an official’s ruling that his shortcut maneuver through the field was unavoidable and thus legal, Armstrong finished the stage strong on his way to a fifth straight Tour victory.

  Before the cancer, he said, winning was nice but not essential. After the cancer, “I was pretty fucking laser-focused,” he told me.

  He expressed that focus in eight words:

  “I win, I live.

  “I lose, I die.”

  As the 2004 Tour approached, Armstrong staged a preemptive strike against L.A. Confidentiel: Les Secrets de Lance Armstrong, the book Walsh wrote with Pierre Ballester, a Frenchman who had worked at L’Equipe. A month before it was scheduled to be published, Nike and the Lance Armstrong Foundation began selling yellow rubber wristbands bearing the word “Livestrong” for a dollar apiece. Proceeds funded the foundation’s programs for young people with cancer.

  The specific timing was contrived, but the idea for the wristband had been a work in progress for months. Nike wanted to do something to commemorate Armstrong’s fifth Tour victory and Scott MacEachern, his personal representative at the company, thought it should be something that people could wear to show their support for the cancer cause. Nike and a team of advertising and marketing gurus then designed the rubber bracelet, after getting the idea from some NBA stars who wore something like it.

  Within weeks demand outran supply. Armstrong had created a pop culture phenomenon just when he most needed positive press. Together with his foundation and Nike, he had planned it that way.

  They hoped that the wristband’s “Wear Yellow” campaign would overshadow Walsh’s exposé, which was to be published June 14, about two weeks before the start of the 2004 Tour. (On that date, a Lance Armstrong Foundation press release asked all Americans to wear yellow on June 16 to show support for people living with cancer.)

  Armstrong had read a ten-page excerpt from the book in the French weekly magazine L’Express. He knew it included the most damaging doping accusations against him yet—that he had doped with various substances, including EPO. The book also described Armstrong telling his cancer doctors in an Indiana hospital room that he had used several performance-enhancing drugs.

  Emma O’Reilly, the former soigneur, had been a primary source for Walsh. She told Walsh how she had used her makeup to cover Armstrong’s bruises from an injection and how she had delivered a vial of pills to Armstrong. She said Armstrong’s excuse for the cortisone positive at the 1999 Tour was a lie. He took the drug as a performance enhancer, not for saddle sores as he and the UCI had insisted.

  After years of silence, O’Reilly had been paid for the information—“an insignificant amount of money,” about $7,500—but she said she talked mostly to cleanse herself of some guilt.

  Armstrong immediately came after Walsh. He told a Dutch newspaper that Walsh was the “worst journalist I know,” a man willing to “lie, to threaten people and to steal” for a sensational story that had no basis in fact. “Ethics, standards, values, accuracy—these are of no interest to people like” Walsh.

  Then he filed suit in Britain against Walsh and Walsh’s deputy sports editor, Alan English, at the Sunday Times of London, which had published a news story based on revelations in the book. He was asking for 1 million pounds, or about $1.5 million. In France, he had sued Walsh, Ballester and the publishers of L’Express, plus the book’s publishers, La Martinière. Armstrong also sued O’Reilly for libel—asking the court to grant him “more money than I was worth,” she said. Perhaps he thought the threat of other libel suits would silence stories that hadn’t yet gone to press.

  A day after news of those lawsuits broke, Armstrong announced that his team had secured a new sponsor for 2005, the Discovery Channel. Judith McHale, president of Discovery Communications, praised him as a role model: “There is no better ambassador for quality and trusted information.”

  At the news conference for that announcement, Armstrong said that he had filed the lawsuits because “enough is enough.” He also chipped away at O’Reilly’s credibility, saying he hadn’t worked with her much and she had been fired when “inappropriate” issues arose.

  Armstrong and Stapleton wanted the media on their side. Stapleton told the author Daniel Coyle, who was writing his own book, Lance Armstrong’s War, that Walsh’s effort to expose Armstrong would be futile. Armstrong would never dope and take a chance on losing sponsorships with Coke, Nike and Subaru, companies that had put their trust in him, he said.

  “If we’re fucking lying, we can kiss it all good-bye,” Stapleton said. “Does anybody think for a second that a secret that big wouldn’t come out?”

  A few weeks later, at the start of the 2004 Tour, Stap
leton stood in a parking lot with Bart Knaggs, his business partner, and Frankie Andreu, who had retired as a rider and was working as a commentator for the Outdoor Life Network. In a scene straight out of Goodfellas, Stapleton put a hard squeeze on Andreu to get his wife, Betsy, to say she hadn’t been a source for Walsh’s book. What Stapleton didn’t know was that Andreu was taping the conversation.

  Stapleton, Knaggs and Andreu ended up in that parking lot because of a story that began in 2001. That’s when Walsh reported that Armstrong had seen Ferrari. Betsy Andreu had seen Walsh’s work, and was impressed. She asked her friend James Startt if he could tell Walsh to call her. He did, and that was the beginning of a long-distance relationship between Andreu and Walsh that lasted years. Both were obsessed with revealing the truth about Armstrong.

  Andreu trusted Walsh enough to confirm for him that Armstrong’s hospital room confession had occurred. She told him that he was right to question Armstrong’s story about riding clean. “Don’t stop digging, David,” she said. “You have to expose him. Keep digging.”

  She couldn’t go on the record with him because her husband still worked in the sport and she knew how much power Armstrong wielded over their family and cycling. The Andreus had three children to support. Betsy Andreu was a housewife. Frankie Andreu didn’t have a college degree—all he knew was cycling. Armstrong had the Andreus and their livelihood in a chokehold.

  But from behind the scenes, Betsy could damage him. For Walsh, she became a clearinghouse for information on Armstrong. She tried to help Walsh track down Lisa Shiels, Armstrong’s former girlfriend who was in the hospital room during Armstrong’s confession. Her mistake was calling Becky Livingston for Shiels’s number, specifically asking her to keep the request from Livingston’s husband, Kevin.