Cycle of Lies: The Fall of Lance Armstrong Page 19

A second after Betsy hung up with Becky, Kevin Livingston called, yelling about Betsy’s effort to help Walsh. “He’ll bring everybody down. You can’t do that. This is Frankie’s livelihood; this is my livelihood. Are you crazy?”

  The request got back to Armstrong, who then sent Frankie Andreu a scathing e-mail.

  “To go around and say to becky ‘please don’t tell kevin’ is as snaky and conniving as it gets,” Armstrong wrote on December 15, 2003. “i know betsy is not a fan, and that’s fine, but by helping to bring me down is not going to help y’alls situation at all. there is a direct link to all of our success here and I suggest you remind her of that.”

  So, on that day shortly before the 2004 Tour, Stapleton called Andreu to set up the parking lot meeting. Frankie took along a tape recorder, hidden in his shirt pocket.

  Stapleton said, “You know your wife is a source for Walsh.”

  Andreu refuted it, saying that his wife only spoke to Walsh about some “nitpicky stuff” and that Walsh had asked her help in tracking down Armstrong’s old girlfriend. He said he realized that he, the team and everybody in the sport benefited fromArmstrong’s accomplishments.

  “I have fucking protected Lance for a long time,” Andreu said. “Every interview I give, I frickin’ talk to this stuff, I say everything good and I like him, you know?”

  Stapleton was skeptical. He told Andreu that Walsh boasted about speaking to Betsy, calling her courageous, saying she was willing to testify against Armstrong and that “she knows these things about Lance.”

  He then asked if Betsy would be a witness against Walsh in the libel case in France. Would she be willing to take a strong position and say that Walsh was a liar? Or maybe, for now, could she just make a supportive statement about Armstrong?

  “I know Betsy doesn’t like Lance, but it’s all in our interest not to blow this whole thing up,” Stapleton said. He said it was part of the grand plan to get enough witnesses to discredit Walsh so that the Sunday Times and La Martinière, the book publisher, would be forced to admit that Walsh’s entire premise was flimsy. They would publish an apology and/or pull the book off shelves and Armstrong would drop the lawsuit. End of story.

  “The other option is full-out war in French court and everybody’s gonna testify. It could blow the whole sport,” Stapleton said.

  When they parted, Stapleton said they would send something to Andreu for his wife to sign. But Andreu knew that wouldn’t work. She wouldn’t shake Armstrong’s hand after the 1999 Tour victory, and now Stapleton wanted her to support him publicly?

  Here’s Betsy Andreu’s response to Stapleton’s idea: “Tell him to fuck off. I’m not signing anything. I’m not fucking protecting him.”

  Walsh was treated like an outcast at the 2004 Tour. Armstrong made sure of it.

  Most journalists covering the Tour form carpools during the three-week race because the days are long and the route covers more than two thousand miles. Walsh had planned to ride, as he had before, with John Wilcockson and Andy Hood, two journalists from the U.S.-based cycling magazine VeloNews, and Rupert Guinness, an Australian who wrote for the Sydney Morning Herald.

  At the race start in Liège, Belgium, though, Wilcockson told Walsh he could not ride with them. If he did, Armstrong would no longer talk to VeloNews. For an American publication, that would be suicide. So Walsh squeezed in with several reporters from the French newspaper Le Monde. He felt like he couldn’t ask any English-speaking journalist for the favor because Armstrong likely had power over them, too.

  While Walsh was being vilified, Armstrong and Postal Service were on a high. Early in the Tour, Armstrong and his teammates won the team time trial to put Armstrong in yellow, with Hincapie second overall and Landis third. It was the first time in the 101-year history of the Tour that American riders were first, second and third in the standings.

  Emboldened by their success, the Postal Service team did what was necessary to keep doping. They usually had been so paranoid about their doping that they’d lock down their hotel rooms before performing blood transfusions in them. With plastic and tape, they’d cover the vents, the smoke detectors, the air conditioners and even the toilets in an effort to thwart any attempts at someone taping them with a hidden camera.

  But now, on one ride from a stage finish to the team hotel, the team bus came to a halt on the side of a mountain road. It wasn’t engine trouble that stopped it. It was the riders’ need for blood. While the bus driver pretended to tend to the bus’s nonexistent mechanical problem, the Postal Service team received blood transfusions, some lying on seats, Armstrong on the floor. Their blood bags were hooked to the luggage racks above them, letting the blood flow through the tubes and into their veins more easily. Fans and reporters driving by might have seen it for themselves but for the vehicle’s darkened windows.

  Armstrong also dropped any pretense of benevolence. During the 18th stage of the twenty-stage race, he chased down Italian rider Filippo Simeoni, who was ahead of the pack in a breakaway and 144th overall. Back in the main group, Hincapie thought, “Why is he doing that? He’s leading the race by seven minutes!”

  Revenge, that’s why. Simeoni had testified against Ferrari in the criminal doping case in Italy, saying Ferrari had given him drugs like testosterone and EPO. Armstrong had rushed to Ferrari’s defense, calling Simeoni “a compulsive liar” who had doped long before he met Ferrari. Simeoni sued him for defamation of character.

  So when Armstrong finally caught Simeoni on that Stage 18, he was trying to teach him a lesson. He simply couldn’t help himself.

  While the television cameras rolled, he pedaled next to Simeoni and told him in Italian, “You made a mistake when you testified against Ferrari and you made a mistake when you sued me. I have a lot of time and money and I can destroy you.”

  Simeoni tried to remain with the breakaway, but the other riders asked him not to, because their chances to win the race were diminished with Armstrong there. He gave in. He and Armstrong slowed down to allow the main pack of riders to catch up. French rider Laurent Jalabert said Armstrong’s move was “like a child crushing ants.”

  Once Armstrong was in the peloton again, he appeared to joke with other riders and made the universal signal for keeping quiet—he zipped his lips. The television feed caught him doing it, and played it again and again. He even looked into the camera and smiled as he pulled his finger and thumb across the front of his mouth.

  Later, Armstrong said he had overtaken Simeoni because he “was protecting the interests of the peloton. All he wants to do is destroy cycling and destroy the sport that pays him, and that’s wrong.”

  Simeoni said, “I was surprised by what Armstrong did to me, but he showed today in front of the whole world what kind of person he is. I was the victim of a big injustice today. It wasn’t possible for Armstrong to let a little rider like me have a chance for a little glory in the Tour de France. That’s a sin.”

  Armstrong won that Tour by more than six minutes after winning six stages, and dominated more than ever to set the record for most Tour titles. Robin Williams, the comedian and actor, was in the stands at the finish line, wearing a T-shirt that said, “Yellow, front of the race” in French. The singer Sheryl Crow was there, too, to give Armstrong a hug and a kiss. The superhero and the rock star were an item now. She was just one of Armstrong’s many female partners who knew about his doping but kept quiet about it. How could any of them miss it? Armstrong said to me. For God’s sake, the EPO was right there next to the butter.

  On that final day of the 2004 Tour, Armstrong’s foundation said it sold 25,000 yellow wristbands in Paris. About 1.37 million viewers watched the Tour’s final stage on the Outdoor Life Network, a massive American audience for the French race.

  Despite Walsh’s evidence, things looked as peachy as ever for Armstrong.

  For Simeoni, though, life was about to get worse. Like Bassons, the Frenchman who had been forced to quit the 1999 Tour, Simeoni was first bullied by Armstrong, then t
he rest of the peloton followed. No team wanted him. He was sure that Armstrong had something to do with his team’s not being invited to the 2009 Giro d’Italia, even though Simeoni was the Italian national champion. Once again, Armstrong’s will was done. Simeoni quit the sport a year later.

  Things weren’t any easier for O’Reilly. She had become so entangled with lawsuits relating to Armstrong that her relationship with her boyfriend, Mike Carlisle, suffered. Carlisle had been battling multiple sclerosis, and the stress of the situation worsened his symptoms. She felt like Armstrong was trying to bankrupt her, or drive her crazy, or both. “I thought he was going to take everything from me.”

  For the Andreus, the threats continued. One arrived via Armstrong’s former Postal Service teammate, Hincapie, who had always been the do-as-he-was-told type.

  “I cannot understand how you can just sit around and let besty [sic] try and take down the whole team,” he wrote to Frankie in August 2004. “Yes, she is just saying things about lance, but it effects [sic] us all. You were a part of the team just like us. If he is guilty then so are you. The whole thing is so hypocritical. She is attacking our livelihood. A sport that we love and work fucking hard to be good at. You have not been gone that long. How can you forget?”

  Hincapie says he sent the e-mail because Andreu had been part of the doping culture, too—and had even introduced him to EPO. Hincapie said he and Andreu were on Motorola in 1996 when he found a thermos filled with glass vials in their refrigerator. Andreu first said the vials were substances that would help recovery. Hincapie got him to admit that it was EPO.

  Andreu said he needed the drug because he was getting older. All Hincapie knew, though, was that his competition was taking a drug to get an edge, so he needed to get it, too.

  “He was my role model, and I started doing EPO because of him,” Hincapie said. “It was crazy that he was letting Betsy point a finger at Lance, because her own husband had done the same thing. She was threatening everyone’s ability to make a living in the sport. I was trying to get him to stop her.”

  But the momentum was slowly shifting and Armstrong’s hold on the sport was slipping. His former teammates and employees were becoming increasingly disgruntled with the way he treated them. Instead of being especially nice to those people who knew his secrets, Armstrong was tossing them aside as if they had been strangers. It would be his fatal flaw.

  By the end of 2004, Zabriskie would be gone. Landis would be off the team, too, headed to be the leader of the Phonak team, which had offered him $500,000—more than double his $230,000 salary with the Postal Service squad.

  Zabriskie had problems negotiating a new contract with the Postal Service squad. He said he asked for $70,000 a year, but Bruyneel wouldn’t go past the $65,000 Zabriskie was making. Bruyneel’s argument was that the team had stood by him when he got hit by the SUV back in Utah, so that was payment enough. Zabriskie thought he should be paid more, considering he had just won a stage of the Vuelta a España, one of cycling’s Grand Tours. They had reached an impasse.

  After finishing fifth in the time trial at the 2004 world road cycling championships at the end of the season, Zabriskie sat on the lawn of the race hotel in Verona, Italy, with Steve Johnson, his longtime mentor and the man who had convinced him to forgo college for cycling. In 1999, Johnson had taken a job at USA Cycling and had moved up quickly—he was now chief operating officer and director of athletics. He also was close friends with Postal Service team owner Thomas Weisel.

  Zabriskie complained to Johnson about his contract problems, but in his anger and disappointment over how the Postal Service team treated him, he told Johnson about the team’s doping program. He told him, “They were giving me injections, drugs.”

  Zabriskie had taken a chance in telling Johnson about the doping. Part of him was anxious that it would leak out that he had broken the sport’s code of silence and that he’d be ostracized, because he knew that Armstrong “would just steamroll people in the industry.” Still, Zabriskie had hoped that Johnson would notify USADA, and that someone would look into Postal Service’s cheating.

  But Johnson didn’t even respond. He later said to me that he never heard any “credible, specific claims” about doping on the Postal Service team before 2010, when accusations about Armstrong’s doping were made public.

  After speaking with Johnson, Zabriskie returned to his hotel room and retrieved the team-issued Livestrong bracelet he kept in his luggage. He placed it in an ashtray and set it on fire. As the acrid smell of burning rubber began to permeate the room, he looked at his roommate, a rider set to join the Postal Service squad the next season, and said, “Have fun on your new team.”

  By then, Tyler Hamilton had been gone from the Postal Service team for three years. In the summer of 2004, he became the perfect example of what happens to Postal riders who weren’t under the protection of Armstrong’s team and who weren’t a part of an efficient doping program. He tested positive.

  After he won the gold medal in the individual time trial at the 2004 Olympics, scientists working at the Games for the International Olympic Committee found evidence of someone else’s blood in his system. The World Anti-Doping Agency had just begun to test for blood transfusions in which athletes use someone else’s blood, a practice banned in cycling since the late 1980s. Hamilton was the first to fail the test.

  The positive test was dropped because of a lab error. Yet even that wasn’t enough to scare him into competing clean.

  One month later, Hamilton, riding for the Swiss-based Phonak team at the Vuelta a España, again tested positive for a blood transfusion.

  He immediately denied wrongdoing. “I have always been an honest person,” he said. As Armstrong had done for so many years, Hamilton was stone-cold lying.

  In preparation for that cycling season, he had deposited his blood for safekeeping with sports doctor Eufemiano Fuentes in Valencia, Spain. When some of the blood was reinfused into him late that summer, he was likely given someone else’s by mistake, accounting for why he tested positive for transfusing someone else’s blood. It wasn’t the first time Hamilton had problems with blood he had stored with Fuentes, either.

  Earlier that year, at the Tour in July, Hamilton reinfused another blood bag that had come from Fuentes’s freezer. Minutes later, he came down with a fever and knew something had gone wrong. As his urine filled the toilet, it was such a deep red it looked black, making it seem like something out of “a horror movie.”

  He was nauseous and shivering. “It felt like my skull was being cracked and peeled off my brain, piece by piece.” He placed his cell phone near his bed, in case he needed an ambulance, and told his teammates that he might die. He was convinced that his blood hadn’t been stored properly and that he had infused dead cells into his body.

  “Either that, or my blood bag was tampered with, or the test didn’t work,” he said much later, during his testimony in Fuentes’s criminal trial in Spain in 2012. Whatever the reason, the error could have killed him.

  Armstrong heard about Hamilton’s mishaps and shook his head. He considered Hamilton to be too much of a risk taker when it came to doping. In Armstrong’s eyes, Hamilton always wanted more, always wanted to push the limits of safety. While Armstrong said he only doped to prepare for races, Hamilton doped all year round.

  Hamilton’s first public appearance after the positive test in 2004 was in Las Vegas, at Interbike, North America’s largest cycling trade show. There he began his effort to salvage his reputation. People had given him the benefit of the doubt. After all, he was known as the most polite person in cycling.

  His sponsors and team publicly supported him, with Bell Helmets giving away “I Believe Tyler” buttons. Fans waited hours to get his autograph and offer their condolences for his golden retriever, Tugboat, who had passed away just before the Olympics. Hamilton had ridden to Olympic victory with Tugboat’s identification tag tucked inside his helmet.

  But other cyclists were losing patience
. Bobby Julich, the former Motorola rider, said, “I’m sick of people who cheat, sick of cleaning up their mess and trying to explain it.”

  Back in Boulder, Hamilton’s adopted hometown, Hamilton was introduced to a crowd at the University of Colorado, and his father, Bill, leaped from his seat and shouted, “We believe in you, Tyler!”

  The Hamiltons came out fighting, attacking the validity of the test and calling into question the fairness of the system run by the World Anti-Doping Agency and USADA. One theme central to his case was that Tyler had had a “vanishing twin” who shared his mother’s womb when he was a fetus and created a mixed population of blood cells in his body, a condition that apparently explained everything.

  Vaughters was upset. He knew that Hamilton had lied and that the lies perpetuated the sport’s long-standing culture of cheating. He was sick of Armstrong’s bullying, especially the zip-the-lips gesture regarding Simeoni. After leaving the real estate business behind, Vaughters had started a cycling team for riders under twenty-three years old and cringed just thinking that they could be headed for drug use and a life of lies in the pros.

  So in the fall of 2004, he packed his bags and drove south to Colorado Springs. There, he left his wife and son at the Broadmoor Hotel and headed to USADA headquarters, feeling as though he were consorting with the enemy.

  He sat with Terry Madden, the chief executive of the organization, and Travis Tygart, the agency’s general counsel. As Madden questioned him, Tygart scribbled notes.

  “I just wanted to tell you that you’re on the right path with Tyler,” Vaughters said.

  “Did you ever dope?” Madden asked. Tygart glanced up from his notepad. Vaughters didn’t answer.

  “Well, I guess you’re not going to tell us,” Madden said.

  More silence.

  “OK, then, what can you tell us?”

  Vaughters told them about microdosing EPO—how riders got away with using the drug by injecting small amounts over a long period of time. To have the best chance to catch riders doping, he advised the agency to test them the first thing in the morning and the last thing at night. He also told them riders used testosterone patches to administer tiny amounts of the steroid over many days.