Cycle of Lies: The Fall of Lance Armstrong Page 20

  Madden listened. Tygart scribbled.

  Madden said the agency would be interested in helping clean up the sport. Vaughters said he was, too, but the agency would need to keep their meetings with him a secret. He had seen what happened to riders—the Bassonses and Simeonis—who spoke out against doping. He didn’t want to be publicly annihilated by Armstrong. He had a cycling team of young guys to run.

  Armstrong had already attracted the antidoping agency’s attention. But one incident in particular had raised USADA’s suspicions. Earlier that year, around the time of Hamilton’s positive test at the Vuelta, Armstrong’s agent, Bill Stapleton, had called to tell USADA that Armstrong wanted to donate $250,000 to the agency’s antidoping work.

  After Tygart hung up, he walked to Madden’s office. They looked at each other and smiled. “Did that just happen?” Tygart asked. “What the hell’s going on here?”

  PART FIVE

  LIES OF THE AMERICAN HERO

  CHAPTER 15

  Until that fall of 2004 when Vaughters spilled his sport’s secrets to USADA, Tygart hadn’t given much serious thought to cycling or its long history of doping. He was a stick-and-ball-sport type of guy, a son of a lawyer in a family of lawyers who lived in Jacksonville, Florida. His great-grandparents lived one of the millions of great American immigrant stories: They arrived in northern Florida from Lebanon with nothing but ambition. They taught their children what those children taught theirs: There are no shortcuts. Success comes to those who believe in Christian values and hard work.

  Travis Thompson Tygart went to the Bolles School, a local college preparatory high school that had nationally recognized sports programs. There, he played on state championship baseball and basketball teams. One of his baseball teammates was Larry Jones, destined to be a major league star with the Atlanta Braves and a likely Hall of Famer whom the world would come to know by a nickname, “Chipper.” Tygart and Jones had seen steroids at work, like one opposing team’s catcher whose muscles had blown up so big and grown so tight that he could hardly throw anymore.

  While training for his senior-year season, Tygart had his first run-in with drugs that boost performance. He and his cousin were working out at a gym together one night. The place was a hole-in-the-wall with all manner of dumbbells and free weights scattered in the corners. But it was a perfect place to get your reps in, to go until you couldn’t anymore. Tygart recalls being approached by one of the gym’s meathead bodybuilders, “You guys, y’all are working hard.”

  “Yeah,” Tygart said. “We’re just trying to get stronger.”

  “You do anything else?”

  “The batting cages.”

  “Anything else?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You know, there’s some drug supplements out there. They’re really good and can help you.”

  Tygart was taken aback. Sure, he wanted to be bigger and stronger. What teenage high school jock didn’t want that? He was tall and thin, seventeen years old, a third baseman. He knew what the meathead had in mind. Steroids. He looked to his cousin, then back to the meathead.

  “Um, no thanks, man,” he said. “We’re good.”

  A straitlaced jock and a natural leader, Tygart would become the president of his senior class in high school and the president of his fraternity at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, where he majored in philosophy. When he worked as an intern at a Florida State Attorney’s Office one summer in college, he quit because of what he called “government waste.” Tygart discovered that the workers who were supposed to man the main file room were playing video games on the job. Their office door set off a buzzer whenever someone came in looking for a file, and whenever the buzzer rang, they would leap to their feet and pretend to be busy. He couldn’t stand being a part of a government entity that paid workers to play video games all day. He said he resigned out of protest.

  Even through college, Tygart knew nothing of cycling, or the Tour de France, or Lance Armstrong. He definitely had not heard of an event that came to be known by the single word “Festina.” But he knew everything about baseball. He had played in a rec league while at the University of North Carolina. Then, married and teaching in 1995, he went back to coach the game at his old school, Bolles.

  A few years later, he was in law school at Southern Methodist University in Dallas. Between his second and third year, he worked at a big corporate firm, Jones Day, in Houston. It was the Summer of Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa, the big guys who hit baseballs into low orbit and who were chasing Major League Baseball’s single-season home run record. Most of America was spellbound, captivated by this outcropping of sudden history.

  But if, a decade earlier as a rules-are-rules high school senior, you had been offered steroids in a sweaty, stinking gym, you might have loved the summer of ’98 less. If you had been a high school teammate of Chipper Jones and for years after heard his stories of big leaguers seeking every edge they could get—corked bats, for one—you might have harbored some disquieting feelings about what might lie behind all the multiple-home-run games and the gosh-wow press conferences.

  So you might forgive Tygart his skepticism, even as McGwire and Sosa became America’s favorite sons and as national television cut into regular programming to show the sluggers’ at-bats. Tygart knew enough about baseball and enough about steroids to tell friends, “There’s no way they’re doing that without being on anything.”

  He still loved sports. He had written two law review articles on the subject: one based on a Title IX equality-in-sports case about the baseball team’s versus the softball team’s facilities at his high school, the other an antitrust and relocation case involving soccer fields in west Texas. At one point, he told his old buddy Chipper that he might become a sports agent, only to hear Jones tell him not to. Such work, Chipper said, was “scummy.”

  Still, when the Festina team was kicked out of the 1998 Tour and the Postal Service riders and team doctor flushed their drugs into the toilet for fear of being arrested for drug possession, Tygart had no idea that four years later, he’d be in the thick of it all.

  One day in late 1999, with nothing better to do, the young, bored corporate lawyer Travis Tygart went to a Web site promising jobs around the country. On the site’s search engine, he typed in “sports law.”

  Up came a law firm called Holme Roberts & Owen, which did work for something called the United States Anti-Doping Agency.

  USADA was born of the Festina debacle, which exposed to the world cycling’s drug problem. Before Festina, doping rules varied widely. Each Olympic sport’s international federation had its own rules, conducted its own tests and handled its own cases. Few sports, if any, were more lenient in applying their rules than the International Cycling Union, the UCI.

  If riders tested positive, the UCI decided its punishments only after considering the riders’ careers, what they had done for the sport and “whether they’re paying for their grandmother’s apartment and stuff,” as one antidoping expert put it. “They wanted to control it. They wanted flexibility and weren’t keen on transparency.” The UCI was not alone among sports and national Olympic committees interested in keeping their stars unblemished, so the International Olympic Committee did something to make things more objective—or to at least seem more objective.

  In 1999, after Festina, the IOC formed the World Anti-Doping Agency to standardize drug testing rules. WADA’s antidoping code went into effect in 2004. By then, Lance Armstrong had won the Tour de France five times.

  USADA began operations in the fall of 2000, given its mandate by the United States Olympic Committee and Congress to oversee all antidoping in Olympic sports in the United States. It also was expected to implement the WADA code.

  USADA was not a government agency, though most of its funding came from the White House Office of Drug Control Policy. Its budget is authorized by Congress and is thereby susceptible to the lobbying of high-powered organizations and individuals who don’t like its wor
k. In time, even Lance Armstrong himself would argue that USADA’s funding should be cut, maybe even eliminated.

  Based on the ad he had seen on the Web that day in 2000, Tygart applied to Holme Roberts & Owen. He got the job, and would end up doing work for the United States Olympic Committee, the Pro Rodeo Cowboys’ Association and the national federations of basketball, volleyball and swimming. What interested him most, though, was his antidoping work for USADA. About two and a half years later, he found himself taking a job there as director of legal affairs.

  In the fall of 2002, he arrived at his new office to find a framed poster showing Lance Armstrong riding his bike on a cobblestone street somewhere in Europe. The poster carried the famous Armstrong quote, dripping with incredulity: “What am I on? I’m on my bike, busting my ass six hours a day. What are you on?”

  Though he hadn’t been the one to hang the poster above his desk there, Tygart kept it. He liked how straightforward the sentiment was. His wife’s family had been touched by cancer, and here was Armstrong, a young American coming straight out of a cancer ward to win his sport’s biggest event, the Tour de France. Tygart thought it was one of the greatest sports stories of all time.

  His life first intersected with Armstrong’s a few weeks later, when Armstrong called USADA with a complaint. Until then, Tygart and Armstrong had led parallel lives with nothing much in common beyond their age, thirty-one. One man was the product of a prestigious prep school, the other a virtual high school dropout. One was churchgoing, the other agnostic. One was embraced by a close-knit family, the other scarred by alcoholism, philandering and divorce.

  Tygart had studied up on cycling. He’d also heard about the sport’s doping woes from Madden, USADA’s CEO, and Rich Young, a partner at Holme Roberts & Owen who basically had written WADA’s antidoping code. They told him that drug use was common in an endurance sport like cycling, but that USADA’s new policy for out-of-competition testing should help catch some of the sport’s dopers.

  In order to do those unannounced tests, USADA required all Olympic athletes to report their whereabouts at all times. This set off Armstrong and his handlers, who complained: It’s impossible for Armstrong to tell USADA his whereabouts all year long when his travel and training schedules are constantly changing. It’s unreasonable. It’s setting athletes up for failure, because missed tests could mean a doping offense.

  Just weeks after Tygart had joined USADA, Armstrong himself was on the phone to him. “This is bullshit, we’re not doing this,” Armstrong said. “Showing up at our house to drug-test us is not right. It’s not fair.”

  Tygart turned in his desk chair and said, “Listen, man, you’re getting every benefit of the doubt. I’m sitting here looking at your picture on the office wall, and what you should understand is we need to give your fans the guarantee that you’re doing it right. Out-of-competition is a good thing. It’s the best way to catch people. If you’re clean—like this poster says—you have nothing to worry about.”

  Tygart knew just how far other elite athletes would go to succeed. He was heavily involved in the doping cases that stemmed from the Bay Area Laboratory Co-Operative steroids investigation, in which the company claimed to have supplied elite athletes with legal supplements and vitamins when it was actually dealing performance-enhancing drugs to them.

  The slugger Barry Bonds and the sprinter Marion Jones were two of the athletes who received drugs from BALCO. Another athlete caught in that scandal was track cyclist Tammy Thomas, once a silver medalist at the world championships. She had been barred from competition for life after testing positive for steroids in 2002.

  In one of the most bizarre doping cases ever, she had insisted on her innocence, but one glance at her suggested otherwise. Broad-shouldered and buff, she had a five o’clock shadow, a receding hairline and a deep gravelly voice.

  Just thinking about Thomas’s case made it obvious to Tygart that cycling had major doping problems, and that Armstrong might not be clean after all. What made him particularly suspicious about the Postal Service team was that several of its former riders had tested positive. Some of the tests were administered by USADA, some by the UCI.

  In 2002, Kirk O’Bee failed a test for testosterone. In 2004, Hamilton failed a test for a blood transfusion and fought like mad to get out of it, a process that took nearly two years and ate up a significant amount of Tygart’s time. And there would be others.

  No matter how much Tygart wanted to believe in Armstrong’s courageous comeback from cancer to win the Tours, he couldn’t ignore the mounting pile of clues that Armstrong had probably doped. Every time a former Postal Service rider was caught doping, Tygart tried his hardest to convince that cyclist to talk about the culture of drugs in professional cycling. He wanted someone to squeal on the sport and on his former teammates, for the good of the younger riders who might someday be faced with the same decision of whether to dope or not.

  He tried to convince Hamilton to talk about the doping that may have occurred on his teams by saying, “We understand that you aren’t alone in this.” While Hamilton suspected that Tygart wanted him to turn on Armstrong, Tygart never uttered Armstrong’s name. He was fishing for a lead, but riders like Hamilton—who were loyal to the sport’s code of silence—wouldn’t bite.

  Chris Carmichael, Armstrong’s coach (at least on paper), gave Tygart even more reason to doubt cycling’s hero incarnate. Tygart and Carmichael were friends from Colorado Springs because their children had attended the same school. At a kids’ birthday party one day, Carmichael brought up Betsy Andreu’s claim that Armstrong had confessed to doping, Tygart said, adding that Carmichael then “vilified her” at great length. The insults were so “over the top and so nasty” that Tygart thought it was obvious Carmichael was overcompensating. “You just knew there was more to it, because he wouldn’t have reacted the way he did. I went home and said to my wife, ‘What is he trying to keep me away from?’ ”

  None of these events proved anything, but all of them piqued Tygart’s interest. He didn’t buy the popular theory among Armstrong fans that no cancer survivor would risk the danger of using drugs simply to ride a bike faster.

  “If I personally was on the brink of death and went through a terrible situation and came out of that as an atheist,” he said, “I’m going to do everything in life that benefits me because I might not be here tomorrow.

  “Treating people fairly or being decent or putting myself aside for other people—those basic moral values that most of us practice regardless of what religion we are—wouldn’t matter. I’d have no moral constraints.

  “The logical extension of that would be: ‘I don’t give a fuck about anything. I’m gonna get it when I can get it.’ ”

  Tygart reminded himself of that as the years went on and the evidence against Armstrong mounted.

  CHAPTER 16

  Tyler Hamilton had created a good life for himself. He and his wife, Haven, lived in a palatial house set on the edge of a canyon in Boulder, Colorado. The home’s rear windows framed a breathtaking landscape of rolling hills covered with evergreens reaching to the snow-capped mountains of the Continental Divide.

  In the living room, his Olympic gold medal hung around the neck of a wooden moose with a grin on its face. Near the moose, there was a box containing the ashes of his dog, Tugboat, a lock of the retriever’s pale tail affixed to the lid. Two months after Hamilton tested positive for blood doping with someone else’s blood, he said, “This is the lowest point of my whole life. I could lose all of this.”

  While the Postal Service team geared up for Armstrong’s push to win a record seventh Tour before retiring, Hamilton fought to get his good name back. He insisted he would never have transfused someone else’s blood. He told me it was a ridiculous notion because he was afraid of getting AIDS and spreading the disease to his wife.

  Haven Hamilton, in a blog posted on the Web site www.believetyler.org shortly after her husband’s positive test, called the result a mistake.
She said both of them had an aversion to transfusions after Tugboat’s experience before the Olympics that summer. Internal bleeding caused the dog to lose more than half of his blood, and the second of two transfusions left Tugboat paralyzed on one side of his face before he finally died.

  “With the dangers of transfusing blood so fresh in our minds, it is ridiculous to think Tyler would consider taking another person’s blood,” she wrote.

  Part of what Tyler Hamilton said was true. He hadn’t used someone’s blood, he’d used his own, but Fuentes or someone in the doctor’s office had mixed up the blood bags. Compared with the Postal Service program, it seemed like an organization run by the Keystone Cops.

  Armstrong demanded the best and Postal had given the team the money to provide it. Riders were monitored by doctors who were experts in doping, beginning with del Moral and Ferrari. The team’s cyclists also flew to Belgium to Dr. Dag Van Elsland—a doping control officer in the Flemish region during the 1990s through 2004—so he could remove their blood and store it.

  The team had lucrative sponsorship contracts, and, according to Landis, generated the necessary cash to pay for the doping regimens by selling bikes.

  He learned about the bikes-for-cash deal in 2004. In March that year, his bike frame snapped just as he was in position to win a stage of an eight-day race in France. When he asked Bruyneel for a new bike, Bruyneel told him the team didn’t have enough money to outfit riders with new equipment. Landis wondered why riders didn’t get new equipment on a consistent basis, when Armstrong was able to ride on a private jet.

  Incredulous, Landis called several sponsors, asking how much equipment they provided because the equipment they used was either not enough to go around to all the riders, or was badly worn. When he called Trek, the bicycle company told him that the team should have enough bikes and components for 120 new bikes a year. In 2004 alone, then, Landis figured that 60 bikes had gone missing. At maybe $3,000 each, that would generate $180,000 in cash. He had an epiphany: So, that’s how the team pays for its doping. He discovered that the sponsors were, in a very roundabout manner, paying for the team’s drugs.