Cycle of Lies: The Fall of Lance Armstrong Read online

  Slipstream, he suggested, was a team of losers, including its manager, Johnny Weltz, whom Armstrong had long ago replaced with Bruyneel. Ellis, though, didn’t care about the winning and losing like Thomas Weisel did; he was not a guy who went on training rides with the pros as if he were one. Ellis funded Slipstream because he, like Vaughters, wanted to save cycling from itself. He’d expected Armstrong to disagree with him. That’s how he’d know he was doing something right.

  Armstrong once said he came back to “raise awareness of the global cancer burden,” a sentiment that makes Korioth roll his eyes. “Please,” he said to me, “he came back because he thought he could still kick everybody’s ass.”

  Armstrong made a deal to reunite with Bruyneel on the Kazakh cycling team Astana. He’d be riding in a new world. Though Armstrong had been gone only three and a half years, doping tests were more advanced and done more frequently. The French national antidoping lab that had declared six of his 1999 urine samples to be positive for EPO was eager to have another crack at him. Pierre Bordry, the head of the lab, told colleagues that he couldn’t wait for Armstrong to be tested again on French soil. Tygart and other USADA officials were anxious to see if Armstrong could withstand the new system of antidoping. The circumstantial evidence against Armstrong had grown and grown, but a black-and-white positive was something that would be much harder for him to wriggle out of.

  Armstrong did what he had to do to make it seem like he was clean: He hired Don Catlin to basically act as a PR man to build his reputation as an antidoping advocate. The scientist who once said “to ride the Tour, you have to be doping” would now run a program consisting of Armstrong alone. He would test Armstrong as often as he wanted. He would take urine and blood samples to compile a biological baseline and would analyze those levels to see if Armstrong was breaking the rules. The terms of the agreement were still being discussed, but Catlin wanted to get approval to publish the results.

  Armstrong held the first news conference regarding his comeback in September 2008, in conjunction with the Clinton Global Initiative, a group of world leaders, philanthropists, entrepreneurs and corporate types gathered to talk about the world’s problems. Armstrong was one of the main speakers at the event, held at the Sheraton New York Hotel near Times Square in Manhattan.

  Just after Armstrong finished sharing a main stage with New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg and former president Bill Clinton—whom he called “two of the most powerful men in the world”—he climbed onto a small makeshift stage in one of the adjacent ballrooms. Catlin, wearing a Livestrong bracelet, took his place on Armstrong’s right. Taylor Phinney, a future star whom Armstrong had poached from Jonathan Vaughters’s under-twenty-three team, stood at Armstrong’s left. He also was wearing a Livestrong wristband.

  Vaughters had groomed the prodigy for years, and Phinney had promised to return to JV’s team the next season. But within weeks of Armstrong’s comeback announcement, Phinney’s parents—Olympians Connie Carpenter and Davis Phinney—stopped returning Vaughters’s calls. Vaughters soon heard that Phinney was training with Armstrong in Aspen, Colorado. Next thing he knew, Armstrong was starting an under-twenty-three team to showcase Phinney. Vaughters wanted to tell him, “You stole him just to fuck with us.”

  Landis, who knew about Armstrong’s new development team, was even more incredulous. After losing his long, acrimonious and very public fight with USADA, Landis had been serving a two-year doping ban for testing positive at the 2006 Tour, and that ban was set to expire on January 30, 2009. He and Armstrong had talked about Landis’s possibly becoming the director of Armstrong’s new team for young riders—an offer that never materialized. Instead, Armstrong hired the Belgian and former Motorola rider Axel Merckx for the yet-to-be development team. He told Landis that his team couldn’t be involved with someone with a doping past.

  Hiring Landis would have kept him quiet. Armstrong had hushed up his former Postal Service lieutenant, Kevin Livingston, by letting him base his personal training business out of his Mellow Johnny’s bike shop in Austin. But when Armstrong refused Landis a job as a team manager, then as a bike racer on Armstrong’s pro teams, it was the biggest mistake he’d ever make.

  Nike was all in. Scott MacEachern, Armstrong’s longtime Nike representative, was giddy when he had heard the comeback news. With Armstrong, his career had soared. His wife, Ashley, had even written a children’s book about Armstrong in 2008.

  Nike executives were thrilled because Armstrong’s return was bound to be a marketing boon for the company as he rode back into the public consciousness as a cancer-fighting cycling superhero. They’d seen it before: His name alone could bring consumers to the Nike section of a sports store and could spark a lifelong loyalty to the company.

  So Armstrong’s team at Nike hunkered down to generate ideas to bring the Livestrong brand—and the Nike swoosh—into living rooms all over the world, more than ever before. In advance of the Tour, the company announced that it was launching a Livestrong “Hope Rides Again” line of apparel and footwear to commemorate Armstrong’s return to the sport. (All proceeds, after expenses, went to the Lance Armstrong Foundation, as did all the proceeds from the Livestrong collection.) There was also a Nike-sponsored touring art exhibition, headlined by big names like Shepard Fairey and Damien Hirst, which also made money for Livestrong. The tour featured its own exclusive collection of Nike/Livestrong gear.

  Nike, as it had done before, capitalized on Armstrong’s infamy. A TV spot showed Armstrong training alone on his bike, the ride intercut with scenes of recovering cancer patients. Over dramatic music, Armstrong says, “The critics say I’m arrogant. A doper. Washed up. A fraud. That I couldn’t let it go. They can say whatever they want. I’m not back on my bike for them.”

  In October 2008, while sitting at a west Texas café with his newest girlfriend, a mountain biker named Anna Hansen, Armstrong read a story by the French news service Agence France-Presse that addressed his comeback. The article referenced an editorial written by Jean-Marie Leblanc, the former Tour de France race director. Why, Leblanc asked, would Armstrong subject cycling to the questions certain to come with his return?

  “Us former riders generally have respect for winners, but that’s not always the case with the public, above all the media, who have heavy suspicions about you . . . The hounds will be let loose, column inches will be written, images repeated and debate sparked about the one word which has petrified our passion over the past ten years: doping.”

  Armstrong’s heart fell. Leblanc was basically telling him that a comeback would be a disastrous move. Armstrong thought: “Do I want to face all the scrutiny again? Do I want to test fate?” Sure, he had thought of those downsides before, but Leblanc’s words for some reason had gotten through to him. Since announcing his comeback, he had only been tested once by USADA, but his instincts told him to be careful, that he might really be pushing his luck, like Korioth had warned him. It dawned on him: “There are people who will not rest until I am cooked.”

  He turned to Hansen: “I got to get out of this.”

  They had just started dating. She hadn’t a clue what he was talking about.

  “Get out of what?”

  Armstrong explained the situation to her and stewed about it. He began thinking up excuses to back out, like, “I blew out my knee.” Or “My knee hurts.” Or “I woke up this morning and my kids said, ‘Don’t do it.’ ”

  But Nike’s exclusive Livestrong apparel and footwear lines were already moving forward, and his charity was jazzed that millions of dollars more than usual were likely going to roll in. Fans from all over the world were sending him notes that praised him for his comeback and his publicly stated goal of taking his message of cancer awareness to a global stage. He wouldn’t just race in France. He’d race in Australia, South Africa, Ireland.

  He told me later that this new chapter of his life was rolling and gaining speed, and that he just couldn’t make himself jump off the ride, because eve
ryone was watching.

  “I didn’t have the courage,” he said.

  At a news conference attended by hundreds of journalists before the 2009 Tour of California—the first American race of Armstrong’s comeback—he was as defiant as he’d been on the Champs-Élysées in 2005 when he said he felt sorry for anyone who didn’t believe in cycling.

  He had been chastised by reporters for failing to participate in USADA’s out-of-competition testing program for six months before he could race. When he had competed at the Tour Down Under that January, he had been less than a month short, but the UCI let him compete anyway.

  He was criticized for touting the virtues of his independent testing program, the one run by the antidoping scientist Catlin, when that program hadn’t even gotten off the ground. Catlin told me that Armstrong had balked at the logistics and cost of it.

  At the Tour of California’s news conference, one question stopped him. Paul Kimmage, once a pro cyclist himself and now an award-winning reporter for the Sunday Times of London, asked why Armstrong said Landis and Italian rider Ivan Basso should be welcomed back into the sport after serving doping bans.

  “What is it about these dopers that you seem to admire so much?” Kimmage asked.

  Armstrong recognized Kimmage, an outspoken antidoping advocate who had written a book, Rough Ride, about the sport’s doping culture. Stapleton and Mark Higgins, Armstrong’s personal PR man, had seen Kimmage take a seat in the front row of the news conference, and had given Armstrong the heads-up.

  Armstrong responded to Kimmage as if he had rehearsed his answer.

  “When I decided to come back for what I think is a very noble reason, you said, ‘The cancer has been in remission for four years, but our cancer has now returned,’ meaning me. I am here to fight this disease. I am here so that I don’t have to deal with it, you don’t have to deal with it, my children don’t have to deal with it.”

  He then said to Kimmage, “You are not worth the chair that you’re sitting on with a statement like that.”

  The season had just begun.

  When Landis’s suspension ended, he couldn’t find a job. Even Vaughters, who had remained friendly with him, said no. “I would trust Floyd to babysit my son, which I would say about very few bike racers,” Vaughters said. “If he needs money, I will loan him cash. But I couldn’t hire him as a bike racer.”

  Landis finally signed with a lower-level cycling team, the U.S.-based OUCH squad. While he rode in small-time races, Armstrong was back at the Tour, welcomed heartily by thousands. One farmer propped a sign in front of his cornfield: “Armstrong: Pourquoi pas?” (“Armstrong: Why not?”)

  Even with nearly four years off, Armstrong rode brilliantly, battling his own teammate, the Spanish rider Alberto Contador, to be Astana’s team leader. Eleven years his junior, Contador would win that battle, but Armstrong still showed his strength by whipping dozens of younger riders. On one stage that ended atop the legendary Mont Ventoux, he finished fifth.

  While Contador proved to be better, Armstrong was a serious challenger, once missing out on the leader’s yellow jersey by two-tenths of a second. At the end of the 2,150-mile race, he finished third behind Contador, who had won. Armstrong became the second-oldest rider to finish in the top three in the Tour’s long history.

  L’Equipe, the newspaper that had broken so many doping stories about him, ran a headline, “Chapeau, Le Texan,” which means “Hats Off to the Texan.” French President Nicolas Sarkozy raved about him, saying he “did more in five minutes [at the Tour] than his public relations team did in ten years.” At Tour’s end, Armstrong announced that he’d be starting his own team, sponsored by RadioShack, and would be its lead rider for the 2010 season.

  Landis envied Armstrong. Ever since serving his doping ban, he had threatened Armstrong with blackmail if Armstrong didn’t find a job for him in cycling. When that job didn’t materialize, he was so bitter that he began threatening other former Postal Service riders, saying he was going to expose them as dopers. If he had to suffer because he had doped, others were going to suffer with him.

  In 2008, he told Zabriskie he intended to expose the universally admired George Hincapie. Zabriskie called Hincapie the night before the legendary Paris-Roubaix race.

  “Floyd says he’s going to call the police on you and that they’ll be waiting for you at the finish line,” Zabriskie said. “I wouldn’t have said anything, but I think he might be serious this time . . .”

  Hincapie was so unnerved that he finished ninth, more than five minutes back in a race he was favored to win.

  Landis also talked about making a video about the doping that occurred on the Postal Service team, and then posting it on YouTube. That threat caught the attention of David “Tiger” Williams, one of the Wall Street financiers who was an early backer of the Postal Service squad.

  Williams was a former captain of Yale’s hockey team, a competitive cyclist and an investor in Tailwind Sports, the management company that owned the Postal Service team. He was also a top donor to the Lance Armstrong Foundation and one of the big-time donors to the Floyd Fairness Fund—a pool of money that helped Landis pay the $2 million in legal fees he had incurred while fighting his antidoping case.

  At first, Williams did not have confirmation that Armstrong had doped. He had asked Vaughters again and again if there had been doping on the team, but Vaughters never gave him a straight answer.

  In 2009, Williams felt bad that Landis was out of work, and had heard the rumors that he was going to expose the doping that occurred in the sport if he remained jobless. So the company Williams co-owned, eSoles, which sold athletic shoe insoles, paid $200,000 to sponsor Landis’s OUCH team. Landis soon told him about the doping on the Postal Service squad.

  “We can’t let Floyd be a loose cannon,” Williams told a friend in early 2009.

  So Landis kept quiet until Tiger Williams had a reason to use Landis’s firsthand testimony for his own benefit. He once had pledged $1 million to Armstrong’s foundation in exchange for using the “Livestrong” logo on his company’s shoe liners. But in April 2009, Williams learned the deal was off. He was told that Nike, the foundation’s primary sponsor, had nixed it.

  When Williams asked what happened, Armstrong responded by e-mail: “To be honest, and I say this as a good friend of yours, I don’t feel like dealing with this right now. I’m afraid it’s up to you guys to sort out. For what it’s worth, and maybe a good solution, is to return you all of your money and let’s all get on down the road.”

  Williams had paid only a portion of the pledge. Still, the foundation refused to give that money back, informing Williams that donations had to be made with no strings attached. Williams was livid and vowed to do something about Armstrong’s backing out of the eSoles deal. George Hincapie had known Williams for years and figured the sky was about to fall: “I’d never, ever want to get on Tiger Williams’s bad side.”

  Soon enough, Williams told a friend, “Get ready: Big Texas is going down.”

  Armstrong had no idea what was in store for him. He was too busy enjoying the fanfare of his comeback year. In October 2009, at the annual Ride for the Roses in Austin, throngs of fans came to ride with him, support Livestrong and celebrate his return to cycling.

  Terry Armstrong, his adoptive father, was among them. In the years since divorcing Armstrong’s mother, he had become a staunch Christian. Feeling an inconsolable regret about how his relationship with his son had evaporated, he drove from his Dallas suburb to Austin to ask his son for forgiveness for the pain he had caused him and his mother in another life.

  At the Ride for the Roses, he came within a foot of his son at the finish line, close enough to touch his arm and call out, “Lance Edward.”

  Armstrong asked Stapleton to have police take him away.

  In the fall of 2009, Landis confided in Zabriskie before the Tour of Missouri. He was emotional. He said he had turned into a terrible person and didn’t know what to do with his li
fe. His marriage had fallen apart. He had moved out of his spacious house in Temecula, California, and into a small, bare-bones cabin in Idyllwild, a remote town tucked into the San Jacinto mountains. He loved bike racing, but it had become a dead end. He wanted to race again in Europe. He deserved that chance, right? He was the winner of the freakin’ Tour de France, right? He had maintained cycling’s code of silence for so many years—and for what?

  “Remember the conversation we had in our apartment in Girona?” Zabriskie said. “If we ever get caught, let’s not bullshit around, let’s just stop and come clean? So man, maybe you should admit it?”

  Zabriskie wasn’t surprised, then, when he received a text message from Landis in the spring of 2010. Landis was apologizing for what he was about to do. He was going to come clean about everything and everyone. He said he was going to tell USADA that he, Armstrong and other top Americans in the sport had used performance-enhancing drugs and blood transfusions.

  “Man, can’t you just leave me out of it?” Zabriskie said. “Isn’t this just between you and Lance?”

  “No, I’m sorry, man, I’m sorry.”

  Landis felt safe enough to come forward because he had Tiger Williams’s support. Landis didn’t have to worry about money or a roof over his head. Williams had a place on Central Park South in Manhattan and a guesthouse in Connecticut.

  For Williams, helping Landis was a win-win. He could exact a measure of revenge against Armstrong for reneging on the agreement Williams thought he and eSoles had with the Lance Armstrong Foundation. (Williams had previously denied that revenge played a role in his helping Landis.)

  By then, Landis had e-mailed a puzzling array of Led Zeppelin lyrics to Vaughters, words heavy with misery and confusion. He said he was about to let go of everything he’d held inside so long. “I can’t live with this,” he told Vaughters. “I can’t live with this secret.”