Cycle of Lies: The Fall of Lance Armstrong Read online

  Vaughters heard the darkness in Landis’s voice.

  “I felt like he was going to commit suicide,” he said, “or tell all.”

  CHAPTER 20

  Night after night in the spring of 2010, Landis sent e-mails to Armstrong, taunting him with what he was about to do, goading him into trying to do something to stop it. Landis would send them past midnight during the Tour of the Gila, a multistage race in New Mexico in which they both were competing. But Landis never said a word to Armstrong at the race itself. It creeped Armstrong out.

  The week before, Armstrong had eavesdropped on a phone conversation between Zabriskie and the former Postal Service team manager Johan Bruyneel, in which Zabriskie had called to warn Bruyneel about Landis’s plans to come clean.

  Armstrong had never been so jumpy. Landis had long said he was going to go public with his doping claims, but this time he seemed prepared to follow through. While he needled Armstrong, he dared Steve Johnson, the chief executive and president of USA Cycling, to act. On Friday, April 30, 2010, at 5:19 p.m., after the third stage of the five-stage Tour of the Gila, Landis wrote to Johnson under the subject line: “nobody is copied on this one so it’s up to you to demonstrate your true colors . . .”

  In that single e-mail laying out the highlights of the doping that occurred on the Postal Service and other pro teams, Landis implicated nearly every top American rider and several cycling officials. It read like a description of a drug ring.

  He said that in 2002 Bruyneel had instructed him on how to use testosterone patches. He said that Armstrong had handed him a box of patches in view of Armstrong’s wife; that Ferrari extracted blood from him to be reinfused at the Tour; that Armstrong told him he had made a financial agreement with the former UCI president Hein Verbruggen to hide a positive test for EPO.

  More charges: In 2003, Armstrong had asked him to keep an eye on Armstrong’s blood while he was out of town. Landis’s job was to ensure that the temperature inside Armstrong’s refrigerator didn’t fluctuate so that the blood stored there would remain fresh.

  During the 2003 Tour, Landis received a blood transfusion alongside Hincapie, Armstrong and another teammate, Chechu Rubiera. The team doctor gave him and Hincapie testosterone oil. Later that season, Bruyneel told Landis to get EPO from Armstrong, who complied when asked for it. Bruyneel also explained to Landis how to use growth hormone, and Landis bought it from the trainer Pepe Martí. Landis’s Postal teammates Matthew White, an Australian, and Michael Barry, a Canadian, shared their testosterone and EPO.

  In the e-mail, Landis also wrote that in the 2004 Tour, he and teammates received a transfusion along a mountain road on their way to the team hotel. In 2005, he hired Allen Lim to prepare transfusions and keep the blood cold when Landis performed the transfusions on himself and Levi Leipheimer.

  In 2006, Landis told the Phonak team owner, Andy Riis, that he needed money to dope, and Riis granted it. (Riis denies it.)

  After all that, Landis told Johnson he had “many, many more details” in diaries. He signed off with an ominous line: “Look forward to much more detail as soon as you can demonstrate that you can be trusted to do the right thing.”

  To the others, Landis warned that he was about to drop a bomb. And soon. He wrote to Andrew Messick, the race director of the Tour of California; Bill Stapleton, the agent who’d said the Postal Service team could help him “with further doping”; and UCI president Pat McQuaid, as well as a handful of cycling sponsors. Then he wrote to Armstrong again: “I’ll just come out and say directly that I’m going to accuse you and our former teammates of using blood doping and performance-enhancing drugs to help you to win the three Tours de France in which we raced together. So make no mistake about that.”

  He called the doping on those teams “a fraud perpetrated on the public” and said Armstrong could not intimidate him.

  “My only goal in enlightening the public and the press regarding these matters is to clear my conscience and thereafter be able to sleep at night,” Landis wrote. “I’m certainly not oblivious to the fact that the thought of this would cause you and many others considerable anxiety and am sympathetic to your reaction but need to remind you that I don’t react well to threats or bullying and see no good outcome if that continues.”

  In April 2010, Floyd Landis arranged a lunch meeting with the race director Messick in downtown Los Angeles, at an upscale restaurant called the Farm of Beverly Hills. More than a year had passed since the end of Landis’s suspension.

  He liked Messick and wanted to warn him that the sport was about to implode, perhaps within a month, maybe during Messick’s Tour of California in May. He placed a tape recorder on the table and pressed “Record.” He wanted proof that he had told the truth about his doping to someone who was an authority in the sport.

  “I used performance-enhancing drugs pretty much throughout my whole pro career,” he said. “I can’t keep the truth inside anymore. It’s going to come out, and soon.”

  Messick was dumbfounded. The man who had written a book called Positively False: The Real Story of How I Won the Tour de France—a story about Landis’s winning clean, despite his positive drug test—was now admitting that he had lied to the public for four whole years? The man who had shouted his innocence and solicited money from donors for his defense was now saying his version of his story was, actually, positively false?

  “How do you expect people to believe you when you lied for so long?” Messick said. “Have you told your mother? Have you told Travis Tygart?”

  He had not. Telling his mother required more courage than Landis could summon. And Tygart, who had slapped him in 2007 with a two-year ban, was not someone Landis could tolerate helping. (Landis said he spent $2 million, including at least $478,354 in public donations from 1,765 people, and nearly two years fighting his case.)

  Though he gave up nothing about Armstrong, Landis told Messick that all the veteran riders referred to their code of silence as “the omertà.”

  “When you’re in the Mafia, and you get caught and go to jail, you keep your mouth shut, and the organization takes care of your family,” Landis said. But in cycling, he said, there was no honor among thieves. “You’re expected to keep your mouth shut when you test positive, but you become an outcast. Everyone just turns their back on you.”

  Cyclists had violated the omertà in the past, but none had been as high-profile a rider as Landis. Even Frankie Andreu, who had tattled on the sport four years before, had been a mere domestique.

  In the spring of 2010, Austria’s Bernhard Kohl admitted to a lifetime of doping, saying “it’s impossible to win without doping.” He had finished third at the 2008 Tour, but was stripped of that result because he had tested positive at the race. He said it was easy to get around the drug testing: “I was tested two hundred times during my career, and a hundred times I had drugs in my body,” he told me in 2010. ”I was caught, but ninety-nine other times I wasn’t.”

  In 2004, Spain’s Jesús Manzano exposed the systematic doping that occurred on the Kelme team and later admitted that a team doctor at the 2003 Tour had given him the veterinary drug Oxyglobin—bovine hemoglobin, used to treat anemia in dogs. After taking the drug, Manzano collapsed during a stage and had to be airlifted to a hospital.

  The revelations of cycling’s dark side weren’t just spokes on the dubious wheel of Lance Armstrong. But the sport in America was about to receive a potent injection of truth-telling, maybe for the first time ever. And Landis was the tip of the needle. He had been abandoned by everyone and everything that had meant something to him: his sport, his wife, his father-in-law, most of his former teammates. The truth, he told Messick, was all he had left.

  About a week before the Tour of California, Landis called Tygart, and they planned to meet at the Marriott at the Los Angeles airport a few days later. Tygart knew what to expect. He had heard the basics of Landis’s doping stories from a USADA scientist named Daniel Eichner who two weeks before had heard the de
tails of Landis’s drug use through an anti-doping expert Landis had recruited to be his intermediary. After his lunch meeting with Messick in Los Angeles, Landis had been eager to talk to USADA—yet he didn’t want to confess to Tygart right away because they’d had such a contentious relationship during Landis’s doping case. Telling Eichner his dirty deeds was his first step toward full disclosure.

  Sitting across from each other in a conference room at the airport Marriott, both Landis and Tygart were cautious. Learning to trust each other would take time.

  “If I’m willing to come forward and be truthful, are you going to do what everyone else would do, or are you going to do your job?” Landis said.

  Tygart was surprised at his skepticism. He made a point of looking him straight in the eyes. “We are going to do our job and follow up with whatever evidence is presented. That’s if you tell the truth.”

  So Landis told the truth. They sat for hours, with Landis reeling off details of his doping, Armstrong’s doping and other riders’ doping. Tygart tried to keep his jaw from hitting the floor.

  “We were all doing it—Lance, me, all the other guys on the team; everybody was doping,” Landis said. “It was just part of the sport.”

  “Well, we’re going to try to change that,” Tygart said. “You have a lot of courage for coming forward. I know how tough it is for a single person to speak the truth. You get vilified in the press.”

  Landis didn’t name any of the other riders who doped—just Armstrong. For the moment, Zabriskie was in the clear. Landis was trying his best to convince Tygart that his friends—“the guys that want to clear their conscience” about doping—should receive no punishment for their confessions. He didn’t put Armstrong in that category.

  After the meeting, Tygart contacted an old friend—Jeff Novitzky, a bald-headed, 6-foot-6 criminal investigator for the Food and Drug Administration who had made a name for himself as the country’s top antidoping cop. Tygart told him that Landis had explosive information about Armstrong’s doping and the doping on Armstrong’s Postal Service team, and suggested that the two of them team up to interview Landis on the record.

  Novitzky had been the lead agent in the BALCO steroids case that implicated elite athletes like the slugger Barry Bonds and the sprinter Marion Jones. (Both were convicted of felony crimes stemming from their doping.) He and Tygart had worked closely together on that case, and had since been in touch about the doping problem in cycling and other sports.

  Novitzky was already investigating PED use in cycling when Tygart reached out to him about Landis. His investigation had been spurred by the doping case of a rider named Kayle Leogrande, a medium-level cyclist who’d left some EPO behind when he moved out of his Southern California apartment, causing his landlady to call the FDA. Novitzky was working on that case, so he jumped at the opportunity to hear what Landis had to say.

  The three of them met in early May at the Marriott in Marina del Rey, not far from the Los Angeles airport. Landis also brought his doctor, Brent Kay, to the meeting because Kay had felt threatened by Armstrong when they had corresponded through e-mails.

  Landis recalled detail after detail, and even gave them his diary, in which he had written his doping schedules in code. He wanted to be thorough. What he didn’t want was to lie anymore.

  As the Tour of California, the most prestigious road cycling race in the U.S., grew closer, Armstrong became increasingly edgy. He asked Landis’s doctor, Kay, to persuade Landis to reconsider his vendetta. But Landis was stubborn, even when he heard that Stapleton was preparing to sue the cycling shorts off of him. Power had shifted. Now Landis was the bully.

  “See all these security guys around here?” Armstrong asked his former teammates Hincapie, Leipheimer and Zabriskie as they gathered for a press event before the Tour of California. “I called these guys in. I’m scared. I’m scared of Floyd. He’s, like, texting me with pictures of him and a gun. That motherfucker’s going to shoot me.” Landis told me in late 2013 that he didn’t remember sending Armstrong such a text.

  Four days later, Landis’s doping confession and his accusations that others had doped with him went public. Thanks in part to Tiger Williams, Landis’s mentor, who held a grudge against Armstrong, the contents of several of Landis’s e-mails to Armstrong and top cycling officials—including the naming-all-names note to Johnson—showed up on the Wall Street Journal’s Web site several hours before midnight on May 19, the eve of the race’s fifth stage.

  Armstrong texted Hincapie: “Check out the Wall Street Journal. It’s going to be rough tomorrow.” Vaughters saw the story and called Zabriskie about it right away.

  Zabriskie called Bruyneel, who told him, “We have it covered.” Zabriskie then ran to Hincapie’s hotel room.

  Hincapie was frazzled. “The FDA is calling me—this Novitzky guy who dealt with Marion Jones and stuff,” he said. “He left a message saying, ‘Please call me.’ ”

  Vaughters had heard the rumor that Novitzky was investigating drug use in cycling, and knew it was only a matter of time before he would reach out to his Garmin-Chipotle-sponsored team. Many of the squad’s riders had doped in the past. Vaughters had purposely hired them and given them jobs where there would be no pressure to cheat.

  He brought Zabriskie into his hotel room and told him he had his support, that if Novitzky came calling, Zabriskie shouldn’t be afraid to tell the truth about his experience with performance-enhancing drugs. You will have a job with us, no matter what you say.

  Vaughters also spoke to Tom Danielson, another American rider who’d been Armstrong’s teammate, and echoed what he’d said to Zabriskie: If Novitzky comes calling, don’t be scared to tell him what you know. We will back you up.

  Then he gathered his team and instructed everyone, no matter how upset with Landis, to decline comment about the situation.

  “Do not call Floyd a drunk. Do not cause a media explosion at the race,” he said. “Let’s just finish the race and figure out what we’re going to say.”

  Armstrong’s counterattack had already begun. First, he taped a short video that was posted on YouTube.

  “I had a fairly uneventful day,” he said, explaining that it was “an honor” to ride for MCA, the rapper Adam Yauch from the Beastie Boys, who was battling cancer. Then he spoke about his own struggle. He said that in the next stage, he would be riding for LaTrice Haney, the nurse at Indiana University Cancer Center who had helped him through his cancer treatment. He called her and other nurses “unsung heroes.”

  “LaTrice was a very special woman,” he said. “She was somebody that really made the leap for me from the nurse-patient relationship; she crossed the line and we became friends.”

  The next morning, barely twelve hours after Landis’s e-mails first appeared on the Internet, Armstrong walked off the RadioShack team bus near the stage start in Visalia, California. He looked coolly out into a roiling sea of reporters.

  “So obviously everybody has a question about Floyd Landis and his allegations, and I would say that I’m a little bit surprised, but I’m not,” he said. “The harassment and the threats from Floyd started really a couple of years ago and at that time we largely ignored him. Finally, a year or so ago, I told him, do what you have to do.”

  Reporters thrust tape recorders toward him. Television boom microphones hovered over his head. Not one, not two, but three public relations people (Armstrong’s, the team’s and the Tour of California’s) stood within five feet of him, each wearing Livestrong bracelets.

  Armstrong looked confident. He thrived in combative situations. As if for the thousandth time, he said Landis had “no proof; it’s his word versus ours. We like our word. We like where we stand. We like our credibility.”

  He called Landis’s accusations ridiculous and said Landis was simply seeking attention because his cycling team had not been given an entry in the race. Landis cannot be trusted, he said—remember, Landis wrote a book that mentioned none of his latest accusations. Keep in mind
, he added, that Landis took “what some would say was close to a million dollars from innocent people” who contributed to his defense fund after he tested positive at the 2006 Tour.

  One reporter asked if he would take legal action against Landis. “I don’t need to do that anymore,” Armstrong said. “My energy needs to be devoted to my team, to Livestrong, my kids.”

  Another reporter asked, “So, Lance, you never paid the UCI any money?” He answered, “Absolutely not.” He chuckled, but caught himself.

  “If you said, give me one word to sum it all up, I’d say ‘credibility,’ ” Armstrong said. “Floyd lost his credibility a long time ago. I’m not breaking any news here to you guys.” Armstrong brought up the long-standing rumor that Landis had a photo of the alleged refrigerated panniers Armstrong’s team used to transport blood bags from one Tour stage to the next. “Where’s that? Where’s that? It’s all a bunch of bullshit. It never existed,” Armstrong said.

  As the impromptu press briefing went on, Armstrong tightened. “From our perspective, from what’s gone on at U.S. Postal and Discovery, all those Tours, we have nothing to hide. We have nothing to run from,” he said. Then he folded his tanned, muscled arms across his chest so his veins bulged.

  “Are you gonna tell the truth to federal prosecutors who are investigating this?” one reporter asked.

  “Absolutely,” he said. He tried to smile and failed.

  When asked about Novitzky, Armstrong cracked a little. Though he usually spoke with authority, he seemed to have trouble organizing his thoughts.

  “If—what—why would Jeff Novitzky have anything to do with, which is fine, if that’s the case, we’ll be, because we’ll be more than happy to participate as well,” he said. “But that would, why would Novitzky have anything to do with what an athlete does in Europe?”

  On the team bus that morning and later with reporters, Bruyneel attacked Landis without reservation.