Cycle of Lies: The Fall of Lance Armstrong Read online

  Neal was so serious about his new vocation that he traveled to China and spent several months learning Eastern healing techniques, including how to perform acupuncture on the inner ear.

  Back in Austin, he volunteered to work with the athletes at the University of Texas. In time, he had made enough connections and had cultivated a reputation in the Olympic sports world for being so good at his job that he was hired to work as a soigneur for the Subaru-Montgomery professional cycling team. Former United States Olympic cycling coach Eddie Borysewicz was in charge of it. Thomas Weisel, an investment banker who was a legend in financial circles, was the owner.

  When he first signed on, Neal worked races only in the United States and hadn’t heard much about doping in the sport, except that performance-enhancing drug use among cyclists was prevalent in Europe.

  He met Lance Armstrong in 1989 at a Texas triathlon after Borysewicz told him to look out for the budding cycling star. Armstrong’s all-out effort at the 1989 junior worlds in Moscow had caught Borysewicz’s eye. The coach convinced him to switch to cycling from triathlon because cycling was an Olympic sport, while triathlon wasn’t.

  Armstrong, arguably the hottest up-and-coming cyclist in the world, later landed a spot with the Subaru-Montgomery team. By then, Neal and Armstrong knew each other well.

  Nearly a dozen athletes in Austin—both men and women—still say they were closer to Neal than to their own fathers. He brought them into his family and gave them some stability. Lance Armstrong was just the latest athlete in need.

  Armstrong was relocating to hilly Austin from flat Plano because the area’s terrain was perfect for training. At a steeply discounted rate, Armstrong moved into an apartment complex owned by Neal. Near downtown—among tall trees, twenty paces from Neal’s office—it was a comfortable, safe place that Armstrong could call home. Later, Armstrong told the Dallas Morning News his apartment was “killer . . . s-o-o-o nice!” He and Neal met every day, sometimes several times a day, for massage treatments and meals. It gave Neal satisfaction to know that he could make a positive impact on the life of a teenager who needed some guidance.

  Neal’s first impression was that the kid’s ego exceeded his talent. Armstrong was brash and ill-mannered, in desperate need of refinement. But the more he learned of Lance’s home life, the sorrier Neal began to feel for him. He was a kid without a reliable father. Linda Armstrong was pleased that her son now had a responsible male role model in his life, and Neal lent a sympathetic ear to her as well while she dealt with the rocky transition between marriages.

  Neal soon recognized that Armstrong’s insecurities and anger were products of his broken family—he felt abandoned by his biological father and mistreated by his adoptive one. Armstrong didn’t like to be alone, so Neal often met him for breakfast at the Upper Crust Café, just down the street from Neal’s house, and for lunch at a sports bar called The Tavern. Armstrong ate dinner with the Neals three or four times a week. The Neals’ three children would be there, along with the occasional Armstrong friend or a student Neal was mentoring. It was nothing fancy—sometimes just slow-cooked beans eaten with plastic utensils out of mismatched mugs, as if they were on a camping trip. But they were a family.

  Frances, Neal’s wife, and Armstrong were the group’s jokers. They might chase each other around the dinner table. They might sing parts of the song “Ice Ice Baby,” by the Dallas rap star Vanilla Ice, a song that then sat atop the music charts. One would sing, “Ice ice baby!” and the other would reply, “Too cold, too cold!” On some days, they would bring their show to the Neals’ motorboat, where they would spend the day swimming or water-skiing.

  It was arguably the happiest, most uncomplicated time in Armstrong’s life. He no longer had to worry about Terry Armstrong, and his mother’s current marital woes were 215 miles north on Interstate 35, back in Plano. His world centered on Austin and Neal, who gladly opened up his home or apartments to national team cyclists—like future Postal Service teammates George Hincapie, Frankie Andreu, Chann McRae and Kevin Livingston—who wanted to train with Armstrong in the Texas Hill Country.

  The day after Armstrong moved into his new apartment, the Neals saw him ride in Lago Vista, thirty-five miles from Austin. Armstrong did poorly and admitted to Neal that he’d been up late the night before, drinking at an Austin strip club named the Yellow Rose. Neal passed it off as Lance’s being just another rambunctious teenager testing his newfound freedom.

  The call from Armstrong to J.T. Neal came before dawn on an August morning, 1991. Could Neal come to San Marcos and pick him up? Armstrong wasn’t stranded on the side of the road in the Texas outback. He had not blown out a tire on his bike in a marathon training ride. He was in jail.

  The night before, thirty miles from Austin, Armstrong had partied with some coeds from Southwest Texas State University. As they frolicked in an outdoor Jacuzzi at one coed’s apartment complex, they made so much noise that the police came to quiet them down. But that was only Armstrong’s first meeting with cops that night. The second was the big one. Pulled over for driving erratically, he thought he could talk his way out of trouble. So what if he had appeared drunk and refused to take a Breathalyzer test? He was sure the officer would be impressed when he told them who he was—the best young cyclist in the entire country.

  Had he been a quarterback, maybe the ploy would have worked. But a Texas police officer could not care less about a guy boasting about his prowess on a bike. No, it was off to the county lockup.

  Neal, always concerned about Armstrong’s drinking and driving, came and got him from the San Marcos jail the next day. Months later, upon receiving a notice informing him that his driver’s license could be suspended, Armstrong forwarded the letter to Neal. On the envelope, he wrote, “J.T.—This came today?? Have a great Xmas! Lance.” Now acting as his lawyer as well as his friend, Neal helped Armstrong beat the charges and keep his license.

  In turn, Neal received from Armstrong something rare and precious: Armstrong’s trust. Armstrong sent him postcards from training trips and races—such as a note dated August 16, 1991, from Wein-und Ferienort Bischoffingen, Germany:

  J.T.—Hows it going? Well, Germany is very nice. As you probably know the worlds are a little over a week away and Im [sic] nervous as hell. At least I’m riding good now! Wish you were here! The boys say “hello.” Lance

  Neal was an admitted cycling groupie. He was never athletic enough in any sport to be a hotshot jock—he rode a bike, but only recreationally—but now he could walk among those jocks and be accepted and respected by them. He had the job of a cycling fan’s dreams.

  Neal loved that the national team riders and American pro cyclists knew who he was. Some even called him for advice. In Hincapie’s case: I was stopped by customs with a suitcase filled with EPO and other drugs, what should I do? Some of them, like Armstrong and Hincapie, were open with him about their drug use. Whether Neal was complicit in any of that drug use is unclear. He said, though, that a soigneur’s job in the United States was different from that of one in Europe, where the job had long required an intimate knowledge of pharmaceuticals. He had learned that from his fellow soigneurs who had done work overseas. Only once did Neal inject Armstrong, Neal said: a vitamin shot in the rear end.

  In those early days, Armstrong didn’t hide the fact that he received regular injections. Neal always said that Armstrong never liked to do things for himself, that he felt entitled to have someone wash his car for free or make restaurant reservations. At first, he didn’t like injecting himself, either. A coed named Nancy Geisler, Neal’s office assistant who was close with both men, said that Neal once asked her to give Armstrong a vitamin shot because he’d be out of town and couldn’t do it. She presumed that it was just a part of Armstrong’s training regimen.

  Armstrong was nonchalant about it when she filled in. She saw no label on the vial from which the syringe had drawn its liquid. She assumed that Armstrong had been doping and that Neal knew it. Only years late
r did she think, “Had I been a part of something illegal?”

  According to Neal, Armstrong relied on shots and IVs for recovery and a pre-race boost of energy. On the eve of the road race at the 1992 Olympics, fellow Olympian Timm Peddie walked into Armstrong’s hotel room and saw Neal, United States national team coach Chris Carmichael, national team soigneur Charlie Livermore and a gaggle of USA Cycling officials standing around Armstrong as he lay on a bed, hooked to an IV. Peddie was astonished at the openness of the procedure. Everyone there stared at the unexpected guest until Peddie left as quickly as he had come in. He hadn’t been sure what he had seen. Maybe a blood transfusion? An infusion of electrolytes or proteins? He only knew that he himself had never received an IV of anything before a race. Armstrong was, evidently, special.

  In the early 1990s, U.S. cycling had a single star, Greg LeMond, who in 1986 became the first American to win the Tour de France, a feat he would repeat in 1989 and 1990. But his victories had little impact on the sport in the United States. LeMond had ridden for a European team and his success came primarily in Europe, out of sight of America’s sports fans.

  Armstrong, however, came into the sport with the dramatic backstory—the struggling single mother who had dropped out of high school to raise him—and he raced for an American team, Motorola, starting in 1992. Young and charismatic, he was set to be a star, and he wanted fame badly.

  He insisted that Steve Penny, the managing director for USA Cycling, sell the hell out of him to raise awareness of the sport. News about cycling had rarely gotten much past the sports pages’ agate section.

  Penny persuaded Descente, the federation’s new clothing sponsor, to produce a poster of four top athletes on the national team: Armstrong, Hincapie, Bobby Julich and the 1991 junior road cycling world champion, Jeff Evanshine. The poster featured a dramatic photo of Pikes Peak behind the riders, each of whom carried a look of grim determination on his face. All would go on to admit doping or serve a suspension for breaking anti-doping rules. In the lower left-hand corner of the poster was a list of the “U.S. Team Rules.”

  RULE #1: Don’t mess with Lance, Bobby, George and Jeff.

  RULE #2: No Whining.

  RULE #3: It doesn’t count unless you do it under pressure.

  RULE #4: There is no “Back Door.”

  RULE #5: There are no rules: Winning the Gold in Barcelona is the only thing that counts.

  As much as Armstrong loved being a star, his devotion to celebrity may have run a distant second to his hunger for money. J.T. Neal sensed that early on.

  He saw Armstrong driven by money—how to get it, how to keep it and what he had to do, ethically or unethically, to get more of it.

  In 1993, Armstrong chased a million-dollar bonus. The pharmacy Thrift Drug offered the prize to a rider who won three big American races—the Thrift Drug Classic in Pittsburgh, the Kmart Classic in West Virginia, and the CoreStates USPRO national championship in Philadelphia. Each required a different strength: Pittsburgh’s was a demanding one-day race, West Virginia’s a grueling six-stager that rewarded the best climbers and Philadelphia’s an event geared toward sprinters.

  Armstrong, only twenty-one, won the first race and surprised everyone. Five stages through the second race, he was among the favorites to win. So, with the possibility of a million-dollar payout dangling in front of them, several riders on the Motorola team devised a plan to guarantee victory.

  Motorola rider Frankie Andreu allegedly approached a Coors Light rider, Scott McKinley, to propose a $50,000 deal: a flat fee if the Coors Light team would help Armstrong win the million-dollar prize by not challenging him for the victory in the rest of that second race and the entire final race. Coors Light was a strong team with riders who also were among the top contenders.

  Later that night, several riders from each team discussed the deal in the hotel room Armstrong shared with his Australian teammate, Phil Anderson. By the time the Coors Light riders left the room, the deal had been done.

  If Armstrong won the million, both teams would benefit. Armstrong would receive the prize money—$600,000 taken in a lump sum—and would walk away with $200,000 while the balance would be distributed to his team and other cyclists who had helped him win. Each rider on Coors Light would be given $3,000 to $5,000, according to Stephen Swart, a Coors Light rider in on the discussions.

  As long as America had no idea how it happened, Armstrong’s $1 million jackpot would also give cycling the positive publicity it needed to grow. It was a win-win all around.

  The practice of throwing races had existed for decades, and was as much a part of the sport as doping. Joe Parkin, an American who raced in Europe, said so in his book, A Dog in a Hat. He wrote that selling victories was a common and accepted practice in Europe in the late 1980s. A rider racing in his hometown might shell out several thousand dollars to win. The losers would get guaranteed, easy money. Everybody left happy, pockets stuffed with cash.

  Parkin wrote, “My experience as a pro cyclist in Europe has left me with a somewhat altered moral code, such that many of the things that bother normal people are invisible to me.”

  With the Coors Light team on his side, Armstrong won the second race in the million-dollar race series. Then, in the last moments of the Philadelphia race—the final race in the series—Armstrong was in a breakaway of six riders when he took off toward an impossibly steep climb called the Manayunk Wall. None of the other riders in the breakaway chased him, leaving him to win the race in what seemed like a heroic solo effort.

  Before the race, Neal thought Armstrong would win because he was the strongest rider. Only after the event did he learn that Armstrong had paid his way onto the top of the winner’s podium. The Coors Light riders had kept their end of the deal. They did not attack Armstrong during the Philadelphia race, making it easier for him to win. But Armstrong had taken an extra step to guarantee his victory.

  Armstrong had told Neal that in the race’s waning miles he bribed Italian rider Roberto Gaggioli to ensure the victory. He offered Gaggioli, who had been one of the cyclists in the final breakaway, $10,000 to hold back when Armstrong took off on his solo breakaway. Gaggioli took him up on the offer and later said Armstrong had given him $100,000 in the deal, though that large amount seems improbable. Several other Italian riders in that breakaway also said they had accepted Armstrong’s bribes.

  Neal, uncomfortable with the shameless dishonesty, chastised Armstrong for cheating.

  “For God’s sake,” he told Armstrong, “stop bragging about it.”

  Neal also was upset with Ochowicz, who he thought was in on the deal. He didn’t like Ochowicz very much anyway. He complained that the team manager knew little about cycling tactics and that the only thing he did was gorge himself on the peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches that were kept for him in the team car. He felt that Ochowicz was a bad influence on Armstrong, a kid who didn’t need much prodding to break the rules. It was now evident to Neal that Armstrong’s moral code would be forever altered. Armstrong, according a person with direct knowledge of the situation, would later win the Clásica de San Sebastián race in 1995 only after bribing another rider in the final few miles, but that he was just following the sport’s well-established customs.

  If Armstrong ever had a conscience, his bosses had convinced him it didn’t matter. According to Armstrong, Ochowicz had okayed the bribe to win the million dollars and had made the final call. It worked.

  In the television broadcast of the prize ceremony, Armstrong summed up the victory with an ironic hint at the fact of the race: “Everybody won today.”

  The year of the bribe, 1993, Armstrong’s star rose sharply. Not only did he win the million, he also won his first stage of the Tour de France. In August, at twenty-one, he became the second youngest world road racing champion ever. With Motorola planning to leave cycling, Armstrong’s brilliant season gave his team reason to believe it would gain a new sponsor, probably one with much deeper pockets.

  All of a
sudden cycling mattered. Reporters from around the world descended upon Austin. ABC News interviewed Armstrong and his mother, calling him a “boy wonder” and playing up Linda Armstrong’s role as a teenage mom.

  “Well, being young and pregnant, I was scared,” she said.

  Lance said: “We had to overcome a lot of obstacles and a lot of resistance in our lives. And I mean, all these people, they counted her out, counted me out.”

  Newspaper stories said he had never met his father and that Linda’s second marriage ended after ten years. Those lies somehow made Armstrong’s story even more attractive to the media.

  “Lance is just what our country needs to get excited about cycling,” the USA Cycling marketer, Steve Penny, said in one news report. “If someone is looking for a hero to back, Lance fits the mold.”

  Team manager Ochowicz said he was ecstatic about Armstrong’s $1 million victory. “It’s a great day for U.S. cycling.” By year’s end, Armstrong and the cycling team were so good that Motorola signed on for another year. The team did not have to fold after all. Armstrong had a new name for Penny: “Dime.”

  Back in Austin, Armstrong paid $70,000 for a new sports car, a black Acura NSX. He then asked Neal to build a garage at the apartment complex. Neal resisted, but only for a moment. For about $50,000, he built the garage. Whatever Armstrong asked, it seemed, J.T. Neal was there to say yes.

  At Christmas that year, Armstrong thanked him with several gifts. One was an autographed national champion’s rainbow jersey. In black marker, he wrote, “J.T. I’m very fortunate that our paths have crossed. You’re truly my righthand man! Not to mention my best friend! Lance Armstrong.”

  He gave Neal a Rolex watch inscribed with the words “To J.T. From LANCE ARMSTRONG.” Neal accepted the watch as a symbol of Armstrong’s gratitude, even his love. For a number of years, Neal wore it with pride—until the day came that he decided to never put it on his wrist again.