Cycle of Lies: The Fall of Lance Armstrong Page 9

  Some of Neal’s friends had called their cancer doctors for him and helped him investigate alternative treatment programs. “But not Lance,” he said. “He has not done that.”

  The more Neal thought about Armstrong standing him up at the airport, the more hurt he felt. He took off the Rolex that Armstrong had given him. It stayed off for good.

  One day in late summer 1997, Armstrong sat down with Carmichael, who had flown to Austin to meet him. Carmichael wanted Armstrong to start racing again, and convinced Stapleton to argue the point, too. Both men had a financial stake in a comeback.

  Carmichael, who had been replaced by Ferrari in 1995 as Armstrong’s main coach, said it would be a shame for Armstrong to quit when he was still so young. Stapleton told Armstrong a comeback could mean big money. Sponsors would flock to him, and not just any sponsors—Fortune 500 companies. Armstrong could very well transcend the provincial roots of the sport.

  Though Armstrong knew he’d have to dope again, he told me it didn’t scare him because he felt safe in the hands of Ferrari and knew from experience that he would use only a fraction of the EPO that he had—ironically—taken as part of his chemotherapy. He doubted his drug use had caused the cancer. So he agreed to get back on his bike.

  Problem was, he had nowhere to go.

  Cofidis, the French team, had terminated his $2.5 million, two-year contract. Instead, it offered $180,000, plus incentives that would pay him more for an unexpected return to form. The team wasn’t confident that Armstrong would be the same rider.

  The offer, insulting in Armstrong’s eyes, flipped a switch of anger. Those “Eurobastards” had screwed him. A master at holding grudges, he vowed to get even.

  Armstrong had one shot at a better deal: the United States Postal Service team. The U.S.-based squad was owned by Thomas Weisel, a San Francisco investment banker whom several Postal Service riders called “a jock sniffer”—a derogatory term for someone who loves to hobnob with elite athletes. He was a good athlete himself. Competing in his age group, Weisel was a national champion speed skater, a world champion cyclist and a competitive skier. His next athletic goal was to build the country’s preeminent cycling team.

  Armstrong had ridden for Weisel in 1990 and ’91 as an amateur on the Subaru-Montgomery cycling team, which Weisel had bankrolled. Weisel had seen his raw talent. With that in mind, Weisel accepted Stapleton’s proposal of a $215,000 base salary for Armstrong, heavy with performance-based bonuses.

  That was October 1997, about a year after Armstrong’s cancer diagnosis. The cancer would turn out to be a financial boon for Armstrong—and for Stapleton, too. Stapleton wasn’t embarrassed to call a postcancer Armstrong a marketer’s dream. An autobiography was in the works. People who had paid no attention to cycling now wanted to know about its superhero.

  “Lance isn’t just a cyclist anymore—because of the cancer, the Lance Armstrong brand has a much broader appeal,” Stapleton told the Austin American-Statesman. “Our challenge is to leverage that now. He’s on the verge of being a crossover-type spokesman. He could be just like an athlete who does a Pepsi or Gatorade commercial. If his comeback has success, we hope to take him to a Kodak or Sony and hope they will turn him into a corporate pitchman.”

  With Stapleton and Carmichael pushing Armstrong to the brink of international fame, J.T. Neal tried to keep him grounded. Perhaps because he faced imminent death, he wasn’t dazzled by the portrayal of Armstrong as the poster boy for cancer awareness. He was dealing with Armstrong, as always, as a father would.

  A family friend had taken Armstrong’s place as Neal’s caregiver in Arkansas for his second bone marrow transplant. That whole week, Neal had wondered where he and Armstrong’s mother had gone wrong with Lance. He had long recognized the selfishness inherent in Armstrong’s naked ambition, but this time, in dismissing Neal when Neal most needed him, he had gone too far But Neal had kind of seen it coming.

  Armstrong had ignored those doctors and nurses who had been at his bedside during his cancer treatments in Austin, and then he used his recovery to make money. It was hypocritical for Armstrong to be a spokesman for cancer awareness, Neal said. “Look how he got it in the first place,” Neal would say later. “How he flaunts the rules. It’s like, ‘I have cancer and I’m a good guy’ and ‘I will use all means to justify the ends.’ ”

  Neal knew Armstrong was doping again. While Armstrong was raising money for his foundation, he was looking for a way to get EPO in the United States after he’d stopped using the drug to fight his cancer. Armstrong went so far as to ask for the EPO that Neal was using in his cancer treatment. Eventually, when Neal repeatedly refused to share the drug, Armstrong said he had developed a source in the southwestern United States.

  As weary of Armstrong’s machinations as he was, Neal continued asking him to help his mother, Linda. Neal asked him to give her $10,000 a year. Armstrong refused.

  So Neal eventually asked Garvey, the foundation’s chairman of the board, to push Armstrong. When Armstrong again refused, Garvey offered to front the money himself. But he had a public relations problem. If news got out that Armstrong wouldn’t help his mother in need, how would it look for the foundation? What if America learned that Lance Armstrong was not a selfless hero?

  CHAPTER 8

  Two years before Armstrong showed up on the Postal Service team, there was a big shake-up in its organization. After the 1996 season, team director Eddie Borysewicz, the 1984 Olympic coach and Armstrong’s former mentor, was not asked back, and neither was Prentice Steffen, the team’s doctor.

  Steffen had been in a team hotel room during the 1996 Tour of Switzerland when two Postal riders—Tyler Hamilton and Marty Jemison—approached him to talk. Jemison brought up the team’s medical program. He said the team wasn’t getting anywhere with the current program—the riders were getting crushed at that race, the team’s first big European competition—and asked Steffen’s advice.

  “Do you think there is something more you could be doing to help us?” he said.

  Steffen considered this a euphemism, and felt that Jemison was asking for performance-enhancing drugs. He remembers it as a wink-and-nod conversation that he knew would not go anywhere because, having conquered substance abuse himself, he was against the use of drugs.

  “No, I can’t really get involved in that sort of thing,” Steffen answered.

  Hamilton has denied that the conversation ever happened. Jemison said they had spoken with Steffen that day, but that they were asking for legal products, things like vitamins and amino acids. Whatever transpired, Steffen felt that the riders and team management began distancing themselves from him. Mark Gorski, the team’s general manager and a 1984 Olympian, stopped returning his calls and e-mails. The next thing he knew, he had been replaced by a Spanish doctor, Pedro Celaya.

  Steffen had been with the team for several years and was hurt by his unceremonious departure. There were no formal good-byes; the team just let his contract lapse. Fuming, he wrote a letter to Gorski. “What would a Spanish doctor, completely unknown to the organization, offer that I can’t or won’t? Doping is the fairly obvious answer.”

  The team’s response came from its law firm. In it, Steffen was threatened with a lawsuit if he made public his accusations.

  Borysewicz had also lost his job with the team. Though he had been caught up in the blood doping scandal of the 1984 Summer Games, several of his riders on the Postal Service team said he never offered them anything of the sort. He had told them that he didn’t want to be involved in another doping scandal. He was replaced in 1997 by Johnny Weltz, a Dane and a former rider who had spent most of his career with the Spanish ONCE team, which was known as one of the dirtiest teams in the sport. With Celaya—a doctor who knew his way around the doping of athletes but has denied having any involvement with PEDs—and now Weltz, the team was prepared to take its doping plan to another level. Armstrong would return to the sport and would join right in.

  As soon as their t
eammates left their apartment in Girona, Spain, Darren Baker and Scott Mercier went to work. They looked under beds, in drawers, inside jacket pockets—any and all possible hiding places inside the bedrooms of Tyler Hamilton and George Hincapie, their roommates and fellow Americans on the United States Postal Service team. Finally they stumbled upon a shoebox filled with small pill bottles at the bottom of Hincapie’s closet. Tucked among bottles of vitamins was a small tan bottle of testosterone.

  “No way!” Mercier said.

  “What? That’s it? I was sure there would be more,” Baker said.

  That’s all they found, but they’d found an answer to their question: Were their teammates doping? Yes. At least one of them was.

  In 1997, Hincapie was only twenty-three, but had long been one of the top cyclists in the United States. The son of Colombian immigrants, he grew up in Queens and began cycling when he was eight. His father, Ricardo, had been a competitive cyclist. George Hincapie would train with his older brother, Rich, in Central Park. On weekends, the Hincapies drove to races in New Jersey, Connecticut and all over New York. Unlike Armstrong, who was a late bloomer as a pure cyclist because he had been concentrating on triathlons, Hincapie was only twelve when he won his first national championship.

  In school, he daydreamed about racing in Europe, maybe even in the Tour de France. Ignoring homework, he planned training schedules. He tried one semester of college, at Hofstra University, but decided academics weren’t for him.

  He took his first vitamin shots with the United States national team, in Italy. In Europe, he said, injecting vitamins was so common that supermarkets sold syringes “next to the apples.” At the 1992 Olympics, he received injections from national team trainer Angus Fraser—later accused of doping young riders—but Hincapie assumed his injections were legal supplements, like vitamins B12 and C.

  Early on as a pro on the Motorola team, he saw a Belgian teammate inject what he assumed was EPO. Another teammate, an Italian, had a drawerful of drugs that he bequeathed to Hincapie when the Italian left the team with an injury. The team’s soigneurs, including Hendershot, gave Hincapie injections, but he never questioned what was in them. He said his mentor, Frankie Andreu, who’d already been a pro for several years and later raced for the Postal Service team, introduced him to EPO.

  “It was just standard,” Hincapie says, referring to the doping in Europe’s pro peloton. “It was shocking, but I didn’t have a Plan B. At that time, it wasn’t like, ‘Well, shit, I’ve got to cheat.’ It was, like, ‘I’m not going to let myself get cheated. I have to do this.’ ”

  At his first Grand Tour—the Vuelta a España in 1995, when he was still clean—Hincapie struggled to stay with “the fattest, most out-of-shape guy in the race; that’s how hard it was.” He realized then that no matter how hard he worked, he would never succeed unless he doped.

  For thirty years, his father woke up at 4 a.m. to work in the baggage department for United Airlines at LaGuardia Airport. His mother drove a city school bus for ten years. “That focus and commitment to something was really passed on to me,” he said. “I was going to do what I wanted to do, one hundred percent.”

  So when faced with the decision of whether or not to take performance-enhancing drugs, Hincapie followed his close friend Armstrong’s lead: He went all in. In a year’s time, Armstrong would be back on a team with Hincapie and the two would race together and dope together. It was a partnership that would take them places they’d never imagined—places filled with both glory and grief.

  Baker and Mercier were two riders on the Postal Service team—perhaps the only two top riders—who said no to doping. Though they had never seen their teammates use performance-enhancing drugs, they were suspicious that their roommates, Hamilton and Hincapie, had gained ground on the EPO-fueled Europeans. How could they do that?

  Hincapie, the tall, lanky sprinter whose strength was his speed and power on flat roads, had grown stronger in the mountains. Hamilton, a small guy with freckles, icy blue eyes and wavy auburn hair, had also been climbing better than ever.

  Neither had seemed like the type who would dope. Hincapie, nicknamed Big George, was quiet and an all-around nice guy who was as well liked in the peloton as he was with fans.

  Hamilton might have been plucked from a J. Crew advertisement featuring a boy and his golden retriever. He was a New Englander and former prep school ski racer whose family dressed him in button-down shirts and taught him to be kind and polite. At a glance, Hamilton came across less as a professional athlete and more as a teenager on a bike who tossed your morning newspaper onto the roof instead of the porch.

  Armstrong would join the team in 1998. In his year or so away from the sport, the doping culture had not changed. Just because the squad was sponsored by the Postal Service, an independent agency of the United States government, didn’t mean the team would follow the rules. Perhaps the opposite held, with the high-profile sponsor putting even more pressure on riders. In charge was Weisel, the financial wizard with a fierce competitive streak, so fierce that he has been said to hire some employees not for their financial acumen but for their ability to help his company win corporate track-and-field competitions.

  Baker said one night he and a top Russian rider debated whether there was any justification to dope. The Russian had a good argument. He had been shipped to a sports camp when he was around eleven or twelve, leaving his family and friends behind. He was fine with it, considering the alternative, which would have been a factory job. At camp, three shifts of kids rode ten bikes, and those kids dutifully took “vitamins.” It was a life chosen for them. Most American cyclists, for that matter, had nothing to fall back on if they failed. Only a handful attended college.

  Baker and Mercier were a couple of rare exceptions. Baker had been a finance major at the University of Maryland, Mercier an economics major at the University of California, Berkeley. So they didn’t look at doping as a life-or-death decision. They were in the sport because they loved it.

  “It’s a bike race,” Mercier says. “It’s a fun way to make a living, but it’s a bike race, c’mon!”

  Hincapie hated hearing that, and he hated Mercier because of it. Sure, Mercier had options, but riders like him and Armstrong did not—at least, they felt they didn’t. Armstrong feared that he’d have to work at Starbucks if cycling didn’t work out for him.

  While teammates cursed them under their breath, Mercier and Baker joked about the rampant drug use. Mercier would shake the locked refrigerator on the team truck to hear the glass vials rattling inside. “Hmm, I wonder what’s in there? Oh, the special lunch. These are my special B vitamins,” he’d say to Baker, laughing as EPO vials made their cheater’s music.

  To Baker and Mercier, it was obvious the sport had been taken over by doping. Mercier noticed riders in their twenties and thirties with acne, a common side effect of steroids, and some who seemed to have developed big brow bones, a possible side effect of human growth hormone.

  At the Tour DuPont in 1994, Mercier had walked into a bathroom and noticed two Spanish riders sharing a stall. He heard one say, “Poco más, poco más,” then saw a syringe fall at the riders’ feet. “I thought it was gross,” Mercier says. “It felt to me like heroin addicts. I felt like, wow, if I have to do that, this is not the sport for me.”

  At the same race, Mercier had pulled up at the start of one stage along Armstrong, who had such brawny arms that he had to cut his jersey sleeves. His legs rippled with muscles. Mercier said, “Man, Lance, you could be a linebacker, you’re so huge. You could play for the Cowboys.”

  Armstrong’s answer: “You think?”

  Three years later, Mercier was confronted with doping head-on. At the Postal Service team’s training camp in 1997, the Spanish team doctor Pedro Celaya withdrew blood from the riders so he could test their hematocrit levels. Mercier’s was 40.5.

  “To be professional in Europe, maybe 49, 49.5,” Celaya told him.

  “Gracias, Pedro, how do I do t
hat?”

  “Special B vitamins. We can talk later, OK?”

  Mercier walked away from it knowing EPO was in store.

  In the spring of that year, Mercier had a four-week break during which he was going to his wife’s home country, South Africa. He would travel there after competing in the Tour of Romandie, in Switzerland, take two weeks off and train for two weeks. Before the race ended, he met Celaya in a hotel room to discuss the upcoming training schedule.

  Celaya handed him a calendar with several little circles and stars marked on certain dates. Next came a Ziploc bag filled with pills and vials of liquid.

  “What’s this, Pedro?” Mercier asked.

  “These are steroids,” the doctor answered.

  “Are these going to make my balls shrink up?”

  “No, no,” Celaya said, laughing. “You go strong like bull. No racing, for sure you test positive. But it will make you go stronger than ever before.”

  Celaya told him to buy some syringes once he arrived in South Africa, and showed him how to extract liquid from the glass vial. Then he advised Mercier to put the drugs in his front pocket for his flight. If a customs officer stopped him, Celaya said, just say the drugs were vitamins.

  Mercier made it to South Africa without incident. Once his training was supposed to begin, he took out the bag of drugs and the calendar that told him what to take and when. On some days, he was supposed to take the green pills first thing in the morning, then later in the evening. Some days at lunch, too. The instructions told him to stop taking the pills on a Sunday before a race in the United States the following Saturday. That’s how fast the drugs would exit his system; he wouldn’t test positive. Getting away with doping would be easy, if he decided to take that step.