by David Walsh
"I hadn't, in my own mind, committed to lying at that point," he explains, "but I wasn't strong enough to say yes. I was too exhausted to even consider it, and I knew, if I did, that there would be a million other questions. But I couldn't bring myself to say no either, so I just said the first thing that came into my head."
"I'll say no," he replied.
Five minutes after the press conference, he says, he received a call from Armstrong, who allegedly advised: "Just say 'no' and stop talking, or 'absolutely not'." Armstrong insists he did not say this to Landis.
Once Landis started denying, it became harder to turn back. He returned to California, hired a hugely expensive legal team and announced his intention to fight the charge.
Three weeks after they had embraced on the Champs Elysées, David Witt, his best friend and father-in-law, who had always suffered from depression, committed suicide. A year later, in deep financial trouble and with his marriage crumbling, he received a call from his lawyer announcing they had lost the case. He put down the phone, walked upstairs and ripped the Tour de France trophy from a cabinet.
"I had walked by that thing a hundred times, and every single time I wanted to smash it… and so I just grabbed it. I felt better for about five minutes and didn't ever regret it… It represented a turning point in my life where I had to lie, and I didn't want to lie, not like that. That wasn't me."
He did not close his eyes that night, but as his life continued to unravel, the problem was not his sleep but his dreams. He dreamt about his epic performance on the 17th stage of the Tour, to Morzine; the crowds cheering him on, the legend Eddy Merckx shaking his hand; commentators singing his praise — "Is this the greatest ride ever in the history of the Tour de France?" He dreamt about David, the best friend he had ever had, sitting alone in his car with a pistol to his head. His excitement two weeks earlier on the Champs Elysées: "You always said you'd do it, Floyd." Winning the Tour had been David's dream too. What did it matter? He dreamt about Amber pleading with him — "No, Floyd!" — and trying to cool his rage as he raced towards the trophy cabinet. How good it had felt to smash it; how bad it had felt listening to her tears as she gathered the fragments in a box. She was right; it was all they had left.
He dreamt about his mother and her panic on the phone when her house came under siege after the bomb dropped. "Floyd, you're my son," she said, "and I love you no matter what, so it doesn't make any difference to me. Just tell me. If you did something, why don't you just confess it and get it out of the way. Great, great men have made mistakes, so if you did it, just say you're sorry and go on with your life."
He hadn't listened. He dreamt about the doping arbitration hearing, and that first morning in court when he was called to take the stand. His father watching from the gallery as he raised his right hand: "I swear by almighty God to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth."
He lied.
After separating from Amber, he moved to their cabin in the mountains and started riding and competing again when his suspension expired in February 2009. "I had this idea that I would feel better once I started to race again, but I didn't. Some days I was okay and I would race okay, and other days I just didn't like who I was. I felt like I was completely disconnected from the world, like I was looking at things from the outside, just watching them happen. I couldn't think forward, that was too much, or think backward, but I knew that nothing that happened in front of me could hurt me."
He started to self-medicate with alcohol.
"I had a few drinks every day for quite some time, and it got to the point where I realised I had to stop. I went to some therapy and realised I was just trying to avoid thinking again, except that this time I was using alcohol rather than riding my bike. The process of talking to somebody helped. I realised, 'I am not going to be all right if I've got to keep living like this. I'm not going to be all right if I just keep avoiding it. I can't go back and make it different. I can't change the facts.' " Darkness is falling on the mountain. The only winner in the history of the Tour de France to be disqualified for doping rises from his chair and flicks on a lamp. For nine months, since his emails were leaked to the press, he has lived and moved like a fugitive. He still races his bike but the fire merely flickers now. People are generally kind but he feels awkward in their gaze.
The walls are bereft of portraits or mementos of his glories. He is 35 years old, broke, unemployed and owes $80,000 to lawyers. Newspapers refer to him as "the proven liar and drugs cheat", and there is a chance he may be jailed for perjury. He feels guilty about that and the pain he has inflicted on family and friends.
"You know," he says, "my parents were right about a lot of things. At some level, whatever life you live, you have to accept things before you can be happy — whether that's having very little, like they prefer, or having everything. Until you are content with what you've got, you are always chasing something, or running from something, neither of which is good."
Where are you? "I'm stuck in the middle between chasing something and running for something and at the same time trying to be content."
What about the outcome of the federal investigation? What's a happy ending? He laughs. "Well, one thing about life is that there is no happy ending, the ending is never good. But in terms of the investigation and other people getting hurt, that's not going to make me feel better. There needs to be something better for the next guy that comes along, so he doesn't have to face the decisions I had to face. But in terms of me being okay with me? That's up to me, that's not up to someone else."
A cycle of deceit
David Walsh
May 22, 2011
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Betsy Andreu called her husband and said she didn't believe he was clean any more. He was too wasted to argue
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It now seems so far from the days of summer; those dog-day afternoons of the mid-90s in Como when three young Americans, Lance Armstrong, Frankie Andreu and George Hincapie, could leave their apartment and make the short journey to the Café Hardy on Via Masai. A quick double espresso before training made you ride faster but, alas, caffeine wouldn't be enough. Not by some way.
They were in their twenties then, eager to make something of their cycling careers but determined to enjoy the ride. George made them smile. Every time they went to eat, he would ask for the pizza margherita, reducing Italian cuisine to one dish. They called George Margherita in deference to his dietary taste and though amused by his predictability, they warmed to the lack of pretension.
But boys of summer grow older. Frankie married Betsy, Lance got cancer and George went on ordering pizza margherita.
When Lance recovered, everyone was older, life was tougher and professional cycling had gone through the trauma of the Festina scandal and that 1998 Tour de France when French customs and police exposed the sport's drug-riddled underbelly.
Wherever the authorities looked, they found dope and teams with systematic doping programmes. The tribunal of inquiry lasted two years, it should have been a catharsis but it changed nothing and the team for which Lance, Frankie and George now rode, US Postal Service, fully understood that. Without EPO, many thought there was no point in turning up. US Postal turned up at the 1999 Tour expecting to win.
It was Armstrong's first victory and the upbeat story the sport craved. Not just a guy winning a three-week bike race but a triumph for the human spirit.
Throughout that Tour, a young French rider, Christophe Bassons, spoke bravely about his belief that nothing in cycling had changed, that there was still as much doping in the 1999 race as in the previous year.
"We are racing at an average speed of more than 50km per hour, as if the roads of France are nothing more than one gigantic descent," Bassons said. He also claimed there was no way that a clean rider could hope to finish in the top six of that Tour de France.
Armstrong despised Bassons and on the road, they argued. "You know, what you're saying to journalists, it's not good for cycling," Armst
rong said.
"I am simply saying what I think. I have said there is still doping," Bassons replied.
"If that's what you're here for, it would be better if you returned home and found some other kind of work."
"I have things to say and I will say them."
"Ah, f*** you."
Betsy Andreu watched the first two weeks of that Tour from her home in Dearborn, Michigan. Even at that remove, she had doubts about what she was watching.
"It was the first mountain stage, the one to Sestriere, and as they began the climb Frankie was at the front of a line of Postal riders. Frankie is about as much a climber as the Pope is an atheist. 'What the hell is this about,' I said." She called her husband and said she didn't believe he was clean any more. He was too wasted to argue.
Armstrong would win, nearly all the journalists were swooned by a feelgood story and after the travails of the year before, cycling's authorities embraced the new champion like a long lost son. Anybody who dared to ask a serious question was shouted down and with hundreds of sycophantic journalists in his entourage, Armstrong needed no PR staff.
When journalists at The Sunday Times asked serious questions, Armstrong engaged lawyers to sue us. In France, judges gave him short shrift. He never dared to sue in his own country.
As the Tour victories rolled on, one after another, a strange thing happened: the boys of summer found the sport wasn't as much fun. Lance kept winning but the questions became more persistent and more difficult to silence. George tried to keep rolling along, Sancho Panza to Lance's Don Quixote. As for Frankie, life definitely got tougher.
Betsy despised the dishonesty that underpinned the success. Frankie could choose EPO or her but he couldn't have both. And it bothered her that Armstrong was feted as a hero when she had a different view. She couldn't forget that when she and Frankie visited the cancer-stricken Lance at Indiana University Hospital in October 1996, they insist, they both heard him tell doctors about the performance-enhancing drugs he had used in his team.
Stephen Swart, a retired bike racer from New Zealand, broke his silence on the doping question in an interview with this newspaper and spoke of the two years he had ridden with Armstrong on the Motorola team of the mid-90s. They were a good team who couldn't get good results and felt they had to consider doping. Armstrong, claimed Swart, was the most persuasive voice in favour.
Emma O'Reilly spent two years as Armstrong's masseuse on the Postal team and claims she saw enough to convince her that he doped. Moved by the drug-related death of Italian cyclist Marco Pantani in February 2004, O'Reilly felt compelled to go public with her concerns about Armstrong's success. For telling her story, she was vilified by Armstrong. As was Swart, the Andreus, and anyone else who dared to question him.
But ultimately, the facade of friendship among the cyclists was too great to maintain. Frank Andreu publicly admitted doping to help Armstrong win the 1999 Tour and a year ago Floyd Landis told the sordid details of the doping culture that existed during the years he was Armstrong's strongest teammate. Landis claimed that both he and Armstrong doped.
And, then, in the past two days, the dam has appeared to break. Tyler Hamilton ended 10 years of lying about his doping and in an interview with CBS, he confessed to having doped throughout his career. For the 1999 and 2000 Tour de France, he rode with Armstrong in the US Postal team and used EPO to perform better.
Hamilton was asked if his team leader had used EPO. "I saw him inject it more than one time," he said.
But still Armstrong denies all the allegations against him and has criticised his detractors.
"Tyler Hamilton," it said on a new Armstrong website, "is a confessed liar in search of a book deal." That might have deflected attention away from the accusation, back onto the accuser, but a day later, George Hincapie came to the table.
George, reliable, so regular, and guaranteed to have Lance's back covered. Good old Margherita.
Except that on this occasion George didn't order the usual. He claimed that he and Lance used to supply each other with EPO. And George Hincapie can't be shouted down like all the others.
It’s not about the bike, it’s about the drugs
David Walsh
May 22, 2011
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Lance has ripped apart, attacked and shredded anybody that's said anything against him. I don't know that that would work against George Hincapie
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If there was one thing Lance Armstrong had, greater even than his gift for winning the Tour de France, it was a talent for discrediting those who said he cheated with performance-enhancing drugs.
He described them as losers jealous of his success, low-lifes trying to sell books, former team-mates with axes to grind. None was credible.
On Friday, George Hincapie, whom Armstrong described last year as "like a brother to me", came out of the woodwork and the champion's reputation splintered.
Hincapie, a 37-year-old professional cyclist who is expected to start his 16th Tour de France this summer, is the former team-mate by whom Armstrong could not afford to be accused. Through Armstrong's seven consecutive Tour victories, Hincapie was at his side, his most trusted lieutenant; the guy that always covered his back.
The US television network CBS reported that in sworn evidence given in a federal investigation into Armstrong, Hincapie had testified that he and Armstrong supplied each other with EPO (the banned blood-boosting drug erythropoietin) and discussed using testosterone. Normally sharp in his dismissal of accusers, Armstrong did not immediately respond to the Hincapie revelations.
Since winning his first Tour de France in 1999, Armstrong has become an icon. Three years before that first Tour victory he had been struck with life-threatening testicular cancer but recovered to become his sport's greatest champion.
Like many successful athletes, Armstrong established a foundation, and his championed the cause of cancer victims. His charity Livestrong became a big presence in the battle against the disease and Armstrong became one of the world's best-known sportsmen.
He went for bike rides with President George W Bush; the Hollywood actor Robin Williams was a regular training partner; he dated the singer Sheryl Crow; and he described the Irish rock star Bono as "a dear friend". Yet Armstrong couldn't shake off suspicion.
Ten years ago Greg LeMond, the other American cyclist to have won the Tour de France, encapsulated the dilemma in one short sentence to The Sunday Times: "If the [Armstrong] story is true, it is the greatest comeback in the history of sport. If it is not, it is the greatest fraud."
Armstrong dismissed LeMond as a jealous has-been.
And when The Sunday Times raised legitimate questions about Armstrong's record in an article about cycling and doping, Armstrong sued. The paper, unable to persuade sufficient colleagues to talk, reached a settlement in 2006 which will be reviewed by our lawyers once the federal investigation concludes.
But the story did not go away. Armstrong's former masseuse, Emma O'Reilly, said she had seen enough to convince her he doped; former teammate Stephen Swart said Armstrong was the team's most persuasive advocate of doping when they were together at Motorola in 1993 and 1994; another former teammate, Frankie Andreu, and his wife Betsy said they both heard Armstrong admit using performance-enhancing drugs to his doctors during his cancer treatment in 1996; and more recently former team-mates Floyd Landis and Tyler Hamilton said they saw Armstrong dope.
Always, Armstrong had a counter: O'Reilly had a grudge, Swart came from an unstable background, Andreu and his wife did not like him, Landis and Hamilton had both lied before. His lawyers threatened newspapers and broadcasters, legal warnings were circulated and in some case writs would follow. And for years it seemed Armstrong would survive.
That was until Hincapie, the man likened to a brother, claimed the two had shared EPO and discussed their use of testosterone.
"You can't find a nicer guy than George," said Andreu, "a more trustworthy guy, a more respected person in the cycling world. Lanc
e has ripped apart, attacked and shredded anybody that's said anything against him. I don't know that that would work against George."
The US federal investigation that threatens to destroy Armstrong — led by special agent Jeff Novitzky of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) — began three years ago in Calabasas, a small, affluent town in California, home to Kayle Leogrande, a lowly ranked American pro-rider for Rock Racing.
In late 2008, Leogrande was given a two-year ban by the US Anti-Doping Agency. Soon after he left his rented apartment in Calabasas, his landlord found medical products in the fridge. Having read about Leogrande's doping ban, the landlord guessed the abandoned products were drugs and called the agency.
The agency, which had no legal means to seize the drugs, invited the FDA to look into the case. It was a momentous decision because it brought Novitzky, who had been conducting investigations into steroid abuse in other professional sports, into the dark world of professional cycling.
Novitzky, a 6ft 7in gritty son of a high-school basketball coach and a man who once cleared 7ft in the high jump, soon realised Leogrande and Rock Racing's founder, Michael Ball, were small players in a big racket.
And then in May last year Landis, winner of the 2006 Tour de France before being disqualified for a failed drug test, circulated an email detailing his own doping and the epidemic within the sport.
Landis also pointed at Armstrong, with whom he had ridden from 2002 to 2004.
From the outset, Novitzky's team was warned not to expect co-operation. For decades, professional cyclists practised a code of silence. Their culture of doping had survived countless investigations in Italy, France, Germany, Belgium and other countries. What made the feds think they could do better? Their reply was that they had a truth serum, in the shape of the gun and badge that were visible during interviews and in the constant reminder to witnesses that one lie would land them in prison.