Cycle of Lies: The Fall of Lance Armstrong

by Macur, Juliet

  The Philadelphia Inquirer said that the Tour de France had found “its healer after last year’s drug scandal.” “The French press, in which objectivity is scant, has hinted cynically, through ambiguous headlines and quotes from unnamed doctors, that no mortal could rise so phoenix-like without artificial help.”

  The Detroit News wrote that Armstrong was “doing his best to ignore the silly whispers among the French press corps,” and that many journalists who’d never covered cycling were continuing to “search for another doping scandal such as the one that rocked the Tour last summer.”

  The Washington Post dubbed him “a cancer survivor and a man who almost single-handedly has revived a sport tarnished by widespread doping.” It also called the French media “prickly.”

  The New York Times wrote that Armstrong was “an outspoken opponent of the use of performance-enhancing drugs in the sport” who has given the Tour “a resoundingly positive image” and has “provided an inspirational, feel-good story.”

  Americans were inundated with pro-Armstrong propaganda. Phil Liggett, the Tour commentator for ABC television, pointed out that the French were having their worst showing at the Tour since 1926 and were just envious of Armstrong’s success. “No way he’s taking drugs,” he said. “They’re just knifing him over there.”

  Even Armstrong’s cancer doctors piped up. “This guy is so clean-living you wouldn’t believe it,” Dr. Lawrence Einhorn of Indiana University Cancer Center told the Associated Press.

  People who pay attention to sports—journalists included—want to believe in the miracles of athletic competition. Reporters wrote what they were told by the Postal Service team, by Armstrong and his agent, Stapleton. Gorski, the business manager, said that because of the Festina scandal, clean riders like Armstrong finally had the chance to make it to the top. “It’s like a miracle!” he said.

  They explained how Armstrong became a three-week stage-race rider after years of being a cyclist whose strength was one-day events. It was the cancer. It caused him to shed fifteen pounds from his 5-foot-9 frame—though some news outlets reported it to be ten pounds, and yet another, ten kilos (22.2 pounds). His weight loss became his defense: With fewer pounds on his body, it was so much easier for him to propel himself up steep mountains.

  The American press also gave credit to Armstrong’s “coach,” Chris Carmichael, who was in essence a prop to cover Armstrong’s involvement with Ferrari’s drug program. According to USA Today, Carmichael helped Armstrong by using “cutting-edge techniques to develop tremendous aerobic capacity and pedaling efficiencies.” The Washington Post said Carmichael’s techniques used “more revolutions at a lower gear speed instead of power riding at a higher gear.” Carmichael once boasted that Armstrong’s training results were “even better than if he had used EPO.”

  Betsy Andreu was at home in Dearborn, Michigan, with her two-month-old son, Frankie, watching Armstrong’s phenomenal stage to the mountaintop of Sestriere. She was aware that doping existed in the peloton, but thought her husband was clean, considering he had told her so that day in 1996 when the two of them had overheard Armstrong’s drug confession to his doctors in Indianapolis. But as the Sestriere stage unfolded on her television, the truth dawned on her.

  Not only was Armstrong chugging up the mountain like a train, her husband was out in front, too, pulling Armstrong up some of the toughest climbs in the Alps. She called her friend Becky Rast, the wife of cycling journalist and photographer James Startt.

  Becky Rast thought Betsy was calling to preen over her husband’s accomplishments. She said, “Oh my God, Betsy, Frankie’s doing it! He’s going so great!”

  “Great, my ass,” Andreu said. “What the hell is he doing pulling? He’s not a climber! He should be just trying to make the time cut.”

  Betsy Andreu knew that her tall, lanky husband was a born sprinter, made to go fast and use his power over short distances. She was seeing something that was not physically possible. She had left Europe at the end of March to settle in back home to have her first baby, and had seen Frankie only briefly for the birth. In their entire time together, she had seen him inject himself with something only once, and he said that had been a vitamin B12 shot. Now it seemed obvious he had been doing some type of drug in her absence.

  When she called him later that day, she skipped the pleasantries.

  “What the hell was that?” she said.

  By the 1999 Tour, Betsy had already begun to suspect that their good friend Lance was cheating in more ways than one. When Betsy talked to Armstrong one morning before she left Europe that spring, it only complicated her image of him. They had seen each other the night before at a party at Armstrong’s house in Nice, France. He called Betsy upon waking up and told her he had found a woman’s clothes and jewelry strewn next to his pool.

  “Who’d I end up with?” Armstrong asked.

  “You have to be kidding me. You have a pregnant wife at home [in the United States]! How could you?”

  In a lather, she called Kevin Livingston’s wife, Becky, who said she was the one who had left her clothes and jewelry at Armstrong’s pool after changing into her bathing suit. She said nothing had happened between them. Still, Andreu decided Armstrong had “no moral compass.”

  For years, she told only family and friends about Armstrong’s doping confession in the hospital room, but never went public with it because the cycling family protected its own. Frankie didn’t have a college degree and needed to work in cycling because he felt, like Hincapie and many others, that it was his only way to make a living. So Betsy kept her counsel, believing Armstrong’s confession “exposes cycling to a certain extent. It was a secret we all had to keep quiet about.”

  Armstrong was confident that she would keep his secret. On one training ride the year after the Andreus overheard his doping confession in the Indianapolis hospital, he asked Frankie about Betsy’s reaction to it.

  “Did she say anything about it?”

  “She freaked out a little bit, and, you know, we got into a couple of arguments. But then it kind of went away.”

  “Good, good, we don’t want anyone asking too many questions.”

  Armstrong rode on, unconcerned and comfortable with his buddy’s assurance that it kind of went away.

  On the final ride in the 1999 Tour de France, Armstrong and his Postal Service team led the peloton into Paris, a red, white and blue blur as they whooshed to the finish line in the fastest time ever recorded—better than 25 miles an hour. En route to completing the 2,404-mile odyssey, they posed for photos and drank champagne. After three weeks of eating right, Armstrong ravenously licked an ice cream cone.

  The streets were lined with nearly 500,000 fans, including a bigger-than-ever contingent from the United States. Armstrong rode imperiously beneath American and Texas flags as he became only the second American—Greg LeMond was the first—to win cycling’s crown jewel.

  Standing atop the podium, with the Arc de Triomphe as a backdrop, Armstrong listened to the “Star-Spangled Banner” play as he held his right hand over his heart. His pregnant wife stood to the side, and he stepped over to her for a moment to wipe tears from her eyes. He said, “I’m in shock, I’m in shock, I’m in shock.”

  He said he hoped his victory inspired those fighting cancer: “We can return to what we were before—and even better.” Then he gave credit to those who helped him achieve a previously unthinkable goal.

  “Fifty percent of this is for the cancer community—the doctors, the nurses, patients, their families, the survivors and those unfortunate ones who haven’t made it,” he said. “Twenty-five percent was for myself, my team. And the other twenty-five percent was for the people who did not believe in me.”

  George W. Bush, then Texas governor, called Armstrong’s cell phone and said, “We’re so proud of you. It’s unbelievable.”

  Kirk Watson, the mayor of Austin and a testicular cancer survivor, was in the process of arranging a parade and a festival back hom
e in Armstrong’s honor.

  Armstrong’s oncologists boasted. Dr. Einhorn, one of his doctors in Indianapolis, said, “If Hollywood makes a movie of this, most people will leave the theater shaking their head with incredulity. Even the name, ‘Lance Armstrong,’ it just sounds too good to be true.”

  Armstrong’s march to victory immediately ignited the sport’s popularity in the United States—TV ratings for the Tour’s final day had jumped by 80 percent over the prior year. Viewers got their first glimpse of Armstrong as a Nike spokesman as he starred in one of the company’s “Just Do It” commercials. The company cast him as the first dead man to ride the Tour: “According to the latest cancer survival rates, Lance Armstrong is neither alive nor is he racing in the Tour de France.”

  One Chicago sports columnist, Bernie Lincicome, said fans should not feel guilty about cheering for Armstrong in the wake of the drug insinuations, which he called “petty slander” created by jealous journalists. Followers should believe that Armstrong is an inspiration and an honest athlete, he said in his column.

  “I mean, a guy beats cancer and the Alps,” he said. “Did they give Hannibal a drug test?” He continued, “We have every right to feel good about it, about him and his place at the top of the American summer.”

  An army of people rallied to Armstrong’s side because of his victory. Fans who had considered bike racing an exotic, niche sport and who never even knew there was a big race in France every summer—much less nearly every summer for the past ninety-six years—bought bikes and looked to Armstrong for motivation. Trek promised its dealers a signature Armstrong bike by Christmas. One shop owner in suburban Dallas said she couldn’t keep Postal Service jerseys on the shelves because they were selling so fast, at $70 each.

  Armstrong would soon be on the cover of not one, but two Wheaties boxes, and General Mills said those boxes outsold others by about 10 percent, meaning millions of dollars in extra sales. The Postal Service said it won “millions and millions” of dollars of business from its rivals because of its relationship with Armstrong.

  Some marketing experts, like David Carter and Rick Burton, told USA Today that Armstrong could be as big an American sports star as Michael Jordan and Tiger Woods.

  Carter called Armstrong an “all-American, Norman Rockwell-like embodiment of what people want their heroes to be.” Burton said, “He’s the kind of guy you want your son to become—or your daughter to marry.”

  Armstrong, in turn, was about to become very rich as the new American sports hero. His agent, Bill Stapleton, had already negotiated a book deal with $400,000 in guaranteed money for Armstrong, and two movie deals were in the works. Stapleton said Armstrong had signed close to $1 million worth of new sponsorship deals before the Tour was even over. “And we haven’t even started hearing from the soft drink and fast-food companies,” he said.

  Bristol-Myers Squibb, the company that manufactured Armstrong’s chemotherapy drugs, had signed him to a $250,000 endorsement contract. The Postal Service boosted his salary to $2 million. His public speaking fee increased from $30,000 to $70,000, plus first-class expenses for two.

  He would go on to write a best-selling autobiography, It’s Not About the Bike, in which he told his story of surviving cancer and winning the Tour against all odds. Of performance-enhancing drug use, he said in the book, “Doping is an unfortunate fact of life in cycling, or any other endurance sport for that matter. Inevitably, some teams and riders feel it’s like nuclear weapons—that they have to do it to stay competitive within the peloton. I never felt that way, and certainly after chemo the idea of putting anything foreign in my body was especially repulsive.”

  The book launched him into another stratosphere altogether when it came to marketing. For the year 2000, he would make $5 million in endorsements, plus a $2 million salary, which put him on the level of top NFL football players—those athletes once revered by his classmates back in Texas.

  In the days after the 1999 Tour, Armstrong flew on Nike’s jet to New York City, where he hit all the morning and talk shows, including The Late Show with David Letterman, during which Letterman called the European press “idiots” and said their doping accusations were “just crap.” Armstrong’s next stops included the White House, where he presented President Bill Clinton with a bike.

  Armstrong and Stapleton were right: Armstrong’s cancer was the best thing to ever happen to him, marketing-wise. He was turning down offers of endorsement deals that were for less than $1 million. Armstrong said he was now “a business entity, instead of a person.”

  But on that final day of the Tour, Armstrong had a moment to savor his triumph, and all that it would mean to him. After stepping off the podium, he grabbed a giant American flag and rested its pole against his shoulder as he and his teammates climbed onto their bikes. A team Armstrong had dubbed “The Bad News Bears” rode up the Champs-Élysées for the honorary lap around the Arc de Triomphe. Seven of the nine riders were American, and the team had done what it needed to do to succeed in an unscrupulous sport.

  During the ride, a French journalist pulled beside Armstrong on a motorcycle and asked him what he thought of his achievement.

  “If you ever get a second chance in life,” Armstrong said, “go all the way!”

  CHAPTER 11

  In preparation for the 2000 tour, Armstrong, Hamilton and Livingston flew by private jet from Nice to Valencia, Spain. Three weeks later, Armstrong would try to win his second straight Tour. But one important task had to be completed first.

  There in Valencia, in a deserted luxury beach hotel, Bruyneel and Martí watched as del Moral slid wide-gauge needles into the veins of the Postal Service stars. In just fifteen or twenty minutes, 500 ccs of blood from each rider had flowed through tiny tubes into plastic IV bags atop a white towel on the floor. The blood bags were then stored in a blue cooler.

  The next month, two days before the Tour’s hellish Mont Ventoux climb, those blood bags reemerged just when the riders needed them most. As the riders lay on beds in a spacious suite at the Postal Service team’s hotel, the blood bags were affixed to the wall above them with athletic tape. Out came the wide-gauge needles and IV tubing. The riders shivered as the chilled blood dripped into their veins.

  Riders had heard that the Tour might be using a newly developed test for EPO, so the Postal Service team fell back on the old-school technique of blood transfusions. No test could determine whether riders had transfused their own blood. The UCI still measured each rider’s hematocrit level to ensure it was below 50 percent, but now the riders were raising their hematocrit with transfusions instead of with a drug.

  The process was “Frankenstein-ish,” Hamilton said later, “something for Iron Curtain Olympic androids in the ’80s.” He also thought it smacked of “a junior-high science experiment.”

  By the time the riders put the blood from those bags back into themselves at the 2000 Tour, Armstrong was already wearing the leader’s yellow jersey. He had made his move on Stage 10, going from 16th place to first, gaining an improbable ten minutes on his competition. Hamilton, Livingston and Russian teammate Viatcheslav Ekimov had ushered Armstrong to the final climb of the stage. With about eight miles to go, Armstrong took off on his own, ascending with such speed that rivals called his efforts “otherworldly,” as if his bike had a hidden motor.

  Armstrong extended his overall lead with a swift climb up Mont Ventoux. He bolted up the mountain to finish inches behind the stage winner, Marco Pantani, a skinny, compact Italian, one of the era’s best climbers. In the media room, reporters gasped.

  Aside from some French fans yelling, “Doper! Doper!” as he pedaled past them, Armstrong won the 2000 Tour without being thwarted by controversy.

  Only later that year did he learn he was in trouble again.

  Hugues Huet, a journalist from the state-sponsored television station France 3, had followed an unmarked Postal Service team car for more than a hundred miles. At one stop, two team staff members had tossed trash
bags into a Dumpster. Huet filmed them doing it, then later looked inside the bags and found used syringes, bloody gauze and empty boxes of medical products, including Actovegin. The drug wasn’t a banned doping product, but antidoping experts said the calf’s blood derivative could improve the performance-enhancing effects of blood transfusions or EPO.

  The footage of the team staffers throwing out that trash would make it into a France 3 documentary. But even before that film appeared, the Paris prosecutor’s office opened an inquiry into whether Armstrong’s Postal Service team had broken antidoping laws in France.

  Armstrong and his team acted surprised by the investigation. Dan Osipow, a Postal Service spokesman, said the squad had a zero-tolerance policy regarding doping. Armstrong was so upset that he threatened to boycott the 2001 Tour and not defend his back-to-back titles.

  “The substances on people’s minds—Activ-o-something is new to me,” Armstrong said. “Before this ordeal, I had never heard of it, nor had my teammates.”

  He said he was innocent, his team was clean, no one on his team had tested positive. Later, he said the doping charge could have been devastating for his reputation and his family if it had stuck.

  “Everything I had worked so hard for, my career, my reputation, what I’d done as an athlete, everybody I had could go away, all the things you lose when people don’t think you’re a good guy,” he wrote in one of his books.

  Eventually, Armstrong allowed that the team had kept Actovegin so the team doctor could treat road rash. Then he claimed the drug was for a staff member who was diabetic. Gorski insisted that none of the team’s nine riders had taken it.

  Vaughters was at home in Denver during the off-season when he heard about the French criminal investigation. Out of curiosity, he researched the drug on the Internet and surmised that it was the same one del Moral had injected him with at the 1999 Tour. Extract of calf’s blood? He felt like vomiting.