Cycle of Lies: The Fall of Lance Armstrong

by Macur, Juliet

  His first wife, Alisa, came home to find her husband balled up on the floor in the foyer, clutching his knees and crying.

  “I didn’t know what it was,” he said. “They wouldn’t tell me.” He spat out the words as he sobbed. “And now, what if I have mad cow disease? What have I done? What have I done?”

  Alisa Vaughters had heard her husband cry only once before, and that was after he had cheated with EPO to set the course record on Mont Ventoux in the Dauphiné. But mad cow disease? People had died of it in France. She worried about her husband, the father of their infant boy, Charlie.

  Unlike Betsy Andreu, who was duped by her husband during that 1999 Tour when he had used EPO to help Armstrong win, Alisa Vaughters knew her husband had been doping. She was shocked by the suggestion that any of the wives or girlfriends didn’t—they had to know if their men were using EPO. Her husband kept EPO in the refrigerator, same as Armstrong. “You’d have to be pretty dumb not to know,” Alisa said.

  When Alisa had met Jonathan, he had been open about his drug use and seemed educated about the possible side effects. Later, he told her that some wives helped their husbands dope, but—to her relief—he said he didn’t want her to do that.

  She wasn’t like Kristin Armstrong, who casually referred to EPO as “butter” and handed out cortisone to riders at the 1998 worlds like bottles of Gatorade. And she wasn’t like Haven Hamilton, who many on the Postal team noticed seemed ultra-involved with her husband’s career and just as invested as he was in his success. As Tyler Hamilton trained for hours every day on the roads of Spain, his wife often drove a pace car. (Tyler would later admit that Haven was “a team player,” at times ensuring that his blood stayed cool in their refrigerator, where they stored it in a soy milk container.) No, Alisa Vaughters was a flight attendant, rarely available for such training support and not interested in it anyway.

  The first time she spoke about doping with another wife was in 2002, at a bachelorette party for Christian Vande Velde’s soon-to-be-wife, Leah, who fought constantly with Christian about the presence of needles in their house. (Vande Velde had become a client of Ferrari’s in late 2000.) He hid the injections from her by taking them in the bathroom with the door closed, but she’d find stray evidence anyway and blow up. She worried about drug use affecting his ability to have children. Finally, at her bachelorette party in Boulder, Colorado, Leah turned to Alisa with tears in her eyes.

  Above the heavy beat of the dance-floor music, and after several drinks had lowered inhibitions, Leah shouted, “It’s just so hard! All the needles! It’s just so hard!”

  Alisa yelled back, “I know!” They hugged. Both cried. They felt relieved that they could finally commiserate with another wife about the doping. Both felt helplessly entangled in the sport’s lies.

  Like Mafia wives who enjoy the spoils of the business but never discuss their husbands’ dirty work, the two women had never before even broached the subject of doping. Like other riders’ wives, they would gather for lunches in Girona or meet for coffee. They would spend hours together, weeks together, turning to each other for support in a foreign country when their husbands were on five-hour training rides or at weeklong races. While their husbands spoke freely among themselves about their doping regimens, wives like Leah and Alisa remained awkwardly silent.

  Once the bachelorette party was over, the two friends went back to their old ways. They never mentioned the subject of doping again.

  It seemed implausible to Betsy Andreu that Armstrong could use drugs after nearly dying of cancer. She couldn’t understand how Armstrong’s wife, Kristin, and other wives accepted their husbands’ doping regimes. She would confide in Angela Julich, the wife of Bobby Julich, an American rider who had competed with Armstrong on the junior national team and had finished third in the 1998 Tour. When she told Angela about Armstrong’s confession in the hospital room, Julich replied, “I’m not surprised.”

  The two hated the doping, but could prove nothing. They did know, however, that Armstrong, Hamilton, Livingston and Axel Merckx were clients of Ferrari, then under investigation in Italy. Betsy Andreu considered that connection to be evidence enough for what was going on with the Postal Service team.

  “If your husband comes out of a hotel room wearing only his underwear and there’s another woman inside the room in bed, do you need more proof to know that he’s cheating on you?” she said. “I’m not stupid, you know.”

  She asked Haven Hamilton about doping and heard Tyler’s wife say, “I don’t want to hear about it.” Andreu dreaded bringing it up with Livingston’s wife, Becky, because Becky seemed too naive. The way she talked about Ferrari made it seem as if she really thought her husband would drive all the way to the doctor’s office in Bologna, Italy, to get stretched out or massaged. When Andreu told her that she once overheard Armstrong admit his drug use, Becky Livingston grew sheepish. “Wow,” she said in almost a whisper. “Wow.”

  But Andreu was most annoyed by Kristin Armstrong, partly for her Gucci-wearing, Louis Vuitton–toting, condescending snobbery, but mostly because she so casually accepted the doping. “It was kind of like a necessary evil,” Kristin Armstrong told her when Andreu asked her about EPO.

  Just the thought of EPO made Andreu upset. In early 1999, she recalled, she was at dinner in Nice with the Armstrongs and Livingstons when Pepe Martí, the trainer/drug courier, arrived late. He had driven from Spain, crossing the border at night, to deliver EPO to Armstrong. As Armstrong took the drug from Martí, he said, “Liquid gold!”

  Weeks later, Betsy and Frankie Andreu drove to the Milan-San Remo race with the Armstrongs. They made an unusual pit stop in a parking lot of an Agip gas station just off the highway, on the outskirts of Milan, so Armstrong could meet Ferrari in a camper van parked in the lot.

  Betsy asked Armstrong, “Why are we stopping here? Isn’t it weird that you’re seeing a doctor in a parking lot?”

  “It’s so the fucking press doesn’t hound him,” Lance said, referring to reporters who wanted to ask Ferrari about his involvement in doping riders.

  Waiting for Armstrong that day, Betsy Andreu said, felt like she had fallen into a spy movie. An hour or so later, Armstrong bounded out of the doctor’s camper, saying, “My numbers are great!” Back on the highway, Armstrong told Frankie Andreu he would get better results himself if he weren’t too cheap to use Ferrari.

  Frankie had told Betsy, “Sure I don’t want to spend the money, but I don’t want that shit in my body.” He told her about Ferrari’s fee, 10 to 20 percent of a rider’s salary, way too much for him. Armstrong had also been pressuring him to “get serious” about his training, which he took to mean he should use EPO regularly.

  With all that in mind, Betsy Andreu had shown up at the very end of the 1999 Tour de France on a mission to find out what drugs her husband had taken to climb so fast during the mountain stages. Their first time alone was the night of the Postal team’s lavish post-Tour celebration party, held on the banks of Paris’s Seine River, inside the Musée d’Orsay. She wanted to talk about the doping. He didn’t. He begged her to shake Armstrong’s hand and congratulate him on the victory. She wouldn’t.

  “I want to know what in the hell you did,” she said. “Why did you climb the way you did? There’s no way that Lance won this thing clean.”

  “Please go shake his hand, Betsy, please.”

  “No.”

  “Please, for me?”

  “No. Get it through your head—I’m not doing it.”

  It took a trip back to their home in Nice to finally get Frankie talking about his drug use. Betsy found a thermos and a thermometer in their refrigerator, telltale signs her husband had been using EPO.

  “You don’t understand—I can’t even keep up if I don’t use EPO,” he said. “The speeds are so fast that I wouldn’t even make the time cut.”

  “You can’t tell me that everybody is doing something, Frankie. You know that’s not true. But I don’t care what other people are
doing. If you need to use EPO to stay on Postal, then I want you off of Lance’s team. Get off the team, Frankie; we don’t need to deal with this shit.”

  Frankie Andreu remained on the team for the 2000 season, but told me he didn’t participate in the team’s new blood doping scheme. He said he rode the Tour clean. His contract was not renewed. He would never again compete in the sport.

  For Postal Service’s top riders—Armstrong, Hamilton and Livingston—duplicity and secrecy were part of the game they played with the public. What began as an innocent love of riding bicycles became a life of code words, clandestine meetings and furtive conversations. They received their drug cocktails in white paper bags, like packed lunches, and each had a secret, presumably untraceable cell phone, which they used to discuss their doping and plans to avoid drug testers. To avoid being heard talking about doping, they often referred to EPO as “Edgar Allan Poe,” or just “Poe.” They flew to races on Armstrong’s private plane, to avoid nosy airport security agents.

  Once, on a training ride in Girona, Vaughters heard Armstrong say into his cell phone, “I had an ice cream with sprinkles.”

  “Who was that?” Vaughters asked.

  “None of your business,” came the reply.

  To Vaughters, exchanges like that made it evident that Armstrong enjoyed “the cloak and dagger” part of doping. It was just another way of competing.

  Blood transfusions put the Postal team far ahead of the other cheaters in the peloton. Those teams didn’t have Postal Service’s money. Armstrong’s team also had Motoman—Armstrong’s motorcycle-riding personal assistant—transporting their chilled blood into France and to the riders’ hotels when they needed their transfusions. They had Bruyneel in charge of the whole plan, the team chef facilitating the logistics, del Moral watching over the medical process and Ferrari in charge of the top riders.

  “The systemization of it gave them the edge,” according to Vaughters. “While other teams maybe had one or two guys doping like that, nobody but Postal had every top guy on a sophisticated plan.”

  The riders paying for Ferrari’s private services often used testosterone patches. He told them the drug would be detectable for only a very short time after the patch was removed from the skin. Ferrari also had advised them that using EPO was OK, even in 2001, when the UCI first started testing for it. They could inject a smaller amount of the drug into their veins instead of subcutaneously, so it would clear their systems faster. They could use that small amount more often, too, a process called microdosing. Even when they used blood transfusions to cheat, they still needed to use EPO to mask the effects of the transfusions.

  Blood transfusions would flood the body with red blood cells, blocking its need to produce immature cells called reticulocytes. EPO then would stimulate the production of those reticulocytes, a value that drug testers examined closely for signs of doping. So by using transfusions coupled with EPO, riders could fool drug testers with blood test results that looked normal.

  Not that it was very difficult to beat the drug testers, anyway. At that time there was little if any out-of-competition testing for professional cyclists, so they didn’t have to worry much about surprise drug tests.

  The United States Anti-Doping Agency, a quasi-governmental agency formed to handle antidoping in Olympic sports in the United States, was in its infancy, created as an independent agency only in October 2000. Until then, USA Cycling and the UCI were in charge of the drug testing, but those entities couldn’t be trusted. They had an interest in making it look like their sport was clean.

  In 2001, Armstrong was tested by USADA twice. Hincapie was tested three times, Hamilton once, Livingston not at all. For the next two years, USADA tested Armstrong once a year, though he was tested by other entities during the Tour.

  The UCI didn’t perform many out-of-competition drug tests until the mid-2000s. That lag in testing made it easier for riders to dope in previous years because most drug use was done in preparation for a race. Doping before the competition would allow them to train harder and recover faster.

  Back then, it wasn’t hard to avoid testing positive even when riders were tested in competition. They weren’t properly chaperoned before the drug test and were given way too much time to possibly manipulate their urine so it wouldn’t produce a positive sample (by drinking tons of water, or even using a hidden catheter filled with clean urine at the moment of collection).

  When drug testers showed up at the team hotel during a race, or at someone’s house, Armstrong and his teammates seemed to know they were coming. In 2000, at a race in Spain, Hincapie—the loyal sidekick—saved Armstrong from testing positive by warning him that the drug testers were in the hotel’s lobby. Armstrong had just taken testosterone oil, and so he dropped out of the race to avoid testing. Other times, it was as if Bruyneel knew the testers’ schedules, as if someone had tipped him off.

  At the Hamilton household, when testers came knocking, Haven Hamilton knew enough to ask her husband, “You’re good?” If he had taken drugs recently—if he was still “glowing,” as he called it—they huddled on the floor until the testers left.

  During races, the winner is usually tested along with three random riders. Postal Service never had anyone test positive—at least officially. According to Hamilton, Armstrong tested positive at the 2001 Tour de Suisse.

  “You won’t fucking believe this,” Armstrong had told him. “I got popped for EPO.”

  Armstrong told Hamilton he wasn’t worried about it because “his people had been in touch with the UCI, they were going to have a meeting and everything was going to be OK.” He also told Floyd Landis, a rider who would join the team in late 2001, that “he and Mr. Bruyneel flew to the UCI headquarters and made a financial agreement to keep the positive test hidden.” Verbruggen, the UCI president at the time, later said that neither he nor the UCI was ever complicit in a cover-up.

  Armstrong bragged to those teammates that he had so much power in the sport that even a positive test couldn’t stop him. The funny thing is that his EPO test result was never an official positive, according to several people who worked on the case.

  The EPO test was so new that Martíal Saugy, the director of the antidoping laboratory that analyzed the 2001 Tour de Suisse urine samples for the drug, did not deem Armstrong’s urine positive because the threshold to flag a sample as positive was so high. Instead, he labeled Armstrong’s samples as suspicious for EPO. About a year later, another antidoping lab director, Jacques de Ceurriz, also tagged Armstrong’s urine sample as suspicious. That time, the sample came from the Dauphiné, and UCI was notified about it.

  The lab directors Saugy and de Ceurriz did not realize they were dealing with Armstrong’s urine sample until much later because they had been working with anonymous samples. But the UCI officials were able to match the sample number with Armstrong’s name. They quickly called Armstrong to notify him that he had come perilously close to testing positive. It was a slap on the wrist that said Armstrong should be careful about being so sloppy.

  Armstrong was in disbelief. He also didn’t understand how his test result could be considered questionable, and considered the test unreliable. So he set out to learn how the new EPO test worked, and asked the UCI for help. It arranged a tutorial.

  The UCI set up a meeting that was held at the start of the 2002 Tour, with Armstrong, Bruyneel, and Saugy, so that Saugy could explain the science behind the EPO test. Though the meeting was unconventional—USADA later bristled that Saugy had given Armstrong “the keys” to beating the EPO test—Saugy thought he was proving to the patron of the peloton that the method of screening for EPO was valid. His hope was that Armstrong, in turn, could warn other riders to stop using the drug. After all, the literature concerning the test was already publicly available. Saugy also was told by the UCI that Bruyneel had a scientific background and had a lot of questions for him. So Saugy explained to Armstrong and Bruyneel that the EPO test entailed scientists putting the urine sample o
n a thin layer of gel, running electricity through it and waiting for different forms of proteins in the urine to spread out. When those proteins finally did, they left a ladder-shaped pattern that the scientist had to interpret as positive or negative for the synthetic version of EPO. Because the test required interpretation, that left a big gray area that riders could possibly use to their advantage.

  Armstrong and Bruyneel listened to Saugy like schoolkids in a classroom, but said nothing. At the end of the presentation, only Armstrong spoke. He crossed his arms and gave Saugy a menacing look. His eyes narrowed.

  “Do you realize that you are putting so many careers under pressure?” he said.

  Then he stomped out of the room.

  According to two antidoping scientists who are unauthorized to talk about the case, if Armstrong’s urine sample from that 2001 Tour de Suisse had been examined under 2013 standards, Armstrong would have failed the test.

  Heading into the 2001 Tour, the Sunday Times of London published a story by David Walsh that claimed Armstrong had spearheaded the use of EPO on his Motorola team in 1995. Walsh was an award-winning writer who had long doubted Armstrong’s claims of innocence and was one of the few English-speaking reporters who put those doubts in print. Now he had gathered circumstantial evidence suggesting he had been right to doubt.

  Walsh’s story said Armstrong was a Ferrari client. It also quoted an unnamed Armstrong teammate saying that several Motorola riders discussed the use of EPO and that “Lance was the key spokesperson when EPO was the topic.” (Years later it was revealed that the New Zealander Stephen Swart had been Walsh’s source.)

  Armstrong was livid. As usual, he fought back. His agent, Bill Stapleton—who would later earn a reputation for threatening reporters with lawsuits after they wrote critical stories about Armstrong—had heard about Walsh’s story even before it was published and executed a preemptive strike by arranging for a reporter from the Italian newspaper La Gazzetta dello Sport to interview Armstrong. In the interview, Armstrong said he had worked with Ferrari for six years in preparation for a special feat he had wanted to accomplish: a world’s record for the most miles a rider could log in an hour while riding on a velodrome.