Cycle of Lies: The Fall of Lance Armstrong

by Macur, Juliet

  Even the sweet smell of coffee from the shop below provided no comfort to Zabriskie. His loneliness hit an all-time low. He lived on pizza. He didn’t race much because his training was going so badly. He spent hundreds of dollars on phone calls to Randi Reich, a beautiful, brainy blonde enrolled at the University of California, Berkeley, whom he had met before leaving Utah. She had been a high school classmate of one of Zabriskie’s sisters. He told her the pressure to dope was rising slowly but steadily. She said if he ever took drugs, she’d leave him. He assured her he never would.

  He tested Armstrong on a training ride, trying to see if the two-time Tour winner would admit that doping was part of the sport. “I think I’m a pretty strong bike rider,” he told Armstrong. “I just don’t understand how if I’m at my maximum, guys are just flying by me.”

  Armstrong said only, “You got to train harder.”

  Zabriskie was skeptical. He had heard foreign riders talk about doping, casually chatting about what they were taking and what other riders were on, as though the stuff weren’t banned. He had seen what went on inside the team hotels on a daily basis. Sometimes the injections came from syringes with a green liquid inside, sometimes the liquid was yellow, other times it was clear or red. Del Moral told him it was a mix of vitamins and that he shouldn’t be afraid to take them. That first season, every time he was offered a shot of that different colored “recovery,” he politely declined.

  By fall 2001, Zabriskie believed some top riders could be clean, and that included Leipheimer, who had finished third in the Vuelta. His finish sparked rumors that he was a doper, but Zabriskie didn’t believe it, even going as far as to defend Leipheimer to naysayers.

  “I know Levi, and he trains his ass off,” he said, only to see the doubters laugh in his face. He told Leipheimer, “Dude, I know a lot of guys are saying that you’re dirty and taking drugs and stuff, but I know how hard you train, and I think you deserve it.”

  The next year, Zabriskie made only $15,000 because of his performance the season before. His training had gone so terribly—he was eating poorly and was unfocused because he was so lonely—that Bruyneel didn’t even trust him enough to enter him in races. Zabriskie returned to the team only after begging Bruyneel to give him another chance. In his desperation to remain in the sport, he started to feel that some performance-enhancing substances were OK. At the Redlands race in April 2002, he felt so beat down and exhausted that he asked a teammate, Dylan Casey, for a shot of those “recovery” vitamins. Casey took out the vial and Zabriskie inspected it. Yep, the label said vitamins, so he let Casey inject the liquid into his arm. Zabriskie couldn’t tell whether it had worked or not, but it didn’t feel that nefarious—he was always taking loads of vitamins orally anyway.

  He eventually learned to inject himself and search for a proper vein in which to deliver the “recovery.” Nobody had offered him any doping products yet.

  Later in the 2002 season, Bruyneel told him he would have to inject all the vitamins the team offered to him. Zabriskie agreed. He thought it was strange that his teammates didn’t comment on the fact that he injected himself regularly, like a junkie. Once, when he missed the vein with the “recovery,” prompting a huge bubble to form beneath his skin, Zabriskie ran to get Frankie Andreu’s help. Andreu laughed and said, “Don’t worry, it’ll go away,” as if he’d seen it many times before.

  Zabriskie remained reluctant to blindly take what other riders got from the doctors. At the Spanish Vuelta in 2002, del Moral had the entire team line up on the team bus before the time trial for an intramuscular shot that no rider could identify. Zabriskie wasn’t sure if it was legal or not, but no one complained.

  “OK, stand on one leg and relax your butt,” del Moral said before jamming a needle into each rider’s buttocks. Zabriskie wanted to lie down for the shot because it would be less painful. The doctor refused the request and demanded that he remain standing, so he declined the injection altogether. “No, thanks.”

  Afterward, del Moral was annoyed that Zabriskie had not gone along with the plan.

  “You are a pussy, you are a fucking pussy,” the doctor said.

  In his second year on the team, Zabriskie became more comic relief than just an awkward young kid. Occasionally, he broke into song on the team bus to elicit laughs. Once, Zabriskie serenaded Bruyneel with a song he’d learned from Burke Swindlehurst, a friend and pro cyclist who was also from Utah, belting it out to the tune of Jimi Hendrix’s “Purple Haze.”

  EPO all in my veins

  Lately things just don’t seem the same

  Actin’ funny, but I don’t know why

  ’Scuse me, while I pass this guy.

  At the café in Girona that day in May 2003, after finishing fifth in the Four Days of Dunkirk, and feeling good about his clean success, Zabriskie listened to Bruyneel and del Moral talk about the need for doping in elite cycling. To succeed in the sport, they said, Zabriskie needed to start shooting up EPO and taping testosterone patches to his body.

  “Look, Dave, those guys that just beat you at this race in Dunkirk? They were all on it,” Bruyneel said. “Even the guys behind you were all on it.”

  Zabriskie wasn’t sure if he was telling the truth. He said, “I know the team is in trouble right now with points, and you guys just want me to score you some easy points.”

  “No, it’s not like that,” Bruyneel said, laughing.

  Zabriskie looked to Barry, with whom he had talked about EPO while rooming together earlier in the season. He needed some backup. Just weeks before, Barry had told him that he wanted to find a way to quit the sport because of the doping.

  “Are you not going to ask any questions?” Zabriskie asked Barry. “Are you going to do this?”

  “It’s just how it is,” Barry said.

  Barry, who had joined the team the year before, was once one of the riders asking doctors about their injections. Del Moral would respond, “Don’t you trust me?” or “You guys ask too many fucking questions.” Yet by the time he and Zabriskie were offered EPO that day, Barry had already decided that he would join in. He had seen too much doping to believe he could succeed without it.

  When Barry moved into Jonathan Vaughters’s room in Girona the year before, in an apartment now shared by Vande Velde and another rider, he had found empty ampules and used syringes under the bed. Later, he had discovered EPO and human growth hormone hidden inside a bag of coffee in the fridge, and saw chemical burns that testosterone patches had left on Vande Velde’s body. The more time Barry spent on the team, the more brazen his teammates became with letting their doping be known. Hincapie, who became close with Barry, encouraged him to use EPO and testosterone to “make him feel better,” and said that he wouldn’t have to use much of either drug to see results. Barry trusted Hincapie’s advice.

  So the four of them—Zabriskie, Barry, Bruyneel and del Moral—rose from the café table and made the short walk to Barry’s apartment. Two new riders were about to graduate from the clean class of Postal riders and be inducted into the team’s doping program.

  Once inside, Bruyneel and del Moral rushed through the ceremony, with del Moral walking them through what they needed to do to use EPO.

  Be careful when you inject it. Needs to be directly into the vein. If accidentally injected into fat, the EPO can be detected for more than a week and you could easily test positive. You will receive a coded text from me with instructions on how much to use.

  As the administrator of this ever-growing club based on secrecy, cheating and lies, Bruyneel emphasized the importance of paranoia. Wash your syringe out, so if anyone finds it, the substance will be undetectable. Throw away the ampule far from your apartment and make sure you are not being followed when you do it. If a drug tester shows up, don’t answer the door. And never, ever tell anyone.

  Both riders held out their arms so del Moral could prick them with the needle.

  “It went in just like the other stuff, the ‘recovery,’ ” Zabriskie said
. “It just didn’t feel any different.” It was one more step in a series of tests toward making the Tour team. Just another step toward helping Armstrong win and become richer, more powerful, more beloved by millions.

  To Zabriskie, it all happened so fast—the café meeting, the walk to Barry’s apartment (a relatively safe place to dope because he was Canadian and USADA wouldn’t show up there), the instructions, the needle prick. It felt like he was a passenger in a plane crash and he had no time to save himself. He wondered: “Is this how it felt for everyone their first time? For Armstrong? For Vande Velde? For Hincapie? Is there anyone strong enough to resist the suffocating pressure, to stop time and walk away?”

  Zabriskie felt betrayed by Bruyneel, a man he trusted, someone who had swooped into his life and helped him rebound from the loss of his father. In his apartment, alone, he threw down the EPO, testosterone patches and “recovery” that Bruyneel had given him, collapsed onto the floor and melted into a fetal position. After several hours, he finally rose to call his mother and tell her what had happened.

  “I just, I just, used drugs, I just became Dad,” Zabriskie said.

  Her son repeated that sentence several times before the mother understood the words through his tears. He had just cheated. He had just broken his promise to the woman he considered the love of his life.

  “I think you need to leave right now and be done with this,” his mother said. “Come home. Come home. Just come home. These are not good people.”

  Zabriskie went home the next week to train for the rest of the season. On Memorial Day, he rode alone down Millcreek Canyon, a popular hiking and biking area. Speeding down the main road, he saw a white Nissan SUV stop to turn into a parking lot. He thought the driver had seen him coming. She had not. Zabriskie crashed head-on into the SUV. He flew more than twenty-five feet through the air and landed on sharp rocks along the road.

  His entire left side was torn up. Several fingernails had been ripped off by the SUV’s headlights. His left lower leg was positioned at an unnatural angle, badly broken and afire with pain. His left wrist was broken and began to swell.

  Covered with blood, Zabriskie pulled himself to a seated position and considered what had just happened. It was more than an accident, he thought. This was a sign from God.

  CHAPTER 14

  At the end of the 2001 season, Lance Armstrong wanted another strong climber on his team. He got one all right: a slight, redheaded, fair-skinned Kid Rock look-alike from a community of religious fundamentalists in Pennsylvania. His name was Floyd Landis, and he was smart, witty, and more than a touch paranoid. Given to extremes, he might drink a case of beer every night for a week before switching to nothing but a bowl of cereal for days. But Landis could really ride.

  When Zabriskie was healthy enough to return to Postal Service, in 2004, he shared an apartment with Landis and another rider, Tony Cruz. Both Zabriskie and Landis were enigmatic, and both had distinctive senses of humor. They became fast friends. But Landis battled depression. In 2002, his first season, he had popped antidepressants to get by. He didn’t like living in Girona, apart from his wife, Amber, and his stepdaughter, Ryan, and he didn’t like the hierarchy on the team. He thought it was unfair that he made only $60,000 a year.

  In their Girona apartment, he grumbled to Zabriskie about Armstrong’s wealth: “His fucking money, his fucking jet.” Frustrated and angry that he had not achieved Armstrong-level success, Landis once walked onto the balcony and threatened to jump. He said he wanted to “end it all.”

  “Floyd, have you ever had a good day?” Zabriskie asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Well, you will never have another good day if you end it all right now.”

  Chances are, he wouldn’t have ended it right there. The balcony was on the second floor.

  The two men became inseparable, almost literally. They squeezed together on a little scooter, because they didn’t want to buy a car. Zabriskie would sing Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Simple Man”: “Forget your lust for the rich man’s gold/All that you need is in your soul.” Armstrong called them “Dumb and Dumber.”

  One rainy day, Landis convinced Zabriskie to skip their daily training ride. They sat at a café and ingested enough caffeine to kill a small mammal. The story became part of the team’s folklore: Landis drank thirteen cappuccinos in a row, Zabriskie stopped at five.

  The pair’s version of life as a cycling pro was nothing like Armstrong’s. They were out to have fun, which included throwing darts at a team poster they had taped to their apartment wall. Armstrong treated cycling like a serious business of which he was the CEO. A lot of money was at stake. Armstrong’s top domestiques, like Hamilton and Vande Velde, would come to earn salaries approaching a million a year. Armstrong was pulling in millions annually.

  Armstrong looked at Landis like he was a bad employee who could keep the company from reaching its potential. He didn’t like Landis’s lack of discipline. Worse was Landis’s lingering conflict with the UCI, which held the bank guarantees for the teams in competition, and as such was responsible for paying out if one of them ever went belly up. Landis, who was owed his salary from his previous team, was telling reporters that the UCI wasn’t protecting its riders.

  Verbruggen, president of the UCI, replied with a letter rebuking Landis. “Such an aggressive approach might perhaps work in the U.S.A.,” Verbruggen wrote, “but it does not in Europe and most definitely not with me.”

  Armstrong told Landis that he needed to apologize to the UCI chief. He said, “Look, Floyd, you have got to do what this guy says because we’re going to need a favor from him at some point.” Armstrong told him that he’d needed the UCI’s help when he had tested positive at the 2001 Tour de Suisse. Landis needed to apologize to Verbruggen so the Postal team could remain on the UCI’s good side.

  Landis apologized rather than further antagonize Armstrong and Verbruggen. It was a rare moment that reached back to his childhood when, as a good Mennonite boy, he bowed to authority. But those days had come and gone.

  Floyd Landis had grown up in Ephrata, in the heart of Pennsylvania Dutch country, where many of the residents are either Amish or Mennonite. His parents, Arlene and Paul, raised him and his five siblings as Mennonites, following a branch of the Anabaptist Protestant religion that believes in a literal interpretation of the Bible and preaches pacifism. For his first nineteen years, Landis shared a double bed with his brother, Bob, in a two-story white house with a white picket fence, a radio tuned to a local gospel station and a television used only to watch home movies.

  Paul Landis made his living from a self-service laundry, a car wash and odd jobs. Money was tight, but they didn’t need much. Clothes were simple—the women wore plain cotton dresses and head coverings; the men wore white shirts and cotton slacks held up by suspenders. Life on Farmersville Road included no rock music, no cursing and no alcohol.

  Landis grew up with strict definitions of how a person should act and what he should do with his life: Give all glory to God. Live simply. But Landis was an independent thinker, and full of questions like, “Why is it that half of the world has never heard of this religion and they are going to go to hell?” He could recite passages from the Bible, but, like Armstrong, he struggled to keep the faith.

  He left home for California at the age of twenty, on his bike. Six years later, he joined Postal Service and headed for Europe. As a professional, he continued to question convention. He didn’t understand why some people thought it was OK to snack on pastries during a race but it was taboo to eat a doughnut. He found it hard to believe the accepted wisdom that a rider who didn’t wear socks could catch a virus through his feet. And why were riders allowed to eat cheese but not ice cream? Landis gained a reputation as a man stirring the pot just to stir it—or drinking thirteen cups of cappuccino just to drink thirteen cups of cappuccino.

  He tried to fit in when it became clear that he risked being ostracized. He agreed to undergo blood transfusions to gain an edge,
and accepted testosterone patches from Armstrong, in full view of Armstrong’s wife. He was rewarded for following rules. Landis made Postal Service’s Tour team for 2002. A week into the race he lay on the opposite side of a bed with Armstrong as they received blood transfusions the day before an individual time trial, in which Armstrong finished second, and Landis fifteenth.

  As one of the feared members of the Postal Service’s Blue Train—the team’s nickname because it often rode together, creating a blur of blue—Landis helped Armstrong to strong finishes in the mountains, including back-to-back stage wins in the Pyrenees. Those daily victories helped set Armstrong up for his fourth Tour title.

  By 2002, Armstrong had replaced Livingston and Hamilton with Landis and Spanish climbing specialists who did what they were told.

  All but two of Armstrong’s band of brothers on that first Tour-winning team had left. Hincapie and Vande Velde had remained. By then, they had hired Ferrari to help them dope, often meeting in Hincapie’s apartment—because he lived alone—to inject themselves with EPO. They wore long sleeves to hide bruises and track marks.

  From Armstrong’s perspective, his team had changed but the doping program ran as smoothly as ever. Upon winning the 2002 Tour, he said his body “was remade” after his cancer, but it was his team that deserved the credit for his success. “It’s the organization, the team, the program,” he said, adding that it was a “sick mentality” to think he’d dope.

  Yet the French newspaper L’Equipe published a story with the headline, “Must We Believe in Armstrong?” The story reported, “There are too many rumors, too many suspicions. He inspires both admiration and rejection.”

  The Washington Times, meanwhile, reported that the French were just jealous: “France’s motto: If you can’t beat them, investigate them.”

  In addressing reporters, Bruyneel praised the U.S. Postal Service for its laissez-faire attitude with the team. “We have a sponsor that doesn’t tell us, ‘You have go to this race or that race because we have commercial interests there.’ What Postal wants is that we arrive at the start of the Tour 100 percent. How we get there is our problem.”