Cycle of Lies: The Fall of Lance Armstrong

by Macur, Juliet

  “What an idiot! Fucking Floyd, he can’t touch us! Floyd, what a douche,” Bruyneel said. Then he told reporters that Landis had “threatened, blackmailed” him ever since testing positive. He said Landis had asked him for “a lot of money” and a job in exchange for his silence about Postal Service’s doping—an accusation, Bruyneel added, that was completely untrue. He also said he thought Landis was mentally ill: “Floyd should seek professional help, and by that I don’t mean lawyers.”

  The RadioShack team posted on its Web site a string of e-mails that it said showed Landis’s accusations were “a troubling, angry and misplaced effort at retribution for his perceived slights,” including that RadioShack would not hire him. A statement from the team’s lawyer said Landis had been threatening Armstrong for two years.

  “Getting no satisfaction and not receiving a position on the RadioShack team, Landis then carried through with his threat and provided the press with false accusations,” the statement said.

  The individual riders struck a more sober tune:

  “I don’t know what is in the head of Floyd Landis, what his motivations are,” Vaughters said.

  Hincapie released a statement through his team, BMC Racing, saying he was “very disappointed” by Landis’s accusations.

  Leipheimer said he had no idea why Landis would accuse him of anything: “I can’t believe it. He said we were teammates and we did stuff together, launched all these allegations. We were never even teammates. . . . All I’ll say is it is absolutely false, and I just hope that Floyd gets some help. I think he needs it.”

  During the first few warm-up miles of the Tour of California’s next stage, riders talked about the Landis affair.

  Zabriskie rode next to Armstrong. “So now what?” he asked, to no reply. “Now what!”

  “They’re going to ask me stuff, so you won’t have to worry about it,” Armstrong said. “It’s all going to be on me.”

  Armstrong chastised Hincapie for not giving stronger statements against Landis.

  “Why don’t you just deny it?” Armstrong asked.

  “I just don’t think that’s the way to go,” Hincapie said. “Why don’t you just admit it? You could say it, get it over with and people would forgive you after a while and that would be that.”

  Armstrong stared at him. “Admit what?”

  Five miles into that stage of the Tour of California, the peloton came to a town called Farmersville. On a road that cut through fragrant orange groves, a rider skidded on gravel and crashed. Several riders in his wake were unable to avoid him. They, too, fell. One was Armstrong.

  In an instant, an official on the race radio called out, “Armstrong’s down! Armstrong’s down!” The sport’s greatest star was on the street with his legs splayed out and quarter-sized rips in the back of his red-and-gray RadioShack jersey. Blood flowed down his face from a cut beneath his left eye.

  Bruyneel and another team employee dragged Armstrong to his feet. They led him to his bike, and Armstrong spent the next eight miles riding next to the team car, with Bruyneel driving.

  “How do you feel?” the team manager asked. “You have a headache, or is it just the eye?”

  “It fucking kills, my face,” Armstrong said. He fought to catch his breath.

  Bruyneel said the race doctor could control the bleeding. He suggested that Armstrong take an anti-inflammatory pill or a painkiller. Armstrong said he thought his elbow might be broken, that it would be hard to go on.

  “I don’t think it’s broken,” Bruyneel said.

  “I can’t stand on the bike,” Armstrong said. “I don’t want to . . . We got to decide. I don’t want to be a pussy about this, but I can’t get up. The slightest of pressure, it makes it worse, it’s almost nauseating.”

  “Let’s give it a try first, Lance, to see if we should stop or not,” Bruyneel said. “Let’s see how it goes.” Bruyneel again suggested that Armstrong take medication. Armstrong said it wouldn’t do much good.

  Injured and with Landis’s accusations ringing in his head, Armstrong almost pleaded with Bruyneel.

  He said, “I don’t know what to do!”

  “OK, let’s stop,” Bruyneel said.

  “What do I do? What do I, how do I, I don’t think, I don’t, I don’t know the last time I stopped in a race. What do I do?”

  “Just pull to the side of the road,” said Bruyneel. Soon, Armstrong was on the team bus with a doctor tending the wounds before they drove to a hospital. Allen Lim, whom Armstrong had poached away from Vaughters at nearly six times his salary for the 2010 season, sat next to him, and saw a glint of tears in Armstrong’s eyes.

  “Why am I doing this?” Armstrong said.

  Lim had seen dozens of riders after crashes. Their emotions were always raw. For the first time, he saw a sadness swell in Armstrong.

  “Why the fuck am I doing this?” Armstrong said again. “What the hell? I have more money than I would ever know what to do with. I have these kids who adore me, who are constantly asking me why I do this. And I have no explanation for this. Why am I doing this?”

  “I don’t really know,” Lim said. “But, Lance, here’s the deal, buddy. The happiest I’ve ever seen you, really the happiest I’ve ever seen anybody, is when we were training in Hawaii earlier this year and you were with your family, and all you were doing was riding your bicycle. So if you’re asking me why you are doing this and if you want advice from me on what to do, I would say, ‘Go get your family, fly them all to Hawaii and just go for a bike ride. Just go for a bike ride and don’t worry about this.’ All this? This is stupid.”

  PART SIX

  THE TRUTH

  CHAPTER 21

  What forever had been whispered about the Tour became a public outcry. For a long time, Americans didn’t care what cyclists did to themselves or their sport. It was a curious enterprise: men in Technicolored spandex racing bicycles past oblivious cows and through narrow village streets in France, of all places. Lance Armstrong changed that with every Tour he won. Texas vouched for the Tour de France, so the nation’s sports pages did, too. Before Landis’s accusations went public, Armstrong was a symbol of survivorship and dominance. It took only hours for him to transform into the most infamous example of the Tour’s cheating ways.

  Frankie Andreu’s admission to having used EPO in order to ride on Armstrong’s team appeared on the front page of the New York Times, and it wasn’t a lone voice: Another Armstrong rider, Vaughters, though he went unnamed in the article, said he too doped. The former Motorola rider Stephen Swart said Armstrong had convinced his teammates to use EPO.

  But the hardest blow Armstrong received from a former teammate, hands down, was dealt by Floyd Landis. He had been a loyal soldier to Armstrong, had won the first Tour after Armstrong’s retirement and had that title stripped before stepping into the spotlight to basically say the whole sport was a sham.

  Armstrong called him a liar. So did Armstrong’s team manager, Bruyneel. So did other former teammates of Armstrong: Leipheimer and Michael Barry, the Canadian who took EPO with Zabriskie that first time in 2003. The international cycling organization’s boss, Pat McQuaid, invoked the loaded words “scandalous,” “mischievous” and “traitor” before telling me he felt sorry for the guy. He called the revelations “the last roll of a desperate man” and said, “It’s unfortunate. He’s turned on us.” Fans wearing Armstrong’s Team RadioShack shirts confronted Landis with posters bearing his name alongside the image of a menacing black rat.

  Jonathan Vaughters knew the truth, and when he saw the vilification of Floyd Landis, he realized it was time to come clean, finally and officially. But he also knew he needed other riders to join him in admitting that they had doped, and that they knew Armstrong and others on the Postal Service team had doped. He framed it less as an attack on Armstrong than as a defense of Landis, a good friend.

  Vaughters said, “It’s almost like you’ve got to say, ‘Sorry, Lance, but Floyd’s telling the truth—so is Bets
y, so is Simeoni—and you’re wrecking these people. The federal government and USADA are investigating this. We can’t lie for you. We can’t lie. It’s wrong.’ It’s as simple as that.”

  Cycling could no longer keep the world at bay. Its secrets once were safe because of the sport’s obscurity, and then later because of the code of omertà when the Tour became a cash cow. But now? The United States government, in the form of the towering and initimidating Jeff Novitzky, honored no one’s code of silence. So Vaughters got Novitzky’s number from Tygart and called the agent to learn that the rumors were true, that the federal government had started an inquiry into doping-related crimes and cycling.

  “When the time is right,” Vaughters told him, “and if you decide to speak to anyone [on his Garmin team], I’m going to ask them to cooperate. I can’t force them, but I can ask them.”

  Zabriskie didn’t want to be the only witness for the prosecution. He eventually knew that Vaughters, Danielson and Vande Velde (who had been racing in Italy during that Tour of California) were also going to testify. But even the idea that it would be only him and three others gave him doubts when he considered the size of Armstrong’s army. To spur Zabriskie forward, though, Vaughters needed only one word to persuade him: “Bruyneel.” Zabriskie recalled the pain the team manager had caused him, of how he felt that Bruyneel was the person who convinced him to dope and, in turn, become just like his drug-using father who had drunk himself to death.

  Zabriskie had trusted Bruyneel and had been betrayed. He believed Bruyneel targeted him because he was vulnerable in the wake of his father’s death, and then led him into the culture of doping.

  No, Zabriskie thought, what happened to me should not happen to anyone else.

  No, Landis was neither an alcoholic liar, nor a vindictive madman.

  No, too many people knew the truth to let his be the only voice in the courtroom.

  “OK, fuck it,” he said. “Here we go.”

  After meeting with Danielson and Vande Velde, Vaughters issued a statement saying the members of the Garmin squad, if asked, would talk to investigators. It was a warning directed at Armstrong, and talk they did. Though only Vaughters told investigators he had actually seen Armstrong dope, all four described systematic drug use by the Postal Service team.

  Danielson, once dubbed the Next Lance Armstrong because of his talents, talked about a panic attack after a blood transfusion. It was so bad that Bruyneel and the team doctor thought he was having cardiac arrest.

  Vande Velde told how Armstrong had summoned him to his apartment and subtly threatened him to follow Ferrari’s doping program or be fired. “Lance called the shots on the team,” Vande Velde said. “What Lance said went.”

  Hincapie didn’t return Novitzky’s calls. He wanted to get legal advice first.

  He was concerned that testifying would hurt his sportswear company, Hincapie Sports, which employed a lot of his family. He was upset that the doping allegations would tarnish his legacy as one of the country’s best cyclists. Maybe cost him his career.

  It wasn’t fair, he thought. He had just cruised along and done what everyone else did—dope.

  At the final press conference at the 2010 Tour of California, Hincapie’s eyes filled with tears upon being asked about Landis’s confession, which implicated Hincapie as one of the Postal Service riders who had received blood transfusions and used drugs like testosterone.

  “I would like to say there isn’t anybody out there—the press, the fans, USADA—who wants a clean sport more than me,” he said. “I’m out there suffering day in, day out. I don’t get to see my kids that much even when I’m home because I’m training five, six, seven hours a day. We’re the ones busting our asses on the road.”

  He sounded a little like Armstrong’s defiant Nike ad. Though he hid his real feelings, Hincapie was unhappy that Landis had turned him into a doper, dragging him back to his Postal Service days after he had ridden clean for years. He told me that he stopped doping in 2006, the first Tour in seven years that he didn’t have to do Armstrong’s bidding. He said it was also the first Tour in maybe five years in which he hadn’t had a blood transfusion.

  He was sick of doping. Sick of the needles, the potions, the fear of getting caught, the secrecy and the lies. He had a wife and kids; he needed to support his family and not embarrass them. In 2005, after he had won the hardest mountain stage of the Tour, he had heard the whispers: Hincapie, a sprinter, must have doped to finish first that day.

  Enough, Hincapie thought, enough. The days of protecting the sport and protecting Armstrong were about to end.

  Landis showed up at the Tour of California on the final day. He wore a T-shirt, jeans and dark sunglasses. Flanked by private security guards wearing bulletproof vests and carrying guns and nightsticks, he was escorted to a private hospitality area to watch the finish. Earlier that week, Landis had been interviewed by ESPN.com’s Bonnie Ford. He said he didn’t feel remorse about his doping because everyone was doing it, but that it was time for him to tell the truth. “I want to clear my conscience,” he said. “I don’t want to be part of the problem anymore.”

  Landis said that he first used drugs on the Postal Service team in June 2002. That meant the World Anti-Doping Code’s eight-year statute of limitations on some of the team’s doping was about to expire and he wanted to confess before that. “If I don’t say something now, then it’s pointless to ever say it,” he said.

  It was also true that Landis had another statute of limitations in mind. It had nothing to do with antidoping rules. It was part of the United States government’s whistle-blower law.

  On June 10, 2010, less than three weeks after his accusations against Armstrong and basically the entire sport, Landis filed a federal lawsuit under the False Claims Act. Such suits give citizens the right and financial incentive to bring suits on the government’s behalf.

  Landis’s lawsuit named Armstrong, Bruyneel and the Postal Service team owner, Thomas Weisel, as well as Armstrong’s agent, Bill Stapleton, and Stapleton’s business partner, Bart Knaggs. It also named the business entities tied to the Postal Service team, like Tailwind Sports, the management company, and Capital Sports & Entertainment, Stapleton’s company.

  The suit claimed that each defendant knew—as everyone in the sport seemed to know—that the Postal Service team was doping. In doping, the suit claimed, the team had defrauded the U.S. Postal Service.

  The team’s sponsorship contracts with the U.S. Postal Service were worth about $40 million. Under the law, defendants who lost a False Claims Act case could be forced to pay three times that amount in penalties—in this case, possibly $120 million. The whistle-blower in such a case could be awarded as much as 30 percent of the penalty—in this case, $36 million.

  As Landis sat in the hospitality tent, his former Postal Service teammates approached the finish line, and the race announcer belted out their names:

  George Hincapie, the United States road racing champion!

  Three-time defending Tour of California winner Levi Leipheimer, “Mr. California!”

  Dave Zabriskie, the five-time national champion in the road race time trial!

  Of those possible witnesses in the case against Armstrong, Landis was the only one who could come out of it a double-digit millionaire.

  Two days after the Tour of California, Zabriskie walked into the Marriott Hotel in Marina del Rey, into the same conference room Landis had occupied weeks before. He sat with Novitzky and prosecutors from the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Los Angeles. For five hours, Zabriskie told his story. He described his first EPO experiences. He backed up many of Landis’s claims, including the one about Armstrong and Bruyneel’s sabotaging Landis at the 2004 Tour by dumping a bag of his blood. He said that Landis gave him doping products and showed him how to inject human growth hormone. He repeated Landis’s claim that the growth hormone would make him “fucking strong.” Zabriskie used the drug, even though he’d asked Landis, “Isn’t that how Lance’s ca
ncer got out of control and stuff?”

  Zabriskie told the feds about life with his drug-dealing father—how a SWAT team burst into his house when he was fourteen; how his father drank himself to death; how he had promised himself he would never do drugs, never be like his dad. Twice, he had to take a break to regain his composure.

  For the first time, the federal investigators realized that they had a real case. Zabriskie was Landis’s friend, yes, but he was not Landis. He was not seeking vengeance. He was not screaming to be heard.

  He was believable.

  Tygart sat in on Zabriskie’s interview. As he listened to the testimony, his duty crystallized in his mind. He understood there to be a difference among dopers. Some, like Zabriskie, regretted it and wished they could take back their bad decisions to use PEDs. Others, like Armstrong and Landis, would do it all over again if they could.

  Even after all Landis had been through, all the money he had lost and all the embarrassment he had brought to his family, Landis said he didn’t “feel guilty at all about having doped.” “I would do everything the same and I would just admit it [doping] afterwards.” But at least he believed he had cheated. Armstrong just thought he was competing.

  At the heart of it, Tygart was fighting for the clean athletes—like the Postal Service team’s Scott Mercier and Darren Baker—who never chose to dope and never had the opportunity to test themselves against a clean Armstrong. And he was fighting for guys like Zabriskie, the ones who felt forced to dope and who fell victim to the peer pressure of the sport.

  Thinking about all that, Tygart had told the federal investigators and prosecutors that they needed to push forward against Armstrong—they needed to nail him. “For guys like Zabriskie, you have to win,” he said. “We have to stop this.”

  Headed back to Europe, Zabriskie was content to have finally told the truth to someone who might make a difference. And he was preoccupied by the hope that others would join him before news leaked that he had squealed. Flying to Barcelona, Zabriskie sat one seat over from Hincapie, who asked, “Everything OK?”