Cycle of Lies: The Fall of Lance Armstrong

by Macur, Juliet

  “Just great,” Zabriskie said.

  “Really? Because you’re kind of looking at me funny.”

  “Nope. All good.”

  By then, May 2010, a grand jury had already convened in Los Angeles to investigate Armstrong and his alleged crimes—crimes that amounted to fraud, money laundering and drug trafficking. Investigators also looked into charges under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, which historically had been brought against Mafia organizations.

  As a witness for the prosecution, Zabriskie had been told to say nothing of his session with Novitzky and the prosecutors. But he confessed to Hincapie that he’d told the federal investigators everything. “I think you should, too. I didn’t know anything about you, so I didn’t say anything about you. But I think this is the right time to talk.”

  Hincapie said nothing.

  “Oh, man, I wasn’t supposed to say anything,” Zabriskie said. “Now I’m in trouble.”

  In Girona, Zabriskie and Hincapie met Leipheimer, who complained that Landis had created a mess. “You know, don’t tell anybody, but you don’t have to talk to those people,” Leipheimer said, meaning the federal agents.

  Zabriskie glanced at Hincapie, then said, “Uh, yep, I know.”

  From then on, he kept his mouth shut. Even when Danielson hinted that he had spoken with “the bald guy”—Novitzky—Zabriskie feigned ignorance of just who “the bald guy” was. He didn’t comment at all when Vande Velde called him and said, “I’m in L.A., and I had to do what you did, man.” No one knew what Armstrong would do if he ever found out.

  CHAPTER 22

  Novitzky and federal prosecutors worked toward the center of the wheel, toward Armstrong. They had Zabriskie, Danielson and Vande Velde on record, and now they sought eyewitness proof from other riders. They wanted George Hincapie, Tyler Hamilton and Kevin Livingston.

  Along with Landis, they had been the closest Americans to Armstrong. They trained together in the mountains and rode together in Armstrong’s Tour victories, Hamilton in the first three, Livingston in two, and Hincapie in all seven. Like Armstrong, they were Ferrari clients. They knew Armstrong’s secrets.

  Livingston wouldn’t volunteer his testimony and would later testify to the grand jury. Hamilton ignored the first missed call to his cell phone from Novitzky. He also didn’t want to talk. So Novitzky called Hamilton’s lawyer, Chris Manderson, and tried to convince him to set up a meeting. The lawyer declined. Finally, Novitzky gave Hamilton no choice. He served him with a subpoena to appear before a grand jury in Los Angeles on July 21, 2010. Now Hamilton had to talk. There was no backing out.

  Hamilton considered his options. If he testified, he would stand alone in front of a grand jury at the United States Attorney’s Office. No lawyer. No Armstrong public relations man whispering in his ear. He could stay true to big-time cycling’s omertà and say he knew nothing, or that he simply couldn’t recall those long-ago years. After all, it was only perjury.

  In the meantime, Armstrong lied.

  In Rotterdam, he faced reporters before the prologue of the 2010 Tour de France and again answered to Landis’s allegations.

  “C’mon, it’s been ten years, ten years, it’s nothing new,” he said.

  No, he had never doped. He disputed Landis’s claims that the Postal Service team had sold bikes from its sponsor, Trek, to fund a doping program. In a statement he had sent to the media mob that morning, Armstrong likened Landis’s credibility to a carton of sour milk: “Once you take the first sip, you don’t have to drink the rest to know it has all gone bad.”

  Armstrong had left the Tour of California battered and beleaguered. He took Lim’s advice and rode his beach-cruiser bike and just tried to relax with his girlfriend, Anna Hansen. Only he couldn’t.

  “No one is taking this away from me,” he told Lim, who had joined Armstrong’s team for the Tour de France. “Al, I’m all in, buddy, we’re doing the Tour. I’m going to do this. I’m going to win that bloody, fucking, goddamn whatever race.”

  Lim kept a close eye on Armstrong. Unlike his hands-off policy with Landis’s doping, he wanted to prove to himself that he could “kick Lance in the ’nads” if he caught him doping. After learning from his mistakes with Landis, Lim wanted to prove that Armstrong couldn’t cheat on his watch. But to his surprise, he came to think that Armstrong wanted to ride clean for the first time and had sincerely wanted Lim’s help.

  “It hurt his sense of pride and ego so much that these other guys were riding clean and he had not,” Lim said. “He wanted to end his career with honor, with some legacy intact.”

  It underscored Lim’s decision to join the team. “If I could change Lance, then the whole sport could change, because he had that much power,” he told me.

  In training Armstrong for the Tour, Lim came to the opinion that Floyd Landis had been far superior to Armstrong in terms of the power he could generate on the bike. “I’ve seen them both, and Floyd is way better. He’s a way better athlete, bottom line.” If there had been no doping in cycling, Lim contends, Landis would have won ten Tour de France titles, maybe more.

  Lim considered it funny that stories about Armstrong always touted his superior physiology. I mentioned a story in the New Yorker from 2002 that described Armstrong’s physical superlatives, like his unusually long thighbones. Lim laughed.

  “All top riders have thighbones that are unusually long,” he said.

  His heart is unusually large, a third larger than the average man’s?

  “So is Christian Vande Velde’s, so is Bradley Wiggins’s,” he said, mentioning two top Tour riders with whom he had worked.

  He has a resting heart rate of 32?

  “So does Christian Vande Velde, so does Floyd Landis.”

  But none of them were trying to win an eighth Tour de France, at the ripe age of thirty-eight. And certainly none of them were trying to focus on that task with a federal criminal investigation and the prospect of prison time hanging over their head.

  During the Tour of Switzerland, a warm-up race for the Tour, a sleep-deprived Armstrong paced around hotel rooms. Before a time trial, he put on and took off his tight-fitting uniform again and again. His eyes stared out over puffy bags. Finally, he shouted it out loud.

  “I’m not scared of USADA,” Armstrong said. “USADA, I’m not scared of those guys, yeah, I’m not fucking scared of them. But the feds? The feds? Oh, dude, dude, I’m scared of the feds.”

  Lim was stunned.

  “They can take everything I have,” Armstrong said. “But they’d better not touch Livestrong. Fuck, dude, fuck! Livestrong—it’s the only pure thing I’ve ever done.”

  What would Tyler Hamilton tell the grand jury?

  Hamilton’s lawyer, Manderson, learned the full scope of his client’s knowledge only on the eve of his testimony. On July 20, 2010, the same day Armstrong rode over four mountain passes in the Pyrenees, Hamilton told the lawyer about transfusions he had performed with Armstrong—told him all about the EPO and the bad blood bags stored in a freezer called Siberia, recounted the story of Armstrong’s 2001 failed test and how Armstrong had boasted that the UCI covered it up, related how blood feels when it slides from a chilled IV bag into your veins.

  To Manderson, Hamilton’s story did not sound like a sports story. It sounded like a well-organized criminal operation. The lawyer knew the federal investigators likely would go after Armstrong for drug distribution. He made Hamilton repeat the story of Armstrong’s dripping testosterone onto his tongue, and how Armstrong sent EPO from Texas through the mail to Hamilton in Massachusetts.

  Hamilton occasionally stopped for breaks and played with Manderson’s kids, lightly pulling Manderson’s four-year-old daughter’s curly hair and goofily going, “Bo-ing!” Then he would return to the patio and describe his furtive traveling in Europe with secret cell phones that could not be traced back to the Armstrong team.

  So who, exactly, was Tyler Hamilton? The good Tyler persuaded people he
could never have been one of Armstrong’s key henchmen on a team obsessed with pushing the limits of doping. But if Armstrong was the all-time champ at leading a double life, easily morphing from doping kingpin to cancer hero, Hamilton was a close second.

  “You’re the first person I’ve really told this to except for my wife,” Hamilton said to Manderson. “Chris, you must really have a low opinion of me. You must really think I’m a bad guy.”

  “No,” Manderson said. “I think you did what a lot of other people did.”

  Armstrong finished fourth in the Tour prologue in Rotterdam, a decent showing for so old a guy. But under the threat of criminal prosecution, Armstrong was not the spry, tough Texan who had garnered so much fame over so many years.

  After Stage 3, with a thin coat of dust covering his body, and with his eyes locked in a thousand-yard stare, Armstrong might have been a zombie. He had been caught behind a crash and suffered a flat tire on a cobblestone road, misfortunes that dropped him from 5th to 18th.

  He came more undone each day. Winning was out of the question—it was all he could do to stay upright. On Stage 8, the rider known for avoiding crashes in his Tour career became entangled in not one, not two, but three crashes. He clipped a pedal on the curb of a roundabout, causing his front tire to roll off and throwing him against the pavement at nearly 40 miles an hour. To avoid a second crash, he was forced to stop on a grassy roadside. And, in the day’s last misadventure, ten miles from the finish of the 117.4-mile route, a Spanish rider crashed ahead of him and Armstrong again came to a full stop. But this time his leg became stuck in a wheel and Armstrong toppled over. He stood up, put his hands on his hips and snarled at his bike, as if to say, “How could you let this happen?” He finished 61st in that stage, nearly twelve minutes off the pace.

  Reporters wondered if the federal investigation was a distraction. No, he told Neal Rogers of VeloNews: “I might be distracted, but I’m not distracted on the things people are speculating I’m distracted on. I don’t have any fear about any of that. I know what’s gone on in my life. I rest at night perfectly well. But if I was distracted by the other stuff, I wouldn’t sleep at night. And I sleep like a baby.”

  Armstrong’s PR team begged him not to talk to reporters about the criminal investigation that was ensuing in California, but he couldn’t help himself. Before Stage 10, he stomped down the stairs of his team bus and planted himself in front of a small crowd gathered there, myself included.

  My colleague Michael Schmidt and I had broken a story the previous day saying the grand jury had served subpoenas to witnesses in the Armstrong case and that those subpoenas represented a significant step in the investigation. The grand jury was especially interested in people, including Armstrong, who had financed the Postal Service team.

  “You’ve got to stop writing this stuff,” he said. He claimed he had nothing to do with the operation of Tailwind Sports, the Postal Service team’s management company. He wasn’t an owner and he had no idea about the ownership structure. He was a rider, an employee, like any other guy on the team.

  “It wasn’t my company,” he said. “I can’t make it clear enough to you. I don’t know. I didn’t know the company. I didn’t have a position. I didn’t have an equity stake. I didn’t have a profit stake. I didn’t have a seat on the board. I was a rider on the team. I can’t be any clearer than that.”

  Those statements stood in contrast to Armstrong’s testimony in the SCA Promotions case when he said he gained a financial interest in Tailwind in 2004. His agent, Stapleton, also testified that Armstrong was granted an 11.5 percent interest in the team sometime that year. When asked at that Tour why he hadn’t cleared up misconceptions about his role, Armstrong said, “I’m correcting that now.”

  Armstrong said that neither he nor Stapleton’s company, Capital Sports & Entertainment, gained equity in Tailwind Sports until 2007. Tailwind’s cycling team folded the next year, after the Discovery Channel did not renew its sponsorship. So Armstrong was given stock that soon would be worthless.

  How odd: Armstrong, in 31st place, debating ownership of a defunct team in the middle of a Tour. He didn’t even know who signed his paychecks, he said, so why would he have any knowledge of Tailwind’s fraudulent sponsorship contracts—especially when none of the riders did? He wanted people to know he was a nobody, just a low-level domestique, when it came to his team’s business side.

  On accusations that he had doped, he remained consistent in telling me, “As long as I live, I will deny it. There was absolutely no way I forced people, encouraged people, told people, helped people, facilitated. Absolutely not. One hundred percent.”

  As a leader of a Tour team, he said, he was the equivalent of an NFL quarterback. He would have no idea if teammates—say Landis or Andreu—were doping. “I can’t speak to what they did themselves,” he said. “It would be like me asking you, ‘Listen, do you think there’s any abuse of performance-enhancing drugs in the NFL in the offensive line?’ Most people would probably say yes. Does that mean Peyton Manning is guilty? I mean, I can’t control what other riders do.”

  He questioned whether the American people would consider a criminal investigation of him a good use of tax dollars. It would be “a shame for a lot of people,” he said, if Livestrong crumbled because the government came after him. “I’m not going to participate in any kind of witch hunt. I’ve done too many good things for too many people,” he said.

  On his bike three days later, Armstrong crashed again. It happened even before the start of the race’s Stage 13. In the warm-up zone, he collided with a teammate and fell, scraping his left elbow. The next morning, I had a single question for him. He ignored me, hopped on his bike, pushed me out of the way and rode off. I jogged after him and asked, “Why do you keep crashing?”

  Armstrong only glared.

  Five thousand miles from France, on July 21, Hamilton entered a federal building in Los Angeles. Hoping no one would see him, he took an elevator to the floor above the grand jury room and took an interior staircase back down.

  Hamilton’s testimony, halting and circuitous, lasted for several hours in front of the grand jury. Doug Miller, the main prosecutor on the case, was frustrated. He just couldn’t seem to get Hamilton to give him clear-cut answers that would help build the government’s case against Armstrong. Miller emerged from the grand jury room and asked for the help of Hamilton’s lawyer. Could he convince Hamilton to leave the grand jury and talk directly to the investigators? It would be so much easier for both parties, he said. That way, the government’s entire team—not just Miller alone—could question Hamilton. Also, Hamilton wouldn’t be forced to participate in the grand jury’s very formal Q&A.

  Hamilton’s lawyer said yes, but only if they first had a deal for immunity, which was granted. With limited immunity secured, Hamilton spoke to investigators as they sat around a table in a nearby conference room. The federal investigators asked if Hamilton knew anything about Armstrong being an owner of the Tailwind team? “No.”

  Where were the drugs coming from? “Different places, including Bruyneel and Armstrong.”

  Did Armstrong ever give you any drugs? “Once, he mailed EPO from Texas to me in Massachusetts. Another time, he dropped testosterone oil onto my tongue.”

  For three hours, Hamilton spoke to investigators as he gripped one of his legs with both hands. He gripped that leg so hard and for so long that blood from a large wound on the leg—suffered when Hamilton fell jogging—seeped through his pants.

  The day Hamilton spoke with the federal investigators, Armstrong tried to make a final mark on the Tour de France. His hopes of winning an eighth time were long gone. But he might still win a stage—he had won twenty-five previously—and Stage 16 was his last, best chance to experience a Tour victory.

  He had come to the stage in 38th place. He had taken it easy in previous days, several times slowing up before a stage finish to thank fans for coming. L’Equipe poked fun at his lack of effort, saying t
hat he started the Tour as a professional cyclist, then became a tourist on a bike, then was simply a tourist.

  But while Hamilton testified, Armstrong made it into an early breakaway on the 124-mile route with four grueling climbs and remained out front until the Frenchman Pierrick Fedrigo—seven years younger—outsprinted him to the finish.

  It enraged him. Armstrong barreled through the crowd on his bike. At one point, for no apparent reason, he lowered a shoulder and body-checked a gray-haired man, nearly knocking him down. At the team bus, Armstrong twice pushed a fan trying to take a photo, finally snapping, “Get off me, get off!”

  Armstrong knew he needed help. Not on his bike; it was too late for that. He needed to control the narrative of his story. So in the middle of the Tour, he and his personal lawyer, Tim Herman, decided to try to dig up dirt on Novitzky. Herman would pay $50,000 to the lobbying firm the Ben Barnes Group to “raise concerns” about Novitzky in Congress.

  Armstrong also spent some of his downtime at the Tour meeting and hiring Mark Fabiani, a political spin doctor who represented President Bill Clinton during the Whitewater scandal.

  Fabiani would help with the public relations aspect of Armstrong’s federal case. First, he told Armstrong to stop talking to reporters until a countering narrative was in place. It would go like this: Armstrong would say the government should not waste taxpayer dollars on the investigation of a cyclist who’d supposedly doped in Europe a decade before. He would attack the credibility of accusers. The effort also would stress Armstrong’s persona as a heroic cancer survivor.

  As it happened, Armstrong had a PR team of sorts already at work. Dozens of Livestrong workers and volunteers were at the Tour, spreading the pro-Armstrong and pro-Livestrong message. Along the Tour’s course and in the start and finish towns of stages, they sold Livestrong bracelets for a euro, about $1.30 each, to raise money for cancer survivors in France. They handed out chalk so fans could write messages on the road.