Wheelmen: Lance Armstrong, the Tour De France, and the Greatest Sports Conspiracy Ever

by Reed Albergotti

  Armstrong was holding on to his position in the Vuelta. He was in ninth place on September 25, before the final mountain stage, a 130-mile monster that finished atop the 6,200-foot Alto de Navacerrada. The weather was cold and rainy, with temperatures on the mountain peaks reaching only 34 degrees. Riding a bicycle in 34 degrees is a bit like jumping into a lake in Minnesota in February: It’s painful. Armstrong decided that this day—the most painful day—was going to be his day.

  He began at the base of the climb with some of the best riders in the world around him—Roberto Heras, José María Jiménez, Fernando Escartín, Andrei Zintchenko. But Armstrong remained steady, staying on their wheels and alongside them as he crossed the finish line in the cold rain. By the end of the stage, Armstrong had moved up in the standings, to sixth place. After finishing third in the time trial the next day, he was in fourth place overall, where he remained.

  Those who had seen Armstrong race before cancer could tell from the way he raced the Vuelta that he was a different rider. He waited for the right moments to attack, and conserved energy whenever he could. He was a more mature rider, more tactical. Though he had lost the explosive power that had helped him to win one-day races, he had gained the mental fortitude that enabled him to keep up on long, steady climbs that went on day after day.

  In addition to boosting his confidence, Armstrong’s success at the Vuelta and in the other minor stage races in Europe boosted his bottom line. In order to incentivize Armstrong to do more races in Europe, his Postal contract offered him bonus money for gaining UCI points, which he earned by placing well in certain races. In the past, that money would have been paid by Montgomery Securities, Thom Weisel’s investment bank. But in 1997, Montgomery Securities was acquired by NationsBank, which had then acquired BankAmerica (which became Bank of America). Weisel had become locked in a power struggle over control of various divisions in what had been his company. In September of 1998, while Armstrong was in the middle of his amazing Vuelta performance, Weisel finally resigned from the company he had once owned and was all too happy to inform Bank of America that they now owed Lance Armstrong, a cyclist they had probably never heard of, more than $1 million. Weisel then bought Montgomery Sports from Bank of America for $1, and promptly merged it with Disson Furst and Partners, the company Steve Disson had founded years earlier.

  During the Vuelta, Johan Bruyneel, a former competitor, walked up to Armstrong at the end of one stage and said, “Whew, some result.” Armstrong was gracious. The exchange was a short one, but long enough for Bruyneel to see in Armstrong’s intensely focused eyes something he had never observed during the years he had raced against him: a desire to win that ran deep, all the way to Armstrong’s soul. In the past, Bruyneel thought of Armstrong’s competitiveness as shallow—like that of a crazy uncle who wants to beat his nephew at Ping-Pong, or a teenager with his first car who wants to beat his friend in a drag race. But now, Armstrong’s eyes revealed an intensity of will that was new.

  The next day, Bruyneel’s phone rang. It was Lance. Emboldened by his strong finish, he told Bruyneel that he felt the team needed more structure. The Postal team lacked vision, he said. “Can I have Gorski call you?” Armstrong asked. Bruyneel wasn’t sure what Armstrong had in mind, but he figured that he might be proposing some sort of consulting gig. Sure, he replied.

  Just a few weeks earlier, Bruyneel had been a cyclist like Armstrong. He had been in the Tour de France while the Festina scandal was erupting and had been one of the riders sitting on the pavement, protesting the police raids and the crackdown on doping. Raised in cycling-crazed Belgium, Bruyneel grew up racing. Although nobody ever thought he had superstar potential, he was strong enough to become a known quantity in the junior racing circuit, and later, to Bruyneel’s surprise, in 1992, he had been given a spot on Spain’s ONCE team.

  A day or two later, Bruyneel got a call from Mark Gorski: “So Lance says you’re interested in becoming the director of our team?” This was not what Bruyneel was expecting to hear. The job he was being offered was already held by Johnny Weltz, Eddie B’s replacement. Armstrong wasn’t impressed with Weltz, whom he thought lacked tactical savvy. So Armstrong was determined to give Weltz’s job away, insisting to Weisel and Gorski that the team had to hire Bruyneel as directeur sportif. The term, translated from French, means simply “sport director” but is the cycling equivalent of a head coach. The sport director decides everything from what the hotels should serve the team for dinner to what tactical role each rider on the team will play.

  For Bruyneel to get this job was sort of akin to the second-string quarterback of the New England Patriots retiring, and then a few days later being hired as the head coach of the New York Jets. Astonished by this sudden change of fortune, Bruyneel accepted the offer.

  As a rider, Bruyneel was considered a master of strategic thinking. He began competing before cyclists used radios to communicate with a team director. This meant that most of the information he got about the status of a given race came either from witnessing it firsthand or from motorcycles that carried chalkboards with information written on them. If a group of riders was in a breakaway up the road, the motorcycle drivers would drive up ahead, use a stopwatch to record the gap, and then write the number on the chalkboard. In order to assess who the overall leader was at any given moment and make strategic decisions about when to hang back and when to try to sprint forward, riders had to keep track of where each rider stood in the general classification (the GC) and be smart enough to figure out the math in their heads. For instance, if a breakaway contained a rider who was two minutes down in the GC, and the breakaway was three minutes up the road, that rider would be, in effect, winning the race by only one minute, and therefore a target. On the other hand, if all the riders in the breakaway were more than fifteen minutes down in the GC, the top riders in the race wouldn’t have any reason to chase them down. This was a lot of thinking and strategizing for riders under extreme physical duress. But Bruyneel had been a master of it.

  Bruyneel immediately began talking to Armstrong about his goals for the following season. Armstrong figured he would target the same races he had won before his cancer—the one-day classics and the world championships. But Bruyneel had another thought: If Armstrong could finish fourth in the Vuelta, who was to say he couldn’t win the Tour de France? Armstrong had once struggled just to finish the race. “Win it?” he asked incredulously.

  Bruyneel explained his reasoning. In the past, Armstrong had won stages in the Tour, which showed that he could compete at that level. He lacked only the endurance capacity to keep up in the mountains. But he had never trained for the Tour in the correct way. He had always tired himself out with a racing schedule focused on the classics and the world championships. Now that he had, quite by accident, discovered his potential by resting during the 1998 season and then racing the Vuelta fresh, imagine: What could he do if he consciously focused all his energies on the Tour de France?

  A cancer survivor who had seen death up close coming back to win the Tour de France—the prospect of such an astonishing outcome was worth the gamble. Armstrong had just earned $1 million in bonuses while still building his strength post-cancer. If he won the Tour de France, he would earn multiples of that, including endorsements.

  It did not take long for Armstrong to convince himself that winning the Tour de France was a sure thing, even if the rest of the world thought he had long odds. In the late winter of 1998, Armstrong was in Minneapolis visiting Kristin’s parents when Greg and Kathy were invited over for dinner at the Richards’ house. About midway through dinner, Armstrong announced to the other five people at the table that he planned to win the 1999 Tour de France. “My goal is to win the Tour de France four times,” he said.

  “Wow,” LeMond said, not sure what to say. LeMond had watched Armstrong develop as a bike racer, knew Armstrong’s physiology, and thought there was no way Armstrong had a chance at winning the world’s biggest race. But he tried to play along, encou
raging Armstrong.

  On the way home, Greg turned to Kathy. “I feel sorry for him,” he said. “He’s delusional.”

  Meanwhile, Lance distanced himself from several of the people who invested the most time and effort in his success—including his mother, whose third marriage was falling apart, and J.T. Neal, who was fighting for his life and undergoing chemo. He also had a significant falling-out with John Korioth, his best friend and cycling buddy, who had put his heart into building the foundation, which by then had three full-time employees and rental space in a downtown Austin house. Korioth had a disagreement with the foundation’s board, which was forcing him out. When Lance took the side of the board without first reaching out to him to hear his own version of events, Korioth felt rejected and hurt. He had developed a brotherly love for Lance, particularly when Lance was recovering from cancer. The two men wouldn’t speak again for three years.

  Armstrong and Bruyneel spent the off-season preparing a plan and training for the race, with Ferrari as part of the team. Ferrari observed Armstrong riding up mountain passes and equipped his bike with a set of sensors that measured the wattage, or power output, he was producing with each pedal stroke. After each climb, he would record the average wattage generated on the climb and divide it by Armstrong’s weight, entering the resulting number on his spreadsheets and using it to prescribe the next workout. A typical cyclist might put out 2 or 3 watts per kilogram of body weight. To win the Tour de France, Ferrari calculated that Armstrong needed to generate about 6.5 watts per kilo—a number he arrived at through his intimate knowledge of many of the top riders in the peloton. Aside from his spreadsheet skills, Ferrari was good at his job because he understood what performance-enhancing drugs could and couldn’t do. They couldn’t turn mediocre endurance athletes into great ones. But what these drugs could do was allow an athlete to keep pushing at his maximum pace for a longer period of time. For instance, Armstrong may have been able to push 400 watts for a half hour up a mountain climb, but could he do it on every climb during the 21-day Tour de France? Probably not. With a steady dose of EPO, or blood transfusions, however, he might be able to maintain that pace.

  Armstrong needed to put thousands of difficult training miles in to reach this goal. He needed to get stronger, and to lose weight as the July start date for the Tour de France got closer. So in the months leading up to the race, his life consisted of bike riding and sleep. It was a difficult, solitary life, away from his wife. While Armstrong stayed in Nice, Kristin stayed in Austin, where she was attempting to get pregnant via in vitro fertilization treatments, using sperm that Armstrong had banked before his chemotherapy. She also began keeping a journal of Armstrong’s comeback story that she hoped to show their future child.

  During the spring months, Armstrong rode many of the same climbs that would be included in the 1999 Tour de France. When riding up a mountain, cyclists learn very quickly that the roads do not go up and up at a constant gradient. The road is steeper in some sections, and flattens out in others. The road twists and turns, and the quality of the pavement also determines the difficulty of the road. Every cyclist has preferences. Some prefer steeper roads, some like more gradual ones. Ferrari and Bruyneel wanted to know which roads Armstrong favored, so they could decide where it would be wise to attack. And Armstrong needed to ride the roads he didn’t like over and over again, to train for his weaknesses. Those were the little things that would give Armstrong a mental edge over his competitors, many of whom might be riding the roads for the first time during the race.

  On April 24, Armstrong entered Amstel Gold and finished in second place, losing in a sprint to Dutchman Michael Boogerd. The strong finish was a good sign, but at the race, Armstrong’s relationship with Frankie Andreu, who was to play a key part in Lance’s plan for the Tour, began to fracture.

  The row began days earlier when Betsy, who was pregnant, sent an e-mail to Kristin, telling her about an anonymous person on a cycling Internet message board who had written a post questioning what kind of mother Kristin would be and whether she would hire a nanny to look after her new son. Betsy had jumped on the message board to defend her friend, arguing that Kristin would never be one of those moms who practically lets a nanny raise her kids. But when Kristin read Betsy’s e-mail, she started to cry and called Lance, who then picked up the phone, steaming mad, and called Frankie. He yelled at Frankie for indirectly making Kristin cry. So Frankie picked up the phone and called Betsy, who tried to explain.

  “There’s got to be more to it than that,” he said to Betsy, who showed him the e-mail exchange.

  Now Frankie was pissed off at Lance for overreacting and causing a huge stir over nothing. For days, both men brooded, hashing out the problem.

  On April 21, Betsy sent Lance a scathing e-mail.

  Don’t even get me started. You can be disrespectful to so many people and so many people put up with it. I won’t and don’t have to. Kristin and I don’t have a problem with what happened; it’s cleared up.

  Sorry, Lance, I’m not going to not stand up to you like so many others.

  As both men were getting ready for Amstel Gold to start, Lance bumped into Frankie.

  “Sorry,” he said.

  “Fuck you!” Frankie shot back.

  “What’s your problem?” Lance asked.

  “You made such a huge deal out of something so small,” Frankie said. “You blew it out of proportion. It’s fucking dumb.”

  “Dumb?” Lance said. “I’ll fuck you.”

  Both men began yelling obscenities. And then Lance crossed a line and began to threaten and taunt Frankie.

  “You’ll regret messing with me! I’ll make you pay!” he shouted. “I’ll make sure you’re not on the Tour team. I have the power. I can!”

  “You don’t scare me,” Frankie said.

  After the race, the two men didn’t speak for nearly two months. When Frankie’s son was born in Michigan, Frankie sent out a mass e-mail to the entire team announcing the birth but left Armstrong off the distribution list. Lance was pissed off, and thought Frankie was acting unprofessionally. Then, a couple of weeks before the Tour, Armstrong sent Frankie an e-mail.

  As we approach the Tour and Johan is trying to decide on the selection I can tell you that you are not, yes I said NOT, currently doing the Tour de France. I have been focusing on the Tour all year and am ready for a big ride so of course my input matters. While I am very pissed about the last few months I realize that I need all the help/support in July and I know that you are one of the strongest guys on the team. Why are you not selected? Because, and this has nothing to do w/ me, others have seen your deteriorating attitude this year and they question you [sic] commitment to the team. I can’t believe you have all of a sudden become selfish. I know you must have been stressed as hell w/ the baby coming and all but is that the only reason for your unhappiness? Whatever the reason it has showed.

  Frankie, I am not willing to scrap a relationship of 7 years because of a couple of bad months and I know you want to be a part of this team for the Tour and for next year but we have to know you are committed.

  Armstrong then followed up by forwarding Betsy’s April 21 e-mail. “While I was disgusted at the time I realized it wasn’t even worth a response however in the future [sic] I suggest your wife keep her opinions to herself,” Armstrong wrote.

  Frankie sent back a long e-mail, ending with, “If the team has a problem with my attitude, commitment, selfishness or whatever and don’t [sic] want me to help them at the Tour then tell Johan to book me a ticket home. I have a new born [sic] baby waiting for me. I’ve only been getting online every few days. Call if you want or I’ll see you in Nice if you want to talk.”

  Eventually, the two men worked out their differences, and Frankie was added to the Tour team. He was the most experienced veteran Tour rider on the team, and Armstrong needed him. Frankie also needed the extra pay that came with being on the Tour de France team. But the relationship had cooled. Frankie thought he’
d gotten a glimpse of the real Lance Armstrong, and he didn’t like what he saw. And Lance had begun to wonder whether he could trust Frankie.

  In the lead-up to the race, all the teams faced a new dilemma over whether to continue using performance-enhancing drugs while taking ever greater precautions against being caught, or to quit. The already strict French laws had been tightened even further, and stiff penalties awaited anyone caught with EPO or other banned drugs. Some French teams figured they would play it safe and had asked their riders to quit doping cold turkey before the Tour de France.

  But Armstrong and Bruyneel had no intention of racing clean. EPO was a central part of their plan to hand Armstrong the team victory. And neither of them believed the other teams were going to race clean, either, despite the propaganda to that effect. For US Postal, the doping arms race was very much on.

  Ahead of the 1999 season, the team let go of Pedro Celaya, whom Armstrong felt was too conservative for their approach. Though Celaya had helped the team with doping, he also tried to encourage riders to see how much they could get out of themselves without drugs. “Might as well race clean,” Armstrong once remarked to Jonathan Vaughters, referring to Celaya’s stinginess with drugs. “He wants to take your temperature to give you even a caffeine pill.” Armstrong was so concerned that his teammates weren’t getting adequate quantities of drugs from Celaya that during the 1998 World Championships in the Netherlands, he’d enlisted Kristin to do what he considered Celaya’s job: She wrapped cortisone tablets in tinfoil and handed them out to Vaughters and others on the team.