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

by Reed Albergotti

  It was too little, too late. Whisnant called some of his mentors and discussed the situation and came to the conclusion that he needed to resign. He knew it would hurt his career to leave so abruptly. He had just sold the house, and it would cost him a lot of money to undo his real estate transactions. But six weeks after moving to Austin, Whisnant resigned and walked out on Lance and the foundation.

  • • •

  In the spring of 2001, in part because of his problems with French law enforcement, Armstrong moved his European base of operations from Nice to the Spanish town of Girona, where a tight-knit contingent of American bicycle racers had lived for years. He and Kristin still owned their French villa, as well as two homes in Austin, but now they also had the first floor of what had once been a small palace in one of the most historic streets of Girona, a two-thousand-year-old city of about eighty thousand people in northeast Catalonia. Located on a narrow cobblestone footpath, the apartment had a wrought iron terrace and Gothic arches and cornices, as well as small gardens and a small family chapel with a wooden altar. Lance had picked out their new Girona home on his own while Kristin remained in Austin, trying to become pregnant again through in vitro fertilization. In April she called to tell him she was pregnant with twins.

  The Girona location brought him into closer contact with his teammates, including George Hincapie and Tyler Hamilton, who lived in a complex of apartments there during the racing season. The migration of American cyclists to Girona had begun in 1997, when Weisel and Johnny Weltz were putting together a European-style team capable of winning a spot in the Tour de France.

  By 2001, following the Postal team’s successes, some of the American riders had earned enough in salary and bonuses to be able to afford to bring their wives and girlfriends to Spain, too. “You can’t go outside without seeing a wife, a rider, a girlfriend, a soigneur, a director, a team car,” Haven Hamilton, then Tyler Hamilton’s wife, wrote in an e-mail to Betsy Andreu. “You should see it here in Girona—grand central station,” she added.

  Girona also had the advantage of being a short train ride to Valencia, where team doctor Luis Garcia del Moral had his sports medicine clinic. That meant that Armstrong and the other riders could go there for treatment without crossing international borders and arousing suspicion.

  Girona became a sort of hub for performance-enhancing drugs. Laws against doping in Spain at the time were much more relaxed than they were in France, and there was a pharmacist in town who was more than willing to fulfill practically any prescription for any drug on the market. If a cyclist had been prescribed a round of EPO by a team doctor, all he had to do was stroll down to the pharmacy and order it. If drug testers came to town, the first rider to notice the tester would alert other riders by text message: “The vampires are here.” Riders who knew they had drugs in their system would hide, or inject themselves with masking agents and other substances to fool the tests. The US Postal riders, and other Americans riding for other teams, felt emboldened to do whatever they wanted in Spain.

  However, the doping began taking a toll on some of the wives and girlfriends. The women talked to each other about the health risks of the drugs. They told each other they wished the men did not have to take these substances, some of them mysterious and with unknown side effects.

  Kristin resented the drug testers, or “doping control officers (DCOs),” who would show up at the Armstrong home in Austin during the off-season. The Austin-based testers were typically a husband and wife team, and they were hired by the US Anti-Doping Agency to administer unannounced tests.

  In 2000, USADA began these “surprise” out-of-competition visits to cyclists’ homes. Cyclists were required to inform USADA of their whereabouts and when they’d be in the States. Lance hated having to fax or e-mail the testers about his movements. He felt he was “under constant surveillance.”

  The testers in Austin would ring the bell, and when Lance or Kristin opened the door, they’d say, “Random drug control,” and hand Lance a piece of paper instructing him of his rights. If he declined the test, it would be considered an automatic positive. The procedure took fifteen or twenty minutes. First, at least one inspector would accompany Lance into the bathroom, where he’d urinate in a container. His pants would have to be down around his knees, and his shirt yanked up to his chest, so the tester could see that no device was being used to somehow switch samples. He would then distribute his pee into two other containers, the A sample and B sample. Generally, the testers would immediately check the pH of the urine. A high pH, for instance, could indicate a cyclist was taking sodium bicarbonate to mask something. These visits often involved paperwork to document the circumstances of the urine sample collection, and then the sample was mailed by the testers to a lab for analysis. Generally, Lance’s urine samples were sent to a lab in Los Angeles.

  That year, the day before Thanksgiving, Kristin had a routine prenatal checkup, where the obstetrician told her to call Lance, get home to pack a bag, then go immediately to the hospital to prepare to give birth. Lance was standing in the foyer, holding their bags, when the drug testers suddenly arrived at their front door. “My wife is in labor. So it better be fast,” Lance told them.

  Then, when the twins, Grace and Isabelle, were about a week old, the drug testers showed up again, at about 7:00 A.M. The babies were sleeping and Armstrong’s small white Maltese, Boone, started barking. Kristin opened the door. “It’s seven in the morning!” she said. The woman tester handed her the paperwork. Lance came to the door. “What are you doing?” he asked. After they tested Lance and completed the paperwork, Kristin, visibly upset, walked the drug testers to the front door. When they reached the doorway, Kristin threw her arm out as a barricade, leaned into the woman’s face, and snarled, “I don’t want you coming over here early in the morning like this and disrupting this family ever again.”

  • • •

  As the allegations about Lance mounted and his stature grew, he built an intricate layer of protection around himself, with a circle of influential friends and associates. The companies that sponsored him, his doctors, and most of his close confidants closed ranks around him. Nike, for example, consistently backed him. In 2000, they began airing commercials in which Armstrong is shown taking a blood test in front of reporters and then saying, “What am I on? I’m on my bike, busting my ass six hours a day.”

  After having put their friendship on deep freeze, in 2001 during the Tour de France, Lance reached out to his old best friend and biking buddy John Korioth. He’d seen a story in the July Texas Monthly magazine in which Korioth was quoted as defending Lance. Korioth said, “Beyond the health reasons for not doing it, Lance has to say, ‘What does something like that do to my reputation?’ US Postal would drop him. He’d lose his sponsorships. He has everything to lose and nothing to gain.” So Lance deputized Stapleton’s assistant, then in France, to call his old buddy, reaching him at home in Austin. “Look, Lance is racing in the Tour de France right now, otherwise he would have called you himself,” the assistant said. Lance, she told him, would like to fly him to Paris to see the last two days of the Tour. Korioth thought it over. He had been disappointed in how Lance had treated him when he was forced out of the foundation. But he decided to go.

  The night he arrived in France, Korioth met Stapleton at a dinner party. “What the fuck am I doing here?” he asked Stapleton, who told him Lance would explain later. The next day, Korioth went to the start of the race and boarded the Postal team bus. He sat down next to Lance, and the two men talked about their feud. “Man, that was a tough time,” Lance said, adding that he was confused after listening to the complaints of the foundation board members. “You’re listening to people give you advice. You don’t know what’s right. You don’t know what’s wrong.”

  “Well, you could have always called me,” Korioth responded.

  They agreed to renew their friendship, but Korioth told Lance he wouldn’t work for him or his foundation ever again. Years later, Lan
ce invested in a couple of bars Korioth was running in Austin, and another potential enemy was made an ally.

  • • •

  Once the Postal team embarked on an organized, systematic doping program, Lance’s most important defenders may have been his own domestiques. They had a vested interest in his success, especially since it was customary for the Tour winner to divide the $400,000 prize money among his teammates. On top of that, Lance would double the amount, using his personal money to add to their winnings.

  His domestiques also had a very personal reason for being discreet, since several of them were working with Michele Ferrari. Johan Bruyneel had facilitated this during a meeting at the Postal training camp in late 2000. He told the riders that each of them could meet with Ferrari, but if they decided to hire him, they would be responsible for paying him out of their own salaries.

  George Hincapie was among those who hired Ferrari, paying him $15,000 for his services during the 2001 season, and keeping him on for five years after that. Hincapie reached out to Ferrari because he felt Ferrari could help him figure out a training plan incorporating blood transfusions instead of primarily EPO. As far as Ferrari was concerned, Armstrong’s close call with testing positive for EPO during the 2001 Tour de Suisse had been the last straw. So he was now pushing transfusions. In fact, Ferrari thought, if transfusions were done in combination with small, undetectable doses of EPO, that combination could be even more effective at delivering oxygen to the muscles than just the EPO. Floyd Landis was another rider on the US Postal team who eventually became involved in doping. At the end of the 2001 season, Hamilton left the Postal team to pursue his own ambitions as a team leader, joining the Danish Team CSC. To replace Hamilton, the team brought in Floyd Landis, who arrived at the team’s training camp for new riders in December 2001. Landis had just signed a $60,000-a-year contract to race for the team, and he was thrilled by the chance to be on a team led by such a heroic athlete. But the Lance he got to know in those early days didn’t line up with the Lance he’d only read about. Most of what Landis knew about his hero, he had read in Lance’s bestselling memoir, It’s Not About the Bike. He’d devoured the chronicle of Lance’s comeback from cancer, and some things in the book stood out to him more than others, like the fact that Armstrong called himself a devoted family man, even going so far as to say he was offended by pornography. Lance had made that remark at a point in his book where he was describing being offered a girlie magazine at a sperm bank when he was storing sperm before chemo. Even to Landis, who had been raised in a Mennonite family in Pennsylvania’s Amish country and who used to race mountain bikes in sweat pants because spandex was too risqué, Armstrong’s portrayal of himself as such a straight arrow came across as a bit extreme.

  And once he got to know him, he realized just how far from the truth that depiction was. One night during the training camp, Landis and a few of the other new riders on the team piled into a black Suburban with Lance behind the wheel. They were headed to the Yellow Rose, a gentleman’s club in Austin. Armstrong was driving so fast, running so many stoplights and stop signs, that Dave Zabriskie, another of the new riders, turned to Landis and asked, “Are there no cops in this town?” The US Postal team got its own booth at the strip club, and took turns getting lap dances from the scantily clad women. After leaving the Yellow Rose, Armstrong drove the riders to Bill Stapleton’s office. More dancers arrived. As the men partied into the early morning hours, Armstrong retreated to one of the private offices. He sat at a desk with two completely naked women beside him. Landis noticed what looked like cocaine on the desk. When Armstrong looked up and saw Landis staring at him, he shut the door, and that was the last he saw of him that evening.

  Landis’s eye-opening training camp seemed to him an appropriate time to broach another topic at odds with Armstrong’s image in the United States: performance-enhancing drugs. He met Johan Bruyneel in the lobby of the Four Seasons Hotel, where he and most of the rest of the team were staying and, in vaguely worded language, asked what he would be expected to do beyond simply training and racing. Landis had, of course, heard stories about the use of drugs in the pro peloton and assumed he would be asked to use them, too. According to Landis, Bruyneel responded, “Look, just keep training and when the time comes, if it’s necessary, we’ll figure that out.”

  “The fact that he didn’t totally dismiss it was all I really needed to know,” Landis later said.

  And within a year, his time would indeed come.

  CHAPTER NINE

  DOMESTIC DISCORD AND THE DOMESTIQUE

  Floyd Landis was wearing bibbed spandex bike shorts over a thin, low-cut undershirt as he rode a stationary bike. His face was covered by a high-tech mask with tubes and wires coming out of it, connecting to a large machine with digital readouts and dozens of buttons. As he pedaled, a sports physiologist looked intently at the numbers. Every few minutes, he told Landis to pedal a little bit harder. Beneath the mask, sweat began to glaze Landis’s face, then to roll in rivulets from his forehead down to his nose and onto the floor.

  At the physiologist’s direction, he gradually built up his pace until he was pedaling madly in an all-out sprint, the stationary bike rocking back and forth, the whir of its tires against the resistance roller sounding like a V-8 engine in the small room. “Go, go, go,” the physiologist kept saying as Landis pushed himself to the maximum of his ability. And then finally, “Okay, you’re done.”

  Landis slowed down, slumping over the bike as he recovered from the effort, his chest expanding and contracting as he took massive gulps of air. Meanwhile, the physiologist was punching keys and looking at the computer monitors. After a few minutes of calculations, then double-checking of those calculations, he began to smile. Landis had registered an astonishingly high VO2 max score—the measure of maximum oxygen intake.

  The gist of the computer readouts was that Landis was extremely efficient at processing the air he sucked into his lungs. His body extracted oxygen and delivered it to his muscles at an incredibly high rate. In fact, he consumed more than 90 milliliters of oxygen per kilogram of his body weight, per minute. The average person consumes about 50 milliliters. This meant Landis was a remarkable physical specimen. Cyclists who can consume more oxygen can keep pedaling at a higher pace, for a longer period of time. The best endurance athletes generally average a VO2 max score in the low to mid 70s. Lance Armstrong’s was measured in the low 80s, making him more special than most, but hardly superhuman. Landis’s score of 90, significantly higher than Armstrong’s, meant he was off the charts in cardiovascular ability. And as the physiologist explained to Landis, it meant that his potential was enormous, limited only by his own desire and determination.

  Landis took that test long before he joined the US Postal Service team, and he knew there was more to bike racing than one number, albeit a significant one. But the result had made him feel he was special—destined for great things. On the Postal Service team, though, he’d been slotted to fill the role of one of the lowliest domestiques, whose job was simply to slog it out in races around the world, aiding other riders in their pursuit of glory. From his first day at training camp, when US Postal head coach Johan Bruyneel had given him a training schedule, it was clear that Bruyneel viewed Landis as a lower-level domestique, someone who would ride in support of one of the higher-level domestiques—someone like Roberto Heras.

  But thinking back on the test, Landis knew it might not be long before he was riding on the nine-man Tour de France squad, shepherding Armstrong himself over the mountain passes. In fact, his physiology meant he might one day be riding the Tour to win it.

  Before Landis could even get invited onto the Tour de France squad, however, he needed to show that he could actually put his genetic gifts to use in the ultracompetitive European racing circuit. Plenty of physically gifted young athletes caved under pressure once they hit the professional ranks of Europe. This was such a common occurrence, it had become almost a cliché in American racing. A cycling
coach would spot a promising young rider, bring him in to a lab for testing, and discover that he was amazingly gifted. “This kid could be the next Greg LeMond,” he would proclaim. The young rider would think, “Great, if I’m the next Greg LeMond, all I have to do is get on my bike and go.” But as the rider rose through the ranks, he’d realize that winning required hard work and sacrifice. Other less gifted but more driven riders wouldn’t just roll over. They trained harder, wanted it more. On top of that, cycling doesn’t pay well unless a rider rises to the highest echelons. At some point, the gifted rider would quit the sport altogether, go to college, and make more money as some corporate middle manager.

  Aware of all the things that could go wrong, the US Postal team coaches chose Landis’s races carefully during the 2002 season. They wanted to test out his legs and see how well he could compete in a European peloton.

  Floyd shared an apartment in Girona that spring with Dave Zabriskie. Arriving in Spain, Landis had a lot of worries, serious financial problems, credit card debt and medical bills, and he was struggling to support his wife, Amber, and her six-year-old daughter, Ryan. Even so, he was there to focus on riding his bike. The team’s deal with Floyd paid him a salary of $60,000, but if he made the nine-man squad that raced in the Tour de France and the team won that event, then Landis would get about $50,000 more in prize money. Plus it was known that Lance sometimes threw in an additional bonus on top of that.

  In March, Landis finished third in the 12.7-mile individual time trial on the fourth day of Tirreno–Adriatico, a weeklong stage race that attracts the top talent from all over Europe. That was an impressive finish for a “neopro,” the term for a professional cyclist who has just gotten started in Europe. In May, he raced with the US Postal Service’s best climbers—including Armstrong—in the Midi Libre Grand Prix, a five-stage race in the south of France with several tough mountain climbs. Armstrong won and Landis finished in 37th place. Helping Armstrong win a stage race was something he could put on his cycling résumé. It meant the team had not wasted their money.