Frankie may have gone to Betsy’s defense, but he, too, was angry at his wife for stirring the pot. He knew Betsy was disgusted by the doping in the sport, and that she hated Armstrong because she viewed him as a ringleader. She told Frankie she supported Walsh’s efforts to out Armstrong. But she didn’t seem to grasp that the whole thing threatened to bring him down as well.
Andreu felt that what Walsh was doing was bad for the sport, and bad for him personally. He was now a respected television commentator for a sports network, and he liked his job and wanted to keep it. Over the years, he had come to think of Armstrong as something of an asshole. When Frankie refused to take the next step in his doping—to hire Ferrari—Armstrong began saying he wasn’t a “team player.” Frankie lost his contract and left the team. But Armstrong played nice with Frankie—when he needed something. The team hired Frankie as a coach for its lower-level riders in US races, and Andreu wondered if Armstrong orchestrated this to keep him quiet. But Frankie didn’t care, so long as Armstrong kept bringing more money into the sport and more attention.
While Walsh continued to work on his book, Armstrong was looking to another book to counterbalance whatever Walsh would end up writing about him. He had granted access to an amiable journalist named Daniel Coyle, who worked for Outside magazine. Coyle would end up spending part of the 2004 season with Armstrong, George Hincapie, and Floyd Landis, as well as Dr. Michele Ferrari. This gave him the closest view of the superstar that any American journalist had ever had. If Walsh’s book accused Armstrong of doping, it would have competition on the shelves from a friendlier book. “Coke. Nike. Subaru. If we’re fucking lying, we can kiss it all good-bye,” Bill Stapleton told Coyle, referring to three of Lance’s premier sponsors. “Does anybody think for a second that a secret that big wouldn’t come out?”
Coyle was independent, and had free rein to write anything he wanted about doping. Surely Coyle feared writing the doping story would come with lawsuits and attacks from Armstrong and his followers. But writing an intimate portrait on the hottest athlete on the planet was likely to be a bestseller. To help ensure “openness,” Coyle showed Lance and his people drafts of what he wrote, so they might respond and offer corrections. And in order to interview Ferrari, Coyle agreed that he would not ask Ferrari questions about doping. Coyle finished the book, and in it, he explored what factors gave Armstrong the edge over his rivals. But he chose to tread delicately on the doping topic. He gave an airing to Walsh and his investigative work, but focused his story on Armstrong’s obsessive training and management style.
In April 2004, Armstrong won the Tour de Georgia, a seven-day race that had become the biggest stage race in the United States. Armstrong’s win drew unprecedented attention to the race and millions of dollars in tourism money to the state of Georgia. Soon after, however, there was bad news: The US Postal Service, after years of taking flack for using taxpayer money to sponsor a cycling team, had decided to pull out. Armstrong was in familiar territory—beginning the season knowing there might not be a sponsor the next year.
In May, Armstrong was back in Europe, mostly in Girona, training with George Hincapie and Floyd Landis. Michele Ferrari, who was facing an upcoming trial in Italy over allegations that he was responsible for doping cyclists all over the world, was there with them on most days, seemingly unfazed by the damning testimony. As usual, he followed the riders up and down the slopes of the Pyrenees in his old station wagon. At the tops of the climbs, Ferrari would prick their fingers, take a drop of blood, and analyze their lactate levels on a small, portable machine. Then he would analyze their wattage numbers. The wattage was measured by a tiny stress meter placed inside the bicycle crank, which was made by a Danish company and cost thousands of dollars. Ferrari would compare the lactate in their muscles with the amount of power they were producing to figure out their fitness level, and whether they were on track for Tour de France–level form.
While the group trained in the mountains during the week, Sheryl Crow spent many of her days in Southern France, not far from Girona, sightseeing, shopping, writing music, and seeing Armstrong between training rides.
After one of their training days, Ferrari told Landis that he was impressed with his numbers. In fact, Landis had attained Ferrari’s “magic number.” He could, for a sustained period of time, produce more than 6.7 watts of energy per kilogram of body weight. This meant, by Ferrari’s calculations, that he was potentially good enough to win the Tour de France. Landis’s impressive numbers made Armstrong hungrier—and slightly agitated. He couldn’t be weaker than one of his domestiques. But Ferrari’s data was good news for Landis, who was thinking about leaving the US Postal team. Other teams were courting him. Landis was tempted because, despite all the money that was flowing in, he still felt he deserved more. And he needed it. He spent lavishly on cars, his house, gifts for his family. He wasn’t saving and he again had credit card debt.
Also, Landis had begun to resent the system of the US Postal Service team—the way everything was centered on Armstrong, and the rest of the riders were just chattel. Landis had noticed that Armstrong always rode around on newer training bicycles than the rest of the team, and never had any mechanical issues. He was suspicious that USPS was holding back equipment from the rest of the riders.
Landis placed a phone call to Scott Daubert, the Trek employee in charge of the sponsorship, and asked him how many bikes the company supplied to the team. “Dozens” was the reply. Enough to supply every rider on the team with a few frames each season. So where did they go? Landis wondered. He called another friend, at Shimano, the component maker that supplied the teams with gears, chains, brakes, cogs, cranks, and every other piece of equipment on the frame. The answer was the same: USPS got enough componentry to supply each rider several times over.
After the Paris–Roubaix race in April, Landis was having dinner with a few of the other riders and several staff members, including Geert “Duffy” Duffeleer, who was in charge of the team’s equipment. When Landis confronted him about the bikes, Duffy shot back, “Who do you think you are?!”
Later, Landis received a call from Bruyneel, who had gotten wind of the confrontation. Bruyneel explained to Landis that the team sold much of the equipment it received on the secondary market in Belgium. The bikes, which could run more than $5,000 at retail, generated cash for the team to buy performance-enhancing drugs and medications off the books. This explanation did not make Landis feel any better.
Armstrong’s patience with Landis’s insubordinate attitude was wearing thin. Landis by now realized just how talented he was, and he wanted the team to put more resources into helping him rack up some high-profile wins—and he let Armstrong know it. But Armstrong dismissed Landis. There was no way the team was going to divert resources from its one and only goal: getting Lance his sixth win. Landis felt he was being brushed aside.
Armstrong had bigger problems to deal with at the time than an uppity domestique. David Walsh’s book, which now had a title, L.A. Confidentiel, was due out in June, just before the 2004 Tour de France. It had become a major worry, and Armstrong turned to litigation to deal with it. He hired lawyers in France and the UK, who promptly sued the authors, the publishers, the sources, as well as a magazine that ran an excerpt of the book and the newspaper Walsh worked for, The Sunday Times, which had also run a preview of it. The legal assault began just as the book was hitting the bookstores in France but in time to prevent its publication in the UK. Lance’s lawyers also asked the French courts for an “emergency ruling” to insert a statement from Lance into Walsh’s book, denying the allegations, but a judge turned down the request. They then sued the publisher in French court, asking that the book be taken off the shelves. Though Lance eventually withdrew his claims before a trial could begin, he later claimed to have won every case. (His claim against The Sunday Times, however, was later settled, in his favor.)
June’s Dauphiné Libéré was Armstrong’s biggest moment to date of the 2004 season. His
form there would be a predictor of whether he could produce a record sixth win in next month’s Tour de France. Iban Mayo, wearing the bright orange jersey of the Euskaltel-Euskadi team, prevailed in the opening 3.35-mile time trial. Armstrong’s former teammate, Tyler Hamilton, finished second. Armstrong was in third, 1.41 seconds off the leading time. The result was not what he’d hoped for, but not dreadful.
The Dauphiné organizers had scheduled another individual time trial up Mont Ventoux. As time trials go, this was one of the more painful ones. Amateur cyclists could spend the better part of a day climbing Mont Ventoux. By the end of the time trial, Armstrong had finished a disappointing fifth place—nearly 2 minutes behind Mayo’s winning time of 55 minutes, 51 seconds, and 1.5 minutes behind Hamilton.
After the ride, Armstrong stormed into his trailer and slammed the door. He was fuming. He picked up his cell phone and dialed the UCI president, Hein Verbruggen. Hamilton and Mayo must be doping, Armstrong told Verbruggen. They couldn’t possibly ride that fast. He went on to tell Verbruggen that drug testers needed to keep a closer eye on Mayo and Hamilton and test them more often. Armstrong finished the Dauphiné in fourth place, more than 2 minutes behind Mayo and nearly 1.5 minutes behind Hamilton. His Tour de France hopes were looking grim.
Armstrong also continued his attack on L.A. Confidentiel, declaring in a news conference at which Walsh was present that “extraordinary accusations demand extraordinary proof” and that Walsh and his coauthor, Pierre Ballester, had failed to provide such proof. Indeed, they had not revealed all of their sources.
Behind the scenes, Bill Stapleton and Bart Knaggs were doing everything they could think of to undermine Walsh. Besides trying to find out who, exactly, Walsh had talked with, and what, exactly, he had gathered on Armstrong, they were looking for any dirt they could find on Walsh himself. And they were putting so much pressure on Frankie Andreu to help them soil Walsh’s reputation that Andreu felt flat-out threatened. When Stapleton and Knaggs tracked him down during the lead-up to the Tour de France, which he was covering for the Outdoor Life Network, he surreptitiously flipped on his tape recorder.
“I ain’t got that much time,” Andreu said.
“You know your wife is a source for Walsh,” Knaggs shot back.
“No, no, no,” Andreu said.
Knaggs was insistent that Betsy must have been Walsh’s source. “Cuz, see, he’s talked to other people about her and said that she’s very courageous, and she’s willing to take a stand against Lance,” Knaggs said. “She knows things about Lance . . . that she’s told him.”
Knaggs thought Betsy had told Walsh about the hospital room scene in 1996, when Lance admitted to using drugs. But when Frankie denied it, Knaggs and Stapleton pushed him harder.
“Would Betsy be willing to sign an affidavit saying that she wasn’t the source for Walsh?” Knaggs asked. “That’s very important, cuz it says that he’s lying. He lied about sources.”
But Betsy was the source. She had been actively and enthusiastically helping Walsh.
Andreu was caught in a difficult bind. He was trying to cover for his wife and, at the same time, stay out of the crosshairs of Armstrong, whom he knew to be one of the most powerful and vindictive people in the world of sports. Stapleton said he’d be willing to “draw up something” for her to sign. “She could help,” he said.
Andreu tried to change the subject, pull the conversation away from the affidavit idea. “I know Betsy doesn’t like Lance, but it’s all in our interest not to blow this whole thing up,” he said.
Stapleton and Knaggs didn’t succeed in getting what they wanted from Andreu. But the public and much of the press seemed to be siding with Armstrong, whose historic effort to win his sixth Tour de France was generating so much excitement that it drowned out the critics. New York Times columnist George Vecsey wrote another glowing column defending Armstrong, giving L.A. Confidentiel short shrift, and even repeating with approval Armstrong’s words about “extraordinary accusations.”
Armstrong appeared to have beaten David Walsh. As the Tour de France began, the mainstream press was paying little attention to the book. But if Armstrong was winning the public relations battle against Walsh, Armstrong’s team was now worried about a far more formidable foe: the French police. Would they crack down on the team, perhaps with a raid of their hotel rooms or by planting bugs or surveillance cameras? Because the Tour de France required every team to stay at designated hotels, the police had the advantage of always knowing in advance where they would be.
This kind of scrutiny could be disastrous for the team, because even as Stapleton and Knaggs were doing damage control in an attempt to cover up Lance’s past doping, the team was engaged in its most brazen acts yet. The doping effort had become more complicated than ever, and more vulnerable to exposure. The riders could no longer just take a train from Girona to Garcia del Moral’s clinic in Valencia for their transfusions, because the US Postal team had fired the doctor the year before. Without access to the clinic, the team sometimes had to fly into Belgium, where the new team doctor was based, to have their blood swapped out ahead of the Tour. Then they’d had to arrange for it to be secretly transported to France.
Armstrong let Sheryl Crow accompany him on a private jet to Belgium, where he conducted a blood transfusion. Rather than try to hide the transfusion from her, Armstrong was completely open about it. He trusted that Crow would have no desire to tell the press or anyone else about the team’s doping program. He explained that it was simply part of the sport—that all cyclists were doing the same thing.
It was a messy Tour de France for the US Postal team. But on television, it looked beautiful. Armstrong’s two biggest competitors in the Dauphiné—Iban Mayo and Tyler Hamilton—dropped out of the race before it was over. And just as he had been unable to do in previous Tours, Jan Ullrich couldn’t match Armstrong in the mountains. Armstrong turned the broadcast of the race into a picturesque travelogue through France, as he and his US Postal teammates floated up the narrow mountain roads with the Alps and the Pyrenees in the backdrop. But there were a few strange moments captured by the cameras that no one at the time knew what to make of.
At the start of the seventeenth stage, which was the final climbing day of the Tour, Armstrong was in the lead by almost 4 minutes. He had pummeled Jan Ullrich on the Alpe d’Huez time trial a day earlier, and now Ullrich was almost 8 minutes behind. The long brutal route before them that day was 127 miles long and had five major climbs. Armstrong was shepherded the entire length of that ascent by Floyd Landis, who stayed with him for every pedal stroke. Six hours after they had begun, when Armstrong reached the top of the final climb, Landis was still right beside him, in good form—another indication that Landis was destined for greatness.
Armstrong and Landis had about ten miles to go to the finish line and it was almost all downhill. Armstrong turned to Landis and asked him if he was a good descender. Armstrong, of course, knew that Floyd could descend with the best of them. But Floyd just smiled and said yes. Armstrong told him to go for it: Attack on the descent and win the stage. This was a rare offer. In none of his five winning Tour de France races had Armstrong ever offered a teammate a chance to win a stage.
Landis gunned it down the hill, but Jan Ullrich didn’t want to let Landis win, so he took off after him. Armstrong wasn’t about to let Ullrich go, and clung to his wheel. At the very end of the descent, it was clear that Landis was not going to win. He was wiped after having spent the whole day pushing the pace for Armstrong on the climbs, and now the other riders, including Ullrich, Ivan Basso, and Andreas Klöden—the top cyclists on the planet—were right on his wheel. Klöden went for the win, but Armstrong wouldn’t allow it. If Landis wasn’t going to win the stage victory, then Armstrong would. He passed Klöden right at the line and again pumped his fists in the air. It was a bravura show of absolute dominance.
The next day, on stage 18, Armstrong noticed that Filippo Simeoni was attacking the field and attempting
to make it into a breakaway group. Breakaway groups were reserved for riders who were so low down in the standings that it didn’t really matter if they got far ahead of the field on one stage. But it mattered to them, because doing well in a breakaway could make them look good and keep sponsors happy with their jersey logos plastered all over television. Simeoni fell into that category. But Armstrong would not allow Simeoni to have an ounce of glory. Simeoni was one of the riders who had testified against Michele Ferrari, saying that the doctor had told him how and when to use doping products. After that, Armstrong had blasted Simeoni in the press, calling him a “liar”—to which Simeoni had responded by suing Armstrong for defamation in an Italian court. Now when he saw Simeoni making for the breakaway, Armstrong was so enraged that he left the peloton and chased him down. As he put his hand on Simeoni’s back, the television announcers couldn’t quite figure out what Armstrong was doing. Speaking in Italian, Lance told Simeoni: “You made a mistake when you testified against Ferrari and you made a mistake when you sued me. I have a lot of time and money and I can destroy you.”
Next, the television commentators noticed that he was having discussions with other riders in the breakaway group, but they didn’t know what that was about, either. In fact, Armstrong was telling them that as long as Simeoni was in the pack, he would never let the breakaway survive. The men knew that if Armstrong remained with them, the peloton would have no choice but to chase them down. The other riders in the group badgered Simeoni until he agreed to slow down and fall back to the main peloton. Armstrong, satisfied, also fell back. In the middle of the main peloton, Simeoni faced further abuse, this time from the riders in the pack, who were being egged on by Armstrong. Armstrong made a gesture in full view of the television cameras, pretending to zip his mouth shut. It was a clear message to the rest of the peloton: No talk about doping allowed.
A day later, on the final time trial, Armstrong bested Ullrich by more than a minute, winning his fifth stage. He was dominant in every aspect of the tour: The sprints, the climbs, the race against the clock.
Wheelmen: Lance Armstrong, the Tour De France, and the Greatest Sports Conspiracy Ever Page 23