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

by Reed Albergotti

  The next day would be the relaxing ride to Paris. Champagne toasts while still on the bike, victory laps on the Champs-Élysées. He knew the drill well. Everyone was happy it was about to be over, even Armstrong’s competitors—everyone, that is, except Filippo Simeoni. During the early part of the stage on the final day, the US Postal team had planned to pose for some photographs and toast with champagne. The rest of the peloton had agreed to hang back to give them the opportunity to get their media exposure. But before the team could raise a glass, Simeoni decided to attack and race out in front of the field. The Postal team quickly chased Simeoni down, causing a brief delay in the festivities. Once Simeoni was caught, Armstrong celebrated with the traditional toasts and victory laps. The television cameras had largely ignored the interruption, and few viewers would have understood the backstory to Simeoni’s attack, even had they witnessed it.

  • • •

  The mood was as jubilant as ever at the team party, which was held, as had come to be their standard practice, at the Musée d’Orsay just hours after the race. Floyd Landis, however, was distracted. His two-year contract was set to expire at the end of the season, and the USPS negotiators were pressing him hard to renew. In fact, one of them had approached him right before the Alpe d’Huez time trial to try to get him to sign, and Landis had blown him off, saying that he had to focus on getting ready for the upcoming race. But the time for a decision was nigh. Among the competitors that had been courting him was Phonak, a team sponsored by a Swiss hearing aid manufacturer, which approached him with a $500,000 offer. The USPS made a counteroffer for significantly less money and now Landis was tormented about the decision he was being forced to make. As he agonized over his dilemma, Tiger Williams, who had come to France along with a number of the team owners and sponsors to watch Armstrong go for his sixth tour win, approached Landis to congratulate him. Williams seemed like a smart guy to Landis. Clearly, he was a successful businessman. And Landis viewed the decision he had to make as a business decision. So he decided to ask him what he thought he should do.

  Williams’s answer was surprising. Floyd remembers Williams telling him to get out of there. If they weren’t willing to pay him what he was worth, just leave, Williams told him. The advice meant a lot to Landis. After all, Williams was part owner of the team. It was against his own interest to tell Landis to leave. But he did it anyway.

  Shortly afterward, Landis flew home to California, his contract situation still unresolved. Soon he got a call from Bill Stapleton, who told him that Lance wanted to speak with him about his contract. Lance rarely called Landis—or anyone else, for that matter—so Landis knew it was important. In early August, Armstrong called with “good news”—although the team “never did this for anyone,” he said they’d be willing to match his offer from Phonak. Before Landis could say anything, Armstrong followed with a stern warning. “But you better get shit right. You better keep training hard!”

  Landis was annoyed. He knew he was supposed to feel special because the great Lance Armstrong had given him a call. But he didn’t. “Whatever, man, I’m not really interested,” he told Armstrong, who seemed shocked.

  Stapleton called Landis again and informed him that there was a clause in his contract that gave US Postal the right to match any offer from a competing team, and Landis had to stay with US Postal. “Well, that’s fine,” Landis said. “If you want to pay me half a million bucks a year to get fat and eat doughnuts and fuck off for two years. I’ll be glad to do that, but I’m not going to train.”

  “You’re being a dick,” Stapleton said. “How much do you want?”

  At this point, though, Landis was set on leaving. He was fed up with everyone in management, from Armstrong to Bruyneel and Stapleton, and he wanted out. So he picked an outrageously high number—$750,000—which Stapleton promptly declined. And with that, the phone call and, Landis assumed, their negotiations were over.

  In the meantime, however, Landis was having a difficult time reaching Phonak, who were not returning his calls. He found out later that someone close to Lance had told Phonak’s leadership that Landis had already signed a contract extension with US Postal. That was a lie. In the end, Landis was able to reach Phonak and sort matters out. He would soon be joining former teammate Tyler Hamilton on the Phonak team.

  Landis would later recall that Tiger Williams was the only person connected to the Postal team who didn’t try to pressure him to stay. And after Landis did decamp to Phonak, the two men stayed in touch, even though Landis was now riding for a rival team.

  Landis did one final race for USPS: The 21-day Vuelta a España. Through stage 11, Landis was in the lead. He credited his performance to a pill that Pedro Celaya had given him. Celaya didn’t tell Landis what was in it, but it made him feel amazing. He could fly up the mountains without feeling a thing. He was blazing. Landis told his teammates about it, and said that Celaya had given him another one for the next day’s stage, but he wasn’t going to take it because he was going to bring it back to the United States and have it analyzed in a pharmacy. With the secret formula, Landis was going to “get rich.” Landis did save the pill—and promptly lost the lead to Spaniard Roberto Heras, who had left US Postal for Liberty Seguros. Landis had it analyzed, but the lab was unable to find out what was in the pill.

  Landis was of course not the only rider doping during the Vuelta. A blood test taken during the race showed that Tyler Hamilton had tested positive for having someone else’s blood in him—the same thing he had tested positive for during the Athens Olympics, a month earlier. Hamilton had been lucky that time; the laboratory accidentally froze one of the samples, making the test invalid. Hamilton was puzzled, however. He wasn’t transfusing anyone else’s blood. He was reinfusing his own. The test result made no sense to him. One explanation was that Hamilton may have accidentally reinfused another rider’s blood. This theory was supported by the fact that one of his teammates had also tested positive at the same time for the same thing.

  Hamilton denied the positive test, blaming it on a “missing twin” who had died in his mother’s womb, causing him to produce two types of blood. Determined to fight back, Hamilton set up a foundation and accepted donations to help him appeal his positive test in an arbitration hearing against USADA, the US Anti-Doping Agency. But Hamilton had chosen to fight an unwinnable war.

  • • •

  By August, Armstrong was on the cover of Sports Illustrated, and it seemed few people in the United States had read Walsh’s book, since it was published only in French, or cared enough about the allegations it made to talk about it. But one person who had a vested interest in what it said had read it—Bob Hamman, the owner of SCA Promotions, a Dallas-based promotional marketing and insurance company.

  Lance Armstrong, according to his contract with Tailwind Sports, was owed $10 million in bonuses for winning his sixth Tour de France in a row. But Tailwind had taken out an insurance policy from SCA Promotions against Armstrong winning the race, thus mitigating some of the risk, specifically, the risk associated with half of the bonus offer. Founded in 1986 by Hamman—the world’s top-ranked bridge player for nearly two decades—SCA underwrote long odds events such as hole-in-one competitions. Hamman had paid Armstrong $1.5 million for his 2002 win, and $3 million in 2003. When yet another $5 million was due for winning in 2004, Hamman became suspicious. Nobody else in the world had managed to win the Tour de France six times. How could this be? he wondered.

  Hamman—whose bridge buddies include Bill Gates and Warren Buffett, and whose bridge team has been called the Gods of Odds—certainly didn’t have any firsthand knowledge of performance-enhancing tactics, let alone any inkling of the sophisticated doping program conducted by Lance’s team. But by then, American newspapers had begun covering the accusations of covert steroid use by American track-and-field athletes and baseball players, including such stars as Olympic medalist Marion Jones and San Francisco Giants slugger Barry Bonds. If steroids were involved in so many elite-l
evel sports in the United States, Hamman figured they might be in use in European pro cycling, too. So he refused to pay Lance.

  He figured he’d do a little research. Based on leads he got in Walsh’s book, he began looking for pertinent information that would help him prove that Lance had cheated to attain his victory. Hamman’s lawyers got in touch with investigators in France, who had launched an investigation there but had found no proof. So Hamman suggested that they track down Betsy Andreu.

  Lance’s wealth by then had soared. He had endorsement deals worth $16.5 million a year. But he was incensed that Hamman wouldn’t pay him the $5 million bonus and he figured Hamman’s refusal to pay was merely a high-stakes bluff.

  Lance needed a lawyer.

  Bill Stapleton brought in Tim Herman, an Austin lawyer he’d known since 1994. Herman’s claim to fame was that he had represented President George W. Bush during the final year of his gubernatorial term, filing a lawsuit against a rental car company in Austin over a fender bender involving Bush’s daughter, Jenna. Once Armstrong and Stapleton hired Herman and his partner, Sean Breen, they promptly filed suit in Texas state court to demand an arbitration with SCA.

  This was not the only battle on the agenda for Armstrong and his crew. They were also pressuring Trek to punish Greg LeMond over doping allegations he had made to the French paper Le Monde during the 2004 Tour de France: “Lance is ready to do anything to keep his secret. . . . I don’t know how he can continue to convince everybody of his innocence.” The comments infuriated Armstrong and he leaned hard on Trek to sever ties with him. Trek’s lawyers sent LeMond a notice saying that, by speaking out against Armstrong, he had breached his contract. Trek president John Burke sided with Armstrong and drew up plans to cancel its contract with the LeMond bike brand and to start negotiating to acquire Merckx bikes. Cooler heads prevailed, however. Trek’s board decided it would be too costly and risky to hastily end their relationship with LeMond. One of Trek’s advisers, Andrew K. Morris, wrote in a July 30, 2004, e-mail to Burke:

  I think we should explore every diplomatic avenue to resolve this dilemma rather than to make a judgment as to the accuracy of Greg’s claim, go through the legal cost of terminating his contract, lose the profits from the line only to find ourselves back in court with even bigger legal bills, one lost tour winner and one tainted 6 time winner. . . . I’m not so sure I’d “bet the farm” on Lance being completely clean.

  Meanwhile, in a laboratory outside Paris, more trouble was brewing for Armstrong. The French anti-doping agency, AFLD (Agence Française de Lutte Contre le Dopage), was conducting tests on urine samples from the 1999 Tour de France. In 1999, there had been no test for EPO, but now that there was one, the lab wanted to get a sense of how many cyclists had used the drug during that year’s race. About fifty samples were still in good enough condition to be retested, and out of those fifty, a dozen were positive. Six of those tests shared the same rider identification number, but since the numbers were anonymous, the lab had no idea who the rider was. Someone at the lab leaked the rider number to French journalist Damien Ressiot, who wrote for L’Équipe, a French national daily sports newspaper.

  Ressiot had an idea how to find out which rider matched the anonymous number.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  ADIEU AND FUCK YOU

  Armstrong said the 2005 Tour de France would be his last. He would retire from cycling shortly after the race, whether he won or lost, and then embark on the next phase of his life, which would consist of campaigning for cancer awareness—and, of course, enjoying the good life of a retired athlete with a ton of money in the bank.

  But there were people in cycling who thought that for Armstrong to attempt a seventh Tour de France win was greedy, that he was disrespecting the sacred race by dominating it for too long. Armstrong had six victories under his belt. It was a record that might stand forever. Why go for seven? Armstrong himself had considered retiring after his sixth. In fact, he and some partners (including his friend John Korioth) had opened a loft-style bar called Six in Austin’s downtown district, which seemed to suggest an ending.

  Even Armstrong’s sponsor thought it was time to call it quits. When the US Postal Service bowed out, Tailwind Sports got the Discovery Channel to sign on as the new sponsor. Tailwind also needed to replace a number of riders. Former teammates such as Bobby Julich, Tyler Hamilton, Levi Leipheimer, Dave Zabriskie, and of course Floyd Landis—all Americans—had all left over the years, having ultimately fallen out with Lance. Tailwind wasn’t able to replace those riders with other Americans. There was simply a shortage of talent in a country whose cycling culture was tiny. By the time Armstrong was planning to go for his seventh Tour win, there was only one other American left on the team’s Tour de France squad: George Hincapie. The other seven riders were mercenaries from Italy, Spain, Ukraine, and the Czech Republic. Though the team still called itself American, because it was technically based in the United States, it was American in name only, and largely operated out of Belgium and Spain.

  The Discovery Channel attempted to market the other cyclists on the team as up-and-coming superstars looking to fill Armstrong’s shoes when he retired, and to create suspense around the competition. But the marketing effort was a dud. American fans weren’t interested in Armstrong’s replacement if that replacement wasn’t American; they had been passionate about the Postal team because it was an essentially American team, headed up by an American cyclist—so American that it had counted two US presidents, Bill Clinton and now George W. Bush, among its fans. Bush was such a fan that when a knee injury forced him to give up his jogging routine for a while, he had invited Lance to join him for a mountain bike ride on his Texas ranch.

  At the Tour de Georgia in April of that year, the team showcased its newest up-and-comer, American Tom Danielson. The twenty-seven-year-old was known for his physiological gifts—a high VO2 max and an ability to climb amazingly fast. He had joined the team that year, and Armstrong was riding in support of Danielson in the race. Discovery’s biggest competitor was Landis. The rivalry climaxed on the fifth and penultimate stage with a brutal climb up the exceedingly steep Brasstown Bald. Landis was leading the six-day race by one minute. On the final climb, Armstrong played the role of domestique and set a blistering pace, towing a small group of riders behind him. The effort tired out Landis, and Danielson attacked, leaving Landis and Armstrong behind. As Landis lost time to Danielson, Armstrong stayed right on Landis’s wheel, marking his former teammate. At the top of the climb, Armstrong sprinted around Landis and pointed at the big clock above the finish line, which showed Landis had lost the lead and now trailed Danielson by 9 seconds. It was an old-fashioned taunt.

  After the race, Armstrong commented to reporters that he helped Danielson out because he was a loyal teammate. Landis got the message. Armstrong was still bitter that Landis had left the team. It confirmed Landis’s opinion of Armstrong: that he was a selfish asshole. Landis had given everything he had to Armstrong in the three years he was on the team. His contract was up, and he left for a better opportunity. Armstrong, he felt, had no reason to treat Landis with any disrespect.

  As the Tour de France kicked off in 2005, the race took on a different feel. It didn’t have the suspense of previous races. It felt more like a victory lap for Lance.

  In the race’s opening time trial, Armstrong was given the honor of going last—an advantage always extended to the defending champion. By the time he approached the starting gate, the fastest time of the day belonged to another American—shy twenty-six-year-old Dave Zabriskie, now racing for the Danish team CSC (Computer Sciences Corporation).

  Zabriskie had bought his first bike after seeing the old 1970s movie Breaking Away. He started out riding a mountain bike in junior high in order to develop muscles in his chicken legs, and at age fifteen, he attended a meeting held by a local cycling club where he met and befriended Steve Johnson (who later went on to become president of USA Cycling). The cycling club’s long, hard train
ing rides of fifty to sixty miles provided Zabriskie with an escape from his difficult home life. His father had a long history of substance abuse, and after watching him deteriorate because of his drug addiction, Zabriskie vowed to himself that he would never take drugs. He saw cycling as a healthy, wholesome hobby that would keep him from following in his father’s footsteps. In 1998, while still an amateur, he was invited to ride with Lance and Kevin Livingston. The ride was an initiation of sorts. Armstrong and his pals had their eyes on Zabriskie. After turning pro, Zabriskie joined the Postal team in 2000, where he remained until the end of the 2004 season. For his entire first year, Zabriskie, whose form was near perfect in time trials, refrained from doping. At hotels, he had seen his teammates and roommates getting injections from team doctors, but he had refused. He didn’t know what these riders were taking, but he was worried that the injections might in fact be a doping product. But in 2002, after having a lackluster season, he began accepting what his teammates called “recovery” injections, which were provided by the team doctors. Eventually, despite his aversion to needles, he began injecting himself. He didn’t really know what was in the syringes; the only ingredients listed on the package, which he read carefully, were vitamins.

  In 2003, when Zabriskie was starting to show some real promise, Johan Bruyneel and Garcia del Moral summoned him, and then teammate Michael Barry, to a café in Girona, Spain, where they provided the two young cyclists with injectable liquids—“recovery,” as well as EPO. Zabriskie was shocked. He hadn’t expected this. He questioned them about the health risks of using EPO: Would he be able to have children? Was it safe? Would it cause any physical changes? The cheating aspect was of lesser concern, since it seemed as though the entire peloton was using.