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

by Reed Albergotti

  “Everyone is doing it,” Bruyneel told him, adding that if EPO were dangerous, no pro cyclists would be having kids. Zabriskie was terrified. But ultimately he ran out of questions and caved.

  Then Bruyneel explained that EPO worked better in combination with testosterone, and he and Garcia del Moral left a box of testosterone patches behind for the two riders to split. Afterward, Zabriskie went home, called his mom, and cried.

  Zabriskie’s disillusionment with Bruyneel and the Postal team, and some bad luck with crashes, prompted him to consider giving up the sport. But in October 2004, he signed a two-year contract with CSC, becoming a key support rider for Italian Ivan Basso—one of Lance’s major rivals in the 2005 Tour. While on the CSC team, Zabriskie used testosterone patches and took growth hormone and EPO, but he felt less pressure from CSC team management to use banned substances. In fact, the drugs he used at that time were provided to him by his friend and former Postal teammate, Floyd Landis, who was now riding for Phonak.

  The 2005 Tour de France again opened with a prologue time trial, and Zabriskie had posted the best time of the day so far. Armstrong, as the defending champion, went last, and most people assumed that he would beat the time and put on the yellow jersey. But after Armstrong’s final sprint across the finish line, the clock showed that he was 2 seconds behind Zabriskie. For the first time in more than a decade, an American other than Armstrong was wearing the yellow jersey. Armstrong was shocked. Zabriskie held on to the yellow jersey for the next three stages, all of them flat.

  The Tour de France had scheduled a team time trial for the fourth day. Team time trials are entertaining spectacles. The riders wear high-tech aerodynamic skinsuits and long, pointy helmets to break the wind, and mount special, space-age bikes that look like human-powered fighter jets. And all the riders on a team stay together, taking turns being at the front of the line, heading into the oncoming winds.

  Zabriskie’s team was on track to potentially beat the Discovery Channel team when his bike accidentally touched the wheel of the rider in front of him, causing his front wheel to wobble. Zabriskie fell to the left, smacking into the metal barriers. The two teammates behind him swerved around him, and his team carried on. They were only 0.9 miles from the finish and they were still going for the win. They crossed the finish line 2 seconds behind Discovery. Armstrong was now the race leader. However, it wasn’t the way Armstrong wanted to take the yellow jersey, and he informed Tour organizers that he would refuse to wear it. It’s considered bad form in the Tour to capitalize—at least directly—on another’s misfortune. The Tour de France, though, was trying to capitalize on Armstrong and they wanted him in the yellow jersey. They rejected his gambit and told him that if he didn’t wear the jersey, he would be booted from the race.

  Armstrong wore the yellow jersey until the ninth stage, when German Jens Voigt attacked on a mountain stage and gained enough time on him to take it.

  By the fifteenth stage, although he hadn’t won any of the individual stages, Armstrong was so comfortably in the overall lead that, in a rare move, he gave other riders on the team a chance to show off their skills. As they rode from Lézat-sur-Lèze to Saint-Lary-Soulan, George Hincapie saw an opportunity to get into an early breakaway. Hincapie clung to the wheel of another rider all the way up the mountain roads to conserve as much energy as possible. As the two men neared the finish line, Hincapie sprinted around the other rider with ease, winning the stage. Hincapie placed his hands atop his head in disbelief and seemed to be close to tears. It was as if he never expected to actually win a stage in the Tour de France, much less a mountain stage. He was known as more of a sprinter—good on the flats, not so good in the mountains. EPO had given him the power to climb. But Hincapie didn’t feel he benefited from an unfair advantage. Any rider he beat probably was also on EPO, he figured. It was an equal playing field. The stage win was huge for his career, and he later thanked Armstrong for giving him the opportunity.

  By the time the penultimate stage came around—a 34-mile time trial around the town of Saint-Étienne—Armstrong was so far ahead of everyone else that he could have walked the last mile and still won the Tour de France. But Armstrong felt he had to prove that he was still the fastest man in the race—that it wasn’t just his strong team that was propelling him to his seventh win. Wearing his yellow Nike skinsuit, he darted out of the starting gate and headed on his way. As his smooth, aerodynamic silhouette blazed through the country roads, Armstrong rocked slightly back and forth on his bike, giving it every bit of energy he had. The effort was good enough to beat Ullrich by 23 seconds. It was Armstrong’s only stage win of the race, and it was a sweet one. He led the general classification by 4 minutes, 40 seconds over Italian Ivan Basso.

  On the final day of the race, the peloton left the town of Corbeil-Essonnes and took its leisurely time riding toward Paris. Armstrong again lifted a glass of champagne and posed for the cameras before crossing the finish line.

  After the race, Armstrong gave a speech. The Tour de France had never before allowed the winner of the race to make remarks from the podium on the Champs-Élysées, and they probably regretted making that exception. Armstrong’s words were bitter, aimed at those who doubted him, like David Walsh. “Finally, the last thing I’ll say to the people who don’t believe in cycling, the cynics and the skeptics: I’m sorry for you. I’m sorry that you can’t dream big. I’m sorry you don’t believe in miracles. But this is one hell of a race. This is a great sporting event and you should stand around and believe it. You should believe in these athletes, and you should believe in these people. . . . And there are no secrets—this is a hard sporting event and hard work wins it. So vive le Tour forever!”

  About a week later, those words would seem oddly prescient. It was as if Armstrong had been telegraphing what was about to come—this time courtesy of the French press.

  Damien Ressiot, of L’Équipe, had finally figured out a way to identify the anonymous rider who had tested positive for EPO on six urine samples from the 1999 Tour de France. He first contacted Armstrong’s camp and asked them if Armstrong had any medical exemptions relating to his cancer that allowed him to take performance-enhancing drugs. Armstrong, through a spokesman, denied that he had ever taken any drugs using a medical exemption. Ressiot pressed the issue, by asking Armstrong to prove it. Armstrong agreed to give Ressiot permission to go to UCI headquarters in Aigle, Switzerland, to look up his medical forms from the 1999 Tour de France. Those forms contained Armstrong’s rider number—which, just as Ressiot had suspected, matched the number on the six positive samples.

  After Ressiot’s story came out in L’Équipe, Armstrong denied the accusation. He called L’Équipe a sleazy French tabloid and he accused the French lab of spiking his samples with EPO and then leaking the results to the press.

  Armstrong had many friends in the media, who either largely ignored the story or flat-out defended him.

  The New York Daily News ran an article comparing the European and American commentary on the matter. Americans tended to blame the results of the urine tests on some French nationalistic desire to take down Armstrong.

  “Because he didn’t show up with a red wine hangover every morning, he was cheating,” said Tucker Carlson on CNN. “I defend the Frogs at every turn, as you know. But this is a case of envy,” he said.

  “They don’t mind us when we’re buying their wine or storming German pillboxes. But aside from that, they don’t really care for us,” said Mike Lopresti of USA Today. “They have never been able to accept their sporting jewel being dominated by an American.”

  “It doesn’t take a French poodle to sniff out the reasons why the laboratory leaked the results,” wrote Gil LeBreton of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. “The French, by nature, are skeptical of outsiders who come in and do what the French say can’t be done.”

  Needless to say, the story didn’t get much traction in the United States. The New York Times ran the to-the-point headline, A TOP U.S. CYCLING GROUP
IS STANDING BY ARMSTRONG.

  The six positive tests, though, didn’t help Armstrong’s ongoing case against SCA Promotions, which was still refusing to pay his $5 million in bonuses. Armstrong’s lawyers had supplied SCA with paperwork that said he had undergone the proper drug testing. He had followed the rules. He deserved his bonus. End of story.

  At an early procedural meeting in a downtown Dallas courtroom, both sides had agreed to have the case settled by an out-of-court arbitration panel. While the arbitration hearing was supposed to remain confidential, Armstrong and his advisers knew there was no way the case could be kept quiet. Perhaps it would be better for Armstrong’s image to let it go. But that would mean giving up $5 million, and Armstrong was quite serious about getting that money.

  Bob Hamman was aggressively pursuing every possible lead in his investigation. He first called Betsy Andreu in the fall of 2004. Hamman was serious over the phone, speaking in his deep, deliberate, almost guttural voice. Betsy was hesitant at first, but eventually grew to trust Hamman. Betsy’s father owned a jewelry store in Detroit, and she sympathized with Hamman as a small business owner who, she felt, got screwed by Armstrong. The two began to talk often. Betsy would pass on any rumor or story she heard about Armstrong, and Hamman would try to chase it down. Hamman had a nickname for Betsy: Captain Ahab. “Captain Ahab, it’s nice to hear your smiling voice, kid,” he would say over the phone. “Have you found anything new? Anyone else who could tell the truth?”

  In one conversation, Betsy brought up another potential witness: Stephanie McIlvain.

  Andreu had persuaded McIlvain to speak with David Walsh and she became a significant source for Walsh’s book and his reporting. McIlvain also spoke to ESPN, confirming the hospital room incident.

  For McIlvain, it was one thing to tell David Walsh and ESPN about the hospital room scene. They protected her name and she felt comfortable that nobody would ever find out she was the source. It was another thing entirely to get involved in a lawsuit where she might have to testify on the record. McIlvain and her husband, Pat, still worked for Oakley, which still sponsored Armstrong. When Betsy called Stephanie and asked her to speak with Hamman, she balked. Eventually, SCA subpoenaed McIlvain to testify. She notified executives at Oakley, including its billionaire founder, Jim Jannard, of the subpoena.

  Just days before Frankie’s scheduled deposition, he received a phone call from Lance, telling him that Craig Nichols, his primary oncologist at the hospital in Indianapolis where he had been treated for cancer, was going to sign an affidavit saying that his hospital confession never happened. Lance didn’t make any threats against Frankie, except to suggest that any testimony would be meaningless compared with a doctor’s affidavit. But Betsy felt the call was an attempt to intimidate him—that the unspoken message was: I’m watching you. I’m in control.

  In October 2005, Betsy showed up alone for her deposition, which was held in a conference room in a nondescript hotel in Romulus, near Detroit. Two surprise visitors walked in: Lance and Bart Knaggs. Betsy freaked out. “Oh my God! Oh my God! Oh my God!” she kept saying in a quiet whisper. But she went on to recount the hospital room scene—including Lance’s admissions and her subsequent dramatic threat to break off her engagement to Frankie—while Lance sat on the opposite side of the conference table, alternately staring at her and looking down at his cell phone to send frequent texts.

  Once Betsy finished her testimony, Lance and Knaggs left the room and headed to a small airport, boarding a private jet to New York, where Lance joined Sheryl to tape an appearance on Saturday Night Live. Lance was included in a skit in which he fended off a fake Frenchman who demanded a urine sample and screamed, “It’s our race. Stop winning it! J’accuse!”

  Betsy got a call from Stephanie McIlvain, who was upset. Stephanie said her husband had been called into a meeting by an Oakley executive. If Stephanie testified about the hospital room scene, the executive said, she and her husband would lose their jobs at Oakley.

  Frankie and Betsy were devastated. They had been counting on at least one other person to back them up. Now they’d be exposed, isolated. It would be easy for Armstrong to discredit them as disgruntled crazies.

  A few weeks later, Lance showed up at the downtown Austin office of his lawyer, Tim Herman, for his own deposition, dressed casually in a shirt with the cuffs left unbuttoned. He was ornery and difficult that day, and everything Jeff Tillotson asked him left him in a state of high agitation.

  When Tillotson asked Armstrong if he thought Frankie, his old friend, was lying about the hospital room, Armstrong responded, “One hundred percent. But I feel for him.”

  “What do you mean by that?” Tillotson asked.

  “Well, I think he’s trying to back up his old lady,” Armstrong said.

  Armstrong said the hospital room scene never happened. “How could it have taken place when I’ve never taken performance-enhancing drugs?” he said.

  “Okay,” Tillotson said.

  “How could that have happened?” Armstrong asked again.

  “That was my point. You’re not—it’s not simply, you don’t recall. Just—”

  “How many times do I have to say it?!” Armstrong asked.

  “I’m just trying to make sure your testimony is clear,” Tillotson shot back.

  “Well, if it can’t be any clearer than ‘I’ve never taken drugs,’ then incidents like that could never have happened,” he said. “How clear is that?”

  In fact, Lance seemed so genuinely infuriated at being asked questions about his use of performance-enhancing drugs that Tillotson began to question the case. Is he pathological? Or could it be that we have it wrong?

  Armstrong said he would never dope, never take a banned substance, never reinfuse his own blood—and it was preposterous to suggest otherwise. Outraged by the suggestion that he was a doper, he provided a touching rationale for why he had remained clean:

  Doping would destroy the hopes of millions of his American fans. It “would all go away,” Armstrong said. The “faith of all of the cancer survivors around the world. So everything I do off the bike would go away, too. And don’t think for a second that I don’t understand that. It’s not about money for me. Everything. It’s also about the faith that people have put in me over the years. So all of that would be erased. So I don’t need it to say in a contract, you’re fired if you test positive. That’s not as important as losing the support of hundreds of millions of people.”

  Despite Armstrong’s denials, the testimony in the SCA arbitration did seem damning. Frankie and Betsy Andreu had both sworn under oath that they witnessed Armstrong telling his doctors in Indiana that he had used human growth hormone, EPO, testosterone, steroids, and cortisone. Stephen Swart, his former Motorola teammate, said in a videotaped deposition that Armstrong was the instigator in the team’s EPO use. Kathy LeMond, Greg’s wife, said she attended a dinner party in France at which Armstrong’s mechanic, Julien de Vriese told her Armstrong had paid $500,000 to get out of a positive drug test. De Vriese guessed the money must have come from Nike. And of course the recent story in L’Équipe was another powerful indicator that Armstrong had been doping at least as far back as 1999.

  As the arbitration hearings entered the final phase, in January 2006, Lance’s lawyers cited material from Dr. Edward F. Coyle’s article in the Journal of Applied Physiology, extolling Armstrong’s extraordinary physical gifts, to explain how he had been able to make such a spectacular comeback from cancer and go on to have such a remarkable string of successes. And they showed the arbitrators the 2005 Discovery Channel documentary The Science of Lance Armstrong, which also went into detail about Lance’s superhuman physiology.

  On a later day during those January hearings, Lance was called to give testimony. Speaking before a panel of three lawyers who were serving as arbitrators, Lance displayed a demeanor dramatically different from his behavior during the deposition in his lawyer’s office in Austin. He was polite, even charming. When cross-
examined about some pills he was alleged to have shown Frankie Andreu, Lance demurred, “I have to confess—if you want a confession—I’m a little bit of a coffee fiend,” and asserted that what Andreu had seen were caffeine pills (which at the time were allowed at low doses).

  Lance also cited the book Lance Armstrong’s War, which Dan Coyle wrote after spending the 2004 season in Girona, Spain, with Armstrong, Hincapie, and Landis. “As you can see from that book, for a bunch of people that are trying to hide [something], there really wasn’t a lot of hiding going on,” Lance asserted.

  To prove that Lance had been tested for drugs and found to be clean, his lawyers also submitted a 2005 affidavit from Travis Tygart, then the general counsel of the US Anti-Doping Agency, stating that Lance had taken part in USADA’s testing program and was under its jurisdiction. What the panel didn’t hear was that the two men had never met in person, though in 2004, Tygart had heard from Bill Stapleton, who offered the agency a donation of $250,000. Tygart had rejected the funds, saying that the agency’s ethics policy prohibited it from taking gifts from people it might be testing in the future.

  For its part, in addition to the depositions, SCA included testimony from an Australian scientist named Michael Ashenden, who questioned the validity of the science behind Edward Coyle’s study. Ashenden who, like Coyle, was a paid consultant, said he didn’t buy Coyle’s conclusions. “There’s inconsistencies there which, to my mind, make me question the validity of it,” he said. “I still haven’t seen any data that suggests there was an improvement in efficiency and, therefore, as a scientist, I couldn’t take that as an explanation,” he said. In part because of pressure from Ashenden, Coyle would later be forced to write a letter admitting errors in his math.

  Ashenden noted several other inconsistencies in the myth of Armstrong versus the reality. Armstrong’s oxygen uptake—the sheer rate at which his body is able to use oxygen—was only mediocre compared to many other top-level endurance athletes. “It struck me that, gee, that’s lower than what I would have expected,” he said.