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

by Reed Albergotti

  Landis began to seriously consider coming clean. But when he spoke again with Armstrong as well as other people in the cycling industry, they all advised him to fight the charges. He couldn’t admit to doping, they said, because a revelation could expose the entire team as well as its support staffers. Landis still hoped to get back into the sport, and bombshell allegations would eliminate that possibility.

  About a month after Landis’s positive test, his father-in-law and best friend, David Witt, committed suicide, shooting himself in the head. The co-owner of a local restaurant and an avid bodybuilder, Witt had become one of Landis’s drug suppliers. Witt got prescriptions in his own name for the drugs Landis needed—including testosterone and human growth hormone. Though Witt had long suffered from depression, Landis was certain his own disgrace had at least contributed to Witt’s suicide.

  Landis was devastated and depressed. It felt as if his life were in the middle of a massive mudslide, wiping away everything in its path.

  Anguished and desperate, Landis again reached out to Jim Ochowicz. He figured Ochowicz was one of the few people who would understand the situation he was in and be able to advise him about what to do. Ochowicz had been there in St. Moritz when Landis and Armstrong were training with Michele Ferrari. And Ochowicz knew everything there was to know about the cycling world. Not only was he still the president of USA Cycling, and still an employee of Thom Weisel’s, but he knew all the key players, including of course Lance Armstrong, with whom he was close.

  When Landis called, Ochowicz was staying in the Hollywood home of Sheryl Crow. She was a good friend, and had remained so even after she and Armstrong split up. Ochowicz invited Landis to come and talk. Landis drove his Harley-Davidson up from Temecula. Crow brought the two men drinks and sandwiches, then left the house about ten minutes later. As they sat on her veranda overlooking downtown L.A., Landis said, “Listen, you know what’s going on in cycling. You and I both know about the doping programs on every team you’ve ever run, certainly the US Postal team.”

  “Yeah, yeah,” Ochowicz responded.

  “I can’t fight it anymore,” Landis said. “I don’t want to be broke and feel guilty, and that’s what’s about to happen. I don’t mind being broke, but I’m not going to feel shitty anymore,” he said. “My two choices here are either fight this or just admit to it and clear my conscience. I’ll tell you what I’m not going to do. I’m not going to take the fall for this sport and walk away and just get beaten up the rest of my life. At the very least, I’m going to clear my conscience.”

  Ochowicz gave Landis some firm advice: He should say nothing. Nobody would believe him anyway. The allegations would drag down the entire sport and ruin not only his career but the careers of others. The only option was to fight the charges in every way he could, Ochowicz said. Floyd didn’t explicitly ask Ochowicz for money, but it was clear that was what Floyd needed if he were to continue his denials. “Look, I need some support,” Landis pleaded.

  “Let me make some phone calls and I’ll let you know,” Ochowicz said.

  A few days later, Landis got a call from Bill Stapleton, who demanded to know why Floyd had asked Ochowicz for money. Floyd explained that he was short on cash and could use some help. Over and over, Stapleton kept asking him, “Why should we help you out?” Landis felt that Stapleton was trying to goad him into threatening them with extortion if they didn’t give him money.

  Despite Stapleton’s call, Armstrong did arrange to help Floyd. Not directly—Armstrong couldn’t risk the association—but he connected Landis to some of his own wealthy backers, like Thom Weisel and John Bucksbaum. Tiger Williams, whom Landis already knew, also helped out.

  If Landis stayed quiet about the doping, there was an enticing carrot: money to help him fight the US Anti-Doping Agency.

  But if he came clean in order to clear his conscience, he knew there was a giant stick: the wrath of Armstrong. Lance, Stapleton, and their powerful friends would try to discredit and destroy him.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  THE COMEBACK (AGAIN)

  In winter 2006, newly single Lance was spending even more time with his celebrity pals, traveling with actor Matthew McConaughey to South Beach, where they hit the beach and the clubs, and accompanying Jake Gyllenhaal to the National Arts Awards in New York.

  Lance also registered for his first marathon, the New York City Marathon—a way to fill what he characterized as the void in his life after he quit professional cycling. The marathon, held in November, was also a way for him to keep both himself and Nike, his main sponsor, in the public eye as he approached the ten-year anniversary of his initial cancer diagnosis.

  Nike was already so invested in Lance that it had named a building on its corporate campus in Beaverton, Oregon, after him. The Lance Armstrong Fitness Center had an Olympic-size pool and a multistory rock-climbing wall, as well as a spinning studio, a Pilates studio, and a weight room. But now Nike was turning to Lance for a fresh boost to its flagging business. At the time Lance registered for the marathon, Nike was scrambling to meet the changing tastes and demands of consumers who could order thirty-dollar sneakers online, and its executives were under pressure to improve their profit margins. Looking for ways to capitalize on the inspirational aspects of Lance’s life and incorporate them into their product line, they had come up with an ingenious new idea. With Lance now training for the world’s most famous marathon, Nike arranged for him to promote a new device that had grown out of Nike’s partnership with Apple. The device, the so-called Nike+iPod, made it possible for runners to collect their personal speed and distance data on Apple iPods, at a cost of about $300, which included the iPod itself as well as specially outfitted $100 sneakers that connected to a sensor. The iPod also featured a prerecorded download of Lance chanting a series of motivational mantras. When the runner accessed his results, he would hear Lance saying things like “Congratulations! You’ve just set a personal mileage record!”

  Running was not new to Lance. In his eyes, in fact, running was his first sport; it had come before swimming, before cycling, before triathlons. When he was a rebellious teen, with a pierced ear sporting a diamond stud, he was the fastest runner on the Plano East High School cross-country team, which won Dallas district championships. He had continued to run throughout the years, even while cycling professionally, as a form of cross-training.

  Just days before the marathon, however, Lance came down with a bad case of shin splints. Not to be deterred from entering the race, he took heavy doses of ibuprofen and iced his shins, ran the marathon—paced by running great Alberto Salazar, a world-renowned marathoner and consultant to Nike—and came in 868th. His time, which was just under three hours, was obviously a long way from breaking any records, but his friends were impressed, for he had run the last three or four miles of the race in intense pain, which it turns out was from a stress fracture. To this day, his close friends hold up his performance in that marathon as evidence of his extraordinary determination and persistence.

  These were the qualities Lance wanted to project in his postretirement years, as he worked on expanding his image as a symbol of inspiration and motivation not only for cancer survivors but also for America’s Average Joes and underdogs. His friends in Hollywood helped reinforce that image, casting him for a cameo role in the 2006 movie You, Me and Dupree, executive produced by and starring his Dallas-born buddy, Owen Wilson. In the movie, Wilson’s character, Dupree, loses his job and moves in with his newlywed friends, played by Kate Hudson and Matt Dillon. Dupree’s character is essentially that of a hapless loser, but throughout the film, he keeps mentioning Lance as his inspiration.

  At one point in the movie, the Matt Dillon character says to his friend: “You get your first ten-speed bike, and suddenly you’re Lance Armstrong.” Dupree responds: “Let’s leave Lance out of this. Guy’s done more with one testicle than you and I could do with three.”

  The movie ends with Dupree having transformed himself into a successful aut
hor and a motivational speaker, and features a shot of his hero, Lance, reading Dupree’s popular inspirational book, whose cover is a knockoff of It’s Not About the Bike. Lying in the grass, wearing his trademark yellow Livestrong wristband, Lance is holding the book open and trying out different pronunciations of the word “Lance-ness.”

  That was not the first time Hollywood had deployed Lance as a real-life inspirational figure. Two years earlier, he had done a cameo in Rawson Marshall Thurber’s movie Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story, starring Ben Stiller and Vince Vaughn. Armstrong, playing himself, had a pivotal scene in which he inspired the character played by Vince Vaughn to continue his David and Goliath struggle against a commercial megalith. A sample bit of dialogue:

  La Fleur: “Uh, actually I decided to quit . . . Lance.”

  Armstrong: “Quit? You know, once I was thinking about quitting when I was diagnosed with brain, lung, and testicular cancer, all at the same time. But with the love and support of my friends and family, I got back on the bike and I won the Tour de France five times in a row.”

  Lance’s celebrity opened all kinds of doors for him, and not just in Hollywood. He had always had a taste for beautiful women, and, single again, he was in a great position to meet whoever struck his fancy. In January 2007, he noticed a feature on socialite and fashion designer Tory Burch—who could have been Sheryl Crow’s long-lost twin sister—in Vanity Fair magazine. He used his connections to score a date. They quickly became an item, and their relationship brought them both a lot of attention. That April, Tory was at his side when he opened his Austin home to 450 people to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the Lance Armstrong Foundation. But Lance and Tory broke up by that fall. The strain of trying to carry on a long-distance relationship—Lance had children in Austin, Tory had children in New York—was too great. After their breakup, Lance began a brief and public romance with the petite twenty-one-year-old actress Ashley Olsen, fifteen years his junior, who was sighted perched in his lap at the bar of New York’s Gramercy Park Hotel. In the spring of 2008, he began seeing the actress Kate Hudson, following her breakup with Owen Wilson. But Lance broke off the relationship just a few months later. Not long after that, he became more seriously involved with Anna Hansen, a University of Colorado at Boulder graduate and mountain-biking enthusiast, whom he had first met at a corporate speaking gig in Denver in early 2007, when she was working for a nonprofit that offered outdoor adventures to young adults with cancer.

  Around this time, there was even talk that Lance might run for public office. Perhaps governor of Texas. Or even the Senate. Lance hadn’t declared any party allegiance, but he was pro-choice and supported increased health care coverage and gun control—positions that might have enabled him to win favor from Democrats, who were already looking ahead to finding a strong candidate to challenge the Republican incumbent, Rick Perry, in the next gubernatorial race, in 2010.

  Lance squashed the speculation that he might run for the Senate seat, however, by explaining that he didn’t love the idea of spending half the year living in Washington, DC. And no wonder: He’d recently moved into an 8,000-square-foot Spanish colonial mansion in Austin, with a pool, cabana, green lawns, and a row of Italian cypress trees. He decorated his new home with huge paintings of minimalist Pop art, placing one Ed Ruscha painting—with the words safe and effective medication spelled out against a backdrop of storm clouds—prominently on his living room wall.

  Armstrong and his agent, Bill Stapleton, also began to look for new investments and business ventures. In mid-2007, New Sun Nutrition, Inc., a Santa Barbara–based distributor of FRS energy drink, made Armstrong the FRS spokesperson and put him on the board—around the same time that it received $25 million in a funding round in which Thom Weisel participated. The sports drink company also gave Lance a financial stake. FRS, which stands for Free Radical Scavenger, hired an ad agency that had done work with Nike to play up its scientific claims. In one video on FRS’s site, Lance touted the energy boost he claimed he got from the drink: “Five minutes later you feel strong, fifteen minutes later you feel strong, an hour later you still feel strong.” FRS agreed to give Lance’s foundation a percentage of its profits, and the foundation made it the official sports drink at its events, such as Livestrong bike races and marathons. The drink company claimed that a plant-based supplement called quercetin added to the drink provided a natural boost of energy. As is the case with many energy drinks, FRS’s claims were probably a bit overblown.

  Armstrong also put together an unusual deal with Demand Media, a Silicon Valley web content company, after he became friends with its cofounder, Richard Rosenblatt, the former chairman of MySpace.com. Demand Media came up with the idea of starting a website under the name Livestrong .com, which would be a for-profit company that would make money mostly from web advertising. As part of the deal, Armstrong and Stapleton’s firm, Capital Sports & Entertainment, got stock options from Demand Media, which was planning its IPO. With Lance’s foundation now using Livestrong.org as its website address, there were now two Livestrong addresses—one for the for-profit health website (the .com), and one for the foundation website (the .org). By the time of the IPO in 2011, the foundation ended up with 184,000 shares of Demand Media at an offering price of $17 a share, though the shares rose to as much as $25 apiece during their first day of trading. Lance received 156,000 shares, valued at about $2 million, which he donated to the foundation. Capital Sports & Entertainment received 28,000 shares, valued at about $400,000. Some donors were upset that the board of the Lance Armstrong Foundation would allow Armstrong and his agent to make personal business deals using the charity’s image. The move set off alarm bells and some worried it might trigger an inquiry from government regulators.

  In the spring of 2008, embarking on another commercial venture, Armstrong and his buddy Bart Knaggs opened a bike shop just west of downtown Austin, in a converted 9,000-square-foot brick warehouse about a dozen blocks from Knaggs’s office at Capital Sports & Entertainment. Wedged between a trio of banks and an almost-completed high-rise condominium building, it was just north of the left bank of Lake Austin, where a bike path that was to be known as the Lance Armstrong Bikeway was then being planned.

  The bike shop was called Mellow Johnny’s—a riff on Armstrong’s way of pronouncing maillot jaune, or “yellow jersey.” (The actual French pronunciation sounds something like “My-Oh-Zhan.”) The store was stocked with high-end merchandise from Lance’s sponsors, in particular Oakley, Nike, and Trek, all of which by then had licensing agreements to develop lines bearing Armstrong’s Livestrong brand. Trek had made a multiyear pledge to the Lance Armstrong Foundation worth close to $1 million; Oakley had guaranteed several hundred thousand dollars a year.

  Mellow Johnny’s carried Trek’s Madone series of racing bikes, as well as the costly, retro “naked” single-speed bicycle with wooden rims, which is one of the only bikes Armstrong has ever bought with his own money. The store also featured a media section selling Lance-related items, such as his two books and DVDs. Mixed in among the Armstrong bestsellers were books by his friends, such as his coach, Chris Carmichael; the Postal team’s former directeur sportif Johan Bruyneel; and photographer buddy Graham Watson. And for those who wished to linger, there was an in-store coffee shop called Juan Pelota—an alias Lance had sometimes used while traveling overseas, which itself was a tongue-in-cheek reference to his one testicle. (Juan sounds like one, and pelota is Spanish for “ball.”) Everything about the store was in some way a reflection or a celebration of Armstrong.

  Armstrong’s most ambitious business endeavor was kept hush-hush. With the help of a handful of wealthy backers, Armstrong was making an attempt at a buyout of professional bike racing. Since his retirement, the Tour de France and the international governing body of the sport, the UCI, had become embattled to the point of dysfunction.

  Trouble began in 2005 when the UCI, at the behest of its former president, Hein Verbruggen, who had retired in 2005, put together
a series of races it called the UCI Pro Tour. The series, which included many of the oldest and most well-known races in Europe, was an effort to bring together under one umbrella all the top cycling events so that they could negotiate for television rights and marketing deals more effectively. Most of these races were owned by individuals or promotional companies. The problem was that the company that owned the Tour de France—the Amaury Sport Organisation, or ASO—would not join the Pro Tour. Without the sport’s biggest race on board, the Pro Tour could never survive.

  The relationship between the UCI and the ASO had long been strained. By 2006, it was absolutely hostile, and the bitter feud was tearing apart the sport. One of the main areas of disagreement had to do with drug testing. Top executives at ASO believed that the UCI had been covering up the sport’s doping problem for years, which had allowed it to become rampant in the peloton.

  Armstrong’s camp saw an opportunity. In fall 2006, at a Manhattan bar, Armstrong, Bill Stapleton, and Tiger Williams, along with actor Jake Gyllenhaal, discussed how cycling could benefit from central ownership. Armstrong said no new organization could succeed unless it controlled the Tour de France. Soon after, Armstrong rounded up a number of wealthy cycling enthusiasts willing to help fund a potential acquisition of the Tour de France. It would have cost about $1.5 billion at the time. The group of wealthy backers, which included Thom Weisel, had occasional meetings to discuss the matter and the possibilities of making an offer to purchase the race from the Amaury family. But the financial crisis that began to manifest in mid-2007 slowed things down, and the Amaury family proved less willing to sell the Tour de France than Armstrong and his wealthy friends had hoped. Ultimately, the deal went nowhere.