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

by Reed Albergotti

  Even as Armstrong transitioned from professional bike racing to a career that consisted largely of public appearances related to his cancer charity and a slew of new business ventures, his bitter feud with Greg LeMond continued and, in some ways, intensified.

  In April 2008, LeMond filed suit against Trek, claiming that Trek had tried to sabotage his brand by telling dealers it was discontinuing the line and refusing to sell them LeMond bikes. Included in the lawsuit was LeMond’s contention that Trek had attempted to silence him about his anti-doping stance, and specifically that John Burke told LeMond that if he did not issue an apologetic press release, LeMond’s relationship with Trek would suffer.

  In connection with the suit, LeMond’s lawyers issued a discovery request demanding any internal documents from Trek relating to the statement that had appeared on August 15, 2001. LeMond’s attorneys also demanded anything related to Ferrari, to doping allegations, or to any telephone calls Burke made on August 13. Other documents in the case included a transcript of a 2004 phone conversation between LeMond and Burke in which Burke responded to LeMond’s contention that there was mounting evidence to support the allegations that Armstrong was doping by saying: “Well, I still get back to the innocent until proven guilty, and that’s somebody else’s job.” Burke knew that Armstrong’s image moved bicycle sales, and it was clear whom he favored in the dispute between the two men.

  LeMond wanted the court to award declaratory judgments and financial damages. Responding to LeMond’s complaint, Trek said that it had merely wanted LeMond to stop his disparagement of Armstrong, which Trek claimed was undermining not only its own bottom line but the LeMond brand as well. Citing anonymous letters from customers who claimed to be put off by LeMond’s comments about Armstrong, Trek said LeMond had sabotaged his own brand, causing sales of LeMond bikes to plummet. In April, just weeks after LeMond launched his suit, Trek announced that it was dropping LeMond bicycles from its product line.

  In late September 2008, after having done the Leadville 100 mountain bike race the month before in Colorado—his first bike race since retirement—Armstrong announced that he would return to professional cycling. He was joining Team Astana, based in Kazakhstan—the land of Borat Sagdiyev, the fictional Kazakhstani TV personality in the 2006 mockumentary Borat.

  How Armstrong landed in such a far-flung, unlikely place was a tale of surpassing strangeness—and yet a familiar tale, too, because so much of it had to do with complications related to doping. Armstrong’s team had last been sponsored by the Discovery Channel. But when the Discovery Channel ended its sponsorship after the 2007 season, cycling’s drug scandals had become so numerous and so devastating that Tailwind Sports was unable to find a new sponsor, and it floundered. It seemed that Thom Weisel was done owning professional bike racing teams. This left Johan Bruyneel, the longtime director, without a team to run.

  Bruyneel approached Team Astana, which was in disarray following star rider Alexander Vinokourov’s positive drug test in the 2007 Tour de France. Bruyneel offered to move his squad and infrastructure over to Astana. Astana, which was supported financially by Kazakhstan’s state holding company, Samruk-Kazyna, agreed to the deal. The result was that the 2008 Astana team roster was nearly identical to the 2007 Discovery Channel team (except for a handful of Kazakh domestiques required by the sponsor).

  In 2008, Alberto Contador, who had won the 2007 Tour for the Discovery Channel team (if only because the actual race leader, Michael Rasmussen, was disqualified for dodging a drug test), went on to dominate cycling that year—this time while wearing the Astana jersey. He won the Giro d’Italia and the Vuelta a España. However, he didn’t have a shot at that year’s Tour de France because the Tour organizers were punishing the Astana team for embarrassing the race in the prior season with Vinokourov’s positive test. But Contador’s overall success made Bruyneel look like a genius. Contador was the second great Grand Tour rider Bruyneel had developed.

  When Armstrong decided to return to cycling, it was almost a given that he’d return to race under Bruyneel. Armstrong, who said he was returning to cycling not out of personal ambition but to raise awareness of cancer, agreed to race on the team without a salary. The announcement that he would join the team caused a major rift on the squad. As the captain of the team and winner of the 2007 Tour de France, Contador would be the hands-down favorite to win the 2009 Tour de France (if the Astana team was allowed to participate). But Contador knew enough about Armstrong to know he would never work in support of another rider. Having Lance as a teammate would be like having a competitor on his own team. Contador considered quitting: “I think it’s too premature to say just yet if I’ll leave the team. I still want to see how things develop and talk to the team,” he said at the time of Lance’s announcement.

  “I think there’s room for all of us” was Lance’s response.

  In framing his decision as a move to bring more awareness to his foundation’s fight against cancer, Armstrong showed his mastery at mixing his personal image with that of his charity: “While my intention is to train and compete as fiercely as I always have, this time I will gauge victory by how much progress we make against cancer, a disease that will claim eight million lives this year alone,” he proclaimed at the Clinton Global Initiative in New York in late September 2008. “Our campaign will appeal to every person affected by cancer as well as their nations’ leaders, and we intend to visit, race, and train in those countries that join our cause.”

  Over the years, Armstrong had indeed devoted considerable time and effort to the fight against cancer—not just on behalf of his foundation but as a political issue. As an icon in the cancer community, he had met with lawmakers, including Senator John Kerry, to lobby for more funding for cancer research, courted presidential candidates such as Democrat Barack Obama and Republican John McCain to push for more research dollars, and spoken at numerous fund-raisers around the country. His passionate testimony before Texas officials helped convince the legislature to pass a $3 billion cancer research referendum. He could rally millions of his “Livestrong Army” fans through his website to support cancer causes.

  By 2008, his own foundation had raised more than $250 million for cancer-related causes, and its staff had grown to seventy-five employees. The foundation began construction on a new headquarters in a 30,000-square-foot, spruced-up former paper warehouse in East Austin. Seven of Armstrong’s Tour jerseys would later hang on the wall, and a yellow Livestrong sign would be placed just inside the front door. A section of the Lance Armstrong Bikeway, also under construction, would run just behind the light-filled building.

  However, as the foundation flourished, questions arose about the blurring of boundaries between what benefited the foundation and what benefited Armstrong himself. Armstrong’s return to competitive cycling meant millions of dollars for him personally. For example, his sponsorship contract with Trek said that if Armstrong decided to make a comeback, Trek would pay him a bonus of $1 million a year. And he was such a star that he was able to collect huge fees just for appearing in certain races, like the Tour Down Under, for which the government of South Australia offered him $1 million.

  Still determined to clear his name of the doping suspicions that continued to haunt him, Armstrong also hoped to use his comeback as a chance to silence the doubters who had questioned whether he was clean when he won, and whether he had it in him to win without doping. Toward that end, he announced the Astana team’s retention of Dr. Don Catlin, a leading expert in identifying and detecting the use of performance-enhancing drugs in professional sports. Dr. Catlin, Armstrong said, would design the most comprehensive program ever implemented for a professional athlete. The goal of the program would be to make it possible for Lance to prove he was racing clean. All of Lance’s blood work and testing would be posted online at www .livestrong.com—the for-profit website Demand Media had created for him.

  Catlin seemed an impeccable choice for the purpose. He had overseen testing for anabo
lic agents at the 1996 Atlanta Olympics, and for twenty-five years had run the country’s first anti-doping lab at UCLA. At the time he was hired by Armstrong, he ran a company called Anti-Doping Research, a nonprofit organization he founded to research performance-enhancing drugs, uncover new drugs being used illegally, and develop tests to detect them. Although Catlin was to be paid by Astana, Armstrong characterized him as completely independent.

  Not long after the announcement about his return, Armstrong held another news conference at the Interbike cycling trade show in Las Vegas, where he was joined on the podium by Dr. Catlin. Greg LeMond showed up and proceeded to attack the testing program, calling it a conflict of interest for Catlin to take payment from the team, and asking Catlin whether he would be measuring Armstrong’s oxygen intake, power output, and maximum aerobic capacity—factors he described as being able to indicate doping. Catlin responded by saying that those factors were not his areas of expertise—at which point Armstrong said, “It’s time for us, everybody in this room, to move on. . . . I appreciate you being here—next question.”

  Determined to press his point, LeMond went on: “So the whole history has just been passed over?”—a reference to the speculation that Lance had doped to win his seven Tour titles.

  The exchange did little to put a dent in Armstrong’s ironclad defenses against doping accusations, but it did a lot to hurt LeMond’s personal brand. Most people in cycling by this point knew LeMond was absolutely right. But by crusading against Armstrong, he looked like he was unwilling to let go and move on. LeMond had gone from being ambivalent about professional cycling to wanting to fix it single-handedly.

  No matter what he did, Lance could not lay such speculations to rest. In late 2008, the French anti-doping authority threw down a challenge to Armstrong. The head of the agency, Pierre Bordry, had become convinced that Armstrong had cheated and gotten away with it. He proposed that he agree to retesting of his 1999 urine samples to see whether the French newspaper L’Équipe had been right. Bordry, who had overseen the testing of the anonymous samples from 1999, was quoted in L’Équipe as saying that he wanted to act as a referee between the newspaper and Armstrong (although Bordry seemed to already have an opinion, for he referred in the newspaper to samples “which contain erythropoietin [EPO]).”

  A positive test from the samples could not lead to a ban from racing because too much time had passed for Lance to be disciplined. Even so, the French agency proposed that Armstrong show good faith by agreeing to the retesting. Doing so, the agency argued, would be in Armstrong’s interest, for if he was really innocent, it would make it possible for him to cut short the rumors he’d been unable to shake. The tests could be carried out quickly at Bordry’s lab and done in the presence of a representative sent by Armstrong, the agency said. Or, if Armstrong preferred, they could be done at another World Anti-Doping Agency–accredited European lab outside France.

  Armstrong declined Bordry’s offer.

  And by early 2009, the strict and transparent individual anti-doping program that Lance had announced was abandoned, before it ever began. Dr. Catlin issued a statement saying that by mutual agreement, he and Lance had decided to part ways, without his ever having looked at a single blood or urine sample from Armstrong, because the program was too complex and too costly to carry out. Bill Stapleton issued a statement saying that Armstrong had been tested two or three times since December by Rasmus Damsgaard, a Danish anti-doping research scientist who ran the internal anti-doping program of the Astana team, and would continue to do Armstrong’s testing throughout the season. Meanwhile, Astana had rehired Armstrong’s old team doctor, Pedro Celaya.

  Lance also began to back off his initial commitment to publish all of his biological data online. In late January, he headed to Australia for the Tour Down Under, his first race out of retirement. It was just a tune-up race. He wasn’t seriously attempting to win it. After the race, people noted that the data about his blood work had not been posted on his website, contrary to his promise to do so as the season got under way. Armstrong explained that he was worried that publishing all his biological data would prompt unfair questions about him from the public. A layman would probably not be able to understand complex information, he said, adding that there are natural fluctuations in some blood levels when a rider races at a high altitude. His website did post seven of his basic test results, which had been obtained since he rejoined the testing pool, and stated that since he had returned to cycling, he had been tested seventeen times. But that didn’t satisfy critics.

  Dick Pound, the former chairman of the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA), said: “Armstrong made all the big announcements, and the testing has dropped right off the radar. No sign that anything is actually getting done.”

  Notwithstanding the controversies that continued to swirl around him, many veteran cyclists, both on and off his team, were excited about Armstrong’s return to the sport. They had never before seen anything like what Lance had managed to achieve in his first comeback—the crowds, the media, the electricity in the atmosphere wherever he went. Even riders from rival teams sought his autograph and wanted to have their photos taken with him. As the mayor of the French town of Manosque told one rider during a race in March: Whether the people love him or hate him, whether they like him or dislike him, they’ll all come to the Tour because they want to see the best.

  Several anti-doping scientists, though, had different ideas. They believed Armstrong was planning to use blood transfusions during the 2009 Tour de France, and they were in the process of developing a test they thought would be able to catch him. The new test, which was being developed in a laboratory in Barcelona, could detect plastic molecules from transfusion bags in riders’ blood. The scheme would require cooperation from several organizations, including the WADA, the UCI, and the Swiss anti-doping laboratory that handled blood testing for the Tour de France. But as the test hadn’t yet been perfected, the plan was to freeze Armstrong’s blood and test it later. There was a small hitch, though: In order to preserve frozen specimen, a chemical needed to be mixed with the blood.

  Drug testing follows strict protocols. When a rider gives a sample, the blood or urine is divided into two separate containers—an A and a B sample. Both containers are sealed. When the samples get to the lab, only the A sample is tested. The seal on the B sample remains intact. If the A sample tests positive, a rider has the right to witness the seal on the B sample being broken and the sample being tested. The procedure guards against tampering.

  Armstrong would surely notice if a drug tester put something into his blood sample. Savvy veterans know to watch the sample carefully until it is sealed. The people involved in the plan decided they would take the blood test, seal both samples in front of Armstrong, and then break the seal back at the lab, add the preservative, and freeze it. Once the Barcelona test was perfected, they would test Armstrong’s blood for the plasticizer. Because the seals were to be broken, the test itself could not be used to sanction Armstrong, but it could be used in conjunction with other evidence—such as witness testimony—to convict him of a doping offense. The scientists were excited. They thought they had their man.

  In a separate and unrelated drug-testing incident in early March, Armstrong returned from a training ride in the south of France to discover an official from the AFLD, the French anti-doping agency, waiting for him, ready to take a urine sample. That year, the AFLD quietly stepped up its efforts to catch cheating cyclists with out-of-competition testing. Armstrong, who was with Bruyneel, got off his bike and darted inside his house while Bruyneel blocked the drug tester from entering. After twenty minutes—theoretically enough time to manipulate his bodily fluids to avoid testing positive—Armstrong came out and submitted to the test. Armstrong was in violation of anti-doping protocol, which says that athletes must stay within sight of the sample collectors at all times once they show up to do the test. The incident was all over the news. Armstrong’s explanation was that, although he was used
to being tested by the UCI, he hadn’t expected to be tested by the French and he had wanted to make a call to be sure the tester was legitimate. But that didn’t explain why Armstrong went inside and took a shower. If he had, as he said, taken four hundred drug tests, surely he knew the rules. The UCI, of course, backed Armstrong. The French anti-doping officials were not so obliging; they were considering banning Armstrong from the Tour de France over the incident, which Lance dubbed Showergate.

  “I suspect this will escalate, and we’ll see even more antics out of the AFLD in the near future,” he said in a video he recorded and posted on the Internet. “There’s a very high likelihood that they’d prohibit me from riding in the Tour. And that’s too bad. The tour is something that I love dearly, something I wanted to ride in.”

  For his comeback year, Armstrong had decided to limit the number of races he participated in. He had done the Tour Down Under and was planning to do the Leadville 100, the mountain bike race he had done the previous year to mark his return to cycling. The only race he had committed to in Europe was the Tour de France. But now, with “Showergate,” Armstrong announced that it was possible he would skip the Tour. In the meantime, he would race in the Giro d’Italia in May, a decision that was seen as a snub to the French. The huge publicity boost the Tour de France would have received as Armstrong’s European comeback race would now be going to the Italians.

  Later in March, Armstrong entered the Vuelta a Castilla y León, a stage race in Spain, in preparation for the Giro. On the opening day, Armstrong was caught in a crash and fractured his right collarbone, putting his Giro d’Italia berth in jeopardy. But after undergoing emergency surgery, he bounced back in astonishingly good form and was ready for the start of the race. He finished in a respectable twelfth place. Pretty good for a guy who was thirty-seven, older than practically anyone else in the field, who had just broken his collarbone, and had been out of bike racing for a couple of years.