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

by Reed Albergotti

  As of the end of 2011, Armstrong was still actively working for a large stable of sponsors that included Nike, Nissan, Demand Media, FRS, and Anheuser-Busch. “Our relationship with Lance remains as strong as ever,” a Nike spokesman told The Wall Street Journal that summer. Anheuser-Busch continued airing the Michelob Ultra ad that Lance had taped the previous summer, showing it during both the US Open golf broadcast and the 2011 Tour de France. “Lance has performed as an extraordinary athlete in a demanding sport, making him admired by millions who lead active lifestyles,” a spokesman for the company said. “That was our opinion when we signed him and that is our opinion today.” There was a slight drop in requests for Lance to make speeches and public appearances, compared with a year earlier. His agent, Bill Stapleton, even got on the phone with Vanessa to say, “That’s typical of a retired athlete.”

  • • •

  Sitting in his living room in front of his fireplace in Durango, Colorado, in January 2012, Rick Crawford checked the Twittersphere for the latest posts about Lance Armstrong. The two men hadn’t spoken since the late 1980s, back when Rick had invested a couple of years of his time in helping Lance to make the transition from swimmer to triathlete.

  After working with Lance in Plano, Rick had become a cycling coach to elite riders, including Levi Leipheimer, who later joined Armstrong’s teams. Between 1999 and 2002, Rick also helped Leipheimer procure EPO. The blood booster provided Levi the edge he needed to get a job offer in 2000 from Lance’s US Postal team. But Rick’s beef with Lance had nothing to do with doping. Rather, it had to do with his bitterness over the sense that he had been used by Lance to get to a certain level—then, once Lance reached his goals, Lance had tossed his old coach aside. You steamrolled me, Lance, Rick thought to himself. You have no regard for feelings or relationships.

  After a few glasses of wine, Rick jumped into the Twitter conversation himself, adding: “Lance isn’t what he says he is. He’s kind of a dick. And the foundation is a shell, just another thing Lance has learned to control.”

  Within a day, Rick received a direct message on Twitter from Lance, seeking his phone number. When Lance called Rick the next day, Rick recalls him saying, “Hey, dude, I just saw your boss-to-be, here in Austin. He was here for a fund-raiser.” At the time, Rick was up for a job as collegiate cycling director at Colorado Mesa University. It just so happened that the head of CMU’s athletic program had brain cancer and recently had become a Lance Armstrong Foundation donor.

  “I don’t think this is looking good for your job prospects at CMU. I’m just going to tell him you’ve been talking shit. This doesn’t look good for you,” Lance added, according to Rick.

  Rick was repentant. “I had one wine too many. The tweets were immature,” he said, and he apologized. But as he spoke, he had the sense that he might never get to talk to Lance on the phone again in his life. So just before hanging up, Rick decided he would use the moment to cleanse his soul, to tell Lance what he really thought: “You smashed me. You have no right to ask me to be nice to you. You’re not nice to me. And I am not happy about it.” Lance demanded that he erase the tweets, and Rick obliged.

  A few days later, Rick met with the head of CMU’s athletic department, who asked him to explain himself. He apologized for sending the tweets. “Look,” Rick said, “this is personal. It’s between me and Lance. To me, he isn’t a hero.” Rick got the job.

  At the time, Lance, Anna, and their two young children were living part-time in Austin and part-time in their $9 million five-bedroom home in Aspen, Colorado, with views of the Rocky Mountains.

  He traveled a lot for foundation-related events. When he popped in at a Canadian Tire store in Toronto, after the chain agreed to carry Livestrong ellipticals, treadmills, and exercise bikes and to make a minimum $4 million donation, an adoring throng was there to greet him. He flew to New York, where he met with Nike CEO Mark Parker to don a flashy new $150 Nike wristband. He and Stapleton reached a deal with two-year-old Israeli start-up Mobli, a visual social media platform based in New York, that would allow Armstrong followers to watch moments from his training sessions as well as his work with the foundation. Both Armstrong and Stapleton joined Mobli’s board.

  And suddenly things seemed to be again looking up. In early February 2012, André Birotte Jr., the US attorney for the Central District of California, announced, without any explanation, that his office was ending its two-year investigation into alleged fraud by the US Postal team. Doug Miller and Mark Williams, the line prosecutors, who had put so much energy into this investigation and felt they had built a strong case, were very upset. So was Jeff Novitzky, who had been informed of Birotte’s decision only minutes before he sent out a press release.

  Armstrong had a quiet celebration in Austin, with his kids, his girlfriend, and a cold beer. The end of the investigation didn’t just seem to exonerate Armstrong; it also provided his lawyers with ammunition against the media, who, they argued, had gone too far in asserting that there had been illegal behavior and had failed to ask tough questions about the government’s legal theory. With the probe now having been dropped, Armstrong’s lawyers seemed to have a point.

  Travis Tygart, undeterred by the inaction of the US Attorney’s Office, decided to proceed with his doping case. Though USADA couldn’t press criminal charges, it exercised a great deal of power in the world of elite sports. Tygart had already spoken to a number of the witnesses—not just Floyd Landis but also Tyler Hamilton, and Frankie and Betsy Andreu, with whom he had had extensive conversations. Now he needed more evidence.

  Tygart knew the daunting odds. One problem was the eight-year statute of limitations in the anti-doping code. He wanted to bring the case quickly so that Armstrong’s final two Tour de France wins in 2004 and 2005 would fall within the statute window. In any case, Tygart planned to argue that the eight-year statute did not apply.

  To prepare their case, Tygart and USADA’s general counsel, Bill Bock, initiated a series of meetings with about a dozen former Postal riders, promising them leniency if they testified truthfully.

  In March, they sat down with David Zabriskie at his lawyer’s office on Park Avenue in New York City. As Zabriskie described the moment that Bruyneel told him to start to use EPO, he began to weep. They took a break to allow him to recover.

  Tygart and Bock looked at each other before resuming their questioning.

  “This is why we’re doing this,” Bock said quietly to Tygart.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  SCORCHED EARTH

  In February 2012, Lance joined some of the world’s fastest and most masochistic athletes, including several Olympians, for a triathlon in Central America. Donning goggles and a bright yellow swim cap, he freestyled 1.2 miles in a strong current on the banks of the Panama Canal. After getting caught in a pack behind American Matty Reed, a 2008 Olympian, he managed tenth place in the swim, in 19 minutes and 22 seconds. Peeling off his black swimskin, he then biked fifty-six miles through the jungle and rain forest on his new Trek Speed Concept, wearing a tight, black custom-made Nike triathlon suit. Unsure of how to pace himself, he came in second on the bike course. Next he ran 13.1 miles on a sunbaked oceanside causeway. After just a few miles, he picked up his pace, flying past pro Chris Lieto to take the lead. For most of the run, it seemed Lance might win. But around the ninth mile, his pace slowed, and in the final mile, an Olympic triathlon bronze and silver medalist overtook him. New Zealander Bevan Docherty crossed the finish line in 3 hours, 50 minutes, and 13 seconds—42 seconds ahead of Lance, who was runner-up. Not too shabby for his first professional triathlon since his retirement from cycling.

  Triathlons, Lance figured, would now be his calling—his future livelihood and the source of renewed athletic glory. He felt he was on his way to proving to the world that he was not just the best cyclist of all time but a badass swimmer and runner, too. Lance vowed to himself that he would lose a little weight and work on his stride. He also changed his diet, going vegan for breakf
ast and lunch. That spring, he entered five middle-distance events, showing up for them with his posse of coaches and handlers, his own personal photographer, and sometimes his girlfriend, Anna, and his kids in tow. Fans mobbed him at the finish lines. His popularity, he gloated to himself, must be driving Novitzky nuts.

  In May, he traveled to the small town of Haines City, in the heart of central Florida. Competing against two thousand other participants, he came out of the swim in Lake Eva in fifth place. Then he biked through rural Polk County, easily passing the top four competitors, before running laps at Lake Eva Park. He won, beating his nearest competitor, a Ukrainian pro, by 11 minutes.

  Two weeks later, he competed against a field of triathlon veterans in Kailua-Kona, Hawaii—considered the spiritual home of the sport and Lance’s new favorite retreat. He completed the entire event in just 3 hours, 50 minutes, and 55 seconds overall, breaking the course record by nearly 7 minutes.

  The next goal: to win the Ironman World Championship, the culminating event in the season’s series of Ironman competitions, to be held in Kailua-Kona that October, when he would be forty-one years old. It begins with a 2.4-mile swim, followed by a 112-mile bike leg and then a 26.2-mile run—double the distances of any of the run-bike-swim events in which Lance had competed to date. His cancer foundation had formed a partnership with the World Triathlon Corporation, a privately held company that owns all the Ironman events. Their deal would raise more than $1 million for the foundation, which would bring hefty financial benefits for Lance, too. He would score payments ranging from $3,000 to $120,000 for every event he won. Even more important, the world championship would bring him an entirely new fan base, making him attractive to sponsors, especially because the Ironman has the most desirable demographic in sports, drawing a disproportionate share of wealthy entrepreneurs, CEOs, doctors, and lawyers—just the kind of sports enthusiasts who happily spend thousands of dollars on high-end athletic gear, equipment, and training. Still solidly behind Lance as he planned for the Ironman, Nike provided him with a series of custom-made triathlon suits in gray and black, with LIVESTRONG down the front and yellow Nike swooshes. Because of Lance’s participation, NBC made plans to broadcast two hours of the championships, up from the usual ninety minutes. It would show the event on the airwaves in October instead of December, as it had in the past.

  Lance had been a part-time resident in Kukio, Hawaii, with its golf and beach club surrounded by white sands and lava rock, since 2008. Once he went into training for the Ironman, he and Anna and their young kids relocated to a friend’s luxury private home in Kona. He planned to spend at least six weeks of 2012 there, arranging to have his older kids—Luke, Isabelle, and Grace—flown in from Austin on his Gulfstream, during their spring breaks.

  To train, Lance rode over the Kohala volcano into the Pololu Valley, with its black sand beach, and alongside the Queen Ka’ahumanu Highway, the stretch of road that comprises a key part of the Hawaiian Ironman, sometimes passing his triathlon rival, the pro Chris Lieto, or his friend Michael Dell, the founder and CEO of Dell Inc., on their bikes. Lance swam in Kailua Bay, an inlet on the west coast of the Big Island of Hawaii, with his coach, Jimmy Riccitello, nearby on a stand-up paddleboard. He also became a member of the Kona Masters elite swimming team, adding pool workouts at the Kona Community Aquatic Center of between 2,000 and 3,000 yards three days a week.

  For Lance to earn one of the 1,700 slots in the Kona championships, he would have to participate in one of the 140.6-mile qualifying events. He selected the France Ironman to be held in Nice in June. Wanting to familiarize himself with the course beforehand, he flew to Kortrijk, Belgium, on his Gulfstream jet in April, met up with Johan Bruyneel, who was then the manager of the RadioShack-Nissan team, and they both headed south to Nice. The France Ironman course took Lance through seventeen towns and into the mountains near the French Riviera, while Johan rode in a follow car beside him.

  Now that the US attorney in Los Angeles had dropped the criminal fraud investigation against Armstrong, life returned to the Lance version of normal. He rented a villa in Cap-d’Ail for the month of April and returned to the States briefly in May, to deliver a keynote speech at a corporate event and to train and compete in Half Ironmans in the States.

  However, the legal battles were far from over. Lawyers with the Justice Department’s Civil Division in Washington, DC, were still considering whether to join Floyd Landis’s whistle-blower lawsuit. One of those lawyers was Robert Chandler, from the department’s Commercial Litigation Branch, who had worked closely with the US Postal Service Office of Inspector General in connection with the civil case for at least a year. In June 2011, the USPS OIG had issued Lance a subpoena, asking him to provide, among other things, a long list of records related to his business relationship with Tailwind Sports and Capital Sports & Entertainment from the mid-1990s to 2004, when the USPS sponsored Lance’s cycling teams. The subpoena also requested Lance’s correspondence with Michele Ferrari, and with any employees of the US Anti-Doping Agency, the World Anti-Doping Agency, testing laboratories, the USPS, and “any person (including any companies or other organizations) that at any time manufactured or distributed any substance believed to have the potential to enhance an athlete’s ability to compete in endurance sports.” On top of all that, it also sought Lance’s training journals and medical records, including hematocrit and hormone levels, and any financial records reflecting payments to Ferrari, the UCI, USA Cycling, WADA or USADA, and any USPS employees, including fellow riders.

  But Lance still hadn’t answered the government’s request for documents. His lawyers sought—unsuccessfully—to quash the subpoena, and then later tried to sidestep it, arguing that complying with the subpoena during the criminal investigation would have violated Lance’s Fifth Amendment rights against self-incrimination. In mid-2012, nearly a year later—and several months after the threat of criminal investigation ended—Lance’s lawyers now fought vigorously to keep the court record from public view. If the public found out that Lance had intended to assert his Fifth Amendment rights, well, that in itself would damage Lance’s reputation, his lawyers asserted.

  Thom Weisel had received a similar subpoena, and on the advice of his lawyer at Sullivan & Cromwell, he had complied, providing documents, including evidence that Weisel had lost a significant amount of money on his backing of the team. Weisel’s lawyers said he hadn’t known about any doping by Lance or others on the team.

  Johan Bruyneel was subpoenaed when he flew back to San Francisco in mid-May for the start of the Amgen Tour of California, in which RadioShack-Nissan was competing. He was served at the airport, and later met with federal investigators, providing a videotaped deposition. What he said during the taped deposition hasn’t been made public so far.

  While he was a pro cyclist, Lance had developed a lucrative side business of hosting so-called once-in-a-lifetime Ride with Lance experiences. Small groups of fifteen to fifty people paid $5,000 to $20,000 apiece for the privilege of working out with Lance for an hour or a morning, with all proceeds going to various charities, or so many participants thought. Some donors who neglected to read the fine print were angry when they learned that Lance himself was pocketing some of the money in the form of appearance fees, and collecting anywhere from $75,000 to $400,000. And now, Lance agreed to spend Memorial Day weekend hosting Swim Bike Run with Lance & Friends, a training camp to be held at a Kona resort hotel whose golf course was situated on the running leg of the Ironman course. Up to fifty participants would pay $25,000, not including the cost of getting to Hawaii, with the proceeds going to a juvenile diabetes charity in Hawaii. Uniforms emblazoned with the name Mellow Johnny’s were to be courtesy of his shop in Austin. Lance was to be paid handsomely to participate in the weekend event, which also advertised Ironman stars Dave Scott and Chrissie Wellington, both new friends of Lance’s, as guest coaches.

  Other events were in the works, too. The Lance Armstrong Foundation began crafting a plan to take bid
s on eBay for the Ultimate Kona Ironman Experience with Lance Armstrong, to be held during the world championships in October. The package included a coveted spot in the race, five nights in a hotel, and a chance to go on a training ride, swim, or run, and dinner, with Lance. Bidding would start at $40,000.

  Anheuser-Busch, which used Lance to promote its Michelob Ultra line, meanwhile began planning a sweepstakes that it would advertise in two-page spreads in Sports Illustrated and Runner’s World magazines. Entrants had the chance to win a $19,000 package highlighted by a trip to Kona to “hike, kayak or even take a ride” with Lance at some point between October 13 and 18. The tagline for the campaign seemed intended to taunt Jeff Novitzky: “Ultra invites you to catch Lance . . . if you can.”

  The organizers of the Kona training camp ended up canceling it, however, blaming low enrollment of fewer than twenty people due to too many overlapping events occurring during and around the Memorial Day weekend. That may have been disappointing, but Lance’s long-range plans were about to encounter a much more serious obstacle, in the form of a roadblock thrown up by Travis Tygart’s US Anti-Doping Agency.

  Earlier that May, USADA’s general counsel, Indiana-based Bill Bock, had placed a phone call to Lance’s longtime attorney Mark Levinstein of Williams & Connolly in Washington, DC. Levinstein had represented Lance for many years. When it surfaced that Lance’s urine samples from the 1999 Tour had tested positive for EPO in 2005, Levinstein, together with Lance and Bill Stapleton, had launched a fusillade of unverifiable accusations, including sabotage, against multiple targets. This was a man who was unafraid to go on the attack.

  When Bock reached Levinstein on the phone, he said that it was clear to USADA that there had been a massive doping scheme and conspiracy on the US Postal team, and that they wanted Lance to come clean about his role. “We’re prepared to bring a case but we’d like to give him an opportunity to be on the right side of this thing, and to tell the truth, and to be a part of cleaning up the sport, like some former teammates of his have done.” Bock didn’t name the teammates.