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

by Reed Albergotti

  While Armstrong was thinking about his public reputation, his lawyers were worried about his growing legal problems—and with good reason. Jeff Novitzky and the prosecutors from the US Attorney’s Office in Los Angeles were trying to see if they could find grounds for reopening the criminal case. After digging, however, what the prosecutors found didn’t rise to the level of obstruction of justice, and there seemed to be nothing they could do.

  But another branch of the Department of Justice—the Civil Division in Washington, DC—was continuing its deliberations on whether to join Floyd Landis’s whistle-blower lawsuit. With the release of the USADA documents, the Civil Division lawyers began looking into the possibility of making a claim that the owners of the US Postal Service team, including Armstrong, had defrauded the federal government by accepting sponsorship money from the US Postal Service while running an organized doping operation. Over at the FDA, Jeff Novitzky began to assist the Civil Division lawyers in gathering evidence in support of the case. Robert Chandler, the DOJ lawyer leading the government’s review of the Landis lawsuit, had been calling up potential witnesses for months, and shortly after the release of USADA’s report, he petitioned a federal court to force Lance to comply with the 2011 subpoena for documents relating to, among other things, any payments he had made to the UCI and Michele Ferrari. Lance did finally satisfy his obligation to the subpoena that fall.

  SCA Promotions’ legal action was particularly worrisome to Lance’s attorneys. It wasn’t just a large sum of money that was at stake. Tillotson hinted that he would ask a court to allow him to question Armstrong under oath about whether he had doped to win. That legal approach would leave Lance with two unpleasant options. He could defend himself and claim he hadn’t committed perjury in the earlier deposition, which would mean claiming, under oath, that he had never used performance-enhancing drugs—which would in turn expose him to new perjury charges by the federal government. Or he could take the Fifth on the stand. However humiliated and disgraced Lance had been over the previous two months, nothing could compare with the damage that would be done by his publicly taking the Fifth. That would restart the news cycle and damage Lance’s brand, perhaps beyond repair.

  Frustrated, Lance took to Twitter again, sending general fuck-you messages to all the people and organizations that were hounding him. He spent the next two weeks in Hawaii, tweeting photos of the breathtaking orange and yellow sunset, over the palm trees of the Kukio golf course, and of himself hanging upside-down during a workout at the Kukio gym, with the notice that he was “hangin’ in there.” His tweets linked to the images on Mobli. Once he returned to Texas, he arranged to be photographed lying on the red couch in the media room on the third floor of his home, with seven yellow jerseys on the wall, glowing under the ceiling lights. “Back in Austin and just layin’ around,” he tweeted Saturday, November 10. Viewers’ reactions were mixed. By Monday afternoon, his “layin’ around” tweet had more than 6,000 retweets and 1,700 favorites. Some expressed their support, telling Lance he had earned all of the jerseys; others dismissed him as smug and deluded.

  Despite his potential legal and financial troubles, and the fact that his net worth was in jeopardy and could potentially disappear in a legal bonfire, Armstrong was still myopically focused on one goal: getting back to competing in triathlons. His good friend Bill Ritter had begun making overtures on his behalf to USADA about striking some kind of deal—admitting to past doping in exchange for a reduction in his lifetime ban. Ritter, the former governor of Colorado, now the head of the privately funded Center for the New Energy Economy at Colorado State University, had gotten to know Lance three years earlier, in 2009, when Lance, having just bought property in Aspen, placed a cold call to the governor’s office. “Why don’t we have a pro stage race in Colorado?” Lance had suggested to Ritter. Ritter, an influential Democrat, then selected a group of people who helped create a new multiday stage race that would eventually be known as the USA Pro Challenge. The two men became friends as they worked on the project, and would often get together in Aspen over beer. In their conversations following USADA’s ban, Lance told Ritter about his hopes of being able to compete again. That fall, Ritter called Travis Tygart, whom he hadn’t previously met, explaining that he knew Lance wanted to get back into sport. “Is there any reason to talk to Lance? Is there a possibility of some kind of reconciliation involving anything other than a lifetime ban?” Ritter asked Tygart. Tygart told Ritter there was hope. Under the World Anti-Doping Code, athletes can get as much as a 75 percent reduction of a ban if they provide the kind of substantial help to anti-doping authorities that enables them to build cases against others. From there, Lance asked his lawyer, Tim Herman, to pick up where Ritter left off.

  Herman called Tygart and offered to dispatch Lance’s legal team to USADA’s headquarters in Colorado Springs to meet with him. Tygart said he wanted Lance himself to come. When Herman pushed back, Tygart said he’d be willing to discuss the plan with Armstrong in person, but he was tired of dealing with Armstrong’s legal attack dogs. He would only schedule a meeting if Armstrong showed up and talked with him, face-to-face.

  At least one of Lance’s lawyers, John Keker, was opposed to the meeting. Keker, who was proud of his work in getting Armstrong’s criminal investigation dropped, thought the meeting could only hurt, possibly undoing his good work. But Armstrong’s legal team had been divided over how to handle USADA’s allegations from the beginning. Mark Fabiani supported the idea of a meeting, as did Tim Herman, who hoped that if Lance agreed to it, USADA’s Tygart might be willing to send a letter to the Justice Department suggesting they abandon the possibility of picking up Floyd Landis’s whistle-blower lawsuit. Armstrong decided to go with his gut and take the meeting.

  Neither Armstrong nor Herman wanted to meet with Tygart at USADA headquarters in Colorado Springs, where they’d surely be noticed, so they asked Ritter if he would allow the December 14 meeting to take place at his CSU offices in downtown Denver. Ritter agreed, as did Tygart. Having sold his private jet, Lance chartered a plane to Colorado, bringing Anna and his two youngest children along, so they could spend time with Anna’s parents in Boulder.

  The meeting began without Lance present. Tim Herman was going to scope out the situation to determine whether it was worth the disgraced cyclist’s while to take part. In addition to Herman, there was Tygart, who had come in from Colorado Springs; Bill Bock, who had come in from Indiana; Bill Ritter; and Steven Ungerleider, a psychologist and visiting scholar at the University of Texas who had suggested that he could serve as an honest broker between the two sides. Having written a book on the state-sponsored East German doping program in the 1970s, and served on the education and ethics committee with the World Anti-Doping Agency, Ungerleider was familiar with the world of doping control. He even brought a copy of his book to the meeting and placed it on the table.

  The meeting had a down-to-business feel. There was no spread of food or even coffee for the participants, just bottles of water. But Bock and Tygart wanted Herman to know they were concerned about Lance’s well-being. They had actually been shocked at the magnitude and velocity of Lance’s downfall, and they had talked with each other several times about how Lance was dealing with it emotionally. Lodged permanently in the back of their minds was the memory of Antonio Pettigrew, a track athlete who committed suicide on an overdose of Unisom sleeping pills in 2010, at age forty-two, two years after losing his gold medal following a USADA doping ban.

  Herman, who seemed to consider himself something of a father figure to Lance, said Lance was doing fine but that he’d be a lot better if he could get back to competing in triathlons. He said that Lance would be willing to come in and talk, to lay it all out on the table, but that in exchange he wanted to be back competing within a year.

  Tygart and Bock explained that such a quick return was impossible within the rules of the sport. But they tried to make a case for other reasons for Lance to come clean. “There are many more benef
its to getting on the side of the truth than simply competing in sport,” Bock said. “Doesn’t he want to leave a legacy of helping to repair the sport?” Coming clean to USADA would be part of the repair, and they also suggested that Lance arrange to meet with people like Floyd Landis and Greg LeMond to make amends.

  Herman said he understood. He, too, was concerned about Lance’s legacy and reputation. But Herman wanted something more tangible from USADA: help with the whistle-blower lawsuit against Lance. Tygart and Bock agreed that if Lance provided details about his past doping, they’d be willing to write a letter to the Department of Justice explaining that Armstrong was playing a role in cleaning up the sport. They couldn’t guarantee one way or another that it would affect the whistle-blower case, but it might help. At that point, Herman agreed to call Lance, who said he’d join them in an hour. Bock and Tygart went across the street to a deli for coffee and muffins and then came back to the meeting room, where they all waited.

  About ninety minutes later, Lance walked in, wearing a baseball cap and a North Face parka. His facial hair was grown out, almost to the point of being a beard. He looked nothing like the famous clean-shaven athlete with the beaming smile and the buzz cut.

  Lance spoke as if it were a foregone conclusion that he had doped. He didn’t bother denying anything, but he didn’t offer any explicit details, either. He referred to what Ungerleider had written about the systematic doping of athletes in the former East Germany and said that whatever he had done was nothing compared to that. Tygart, who was meeting Lance for the first time, noticed that all the people surrounding him seemed to be coddling him, which had probably allowed him to infer that he could avoid the ban completely. It became clear to Tygart that none of Armstrong’s lawyers had given him the “come to Jesus” talk—the kind of frank discussion with no sugarcoating that apprises the client of the true dimensions of his predicament. Lance seemed to be laboring under the false impression that he could still get out of this mess with minimal damage. He said he would be willing to talk about others who might have helped him dope. But in exchange, “You have to give me a fair punishment.” That “doesn’t have to be six months, but a year.” Tygart actually began to feel sorry for him. Lance still thought he could take charge of the situation, but this was one of the few times in Lance’s life when he was no longer in control of his fate.

  Tygart told Armstrong that he had already had his chance to come clean and he’d blown it, that, at best, if he gave full cooperation, the ban would be eight years. The offer was so far from a sweetheart deal that it didn’t seem to create much of an incentive for Armstrong to talk. He’d be forty-nine before he could compete again in elite competition. Lance tried to convince Tygart that he was just another rider on the US Postal team, that he had done what was required of him by a sport in which doping was rampant. In fact, he said, every sport has similar problems, including the National Football League and Major League Baseball, but those athletes hadn’t been singled out by USADA.

  As the discussion wound down, Tygart didn’t budge. He told Armstrong he stood accused of offenses that stretched beyond doping to a cover-up marked by nearly fifteen years of denials, as well as threats and actions against anyone who told the truth.

  Equally un-budging, Armstrong told Tygart that he held the keys to his own redemption. Armstrong said he could create his own “truth and reconciliation commission,” laying out the facts as he saw them. Armstrong believed such a plan would put so much public pressure on USADA that it would have no choice but to allow him to compete again—to which Tygart responded: “That’s bullshit! People will see it for what it is—a ploy for you to get back to competition.” Lance shot back that he would compete in unsanctioned races. And with that, the negotiation was over. Lance thought Tygart’s refusal to budge on the eight-year ban was bullshit. If Tygart was really interested in hearing what Lance had to say, Lance thought, he could just give him a shorter ban.

  Tygart was livid. A few weeks later, he quietly sent an impassioned e-mail to US Attorney General Eric Holder in Washington, DC, requesting that the Justice Department join in Landis’s civil action: “In light of the outcome of recent sport-related federal criminal cases, it is understandable that the government would have some reluctance to spend public dollars going after another sports case. This situation is different,” Tygart wrote. “USADA has already done the work in the sports case and won. Indeed, Mr. Armstrong and his representatives have admitted that doping took place. . . . The central fact of doping is no longer an issue” in the Lance affair, Tygart said. “What remains unresolved is the massive economic fraud perpetrated by individuals who are outside USADA’s jurisdiction.”

  • • •

  With the holidays approaching, Lance retreated again to Hawaii’s Big Island with Anna and their children. He played golf on the ten-hole Tom Fazio–designed course, swam in the local pool, and visited Hawaii Volcanoes National Park. He seemed to be trying to get back to a sense of normalcy. But clearly things had changed, including, most notably, his relationships with his sponsors. Now when he went for a ride, he opted for a Crumpton or Moots, small bike makers from Austin, over his iconic Trek. And when he went for a jog, he wore Asics running shoes, not Nikes. Lance was particularly bitter about Nike. During a long wine-soaked evening he and Anna had shared with Adam Wilk, an old friend from Plano, he had told Adam to go into the closet and take all of his Nike swag, including his new Nike tri suits. As Adam packed the clothing into a duffel bag, Lance handed him two pairs of Nike Air Force 1 sneakers, designed by the Los Angeles tattoo artist Mister Cartoon and released in July 2009. These limited edition sneakers—emblazoned with a skeleton, spiderwebs, and L.A.—were among the most coveted releases in Nike’s history, and Adam found Lance’s relinquishment of them particularly poignant because he knew that Lance had a friendship with Mister Cartoon.

  During this period, we, like many people in the press, tried to get to Lance. Vanessa had been pursuing him aggressively for a confessional interview for several months, and continued her efforts while he was in Hawaii. To make her case, she argued—in notes to Lance, as well as Tim Herman—that, by talking to us, Lance would send a strong message to the world that he was interested in coming clean with the public about his actions, rather than simply looking for a willing outlet to take dictation. After all, we had shown ourselves to be hard-hitting reporters of the events in Lance’s downfall, beginning with the story we broke on Floyd Landis’s explosive allegations.

  One evening in early December, over drinks with Tim Herman in Austin, Vanessa suggested Lance call our editor, Sam Walker, and Lance then began talking to Sam about coming forward. But Lance was wary. The Journal, his lawyers noted, was owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation, the same entity that owned London’s Sunday Times, which had threatened a lawsuit against him, seeking almost $1.6 million for the return of the 2006 settlement payment the Times made to him in a libel case, plus interest and lawyers’ fees. The Times had no connection to us, but Lance viewed us as allied.

  We also got the message that Lance didn’t like us much personally. He described Reed as a C-level journalist and even made insulting comments about his appearance. He had a general but less intense loathing toward Vanessa, whom he seemed to find relentless and annoying.

  Also, he had other ideas about how he could use the press to get his own version of the story out. One late December afternoon, after the Times filed its lawsuit, Lance flew over to the Hawaiian island of Maui to have lunch with Oprah Winfrey, an old acquaintance, at her large ranch in Kula. Oprah had e-mailed him a few months earlier seeking an interview for her cable channel OWN (Oprah Winfrey Network), which was struggling for ratings at the time; he had responded that he wasn’t ready to talk. But then he e-mailed and suggested they get together over the holidays. Hoping to negotiate his cooperation to do an on-camera interview with her, Oprah had stayed in Hawaii a couple of extra days to accommodate his schedule.

  Sitting at Oprah’s mansion
in Maui that day, Lance found that he felt comfortable talking to her about his problems. He began to think he was finally ready to acknowledge his past lies. An appearance on Oprah in January might be the first step in his public rehabilitation.

  If he confessed on camera, he believed he would be able to charm America into loving him again, and to turn public opinion against USADA. That, he thought, would be the only way he would be allowed back into racing. Confessing publicly might also make things easier for his children. During the long night that Lance and Anna had spent with Adam Wilk and his girlfriend, he had talked about the toll the doping scandal was taking on his kids. Lance told Adam that his son Luke had gotten in a fight at the bus stop when a schoolmate teased him, saying, “Your dad does dope! Your dad does dope!” If Lance appeared on Oprah, he would be able to level with his children for the first time, without burdening them with having to keep his secret.

  So he flew back to his home and called his lawyers to discuss the plan.

  They were vehemently against a TV interview. Considering the serious legal jeopardy he was in, they thought it was reckless. If Armstrong had any leverage in the whistle-blower case or other civil suits that he was facing, it was that anyone taking him on in court would have to prove he had doped. By admitting it on television, he would be removing one of the obstacles keeping his enemies at bay and away from his net worth, which now seemed very much in jeopardy.

  But Armstrong continued to believe the interview might be the best course of action for him—the only way he could begin to regain his reputation, and his only route back to the possibility of competing again. For him, those considerations seemed to outweigh any others. He told Oprah he would sit down with her the following week in Austin.