Lanced: The Shaming of Lance Armstrong

by David Walsh

  "

  Four years ago, on the morning of Saturday May, 19 2007, Floyd Landis took the stand at a hearing in Malibu, California, raised his right hand and swore by almighty God to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth about his life as a professional racing cyclist.

  He lied.

  A month later, Landis solicited thousands of dollars from ordinary bike fans to fund his burgeoning legal fees, and published a book, Positively False, which promised to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth about how he had won the 2006 Tour de France.

  He lied.

  In April last year, Landis sent a series of emails to US cycling officials that purported to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth about the sordid reality of doping in professional cycling. The emails were leaked to The Wall Street Journal, and three months later a federal investigation into doping in the sport was launched.

  The investigation is being led by Jeff Novitzky, a federal agent with the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), whose previous work in this field resulted in the shaming of the baseball star Barry Bonds and the jailing of the Olympic track star Marion Jones. Landis may be called on to testify, but why should anyone believe him now? a

  Before the lies, there was a story told about the genius of Floyd Landis. It began in the spring of 2002, on a grey morning in the Spanish city of Girona, when he glanced out of the window of an apartment he was sharing with a team-mate, Dave Zabriskie, and suggested it was too wet to train. "Let's go to the coffee shop," he said.

  They ordered two cappuccinos from a waitress and, after a week of training in the rain, it felt good to be warm. They ordered another round and then another, and by the fourth the waitress was laughing — she had never seen anyone drink four cappuccinos. So they ordered two more.

  Zabriskie could feel his eyes starting to pop; after five cups he gave up, but Floyd kept drinking, and two hours later, when he asked for the tab, the legend was born. He was The Man Who Drank 13 Cappuccinos — but the genius was in what happened next: Floyd went back to his apartment, climbed into bed and spent the rest of the afternoon sleeping.

  Later that year, after completing his first Tour de France, he fell into bed at midnight and didn't wake until 4pm the following day, when he got up, ordered some food, returned to bed and slept through till 10 the next morning. Yes, if there was one speed Floyd did better than fast, it was slow.

  The day it changed — the day everything changed — started in a king-size bed at a plush hotel in southern Holland. Three days before, he had become the third American in history to win the Tour de France; he had taken a call from President Bush, celebrated with family and friends in Paris, and travelled north to Stiphout in Holland for an exhibition race, where he had been paraded around with a local beauty queen and had pocketed €60,000.

  It was the morning of Wednesday July 26, 2006. After a long and leisurely breakfast with Amber, his wife, he returned to his room, where the famed yellow tunic he would wear again at another race that night was draped across a suitcase. Every time he looked at it he smiled. He had done it; he had won the Tour. And with victory came the spoils: a $3m contract with Phonak, the team he had joined in 2005; $4m in prospective sponsorships and a sense of achievement that felt priceless.

  Floyd was 30. For the first time in his life he felt truly content… And then the phone rang. The caller's voice was crackled and strained, and it took a moment for Floyd to register that it was his manager, John Lelangue, calling from another room. "I need to talk to you. Can I come up?" he asked.

  "Sure," Floyd replied. "What's up?" But instinctively, he knew.

  "I opened the door and his hands were shaking," Floyd recalls. "He came in and sat down at a table across from me and said, 'Floyd, we have a positive [drug test] on the team.' And then I had to sit down. I knew at that moment my life was f***** and would never be the same."

  Floyd Landis was the second of six children born to Paul and Arlene Landis. He was raised in a modest house in Farmersville, Pennsylvania, the heart of Amish country. The Landises were Mennonite, a branch of the Anabaptist Protestant religion related to Amish but not as conservative or inflexible. "I would go to church 400 times a year," he says, "and when you're a kid, sitting still for an hour and a half 400 times a year is a trauma in itself… It's not like these church services were stimulating; it's just a plain building with wooden benches and you just sit and listen."

  Listening didn't come easy to a hyperactive boy and he was spanked regularly, but the more he was punished, the more defiant he became. His most aggravating trait was a propensity for asking questions. The questions got more complex as he got older, and by his 12th birthday he began to accept that he was doomed. "We were taught that the Bible says that not only is adultery a sin, but lust is a sin, and when you're a 12-year-old boy, you're going to Hell! There was no way around it. I couldn't will myself to not think about women, and it made me extremely frustrated that this was a sin."

  But nothing stirred his juices like the thrill of riding his mountain bike. "The bike was my escape. The bike was my way to forget about it all, because whenever I wasn't on my bike, riding as hard as I could, I was sitting around contemplating life and trying not to feel guilty."

  In 1993, aged 17, he won the US junior mountain bike championships and was selected for the world championships in Métabief, France. He had never been on an aeroplane, eaten pasta, or witnessed anyone drinking alcohol before, and from the moment he arrived, he wanted to go home. "It was like I had landed on Mars.

  There were so many things that were different, so many things I couldn't adjust to and I just… withdrew. I tried to stay focused on the race, but the more I looked around, the more I had to stop and think about the philosophical issues in my head. I thought, 'Look at how these people behave! How do they justify this?'" In 1994 he secured his first sponsorship deal, with GT Bicycles, and then, before a race in West Virginia, he had his first taste of caffeine.

  "You want an espresso?" a team-mate, Will Geoghegan, asked.

  "What's an espresso?" he replied. Geoghegan laughed and shook his head: "Man, you're like some unfrozen caveman."

  The following summer, they were relaxing in an apartment before a race in Spokane when Geoghegan found a TV channel showing the Tour de France. Floyd had heard of the race but never seen it. "This thing is absolutely brutal," Geoghegan explained. "It covers more than 2,000 miles over three weeks and goes over some of the steepest roads in the Alps and Pyrenees."

  A lone rider in a blue jersey had broken clear of the pack and was entering the finishing stretch. "That guy's crushing everyone," Floyd observed. He was looking at Lance Armstrong.

  That October, on the morning of his 20th birthday, Floyd told his parents he was leaving to spend the winter with a small team in California. His mother started crying; his father urged him to remember who he was; they knew deep down he would never be back. "Don't worry," he assured them. "I'll make you proud."

  He settled in San Diego and spent the next three years scratching a living as a mountain bike racer. In 1998 he met David Witt, a 48-yearold restaurateur who loved riding his bike.

  Floyd was penniless and without a team, but Witt encouraged him to keep trying. "He said, 'Look, you can't quit yet, you've got to give it one more year — try racing on the road. Don't worry about rent, I'll pay for everything, just go train and see if you can find a road deal.' And I rode more than I ever did in my entire life that winter."

  He started well the following season and secured a small ($6,000) contract with Mercury, a new US road team with ambitions for Europe. In September, two months after Armstrong had won his first Tour de France, Landis finished third in the Tour de l'Avenir — a traditional testing ground for aspiring Tour champions — and Mercury upped his contract to $30,000.

  He started dating Amber Basile, a flight attendant and the daughter of David's girlfriend, Rose. "Before leaving home I had gone on some dates with a girl my parent
s didn't approve of, but you don't really date in the Mennonite religion — you just choose a girl who appeals to you and get married. Being married is about having kids and teaching them how to get to Heaven." That Amber already had a kid — a beautiful three-year-old daughter called Ryan — was sure to cause ructions back in Farmersville, so Floyd said nothing until after they were married in February 2001. "I was still racing for Mercury and wasn't making much money, and it wasn't as if Amber's mom could pay for a wedding, so we just got married at the courthouse in San Diego."

  David lent him the money for a down payment on a house an hour north of San Diego and helped Amber move in while Floyd left for Europe with Mercury. In May 2001, the team ran out of money and stopped paying his wages. When a team registers with the Union Cycliste Internationale (UCI), cycling's world governing body, it must set up a bank guarantee to ensure employees get paid if the team has problems. When a team defaults, a creditor can apply to the UCI for the guarantee to be called up, and if within 30 days the team has not raised any "reasonably justifiable objection" to payment of the money, "the national federation shall pay the sum at issue".

  Floyd waited 30 days and sent a letter to the UCI, then acceded to their request to allow Mercury more time (once the UCI draws on the guarantee, the team is suspended). But three months later nothing had changed. With debts piling up, he was getting desperate and hired a lawyer to press the UCI to enforce its own rule.

  Hein Verbruggen, the UCI president, was not impressed. In a fax dated August 10, he rejected any suggestion the governing body had acted negligently. Then he added: "Such an aggressive approach might perhaps work in the USA, but it does not in Europe and most definitely not with me… I have given order to our legal department to take the tone of your approach into account when it comes to following up on your request."

  Floyd was furious. He was also broke. Landis thought about quitting and finding a proper job, but managed to secure a berth with Armstrong and his all-conquering US Postal team.

  There are two versions about what he discovered there during the three seasons that he would spend with Postal. Lance Armstrong has always insisted that he never used performance-enhancing drugs or witnessed them being used on the team. "Floyd lost a his credibility a long time ago," he told reporters at the Tour of California last May. "This is a man who has been under oath several times with a completely different version, written a book with a completely different version, someone that took, some would say, close to $1m from innocent people for his defence under a different premise. Now, when it's all run out, the story changes."

  Floyd's first assignment with the team was at a training camp in Austin, Texas, in December 2001. He had raced with Lance Armstrong twice but had never met him and wasn't sure what to expect: the inspirational champion he had read about and admired in Armstrong's acclaimed memoir, It's Not About the Bike, or the rather less flattering portrait depicted by some of his former team-mates.

  Pre-season training camps are more about planning than training. Landis recounts a story about how, one night, in an effort to bond with his troops, Armstrong took the wheel of a black Chevrolet SUV and drove a group of them into town. The first surprise was Armstrong's rather casual regard for speed limits and signals. "Are there no cops in this town?" someone joked.

  The second surprise was the venue, a strip club, where they ordered drinks and mingled with the dancers before moving to an office downtown, where four strippers arrived with two bouncers and performed a private show. They finished late. "The way he was behaving could in no way be reconciled with what I had read in the book," Landis says. "This guy was going around acting like an asshole. It didn't add up."

  Armstrong's lawyer has denied that his client has had any contact with strippers.

  But the thing that really fascinated Floyd was Armstrong's aura of sporting invincibility. "I mean, I'm a guy that he has never really met, He hasn't given me any sort of period to prove that I'm trustworthy, he just threw me into the car and went to the strip club. How was he able to maintain that? What if the press had followed us?" More troubling to him was the shadow of doping at Postal: at least seven former US Postal riders have tested positive or admitted to doping while on the team. During his first Tour de France win in 1999, Armstrong had tested positive for a corticosteroid, and apparently transgressed the rules, but was not sanctioned by the UCI. The UCI said that Armstrong had used an ointment containing a corticosteroid to treat saddle sores. According to the UCI, this was prescribed and therefore acceptable. Armstrong has not failed a drugs test since.

  Landis had spoken about doping with some old pros at Mercury. "At this point I was still completely against it. I didn't like the idea [of it]. It didn't represent what I felt cycling was to me."

  During that first camp in Austin, he arranged a meeting with Johan Bruyneel, the Postal team director, and informed him of his ambition to race in the Tour with Armstrong and that he would do whatever he needed to do to be at his best. He says the subtext — that he was willing to dope — was clear to the team director. Landis says: "I figured the only way he'd be open with me was if I were happy to do anything." Bruyneel denies this conversation ever took place.

  In the spring of 2002, Floyd moved to Girona, where Armstrong and a number of the Postal team were based. His apartment was small and cramped but was brightened by the wit of his zany team-mate Zabriskie. On the morning after their cappuccino binge, he got a call from Lance.

  "Tomorrow, you're going to do five hours with me and we're going to have a little talk."

  The lecture, on the perils of caffeine, began as they rode into the hills. "He takes me on a ride and starts instructing me on how to behave and how to train, and I wasn't going to argue," Landis says. "I mean, here's Lance Armstrong telling me how to train… I'm not going to say, 'I already train hard. I've worked hard to get here.' I wasn't going to debate it. But all I really got out of the conversation was, 'I've just got to fit in here. I'd better not be seen as the crazy guy.'" Armstrong advised him to move his family from California. He found a plain two-bedroom on the edge of town, rented a car and drove to Ikea in Barcelona to buy furniture. "We don't have the money for this," Amber said. "What are we going to do, sit on the floor?”

  “Don't worry, babe. It's going to work out."

  Those first six months were a struggle. He was 26 years old, earning $5,000 a month and owed $60,000 on his credit cards. The money he insisted he was owed from his Mercury contract still hadn't been paid and the injustice burned like a festering sore. He bombarded the UCI with emails and seized every opportunity to berate them in the press. But this, as Verbruggen had warned, was not how the game was played.

  In late May, a few weeks before the Tour, he joined Armstrong for a high-altitude boot camp in St Moritz. According to Landis, Armstrong counselled a change of strategy. "He said, 'Look, Floyd, I'm sure you're telling the truth, but it doesn't matter. You have to apologise. I'll call Jim Ochowicz [the president of USA Cycling] and he'll arrange a phone call with Verbruggen. You don't want to make these guys mad.'" A few days later, Floyd says, he doped for the first time, applying a testosterone patch to his stomach to shorten his recovery time. Two days later, he did it again. A week later, he says, a half-litre of blood was extracted from his arm. On July 6, 2002, he started his first Tour de France and had the extracted blood transfused during a rest stage. Three weeks later, Lance Armstrong won the Tour de France — his fourth win — and Floyd was rewarded with $50,000 as his share of the prize and a $40,000 bonus.

  The use of corticosteroids, testosterone patches and blood transfusions is banned by the UCI, and cheats are punished with a two-year suspension. But if Landis got his clearance times and paperwork right, he could have laughed all the way to the bank. He was still waiting for his money from Mercury — finally paid in 2004 — but had returned to Amber in Girona with $90,000 in his pocket. So why did he do it? "I've tried to explain this a hundred times," he says, "but it always comes out sounding like I a
m either blaming someone or trying to justify what I did. I don't point fingers. Nobody forced me to do what I did. If I had any reason to believe that the people running the sport really wanted to fix it, I may have said, 'If I wait long enough, I'll have my chance to win without doping.' But there was no scenario in my mind where I was ever going to get the chance to race the Tour de France and win clean. There was no good scenario. It was either cheat or get cheated. And I'd rather not be the guy getting cheated."

  Once he had made the decision, there was no turning back, and during the four seasons that followed, Floyd Landis became a fully paid-up member of the Brotherhood of the Needle.

  To reach Floyd Landis today, you drive two hours west from Los Angeles to a small, sparsely furnished cabin near Idyllwild in the San Jacinto mountains. A bike stands just inside the doorway; some training vests hang from a clotheshorse in the kitchen/living room; the cupboards are bare; the carpet is worn. It's been a while since the president called.

  Five hours have passed since he began telling his story, and we've reached the plush hotel in Holland, three days after his winning ride in the 2006 Tour de France, and his manager has just delivered the bad news. "I didn't want to tell Amber, but by the look on my face she knew something was wrong. I sat beside her and told her I'd tested positive, and she started crying. I tried to be reassuring and did my best to promise her that we'd both be okay, but she could see in my face that we would not be okay."

  They checked out and drove to Paris for a meeting with Andy Rihs, the team owner, and his lawyers. Floyd was shaken and conflicted. He had tested positive for testosterone, a drug he had used before every Tour he had raced since 2002, but never during the Tour. He had been mindful of the clearance times. How had it shown up in a sample after stage 17 but not in the samples taken before? It didn't make sense.

  Rihs' lawyers didn't want to know. This was his problem, not theirs; Floyd was on his own. The following evening, during a telephone conference with US reporters, he was asked: "Have you ever used performance-enhancing drugs before?" It hit like a kick in the crotch.