Lanced: The Shaming of Lance Armstrong

by David Walsh

  Tyler Hamilton, now a 40-year-old former racer from Massachusetts, was of especial interest. He had ridden with the state-funded US Postal Service team for six years and had been a key member of the Armstrong team that won the 1999, 2000 and 2001 Tours.

  Twice Hamilton had tested positive for performance-enhancing drugs. His second eight-year ban ended his career though he had always denied involvement in doping.

  Last July, Hamilton was subpoenaed to appear before a grand jury in Los Angeles. Grand jury protocol does not allow witnesses to have a legal representative in the room, nor any another person at their side. Faced by a prosecutor and the threat of jail if he lied, Hamilton admitted he had been a serial doper and claimed he had seen Armstrong inject himself with EPO "more than one time". He said he had also seen stocks of the drug in Armstrong's fridge.

  Hamilton also testified that he believed an Armstrong positive test at the 2001 Tour of Switzerland had been covered up by the authorities, an allegation previously raised by Landis.

  Hamilton has explained his changed story in a letter to close friends: "Until ... I walked into the courtroom, I hadn't told a soul. My testimony went on for six hours. "For me it was like the Hoover dam breaking. I opened up; I told the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. And I felt a sense of relief I'd never felt before."

  Armstrong responded by saying Hamilton was a proven liar with a book to promote and lacked credibility. A year before he had taken a similar line when Landis claimed to have seen the multiple Tour champion dope. "It's our word against his," Armstrong said. "I like our word, I like our credibility." Though there are solid reasons for believing Landis and Hamilton had lied in the past but were being truthful now, their past lies still worked against them.

  But then along came Hincapie, who, like Armstrong, had never been sanctioned for a doping violation, to tell a grand jury that he and his former leader had both doped. And Armstrong was left to decide what to do about the friend he considered a brother, the one without a stain on his credibility.

  What is also clear is that fears about professional cyclists refusing to speak about their doping were misplaced. "The problem," said one source close to the investigation, "was not getting them to talk but to stop them crying so they could continue talking."

  The truth serum appeared to have worked.

  It did not take long for investigators fully to understand the scope of their inquiry. They believed they had clear evidence that Armstrong and members of his various teams used doping products, but that was not the only issue. Far more relevant were the offences that may have been committed along the way.

  From whom were the drugs purchased? Who was involved in the distribution? Did riders break the law by carrying them over state lines? Most important was the question of fraud. Multi-milliondollar sponsorships were won on the strength of results but the millions would not have been forthcoming without guarantees from Armstrong and others that the team had a zerotolerance policy to doping. Emails between Armstrong and John Hendricks, founder of the Discovery Channel, are believed to exist containing Armstrong's reassurance to his main sponsor at the time that the team did not, and had not doped.

  Questions will have to be answered by Armstrong; Thom Weisel, the original owner of the US Postal team; Bill Stapleton, Armstrong's lawyer; and Johan Bruyneel, the longtime team manager.

  Armstrong has complained the investigation is a waste of taxpayers' money and even ridiculed Novitzky's team for the cost of a trip to meet European anti-doping and police authorities.

  Using a Twitter alter ego, Juan Pelota, Armstrong posted his derision in schoolroom Spanish: "Hey Jeff, como estan los hotels de quarto estrellas y el classe de business in el aeroplane? Que mas necesitan?" ("Hey Jeff, how are the fourstar hotels and the business class flights? Anything more you need?") In fact, while in France, the investigators had stayed in hotels so cheap one of them slept in his suit to protect himself from the bugs.

  Despite the effrontery, Armstrong is under pressure as never before from Novitzky's investigation. Formal indictments are expected this summer or, at the latest, towards the end of the year.

  When Hamilton spoke out for a CBS programme airing tonight in the US, Armstrong's lawyer posted this response: "Most people ... will see this for exactly what it is: more washed-up cyclists talking trash for cash."

  But what about Hincapie, Lance's faithful domestique, still doggedly competing? Will he be damned so easily? Armstrong tweets furiously but is strangely quiet on his best friend: "20+ year career. 500 drug controls worldwide, in and out of competition. Never a failed test. I rest my case."

  U2 singer Bono, Armstrong's "dear friend", was moved to post a tweet to his starry pal some time ago: "Sometimes my friend, the lie is ugly but the truth is unbearable."

  Riding into a storm

  David Walsh

  June 17, 2012

  "

  The anti-doping agency also claims to have blood samples from Armstrong that show he used EPO and blood transfusions during 2009 and 2010

  "

  It is the night of Thursday, July 15, and Christophe Bassons is on the phone to his girlfriend, Pascale. For the previous 12 days he has tried to tell people that for all the talk of a cleaner, less drugged Tour de France, nothing has changed. He is riding and dopers, he knows, still own the Tour.

  They laugh at his anti-doping stance. "Monsieur Propre," they sneer. And when he or any of his Française des Jeux teammates try to break clear they are hunted down. Earlier this evening Bassons' team have turned on him, ordering him to be quiet. "I can't take it," he tells Pascale, and from the sound of air being sucked through his nose, she knows he is crying.

  She asks him to call Antoine [Vayer, his trainer] before abandoning.Vayer tells him to get a good night's sleep and then decide. "A good night's sleep?" asks Bassons. He doesn't sleep and quits the next morning. On the road to Saint-Flour the peloton, minus Monsieur Propre, speeds under a banner: "For a clean tour, you must have Bassons". When the lynch mob had surrounded Bassons in the race, its leader wore yellow. After Bassons' departure, Lance Armstrong said: "If he thinks cycling is like that [dirty], he is better off at home."

  Five nights after Bassons left, Armstrong himself faced a difficult moment. Earlier in the race he had tested positive for the corticosteroid triamcinolone and now Le Monde had been tipped off and the rider had to do something. Emma O'Reilly was Armstrong's masseuse and worked with him that night. "At one stage two team officials were in the room with Lance," she recalled. "They were all talking. 'What are we going to do, what are we going to do? Let's keep this quiet, let's stick together. Let's not panic. Let's all leave this room with the same story'."

  From this discussion, O'Reilly would later say, came the story that Armstrong had used the product Cemalyt to treat a saddle sore and that it contained triamcinolone. Had he already applied for a therapeutic use exemption to take Cemalyt, Armstrong would have been in the clear.

  But Armstrong's doping control form, signed by him, made no mention of an exemption and so he had a problem. According to O'Reilly it was resolved by retrospectively applying for the exemption and she remembers the scramble to get team doctor Luis del Moral to write the prescription. Cycling's governing authority, the UCI, accepted the post-test prescription and while Bassons was being forgotten, Armstrong was in yellow and on his way to the Champs Elysees.

  That 1999 Tour was where it all started, where it might have ended for Armstrong. Faced with a choice between Armstrong and Bassons, cycling chose the American.

  Years would pass, Armstrong would become a serial winner. Though there would be allegations and evidence of doping within the peloton and within his team, he somehow survived. He always insisted he was drug-tested more than any other cyclist and had never tested positive. In the box of rottenness, he maintained he was the one good apple. To preserve this image of Armstrong, officials needed to be complicit, rivals needed to adhere to cycling's omerta and journalists needed to be idiots.

/>   The more he won, the more bullet-proof he became but the suspicions never went away. Almost every rider who stood with him on the podium admitted doping or was in some way linked to doping. According to the scientists, the banned blood booster erythropoietin (EPO) gave cyclists a 5% performance gain. According to Armstrong, he could ride clean and beat EPO-fuelled rivals.

  All changed when US federal agent Jeff Novitzky and a team of officers began investigating Armstrong and other cycling figures in early 2010. With the power to compel witnesses to appear before a Grand Jury and remind them liars would go to jail, Novitzky received a level of co-operation and honesty unprecedented in a doping inquiry into cycling.

  Four months ago the federal case into Armstrong was dropped. But in the small print of that escape, Travis Tygart, chief executive of the United States Anti-Doping Agency, said it would now look at the case against Armstrong. The agency knew who the federal authorities had interviewed. It reinterviewed them, knowing witnesses wouldn't lightly deviate from what they had already said under oath.

  The agency has issued a 15-page charge sheet against Armstrong and five former associates. It has accused Armstrong of using banned products, of trafficking banned products, of administering banned products to others and of being part of an organised cover-up of an illegal doping programme.

  The agency says it has testimony from 10 riders who witnessed the wrongdoings of the accused. Its letter contains detailed allegations against all six and especially against Armstrong. On page three it deals with the use of EPO. "Multiple riders with first-hand knowledge will testify that between 1998 and 2005 Armstrong personally used EPO and on multiple occasions distributed EPO." The anti-doping agency also claims to have blood samples from Armstrong that show he used EPO and blood transfusions during 2009 and 2010.

  Armstrong has described the case against him as "baseless" and insists he has never failed a drug test. He also criticised the agency's methods and has insisted the process is another in a long line of attempts to discredit him.

  But this time, things may be different. Armstrong, who reinvented himself as an elite triathlete, is now suspended from competing in Ironman triathlons. It is the first time in his career he has been "a suspended athlete". The agency believes the case against him warrants a lifetime ban from competition and it wants his seven Tour victories annulled.

  Armstrong has until this Thursday to make a written submission to the agency's review board, which will then make a recommendation in regard to sanctions against the six accused. Once any sanctions are known, Armstrong and the others can seek a formal hearing with the agency. If this happens, witnesses will have to be present and the case fully thrashed out. Any hearing has to be held before November.

  Bassons was asked what he thought of the charges against Armstrong. "It's a shame," he said, "that it's coming 15 years after it all happened. It's a shame because the evidence was there for years. I don't need 15 pages of documents to tell me what I already knew."

  Off yer bike!

  David Walsh

  August 26, 2012

  "

  I figured it was never going to come out. Then it does and I felt no joy because this should have happened a long time ago

  "

  Greg LeMond, the three-time winner of the Tour de France, was at his home in Minneapolis late on Thursday when he heard something on television that turned his head.

  Lance Armstrong, one of the most successful — and controversial — cyclists in the history of the sport, had announced that he would not contest doping charges against him and would be stripped of his seven Tour de France victories and receive a lifetime ban.

  LeMond's scepticism about his fellow American dated to 2001 when Armstrong was about to win a third Tour de France, a miraculous achievement given that he had suffered life-threatening cancer five years earlier.

  At the time, The Sunday Times ran a story that Armstrong was working with Michele Ferrari, an Italian doctor under investigation for doping. The following week LeMond, who had retired from professional cycling in 1994, gave an interview to this newspaper — because he believed we were the only ones asking the right questions about Armstrong.

  On the matter of whether the public could believe in the integrity of his compatriot, LeMond chose his words carefully.

  "If this story is true," he said, "it is the greatest comeback in the history of sport. If it's not, it is the greatest fraud."

  Last Thursday's news left LeMond feeling vindicated — but also surprised. "He [Armstrong] has got a very powerful network of people that have done a lot of amazing stuff on his behalf," he said. "I figured it was never going to come out. Then it does and I felt no joy because this should have happened a long time ago."

  A few hundred miles to the east in Dearborn, Michigan, Betsy Andreu was tipped off about the news earlier that day by a friend closely connected to the investigation. Of all those who believed Armstrong to be a drug cheat, she was one of the most convinced and, without doubt, the most courageous.

  Her husband Frankie had ridden for eight years on the US Postal team that Armstrong led and for a long time they were the closest of friends. Everything changed when she and Frankie visited Armstrong at Indiana University hospital in late October 1996 when he was fighting cancer. "We heard Lance tell doctors he had used performance-enhancing drugs before his cancer," she says.

  Three years later Armstrong won his first Tour de France. Watching the television coverage at her Dearborn home, Andreu heard her husband praised for the work he did in setting the tempo in the early part of the climb to the Italian ski resort of Sestriere.

  She, however, was convinced that her husband could not have ridden that strongly in the mountains without performance-enhancing drugs — and confronted him when she travelled to France for the final week of the race.

  After an initial denial, he admitted he had, indeed, doped to help Armstrong but agreed not to do so again. At the end of the following year, there was no place for Frankie Andreu on the US Postal team.

  From conversations with her husband, Andreu knew doping was endemic within the team and for years worked to have the truth exposed, helping any person or agency that wanted to know what was going on.

  Thursday's news did not affect her in the way she imagined.

  "I felt strangely anticlimactic," she said. "I wanted him [Armstrong] to fight the charges before an independent panel. I would have liked the opportunity to prove the truth of what I heard in that hospital room 16 years ago."

  Her 13-year pursuit has taken a toll, with Armstrong and those around him describing her in highly derogatory terms. "What's the upside been going up against Lance?" she asks rhetorically.

  "To be publicly portrayed as an ugly, obese, jealous, obsessed, hateful, crazed bitch."

  The origins of Armstrong's downfall date to 2001 and Floyd Landis, who that year joined the US Postal team, aged 26. It was a dream move. US Postal were the most successful team in cycling.

  What Landis knew about Armstrong was based on watching him win the 1999 Tour de France and reading his bestselling book, It's Not About the Bike. Landis believed his hero was clean and thought the book inspirational.

  In the first stage of his integration into the team, Landis was invited to Armstrong's home city of Austin, Texas, for a training camp. One evening Armstrong, Landis and other Postal riders packed into a black Chevrolet for a night on the town. Their first call was to a strip club, The Yellow Rose, where they were ushered to a booth and joined by dancers.

  If that evening proved to Landis that all was not as it seemed in the world of Armstrong, the realisation that a well-organised system of doping underpinned the success came as less of a surprise. Landis sensed that the top riders and the most successful teams were doping and began to waver from the strict moral code inculcated into him growing up in a Mennonite family in Pennsylvania's Amish community. He told Johan Bruyneel, director of US Postal, he was ready to do whatever was necessary to be one of the eight rid
ers selected to help Armstrong win the 2002 Tour de France. According to Landis, Bruyneel said when the time came they would figure it out.

  In the weeks preceding that summer's Tour, Landis's participation in the race was confirmed by Bruyneel, who told him he would be given illegal testosterone patches by Armstrong and would have blood extracted from his body to be re-infused during the race.

  Landis says Armstrong gave him the patches and Ferrari extracted his blood at the team leader's flat in St Moritz. For a time, Landis did not look back. He helped Armstrong win the next three Tours before leaving to become leader of the rival Phonak team.

  Armstrong retired after winning his seventh Tour in 2005. Although the suspicion of doping remained, he continued to maintain his innocence and had sued this paper in 2004 over further allegations. The long and costly legal battle ended in an out-of-court settlement — the terms of which are likely to be reviewed in the light of last week's decision.

  Landis won the 2006 Tour de France but tested positive for testosterone and lost his title, his reputation and all his money fighting his case. After a two-year suspension, he tried to return to the sport in 2009 but was not wanted. That was the year that Armstrong, after a three-year absence, made his own much heralded comeback.

  Disillusioned and burdened by his failure to tell the truth in the aftermath of his doping violation, Landis went to the United States Anti-Doping Agency. "I said, 'Here's what happened, here's how we did it. What do you think I should do?'," he recalled. "They didn't have the first clue about the magnitude of it and that's when I was relatively convinced that at least they weren't on the inside."

  Landis then wrote down the details of US Postal's doping programme and sent them in long emails to cycling and antidoping bodies. He was contacted by Jeff Novitzky, a federal officer with the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA). They spoke and then, in May 2010, it was reported that the FDA was investigating Armstrong's team for multiple violations of America's drug laws. Novitzky's involvement would prove critical. He and fellow officers had the power to bring witnesses before a grand jury and warn them that if they lied they would be sent to prison, as the sprinter Marion Jones had been.