Cycle of Lies: The Fall of Lance Armstrong

by Macur, Juliet

  PART TWO

  LIES OF THE SPORT

  CHAPTER 4

  In 1992, someone opening the Motorola team’s medicine cabinet would have come across the usual items—Band-Aids, diarrhea medicine and antiseptics for “road rash”—as well as the banned stuff, like cortisone and testosterone alongside household Tylenol. Most riders didn’t consider them to be real doping products. Using those drugs just meant the riders were minding their health in a grueling sport.

  Cortisone, which could be injected or swallowed, reduces muscle soreness and is an anti-inflammatory for stiff, aching joints. It remains a staple for cyclists because it alleviates leg pain. Riders liken it to taking an aspirin if you have a headache, and many team doctors write bogus prescriptions for the drug.

  Testosterone is a steroid, but isn’t used to help riders bulk up with muscle. Rather, it allows them to recover more efficiently from a workout, so they can rise the next day and train just as hard. Riders treat the drug the way they do getting a massage or staying hydrated.

  Those drugs were common in the European peloton. Everyone serious about the Tour looked for an edge, whether it was steroids or injectable vitamins like B12, B complex or folic acid.

  Performance-enhancing drug use is bound with the history of cycling, especially the Tour de France, a three-week, 2,000-plus-mile race. The event, held every July, is almost impossibly hard, and has been that way since its debut in 1903.

  Riders have always found ways to make the race easier. In 1904, cyclists left their bikes and hitched rides in cars, trains or buses to cut miles off the route. Every stage winner and the first four finishers were among twenty-nine riders punished for cheating that year, ushering in the Tour’s dance with dishonesty.

  Through the early 1900s, riders relied on substances like ether, cocaine and strychnine to blunt the pain. Some stopped at bars to chug wine and other numbing spirits. They used cocaine-based mixtures to convince their bodies they could go on when their brains said they couldn’t. Riders believed they could breathe easier if first they had taken some strychnine (so highly toxic it is used as rat poison) and/or nitroglycerine (given to heart attack patients to stimulate the heart).

  The abuse of those drugs was affirmed by Henri Pélissier and his brother, Francis, French riders who abandoned the 1924 Tour and then gave a blockbuster interview to a journalist, Albert Londres, of Le Petit Parisien. The story was titled, “Les Forçats de la Route”—“The Prisoners of the Road.”

  Henri Pélissier told Londres, “You have no idea what the Tour de France is like. It’s like martyrdom. And even the Stations of the Cross had only fourteen stations, while we have fifteen stages. We suffer from start to finish.” Pélissier showed the journalist the contents of the bag he had carried throughout the race: cocaine for the eyes, chloroform for the gums, horse ointment for the knees. Pills he called “dynamite.”

  Amphetamines became popular in the mid-1940s, and would lead to dangerous accidents. French rider Jean Malléjac collapsed with his bike at the 1955 Tour, six miles from the summit of Mont Ventoux, the famous bald mountain that towers more than 6,200 feet above the Provence region of France, and fell onto boulders at the roadside, with one foot attached to a pedal and the other pawing frantically through the air. He remained unconscious for fifteen minutes in what the Tour doctor deemed an amphetamine-fueled breakdown.

  Another French cyclist, Roger Rivière, landed in a tangle of metal at the bottom of a steep slope after crashing over a wall during the 1960 Tour. He broke his back. Doctors found painkillers in his pocket, which could have distorted his judgment and slowed his reflexes so much that he had been unable to apply his brakes. He never regained use of his lower limbs. Just two years later, fourteen Tour riders left the race because they had been sickened by morphine.

  The Tour and drugs went hand in hand, despite a growing public concern. Five-time Tour winner Jacques Anquetil was famously open about his own regimen. He once said, “You can’t win the Tour de France on mineral water alone . . . Everybody dopes.” Nothing was illegal.

  By 1963, doping had grown so dangerous that a group of cyclists, doctors, lawyers, journalists and sports officials came together to push for drug testing. Two years later, France passed its first national antidoping laws and drug testing began at the Tour.

  Led by Anquetil, riders balked. Before the Tour’s first stage, they gathered and chanted, “No pissing in test tubes!” Their protest included walking their bikes for the first fifty meters of that stage. Félix Lévitan, the Tour director, called the riders “a band of drug addicts” bent on “discrediting the sport of cycling.”

  Then came one of the blackest days in cycling’s dark history. On July 13, 1967, the British rider Tom Simpson began zigzagging across the road not far from the top of Mont Ventoux. He finally toppled over, then told a British team mechanic, “Get me up, get me up. I want to go on. I want to go straight. Get me up, get me straight.” Spectators helped him back onto his bike, but just one hundred meters later, he crumpled onto the road again, still gripping his handlebars as he went into a coma.

  Three hours later, he was dead. An autopsy report said he had died of heat prostration that led to a heart attack. But his jersey pockets told another story. In them were empty vials dusted with amphetamines.

  Don Catlin, the man who set up the United States’ first performance-enhancing drug testing laboratory, the UCLA Olympic Analytical Laboratory in Los Angeles, had been studying the drug erythropoietin, called EPO, from the start. It appeared on the market in the United States in 1989 as a drug used for kidney patients and AIDS-related anemia, but athletes long before that had learned of its magical powers. EPO is a powerful hormone that boosts endurance by increasing red blood cell production. More red blood cells mean more endurance. In the sport of road cycling, it turned out to be a miracle potion.

  The drug comes in a vial less than an inch and a half tall. But it is filled with several doses. No longer would endurance athletes have to undergo the dangerous and logistically difficult process of receiving blood transfusions to boost their red blood cell count. Now enhancing one’s endurance was as simple as pricking the skin with a needle. Athletes could receive what one unpublished Swedish study said was an average 8 percent boost in aerobic capacity. The study said the drug could cut 30 seconds from a 20-minute run. In cycling, using the drug could mean the difference between winning the Tour de France and not even qualifying for one’s Tour team.

  There was a frightening downside, though. EPO raised a rider’s hematocrit level—the proportion of red blood cells in the blood and a measure of blood’s thickness. A man’s hematocrit is usually between 42 and 48 percent of his whole blood.

  But with EPO, some cyclists were boosting their hematocrit into the 50s, or even higher. Bjarne Riis, the 1996 Tour champion, was even nicknamed “Mister 60 Percent” because EPO was rumored to have jacked up his hematocrit that high. The practice was inherently dangerous. If athletes overdosed on EPO, the drug would turn their blood to a viscous, sticky sludge that could cause a stroke or heart failure. Dehydration, which often occurs during long races, makes the blood even thicker. By the late 1980s, cyclists were buying the drug on the black market. Then they started dropping dead.

  In 1987, five Dutch riders died of heart problems. On August 17, 1988, Connie Meijer, a Dutch rider, passed out and died while competing in a criterium race. Diagnosis: heart attack. She was twenty-five. One day later, Bert Oosterbosch, another Dutch rider, died in his sleep, at thirty-two. Again, a heart attack.

  Doctors and blood specialists said EPO abuse might have played a role in the deaths of at least eighteen professional European cyclists in the years from 1988 to 1992. Ten deaths were attributed to heart problems. The cycling magazine VeloNews declared that “an atomic bomb” had gone off in the sport. News of the deaths was picked up by mainstream media outlets. The New York Times carried a headline: “Stamina-Building Drug Linked to Athletes’ Deaths.”

  Catlin sounded an
alarm with the International Olympic Committee. As a member of the IOC’s medical commission, he pressed for an investigation. The athletes had taken a drug for which no test had yet been developed. Catlin believed the IOC should do something about it, and right away, because lives were at stake.

  He went with an IOC team to Europe on a fact-finding mission. He found no one who would talk about EPO. Family members refused to cooperate. Riders said they’d never heard of it. Basically, they told Catlin to go away. Again and again, he told them, Don’t be afraid to talk. We’re trying to save the lives of other cyclists. Please help us.

  In reply, he heard nothing. He believed that some people were protecting not only the memory of friends, family and teammates—they were also protecting the sport. Doping scandal followed doping scandal. Something had to be done.

  Catlin made his pitch in 1988. But the code of silence that had served cycling for so long could not be broken. Seven years later, Lance Armstrong used EPO for the first time.

  When Armstrong signed with the Motorola team in 1992, he had already fallen in with coaches of dubious repute. The first was Eddie Borysewicz.

  In 1985, Borysewicz was at the center of one of the biggest doping scandals in U.S. Olympic history. Borysewicz, a Pole, had honed his craft at sports academies in the Eastern bloc. While coach of the U.S. team at the 1984 Olympics, he was accused of pressuring riders to take transfusions of blood to get an increased supply of the oxygen-carrying red blood cells. If such transfusions were not done properly, or if the blood was not stored at the right temperature, blood doping could make a rider ill—or even kill him.

  The practice was not expressly prohibited by the International Olympic Committee, but its rules said athletes could not take any medication or undergo any procedures that would unfairly affect the competition. Whether forbidden or not, Borysewicz and other team officials watched seven members of the 1984 Olympic cycling team line up inside a room of the Ramada Inn in Los Angeles to wait their turn to lie on a bed and receive blood from a relative or someone else with the same blood type. Two riders became sick. Four went on to win medals, including a gold.

  Months later, the transfusions were made public, marring cycling’s image as well as Borysewicz’s reputation.

  “Eddie B. introduced hard-core doping to American cycling, and it’s never been the same,” says Andy Bohlmann, who from 1984 through 1990 was in charge of the antidoping program for the United States Cycling Federation, then the sport’s national governing body.

  In 1990, Chris Carmichael, a former rider on the 7-Eleven team, was appointed head coach of the national team, with dozens of cyclists under his command—including Armstrong and three other promising riders from the junior national team system. Those three were Greg Strock, Erich Kaiter and Gerrik Latta.

  Each of them would eventually claim that national team officials had doped them without their knowledge when they were teenagers. One pointed his finger at Carmichael. Those riders said they had received injections of substances that team officials claimed were merely vitamins or “extract of cortisone.” They said they were given unidentified pills embedded in candy bars to eat during races, and drank from water bottles spiked with banned performance enhancers.

  Years later, in medical school, Strock discovered that there is no such thing as “extract of cortisone.” He realized that his coaches had probably injected him with the real thing, which likely triggered the autoimmune disease that ended his cycling career in 1991. He thought back to the nationals in 1990, when Carmichael had arrived with a briefcase full of drugs and syringes and injected Strock in the buttocks under the supervision of another coach, René Wenzel. Strock remembers seeing Carmichael at other races carrying that briefcase, looking like a pharmaceutical company representative heading to see his clients.

  And what did Lance Armstrong think of a coach with this background? He told me they were like brothers. One of Carmichael’s future training videos would feature Armstrong’s photo on the box. Armstrong would write forewords for many of Carmichael’s books. All this work was done on the premise that Carmichael was the brains behind Lance Armstrong’s success. And you, too, could learn from the coach of the world’s greatest cyclists, especially if you attended one of Carmichael’s weeklong training camps. The cost: a cool $15,000.

  Throughout the 1990s, J.T. Neal acted as Armstrong’s main soigneur at some domestic races and at national team training camps. But in Europe and at the big races, the honor of rubbing down Armstrong went to a man named John Hendershot. Among soigneurs in the European peloton (another French word, one that refers to professional riders generally as well as the pack during a race), Hendershot was at once the cool kid and the calculating elder. Other soigneurs envied the money he made and the cachet that came with the cash. Wherever he walked—through race crowds or at home in Belgium—people turned to catch a glimpse. Teams wanted him. Armstrong wanted him. J.T. Neal said he was “like a god to me” and called him “the best soigneur that ever was.”

  Hendershot, an American, was a massage therapist, physical therapist and miracle worker. His laying-on of hands would bring an exhausted, aching rider to life. Eating at Hendershot’s direction, sleeping according to his advice, a rider began each morning reborn. He came with all the secrets of a soigneur and an unexpected skill developed over the years. In Neal’s words, Hendershot took to cycling’s drug culture “like a duck to water.” But his enthusiasm for and skills in chemistry would be remembered as his special talent.

  For most of a decade Hendershot sat at home in Belgium in his makeshift laboratory, preparing for races. There he mixed, matched and mashed up drugs, always with one goal in mind: to make riders go faster.

  The mad scientist conjured up what he called “weird concoctions” of substances like ephedrine, nicotine, highly concentrated caffeine, drugs that widen blood vessels, blood thinners and testosterone, often trying to find creative ways to give riders an extra physical boost during a race. He’d pour the mix into tiny bottles and hand them to riders at the starting line. Other times, he’d inject them with it. He wasn’t alone in this endeavor. Soigneurs all across Europe made their own homemade blends of potentially dangerous mixes and first drank or injected those potions into themselves. They were their own lab rats.

  Hendershot, who had no formal medical or scientific training, learned the art of doping riders by observing the effects on a human test subject—himself. He knew a formulation was way off when he felt his heart beating so fast and loud it sounded like a runaway freight train. That wouldn’t work for riders already under extreme physical stress. He wanted “amped up,” but not to the point of a heart attack.

  If Hendershot was his own lab rat, it wasn’t long before he tried his potions and pills on the riders, including Armstrong. When Armstrong went professional after the 1992 Olympics, he signed a contract with Motorola, one of the two major American teams. Because Armstrong wanted the best soigneur, he was immediately paired with Hendershot. It was a match made in doping heaven. Both soigneur and rider were willing to go to the brink of safety.

  “What we did was tread the fine line of dropping dead on your bike and winning,” Hendershot says.

  Hendershot said the riders on his teams had a choice of whether to use drugs. They could “grab the ring or not.” He said he didn’t know a single professional cyclist who hadn’t at least dabbled. The sport was simply too difficult—and was many times impossible, as at the three-week-long Tour de France—for riders who didn’t rely on pharmaceutical help.

  Hendershot believed cyclists had at most four years of clean riding before they could no longer remain in the sport. As a drugged-up peloton went faster, the clean riders could help the team leader for maybe the first week of a race, maybe by riding in front of the pack to set the pace or by delivering water bottles from the team car, but then would have to drop out from exhaustion. A career like that was short-lived.

  When Armstrong arrived at Motorola in 1992, a system that facilitat
ed riders’ drug use was firmly in place on the team—and likely in the entire sport. Hendershot said he would receive a list of drugs and prescriptions for them from the team doctor, Max Testa, an Italian who, as of December 2013, still worked in the sport and ran a sports medicine clinic in Utah. Hendershot would take that list to his local pharmacist in Hulste, Belgium, to get the prescriptions filled and obtain other drugs, too.

  Cycling was always big in Belgium—for generations, it has been one of the country’s most popular sports—and the pharmacist didn’t question Hendershot about the request for such a massive amount of drugs. In exchange, Hendershot would give the pharmacist a signed team jersey or allow him to show up at big races, where he would be a VIP with an all-access pass. Then he would leave the drugstore with bags filled with EPO, human growth hormone, blood thinners, amphetamines, cortisone, painkillers and testosterone, a particularly popular drug he’d hand to riders “like candy.”

  By 1993, Armstrong was using all of those substances—like almost everyone else on the team, Hendershot said. He remembered Armstrong’s attitude from the remark, “This is the stuff I take, this is part of what I do,” and that Armstrong joined the team’s program without hesitation because everyone was doing it.

  “It was like eating team dinner,” Hendershot says. He believes that virtually everyone involved in the team knew about the doping—“doctors, soigneurs, riders, team managers, mechanics—everyone.” He called the drug use casual and said he never had to hide any of it. After injecting the riders at a team hotel, he’d toss a trash bag filled with syringes and empty drug vials right into the hotel’s garbage can.

  While Hendershot never administered EPO or growth hormone to Armstrong, he did administer them to other riders on the team and was aware that Armstrong was using those drugs. Hendershot said his wife, Diann, in 1995 drove a stash of those two drugs from Belgium to the team’s traning camp in southern France.