Cycle of Lies: The Fall of Lance Armstrong

by Macur, Juliet

  O’Reilly, a feisty Irishwoman trained as an electrician, was in the middle of her fourth season as a soigneur with the Postal Service team. It was a thankless job, but she enjoyed seeing the world on the Postal Service team’s dime and liked being a part of a team on the rise. She found much less pleasure in playing a part in the team’s doping scheme.

  For her first year and a half, she was kept out of the drug loop, but in April 1997, she had seen her fellow soigneur Jose Arenas preparing syringes of a liquid to administer to riders at the Circuit de la Sarthe, an early-season race in the northwest region of France. She was in awe of the dexterity and quickness with which he injected the riders in the buttocks. Then it dawned on her: Arenas had been a mediocre-at-best soigneur, giving weak massages and doing a poor job at basic duties like preparing the riders’ food and keeping their water bottles clean. But those tasks weren’t his main function. Not even close, actually. His real job was to help the riders dope.

  The next season, O’Reilly was easing herself into that role. In early summer 1998 she found herself acting as a drug courier for Hincapie. The education of Emma O’Reilly had begun. By the time the Festina scandal rolled around, O’Reilly was tangentially involved in the team’s systematic doping plan. She saved the team from being busted by customs agents before the start of that 1998 Tour, which began in Dublin. She had traveled to Ireland early to spend time with family and met the team at the airport as they arrived past midnight one night. When customs agents showed up, she convinced them that “they would have a riot on their hands” if they tried to search the team cars because the riders were tired and cranky. The customs agents finally let the vehicles go without a search.

  Armstrong liked working with O’Reilly because she had a sharp sense of humor and took her job very seriously. She was a tough, no-nonsense big sister who wouldn’t take his crap and would get the job done. “Someone had to put him in his place, and on the team, that was me,” she said in 2012.

  Still, O’Reilly would bring Armstrong ice for his EPO thermos, and once drove to Spain to pick up a bottle of pills from Bruyneel before delivering them to Armstrong in a McDonald’s parking lot in France. With his wife sitting in the passenger seat of Armstrong’s car, O’Reilly slipped the bottle into his hand, as if they were making a drug deal.

  Armstrong trusted her enough that he asked for her help to hide evidence of his doping before the 1999 Tour. Just before the team’s pre-race medical checkup and press conference, Andreu noticed a bruise on Armstrong’s arm, a black-and-blue mark that came from an injection he had received. Afraid that journalists would notice and pummel him with questions, Armstrong asked O’Reilly for some concealer, and she went out of her way to help him.

  As Armstrong churned his way to the Alpine mountaintop finish in Sestriere, Italy, he looked like he was on a Sunday afternoon training ride in Austin. It was Stage 9 of the twenty-stage Tour, the first mountain stage, and the Postal Service team was crushing everyone in its path. Andreu and Hincapie laid down a grueling pace for Armstrong through the early climbs, forcing other teams to struggle to keep up. When Andreu and Hincapie could go on no more, the climbing specialists Hamilton and Livingston took over. Both crashed on one tricky descent, though, leaving Armstrong to fend for himself.

  With no teammates around to shield him, Armstrong attacked with about six miles left to go in the final climb. It was a remarkable show of strength, and the television commentators made sure their viewers realized it. One said it was astonishing to see Armstrong’s composure during the ascent. His face never once showed a grimace and his pace didn’t slow for even a millisecond. He looked like a machine.

  Armstrong had won the prologue of the Tour, then didn’t wear the yellow jersey again until Stage 8, when he won the individual time trial. But it wasn’t until Stage 9 that he showed everyone he was a completely new Lance Armstrong. Never before had he been so strong in the mountains.

  Now, near the end of the stage, as the crowds along the route cheered him on, Armstrong the cancer survivor yelled into his microphone, so the people in his team car could hear him loud and clear, “How do you like them fuckin’ apples!” He crossed the finish line 31 seconds ahead of the second-place Alex Zülle of Switzerland, and more than a minute ahead of the rider in third.

  The next day, French newspapers launched an attack on his credibility, hinting that he couldn’t have produced that performance in the mountains without pharmaceutical help.

  The French newspaper Le Monde raised questions about the ride, pointing out that Armstrong’s best in the mountains, before the cancer, had left him no closer to the stage winner than eighteen minutes behind and as far back as half an hour. Headlines read, “Armstrong, the Extraterrestrial of the Tour,” “Stupefying Armstrong,” “On Another Planet” and “Hallucinating Armstrong.”

  And then came the first doping charge of his career.

  Le Monde reported that Armstrong had tested positive for cortisone after the Tour’s prologue. One journalist at a press conference asked if he had been taking it for medical reasons. Over two days, Armstrong denied using the drug. “They want me to crack on the bike and I’m not going to. It’s vulture journalism. I have been persecuted,” he said.

  O’Reilly already knew that Armstrong’s comments about the cortisone test were lies. While giving him a massage one day, she heard him, team owner Thomas Weisel and team business manager Mark Gorski brainstorming to devise an excuse for Armstrong’s failed drug test. Weisel and Gorski deny having the conversation or knowing anything about the doping on the team, but O’Reilly said she heard the three of them come up with the idea to produce a backdated prescription for saddle sores, an injury for which cortisone cream is used. They would just have del Moral create a prescription for Armstrong to hand to the UCI, and that would explain why Armstrong had tested positive for cortisone. Gorski left the room to get it. “Now, Emma, you know enough to bring me down,” Armstrong said.

  The UCI was also trying to help Armstrong out of the tough spot. UCI president Hein Verbruggen contacted Armstrong and said, “This is a real problem for me; this is the knockout punch for our sport.” Verbruggen, who denies that he tried to protect Armstrong, told the rider that he wanted nothing to ruin Armstrong’s magical comeback story, particularly post-Festina. So he endorsed Armstrong’s plan for a backdated prescription. But it was up to Armstrong to find a saddle sore cream or eye ointment that contained Cemalyt, the drug for which he had tested positive.

  None of Armstrong’s teammates believed his saddle sore story. They knew the positive test had come from Armstrong’s injection of cortisone several weeks before at the Route du Sud. But the UCI was not only going along with Armstrong’s story—it was also promoting it.

  Several days after news of his positive test was published, the cycling union released a statement saying that Armstrong had been using a cortisone cream to treat allergic dermatitis. He had tested positive for “minimal traces” of the drug, it said, but Armstrong’s use of the cream “was authorized by the rules and cannot be considered a doping practice.”

  The statement came with a request: “We would like to ask all press representatives to consider the complexity of these matters and the regulations and legal aspects before publishing their articles. This will ensure that superficial and unfounded claims are avoided.”

  Defending his sport and its biggest race, Verbruggen would eventually declare that the Tour was “mostly clean.” He said the proof was that the UCI’s blood tests on the riders during the Tour had shown that all of the competitors were way under the cycling union’s limit of a 50 percent hematocrit, unlike in past Tours when riders’ hematocrits were mainly 48 or 49. Verbruggen said the 1999 Tour tests didn’t not reveal any “such a level.”

  But had he misspoken? At the start of the Tour, according to Vaughters, nearly all of the nine riders on Postal Service had hematocrits that were dangerously close to 50. And it was just one of twenty teams in the race.

  The impr
obably fast speed of the Sestriere stage had not been ignored by some of the riders trying to keep up. Former Postal rider Jean-Cyril Robin told fellow Frenchman Christophe Bassons, “This has got to stop! We can’t go on racing like this!” (The speed at the Tour was 25.2 miles per hour. Never before had it exceeded 24.9.)

  Robin and Bassons had finished in the back of the pack that day, and both knew why: doping. Bassons was said to have been the only clean rider on the Festina team the year before. He has said he turned down a salary that would have been ten times his normal paycheck if he’d agreed to a program of EPO. This earned Bassons the nickname Monsieur Propre, or Mister Proper, and other riders gave him a hard time about speaking out against doping in the peloton and breaking cycling’s code of silence. Armstrong had berated him so much at the Dauphiné the month before the Tour that Vaughters once patted Bassons on the back and said, “Sorry what you’ve had to go through.” Armstrong saw the gesture, and excoriated Vaughters: “What are you, another fucking Bassons?”

  During the 1999 Tour, Bassons wrote a daily journal for the newspaper Le Parisien in which he said the Festina scandal had changed nothing. Riders were still doping, and doing it without remorse. After the Sestriere stage, he told the newspaper Aujourd’hui that Armstrong’s ride had “disgusted him” because it was so suspicious that he had ridden so fast, so easily. He thought it was the perfect moment to speak loudly about the “cyclisme à deux vitesses” or “two speeds of cycling.”

  During another mountain stage the next day, with the world watching, Armstrong tapped Bassons on the shoulder and told him to shut up. If Bassons thought that negatively about the sport then he had no right to be a professional cyclist and should quit.

  “What you are saying is no good for cycling,” Armstrong said. “Go home! Fuck you!”

  After that, the power of Lance Armstrong, the sport’s new patron, ripped through the peloton. Many riders stopped talking to Bassons. Nobody wanted to be seen with him.

  Leblanc, the race director, told Aujourd’hui that Bassons spoke as if “he is the only rider who is beyond reproach.” Leblanc said EPO use “has practically disappeared.” Bassons’s own team called him a coward and said he spoke about doping for his self-glorification, and that he should get out of the sport. He was a marked man, and in a day’s time, he would indeed quit the Tour.

  “If I made a mistake, it was believing that others would support me,” Bassons said, adding that riders not using EPO were likely taking cortisone or lesser drugs, so they weren’t in a position to join him in his antidoping crusade.

  The French newspaper L’Equipe said Bassons “died at the stake” and had been “burned by his passion,” like Joan of Arc.

  Every day for six months, Bassons woke up crying for no reason. The next year, he raced with several former Festina teammates, who refused to speak to him. In 2001, he was racing at the Four Days of Dunkirk and several competitors tried to ride him into a ditch. He finally quit the sport entirely.

  Armstrong—the sport’s newly christened leader—had said the words: No more Bassons. And his will was done.

  After the Festina scandal, the top climbers on the Postal Service team didn’t want to travel with their EPO, lest the French police decide to raid their team bus or hotel rooms. So they hired someone to do it for them: A Frenchman named Philippe Maire who was Armstrong’s handyman and gardener in Nice would be their drug courier during the Tour.

  Maire would follow the Tour on a motorcycle, earning him the nickname “Motoman.” When Armstrong, Hamilton or Livingston needed EPO, the team trainer Jose “Pepe” Martí would call Motoman on a prepaid cell phone and Maire would weave through traffic to meet him at a handoff point. Maire and Martí deny any involvement. But the scheme was as simple as ordering takeout.

  Hamilton and Livingston would room together so that Bruyneel and Armstrong could come to their room to talk about doping. That exclusive group, nicknamed the “A” team, used the team’s nicest RV, while the other riders squeezed into a shoddy secondary camper.

  Del Moral or Martí would bring the preloaded syringes into the camper or hotel room, so that the A team could inject EPO every third or fourth day until the third week of the race. When the deed was done, one of them would shove the syringes into a bag or a Coke can and slip out of the room to dispose of the evidence.

  The “B” team received their syringes wrapped in aluminum foil and del Moral gave everyone injections without telling them what the substance was. Though some riders didn’t know it, one of the substances the whole team was taking was Actovegin, the calf’s blood extract that was used for stroke patients and supposedly helped with blood circulation. It was just one of the many drugs in the Postal Service squad’s medicine cabinet.

  Vande Velde, in his first Tour, was so exhausted that he agreed to have del Moral give him testosterone. In my interview with him in early 2013, he said he had been getting a massage from a soigneur who was “a big Dutch dude named Ronnie,” when del Moral came into the hotel room. The doctor said, “I have testosterone. Do you want it or not? Yes or no? I can come back.”

  Vande Velde was lying there, thinking, “Holy shit, he’s giving me my first talk about doping in front of somebody else. Man, oh, man, I’m losing my mind.” He considered the consequences of saying yes. (It would be cheating and he could test positive.) Then he thought of the consequences of no. (He might not be able to ride out front and help Armstrong; he might be so tired that he couldn’t finish the Tour.) Finally, he said, “Yeah, screw it, I’ll take it.” Del Moral asked him to open his mouth, then dropped a few drops of testosterone mixed with olive oil onto his tongue. He told him, “It will be out of your system by tomorrow morning.”

  Vande Velde told me, “It could have been a placebo, for all I know. It was a minute amount . . . Maybe I slept better because my hormones were actually decent.”

  Vande Velde said having an organized doping program wasn’t the only reason the Postal Service team excelled. “To put it concisely, the biggest thing was that we were going to train harder than everybody else, we were going to have a better diet than everyone else and we were going to dope better than everybody else.”

  Vaughters would’ve been on the same doping plan as the B team if he hadn’t crashed in the race’s second stage. The peloton was riding in western France along the slippery Passage du Gois, which is covered by water during high tide. The rider in front of Vaughters tumbled to the ground after skidding on a mossy section. Vaughters hit him, and went flying.

  He hit the rocks along the road so hard that he was knocked out. He opened his eyes to see a woman, screaming. Blood poured from his face. Yet he climbed back onto his bike and rode gingerly down the course, alone and pensive.

  He had taken a shot of EPO in Spain just before the plane’s door closed on his way to the Tour. Because of that he had nearly gone over the hematocrit limit during the UCI’s testing. Now he worried that he would break the limit if he was tested again because his body was so sensitive to EPO. The more he thought about it, the more nervous he became and the slower he rode.

  Vaughters took his crash as a sign to stop doping. Nothing good could come of it. He stopped pedaling, and waited for the ambulance behind him.

  “I’m never, ever going to dope again,” he said, to no one in particular.

  Riders like Vaughters and Hincapie watched Armstrong from afar, thankful that it was Armstrong—not them—who had to lie for the entire sport.

  “What can I do, I’ve been on my deathbed and I’m not stupid,” Armstrong told reporters at that 1999 Tour. “I’ve never tested positive.”

  In one poststage television interview, he said, “I can emphatically say I’m not on drugs. I’m sure that there’s been some looking and prying and digging . . . You’re not going to find anything. If it’s L’Equipe, if it’s Channel 4 or if it’s a Spanish paper, Belgian paper, Dutch paper, there’s nothing to find. And I think once everybody gets done doing their due diligence, everybody realize
s that they’ve got to be professional and can’t print a bunch of crap, then they’ll realize that they’re dealing with a clean guy.”

  In an interview with Australia’s SBS television, he was blunt, saying, “There’s no secret here. We have the oldest secret in the book—hard work.”

  He denied doping in dozens of ways, insisting that he wasn’t suddenly the “new rider” some journalists had suggested. Those reporters pointed out that the best he had done in the Tour before his cancer was 36th. Armstrong explained that if there was something he needed to hide, he wouldn’t be living, training and racing in France, which has such strict antidoping laws.

  When a Le Monde reporter asked why Armstrong initially denied presenting the UCI with a prescription for the cortisone to justify its use, Armstrong shot back, “Monsieur Le Monde, are you calling me a doper or a liar?” The question went unanswered. None of the other journalists in the room chimed in.

  Armstrong used his survivor’s story to gain sympathy, something his critics would eventually dub his “cancer shield.” He said, “They say stress causes cancer so if you want to avoid cancer, don’t come to the Tour de France and wear the yellow jersey.”

  While European writers remained critical of Armstrong, most of the American press defended him. Reporters from the United States were streaming into the Tour to write about the new American hero who had rescued cycling from drug use. Almost a thousand journalists were accredited for the race, two hundred more than usual. Lost amid the hoopla was the Tour’s long history of doping.

  USA Today said Armstrong couldn’t enjoy his success and blamed the French media. “He’s understandably upset about their brand of shoddy, jealous and jingoistic journalism.”