Cycle of Lies: The Fall of Lance Armstrong

by Macur, Juliet

  Bruyneel was furious when he learned of Landis’s calls. Landis had gone over the manager’s head. He had asked too many questions. By making sponsors wonder where their equipment was going if not to the team, Landis had come very close to breaching the unspoken code of silence that protected cycling’s doping programs from the outside world.

  To punish him for not being a good, quiet soldier, at that year’s Tour Bruyneel and Armstrong dumped one of Landis’s blood bags down the toilet. Despite that, Landis helped Armstrong win his sixth Tour de France. But he never rode for Postal Service again.

  While Hamilton was entrenched in a two-year legal battle with USADA, Landis took his spot with the Phonak team. He had finally become the lead rider he thought he deserved to be.

  But Phonak did not have a safe, team-run doping program; Hamilton’s use of the Spanish doping doctor Fuentes had proven that. Landis, however, didn’t care. He thought he could be the exception to the many expatriate Postal riders who had left Armstrong’s side only to become mired in mediocrity or, worse, test positive. Landis thought he could win the Tour clean.

  An early backer was the Saris Cycling Group, the company that manufactured the electronic device many riders used on their bikes to measure their power output. To help Landis navigate the cycling world without the riches and savvy of the Postal Service team, Saris hired Allen Lim, a Ph.D. student in exercise science at the University of Colorado in Boulder, to work with him as a physiologist.

  Lim, a former competitive bike racer, had used Saris’s power meter in his doctoral research and was eager to transfer his academic work into on-the-road experience. Now he could analyze the power profiles and energy expenditure of one of the world’s great cyclists throughout the three weeks of the Tour. To his knowledge, no one had ever done that before.

  Lim, a self-described “nerdy, scrawny Chinese kid from the Philippines,” had immigrated to Los Angeles with his parents just before he turned two. As he pursued the education that the U.S. provided, he endured two tragedies. His father died after choking during a meal. A very close friend, while visiting Brazil, was raped, and returned to Boulder with a cocaine addiction.

  Lim first spoke to Landis in depth about racing in January 2005 when they met at Landis’s home in Temecula, California.

  Landis asked Lim a question.

  “What do you think about my chances in the Tour this year?” he said.

  “Um, well, you know, based on what you did last year and your performance, and now you’re the captain . . .” Caught off-guard by the question, Lim paused to collect his thoughts. He felt Landis staring through him. “It would be really amazing if you got top five at the Tour. That would be a good goal to shoot for.”

  Landis snapped at him. “Fuck, dude, if you don’t fucking believe I’m going to win the fucking Tour de France, then just get the fuck out of here. Because I’m going to fucking win the Tour.”

  Lim was shocked into silence. But Landis calmed down as quickly as he had exploded, one of the dramatic, out-of-left-field mood swings Lim would see many times. More calmly, Landis added, “Cuz, look, if we don’t train and work like we’re going to win the Tour, then we’re never going to learn how to win the Tour.”

  “OK, OK,” Lim said, “I think you can win the Tour.”

  “Good, dude, that’s what I wanted to hear.”

  The Mennonite church had asked the young Landis to accept the church’s teachings on faith alone, and he had refused. But now, unwittingly, Landis had practiced what his church had preached so long ago. He’d asked Allen Lim to just fucking believe.

  The first week of May 2005—two months before the Tour de France—Lim flew to Girona to begin working with Landis. They lived together and became a tight-knit team. Early on, though, Landis asked Lim, “Do you think altitude training can work as well as blood doping?”

  Lim thought Landis had always ridden clean. But the question made him curious. Why would Landis care about finding a method that would be “as good as blood doping”? Had he blood-doped before?

  In time, Landis admitted to Lim that he took part in Postal Service’s doping program. Landis told him how Armstrong had persuaded him. On a training ride, Landis could barely keep up with Armstrong, prompting Armstrong to say, “You don’t have to suffer like you do. I can help take your pain away.”

  After telling the story, Landis turned to Lim.

  “Lance has all these guys looking after his program,” he said. “All I have is you.”

  Until then, Lim had no real idea of doping’s presence in cycling. Now he’d heard Landis say that anyone who succeeded was probably dirty.

  “There’s a system that’s in place, but I don’t need any of it,” Landis said. “I’m better than that, I don’t need the stuff. I can win clean.”

  Landis told Lim about an irate Bruyneel flushing his blood down a toilet at the 2004 Tour to get back at Landis for his constant insubordination. Landis had still finished a respectable 23rd. Lim was encouraged that Landis had done so well without doping.

  Landis also told Lim about the time the team doctor gave him a special pill. After ingesting it, he had a great ride. So when the doctor gave him another one of those pills the next day, Landis kept it without ingesting it. He had a brilliant idea. He would bring the pill home and have its ingredients identified. He would then make the pills himself. He would sell the powerful stuff. He would make millions of dollars and probably win the Tour every year for the rest of his life.

  But the testing turned up only one ingredient. Sugar. The pill was a placebo.

  Landis told Lim he wasn’t sure what had made him more upset—that he had been given a sugar pill when a real doping product could have helped him win more money, or that he couldn’t reproduce the pill and become even richer.

  In Landis’s crazy stories, Lim tried to find a positive lining. He was encouraged that Landis had been truthful about his experience on Armstrong’s team. He also was happy to hear Landis asking questions about legal, natural methods that could improve his performance, even if he always seemed to return to doping.

  On May 26, Landis asked “the Chinaman”—his crude nickname for the physiologist—to drive him the 275 miles from Girona to Valencia for an appointment. Lim, who had never been to Europe until that month, was gung ho. “Oh, great, we’re going to Valencia!” he said. “Valencia, I’ve never been to Valencia before. Do they really have oranges down there? Ha, ha!”

  In Valencia, Lim saw only a small sports clinic. Landis had him park in an adjacent lot and wait. In less than an hour, Landis reappeared with a Band-Aid in the crook of an arm. Lim didn’t like the looks of it.

  “What’s that, what the hell is going on?” Lim asked.

  A nervous and fearful Landis paused. Lim could tell he felt guilty about something.

  A minute later, Landis admitted that he had visited del Moral, the former Postal Service doctor, and had his blood withdrawn and stored in del Moral’s clinic for future use at the Tour.

  The plan was for Landis to pick up the blood just before the Tour and take it to Grenoble, France, where his father-in-law, David Witt, would store it until the Tour went through town. There, the blood would be reinfused into Landis, the day before the race headed into the Alps. The extra blood would give him a huge boost.

  Landis told Lim the blood doping was a last-minute idea. He had planned to ride that Tour without drugs or extra blood, but there was too much at stake to race without doping. He blamed it on Armstrong.

  He followed up with a three-hour explanation of why he needed to dope to beat Armstrong.

  Armstrong’s doping had begun an arms race among top-level riders in Europe, Landis said. Every team knew Armstrong took a cornucopia of drugs to boost his endurance and dull his pain. They also knew he was blood-doping. Landis said he had a responsibility to himself and to the team to level the playing field, to wipe out Armstrong’s medical edge.

  Still, Lim and Landis debated whether doping was necessary. Lim sai
d Landis’s physiology was so superior that, with his talent, he could win clean and shouldn’t stoop to the Postal Service team’s level and cheat.

  The problem with Lim’s argument was the word “cheat.” Professional cyclists believed that doping was not cheating as long as everyone did it. And everyone did it, in part because Lance Armstrong did it so well.

  To back up his argument, Landis told Lim the history of Armstrong’s doping for Postal Service, as he knew it. Armstrong had doped in 1999 to win the Tour for the first time, and he’d never stopped. Landis said it was unfair to riders like him who were exceptional naturally.

  Maybe because of all the sermons Landis had heard in his church—twice on Sundays, once during the week—he often came off as a charismatic preacher. He likened his need to dope to a religious battle waged against Armstrong. While he was the Christian saint, Armstrong and Bruyneel were devils tempting riders into evil.

  “Sometimes to beat the devil, you have to drink his blood,” Landis said.

  With tears in his eyes, Landis told Lim how his father made him stand for hours in the sludge of their home’s septic tank, in sneakers, and shovel the stuff out. He said he had trained on his bike in the dead of night so his parents wouldn’t find out. Later, when he’d train or race in the daytime, he wore baggy sweatpants, because Mennonites thought it immoral for a man to show his legs.

  Landis believed that such a rider, someone who had grown up so simply, with so little, deserved a chance to beat the great cheater, Armstrong. He believed cycling’s pandemic of doping could be traced to the Postal Service team’s band of Mafia-esque enablers—teammates, officials and corporate sponsors who turned a blind eye to it all.

  “Hey, Al, you’re not changing this, and I’m not changing this,” Landis said on the car ride from Valencia back to Girona. He believed it was his moral duty to do the immoral thing and cheat if cheating was what it took to beat the really immoral guys whom Armstrong led.

  Lim walked away with his head spinning. He wanted to fly home immediately, but was worried about what would happen if he left Landis alone. He believed that Landis had been talking so irrationally about doping that he might try something dangerous to gain an edge.

  For advice on what to do next, Lim e-mailed Prentice Steffen, a former Postal Service doctor who had worked with Landis on the Mercury team from 1998 to 2001. He knew Steffen had claimed that the Postal Service team had replaced him with a Spanish doctor because the team wanted to start a doping program. Lim thought that Landis and Steffen could work together to out Armstrong as a doper. He also looked for help from the doctor on how to deal with Landis’s erratic behavior.

  Steffen told Lim that Landis didn’t have to dope to level the playing field. He had another option: File suit against Armstrong in federal court. The doctor had tried to convince others connected to the team—Hamilton, O’Reilly—to join him as plaintiffs in a federal whistle-blower lawsuit. He had contacted a San Francisco lawyer who specializes in those suits, which are filed under the False Claims Act, giving citizens the right and financial incentive to bring suits on the government’s behalf.

  Steffen said the suit would claim that Armstrong and the team’s management company, Tailwind Sports, were aware of the doping when they entered into a sponsorship agreement with the United States Postal Service. That knowledge of the doping constituted fraud, the suit would say. But Steffen needed someone with firsthand knowledge to join him.

  When Lim spoke to Landis about the whistle-blower lawsuit, Landis said, “That’s the stupidest thing I ever heard.”

  Lim also asked Steffen about Landis’s emotional well-being. Landis was still depressed, as he was in 2002 when he joined the Postal Service team and was living with David Zabriskie. His instability made Lim nervous.

  He worried that Landis, who seemed to be struggling with an inexplicable sadness, might hurt himself. “Dude, I think Floyd’s crazy,” Lim said. “I think he needs real professional help.” To Steffen, that was old news. He told Lim that other Mercury staffers once had a rolling pool as to when Landis might kill himself.

  Landis woke up after 4 p.m. following the Valencia-Girona blood doping trip, still groggy from the daylong nap. At Lim’s urging, he talked about his depression. He showed Lim a neurophysiology textbook and told him that reading about the brain was helpful in understanding his extreme emotional highs and lows.

  “Basically, you’re here to keep me alive,” Landis said. It was a joke, but Lim was terrified.

  The next day, Landis trained on his bike while Lim monitored his power output. Less than twenty-four hours after having had a bag of blood withdrawn, Landis should have been weak. Instead, he put up fantastic numbers that, in Lim’s estimation, showed he was a strong enough rider that he didn’t need those extra red blood cells anyway.

  Several days later, though, Lim walked into their apartment, opened the kitchen door and saw Landis injecting himself with EPO. Lim had never seen the act performed.

  “I’m sorry,” Lim said. “I can’t be a part of this. I’m leaving.”

  “No, stay,” Landis said. “Look, if I’m deciding to dope, what you do for me is still the most important thing. I still cannot do this without you.”

  He wanted Lim to believe that a rider’s training meant more than his doping, that doping was a small part of the preparation. The difference was, Landis said, Armstrong had ten times as many people helping him get ready for the Tour.

  “If you leave, it would mean that I have nothing,” he said.

  Despite Landis’s plea, Lim flew home the next day. It was all too weird and creepy. He wanted to tell USADA the story, about Landis, Armstrong and the whole sport. But Landis scared him, and he suspected that no one at the antidoping agency would be brave enough to investigate doping allegations involving one of the nation’s most revered athletes. He had seen Armstrong publicly crush people—Bassons, Simeoni, O’Reilly, Walsh—who dared speak out about his doping.

  So Lim told no one what he had learned.

  Back in Boulder, Lim was angry at Landis, distraught over his father’s death and his mother’s resulting depression and heartbroken by his close friend’s cocaine addiction. Though he had earned his Ph.D., Lim was forced to borrow money from family and friends for rent, not exactly the proper ending to the job of his dreams.

  Then a check for $7,000 arrived in the mail. It came from Amber Landis, the rider’s wife. Lim felt torn. It wasn’t much money; just a good-faith gesture by Landis. But it got Lim thinking.

  The chance to train a world-class cyclist didn’t come along often for an immigrant kid like Lim. He also felt guilty about leaving Landis. What if something bad happened to him because I wasn’t there to watch over him? Already, Lim felt terrible that his close friend who was raped had turned to drugs in his absence.

  So he cashed the check, paid some bills and bought an airplane ticket to Europe. Less than two weeks after he’d left, he returned to Girona. It was mid-June, with just a few weeks to go before the 2005 Tour. Landis was stranger than ever. One moment he was edgy and upset, the next charismatic, sincere and cracking jokes.

  “He was now clearly exhibiting signs of someone with bipolar disorder,” Lim told me. “Suddenly, my concerns had little to do with doping.” It was as if Landis needed to win the Tour to stay alive.

  This time, instead of running away, Lim burrowed in. He wanted to know everything that Landis was up to. Landis told him: While Lim was in Colorado, Landis had decided to become a blood doping expert. He joked that “Dr. Landis” would withdraw blood from himself and do it better than any MD ever had.

  Landis said he needed to become an expert because he had doubts about using the blood he had stored with del Moral.

  “I can’t believe I just made a deal with this guy who is still probably working for Lance,” he told Lim. “Stupid, stupid.”

  He worried that del Moral might tell Armstrong about his plan and that Armstrong would do something to subvert it. So he decided that he
would return to del Moral’s clinic and have the doctor reinfuse him right then and there. After learning that Levi Leipheimer, another American who had ridden on the Postal Service team, also had deposited a bag of blood with del Moral, Landis convinced him to retrieve his blood bag as well.

  Before making the trip to del Moral, Landis removed an entire bag of blood from his body without anybody’s help. He would need it to replace the blood he’d stored with del Moral.

  Lim walked in while Landis was finishing up the transfusion, and watched him panic as he tried to figure out where to store the blood he had just removed. He couldn’t keep his blood bag in the refrigerator. Landis’s wife and young stepdaughter were arriving from the United States the next day. So Landis bought a cooler, an electronic thermometer, ice and a box of orange juice. He cut the top off the juice carton, slipped the bag of blood inside, then placed the carton into the cooler with ice. He also put the thermometer inside a Ziploc bag and into the cooler. Now his replacement bag for the del Moral blood bag was good and ready.

  The presence of Landis’s family only added to the household stress. Days and nights were filled with his shouting matches with his wife. At those moments, Lim took their elementary-school-age daughter, little Ryan Landis, for walks in town. Lim’s mantra became “Keep my mouth shut, don’t piss Floyd off, get through the Tour and be done with it.”

  Landis soon took on a new project: He would help Leipheimer, who was riding for the German Gerolsteiner team, blood-dope for the Tour. The two of them would undergo blood transfusions together when the Tour passed through Montpellier, France. Instead of blood-doping in Grenoble for a boost in the Alps with the blood from del Moral, Landis had opted for Montpellier and a boost in the Pyrenees using the blood he had taken from himself.