Cycle of Lies: The Fall of Lance Armstrong

by Macur, Juliet

  So Landis and Leipheimer became partners in blood doping, but without anywhere near the Armstrong level of sophistication.

  About ten days before the Tour started, Lim drove them to Montpellier. They were greeted by Landis’s in-laws, David and Rose Witt, and David was part of the team that would carry out the plan. While Lim went for a walk with Landis’s mother-in-law, the other men went to work. “Dr. Landis” took 500 ccs of blood—a single bag—from Leipheimer. When Lim returned, Landis placed Leipheimer’s blood bag inside an orange juice container, then put the container in a cooler packed with ice. Leipheimer’s blood bag would then be stored in the hotel room’s mini-fridge. Landis’s in-laws would drive to Girona to pick up the blood that Landis had removed from himself and drive back to Montpellier to store it alongside Leipheimer’s. Landis’s grand plan to dope at the Tour was finally falling into place.

  But Landis had forgotten one important item: a Ziploc bag for a thermometer. They needed it because the thermometer was electronic and not waterproof, and it needed to stay dry. Lim drove his two friends to store after store as Landis and Leipheimer asked for Ziploc bags in bad French accents that sounded like The Pink Panther’s Inspector Clouseau.

  “Est-ce que vous avez un sachet du Ziploc? Ziploc sac? Sac du Ziploc? Avez-vous?” They became so desperate that once, stuck in traffic, Leipheimer rolled down the car window to stop a passerby. “Excusez-moi, où est une supermarché? Je cherche pour un sachet Ziploc.” As Lim giggled, he realized that, like his companions, he was veering into madness. They found the Ziploc and drove back to Girona that night.

  Three days later, Landis flew to Valencia to reclaim the blood that he had deposited with del Moral. His plan went awry. Lim saw him afterward and quickly noticed that Landis looked pale and sickly. Landis’s temperature soared. He was nauseated. He and Lim suspected that the blood transfusion was the culprit and that the blood had gone bad. They both knew the worst-case scenario: Landis could die.

  “We need you to get to an ER,” Lim said. “A doctor needs to look at you—and now!”

  Landis refused. He didn’t want anything to thwart his Tour chances, and especially didn’t want the news coming out that blood doping had possibly made him ill. The race was one week away.

  After two long days had passed, Landis recovered. But he knew he was in trouble. With the bad blood in him, his hematocrit level had plummeted, meaning he would start the Tour at a deficit. He had one choice—and that was to boost his level back to normal by using the blood that was supposed to dope him for the Tour. His in-laws hadn’t taken it to Montpellier yet.

  Landis took that blood bag and disappeared into his room alone. He left the door ajar. Lim walked past the room to see Landis crouched in a corner with the blood bag taped to a wall and a needle in his arm. His blood was going back where it came from.

  Now, though, he had zero bags of blood to use at the Tour. Dr. Landis was having a tough time—both of his plans to blood-dope at the Tour had failed.

  The first aborted attempt had been with del Moral, when Landis balked because of the doctor’s relationship with Armstrong. He had reinfused that blood and gotten sick. The second attempt backfired because Landis needed new blood in him after the bad del Moral blood bag had made him so weak. Landis used that second bag of blood to boost his red blood cell count even before the Tour began.

  Oddly, Landis seemed happier. Later that morning after his transfusion, he pounded out his workout in the mud and rain, and came to a stop alongside a deep canyon overlooking farms and vineyards. As Lim watched, Landis took off his clothes, piece by piece, and wadded them all into a ball that he tossed into the canyon.

  There he stood, naked, and let out a series of screams so primal they raised the hair on Lim’s arms.

  “How’d Grenoble work out for you?” Armstrong said.

  During the 2005 Tour’s first mountain stage—after the Tour had passed through Grenoble—Armstrong rode alongside Landis to drop a hint that, yes, he knew of Landis’s initial plan to blood-dope in Grenoble. Landis surmised that del Moral had told him.

  Now it all fit together. Landis was so paranoid that he thought Armstrong might have convinced del Moral to mishandle Landis’s blood.

  “Holy shit, remember when I got sick?” he told Lim at a stage finish. “What if I got sick because Lance fucked with my blood?”

  Would Armstrong do anything to physically harm Landis? Lim didn’t know, but believed Landis believed it. In late 2013, Landis told me he had reacted badly just once after receiving blood from del Moral, but that he didn’t know why. For Lim, though, the possibility of Armstrong’s having a hand in that incident confirmed his opinion of him: Landis considered Armstrong the enemy.

  A few days later, Lim bumped into Vaughters, who was working as a guide for a bike tour company. Landis had been talking to Vaughters about taking a job with Vaughters’s new development team, called TIAA-CREF. Lim was relieved to see a familiar face, someone he could talk to.

  “Jonathan, this sport is a fucking mess,” he said. “Let me just tell you what happened to me in the last two weeks.”

  Vaughters wanted to know if the sport had cleaned up since 2002, when he retired from racing in Europe. Lim told him, “Not a chance—it’s even worse.”

  “It’s horrible; it’s like a nuclear arms race, but the two superpowers can’t control it anymore. Doping is so commonplace that individual riders are like kids making their own atomic bombs. They are like little terrorists, with no formal training, but with access to plutonium.”

  Lim told Vaughters many stories that Landis had told him about doping on the Postal team—how the doping had grown complex during Landis’s time there.

  He said that Armstrong’s team used a motorcycle courier—and sometimes their team chef—to transport blood to riders. The blood was kept cold by the motorcycle’s refrigerated panniers, and Landis had photos of them.

  Lim said the doping culture was so competitive that Landis believed Armstrong’s line—“How’d Grenoble work out for you?”—meant Armstrong knew Landis had received tainted blood.

  Vaughters thought, “This is crazy.”

  Two days after the Tour, Vaughters (“Cyclevaughters”) sent an AOL instant message to Frankie Andreu (“Fdreu”). Vaughters was relaying to Andreu what Lim had told him.

  It began a string of eighty-three messages, mostly about Armstrong and the Postal Service squad, some specifically addressing the doping.

  CYCLEVAUGHTERS: anyhow, i never can quite figure out why I don’t just play along with the lance crowd—i mean shit it would make my life easier, eh? it’s not like I never played with the hotsauce, eh?

  FDREU: I play along, my wife does not, and Lance hates us both

  FDREU: it’s a no win situation, you know how he is. Once you leave the team or do something wrong, you are forever banned

  Vaughters wrote that when he went to the Crédit Agricole team, he saw that not “all the teams got 25 injections every day” and said he “felt guilty” for what he had done on Postal Service. On Crédit Agricole, he said, riders received no injections. He wrote, “So, I realized lance was full of shit when he’d say everyone was doing it.”

  Vaughters and Andreu commented on Hincapie’s unexpected success in the mountains at that 2005 Tour. He was a specialist at one-day classic races. Yet he had won the Tour’s hardest stage. It was a six-mountain odyssey that only the best climbers handled at great speeds. Hincapie’s victory was the perfect example of how blood-doping changed the sport. That victory was as improbable as a 100-meter sprinter winning a marathon.

  FDREU: explain that, classics to climber

  CYCLEVAUGHTERS: i don’t know—i want to trust George

  CYCLEVAUGHTERS: but the thing is on that team, you think it’s normal

  Vaughters told Andreu that Armstrong and Bruyneel “dumped Floyd’s rest day blood refill down the toilet in front of him in last yrs tour to make him ride bad,” and that Landis had photos of the refrigerated pann
iers on the motorcycle that transported riders’ blood to the Tour.

  FDREU: crazy! It’s just keep going to new levels

  CYCLEVAUGHTERS: yeah, its complicated, but with enough money you can do it.

  Vaughters told Andreu that he could “explain the whole way lance dupes everyone, that it’s very complex how they avoid all the controls now, but it’s not any new drug or anything, just the resources and planning to pull off a well devised plan.” He repeated what Lim had told him: that riders on Armstrong’s team in 2004 had their blood removed before the Dauphiné, which is held in June. A man on a motorcycle would bring them the blood on the Tour’s rest day. They would refuel and take off together on the next mountain stage.

  FDREU: I know, I get tired of hearing how great Lance is, what a super person, etc. It’s crazy and it’s hard to not just tell people he is a cheat and asshole

  Landis finished ninth in that 2005 Tour without blood-doping—an amazing feat. Leipheimer, who had transfused blood with Landis’s help during the race, finished sixth. Collectively, American riders had their best showing in years.

  But, as always, Armstrong was the main attraction. He had won a record seventh Tour de France in the fastest average time in history—26.8 miles an hour. He had a rock star girlfriend in Sheryl Crow. His cell phone’s contact list included Bill Clinton and U2’s Bono.

  His foundation, which would become known as Livestrong, was booming. What started out as just a bicycle ride in Austin for nearly three thousand people had become a brilliant story of philanthropic branding. From 2002 to 2005, the foundation’s revenue grew nearly eight times, propelled to over $63 million. By the time Armstrong won that final Tour, the foundation had sold nearly 53 million little yellow Livestrong wristbands at a dollar each. Donations rose by about $10 million in the year after the bracelets were introduced.

  Many people said the bracelet meant more than a connection with Armstrong. Buddy Boren, a sixty-one-year-old Dallas cyclist and cancer survivor, wore his bracelet in 2005 as he cycled the perimeter of Texas to raise money for cancer. “People say, I see you’re wearing your Lance Armstrong bracelet,” he told the Dallas Morning News. “I say, ‘It’s not just a Lance Armstrong bracelet.’ I tell them it’s a Livestrong bracelet—and I’m going to live my life strong.”

  Each year, Nike gave the foundation $7.5 million, including $2.5 million specifically to Armstrong for his endorsement of its products. In 2005, Nike branched out from marketing just the Livestrong bracelets to selling a line of Livestrong gear—jerseys, shorts, vests and other items marking the date Armstrong was diagnosed with cancer, 10/2. Nike called it “his carpe diem day, a day to overcome adversity and reaffirm life.”

  Stores were requesting so much Livestrong gear from Nike that the company was worried that its other departments—like Nike basketball and Nike running—would suffer because stores wanted to sell Armstrong’s gear rather than merchandise from Nike’s other lines.

  In its first eight years, Livestrong raised $85 million for cancer research, cancer awareness and programs to help people with the disease navigate the cancer-treatment bureaucracy. It had supplied more than $15 million in grants.

  At the 2004 Ride for the Roses, 6,500 cyclists raised $6 million for the foundation in a day. Other Livestrong athletic events—more bike races, run/walk events and triathlons—popped up across the nation. The watchdog group Charity Navigator gave the organization its highest rating, four stars.

  For many people, the money raised was the least of Armstrong’s impact on the cancer community. Cancer once came with a stigma. It was the “C-word” because people were afraid to even say it out loud. Armstrong and Livestrong helped change that. He made it fashionable to wear a yellow wristband identifying you as part of a club of cancer survivors or those affected by a loved one’s battle. Presidential candidate John Kerry even wore one on his campaign trail, and photos spread of that little yellow bracelet hanging from his wrist. Armstrong was the leader of the “Livestrong Army,” bringing together people from all over the world.

  He was a member of the President’s Cancer Panel. Though he’d hated public speaking at first and was raw at it, he agreed to be trained by the best—including high-powered political consultant Mark McKinnon, a board member of Armstrong’s foundation. Armstrong became a polished orator. When he spoke, even powerful people listened. And, McKinnon said, “When he wanted to turn it on, he could be very good.” Armstrong toyed with running for governor of Texas.

  Senators John Kerry and John McCain, both cancer survivors and influential lawmakers in Washington, listened to Armstrong’s impassioned speeches. The summer of Armstrong’s seventh Tour victory, the senators shared their survivor stories on Livestrong’s Web site.

  “Lance Armstrong has been instrumental in demonstrating to people affected by cancer that fighting not just the disease but the fear and isolation is paramount,” McCain said. “When people realize they are not alone, they gain the strength to handle obstacles they face when their lives are affected by cancer. That sense of unity is a powerful tool.”

  People in the cancer community read Armstrong’s autobiography, It’s Not About the Bike, and for some it became their bible, a handbook of hope and perseverance.

  “I don’t think there’s anybody involved who would say the foundation would be what it is today if it wasn’t for Lance Armstrong,” McKinnon said. “But not just because Lance Armstrong gave us the equity and the interest. He put sweat equity into it. He put a lot of time and energy and thinking. And what Lance does well is drive an organization. He drove an organization like he drove the bike team.”

  Armstrong’s involvement came with a personal touch as well. He visited cancer wards and children’s hospitals to hear people’s stories. He often was eager to call or e-mail a cancer patient if someone asked him to. “There’s not a whole lot of things more powerful than life,” McKinnon said. “He was telling people, you can live.”

  One note sent to the foundation in 2005 came from a ten-year-old girl who had survived cancer. She said, “Thank you Lance for being strong. I was strong, too.”

  His impact on cycling was unparalleled. The number of riders with official USA Cycling licenses rose 21 percent from 2001 to 2005. Trek Bicycle Corporation’s sales had doubled since 1998, the year it signed him. “If not for Lance, we wouldn’t be expanding our factory and we wouldn’t have new offices with carpeting and windows and a gym,” said Zap Espinoza, a company spokesman. Everything Armstrong had touched in the sport seemed to flourish. People called it the “Lance Effect.”

  By the time he won his seventh Tour, he was one of the world’s megastars. To reach that status, he had survived not only cancer but years of scrutiny about the legitimacy of his athletic achievements.

  The French government had failed to prove he used performance-enhancing drugs. He’d brushed off accusations by his former soigneur Emma O’Reilly. He’d emerged relatively unscathed from an investigative book by David Walsh and Pierre Ballester. Journalists had asked him repeatedly if he doped, and he’d always rebutted them with such conviction that it seemed impossible he was lying.

  As Armstrong became more successful, he became even more defiant. On a July day in 2005, he stood atop the podium at the Tour de France after winning the race for an unimaginable seventh straight year. There he heard the cheers from the thousands of people lining both sides of Paris’s grand boulevard, the Champs-Élysées. Smiling alongside him were his children—five-year-old Luke and the three-year-old twins, Grace and Isabelle. The girls wore sunflower yellow dresses that matched the iridescently bright leader’s jersey worn by their father.

  As he looked out onto the crowd, Armstrong said, “Finally, the last thing I’ll say to the people who don’t believe in cycling, the cynics and the skeptics, I’m sorry for you, I’m sorry that you can’t dream big. I’m sorry you don’t believe in miracles.

  “But this is one hell of a race. This is a great sporting event and you should stand around and
believe it. You should believe in these athletes, and you should believe in these people. I’ll be a fan of the Tour de France for as long as I live. And there are no secrets—this is a hard sporting event and hard work wins it. Vive Le Tour.”

  It was over for Armstrong. He would retire from racing. There was nothing more to do. He had beaten the Eurobastards, the gendarmes, the trolls, the Alps, the Pyrenees. He had beaten them all.

  Or so he thought.

  CHAPTER 17

  At a glance, nothing about Bob Hamman suggested he would become one of Armstrong’s greatest enemies. He wasn’t an incredible, volatile athlete—a Floyd Landis—driven by vengeance and envy. Nor was he a single-minded spitfire—a Betsy Andreu—motivated to expose what he saw as moral turpitude.

  When Armstrong won his seventh and final Tour de France, Hamman was sixty-six years old, a portly, white-haired bridge champion. But he did have one thing in common with Landis and Andreu: He didn’t want to be cheated. In his case, he didn’t want Armstrong to cheat him out of millions of dollars.

  Hamman and his Dallas-based insurance company, SCA Promotions, had entered into a contract in 2001 with Armstrong and Tailwind Sports, the company that managed the Postal Service/Discovery Channel cycling teams. SCA would pay Armstrong a bonus for winning his fourth, fifth and sixth Tours. The company paid $1.5 million for his fourth and $3 million for his fifth. But it balked at paying $5 million for his sixth.

  SCA balked after Hamman read David Walsh’s book L.A. Confidentiel. He decided SCA wasn’t paying Armstrong a penny until he personally investigated Walsh’s claims. If Armstrong really did dope, Hamman felt that he didn’t need to pay him. News of Hamman’s withholding the bonus got out in the fall of 2004. Armstrong retaliated by doing what had become a habit: He filed a lawsuit.