Cycle of Lies: The Fall of Lance Armstrong

by Macur, Juliet

  Armstrong was outraged that someone would challenge him in front of the American public. Such attacks usually came from the French, or maybe from Brits like Walsh, but certainly not from a fellow Texan. Hamman’s office was in Dallas, just down the street from Armstrong’s boyhood home.

  Bill Stapleton, Armstrong’s agent, went right to work. First, he hammered at Hamman’s credibility with a full-page ad in Sports Business Journal. It touted Armstrong’s Tour wins as an achievement that, “along with his inspirational story of cancer survivorship, has made his story transcend sport and culture.” The ad claimed that SCA didn’t live up to its contract and was trying to change “the rules when it is time to fulfill its obligation.”

  Stapleton’s ad signaled to SCA that the fight would be dirty. Hamman’s son, Chris, told Hamman to back down, saying, “Their PR machine is too big.” But Bob Hamman wouldn’t quit. He wanted to keep his company’s $5 million, but he also wanted to stand up for his company’s integrity. Armstrong and Stapleton should have known Hamman was a fierce competitor—he was arguably the best bridge player in history, a twelve-time world champion, the Michael Jordan of a complex, challenging game mastered only by players who, in Hamman’s words, “hate their opponents and who want to win, win, win.”

  SCA Promotions underwrote the risk companies took when they held special promotions and events, such as a million-dollar prize for a half-court basketball shot or a new car for a hole-in-one. SCA had accepted propositions of all kinds. Would a frog do a world-record jump? (The eventual outcome was no.) Could a farmer grow a pumpkin that weighed more than 1,000 pounds? (Outcome: yes. It grew to the size of a Volkswagen.) Could someone find a cockroach set loose in Houston bearing a numbered tag? (The roach disappeared forever.)

  SCA also took on risks in sports. Could Ernie Els win the British Open when the bookmakers had the odds at 470-1? (SCA lost that one.) Could Armstrong win a fourth, fifth and sixth Tour in a row? (Hamman thought no. Wrong again.)

  Though Hamman had heard the doping accusations that followed Armstrong, he sold Tailwind Sports the $420,000 insurance contract—a legal way of gambling, really—because he believed no cancer survivor would use drugs after nearly dying. It was an educated guess by a man who spent much of his life calculating other people’s moves.

  Hamman had dropped out of college to compete in professional bridge, a game he had played since the age of six or seven. He has won more than fifty North American championships and was the top-ranked player in the world for twenty straight years, until 2004.

  He told me it angered him that he had made the Armstrong deal based on the fundamental premise that cycling would enforce its rules. He had no idea that Armstrong and Stapleton were so cozy with the sport’s ruling body, the UCI.

  Throughout Armstrong’s reign, Stapleton frequently made trips to the UCI’s headquarters in Switzerland to visit Hein Verbruggen, the UCI president from 1991 to 2005. Part of Stapleton’s dealings with Verbruggen focused on money. In 2006, Stapleton told me that Armstrong had donated $100,000 to the UCI’s antidoping program. Later, he said he’d gotten the numbers mixed up, that the donation was only $25,000. Pat McQuaid, Verbruggen’s successor, said in 2006 that he couldn’t remember any donation from Armstrong.

  It all mystified Sylvia Schenk. Once president of the German Cycling Federation and a former member of the UCI management committee, Schenk told me in 2005 that the Armstrong donation was more like $500,000 and that it smacked of impropriety. Neither Verbruggen nor McQuaid ever explained to Schenk or the rest of the management committee the purpose for that donation, or how the UCI used that money. “It was kept secret,” she told me. “Armstrong was always getting special treatment from the UCI. How much, we will never know because Hein Verbruggen and Pat McQuaid wouldn’t address it.”

  Years later, McQuaid said that in 2002 Armstrong and his wife had given a personal check for $25,000 to the UCI and that Stapleton’s company sent $100,000 to the cycling union in 2005. The money was used to purchase the UCI’s blood analysis machine to help in the fight against doping.

  Those donations—whenever they were made and however much they were for—were only a part of the financial ties Armstrong and USA Cycling had with Verbruggen and the UCI. For example, part of Verbruggen’s financial portfolio was managed by the investment bank owned by Thomas Weisel, the same man who owned Armstrong’s cycling team. The broker on the account was Jim Ochowicz, Armstrong’s former team manager and close friend, and the president of USA Cycling’s board of directors from 2002 to 2006. Travis Tygart of USADA said those ties “stink to high heaven” because of the conflicts of interest.

  For his part, Hamman learned about those donations only during the arbitration of Armstrong’s lawsuit.

  Hamman’s first problem had been finding a lawyer. Dallas loves its sports heroes: its Cowboys, its high school football players and, yes, Lance Armstrong, a Texan once considered an outsider by classmates who called him “a sissy who wears tights.” Hamman said several law firms turned him down because they didn’t want to be seen attacking the hometown hero Armstrong.

  So Hamman ended up at Jeff Tillotson’s door. Tillotson, a partner at Lynn Tillotson Pinker & Cox, was initially reluctant, but felt obliged to take the case because no one else wanted it. His mother had survived lymphoma and was part of Armstrong’s cheering section. When she learned her son was representing Hamman, she said, “I’m so embarrassed. I read his book and it motivated me to survive.” It got worse for Tillotson.

  “As soon as we were publicly identified,” the lawyer told me, “I probably got a hundred fifty e-mails within the first few days, saying you’re a shithead, you’re a liar, I hope your firm goes under.”

  As part of his case strategy, Tillotson wanted the public to know the doping accusations in the Walsh-Ballester book. He sent the book to U.S. publishers and offered his legal services for free if Armstrong sued for libel after the book was published in the United States. But there were no takers.

  Then came a huge break. On August 23, 2005—three days after Armstrong spent the day riding bikes with George W. Bush on the president’s Texas ranch—the influential French sports newspaper L’Equipe ran a big headline across its front page: “LE MENSONGE ARMSTRONG” (“THE ARMSTRONG LIE”).

  The story claimed that Armstrong’s remaining backup urine samples from the 1999 Tour had been retroactively tested for EPO. Six came back positive for the banned endurance-boosting drug. “The extraordinary champion, the escape from cancer, has become a legend by means of a lie,” wrote Damien Ressiot, the L’Equipe reporter.

  Ressiot landed his scoop by figuring out which of the tested urine samples were Armstrong’s. (Samples are identified only by numbers.) By antidoping rules, however, the six positives for EPO were not official because the tests had been conducted for research purposes only.

  Quickly, Armstrong claimed that the scientists had not followed proper testing procedures and, because of that, the test results could not be trusted. No, he had not tested positive six times, he said, though L’Equipe and the lab insisted that he did. Armstrong said he was innocent.

  Several cycling and Olympic officials defended Armstrong. Gerard Bisceglia, USA Cycling’s chief executive, called L’Equipe’s accusations “preposterous” because only Armstrong’s backup samples had been tested. For a test to be officially positive, both the athlete’s initial and backup sample must test positive. Sergey Bubka, chairman of the athletes’ commission of the International Olympic Committee, called for the French lab to be suspended because it had breached antidoping rules.

  Broken rules or not, the damage to Armstrong was already done. Dick Pound, the head of the World Anti-Doping Agency, publicly said the case was finally “not a he said-she said scenario” and that scientific research proved something was awry with Armstrong’s urine samples. “Unless the documents are forgeries or manipulations of them, it’s a case that has to be answered.”

  Pound said he heard from Armstrong first in a
series of e-mails, one with the word Livestrong written three times in capital letters and underlined, in the signature section of the note. Then Pound said he received what he called a “Kafkaesque phone call” from Armstrong, in which Armstrong told him again and again, “I love my sport.” The WADA boss took that to mean Armstrong would fight his innocence to the end, no matter what the cost, so Pound had better lay off him. After that call, without any warning, Armstrong sent a letter to the president of the IOC asking that Pound be expelled from the organization because he was “a recidivist violator of ethical standards.”

  Some other officials took the EPO positives as proof that Armstrong had cheated. Tour director Jean-Marie Leblanc, the same man who said Armstrong had saved the sport by winning the 1999 Tour of Redemption, said L’Equipe’s allegations were the first “proven scientific facts” that Armstrong had doped.

  “He owes explanations to us, to everyone who followed the Tour,” Leblanc said. “Today what L’Equipe revealed shows me that I was fooled and we were all fooled.”

  Leblanc wanted an explanation from Armstrong, and he got it. The day of the L’Equipe story, Armstrong called Bob Costas, the sportscaster then working as a cohost on the television talk show Larry King Live. He asked to go on the show for a full hour to refute the allegations. Of course, Costas said.

  Armstrong tried to blame L’Equipe’s accusations on the tense USA-France relationship. (France refused to join the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003.) He also said that the day before the 2005 Tour, the French minister of sport took two urine samples and two blood samples from him, but from no other riders.

  “I can’t say ‘witch hunt’ loud enough,” Armstrong said. “This thing stinks. I’ve said it for longer than seven years: I have never doped. I can say it again. But I’ve said it for seven years. It doesn’t help. But the fact of the matter is I haven’t.”

  He told Costas, “If you consider my situation, a guy who comes back from arguably, you know, a death sentence, why would I then enter into a sport and dope myself up and risk my life again? That’s crazy. I would never do that. No. No way.”

  Costas said, “There’s no way they could have found EPO in your urine because you’re flatly saying you never used it?”

  “When I peed in that bottle, there wasn’t EPO in it. No way.”

  Costas asked if Armstrong planned to sue over the accusations. Armstrong said yes, possibly, but he didn’t know where to start. The French lab? L’Equipe? The French sports minister? The World Anti-Doping Agency? “All of these people violated a serious code of ethics,” Armstrong said.

  Costas then said to Armstrong what millions of the rider’s fans likely thought: “Here in the United States you are one of the most admired athletes of—of all time. People do not want to believe this of Lance Armstrong.”

  Armstrong: “Right.”

  Armstrong ended the interview by reminding viewers why they would want to believe that he was clean: because he was a celebrity hero. He talked about his cancer work with Livestrong. Larry King asked if he was going to marry Sheryl Crow, causing Costas to pipe up, “You know, that’s why Larry’s here, Lance. I wouldn’t have asked that.” He seemed irritated that King had veered from the very serious subject of Armstrong’s possible doping.

  Armstrong provided no real answer to the question about his love life, either, and the show ended awkwardly, with plastic smiles all around.

  Within two weeks of L’Equipe’s story, and soon after the damage control accomplished with the help of Costas and King, Armstrong shared with the American public his personal happy news. Two and a half years after he told Kristin Armstrong that he’d had enough of their perfect-on-the-outside marriage, he had, in fact, proposed marriage to Crow. The tabloids ate it up.

  Hamman and his lawyers knew they needed an airtight case to beat this Houdini who’d escaped from every perilous situation in his career. Now, on national television with Costas and King, Armstrong had wriggled out of an accusation that he had tested positive for EPO six times.

  “You’re swinging for the fences with these guys, because they have celebrity wattage,” Tillotson said. “All Lance had to do was pick up the phone and he was on a talk show bashing us, denying the allegations on TV.”

  Hamman, the master bridge player, reckoned he had a losing hand. So he came up with a Plan B that was devilish in its conception.

  If SCA lost the suit—nearly a certainty; a contract is a contract—Hamman believed the evidence gathered under oath would convince open-minded people that Armstrong had, in fact, doped. In turn, he hoped, sports entities that had the power to do something about Armstrong’s cheating would open an official investigation into the allegations raised by the SCA case. Hamman thought that an official investigation might uncover the truth and even result in Armstrong’s losing his Tour de France victories. In that roundabout way, SCA might get its $5 million back.

  “Bob was insistent that he wanted all the facts out there,” Tillotson said. “He was playing the long game. Even if he never got his money back, one day the truth would be known about Lance, and he would’ve had his measure of peace.”

  Walsh, Ballester and New Zealand cyclist Stephen Swart agreed to be witnesses in the SCA suit, as did Betsy Andreu, who supplied background information and texted/e-mailed/called Hamman nearly continuously. Tillotson had to tell Hamman, “Back off from Betsy. She’s not on our team in the legal sense. She’s a witness.” Tillotson told me Armstrong’s lawyers had requested copies of her communications to prove she was a prejudiced witness. “It played into Lance’s hand that she was a crazy bitch,” Tillotson said.

  Tillotson and his fellow SCA lawyers used sworn testimony to paint a vivid picture of Armstrong the doper. Swart said Armstrong had pushed the Motorola team in 1995 to use EPO. A blood doping expert, Michael Ashenden, said Armstrong’s urine samples from the 1999 Tour showed evidence “beyond a reasonable doubt” that Armstrong had used EPO. He pointed out that Armstrong’s hematocrit levels rose at certain points in the Tour where EPO shots would have helped his performance. Emma O’Reilly, the former soigneur, said she helped cover up Armstrong’s drug use.

  The most riveting testimony came from Betsy and Frankie Andreu. They were served subpoenas to testify in Detroit, and took turns testifying. While Frankie stayed in Dearborn to watch the kids, Betsy drove to a hotel for her deposition.

  She walked into the hotel to see Armstrong in the hallway with his Austin cycling buddy and Stapleton’s business partner, Bart Knaggs. She walked back out and called her husband.

  “He’s here! Lance is here, Frankie, what do I do?”

  “You’ve got to be shittin’ me.”

  “Nope. And you know what? He’s got to be stupid if he thinks he’s going to scare me.”

  She took his presence as a compliment, as proof that he thought her testimony would be consequential. It emboldened her to tell the truth, more so than she already was. She was still upset that he had called Frankie just three days before to remind him that Armstrong’s cancer doctor, Craig Nichols, had agreed to submit a sworn affidavit in the case. In that testimony, Nichols would say that he had no record of Armstrong’s hospital room confession.

  Armstrong told Frankie, “How’s it going to look if you say it happened and the doctor says it didn’t? I’m just looking out for you.” The Andreus weren’t fooled by his faux thoughtfulness. He hadn’t called them for a year and now he cared about how people would perceive them?

  Despite her toughness, Betsy was nervous when she came face-to-face with Armstrong in the conference room where the deposition was about to take place. She was shocked when he greeted her with a wide smile and oozed kindness as they shook hands. She recalled how they used to say hello with a kiss on the cheek.

  He whipped out a stack of photos and started showing her photos of him with Crow and photos of his children. Her oldest son, Frankie Jr., and Armstrong’s son, Luke, were the same age. Now look how much Luke had grown! Betsy sensed that it was Armstr
ong’s way of saying, “C’mon, old buddy, old pal. You and I are friends. You wouldn’t do this to a friend, would you?”

  Tillotson was also surprised to learn that Armstrong and Knaggs had flown in. Armstrong was on his way from Texas to New York, where he was to host Saturday Night Live and where Crow would be the musical guest. Tillotson thought it was a tip-off that SCA was onto something. Tillotson thought, “OK, this is the most famous athlete on the planet and he supposedly thinks we’re all liars and crazy, so why would he bother to show up?”

  Armstrong, the man who had sent the Andreus an e-mail with one word in the subject line, “Cuidado”—Spanish for “Be careful”—now sat at a conference room table hearing Betsy Andreu testify under oath.

  Tillotson asked if she had knowledge of Armstrong’s doping. She said yes, and described the day, October 28, 1996, that she and Frankie visited Armstrong in the Indiana hospital. She named those who were there: Frankie; Chris Carmichael; Carmichael’s then-girlfriend, Paige; Armstrong’s old girlfriend Lisa Shiels; and his Oakley representative, Stephanie McIlvain. Andreu described the doctor: young, thin, glasses, black hair.

  She repeated the doctor’s question to Armstrong: “Have you ever taken performance-enhancing drugs?”

  And Armstrong’s answer: “Growth hormone, cortisone, EPO, steroids and testosterone.”

  Betsy Andreu told Tillotson everything she knew about Armstrong. She recounted how many people she had told about Armstrong’s confession: friends, cousins, reporters, wives of friends—twenty-three people in all. Then she said, “I’m sorry. Two more names.” Later, she added three more, including a neighbor and Kristin Armstrong’s mother, Ethel Richard.

  She talked about the mysterious package, the “liquid gold,” that trainer Pepe Martí delivered to Armstrong after dinner that night in France. She recalled Armstrong meeting Ferrari at a gas station en route to the Milan-San Remo race. She testified that Kristin Armstrong knew about Lance’s doping, that Kristin said it was “a necessary evil.” She described Bill Stapleton asking Frankie—who was secretly taping the talk—to keep Betsy quiet about Armstrong’s hospital room admission because it “will blow the whole sport.”