Cycle of Lies: The Fall of Lance Armstrong

by Macur, Juliet

  For years, she could say nothing publicly. She believed that breaking the code of silence would destroy her husband’s cycling career. But now, for three hours, she unburdened herself.

  By the time she was done, Armstrong was long gone. He’d taken off during a lunch break, bound for Manhattan. It was a relief for Frankie. He shared none of his wife’s confidence.

  In his turn under oath, Frankie took Betsy’s place at the table in the conference room and confirmed her version of the events that had occurred in Armstrong’s hospital room. But when asked if he had known Armstrong used performance-enhancing drugs, he said no. Asked if he ever had a discussion with Armstrong about using EPO or had knowledge of Armstrong’s using drugs, again he said no.

  Unlike his wife, Frankie Andreu remained so afraid of Armstrong that he perjured himself, several of his former teammates said.

  Stephen Swart, a former Motorola teammate, couldn’t explain why Frankie would have denied under oath that he knew about Armstrong’s doping—or that he ever talked to Armstrong about doping—because he said the whole Motorola team in 1995 talked about using EPO. He said Frankie was just another participant in the drug culture of cycling and of the Motorola team, just like Armstrong was, just like many top riders at the time were. He recalled that Frankie’s hematocrit at the 1995 Tour was nearly 50.

  Armstrong said there were “no secrets” on the team back then, and that many riders on the squad—including Andreu—were open about their drug use, which included taking cortisone or cortisone-type substances and later EPO, overseen by team doctor Max Testa. Andreu denies that he and his teammates ever talked about their drug use so nonchalantly among them.

  After providing his testimony, Andreu corrected his written deposition, seeming to backtrack. He now testified he “wasn’t sure” if Armstrong had used performance-enhancing drugs, and that he wasn’t sure if he ever spoke to him about EPO one-on-one. He also said, “While he [Armstrong] was racing postcancer, I can’t recall at this time any use of drugs firsthand.”

  Instead of going with his initial comment that he never heard Armstrong say he had used PEDs, Andreu changed his testimony to something that was borderline comical: “This was the first time I heard him admit all the drugs he admitted to taking.”

  No matter what Andreu said under oath—or, really, didn’t say—Armstrong still felt threatened by the Andreus’ testimony. He was so frightened that his skillful public relations people went to work to push positive press about him. First, they announced that the Lance Armstrong Foundation had given $1.5 million to the Indiana University School of Medicine. The donation established an endowment for a chair in oncology for Lawrence Einhorn, Armstrong’s primary oncologist.

  Later, Nichols, one of Armstrong’s doctors and a board member of Livestrong, submitted an affidavit to the arbitrators, just as Armstrong had warned the Andreus he would. Nichols said he had monitored Armstrong’s blood levels on a regular basis from January 1997 to October 2001, and that he had seen nothing to suggest drug use. He said, “Had Lance Armstrong been using EPO to enhance his cycling performance, I would have likely identified differences in his blood levels.” He told me in 2013 that Armstrong had duped him, then hung up on me when I asked him to elaborate.

  Four days after the Andreus’ testimony in Michigan, Armstrong hosted Saturday Night Live. In his monologue, he says: “I’ve been working really hard on the show, trying to do a good job, but just not too good. Because the last time I did something too good, the French started testing my urine every fifteen minutes.”

  A fake audience member then got up and asks in an exaggerated French accent if he can have a urine sample. Armstrong says no. The man points at him and yells: “It’s our race! Stop winning it! J’accuse!”

  After months of depositions and three weeks of the arbitration hearing, Tillotson thought he’d learned the inner workings of cycling and how far people would go to protect its secrets. Armstrong had called Emma O’Reilly “a whore” and said Betsy Andreu lied about him because she hated him and that Frankie Andreu lied about him because “he’s just trying to back up his old lady.” He said he’d never dope because it would cause him to lose “the faith of all cancer survivors around the world . . . hundreds of millions of people.”

  Tillotson saw Stapleton, the agent, deny that there was a possibility that Armstrong had doped without him knowing it. “It is inconceivable,” Stapleton said in his testimony. He said he even met secretly in 2000 with executives of Coca-Cola, one of Armstrong’s worried sponsors, “looked them in the eyes” and gave them his word that Armstrong was clean.

  He saw the Oakley rep, Stephanie McIlvain, testify—in direct contradiction of Betsy Andreu’s testimony—that she knew nothing of an Armstrong drug confession in his Indiana University hospital room. (Later, a phone conversation between McIlvain and Tour winner Greg LeMond was shown to the arbirators. In it, McIlvain said she did hear the confession. “I was in the room. I heard it,” she said.)

  Still, by February 2006, Tillotson knew Hamman’s case was going nowhere.

  The arbitration panel had said that SCA would likely have to pay Armstrong the $5 million because, as the original contract stated, the money was due to him for the simple reason that he had officially won the Tour de France. So SCA wrote a check for $7.5 million—the $5 million plus fees—to end the parade of witnesses who may or may not have been telling the truth.

  Armstrong added it to his string of legal victories. He also had won the libel suit against Walsh and the Sunday Times of London, with the newspaper paying him about $500,000. (But he ended up dropping all of his libel cases in France, saying they were a waste of time and money.)

  When the SCA case ended, Armstrong declared it another victory. “I recently won a major arbitration, defeating allegations of performance-enhancing drugs after a three-week trial,” he said in a statement.

  “It’s over,” Armstrong said. “We won. They lost. I was yet again completely vindicated.”

  That was not exactly true. The two parties had settled the case, but the arbitrators had not determined whether he had doped or not. Still, when I spoke to Armstrong, I couldn’t get him to admit that he hadn’t won the case outright.

  “I was totally vindicated,” he told me in 2006.

  “But they didn’t rule on whether you doped or not, so technically you didn’t clear your name at all,” I said.

  “No, I won the case, hands down.”

  The same week, Armstrong was in the news again when he broke off his five-month engagement with Crow. Later, he said it was because she wanted to have a child and he didn’t. But Crow announced darker news: She was fighting breast cancer.

  CHAPTER 18

  As Hamman had hoped, evidence against Armstrong spread. News organizations around the country reported leaks of the SCA testimony. Even before the press got ahold of it, USADA was on the phone to Tillotson. Could their lawyers come to review the evidence?

  Less than a week after the case was settled, Tygart and an associate, Bill Bock, flew to Dallas to debrief SCA’s lawyer.

  Tygart and Bock were especially interested in Frankie Andreu’s testimony. They believed that if a rider that close to Armstrong had provided information on his doping, they could build a strong case. They returned to Colorado Springs with copies of everything—depositions, hearing transcripts, exhibits from both sides.

  Hamman had lost once, but now the bridge master had dealt himself a second hand. And this time, USADA was in the game.

  In the deepening love affair between the American public and Lance Armstrong, however, the SCA settlement meant little. No one much cared about an obscure company called SCA—they only cared about Armstrong, an international celebrity who had transcended sports by raising hundreds of millions of dollars for the Livestrong Foundation. He had built a formidable bank of goodwill. The rest was mind-numbing legalese and creeping litigation.

  What helped the public believe him when he insisted that he never doped was a
report released in the spring of 2006 that addressed L’Equipe’s accusation that six of Armstrong’s urine samples from 1999 had tested positive for EPO.

  Less than two months after L’Equipe broke the story, the UCI had commissioned what it called “an independent report” to examine how the French lab conducted its analysis of the urine samples and how the news of the results were leaked to the press.

  Dutch lawyer Emile Vrijman, the former head of the national antidoping agency in the Netherlands who later represented athletes in doping cases, was paid by the UCI to compile the report. He said his investigation would be unbiased and that neither the UCI nor Armstrong would have a role in it.

  “In no way will they be able to see the report in advance or influence the results,” Vrijman said.

  Behind the scenes, according to two people with direct knowledge of how the report came together, it was the complete opposite. The whole idea started as a way the UCI could make Armstrong—its star—and the entire sport appear clean when in fact the doping problem that had hovered over cycling for a hundred years still existed. Armstrong, his agent and his lawyers were upset that L’Equipe had been able to figure out which urine samples from the 1999 Tour were his—and they blamed the UCI for it. The cycling union needed to help fix the mess it and L’Equipe had caused, they said.

  Pat McQuaid, the UCI president, hired Vrijman at the urging of Verbruggen, who was the UCI’s honorary president after stepping down from the head role in 2005. Verbruggen, a Dutchman who was a powerful player in the Olympic movement and an honorary IOC member, was friends with both Armstrong and Vrijman.

  Instead of acting independently as he said he would, Vrijman received feedback from the UCI in compiling the report, said the two people with knowledge of how the report was created. Vrijman also received input from Armstrong, through his representatives. Stapleton was the point man, and might even have written some of the report, based on language in the document that matches language Armstrong had used to defend himself in the past. Stapleton was the man Armstrong had once called indispensable, declaring he “has had my back for so long. I don’t remember when he didn’t have it.”

  The 132-page “Vrijman Report” was released in the spring of 2006. It blamed the French lab for violating athlete confidentiality and said the lab did not follow international standards when its scientists examined Armstrong’s samples. The Vrijman Report also chastised the World Anti-Doping Agency for its conduct regarding the so-called positives. But it neglected to address two very important points: whether EPO was, in fact, found in those samples or the possibility that Armstrong had used EPO to win his first Tour.

  Vrijman said his report “exonerates Lance Armstrong completely with respect to alleged use of doping in the 1999 Tour de France.”

  The American media bought right in. The Associated Press said Armstrong had all along called L’Equipe’s story about the six positives “a witch hunt,” and that “he may have been right.” The Fort Worth Star-Telegram in Texas ran an editorial titled, “Sweet Vindication,” that addressed the report. It said, “Count the report as Armstrong’s eighth Tour de France victory.”

  Dick Pound, the head of the World Anti-Doping Agency, was one of the few outspoken naysayers. He said the report was “so lacking in professionalism and objectivity that it borders on the farcical.” But Armstrong and the UCI had won that crucial round.

  In the spring and summer of 2006, when he normally would have been training for the Tour, Armstrong, in retirement, enjoyed his status as an American icon.

  There were no more surprise drug tests. No more clandestine prerace injections. No more reasons to even come close to France. Between his trips to Livestrong functions or to advocate in other arenas for cancer awareness, he moved into his dream estate in Austin.

  At the Indianapolis 500, he drove the pace car, a 505-horsepower Corvette. At Tufts University in Boston, upon receiving an honorary doctorate, he told graduates: “Somebody send the photos to the principal at Plano East Senior High and let them know that I, in fact, graduated from Tufts and that he has to call me Dr. Armstrong now.” In Washington, D.C., he lobbied Congress for an increase in cancer funding and some lawmakers clamored to meet with him. At least one powerful politician, Jim Oberstar, a long-serving Democratic congressman from Minnesota, had one of Armstrong’s yellow jerseys framed and mounted on his office wall. At a gathering of Livestrong supporters in front of the Capitol, Armstrong talked to the crowd and was met with cries of “Lance for President!” The Arby’s fast food chain proclaimed him the “Greatest Natural Athlete of All Time,” ahead of Jim Thorpe and Muhammad Ali.

  Armstrong soaked in fame, while some of his former teammates mounted their bikes and chased after it. After seven straight years as the Tour de France winner, Armstrong saw his former teammate-turned-nemesis, Floyd Landis, win the race in 2006.

  Landis’s victory was achieved primarily with a breathtaking performance that overshadowed even the best of Armstrong’s rides. It came on Stage 17. A day after falling eight minutes behind the leader, Landis rode solo over three Alpine passes to win the stage. He crossed the finish line in Paris as only the third American to win the world’s most famous cycling race.

  That 2006 Tour had begun with nearly a dozen riders—including those who finished second, third, fourth and fifth behind Armstrong the year before—being banned from the race because they or their teams had been linked to a blood doping ring in Spain. At Tour’s end, Landis was touted as a clean rider who could take American cycling into a new post-Armstrong era. His old friend Allen Lim wasn’t sure what to think of that.

  Lim had visited Landis in his plush Paris hotel suite the morning after Landis won the Tour. He had not worked directly for Landis during that race, but was still part of his entourage while recording and publishing his power numbers as part of a marketing push for Saris Cycling. In appreciation for his support, Landis gave Lim both of his wheels from his Tour bike.

  As Lim turned to leave, Landis said, “Al, do you know why guys cheat?”

  “No, Floyd, why do guys cheat?”

  Landis pulled off his shirt. Then, as if he were a ripped and strutting linebacker rather than a whippet-lean cyclist with a farmer’s tan, Landis struck a pose.

  “Because they’re pussies, Al,” he said. “Because they are all fucking pussies!”

  Lim left the room dazed. He wanted nothing more to do with Landis, with doping, with the moral relativism that said cheating was OK as long as everyone did it. He left Paris that afternoon determined to use his unique experience with Landis to change cycling for the better. If only he knew how.

  Only four days after Floyd Landis stood on the podium on the Champs-Élysées with the American flag flapping in the wind behind him, his Phonak team announced that their champion had failed a drug test.

  The positive test came from urine supplied during his amazing and improbable Stage 17 solo ride over the Alps. His ratio of testosterone-to-epitestosterone was 11-to-1, nearly three times the acceptable limit.

  In a hastily organized teleconference, Landis took the Armstrong approach: Deny, deny and then deny more loudly, preferably on national television. He said the positive test could have come from the Jack Daniel’s and beer he drank the night before. That, or from his naturally high testosterone level. It seemed as if the only excuse he didn’t use was Tyler Hamilton’s vanishing twin story.

  On a teleconference with dozens of reporters around the world, I asked him if he had ever used performance-enhancing drugs or doping methods. He paused, awkwardly: “I’ll say no.”

  In Ephrata, Pennsylvania, his parents staked a big yellow sign on their lawn with an array of spiritual proverbs: “The glory of young men is their strength” and “To God be the glory.” Even after the report of his positive test, Landis’s family remained hopeful of his innocence. His mother, Arlene, appeared on WGAL, a local news station, in her modest brown dress and Christian head covering. She said, “They stirred up trouble for Lance, t
oo” and “I think God is allowing us to go through this so Floyd’s glory is even greater.” Floyd’s sister Charity said, “I am proud of my brother. It humbles me to know that my brother can claim his victory with integrity.”

  A few days later I learned that his urine had tested positive for synthetic testosterone.

  More than a month after Frankie and Betsy Andreu testified, Betsy was getting restless. She wanted the public to know that she and her husband didn’t offer to testify against Armstrong—they were impelled to by subpoenas.

  “If I had to, I’d do it all again because I did what I thought was right,” she said. “But next time, I’d brace myself emotionally. Just because it’s the truth, people aren’t going to embrace it . . . America wants to believe this fairy tale about Lance, that he’s this great guy who’s a hero, but I know who he really is. He’s just a fraud.”

  The Andreus were worlds away from the life they had once enjoyed in Europe. Betsy took care of the couple’s three children, all of them younger than eight years old, and volunteered each week as a lunch monitor at their Catholic school. Frankie had directed a small U.S.-based cycling team, Toyota-United, until he was fired shortly after his SCA testimony broke in the news. His team owner had a previous relationship with Armstrong, which they figured was all they needed to know.

  “Once you’re out of Lance’s inner circle, you’re way out,” Frankie Andreu said. “He holds grudges and wants to crush you, and that’s exactly what he’s trying to do to us.” With the subpoena, Frankie said he and Betsy were “put into a difficult position, a position that we gained nothing from, and, if anything, it was going to hurt me. I chose to tell the truth.”