Cycle of Lies: The Fall of Lance Armstrong

by Macur, Juliet

  USADA needed Hincapie. He was credible. He had never tested positive. He had never been linked to doping, save for Landis’s accusation. The public loved him and trusted him as the humble Big George who sacrificed himself for Armstrong Tour after Tour, the loyal lieutenant who would never let the general down. He was likely to know more about the behind-the-scenes activity on Armstrong’s squads than any other rider. (And that may be the case. For instance, he told me that Armstrong and the team’s climbers once brazenly received blood transfusions while the team bus was still parked at the finish line of one Tour.)

  He would be the linchpin of USADA’s case.

  If Hincapie spoke out against Armstrong, people would listen. “You’re talking about the most liked and respected American cyclist, maybe ever,” said Bob Stapleton, who owned Hincapie’s former team, HTC-Highroad. “We called him Captain America, for all the good reasons.”

  With Big George’s testimony, USADA could convince the public that Armstrong was no hero, that he was a cheater and a liar, the biggest cheater and liar on the Postal Service team. But they needed Big George to say it.

  Big George didn’t want to say it. USADA called his lawyer, David Anders—whose services Hincapie had secured for virtually nothing, thanks again to the Wall Street bigwig Tiger Williams, who was also advising Landis.

  USADA asked if Hincapie would provide testimony against Armstrong. Hincapie said, “Hell no.”

  Tygart came back with an ultimatum: Talk, or be banned for life. Tygart said USADA was prepared to charge Armstrong, Bruyneel, the trainer Pepe Martí and Drs. Pedro Celaya and Michele Ferrari with major doping violations because of their involvement in the Postal Service’s program. Did Hincapie want to join them?

  “You need to tell us everything that happened,” Tygart said.

  In exchange for his testimony, Hincapie would get a six-month ban.

  “They said they had enough on Lance and are going to take him down anyway,” Hincapie told me. “It was, ‘Either join us or be taken down also.’ Those were my options. They certainly took advantage of my relationship with Lance, for sure. They knew that it was going to be the groundbreaker.”

  He was seething. It wasn’t fair. He said he had stopped doping in 2006 and joined a “clean team” in HTC-Highroad. There, he said, he tried to convince younger riders that doping wasn’t the way to go, that the dirty past needed to be forgotten. But a lifetime ban would’ve negated that work, in addition to ruining his reputation, his career and maybe his company, Hincapie Sports.

  He was so angry that he considered coming clean publicly. He told his lawyer, “Fuck it, I doped and I will not cooperate with them. I’ll come out and say, ‘Look, I’ve made these mistakes and look what I’ve done since.’ ”

  But he knew if he did that, USADA would have banned him then and there. It would have ended his career, and he didn’t want that to happen. He wanted to ride again in the Tour and extend his record to seventeen Tour starts. He would talk, but just not yet. As a sign of his good intentions, Hincapie’s lawyer sent Tygart his notes from Hincapie’s interview with the federal prosecutors in 2010. With that information as a starting point, USADA allowed Hincapie to ride in the 2012 Tour, where he commiserated with the members of Vaughters’s team who also were testifying against Armstrong.

  The day of the fifth stage of the 2012 Tour, a news report from the Dutch newspaper De Telegraaf said Hincapie, Zabriskie, Vande Velde and Leipheimer would receive delayed six-month bans for testifying against Armstrong in USADA’s case. The news was the main subject that day at the Tour as reporters rushed to confirm that the story was true.

  On the miles of rolling roads in northern France, between the towns of Rouen and Saint Quentin, the riders chatted about it, too. At one point, Hincapie rode alongside Danielson and Vande Velde during their 122-mile workout on roadways that cut through green fields and hugged canals.

  “Can you believe all this shit? It’s not even true,” Danielson told Hincapie. “We’re not getting suspended.”

  “Really?” Hincapie said. “Um, that’s fucked up. I’m getting suspended.”

  As soon as the stage ended, he was on the phone to his lawyer. He told Anders that it wasn’t fair that he was being suspended for six months, while Vaughters and his riders were getting off without any penalty whatsoever. He complained that Vaughters was getting special treatment from USADA because he was just a kiss-up and that he obviously had been talking to USADA for years to paint himself as a good guy. After a multitude of phone calls back and forth between Hincapie’s lawyer and USADA’s lawyers, USADA decided to back down and dole out penalties that were equal.

  After the Tour, Tygart contacted Vaughters with bad news: The immunity deal was off. His riders would be suspended for six months, starting at the end of that season. Tygart said he and his colleagues had discussed it, and they were taking too much of a chance by granting immunity to some riders but not others. Bending the World Anti-Doping Code like that would require the blessing of the World Anti-Doping Agency, and also the UCI, an institution that seemed to be allied with Armstrong. And if the UCI appealed the riders’ sanctions, every one of them could end up with two-year sanctions instead.

  Zabriskie, Danielson and Vande Velde had no choice but to say yes to the six-month ban. They felt let down and duped. But there was no use in their griping about it now. USADA and Tygart were on a roll.

  Armstrong’s lawyer, Tim Herman, received a letter from USADA on June 4, 2012. It asked Armstrong to disclose everything he knew about doping in cycling. Or else. Armstrong didn’t think much of USADA. How could it catch him when even Novitzky and the federal government hadn’t been able to?

  Herman didn’t know much about how USADA worked and wasn’t familiar with the nuances of the World Anti-Doping Agency’s set of rules. He handed off the request to another lawyer on Armstrong’s team.

  Armstrong’s response came from Robert Luskin, a Washington, D.C., white-collar defense lawyer who had represented Karl Rove in the CIA leak case in 2006. He said USADA’s request to talk to Armstrong was “a vendetta, which has nothing to do with learning the truth, and everything to do with settling a score and garnering publicity at Lance’s expense.”

  “We will not be a party to this charade,” he wrote to USADA. He said the antidoping agency was vilifying Armstrong and trying to lynch him, and warned that if the agency continued to do so, “We will not hesitate to expose your motives and your methods.” He claimed that USADA had “bought and paid for” witnesses’ testimony in the case against his client.

  When Armstrong refused to confess, USADA said it would seek to charge him with a doping violation. The agency’s three-man review board, which determines if there is enough evidence for USADA to move forward with a doping case, began compiling a report.

  On June 28—after calling USADA’s case against him “unconstitutional” and “a witch hunt”—Armstrong received a fifteen-page letter from the antidoping agency. He was in France preparing for a full-length Ironman triathlon—the sport that had become his new career. He had already won several half-distance Ironmans, and his goal was to qualify for the Ironman World Championship in Kona, Hawaii. NBC had bought rights to broadcast a two-hour special of that race, just because Armstrong was going to be in it.

  If Armstrong’s lawyers had thought they could bully USADA into backing down, they were mistaken. USADA’s review board had found enough evidence to charge Armstrong with a doping violation and the agency moved forward with a case against Armstrong, Bruyneel, Martí and Drs. Ferrari, del Moral and Celaya.

  More gravely, it claimed that Armstrong was at the center of a doping ring on his teams, and that he had broken antidoping rules by using EPO, blood transfusions, testosterone, cortisone and saline infusions. The charges against him weren’t focused only on his Tour-winning years, either. They spread from 1996 through 2010, meaning they included the two years of his comeback. USADA claimed that Armstrong’s blood records from those seasons were “fu
lly consistent with blood manipulation.”

  Armstrong only needed to read the second paragraph to know he was in big trouble: “The witnesses to the conduct described in this letter include more than ten (10) cyclists as well as cycling team employees.” Tucked into the letter’s second-to-last page, Armstrong saw a line even more chilling: lifetime ban from Olympic sports.

  That meant if he lost the case, he wouldn’t be allowed to compete in any sport that followed the World Anti-Doping Code—which is basically every sport he’d ever want to compete in. Cycling. Triathlons. Marathons. Swimming meets. Not even just the Olympic-level ones, either. Smaller events, like a 10-kilometer race to raise money for cancer, are usually sanctioned by the sport’s national federation. And national federations of sports that are in the Olympics follow the WADA code.

  Longtime friend Dan Empfield, who had met a young Armstrong during his early triathlon days, told me that a lifetime ban for Armstrong would be “very painful for him, very painful, big-time painful” because Armstrong is an “eating, breathing, sleeping athletic machine . . . It’d be like ripping an organ out of your body.”

  The week in June leading up to USADA’s charges would have been even more painful for Armstrong if he had cared at all about his biological father, Eddie Gunderson.

  The ever-stubborn Gunderson had been pulling up wet carpet from the screened-in porch of his mother’s house in Tool, Texas—home to the brown recluse spider, a poisonous arachnid that happens to find wet carpet an ideal place to live. Gunderson should’ve been wearing long pants, and he knew it. As he’d worked, he felt a stabbing pain in his shin and saw a spider scurrying away. Damn thing had bitten him.

  He waited two days before going to a hospital. He’d never liked going to the doctor. Months before, Gunderson’s legs had swollen so much that they looked like overinflated balloons, a common side effect of liver failure. A doctor had told Gunderson he would treat him, but only if he could stop drinking for at least six months.

  “I can’t assure you that, so I don’t want to take up your time,” he told the doctor. His inflexibility doomed him. He should have gone to the hospital right after the spider bit him. Instead, precious time had elapsed by the time he made it to Methodist Hospital in Dallas, the same hospital in which Armstrong was born. His kidneys and liver gave out. His heart was working so hard to make up for the deficit of the other organs that it went into cardiac arrest.

  On June 25, 2012, Eddie Charles Gunderson, the man whose family called him “Sonny,” died. His funeral was held three days later, the day USADA officially charged Armstrong with being the kingpin of a sophisticated doping program on his Tour-winning teams. Armstrong used EPO. He received blood transfusions. He forced other teammates to dope and even gave them drugs, to give himself a better chance at winning and glory. In short, he was a lying, cheating bully. Nothing like the Lance that the Gunderson family remembered.

  Micki Rawlings delivered the eulogy for her brother. Looking into the crowd gathered inside the Eubank Cedar Creek Funeral Home south of Dallas, she said her brother was loud, proud, stubborn, opinionated, obnoxious, sarcastic, bombastic.

  “Sonny was his father’s son,” she said. “He loved fast cars, fast motorcycles, fast times. He loved family, music, sports, a good fight now and then and a cold beer. He was his mother’s son. He had a huge, loving heart. He had caring and kindness to spare.”

  She said her brother had lived a wonderful life full of family who loved him. He had a wonderful wife and two wonderful children who adored him and “a son, Lance, who will never know how much he missed and how much he was missed.”

  Armstrong was not at the funeral.

  The next month, Doug Ulman, the chief executive of the Lance Armstrong Foundation, met lawmakers on Capitol Hill. He and a lobbyist from the powerful law firm Patton Boggs were to speak about the foundation, cancer care and cancer awareness.

  On the unwritten agenda: how USADA’s investigation would negatively affect the foundation’s mission.

  Armstrong’s efforts to reach lawmakers and raise concerns about Jeff Novitzky and his investigation never materialized, a lobbyist involved in the effort said. But that didn’t stop Armstrong or his supporters from again trying to enlist Congress’s help.

  Ulman chatted with Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison, a Republican from Texas, about the consequences the foundation would face in light of USADA’s inquiry. Among his next several stops was Representative Jose Serrano (D-N.Y.), the ranking Democrat on the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Financial Services and General Government, which oversees how much the government will give to USADA each year. That conversation was “substantially if not all about USADA and Livestrong’s concerns about the process that Lance Armstrong is being put through,” said Philip Schmidt, the congressman’s spokesman.

  When the Livestrong representatives left Serrano’s office, Serrano’s staff members talked about how bold and inappropriate the meeting had been. “Livestrong was supposed to promote cancer awareness—right?—not spend its time and money trying to protect Lance Armstrong,” a staffer said. “Totally inappropriate.”

  In July, F. James Sensenbrenner, a senator from Wisconsin whose district includes the home base of Trek Bicycle Corporation, Armstrong’s longtime sponsor, sent a letter to the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy, which gives $9 million a year to USADA—most of USADA’s $13.7 million annual budget. In questioning USADA’s investigation of Armstrong, the senator relied on arguments identical to those used by Armstrong’s legal team.

  He said USADA was depriving Armstrong of his basic due process and that “USADA’s authority over Armstrong is strained, at best.” He called USADA’s case “a novel conspiracy theory” and said that Armstrong had been tested “over five hundred times” without ever testing positive. (A theme Armstrong had fallen back on for years, though the number of times he had been tested was less than three hundred, according to the UCI.)

  Tygart was called in to talk to Sensenbrenner and his staff several times. The gist of the conversations went like this:

  SENSENBRENNER: What in the hell are you doing to a national treasure?

  TYGART: I’m doing my job.

  In the meantime, Armstrong and his team were working to discredit USADA, convince the government to cut the agency’s funding and discourage the agency from continuing the case. Armstrong posted on his Twitter account that USADA review board member Clark Griffith had been charged earlier in the year with exposing himself to a young law student and telling her to fondle him.

  “Wow. @usantidoping can pick em,” Armstrong wrote. He marked the tweet with “#protectingcleanathletesandpervs.”

  Stapleton asked USOC officials for help in getting USADA to back down. His argument raised eyebrows, because Stapleton had been part of the group that drafted USADA’s original rules.

  Armstrong then sued USADA and Tygart in federal court, asking the court to end USADA’s investigation on the grounds it was unconstitutional. The lawsuit ran to eighty pages and alleged that USADA had violated Armstrong’s right to due process and was prosecuting a “big fish” to justify its existence.

  In a swift smack-down rarely seen in federal court, United States District Court Judge Sam Sparks dismissed the lawsuit only hours later. He said Armstrong’s unnecessarily lengthy allegations “were included solely to increase media coverage of this case, and to incite public opinion against” USADA and Tygart.

  Armstrong’s lawyers tried again, this time filing a shorter lawsuit and asking the court to stop USADA’s prosecution of Armstrong. They argued that USADA was depriving him of his due process and didn’t have jurisdiction over him anyway—that the UCI did. Though Pat McQuaid at the UCI initially said the case was USADA’s to handle, he did a quick about-face—without explanation—and said that the UCI alone should deal with Armstrong.

  Judge Sparks again ruled against Armstrong, allowing USADA’s case to continue. He said USADA’s arbitration rules were robust enough to
deal with the matter and that the federal courts should stay out of the dispute. “To hold otherwise would be to turn federal judges into referees for a game in which they have no place, and about which they know little.”

  Tygart had won in federal court.

  The fight was on.

  It ended quickly.

  Three days later, Armstrong did something he never had before: He stopped fighting.

  “There comes a point in every man’s life when he has to say, ‘Enough is enough.’ For me that time is now,” he said in a statement.

  Upon advice from Washington lawyer Mark Levinstein—who said never go to arbitration with USADA because athletes never win—Armstrong accepted USADA’s charges and agreed to a lifetime ban from Olympic sports. His seven Tour titles would be stripped from him. Gone, too, would be the bronze medal he won at the 2000 Olympics, along with all other titles, awards and money he’d won from August 1998 forward. But Armstrong had a hard time accepting the implications.

  “Regardless of what Travis Tygart says, there is zero physical evidence to support his outlandish and heinous claims,” he said. “The only physical evidence here is the hundreds of controls I have passed with flying colors.”

  CHAPTER 24

  Lance Armstrong had once known what to expect: nothing more than the usual letter from the United States Anti-Doping Agency informing an athlete why sanctions had been levied against him. Maybe a page or two of bullet points, outlining the evidence USADA had gathered in the case. But this report from the antidoping agency was different in an important, unprecedented way. This time, USADA would issue much more than a private letter of explanation to an athlete. It would be an open letter to the world. It would include every piece of evidence, every document, every bit of testimony from Armstrong’s teammates who cooperated with USADA.