Cycle of Lies: The Fall of Lance Armstrong

by Macur, Juliet

  On October 10, 2012, in a conversation between USADA’s Bill Bock and Philippe Verbiest, the main lawyer for the UCI, Verbiest asked Bock when the UCI would see the report. The cycling union had been publicly chastising USADA for taking so long to generate the document.

  UCI officials were anxious to review the evidence USADA had gathered in its investigation of Armstrong, to determine if the cycling union would appeal the matter—but more so to see if they had been implicated in any wrongdoing. They expected a bit of professional, confidential decorum between the agencies.

  When Verbiest asked for the report for what seemed like the hundredth time, Bock gladly revealed USADA’s plans.

  “Well, we can send it to you,” Bock said, “or you can just get it when it goes online in an hour.”

  Verbiest fell silent.

  “You still there?” Bock said.

  Silence.

  Finally, incredulous, Verbiest said, “What? You can’t do that!”

  Armstrong’s attorneys were aghast when they heard the news from Verbiest. They thought releasing the report would be tantamount to a prosecutor’s making public the government’s evidence against a defendant before a trial. Herman, Armstrong’s Austin lawyer, thought USADA’s decision to go public would unfairly prejudice any juror—in this case, the public at large.

  The Armstrong team was in disarray. The evidence was going online? In an hour!

  Fabiani, the spokesman, blamed Herman for not anticipating USADA’s move. Herman in turn thought the beginnings of the whole mess could be laid at the feet of Levinstein, who had convinced Armstrong to accept USADA’s sanction in the first place. Now, USADA had risen to the challenge with a vengeance.

  Armstrong had always beaten the system. He had outsmarted, outlasted, outmaneuvered and/or outspent all the critics. Even the United States government had failed in an attempt to indict him. He thought he could fight anything USADA threw at him. As always, he would use his extraordinary life story—cancer survivor, winner of seven Tour de France titles—as both shield and weapon.

  “Are you fucking serious?” Armstrong said when Herman told him about USADA’s plan to go public. “How the fuck did we let this happen?”

  Tygart knew that if they failed to bring down Armstrong their mission would be irreparably damaged. USADA’s funding could be cut, something he had inferred from his meetings on Capitol Hill about the Armstrong case. Top athletes with money would be inspired to challenge the system because Armstrong would be proof that those athletes could win. Losing the Armstrong case might become USADA’s death knell.

  One or two eyewitnesses to his doping and the doping on the Postal Service team weren’t enough—they needed nearly a dozen. A couple documents that confirmed Armstrong had consulted with an infamous Italian doping doctor—even in the years he wasn’t competing in the Tour but was running marathons and doing triathlons—wasn’t enough. They wanted reams.

  And reams they had—in addition to e-mails, photos, videos and even the Web diary of Armstrong’s first wife, Kristin.

  Rich Young, USADA’s outside counsel, said it best. “It’s the kind of thing where if you’re hunting elephants and you’re up against a great, big elephant, you damn well better kill it, or you’re going to get trampled.”

  Tygart was aware that USADA wasn’t up against just Armstrong. It was also up against his millions of fans. For the agency to bring down Armstrong, it would need to convince the public—all those jurors sitting in judgment—that Armstrong had been someone other than his packaged image all those years.

  To accomplish that, the three main lawyers working on the report—Tygart at USADA, Young at his Colorado Springs law office and Bock in Indianapolis—pulled all-nighters and circulated electronic drafts every twelve hours. They wrote and rewrote the text until the report took on a character they hadn’t really expected. It had begun as a report on a sports hero’s misdeeds. It wound up sounding like a script for a mobster movie.

  Tygart suggested, in a late-night joke, that the Mafia’s wise guys fled Las Vegas and ended up working on Armstrong’s team. Young congratulated Bock, the primary author, for turning the usual dry legal document into a suspenseful crime novel.

  They wanted to make the report simple yet dramatic, so the public would read it from cover to cover and understand, once and for all, who Lance Armstrong really was: a pathological liar who had set an example of doping, not only on his team, but for the entire sport. He was the despot of cycling who had no qualms about crushing those who dared to question him. He was the boss of bosses in a corrupt organization, the undisputed champion of a sport built on lies.

  Tygart no longer cared what Armstrong thought. He and his team had outmaneuvered the champion who smugly asked, “What are you on?” in the poster that had hung above Tygart’s desk at USADA before the agency moved across town. Armstrong could make his threats. He could smear USADA. He could play the victim card as well as he ever had. But this time all the evidence would be on the Web, there for everyone around the world to see.

  Early in USADA’s investigation, Armstrong told me that he was concerned about Tygart’s motivations. “I don’t know his agenda, or if he’s got other ambitions, but these guys are not honest and are not straight shooters. They are not out for the integrity of cycling or the integrity of the sport. He’s just out to screw one guy and make an example out of him.”

  Armstrong believed USADA wanted to bring him down for its own glorification. “C’mon, this is what our taxpayer dollars are funding, a witch hunt?” Armstrong asked me. “They’re just out to get me because they want to get a big celebrity so they can justify their existence. Listen, it’s bullshit. Total lies. Total lies.”

  Among his dwindling circle of friends and colleagues—he was no longer talking to his close friend and “coach” Chris Carmichael because Carmichael had turned his back on him—Armstrong was less confident. He knew that Floyd Landis and Tyler Hamilton were among the riders who had crossed him. Both had spoken publicly. They didn’t worry him. He could impugn their credibility because they had lied for so long about their own doping.

  Other witnesses, however, were riders with clean reputations, good guys such as fellow American riders David Zabriskie and Christian Vande Velde. Armstrong was most worried about George Hincapie—Big George, his most trusted partner on two wheels. In the weeks leading up to the morning of October 10, 2012, Armstrong and his lawyers had learned that Hincapie had talked to USADA. And while they had no idea what he had said, they wanted no one else to hear it, either.

  Several months earlier, they had designed a plan to keep any confessions from going public. The key to that strategy was to accept USADA’s sanctions.

  By accepting them, Armstrong would forgo his right to an arbitration hearing—but that was part of the plan. At such a hearing, all of USADA’s evidence—including teammates’ testimonies—might be aired publicly. Without a hearing, Armstrong and his lawyers thought, USADA’s evidence would remain confidential, and the bomb would stop ticking right then and there.

  Armstrong and his team quietly convinced the UCI not to appeal USADA’s sanction. The cycling union would claim publicly that USADA’s sanction was unfair and its findings unsound, and that the process was so biased against Armstrong that an appeal wasn’t worth the trouble. That would give Armstrong enough plausible deniability to persuade his legion of fans that, yes, once again he had been the victim, not the perpetrator.

  But Armstrong and his lawyers had underestimated Travis Tygart’s resolve to tell the world what he had learned about Lance Armstrong.

  Tygart had hired a private security company after receiving three death threats, including one by someone who wanted to “put a bullet” in Tygart’s head and another that said, “Hope you have a bodyguard and a bulletproof vest. Your [sic] a dead man motherfucker. You just don’t know what you’ve done.” Tygart had thought of putting all of his assets in his wife’s name. Thousands of e-mails from Armstrong’s fans streamed into USA
DA’s office. An agency spokeswoman, Annie Skinner, received one wishing she’d get “ass cancer.”

  In advance of the report, Armstrong lawyers Tim Herman and Sean Breen rushed out a response.

  “We have seen the press release from USADA touting the upcoming release today of its ‘reasoned decision,’ ” Breen said, calling the report “a one-sided hatchet job—a taxpayer-funded tabloid piece rehashing old, disproved, unreliable allegations based largely on axe-grinders, serial perjurers, coerced testimony, sweetheart deals and threat-induced stories.

  “USADA has continued its government-funded witch hunt of only Mr. Armstrong, a retired cyclist, in violation of its own rules and due process, in spite of USADA’s lack of jurisdiction, in blatant violation of the statute of limitations.”

  At his computer at 10 a.m., Armstrong posted a message on Twitter, saying, “Heroes in combat and beyond, #SemperFi.” He included a link to a story about a Marine in Pensacola, Florida, who had carried an eleven-year-old boy across the finish line of a triathlon. That boy had lost his right leg to bone cancer.

  One of Armstrong’s 3 million-plus Twitter followers posted an ominous response to that message: He referenced the scene in the movie Jaws in which the protagonists realize that the great white shark they are trying to capture is much bigger than they expected.

  The Tweet said: “You know that line in Jaws, ‘We’re going to need a bigger boat’? Well, today, you’re going to need a bigger boat.”

  Inside a squat, rose-colored office building in Colorado Springs, Colorado, across the street from the Pro Rodeo Hall of Fame, Tygart was at once giddy and anxious. He drove from his office to a local television station. There he would go live on ESPN’s Outside the Lines. The plan was to appear on national television moments after USADA’s report went live on the Internet. His staff had worked for days preparing the case file for publication. To finally publish the report, all they needed was a final blessing from the boss.

  Just before 2 p.m. Eastern time, he called his office from his cell phone and gave the go-ahead.

  “Let’s do it,” he said.

  About 870 miles southeast, the report popped up on Armstrong’s laptop. On the right side of the home page of USADA’s Web site, there appeared a 2-by-2-inch sky blue box with the words “Pro Cycling Investigation Reasoned Decision and Supporting Materials.” An arrow pointing to the box invited all users, “Click to view information.”

  Armstrong clicked.

  The report portrayed Armstrong as an infamous cheat, a defiant liar and a bully who pushed others to cheat with him—join him, or be gone. USADA called the doping on Armstrong’s United States Postal Service team “the most sophisticated, professionalized and successful doping program that sport has ever seen.”

  The evidence of Armstrong’s doping was overwhelming. More than two dozen witnesses. Eleven former teammates, including the venerable Big George. Blood test results that experts said proved that during his comeback Armstrong had manipulated his blood for an edge in endurance. Banking and accounting records showing payments to EPO master doctor Michele Ferrari, including one payment that appeared to come from a bank account Armstrong shared with his mother. USADA had included proof of more than $1 million in payments to Ferrari, including at least $210,000 in payments after 2004, when Armstrong said he had severed his working relationship with the doctor.

  The report ran 202 pages. With the supporting materials, there were more than 1,000 pages of information. It was all there, even George Hincapie’s question to Armstrong, “Any EPO I could borrow?” and Armstrong’s answer, “Yes.”

  Some friends and others close to Armstrong said that once he clicked on the report, he read it all and even memorized parts of it.

  Yet he insisted to me that, in fact, he had not read a single word.

  CHAPTER 25

  One month before the USADA report was made public, Armstrong unexpectedly had learned about some evidence the antidoping agency would use against him. Those sordid details were in Tyler Hamilton’s tell-all book, The Secret Race, which was published in September 2012.

  Early in 2011, an entire year before the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Los Angeles would drop its criminal investigation of him, Armstrong heard rumors that Hamilton was working on a book with author Daniel Coyle, who in 2005 had written an in-depth book about Armstrong—minus his doping, of course. One of Armstrong’s lawyers called Hamilton’s lawyer to find out if a Hamilton tell-all was in the works.

  There was never official confirmation, but Armstrong braced himself for months and months as he waited to read what Hamilton might write. He was incensed that Hamilton, the former teammate Armstrong called “the dirtiest fucking rider,” would violate the omertà—and would make money off of it.

  Hamilton’s 60 Minutes interview in May 2011 gave a hint about what the book contained. He cracked open the inner workings of cycling—the doping, the lies—but focused on the Postal Service team’s doping program. He told of Armstrong and the team using testosterone, “Poe” and blood transfusions. He said it had been a proud moment for him to receive from the team a white paper bag that contained performance-enhancing drugs because it symbolized his success: Finally, he was being given the chance to do what Armstrong was doing to get ahead.

  Mark McKinnon, the board member and political consultant, thought Hamilton looked “weird” and “suspicious” on 60 Minutes. “It was very halting. It came across as a guy who didn’t really believe what he was saying.” Because of that, McKinnon—who for years had resisted the truth about Armstrong—wasn’t worried that his accusations would harm Armstrong or the foundation.

  McKinnon changed his mind sixteen months later when Hamilton’s book showed up on his doorstep. He lived in Austin with his longtime wife, Annie, a cancer survivor inspired by Armstrong.

  He read the book in one day. With each page, his anxiety grew. He thought back to 2011 and remembered reports that Hincapie had spoken to the grand jury. (He actually volunteered to give statements to the feds.) Hincapie’s testimony plus the accusations against Armstrong in Hamilton’s book meant big trouble for the foundation built on Armstrong’s good name.

  McKinnon felt that the proof that Armstrong had cheated “was incontrovertible.” His first thought: Armstrong needs to go. The next day he was on the phone with other board members at the foundation: “You’ve got to read Tyler’s book. It’s going to be a major crisis.” He found an early ally in Jeff Garvey, the former Livestrong chairman of the board. Garvey also thought that Armstrong had to disassociate himself from the foundation if it was to continue thriving. It was an idea that McKinnon, Garvey and the rest of Livestrong’s board of directors nursed for weeks, until they finally ran out of time.

  When USADA’s report came out, a majority of the board members worked to protect the foundation, without Armstrong’s knowledge. They held an emergency conference call and decided that Armstrong had to step down as chairman of the board. He agreed to step down, reluctantly. At least he could remain on the board of directors, he told the foundation’s president, Doug Ulman, so it wasn’t a complete disaster, right? He could always take over as chairman later, once the rumblings about his doping past settle down.

  So, a week after the USADA report, Armstrong announced that he’d stepped down as chairman of Livestrong’s board to protect the charity from negative publicity. But it signaled much more than that. His stepping down sparked the most precipitous, unceremonious fall of any professional athlete in modern times.

  Within hours, Armstrong’s sponsors jumped ship. Nike was gone. Trek Bicycle Corporation. Oakley. Giro. RadioShack. Anheuser-Busch. FRS, a sports drink maker. Honey Stinger, an energy bar maker.

  Nike released a statement all but accusing Armstrong of hiding information from the company: “Due to the seemingly insurmountable evidence that Lance Armstrong participated in doping and misled Nike for more than a decade, it is with great sadness that we have terminated our contract with him.”

  Of course, Ni
ke had heard suggestions of Armstrong’s doping along with everyone else—his cortisone positive at the 1999 Tour, the six positive EPO samples from that Tour, the testimony of teammates Stephen Swart and Frankie Andreu. Together, Nike, advertising companies and Armstrong had buried that evidence under brilliant marketing strategies that made him one of the world’s most recognized athletes.

  Now Nike was shocked—shocked!—that Armstrong had deceived them. It was as if one of the world’s most sophisticated sports companies knew nothing of doping’s history in cycling, though Tour winner after Tour winner had admitted to doping. (Most recently, in 2007, the 1996 winner Bjarne Riis confessed to doping to win the Tour.)

  It was as if past cycling champions such as Belgium’s Eddy Merckx, France’s Jacques Anquetil and Italy’s Fausto Coppi, or perhaps most winners of this hundred-plus-year-old race, had not tested positive and/or admitted that doping was engrained in the sport. (Merckx publicly claimed he was disappointed in Armstrong, though he was the person who introduced Armstrong to the doctor Michele Ferrari in the first place.)

  Within two weeks of the USADA report, even Armstrong’s allies bailed. The UCI, the cycling federation that had long supported him, turned on him. Pat McQuaid said USADA’s report “sickened” him. “Lance Armstrong has no place in cycling. He deserves to be forgotten in cycling. Something like this must never happen again.” The UCI would not appeal USADA’s sanction against Armstrong.

  McQuaid was hardly pure. He had been barred from the 1976 Olympics after using an assumed name to race in South Africa in violation of an international antiapartheid sporting boycott. He and his predecessor, Hein Verbruggen, had overseen cycling in its darkest days of doping. But it was Armstrong in the public eye, taking the hit for all the sport’s sins.

  Several weeks later, on November 10, 2012, Armstrong posted a photo on his Twitter page, trying to show that he could not be defeated. It showed him at home lounging on a couch beneath his seven framed yellow Tour jerseys. It came with the comment, “Back in Austin and just layin’ around.” No matter what USADA could do to him, he would not let himself be humbled. Not that other people didn’t try to do it for him.