Cycle of Lies: The Fall of Lance Armstrong

by Macur, Juliet

  He called Betsy and Frankie Andreu and said, “Look, I know I called you guys ugly liars forever, and I’m sorry about that.”

  “How could you do this to us? We were friends. You ruined our lives!” Betsy Andreu said.

  “I know, I’m sorry.”

  Armstrong talked to Frankie for ten minutes. For another forty, he spoke to Betsy, only because she made him listen to her tirade against him. She cried. Then she laughed, then she cried—and then they promised to stay in touch by e-mail. After years of not speaking, years during which he wanted her dead if not worse—and vice versa—Armstrong had done the equivalent of climbing Mont Ventoux in eight turns of the pedals.

  He had charmed Betsy Andreu.

  “Yes or no, did you ever take banned substances to enhance your cycling performance?”

  Sitting just feet away from Oprah Winfrey for a two-part blockbuster that had been billed as a “no holds barred” television interview, Armstrong took a breath in front of 4.3 million people.

  “Yes.”

  “Was one of those banned substances EPO?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you ever blood-dope or use blood transfusions to enhance your cycling performance?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you ever use any other banned substance such as testosterone, cortisone or human growth hormone?”

  “Yes.”

  “In all seven of your Tour de France victories, did you ever take banned substances or blood dope?”

  “Yes.”

  “Was it humanly possible to win the Tour de France without doping, seven times?”

  “Not in my opinion.”

  Armstrong met Oprah Winfrey halfway. He told his version of the truth. He neither shed the obligatory Winfrey tear nor offered the anticipated apology. He didn’t feel bad for cheating and, to prepare for the interview, had even looked up the word in the dictionary to make sure he understood it. “Cheating” meant gaining an unfair advantage over your competitors, and he didn’t think he ever did that. The doping program was “very conservative, very risk-averse” on his teams, he insisted. And, he said, it was so necessary that it was like “putting air in your tires.”

  He confirmed Emma O’Reilly’s stories about the cover-up of his positive cortisone at the 1999 Tour. He apologized to her for what he’d put her through. He said he never tested positive for EPO at the 2001 Tour of Switzerland, as Landis and Hamilton suggested. No, he did not pay off the UCI to bury that supposed positive test. No, he never offered a bribe to USADA, either. He also said he was clean during his comeback in 2009 and 2010, which Tygart and prosecutors later said was just his way of protecting himself from criminal charges. He defended his former doctor Michele Ferrari. He admitted that he didn’t like the man he had become—a liar and a bully—and that he was the type of person who needed therapy.

  When asked if he ever confessed to doctors in an Indianapolis hospital room that he doped—as Betsy and Frankie Andreu had asserted he did—he said he couldn’t answer that question. Then, in another awkward moment amid 180 minutes of discomfiting half-truths, he addressed Betsy directly, saying, with a smirk, “I called you crazy, I called you a bitch, I called you all those things, but I never called you fat.” He was trying to be funny—because Betsy is actually rail thin—but the sound of the joke falling flat echoed throughout the country, maybe even the world.

  Only once did Armstrong show emotion or contrition: when he relayed how he had sat down his three eldest children—thirteen-year-old Luke and the eleven-year-old twins, Grace and Isabelle—to tell them why there had always been so much controversy following him. The conversation happened just before the Christmas holidays, a few weeks after Luke had gotten into that fight at the bus stop.

  “I said, listen, there’s been a lot of questions about your dad, my career and whether I doped or did not dope, and I’ve always denied, I’ve always been ruthless and defiant about that, which is probably why you trusted me, which makes it even sicker. I want you to know that it is true.”

  He then told Luke, who had been in other fights over his father’s reputation, “Don’t defend me anymore.” Glimmers of tears appeared in his eyes.

  There were no tears, though, when he spoke of the impact his lies might make on his foundation or on the millions of people who considered him a hero. His summary for Winfrey: “The ultimate crime is the betrayal of these people that supported me and believed in me.”

  He walked off the set a little lighter, but his friends saw him as a shadow of the man from even a few months before. McKinnon called Armstrong’s performance “hall-of-fame horrible . . . I’m sure that will become an exhibit for people who do crisis management on what not to do.”

  Betsy Andreu watched the first night of the Oprah interview from the CNN studios in New York City and went live on Anderson Cooper 360˚ afterward. “If he can’t say the hospital room happened,” she said, again brought to tears, “how are we supposed to believe everything else he said?”

  Armstrong had thrown himself, yet again, between his dwindling supporters and the story being told by reporters, lawyers, prosecutors and USADA. And it may have broken him once and for all.

  After the Winfrey confession, SCA Promotions filed a lawsuit in Dallas to recoup the $12.1 million that Armstrong had received from the company, legal fees and interest. He offered them $1 million to settle it, but SCA’s bridge master, Bob Hamman, would no longer be satisfied by moral victories. Several other insurance companies filed lawsuits to get their money—more than a million, in each case—back from him, too. A group of readers sued him for more than $5 million, claiming that his autobiographies, It’s Not About the Bike and Every Second Counts, were based on lies. They wanted refunds. A judge ruled that Armstrong’s books, filled with lies or not, were protected by free speech.

  A group of Livestrong supporters prepared to sue for a return of their donations because, they said, the foundation was based on lies. “We’re all suckers,” said Michael Birdsong, a donor who gave at least $50,000 to Livestrong and came up with the idea for the lawsuit.

  David Walsh, the Sunday Times of London and its then–sports editor Alan English, sued Armstrong to get back the more than $450,000 they gave Armstrong in 2006 in his libel case against them. This time, they won and received about $1.56 million.

  In February 2013, the government decided to join Floyd Landis as a plaintiff in the federal whistle-blower lawsuit against defendants that include Armstrong, team manager Johan Bruyneel and Tailwind Sports, the company that managed the Postal Service team. The plaintiffs claimed that Armstrong, Bruyneel and Tailwind had defrauded the government by engaging in systematic doping in violation of the team’s contract with the Postal Service. To Armstrong’s dismay, the chances of Landis winning the case rose steeply with the government on his side.

  The year before, Armstrong had told former Postal Service rider Mike Creed that he wasn’t sweating the federal criminal investigation of him because he had “$100 milski” in the bank. But with the payout in the federal whistle-blower case possibly $120 milski, $100 milski doesn’t seem all that much.

  He tried to limit his losses. First, he offered the government $5 million to settle the case, but it refused the offer—too low. Next, he offered $13.5 million. That didn’t work, either. For the government to walk away from the case, it wanted $18.5 million and his cooperation against the other defendants, which included Bruyneel, his trusty team manager.

  Though it could have saved him a multitude of grief and legal fees, Armstrong turned down that deal. The case might end up bankrupting him, but, he told me, he’d rather be poor than a rat.

  Closer to home, friends of Armstrong’s mother, Linda, said she took news of her son’s confession badly. She took down her Web site, called “Force of Nurture,” which promoted her motivational speaking. She stopped posting on Twitter—her account was @LindaASpeaker, with a photo of her in a Tour de France–yellow shift dress.

  Terry Armstrong watched the Op
rah confession and wept. “Lance is asking the country to forgive him,” he said. “It might be a good idea if he forgives his dad.” As his adopted son explained how he became involved in cycling’s most well-organized doping program, Terry thought, “Oh my God, this is me, I instilled that.”

  He said, “I could see him showing up going, ‘You know, everybody is cheating, well, I’ll do it better. I’ll find whoever I got to find that’s the best.’ Then the money just rolled. I taught him to win. I gave him that drive, but I never taught him to be a bully. I never taught him to cheat.”

  Armstrong himself didn’t watch his confession. He retreated to a bedroom to sleep while the show aired in front of his girlfriend, Anna, and his good buddy John Korioth.

  The next day on the golf course, Armstrong asked Korioth, “What did you think?”

  “Man, Lance, I got to tell you, watching that interview, you are a really good liar.”

  “Huh?”

  “Yep, you are a really good liar, but you’re horrible at telling the truth.”

  EPILOGUE

  In my four hours of conversation with Lance Armstrong on his final day inside his Austin mansion, he gave profanity a bad name.

  Here, compressed into a sentence, is an abbreviated compilation of what he had to say about old friends, family members, teammates, journalists and cycling officials.

  The spineless pussies included a blowhard, prick, fool, fuckin’ weasel, piece of shit and weak, ass-covering motherfuckers who are crazy, batshit crazy, certifiably crazy, loopy, toxic, psycho and, anyway, calling her a whore was just shorthand for saying she likes sex, and no, he didn’t sleep with his idiot teammate’s wife but the thought crossed his mind.

  Only when I reviewed my notes did I realize how often Armstrong had dehumanized the people close to him. They were transformed into aural manifestations of his anger. But to feel the heat of his rage was to understand another thing as well: Here was a man who didn’t glide into cycling history. He beat the living crap out of it.

  I came away from my visit with him in June 2013 suspecting that Armstrong, in his heart of hearts, believed absolutely, and will believe forever, that he won those Tours de France because he was the best.

  Hear him now: “The most successful people in the world, the true killers in the world, they weren’t handed anything, they didn’t grow up with anything, they had to fuckin’ scrape and fight for it.”

  In Armstrong’s view, you can pour EPO by the gallons into a man without Armstrong’s obsessions and that man might still lag way behind the leaders, might still be at the bottom of the mountain. But give it to an extraordinary athlete willing to scrape and work beyond human comprehension and that man becomes an unstoppable force.

  Armstrong did whatever it took, no matter the rules. And he lied about it so often and with such vehemence that the only explanation people had for his aggressiveness was that he had left the oncology ward reborn, like a phoenix, with a supernatural motivating drive that pushed him to crush anyone in his way. “If that’s a sociopath, then fuck it, I’m a sociopath,” he told me. “I definitely wanted to win at all costs. But so did Michael Jordan, so did Muhammad Ali, so did Wayne Gretzky.”

  Even as he said that, I didn’t believe he was convinced. Had he been more forthcoming, and less hateful, had he not savaged anyone who dared suggest he had a long and intimate relationship with winning by any means available, maybe he would have built enough goodwill to survive the USADA investigation. Maybe he would still possess a legacy commensurate with those of our nation’s greatest athletes.

  But he hadn’t, and he didn’t.

  “I hated those motherfuckers—the Betsys, the LeMonds. Walsh, I hate him. Bad guy. Cheater. Got some stuff right, lied about a lot . . . Yes, I doped. Yes, I was doping. These people, the lengths that they went to . . . it’s the reason I picked on these people. I really hated them. These people sucked. This is just so dirty, so dirty you just feel like you need a shower. Honestly, I hated these people and I still hate them. I couldn’t let them get away with it because they are so awful.”

  Get away with what? They’d only accused him of truths he spent decades obscuring. They “got away” with exposing a game built on a century of lies. And in their revelations—here, I think, is the crux of the matter—they hadn’t placated his ego by marking his place in history.

  June 6, 2013: on a couch in the media room of Lance Armstrong’s expansive Austin estate. Soon, the place will be empty, the moving trucks having packed up Armstrong’s belongings. By the fall, his things will be moved into a lesser place, one in Old West Austin, a historic district filled with many grand old homes and within walking distance to downtown. The new place is nice, for sure—especially at more than $2 million—but it has no gate or fence, no circular or even paved driveway, no lawn, certainly no sprawling oak tree that has been transplanted from one side of the property to the other. While we talk, Armstrong is, as ever, ferocious and charming, spectacular in his ability to spin brutal lies from a thin strand of truth.

  Armstrong shrugs off the notion that USADA’s long-running war has ruined him. Under the seven framed yellow jerseys that in a day’s time will be stripped from the walls, he insists that he is OK. Look at this house, he says. Look at his kids. Look at the life he’s built for his family. What’s not OK? He says he’s OK so often that it seems clear that he’s not OK.

  He stares at me, giving me the infamous and cold expression that has been dubbed “The Look.” People may have forgotten all the good he did at Livestrong, he says, but that won’t last. People will remember. People still love him, he says, almost hypnotically. Look, he tells me, here’s a letter from one former Livestrong donor who still supports him. Below the strange return address, the sender wrote, “Yep, it’s prison.”

  Armstrong says, “There’s millions of people who might not be empowered right now to say it, but there’s still people that believe.” He jams a finger against his chest. “This is the fucking guy who overcame his disease. He came back to his sport and did what he had to do. Are we all better off that I was here, or are we worse off?”

  He waits, then says, “It has to be better.”

  I ask him how secretive he had been while he doped. Who else knew?

  “Everybody,” he says.

  Everybody?

  “They knew enough not to ask.”

  Bill Stapleton, his agent?

  Silence.

  Nike, his primary sponsor?

  Nothing.

  The board of directors of Livestrong?

  Not a word.

  “I ain’t no fucking rat,” he says, “like these other pussies.”

  Maybe not at the moment. But in exchange for the right to resume his athletic career—held hostage, as he sees it, by USADA—he says he would barter the necessary information to reduce his lifetime ban to four years, maybe two, maybe even less. Only thing is, Armstrong doesn’t want to talk to Travis Tygart. “Just a blowhard,” Armstrong says. “He got what he wanted. He got me. I know where all the bodies are buried. I’m not saying anything. Fuck them until they treat me like everybody else.”

  I’m told by Armstrong that our meeting this week has been a highlight of “Act III” of our professional relationship. Act I was comprised of the years I wrote about the accusations that he had doped to win, a time when he still thought he could win me over. That was before I ever met him or covered the Tour de France. The defining moment of Act I was in 2006 when I reported Frankie Andreu’s admission that he had used EPO to help Armstrong win the 1999 Tour de France.

  Several days after that story ran—that’s several days after his lawyer threatened to sue me—I was walking my dog at 7 a.m. when my cell phone rang. I didn’t recognize the number.

  “Good morning!” someone said.

  “Uh, good morning,” I said. “Who’s this?”

  “It’s Lance!”

  For the next several weeks, we talked about both cycling and his plan to run the New York City Marath
on. I’d ask him how he could be a clean rider when so many of his top competitors at the Tour had been caught for doping. His reply: “Some of us are born with four cylinders and some of us are born with twelve, honey.” He’d shoot me an e-mail asking me to guess his latest workout time for a mile. I guessed 10 minutes, 30 seconds, then 5:13, and added that he’d need to down a bunch of Advil afterward because he was so old.

  He wrote back, “4:51 . . . no advil. Ha! Nope, no drugs. How many times do I have to tell you that?!?!?”

  That was the beginning of Act II: The years writing about him basically became my entire beat, covering his comeback to the sport after his short retirement and breaking news about the various formal investigations into his doping.

  Over the course of our encounters, he was sometimes irritated that I didn’t buy into the fairy tale he spun about his life and career. At the 2009 Tour of California, his first race in the United States after returning to the sport, he singled me out in front of hundreds of reporters, criticizing “my friend Juliet” for a story I’d written about his personal antidoping program, which he touted as a key to his comeback, and which I reported had never gotten off the ground.

  We sparred a few minutes and he later left me an apology by voice mail: “I didn’t mean to call you out in front of all those people, but I was just bustin’ on you,” he said. “I hope you know I was only kidding. Talk to you later!”

  That was vintage Armstrong. He tested reporters, befriended them, and vilified them—sometimes doing all three at once, depending on what he wanted.

  The first two acts were cat-and-mouse games, which ended with me writing about his unceremonious and brutally fast downfall. But Act III, he promised, would be different. No more lies. He didn’t have anything to lose anymore.