Wheelmen: Lance Armstrong, the Tour De France, and the Greatest Sports Conspiracy Ever

by Reed Albergotti

  Describing the events of that 2004 Tour, Landis told Novitzky and Tygart that one night, after the conclusion of one of the stages—just a few days after Armstrong had climbed into the helicopter with Sheryl Crow—the entire US Postal team, including Armstrong, had been on the team bus, driving along largely deserted mountain roads to a hotel near the start of the following day’s stage, when suddenly, the bus came to an abrupt stop. The driver, an old Belgian man, had gotten out carrying orange traffic cones, as if to indicate that there was a mechanical problem. Great, just what we need. Our legs are aching, our bodies are wasting away, and now we have to sit in a bus on the side of the road and wait for the French equivalent of AAA, Landis had thought to himself.

  But soon everyone on board realized what was happening. The bus was being transformed into a secret blood transfusion unit. As had happened before, someone—sometimes a motorcycle driver who had been hired to do it, sometimes the team chef, sometimes a security worker—had delivered the blood immediately prior to the transfusions. Engine trouble was just a ruse designed to outsmart the journalists and the French police who suspected the Postal team of doping.

  As the bus driver pretended to work on the engine, the team doctors began handing out blood bags with code names the riders had chosen for themselves. Some riders used the names of their pets; others used nicknames. Landis used his real name. He was too afraid of accidentally infusing a teammate’s blood—a mistake that could end in death—to take the risk.

  Landis described to the two investigators what sounded like a well-choreographed, ultrasecret M.A.S.H. unit. As the operation got under way, all the riders, including Armstrong, lay down on the floor of the bus, faceup, while the team doctors, who always rode on the bus, hung the chilled transfusion bags from overhead luggage racks so that gravity could help the blood ease its way into their veins.

  The cyclists were gaunt, their faces sunken, the fat burned away by the exertions of the race. Their veins and capillaries had pushed up to the surface of the skin, rising in sinewy, bulging mazes on their arms and legs—the human body’s attempt to supercharge itself by maximizing blood flow. Every day during the Tour, the riders burned up red blood cells like kindling, drastically depleting their ability to bring oxygen to their muscles. The extreme physical demands of the race meant they were wasting away from the inside out. The blood transfusions were to counteract those effects. Boosting the number of red blood cells in the cyclists’ bodies was like injecting fuel into a car cylinder.

  Landis described watching as Armstrong’s bag slowly emptied. Normally, he said, Armstrong would squeeze the bag to the last drop, making sure that every possible red blood cell had flowed down the plastic tube and into his veins. This time, though, Armstrong had pulled the needle out of his arm without bothering to squeeze the bag. Landis said he thought it was because Armstrong was in a hurry, or maybe he just didn’t care because he was so far ahead in the race by then.

  Landis also explained that, during his US Postal years, blood transfusions had come back in vogue in cycling, because they were less easily detected than performance-enhancing drugs—though the practice was banned from the sport and considered as illegitimate as taking those drugs. The US Postal team usually conducted two blood transfusions during the Tour de France—one for each week and a half of racing, he said. Because the US Postal team was under such intense scrutiny at that time, however, trying to arrange for two blood transfusions in a 21-day period was like trying to get away with two bank heists. What made the challenge even more difficult was the fact that blood stays fresh for only three weeks. As soon as it’s removed from the body, the red blood cells begin to wither and age and eventually explode. And while it might seem like a good idea to remove blood immediately before the Tour de France to ensure its freshness, that would be a strategic mistake, as it would weaken the body just when it needed to be at its strongest.

  So in order for every rider to have two fresh blood bags ready by July, which was when the Tour de France took place, the team had to undergo a secret and complicated process that involved months of advance planning. The first blood draws were done in the spring or early summer. The plastic transfusion bags were stored in refrigerators kept at 1 degree Celsius to preserve the blood as much as possible without freezing it. Then every few weeks during the months leading up to the Tour de France, doctors would draw more fresh blood out of the riders’ bodies and re-infuse the old blood into them. The constant swapping ensured the refrigerated blood was always fresh and the red blood cells in the riders’ bodies were not depleted by the stress, and the training stayed steady.

  Shortly before the beginning of the 2004 Tour, the US Postal team had the bags of blood smuggled into France in an unmarked camper. Then the bags were transported by motorcycles with refrigerated panniers. One of the most trusted motorcycle drivers was Philippe Maire, who later opened a Trek bike dealership in the south of France.

  This kind of top secret operation had become something of the norm for the US Postal team, beginning around 2001, by which time Armstrong was well on his way to superstar status. Working out the logistics fell to team chef Geert “Duffy” Duffeleer. Duffy was a good cook—the riders swore by his spaghetti Bolognese—but he also had a dark streak. According to Landis, he was involved in the black market bike trade, along with team mechanic Julien de Vriese. Duffeleer and de Vriese unloaded US Postal bikes, bikes that were supposed to be used by the riders on the team. Instead, they ended up being sold to shops in Belgium. The off-the-books cash helped fund the team’s purchases of illicit performance-enhancing drugs.

  During the 2004 Tour de France, Landis noticed that Duffy had been intensely paranoid. About a week or so before the bus transfusion, during the race’s first rest day, on July 12, Duffy had shown up at the hotel where the team would be staying, to check it out in advance of the arrival of the riders, and he’d gotten a scare when he thought he discovered police reconnaissance equipment in the rooms. Concerned about the possibility of detection, Duffy met the team bus when it arrived at the hotel parking lot, preventing the riders from getting off until he and Bruyneel could discuss what to do. The two men walked out into a nearby field, presumably to avoid any recording equipment that might have been planted by the police, but they remained in full view of the riders on the bus. Though Landis couldn’t hear what they said, he could tell Bruyneel and Duffy were worried about something, and he figured it had to do with doping.

  Duffy and Bruyneel eventually decided it was okay for the team to enter the hotel that day. Later that evening, the riders were summoned to a hotel room. Every opening in the room had been taped shut to evade any kind of video surveillance, and the riders were told not to speak in case the room had been bugged with audio equipment. All of the riders then got blood transfusions, while security guards stood outside in the hall. Afterward, Bruyneel cut the plastic transfusion bags into tiny shards and flushed them down the toilet. For the second mass blood transfusion of the Tour, a week later, however, it was decided that doing it in the hotel again was too risky, which was why it was done on the bus.

  As Landis told his story in the Marriott conference room that day, there was absolute silence. Other than Landis’s voice, all that could be heard was the sound of scribbling pens. Novitzky had spent years investigating drug use in Major League Baseball and the National Football League. Tygart had devoted a decade of his life to fighting drug use in sports. The two men thought they had heard everything by that stage of their careers, but this was the most vivid picture ever painted of the secret world of professional sports. They stayed in the room for six hours, pushing for details, for context, and the next morning they met with Landis for another two hours.

  By the end of the two interview sessions, Tygart and Novitzky felt they understood just about everything about how doping worked on the US Postal team, and how the riders had gotten away with it. They wanted to believe Landis, and they knew they had the makings of a good case. But they couldn’t rely entirely
on Landis’s story, because he would be a terribly flawed witness. After all, in the six years since the 2004 Tour de France, Landis had publicly denied doping after failing a drug test, had written a book professing his innocence, and had taken donations from fans who believed he was innocent. In coming clean with Novitzky and Tygart, Landis was completely changing his story.

  The investigators also had to wonder about Landis’s motivations. Why was he coming clean now? What was in it for him? It was clear that Landis’s life was in tatters. After the positive test, he had broken up with his wife and moved to a small cabin in Idyllwild, a remote town in the mountains of Southern California full of hippies, gun-toting survivalists, and people living on the fringes of society. There were reports in the press that Landis had taken to heavy drinking. Perhaps most important, his relationship with Armstrong had ended in a bitter feud that was well documented. Because of Landis’s shaky background, Novitzky and Tygart knew that every fact, every detail, every allegation he’d made would have to be corroborated by other sources.

  But would anyone else talk?

  CHAPTER TWO

  A NEW BEGINNING FOR AMERICAN CYCLING

  The slender, handsome thirty-eight-year-old Polish man had an athlete’s chiseled face and a mustache. He spoke no English and had no clear idea what he was doing in America. He knew only one thing. He was as far away as he could get from his wife, who he believed had been cheating on him during her many business trips out of Poland. He had also left behind his career, and his teenage daughter, with no idea of when he would be able to see her again.

  Eddie Borysewicz wasn’t so much heartbroken as he was angry that he had allowed his marriage to fall apart. It overshadowed everything he accomplished, and he now looked at his life through the grim tint of failure. He was ready to start his life over, but he did not know how he would reinvent himself. He had originally flown to New York in the summer of 1976 with the intention of attending the Olympics in Montreal, but he never made it to Canada. Now all he knew was that he needed to become someone else.

  Borysewicz’s life in Poland had revolved around cycling. He joined the Polish national team as a teenager, won national championships, and traveled around Europe competing in bike races. As he moved up through the ranks of cycling in the late 1950s and early 1960s, he thought maybe the life of a professional athlete wasn’t so bad. Poland was then a hotbed of cycling, and the sport was fully supported by the Soviet-dominated Communist government. He hoped to make the Polish Olympic team.

  His dreams of Olympic glory fell through when he was twenty-one. During a routine chest X-ray, a doctor found a small lesion, and diagnosed tuberculosis. Borysewicz was hospitalized for treatment. When follow-up X-rays showed no sign of improvement, they tripled the dose of his drugs. This went on for weeks before a doctor finally realized that the mark on his chest was simply old scar tissue, and not tuberculosis. When he returned to cycling, he felt weak and was never able to regain his full strength. He had hoped to one day be a world champion; he resigned himself to the fact that he would never achieve that goal.

  Borysewicz had a sense of curiosity. He had always been a good student, though he had delayed university education to become a cyclist. Soon after his misdiagnosis, he enrolled in the Academy of Physical Education in Warsaw to study physiology and exercise science, an extremely prestigious field in Communist Poland. He continued to race on the Polish national cycling team, but focused more on his studies. Other riders called him professor. At the university, he took a position coaching the junior national team.

  He came up with individual training plans for the cyclists and he kept detailed diaries of their performance and fitness levels and the progress they made in response to his training regimens. He was conducting what was essentially a scientific experiment on some of the finest athletes in Poland to learn the best methods of training. Some of the riders were conducting their own experiments—with drugs. They told him about the various types of amphetamines and hormones they took to be able to compete at a higher level, yet they would always downplay their importance. “Oh, it’s just a vitamin,” they would say, or “Oh, it’s something for my heartburn.” Eddie would take mental notes of the names of the drugs and then look them up in an old medical book. He discovered that many of them had dangerous side effects. Sometimes, if the rider was someone he particularly liked, he would show him the book and make him read about the terrible damage the drugs could do.

  Soon Borysewicz was one of the top athletic coaches in Poland, in charge of developing young talent to feed the Olympic ranks. But as an employee of the state, he didn’t earn much. To bring in some spending money for his family, he also worked as a tour guide. Life was good enough, but after he learned about his wife’s affair, he decided he had to leave. The Polish government gave him permission to attend the 1976 Montreal Summer Olympics as a spectator. He flew into JFK and had planned to drive to Montreal. He never did.

  As it happened, he arrived in the United States at a moment when recreational cycling clubs—organizations like the Wolverine Sports Club in Royal Oak, Michigan; the Lehigh Wheelmen Association in Trexlertown, Pennsylvania; the Quad Cities Bicycle Club in Davenport, Iowa—were proliferating. Amateur races were popping up everywhere, from the Midwest to California to the eastern seaboard. However, as popular as the sport had become at the amateur level—registrations with the Amateur Bicycle League of America reached 8,621 in 1973, for example, a 70 percent increase from the year before—there was no professional racing scene in the United States. There were no professional cycling teams, no pro races on the calendar, and fewer than a dozen pro cyclists.

  While in New York, Borysewicz looked up a former Polish teammate of his who was living in New Jersey. He stayed at his home, earning money doing odd jobs with a Polish work crew, mostly painting bridges and water towers. After Borysewicz had been in the United States for about six months, he stopped by a bike shop in Ridgefield Park, New Jersey.

  Unbeknownst to him, the shop was owned by Mike Fraysse, one of the top officials in the United States Cycling Federation. Fraysse had managed the 1976 Olympic cycling events in Montreal, and when he saw Borysewicz standing in his shop, he knew he recognized him from somewhere, though at first he could not place him. Then he remembered: When he had once traveled to Warsaw with a group of American riders to attend a bike race, he’d seen Borysewicz coaching athletes. Now, identifying himself as a fan, he asked Borysewicz—in French, once he realized Borysewicz spoke no English—what he was doing in the United States and what had happened to his cycling career. Borysewicz gave a bit of his story, adding that he didn’t even own a bike anymore. In fact, he hadn’t yet earned enough money on the odd jobs he was doing to be able to afford one.

  Fraysse got excited. “Wait here,” he said, and disappeared into his shop’s basement. A few minutes later he emerged carrying a lime green, Italian-made Legnano bicycle with beautiful steel Campagnolo components. “Take this,” Fraysse said, and then insisted that Borysewicz join him that weekend for the North Jersey Bicycle Club’s weekly Sunday ride.

  Borysewicz said he’d love to, but he warned Fraysse that he was out of shape and wouldn’t be able to keep up if the pace was too fast. And if Borysewicz got left behind, he’d have no idea where he was or how to get home. He needn’t have worried.

  The following Sunday, Borysewicz, on his new bike, joined the large crowd of cyclists who had gathered at Fraysse’s bike shop. Fraysse and a few of his friends rode at the front of the pack, holding a steady and manageable warm-up pace. As the pack moved down the road, more riders, some from other clubs, joined, until there were about one hundred in all. Their bikes were handcrafted works of art, welded together by specialty bike builders all over the world. The men had shaved legs and wore special shoes with leather soles that gripped the small spikes on their pedals. Their feet were strapped as tightly as possible to the pedals so that they had complete control of the bike and were able to pull up on the pedals for more power. These
were serious cyclists, and the ride was competitive—a chance for them to test their mettle against other fanatics from around the region.

  Initially, the pack was loud with chatter as cycling buddies caught up on what had happened since their last meet. The din of “How are the kids, how’s the wife, how do you like the new car, did you get the job” could be heard as the pack coasted along at about twenty miles per hour. This went on for about half an hour or so, until Fraysse and some pals started to pick up the pace. Soon, the pack was moving at close to thirty miles per hour.

  Within an hour, the group of one hundred had dwindled to about twenty-five. Fraysse and his friends were still driving the pace. Borysewicz was still there, too, hanging with the lead group. As the pack went up a long hill just north of Nyack, New York, a steep, grinding climb, most of the remaining cyclists finally dropped off. Now it was just Fraysse, a couple of his friends, and Borysewicz. They had annihilated half the cyclist population in the tri-state area. They circled Rockland Lake, taking in the scenery, and then rode back to New Jersey, stopping at a small Italian coffee shop in Fort Lee. As they sipped espressos, Fraysse congratulated Borysewicz on his ability to keep up.

  When Borysewicz told him he hadn’t ridden a bike in more than two years, everyone at the table was stunned. How was that possible? Borysewicz explained in French, using Fraysse as a translator, that his ability to keep up had nothing to do with his fitness level and everything to do with technique. He knew how to pedal to conserve energy, exactly when to accelerate and when to slow down. “It’s about efficiency,” he told them.