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

by Reed Albergotti

  The son of a Christian minister, Terry Keith Armstrong had been sent off to military school at a young age, and his ideas about discipline seem to have been shaped by that experience. When Lance was a young boy, Terry used a wooden college fraternity paddle to punish him. His way of dealing with his stepson’s participation in sports was similarly aggressive and outdated. No matter what sport Lance was playing, Terry was determined that he abide by the rules of what it meant to be a real athlete. In one of Lance’s first BMX races, Lance wiped out and began to cry. Terry walked over and told him that because of the crying, they would have to go home. So Lance picked himself up and kept at it. Terry was that kind of disciplinarian, the kind who believed in manhood in the strictest, most traditional sense of the word. Terry cared deeply about Lance and wanted him to succeed—especially in sports. But Lance rejected Terry from an early age, often telling him, “You’re not my dad!”

  Lance’s biological father, Eddie, had lost track of Lance after Linda and Terry moved—first to an apartment in suburban Richardson, then to a brick bungalow in Plano, in a neighborhood near the Los Rios Country Club. The last time Eddie saw Lance was when Lance turned three. Over the years, Eddie forgot about Lance, coming to think of him as someone from a chapter in his life that had closed, and Lance had no desire to meet or see Eddie. As far as he was concerned, Eddie had deserted them, after Linda’s parents deserted her, until her father managed to quit drinking. People in Dallas thought they were losers. He turned to sports to get out of the house.

  Lance wasn’t necessarily a naturally gifted athlete, but he worked hard at it. After he quit football in middle school, he and a few of his buddies joined the local swim club. Twelve years old at the time, when he first showed up at the Plano Aquatic Center pool, he flopped into the water and beat his arms and legs down the lane in a manner that made his mother think of a paddle barge. He was grouped with the nine-year-olds. To improve, the swim coach told him, he had to show up for the team’s grueling morning workouts every weekday at 6:00 A.M., and then again after school. Within a month or so, his swimming proficiency increased to the point where he was put in a group of mostly thirteen-year-olds. A year later, he took fourth place in the 1,500-meter freestyle at the state swim meet. The swimming helped him to add muscle to his shoulders and to develop a powerful neck.

  When Lance was about twelve, Terry flew with him to San Antonio, Texas, for a swim meet, the Texas State Championships. At the time, his mom was in the hospital for a hysterectomy. There were complications and she had to stay there for four days. Lance was angry. He wanted support but not Terry’s support. He wouldn’t even talk to him. In the airport on the way home, Lance noticed Terry writing notes on a manila legal pad that he had in his briefcase. Terry would scribble a note, rip out the page, crumple it, and throw it out in a trash can nearby. Lance was curious, so, after the boarding announcement, Lance told Terry he had to use the bathroom and would meet him on the plane. When Terry wasn’t looking, Lance picked up the wadded-up notes and put them in his bag. He later discovered that they were drafts of Terry’s love notes to another woman. He saved them and didn’t say anything to his mom.

  It was in 1985 that Lance saw the notice at the local bike shop, the Richardson Bike Mart, announcing the IronKids competition—an event that combined swimming, cycling, and running. Terry and Linda wanted to make it possible for him to compete, so they bought him a new bike—the Mercier he would ride to victory in Houston. At that time, the triathlon, which had started in Hawaii as a competition among lifeguards, was just growing into its own sport. Most Americans—especially Texans—had no idea what the word triathlon even meant. Participation was minimal. Mostly, it drew fitness nuts—products of the 1980s gym rat and aerobics culture. There was no standardized set of rules, and the techniques and equipment used by competitors were a hodgepodge.

  Lance and his two closest friends became a sort of triathlon gang, traveling around Texas, competing in the biggest races they could get into. They trained together—running and swimming but mostly biking—and spent most of their free time together, pulling teenage pranks and getting into trouble. Lance viewed himself as a nonconformist who disliked traditional team sports. But he had essentially created his own kind of team, allowing him to enjoy the camaraderie without having to depend on the performance of anyone else to determine whether he had won or lost. He was able to take all the credit for his victories. He needed it that way.

  In June 1986, Lance met Rick Crawford, then a twenty-six-year-old pro triathlete, at a Dallas-area pool. “I want to make money and I want to win. Tell me what I need to know,” Lance said. Rick became Lance’s coach, an unpaid position. He chaperoned Lance to races and oversaw his training regimen: swimming 10,600 meters, cycling 320 miles, and running 30 miles—the equivalent of roughly twenty-five hours a week. Rick invited Lance to be among less than thirty participants at a “duathlon” swimming-and-running race held at a posh health club on the fourth-story rooftop of the Galleria Dallas shopping mall. Participants swam three hundred yards in a very cold twenty-five-yard hotel pool, and then ran two miles around a synthetic turf track. Lance, then fourteen years old, won the race. The first prize was a pair of running shoes from the Portland, Oregon, athletic company Avia.

  Scott Eder, a twenty-eight-year-old promotions rep for Avia who was living in Dallas, showed up at the Armstrong home to deliver the prize—size 10 Avias. As Terry and Linda got to know Eder, who was also a triathlete, they thought he would be a good influence on Lance, who was now interested in going to the next level and participating in some adult triathlon races. They asked Eder to give Lance some tips on training for the sport, and to help keep him out of trouble. Eder was happy to help out. He thought it would be rewarding, for he could see that Lance had potential—that if Lance stuck with it, he could probably turn professional. He took Lance to the pool and to races, and to dinner several times a week. He and Lance talked potential sponsors into giving Lance free running shoes, bikes, and other gear. With Eder’s help, Lance was able to secure the sponsorship of the Richardson Bike Mart, which provided his bike as well as a stipend of $400 a month.

  That the shop owner, Jim Hoyt, agreed to sponsor the teenager was remarkable. Even then, Lance had a lot of attitude, and his adolescent behavior had so ticked off Hoyt in the past that he had once banned him from even coming into his store.

  But Hoyt saw how serious Lance was and invited him on local group rides around Plano, where he became familiar with basic biking terms such as peloton, drafting, and domestique. Lance also began showing up at the so-called Tuesday night crits, racing for Hoyt’s Richardson Bike Mart team. Crits, short for criterium races, are multi-lap road races. Usually, the course itself is about a mile long and the races involve anywhere from twenty to fifty laps around the course. The Tuesday night crits in Plano were held in a small industrial park. The track was about 0.8 miles around, with a couple of sharp turns marked by orange cones.

  All bike racers who participate in sanctioned races have to be licensed by USA Cycling, the national governing body for the sport. First-time racers start out in the lowest category—at the time, that was category 4—and to move up, they have to participate in a number of races and gather points. The process could take months, if not a full year.

  This meant that Lance, technically a novice, would have to begin by racing with the 4s, the slowest and least experienced riders. Hoyt, who organized the races, knew Lance had the ability to ride with the combined 1-2-3 field. So the first time Lance showed up for one of the crits, he allowed him to participate at the higher level on one condition: Lance wasn’t allowed to win the race. If he did, the race official, who had been kept in the dark about Lance’s “cat 4” status, would find out that he had broken the rules.

  Immediately, Lance took off, flying out ahead of the pack of forty or so riders and leaving them behind. Only one rider stuck to Lance’s wheel. By the time the final lap approached, Lance was still in the lead. He knew he wasn’
t supposed to win the race, but something in Lance’s DNA wouldn’t let him slow down. So he won. As Hoyt had predicted, the race official noticed that he was only a cat 4 and was livid. Hoyt had to smooth everything over. It wouldn’t be the last time Lance would hang Hoyt out to dry. But damn, he could fly on a bike.

  For the 1986 triathlon season, Crawford and Eder, who had become Lance’s informal manager, took him around Texas and Oklahoma, where he competed in small triathlons with relatively short distances, to help him build a résumé. At fourteen, Lance was still too young to race in some of the events. The insurance companies that underwrote the races required the organizers to bar anyone under fifteen. No problem: Linda stopped off for a Wite-Out and a black pen and doctored Lance’s birth certificate to say that he was a year older. In at least one instance, for the President’s Triathlon in Dallas, Jim Woodman, a race promoter who lived in Miami and published Florida Sports magazine, knew the birth certificate was doctored but allowed him to race anyway. All the practice paid off, and Lance kept getting better and better. At one triathlon in Waco, Texas, Lance, clad in a Richardson Bike Mart tank top and swim briefs, came in so far ahead that the second-place finisher hadn’t even seen him cross the line, and initially concluded that he himself had won.

  Soon, Armstrong was making a name for himself, getting sponsorships and making important business connections that would serve him later in life. Woodman even put him on the cover of Florida Sports. But Lance, headstrong and often unwilling to listen to advice, was still working out some kinks in his form and strategy. Twice in the summer of 1986 he had to relinquish leads because he was dehydrated. He hadn’t realized the importance of drinking fluids during a competition even when he wasn’t thirsty. He suffered an embarrassment at a big race in Dallas when he was penalized for drafting, that is, riding in another racer’s slipstream. In professional bike racing, drafting is part of the strategy because it helps a rider conserve valuable energy, but in triathlons, it’s generally not allowed. Lance realized he had to become not just a stronger but a smarter athlete, and he was determined to learn from experience.

  By the 1987 season, the soon-to-be high school junior, then five feet ten inches and chiseled, at 150 pounds, was emerging as a serious competitor to some of the world’s top triathletes, men ten years older and at the top of their games. He was getting stronger by the month, and his endurance was increasing. Later that summer, Lance delivered a standout performance at the President’s Triathlon, the race he had participated in the previous year when he was technically too young to have done so. Mark Allen, a twenty-nine-year-old pro, had won the event two years in a row. Allen plunged into Lake Carolyn in the middle of the swanky Las Colinas neighborhood in Irving, Texas, and waited for the countdown to the start. When he emerged from the lake at the end of the 0.6-mile swim, Allen was surprised to discover he was behind Lance, who had finished that leg of the triathlon in third place. Allen didn’t know Lance and figured he must be a high-level swimmer who was just dabbling in triathlon. A few miles into the 21-mile cycling course, however, Allen was shocked to realize that Lance was keeping up with him. He stayed with Allen the whole way. Lance’s weakest leg of the triathlon was the run. He ended in sixth place overall—quite an accomplishment for a fifteen-year-old.

  After his sixth-place performance, Lance got invited to race all over the country and in more exotic locales, such as St. Croix in the US Virgin Islands and Caracas, Venezuela. He also qualified for the International Triathlon Championships in Bermuda, which offered a $100,000 purse. There he raced alongside professionals from all over the world and finished in an impressive eleventh place.

  In all, over Lance’s high school years, he participated in more than twenty-five sleepover triathlon races—and typically never paid a single cent for travel, hotels, rental cars, or entry fees. For the trip to Bermuda, for instance, the fifteen-year-old talked the owner of the Princess Hotel into flying him in and putting him up for four days. A friend of Eder’s worked at Dallas-based advertising agency Moroch & Associates, which managed local advertising for the McDonald’s corporation. He set Lance up with a McDonald’s endorsement of roughly $10,000 a year; Lance wore the golden arches on his helmet and dressed in yellow and red as his racing uniform. McDonald’s offset some of his travel costs.

  If Lance’s athletic ability and talent for self-promotion manifested early, so, too, did his temper. Around this time, Lance received a free Kestrel bike as part of a sponsorship. It was one of the first-ever carbon fiber super-lightweight racing bikes. He rode it in a few triathlons but soon lost his deal with Kestrel after ESPN cameras filmed him throwing the bike across four lanes of traffic into a ditch after getting a flat tire in a South Florida triathlon.

  Race promoter Jim Woodman, who became another mentor for Lance, saw how quickly Lance’s emotions could change, one minute jubilant, the next fierce. When he took Lance out for training rides around Miami, he observed that whenever a driver honked or cut him off, Lance would completely lose control. He would chase after the driver and catch him at a light, then pound on the car windows and scream obscenities. “Fuck you, you stupid motherfucker!” Woodman sometimes feared for his life, and counseled Lance to cool down. “You’re going to get us killed,” he warned him. “A lot of people around here have guns.”

  Woodman also saw the arrogance in him. On one training ride, Woodman moved his position so that he rode directly behind Lance, with Lance sheltering him from the wind. It was the only way Woodman could keep up with Lance, who was flying in preparation for a big triathlon in Florida. “You think I’m ready, bitch?!” Lance shouted to Woodman behind him.

  “Talk with your legs and not your mouth,” Woodman advised him that day. “Nobody wants to hear a teenage kid talking a bunch of crap.”

  Crawford bristled when he overheard Lance’s callous teasing of his closest competitors. “What are you doing here? You suck. Go home,” Lance said to Chann McRae, a local teen, before the start of one event, according to Crawford’s recollection.

  Lance’s belligerence extended to Terry. “Fuck you!” was Lance’s typical snarl when Terry asked him to do anything around the house. Terry worked full-time and provided for the family, buying Lance a used Fiat Spider when he turned fifteen, but Lance thought he was despicable and an insecure, materialistic dork. He also thought Terry was emotionally abusive, and resented his saying, “This is my house and you’ll do what I say.” Lance felt that had been Terry’s way of letting him know he and Linda had been a burden. Crawford understood that Lance had a painful childhood, but he didn’t think Terry deserved Lance’s abuse.

  “Whoa! That’s your father. You shouldn’t talk to him like that,” Crawford said.

  “Oh, he’s a tool. I hate that guy,” Lance told Crawford.

  Lance’s behavior also strained Linda and Terry’s marriage. But Linda figured she couldn’t leave Terry because she would be a single parent, with no college education. She was concerned about supporting herself and Lance. But by the time Lance was sixteen, he was supporting himself through pro triathlons, making $1,000 a month, so she finally left Terry—and Lance was inspired by her independence. God, if she can do that, we can do anything. I can do anything, he thought. Years later, Terry reached out to Rick to ask: “Why did Lance hate me so much?” Rick didn’t have an answer.

  Lance meanwhile was developing a healthy interest in the science and psychology of sport. He enjoyed quantifying every aspect of swimming, running, and cycling. Eder heard about a controlled study being conducted at the Cooper Institute, a sports performance lab in Dallas. A researcher there was testing the effects of a cooling vest on athletes, by measuring their core temperatures after wearing the device and running for an hour. In lieu of payment, study participants would get a VO2 max test, as part of a physical workup. The VO2 max test was designed to measure how efficiently an athlete consumed oxygen. Each of the athletes got on the treadmill and placed a mask over his face. The mask had a tube protruding from it and conn
ecting it to a large machine that measured the gases coming out of the athlete’s body.

  About a week after the VO2 max test, Eder got a call from the director of the research project at the Cooper Institute. “Whoever that kid was that you brought in here, he has the second-highest VO2 max we’ve ever tested,” he said. The test confirmed what Armstrong was telling everyone with unfiltered confidence: His potential was limitless. Later that month, in a feature on Lance, Triathlete magazine cited his 79.5 VO2 max as world-class.

  And then, of course, there was the matter of his ambition. By the summer before his senior year in high school, he was heading to the triathlon mecca of San Diego, where he’d spend the summer months training with professional athletes. Eder had a triathlete friend in Del Mar, north of San Diego, who agreed to let Lance stay with him. The sleepy coastal city attracted endurance athletes from around the world because of its year-round climate, warm and dry with a temperature that always hovered somewhere between 60 and 75 degrees Fahrenheit, and its unique topography. Lance swam at the University of California, San Diego, with a group of competitive weekend warriors and some professional swimmers, and he got his first exposure to riding up climbs similar to those in the Pyrenees or the Alps on the long winding roads that snake up to the top of Palomar Mountain, about 5,500 feet above sea level. Lance was testing his legs daily on terrain that could truly challenge him for the first time.