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

by Reed Albergotti

  The forty-five-minute appointment turned into a five-hour discussion. Ochowicz didn’t have the most sophisticated argument for why it made financial sense for Motorola to invest in a cycling team. But Griffin was moved by his passion. She began to think that sponsoring a pro cycling team whose riders could compete throughout Europe would be a shrewd, and even inexpensive, way to raise the profile of the Motorola brand. The three million dollars Ochowicz thought he needed to accomplish the big things he had in mind didn’t put a big dent in the Motorola marketing budget, and there was plenty of upside: If Ochowicz could use that money to hire a couple of riders strong enough to win stages in cycling’s three Grand Tours—the world’s only three-week stage races—then the Motorola brand, with its bat-wings logo, would be all over the European newspapers and TV. Back in the States, the brand might get a boost, too, if bike enthusiasts, casual riders such as her husband and his buddies, took to donning Motorola jerseys on their Saturday rides.

  Two weeks later, Griffin called Ochowicz to inform him that Motorola had decided to underwrite his team. His American team—managed by his nonstock corporation the South Club Inc., of Waukesha, Wisconsin—would set up European headquarters in Hulste, Belgium, a small West Flanders village near the French border. Ochowicz’s bold move had saved his team. What it had done for Motorola was another question.

  Team Motorola had a disastrous showing at first, taking 55th place (out of roughly two hundred riders) in its racing debut, the Tour of Lombardy, a one-day Italian “classic” race in Milan, Italy, that fall. But Griffin reassured Motorola executives that its fortunes would turn around soon. And Ochowicz was determined to make sure that happened. Thanks to Motorola’s sponsorship, he had the money he needed to buy himself some more promising young riders. The team was already filled with gifted, naturally talented athletes like Frankie Andreu, a solid veteran from Michigan, and great lead-out man, and Ron Kiefel, the first American to win a stage in a Grand Tour. Now he was on a mission to find the next Greg LeMond, who had just won the 1990 Tour riding for the French Z team. Ochowicz was still disappointed over his failure to sign LeMond himself. He and his 7-Eleven squad had made a hefty multimillion-dollar offer to LeMond, but they were outbid by the French team, which had offered LeMond $4.7 million over three years—one of the largest contracts ever signed in cycling. So Ochowicz was on the lookout for a new star.

  In the spring of 1991, Lance was in his second season on Subaru-Montgomery, but he was still angry about the feud he’d had with Eddie B and Thom Weisel earlier that year during the Bergamasca race in Italy. Eddie B had been incensed that, after his win, Armstrong had failed to thank his teammates for their support. He saw it as a further sign that Armstrong was immature and self-centered. Armstrong, in turn, felt betrayed by Eddie B and was worried Weisel might fire him. Given the bad feelings, it seemed highly unlikely that Armstrong would stay with their team for much longer. Lance was effectively in play, and Ochowicz wanted to snap him up for the new Motorola team. Although Armstrong was still a junior, and an amateur with little understanding of the European peloton, he was one of the most coveted young riders on the circuit.

  When Ochowicz approached Armstrong about joining his team, he offered him a special arrangement: If he signed with Motorola, he could remain an amateur, receiving a stipend, until after the 1992 Barcelona Olympics, at which time he would immediately become a full-time pro racer and join Motorola’s European squad. Armstrong was thrilled. In his eyes, Och’s team was like the Dallas Cowboys of American cycling. It was one of the top ten or so teams in the world, the kind of team where he wanted to end up.

  Now Armstrong had to call Thom Weisel to inform him that, after less than two years with the team, he was quitting Subaru-Montgomery. Weisel was blunt: It was a bad idea. He still had a lot to learn, and if he went over to Europe now, he’d get chewed up and spat out in no time. Weisel also told Armstrong that he could get him to Europe soon but that he’d have to wait until he was ready, and until the team had the budget for it, which it didn’t yet. Armstrong, who respected Weisel for his success and his willingness to support the team, at first found it difficult to defend his choice. But by the end of the phone conversation, after Weisel paused for a moment to reflect on everything that had been said, he told Armstrong that he respected his candor and would support his decision to move on.

  The Barcelona Olympics would show the world just how much more Armstrong had to learn. His mother, Linda, and new stepfather, John Walling, used rollers to paint an eight-by-four-foot Texas flag on the pavement of the largest hill of the course. Such roadside graffiti is a tradition in bike racing. Alongside it they painted Texas Flyer, in honor of Armstrong. But Armstrong got stuck in a pack of riders early on in the race—and was still stuck there when the pack crossed the finish line. He ended up in fourteenth place out of roughly two hundred riders, a most unimpressive performance. Armstrong couldn’t explain it. He told reporters he just felt weak that day. Lance was quiet at dinner that night with his mom and stepdad and friends from Plano.

  It got worse. About a week after the Olympics road race, Armstrong turned pro, as Ochowicz had promised him he would do, and entered the Clásica San Sebastián, a Spanish one-day road racing “classic,” and one of the races that tend to favor bigger riders like him. Armstrong finished dead last.

  Armstrong was learning the hard way about the speed of the European cyclist. The peloton in the highest-level European races never slows down. Instead, it hums along at a blistering pace until someone attacks, causing the entire field to accelerate en masse for several minutes until it goes back to the previous, leg-scorching speed. The lack of lulls in the pace means weaker riders have no opportunities to recover. Armstrong may have been good in the junior ranks, but in the top rung of professional racing, he was one of the weaker riders.

  Over the course of just a couple of weeks, Armstrong had gone from an extreme high to a depressing low. Despite what he might have believed, he was not superhuman. He had to come to grips with the reality that there were cyclists out there who were faster and tactically smarter. In fact, there were a lot of them. Armstrong had to come back to earth and the reality that he needed to work harder. He spent the off-season in Austin and Florida, riding 500 to 600 miles, 25 to 30 hours a week, preparing for his first full season as a professional on the Motorola squad. To simulate racing, Lance would ride in the slipstream of J.T. Neal’s motor scooter, often for hours at a time.

  The training paid off. By 1993, Armstrong was starting to realize his potential. He came in second in the Tour DuPont, a prestigious eleven-day stage race in the United States, which attracted many of the sport’s top cyclists, and he became a contender for a $1 million prize, available to any rider who could manage to sweep the three races that were held in succession over the course of a couple of weeks. This trio of events, held in Pittsburgh, West Virginia, and Philadelphia, was known as the Thrift Drug Triple Crown. Armstrong easily won the Pittsburgh race, which he had also won in 1992.

  During the West Virginia race, a 493-mile, six-stage race in the hills, Armstrong won the opening Morgantown prologue time trial—a race against the clock—by just under 2 seconds. The second day of the race brought a 100-mile mountain course in the Monongahela National Forest near Elkins, a small town. After Armstrong won again, his lead in the overall standings was 14 seconds, with Michael Engleman of the rival Coors Light team in second place.

  With the $1 million prize on the line, Armstrong then turned to an age-old tactic to boost his chance of winning. He sent a Motorola teammate to approach Scott McKinley, one of the captains of the Coors Light squad, with a business proposition. Stephen Swart, another Coors team captain, later recalled, under oath during a lawsuit deposition, the following proposition: Would Engleman and his Coors Light teammates be open to a payoff in exchange for agreeing not to challenge Armstrong in what remained of the “Triple Crown”?

  Swart, a stocky New Zealander, testified that he met Armstrong in a hotel roo
m to discuss it. In fact, such deals were common in the strange sport of professional cycling, and not seen as entirely unsportsmanlike. The riders quickly came to an agreement, Swart said. If the Coors team riders backed off and didn’t challenge Armstrong, and if Armstrong won the $1 million, he would pay the Coors team a total of $50,000. While the payment wasn’t a huge amount of money, the Coors riders hadn’t won the first leg of the Triple Crown in Pittsburgh, so they weren’t in the running for the $1 million anyway. They all agreed to keep it quiet, Swart said in his testimony, knowing that if the insurance company that paid out the $1 million bonus found out, it might refuse to pay up.

  Engleman’s lead over Armstrong slipped to 45 seconds and he didn’t challenge Armstrong for the remainder of the race. Armstrong won the second leg of the Triple Crown. Engleman finished second. Swart testified that even if the Coors team had wanted to challenge Armstrong, doing so may not have been possible because Armstrong was so strong.

  The third event in the series, the USPRO National Championships, was one of the few events of that era in American cycling that drew large numbers of fans to the course. Many came to watch the bikers ride up the “Manayunk Wall,” a steep climb in Northwest Philadelphia. Fans would pack the sidewalks, cheering, beer in hand. With Armstrong racing for $1 million, the crowds were even larger than usual that year. Newspapers and television stations all over the country were covering Armstrong’s potential payday.

  Shortly after the start of the race, Armstrong and a group of eight riders—most of them no-names—got out ahead of the rest of the pack. Then, on the final ascent up the Manayunk Wall, Armstrong got out of the saddle and took off, smashing down the pedals, his bike and body swaying from side to side with effort, as he ground his bike uphill. None of the other riders stayed with him, including Roberto Gaggioli, a member of the Coors Light team. By the time Armstrong reached the top, he was far enough ahead that he could coast the final stretch to the finish line. He sat up with no hands on the bars and slowly rolled toward the line, blowing kisses to the tipsy fans.

  It was the highlight of his career so far. The sports press ate it up. “Armstrong makes his first million,” proclaimed the Agence France-Press. “Armstrong feels like a million bucks,” said The New York Times. “Just when it seemed the earnings of athletes couldn’t go anymore haywire,” added the Associated Press.

  A few months after the race, the Coors Light team was paid in cash for their lack of effort in the races.

  Following his $1 million payday, Armstrong headed back to Europe to start his education in the Tour de France. At twenty-one, he would be the youngest competitor in the race that year. He viewed his first Tour de France sort of like he was Joe Namath arriving in Miami to take on Johnny Unitas and the Colts. Photographers, reporters, the room full of people, the electricity—this was just his style, he decided.

  Ochowicz had, since the mid-1980s, set up a training base for his riders at Como, Italy, about forty miles north of Milan, beneath the snowcapped Alps. A town of silk factories, medieval churches, and tourism, Como is considered the spiritual home of cycling and is near the infamous twenty-seven-mile-long Passo del Mortirolo, a climb of nearly 4,400 feet, one of the most difficult mountains a cyclist can face in Italy. It was also the hometown of the 7-Eleven team’s first physician and trainer, Massimo Testa, who set up a sports performance lab there, and later became doctor to the Motorola team.

  When Lance arrived in Como, he shared an apartment on the fourth floor of a six-story building with Frankie Andreu, a native of Detroit who was five years older. For coaching and fitness testing, Lance relied on the doctor, Testa, who assigned Lance training rides through Passo del Ghisallo, a moderately difficult climb at the tip of the lake’s peninsula—with a chapel dedicated to cycling at the summit—and to the Pian del Tivano, with its long, scenic descent.

  Far from home, Lance began practicing his Italian, sunbathing on the apartment balcony, and spending hours on the dial-up Internet. Frankie, a lanky cyclist with a sometimes-cranky demeanor, became Lance’s mentor. Frankie’s girlfriend, Betsy, a petite University of Michigan theater grad with thick brown hair, sometimes snapped at him when he was rude to people.

  One night, the three of them went out for pizza at a small restaurant on one of Como’s charmingly narrow hillside streets. The waiter at the restaurant was taking forever to bring them their wine and pizzas, and Lance grew impatient. “These fucking Italians!” he shouted. “Can’t they bring the fucking wine?!”

  “Lance, they understand what you’re saying,” Betsy said, explaining to Lance that Europeans weren’t as quick with the service as Americans.

  “I don’t fucking care.”

  “You’re not in Texas. If you don’t like it, don’t go out to eat,” she shot back.

  Betsy thought Lance had some behavioral problems, but she liked him, and she thought Lance respected her and listened when she tried to steer him in the right direction. But Betsy visited Como only occasionally. She was in the process of leaving her sales job and opening an Italian espresso bar in Detroit.

  Considering that Armstrong had not yet won a single major European professional race, his cocky smile and full-of-himself personality was a turnoff to some of the top pros, who viewed him as condescending. In France, Germany, Belgium, and Spain, bike racing was considered a blue-collar vocation. Europeans rode bikes because they didn’t want to work in a steel mill or sweat it out on some farm. They kept their heads down, raced their bikes hard, did what they were told, and hoped their meager paychecks would actually arrive. The glitz and glamour of American professional sports were as alien to them as the US tax code.

  The man who would probably have been the top contender for that year’s Tour de France, three-time winner LeMond, decided to pull out just before the start of the race. He told reporters who were covering the Tour that he was suffering from major fatigue. But privately, LeMond told friends and family that he believed that new, powerful blood-boosting drugs had so dramatically improved the abilities of the riders who used them that it had become impossible for riders who weren’t doping to compete.

  The Motorola team knew comparatively little about the sport’s doping culture, which by then had become quite advanced among the European teams. The new drug that was sweeping the peloton and increasing the speeds of the races by double-digit percentage points—the one that caused LeMond to decide to drop out of the Tour—was recombinant erythropoietin, which the riders called EPO for short. A synthetic version of a natural hormone in the body that causes bone marrow to produce red blood cells, it had been developed in the lab to help patients who had developed anemia because of chronic kidney disease and was prescribed off label for anemic cancer patients. For endurance athletes, whose grueling long-haul exertions turn their bodies into fiery furnaces that burn red blood cells at an astonishing rate, EPO was a godsend—even more powerful than the anabolic steroids that had become commonplace in athletics in the 1970s and 1980s. As LeMond knew, any riders going into the Tour without the advantage of EPO would be at a considerable disadvantage.

  The first seven race days of the 1993 Tour de France were uneventful for Armstrong. But on the eighth racing day, a short 114-mile jaunt from a quaint French village, Châlons-sur-Marne, to the town of Verdun, he found himself in a small breakaway group—ahead of all the others. Armstrong, who wore a special American-flag-themed Motorola jersey, an honor for winning the USPRO National Championship, rocked slightly on the bike and worked hard to keep up his pace. As the group of six men approached the finish, huge crowds, kept at bay by red barriers with Coca-Cola logos, lined the sides of the road.

  With 200 meters—656 feet—to go, Armstrong seemed to be at a severe disadvantage, with three riders blocking him from moving up ahead of the pack. Frenchman Ronan Pensec of the Novemail team drove his legs into an all-out, point-of-no-return sprint toward the finish line. But suddenly, Pensec swerved slightly to the left, opening a tiny gap between him and the barriers. Armstrong seized
the opportunity immediately, sprinting at full power through the gap. Armstrong’s handlebars nearly bumped a security official standing against the barriers and he came within inches of hitting an oversize replica of a Coke can. But he made it through the tiny gap without crashing, which was fortunate because he was not wearing a helmet. It’s traditional not to do so on stages that involve mountain climbs—and if he had hit the barrier at thirty-five miles per hour, it would have been a horrific crash. As he crossed the finish line, he threw his hands in the air, swerved left, and nearly knocked a rival off his bike. And with that, Armstrong had become the youngest American to win a stage in the Tour de France.

  But he dropped out of the Tour shortly after that. He wasn’t ready yet for the long and arduous climbs over the Alps and the Pyrenees, and leaving the Tour early was part of the team’s plan for him. He wasn’t a skilled climber, and it wouldn’t do him any good to endure that kind of pain. He was also competing against teams with sophisticated doping programs. Motorola had no organized doping at that time. It was up to the riders to find their own way.

  J.T. Neal had arrived at the Tour de France to collect Lance, and drove him back to Como the next day. Armstrong put the time off to good use: He spent the rest of July and early August in Como, near the home of the Italian team physician, who helped Lance map out a training routine. Lance also shed some weight as be began preparing for cycling’s World Championships, a one-day event at the end of August. By now, he had begun using low-octane doping products—such as cortisone and testosterone. Cortisone gave a temporary boost of energy during one-day races. Testosterone aided recovery. Much like the Olympics, the annual World Championship road race is a competition between nations. Riders ditch their team kits, the uniforms featuring their sponsors, and put on their national colors for the day to become teammates with their countrymen.