The 1995 Tour de France turned tragic for the Motorola team. One of its riders, twenty-four-year-old Italian Fabio Casartelli, crashed on a mountain road and died of head injuries. Casartelli had won the gold medal in the men’s road race in the 1992 Olympics—Armstrong’s last race as an amateur, in which he finished a disappointing fourteenth. Two days after Casartelli’s death, on stage 18 from Montpon-Ménestérol to Limoges, Armstrong attacked alone and crossed the finish line by himself. He pointed skyward in honor of his fallen teammate. Armstrong would later say it was the most meaningful moment of his own career. Two days later, Armstrong finished the Tour de France for the first time, in 36th place.
Two weeks later, Armstrong won his first major professional European bike race, the Clásica San Sebastián, the same race in which he had finished dead last in 1992, shortly after the Olympics. No American had ever won one of cycling’s “classics” races, but this year, Armstrong was red hot.
In late 1995, Lance took another major step in his career. He flew to Ferrara, Italy, to meet an Italian sports doctor named Michele Ferrari. Lance was introduced to Ferarri by Eddy Merckx, the retired Belgian cycling legend. Merckx’s bike company sponsored the Motorola team, and all of its riders used Merckx bikes. Merckx’s son, Axel, was a rider on the Motorola team, and Lance noticed that Axel had improved significantly in the 1995 season. Lance attributed the improvement to Axel’s work with Ferrari.
Ferrari lived largely in the shadows of the sport. He never attended races or official team events. He wore thick glasses and drove an old beat-up station wagon or a camper. He apparently needed nothing for happiness but his Excel spreadsheets and a calculator.
Ferrari’s one brush with the public spotlight did not go so well. In 1994, he had served as team doctor for Gewiss-Ballan, an Italian-based cycling team that debuted in 1993. After three Gewiss-Ballan riders took the top three places in one of the major spring classics—a bit like one country winning every Olympic medal in a single sport—one journalist directly questioned Ferrari about the use of EPO. Ferrari proceeded to wax eloquent about EPO’s safety. “EPO is no more dangerous than orange juice,” he said. Ferrari seemed to be justifying, even advocating, the use of a powerful hormone for performance-enhancing benefit. After the statements, Ferrari was fired from the team.
Of course, when Ferrari made his comments, he and everyone else in the sport knew that EPO was banned in cycling. But there was no test for it. The International Olympic Committee, which at the time oversaw the anti-doping effort in sports, had commissioned a respected sports doctor to develop a test to detect it in urine. Their choice was Francesco Conconi, who had been one of Ferrari’s university professors in Italy and had himself been involved in the doping of Italian Olympic athletes. The irony that Conconi, the proverbial fox, was now charged with guarding the henhouse wasn’t lost on some of the European press at the time, which pointed out his connection to Ferrari.
But the controversy, which was not covered in a single major newspaper in the United States, might as well have been an advertisement for Ferrari. He was about to become the most coveted secret doctor in professional sports. Armstrong always liked to be on the cutting edge—of music, fashion, technology, and, most of all, sports science. Lance quickly came to regard Ferrari as a genius.
Lance didn’t tell his Motorola teammates, such as Frankie Andreu, about the meeting with Ferrari, as he wasn’t ready to share that information. Not every rider on the team could afford to work with Ferrari, whose fees were often based on a percentage of a rider’s salary and ranged from $15,000 to more than $375,000, including bonuses. Motorola certainly wasn’t going to foot the bill.
Armstrong’s cycling prowess was about to get a major boost, but trouble was brewing with the Motorola sponsorship. By the end of 1995, Sheila Griffin was under pressure from her European-based colleagues to move the Motorola sponsorship over to a soccer team, which they believed would give the brand more visibility than cycling. Ochowicz hoped for a last-minute rescue and worked for months to identify a new sponsor, but nothing materialized.
Lance, meanwhile, lived as if he didn’t have a care in the world. He dumped Danielle and she returned to the Netherlands, heartbroken. When Betsy asked Armstrong what happened, he just shrugged. He explained that he was now dating a bathing suit model, who Armstrong crassly explained was clean shaven—everywhere. With no serious relationship, Armstrong had plenty of time to hang out at Austin bars, drinking Shiner Bock and meeting girls. Lance began spending his evenings with John Korioth, then the manager of the Cactus Room, one of Austin’s most popular bars. He also began a casual relationship with Stephanie McIlvain.
One time, when McIlvain visited Como, Betsy heard one of the guys make a crack about Stephanie. “Lance is going to get his blow job,” the teammate said.
“Who is Stephanie?” Betsy asked Frankie, who explained.
“But he has another girlfriend,” Betsy said. Frankie told her this was more casual than that.
“So is that what’s going on here? Women just come here and service you guys?” Betsy asked angrily.
“No, that’s not what’s going on here. That’s just what’s going on with Lance,” Frankie said.
The beginning of Armstrong’s 1996 season was marked by the biggest win in his professional career—a victory in Belgium’s prestigious Flèche Wallonne, a one-day race through the hilly Ardennes region of Belgium known for its constant up-and-down climbs and technical curves. He followed that victory with another second place in Liège–Bastogne–Liège. He had just missed first in a close sprint to the line. Back in the United States in May, he won five stages of the Tour DuPont and snagged his second victory in a row.
Michele Ferrari’s training seemed to be paying off big-time for Armstrong. The program he devised was perhaps the most carefully monitored, intensive, and unusual training regimen in the history of cycling, if not all sports. And he was well compensated for his efforts. During 1996, Lance paid Ferrari $14,000 in February, $28,500 in May, and $42,000 in July, according to Ferrari’s bank records. The July payment came from an account Lance shared with his mother. As Armstrong trained, Ferrari followed his climbs in a battered station wagon, stopping to check how much power Armstrong was putting to the pedals and checking his blood for minute changes in the amount of lactic acid coursing through his veins. He monitored the wattage Armstrong was able to produce per kilogram of his body weight, and the number of vertical feet he ascended per minute, or VAM. And when Ferrari looked down at his spreadsheets through his thick-rimmed glasses, he saw what he considered to be an extraordinarily promising physical specimen. Ferrari had pioneered the use of calculations to predict an athlete’s performance potential, and he was convinced that science could transform Armstrong from a bulky and inconsistent athlete into a Tour de France winner.
By early summer, however, Armstrong was showing signs of strain and fatigue. After his Tour DuPont win in May, he took nearly a month off and returned to Austin. It was unusual for Armstrong to take so long a break. During his training for the Tour of Switzerland in June, Armstrong needed a few days of recovery time after each “hard” day, unusual for a guy who could usually ride hard for several days straight. During the race itself—an eleven-day stage race through the Swiss Alps, which some riders use as a tune-up for the Tour de France—he was clearly struggling. He had started the race as a favorite but finished nowhere near the top of the standings.
Then, Armstrong pulled out of the Tour de France during the sixth stage of the race, complaining of bronchitis and a cold. The kid who never got sick was letting a little flu knock him out of the most important race of the year—one that was supposed to be the key to his preparation for the Atlanta Olympics later that month.
In the Olympics, Armstrong finished twelfth in the road race and sixth in the time trial. Respectable? Sure. But nowhere near his potential. And nowhere near the level of performance he needed to claim the millions of dollars’ worth of sponsorship bonuses that
Stapleton had negotiated for him.
It was a disappointing end to what began as a spectacular season. Armstrong had won the Tour DuPont, a major stage race. Then, he became the first American to win one of the prestigious spring classics, the Flèche Wallonne. Even more impressive, he had nearly completed the Ardennes double with a second-place finish in Liège–Bastogne–Liège. Even after dropping out of the Tour and missing out on another gold medal, Armstrong considered 1996 the best season of his career.
CHAPTER FIVE
TEAMWORK
In 1993, Mark Gorski was living with his family in the sleepy town of Newport Beach, commuting to downtown Los Angeles for his cushy job as a vice president of sales at Wells Fargo. Less than a decade earlier, the thirty-three-year-old with a small gap in his front teeth had been the most decorated sprint cyclist in the United States. He was a cutthroat competitor, a killer on a bicycle, a celebrity on the velodrome circuit. Now he wore a business suit and carried a briefcase and commuted to a high-rise office building. It wasn’t where he wanted to be.
A powerful sprinter who had been one of the 7-Eleven team’s first recruits, Gorksi still longed for the excitement of racing, of traveling around the world, feeling the g-forces on the banked turns of velodromes from San Diego to Stockholm. Winning the match sprint during the 1984 Olympics had been one of the high points of his life. After he put that gold medal around his neck and waved to the crowd, he had wheeled around the track with his eighteen-month-old son, Alex, in one arm, and an American flag in the other, reveling in the moment, probably unaware that it was the last such moment he would enjoy in his athletic career.
After the Games, he landed endorsements from Fuji America, for its Japanese-made bikes, as well as the city of Indianapolis, which had a new cycling track. He also set out on a mission as a race promoter to try to turn professional track bicycle racing into a spectator sport in the United States. He helped to organize international meets, including one between the Americans and the Soviets, which was broadcast on the cable channel ESPN. But men in spandex and skintight jerseys riding so-called intervals around a banked oval track wasn’t something many Americans wanted to watch, and his foray as a race promoter didn’t pan out. Gorski also wanted badly to compete in the 1988 Olympics, but there was only one spot on the team and it went to his rival, the younger Ken Carpenter.
When Gorski finally retired from racing in 1989, he thought maybe the macho world of high finance might satisfy his competitive drive. Wells Fargo at the time was snapping up former star athletes, including Bill Ring, the 49ers Super Bowl winning fullback, to handle large-asset investments for groups and individuals. Gorski figured there was unlimited upside potential.
But for Gorski the challenge of selling financial plans to wealthy folks just didn’t compare to his passion for track racing. When the strapping six-foot-two 200-pounder was asked by a television station to provide color commentary for cycling events during the 1992 Olympics in Barcelona, he had an epiphany. Cycling was his calling! It helped that he had heard that his buddy, Ring, who had become a top-earning salesman at Wells Fargo, was taking a leave to follow his own dream—to become a running backs coach for Stanford under his old 49ers coach, Bill Walsh. Gorski thought about the off-season internship he had done in sports management after the Olympics. Maybe he could do that again?
Gorski turned to cycling’s governing body and was hired by USA Cycling—until 1995, the US Cycling Federation—as national team director, relocating to its headquarters in Colorado Springs. His mandate was to develop young athletes, preparing them for international competition and getting their careers off the ground, but also to use his sales chops to bring in sponsors to help fund the program. For two years, he helped recruit talent, spread the word about the national cycling program, and worked with elite cyclists, often traveling to races.
One of those races was the Santa Rosa Downtown Criterium in 1995. On a cloudy April weekend, about six hundred riders showed up for a series of events including a 40-mile, 57-lap race through city streets around a complex of city, state, and federal buildings. There, Gorski ran into his old friend Thom Weisel, who had come up to Napa to watch his cycling team, Montgomery-Bell (they had lost Subaru as a sponsor and replaced it with helmet maker Bell). The chance encounter in wine country would change both of their lives forever.
Gorski had first met Weisel back in 1987, when Weisel showed up at Eddie B’s training camps in Dallas. Gorski provided him with some racing tips. About a year later, when Gorski was living in Indianapolis, he saw Weisel compete in the Masters Track Nationals, for riders age forty-five and older, where Weisel, then forty-seven, placed second.
As the two men watched the bike race in Santa Rosa and caught up on what they were doing, Weisel was direct with Gorski. Funding a cycling team was expensive. “Mark, this thing is bleeding me dry,” Weisel told him. “We either need to start pulling in some real sponsorship dollars or it’s gonna fold.”
Weisel had financed the team pretty much by himself in the late 1980s. But it soon became too expensive and he was fortunate the team landed Subaru as a sponsor. Over the years, Subaru had increased its spending on the team, ultimately giving Eddie B about $2 million to work with toward their long-term goal of gaining entry to the Tour de France.
After Subaru discontinued its sponsorship in 1994, Weisel had to decrease the team’s budget, and the team’s performance and progress had suffered. Now he wanted back into the big time, so he’d decided to pour more money into the team to reinvigorate it for the 1995 season, spending an amount somewhere in the mid six figures out of his own pocket. But even with the helmet maker Bell stepping in as a sponsor, the total amount of cash supporting the team was only about $800,000—a far cry from the $5 million most Tour de France caliber squads had.
Gorski thought about Weisel’s situation—and his own—on the plane ride back to Denver. Working for USA Cycling was not all he’d hoped. He began to scribble on a piece of paper. What if he could get a new sponsor? he thought. A real title sponsor with a big cash infusion? He figured he would need at least $3.5 million but maybe as much as $5 million to make it work. His scribblings on the plane turned into a proposal to find Weisel’s team a major title sponsor within three years, big enough to give them the backing and resources they needed to assemble a team of champions capable of winning the Tour de France. He put the proposal in a FedEx envelope and mailed it to Weisel. Two weeks later, Weisel got back to Gorski. “You’re hired,” he said. Without even so much as a follow-up meeting or a job interview, Gorski left USA Cycling and was hired to bring Weisel’s team to the next level of cycling. The way Weisel saw it, it was a no-lose proposition. If Gorski succeeded, Weisel could finally achieve his goal of turning an American cycling team into a Tour de France winner. If he didn’t succeed, Gorski’s salary was a small amount of money compared to what Weisel was already spending on the team.
Gorski quickly began to think about how he could deliver on his promise. One of the first people Gorski contacted was the sport’s biggest hero, Greg LeMond. Now retired from cycling and living in Minneapolis, LeMond had started his own bicycle manufacturing company, which was growing rapidly. He was still a big name in the sports industry, and his name was gold in professional cycling. Gorski flew to Minneapolis. At a meeting at LeMond’s house, Gorski asked him to lend his name and persona to the effort to rope in a new sponsor. LeMond agreed to attend meetings with prospective sponsors and to endorse the team’s efforts to grow. In return, Gorski promised LeMond a 10 percent cut of whatever sponsorship money he was able to bring in. LeMond knew Weisel through Eddie B, and had already begun investing in Montgomery Securities. Weisel had done well with Eddie B’s money, though he fell short of making good on his promise to make a millionaire of him. Weisel’s investors got the inside track on big Silicon Valley IPOs and were reaping huge returns. By this point, LeMond had most of his savings with Weisel and was making about 40 percent annual returns.
Gorski also called in a
favor with his old agent, Steve Disson, living in Washington, DC, and running a sports marketing outfit with a partner, Allen Furst. Disson had represented several of the top American cyclists after the 1984 Olympics, but these days, he worked as a consultant to companies searching for sports marketing opportunities. And he had a new client: the United States Postal Service, which wanted to grow its brand internationally. While the USPS had taken in more than $50 billion in revenue the previous year, only about $1.5 billion of that came from outside the United States. Disson pitched the Postal Service on the idea that sponsoring a team that would race in Europe and Asia was a good fit for its goal of doubling its overseas revenue in the next five years. To some Americans, it might have seemed odd that a government agency (albeit a somewhat independent one) like the Postal Service would sponsor a sports team. But European countries had done this for years. The Spanish ONCE team was sponsored by the national lottery sales organization whose proceeds go to help the blind; Germany’s Telekom team is sponsored by the national telephone company, in which the German government holds a stake; and Banesto, the former team of retired five-time champion Miguel Indurain, was sponsored by Spain’s national banking corporation. The Netherlands’ national banking corporation, Rabobank, also sponsored a team.
In the fall of 1995, Disson asked Gorski and Weisel to fly to Washington, DC, for a meeting he had set up for them with Loren Smith, the head of marketing for the USPS. One of the team’s main selling points was that Eddie B was the coach. Although most people hadn’t heard of him, they had seen his work: nine medals in the 1984 Olympics.
Gorski and Weisel convinced Smith that the team would be able to provide the Postal Service with international exposure that it couldn’t otherwise get. After the usual series of bureaucratic deliberations, the US Postal Service signed a three-year contract for $4.5 million to take over the Montgomery-Bell team, effective October 1. The sponsorship didn’t come without criticism from people inside the US Postal Service, who viewed it as a waste of money. The contract stipulated a payment of $1 million in 1996, increasing to $1.5 million in 1997, then to $2 million in 1998. The escalating payments enabled Eddie B to phase his ambitions for the team. It would spend a year moving up in the international standings, before bringing in powerful cyclists for the team’s projected 1998 Tour de France entry.
Wheelmen: Lance Armstrong, the Tour De France, and the Greatest Sports Conspiracy Ever Page 10
