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

by Reed Albergotti

  But on day two of the race, a 100-mile stage, Armstrong began to struggle. The weather was wet and windy, with driving rain making the road dangerous and uncomfortable. Things got worse after he was asked to play the role of domestique for George Hincapie, who was now one of the strongest members of the US Postal team. The team’s new director, Johnny Weltz, instructed Armstrong to help pace—or lead—Hincapie to a breakaway group that had gotten far ahead of the pack. Armstrong had rarely worked for another cyclist, but he also thought there was something off about Weltz’s tactical strategy. Why had he waited so long and allowed the Postal riders to fall so far behind the pack?

  Armstrong’s mind began to wander and leave the race. He pictured life back in Austin, where the weather was perfect right now, and his sprawling home on the lake. He could fire up the barbecue, invite a few friends over, and drink some beer. Besides, hadn’t he already proven himself to the cancer community by his showing in the Ruta del Sol? Hadn’t he made his point? What was he going to do—ride around Europe for five years, finishing fifteenth place in every major bike race until people got it through their thick skulls that he had beaten cancer? He’d won. Cancer had lost. Wasn’t it time to end this charade?

  Ignoring Weltz’s instructions, he drifted back, allowing the other riders to pass him until he was the last one in the pack. He pulled over to the right side of the road and raised his arm. The US Postal team car pulled up. Armstrong got off his bike and got in. He was done. He called Kristin in Nice. He was coming back, he told her. He would explain all when he got home.

  Back in Nice, Lance told Kristin that he was thinking about retiring and going home to Austin. Kristin had given up her job and settled into a school to learn French. She wasn’t happy about leaving. But after all that Armstrong had been through, she felt she couldn’t push back.

  After they moved back to Austin, they both felt disconnected from the world, without purpose. Armstrong wasn’t interested in cycling at all. He didn’t even bother to let his new team know his whereabouts. He drafted a retirement statement, and didn’t unpack his bike for three weeks. When Kristin asked about his plans for the future, he was evasive. And he played a lot of golf.

  Eventually, his informal team of advisers—his mom; his agent, Bill Stapleton; and his former coach, Chris Carmichael—intervened. They persuaded him to try just one more race. In April, he spent ten days off the grid training with Carmichael and Bob Roll, Carmichael’s affable thirty-eight-year-old former 7-Eleven teammate, in the college town of Boone, North Carolina, in the Appalachian Mountains.

  All day, every day, Lance rode his bike, sometimes through pouring rain. He rode up Beech Mountain, a 5,000-foot climb that had been part of the route of the Tour DuPont. Chris would periodically measure Lance’s progress at the Appalachian State University training center, where they could test his wattage using a digital odometer. His VO2 max, which had measured at more than 80, was now at 64.

  During those days, Lance also did some soul-searching. He reflected on his childhood and his early career. He thought about what was behind his desire to compete in Europe, and how his victories in cycling had satisfied his inner need.

  By the end of the ten days, Armstrong decided that he did want to regain his stature in the sport. If he was going to really go full throttle, he knew it had to be about more than just cancer. Professional cyclists don’t ride for causes. They ride because it’s their job and they love it. Cancer just wasn’t enough of a motivation.

  He was going to have to feel the old passion again, to rediscover his motivational fuel. For Armstrong, that was his bitter anger, the burning rage he felt toward those who he believed had treated him unfairly. It was indignation toward a biological father who ditched him, resentment toward his adopted father, Terry, for cheating on his mother and for insinuating that he and Linda had been a burden. It was fury over the way Eddie B expected him to give up his own chance at winning in order to help another rider take first place. It was his hatred of the Cofidis team for dropping him because they didn’t believe in him.

  He empathized with his mother. He believed that since she was seventeen, people had told her she was a loser who couldn’t raise a kid alone, who would never make it.

  On May 8, 1998, Lance and Kristin married at a Catholic church in Santa Barbara. Linda attended the wedding with her third husband, John. Lance had always liked John and felt he brought a welcome feeling of love and humor into Linda’s home. But John was battling alcoholism and Linda recalls him becoming visibly drunk at the rehearsal dinner, an elegant affair at a restaurant on the beach, even breaking a glass. “Mom, you gotta take him home,” Lance beseeched. She enlisted her father to carry John back to the hotel.

  The honeymoon for Kristin and Lance was modest in deference to the cycling season. Armstrong had races to prepare for. They spent a few days in a beach house while Lance trained. Later that month, they returned to Austin for the Ride for the Roses, benefiting his foundation to raise money to fight urological cancers. Miguel Indurain and Greg LeMond showed up at the event to show their support.

  For his first race back in Europe with the US Postal team, he selected the Tour de Luxembourg in June. Though the four-day race was a grueling 105-mile-a-day ride, it hadn’t drawn a strong field of rivals, and Lance won.

  By then, Lance and Kristin had rented a small apartment in Nice. The US Postal team was putting together its nine-man roster for the Tour, and Gorski asked Armstrong whether he would like to participate. Armstrong hadn’t even considered it, and he told Gorski he’d sit it out. In July 1998, as the top nine riders on USPS raced in the Tour, Armstrong went back to the States and raced in the Cascade Cycling Classic, a stage race centered around Bend, Oregon, that included high-level amateurs and some professionals. Armstrong, helped by a handful of teammates, including Jonathan Vaughters, a twenty-five-year-old native of Colorado who had turned pro about four years earlier, won the race handily.

  During the race, Armstrong was interviewed by a small newspaper in the area. When the reporter made a comparison to Greg LeMond, Armstrong went on a rant, calling LeMond a fat ass. LeMond had been dabbling in auto racing and generating publicity after some limited success. Armstrong told the reporter that LeMond should get out of his car and give back to cycling. A friend mailed the article to LeMond, who was shocked that Armstrong would take a potshot at him, attacking him unprovoked. Hadn’t LeMond made a volunteer appearance at Armstrong’s Ride for the Roses just a couple of months earlier? LeMond felt stung, but he quickly put it out of his mind, chalking up Armstrong’s comments to some sort of frustration stemming from his cancer recovery.

  • • •

  The 1998 Tour de France began in Dublin, Ireland. Occasionally, the Tour holds legs of the race outside of France in order to increase the international appeal of the event. The US Postal team and all of its equipment, including its team cars, traveled to Ireland on a ferry from Belgium, which was scheduled to arrive late at night. Emma O’Reilly, an Irish masseuse and team assistant, or soigneur, planned to meet the team at the Dublin port.

  As O’Reilly was waiting for the boat, she noticed several Irish customs agents patrolling the area, and she asked them what they were looking for. The agents explained that they planned to search the Postal team cars after the ferry arrived from Belgium. O’Reilly was anxious. She knew some of the Postal riders used banned drugs, but she tried to play it cool with the customs agents. A young, effervescent brunette from a Dublin suburb, who had trained as an electrician before becoming a massage therapist, she turned on her charm. The people she worked for were top-level professional athletes, she told them. It was already late—close to 2:00 A.M. If these top riders arrived tired and were forced to have to wait for some silly customs search, they might get angry and the agents “would have a riot on their hands.” Playing to their sympathy, she said that she, in particular, didn’t want to have to deal with them when they were cranky. The customs agents seemed to buy her story. They obliged O’Reill
y and left the Postal riders—and their vehicles—alone.

  Soigneurs play a crucial role in cycling. They are like personal assistants, charged with everything from massaging riders’ legs after long rides to filling up water bottles to—in some cases—smuggling performance-enhancing drugs across borders. Suddenly, some of these formerly anonymous assistants to cycling teams were about to have their fifteen minutes of fame, caught in the glare of the international spotlight. The day after the ferry arrived, O’Reilly heard from someone on the Postal team that Willy Voet, a Belgian physiotherapist and soigneur from the rival Festina team, had been stopped by customs agents while driving into France from Belgium on his way to the Tour. After they searched his car and found four hundred vials of illegal drugs, including EPO, they arrested him.

  At first, Voet insisted that the drugs were for his own use, a ridiculous position to take given the quantity the agents found. A few days later, he changed his story and admitted that he was bringing EPO and other drugs to Festina team riders who were participating in the Tour de France. The French watchmaker Festina had lavished its team with major dollars so they could recruit top talent, and Voet was part of their investment. Now he sat languishing in a jail cell somewhere in France.

  The race stayed in Ireland for three days, and when it entered France, about a week after Voet’s arrest, police officers there raided the hotel rooms of the Festina team and brought its riders in for questioning. In France, it’s a crime to use performance-enhancing drugs to cheat in sports, even if some of the drugs, such as EPO, were not expressly illegal. The riders and team officials weren’t just facing disqualification from the event; they were facing the threat of criminal charges. Even the Tour de France organizers were called in for questioning by French police, who wanted to know whether the officials were aware of the doping taking place right under their noses.

  The events triggered a wave of fear among riders and staffers on the Postal team. As they were heading back to Europe on a ferry, they decided to dump some of their stash of drugs overboard. Later, the Postal team doctor, Pedro Celaya, and other staff members flushed the remainder of the stockpile down the toilet of the team bus as it sat in the middle of a field somewhere in France.

  As the race progressed, tensions flared between the French police and the riders. One morning, before the twelfth stage of the race, the entire field of roughly 150 Tour de France cyclists decided to sit down on the road with their bicycles to protest. French rider Laurent Jalabert announced that the riders were refusing to ride the stage, due to harassment by French police.

  But the protest didn’t seem to deter the police. Just a few days later, the officers raided the hotel rooms of the Dutch TVM squad. There, they discovered masking agents that could disguise drugs in urine samples. They called several riders in for questioning, interrogating them about their drug use.

  The riders again pushed back. The next day, during stage 17, dozens of members of the peloton stopped racing, tore off their race numbers, and rode the rest of the stage together, crossing the finish line in a single pack. The stage was nullified. By stage 18, only fifteen of the twenty-one teams remained in the race. The remainder had either been kicked out or left the Tour de France in protest.

  No Postal riders or staffers had been busted or eliminated from the event. But the Tour was a near disaster for the team. Thom Weisel had invited Margot Myers, a media relations executive for the US Postal Service, to join him in the team car to watch the events close-up. He had hoped to give her an education in the beauty of the sport her organization was sponsoring. What she got, instead, was a window into the all-out war between cyclists and French officials over doping. It was like a 1960s-style sit-in, except instead of hippies, the strikers were professional athletes wearing spandex.

  The French police investigation may have been the main topic of conversation during that year’s race, but Myers still managed to have a good time. She was, after all, in France, being wined and dined by Weisel and others at some of the country’s best restaurants. Myers got to meet some of the sport’s greatest legends, including Eddy Merckx, the Belgian five-time winner of the Tour de France, and Miguel Indurain, who won the race five times in a row.

  Toward the end of the race, shortly after the sit-in, Myers was sitting with Weisel at an outdoor patio of a top-rated French restaurant. They were drinking wine, eating some of the best food in the world. During their meal, Greg LeMond, who happened to be at the same restaurant, spotted them and walked up to the table to say hello. LeMond would later recount the conversation under oath in a deposition. He was in France, leading a cycling tour for wealthy Americans. For Myers, then in her mid-forties and responsible for the Postal Service employee communications program, meeting LeMond at a fancy restaurant in France was certainly more exciting than meeting Merckx or Indurain. LeMond was famous, the only true American cycling celebrity, and he had come over to the table specifically to meet her. As LeMond would later recall under oath, the conversation led to an interesting window into Weisel’s views on doping.

  “Thank you for your support of the sport,” LeMond said.

  “Oh, we are just thrilled to be able to sponsor this team,” she responded.

  “Listen, I am really sorry that you have to see this mess this year. The sport obviously has a lot of work to do, but it is cleaning up,” LeMond said.

  Weisel interjected. “I think this is bullshit,” he said. “Riders should be able to take whatever they want.”

  Myers didn’t flinch, and LeMond assumed this was the kind of thing Weisel had been saying to her as the Festina scandal unfolded. LeMond was taken aback, shocked that a team owner would be so open about his acceptance of doping—an American, no less, and in front of an American sponsor. (In fact Weisel had told Myers that the Postal team was clean, and she had believed him, she later told us.)

  LeMond left the table with a sick feeling in his stomach. He worried about the future of the sport, and the health of the riders involved. Like many people in that world, he saw the Festina doping busts as a crossroads for cycling, the point at which the major players would have to make a decision—either cycling had to clean itself up, or the cyclists had to be much more careful about being caught.

  After his conversation with Weisel at the restaurant, LeMond felt relieved that he had nothing to do with the US Postal team. He had been close to becoming part of it, but Gorski had reneged on the deal he made with LeMond in Minnesota. At first, LeMond felt he had been screwed over. Now he felt he had dodged a bullet.

  LeMond had also pulled all of his money out of Weisel’s investment bank, despite the hefty annual returns. He and Kathy had visited Weisel at his bank in the TransAmerica Tower in San Francisco. Weisel had bragged about his multimillion-dollar art collection that covered the office walls. Both Kathy and Greg left with a bad feeling about Weisel, and decided to invest elsewhere.

  While Lance was rebuilding his endurance, his training was more important than ever. He’d become obsessive about everything he ate, how long he rested between workouts, and exactly how far and how hard he rode every day. And he really needed to rebuild muscle. Chemo and his lack of exercise had robbed him of much of his muscle mass, which he was working to rebuild.

  That loss of muscle had the potential to help Armstrong. It was the equivalent of a forest fire, which clears away all the unnecessary brush and dead trees. Through the training designed by Ferrari, he was now developing only the muscles essential for cycling. By August, he found that he could climb slightly faster at a more sustained pace than he had in the past.

  Lance and Kristin felt optimistic enough about his cycling comeback that they purchased a villa situated on a wooded hillside in Nice, France. Armstrong kept his EPO in the butter compartment of his refrigerator, so he code-named it butter. If the French police came knocking and wanted to search the house, presumably, Kristin or Lance could warn each other to throw out the “butter.”

  Though Armstrong and his teammates feared the F
rench police catching them with EPO, they were unconcerned about getting caught via a drug test, since there was still no test that could directly detect it in the body. But the UCI had implemented a new blood test that screened riders for high hematocrits. Since the highest natural hematocrit was about 50 percent, the UCI said that any rider found to have a higher percentage would be suspended from racing for fifteen days. The team had a plan for that, too. As a general practice, riders and staff were given enough advance warning before the tests that the team doctors could inject the riders’ veins with a saline solution, which caused their hematocrit levels to drop temporarily. These invaluable advance warnings suggested that the UCI wasn’t serious about curbing EPO use—it simply had a public relations problem on its hands and needed to appear to be reacting.

  In late August, Ferrari told Armstrong that he was strong enough to race the 1998 Vuelta a España. It would be his first Grand Tour after cancer, and he really just wanted to finish. He had no expectations about how well he’d do. But Armstrong had one thing going for him that set him apart from most of the other participants in the event, who had raced an entire, grueling season: He was relatively well rested.

  The Vuelta began in September. By the end of the first week of the race, Armstrong was in twentieth place. But by the end of the second week, he surged ahead, ranking between fourth and sixth. On most stages, he felt good, and his US Postal teammates were mobilized to help him keep his position.

  One night, about midway through the race, Lance’s teammate Vaughters went to Lance’s hotel room to borrow his laptop. While he was there, Lance went into the bathroom to brush his teeth, then emerged, toothbrush still in hand and—in what Vaughters took to be a show of bravado—pulled out a syringe full of EPO and injected it into his stomach. Vaughters had never seen him do this, but it was no secret that both men were on the drug. Celaya kept all the riders’ hematocrit levels on his spreadsheet, and Armstrong enjoyed keeping track of his teammates’ data so he’d know who was using EPO. Without EPO, a rider’s hematocrit could drop by as much as 30 percent during a long race like the Vuelta; with EPO, the hematocrits recorded in Celaya’s notebook stayed consistent throughout the race.