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

by Reed Albergotti

  For the 1999 season, Bruyneel brought in a new team doctor, Luis Garcia del Moral—whose nickname was El Gato Negro, or the black cat. Every European professional team at that time was required to have a staff doctor, there for the ostensibly legitimate purpose of caring for all the riders on the team, while often playing a role in the increasingly sophisticated doping programs. Only the top riders such as Armstrong could afford their own doctors, although Armstrong paid Ferrari to work with Hamilton, too. The rest of the team had del Moral, who was based in the town of Valencia, not far from where Bruyneel lived when he was racing for ONCE. The doctor ran a small clinic that doubled as a rehab center for sports injuries, and a sort of drug distribution center. After years of working with cyclists, soccer players, and tennis stars, he had become an expert in doping.

  Less conservative than Celaya, del Moral was fascinated by the way drugs affected cyclists’ bodies. He relished the possibility of taking a cyclist who was struggling to make it in the pro peloton and boosting him to another level with a cocktail of proprietary injections and pills. In his mind, this was the pinnacle of medicine, and it sure beat what he saw as the role of general practitioners and family doctors—handing out antibiotics and placebos to make hypochondriacs feel better.

  Del Moral was charged with making sure the US Postal team riders were kept “topped off,” or supercharged, throughout the season. When he showed up at the team’s preseason training camp, he was armed with spreadsheets detailing each rider’s comprehensive season-long doping program. The team devised a system for the administration of the drugs. Every third or fourth day during the Tour, the riders would gather in the camper. Then del Moral or his assistant, Jose “Pepe” Martí would pop into the camper, bringing syringes with EPO. After the injections, the riders stuffed the syringes into soda cans. Del Moral would quickly leave, disposing of the cans. In addition to EPO, del Moral was also injecting the riders with cortisone and Actovegin, an extract made from calf’s blood that he believed improved oxygen flow to the muscles.

  In case the French police decided to raid team vehicles, Armstrong and some of the other riders on the team, including Americans Tyler Hamilton and Kevin Livingston, took extra measures to ensure the secrecy and safety of their drugs. They hired a Frenchman named Philippe Maire, who had worked as a gardener at Armstrong’s villa in Nice, to make secret deliveries of EPO. The riders called Maire Motoman because he drove around on a motorcycle to deliver the EPO, chilled in refrigerated panniers on the side of the motorcycle.

  As the race neared, Armstrong was, for the first time, entering a Grand Tour with a long-range goal. If he wanted an overall victory, he had to think strategically about when he wanted to move and how he wanted to conserve energy throughout the race.

  The Tour de France changes every year. In 1999, it began with a 4.2-mile prologue time trial. The first few stages were flat. The eighth stage was a 34.8-mile time trial. Then the mountains began. There were two significant stages in the Alps. The first ended with a climb to Sestriere and the second ended with a climb up Alpe d’Huez, one of the most famous climbs of the Tour. In the third week, there were two stages in the Pyrenees, followed by an individual time trial on the second-to-last day. The good news for Armstrong heading into the race was that the two previous winners, Jan Ullrich and Italian Marco Pantani, weren’t racing. Ullrich, who won in 1997, was injured. Pantani, embroiled in controversy for going over the 50 percent hematocrit rule in the Giro d’Italia, had withdrawn.

  Armstrong began the Tour with a shocking win of the July 4 prologue time trial in the town of Le Puy du Fou. When Armstrong pulled on the leader’s yellow jersey, Bill Stapleton’s eyes welled up with tears, while his wife, Laura, cried like a baby. With all Armstrong had endured, it seemed to Stapleton the most life-affirming moment he had ever witnessed. And the drama was just about to begin.

  Armstrong lost the yellow jersey the following day, but that was to be expected. The real race for the victory didn’t begin for a week.

  The time trial in the town of Metz was supposed to be a close one. Even before cancer, Armstrong had never been the strongest time trial rider. But now he turned in an astonishing performance, winning the race by 58 seconds, crushing his closest competitor, Alex Zülle of Switzerland. Armstrong had again slipped into the lead in the Tour by 2 minutes, 20 seconds. Nobody in France could believe what was happening.

  Neither could Greg LeMond, who was in France leading a group of mostly American cyclists on rides along the Tour de France route. When LeMond saw Armstrong dominate the time trial at such high speeds, he began to think that maybe Armstrong wasn’t crazy when he said he thought he could win the Tour de France.

  LeMond knew that the mountains began two days later, after a rest day, and he began to worry that Armstrong perhaps doubted his ability to climb. LeMond wanted to encourage him, so he traveled to the start of the first mountain stage and found the US Postal team bus, where Gorski told him he could find Lance. LeMond climbed aboard the bus and found Armstrong.

  “Man, you are just flying up there. Unbelievable,” he said. “I am so happy for you.”

  “Thanks,” Lance responded.

  “I’ve got to tell you, your capability of doing that time trial, that’ll translate directly into climbing,” LeMond said. “Don’t let anybody tell you that you’re a time trialist and not a climber. If you can time trial like that, you can win the Tour,” LeMond said.

  “I know,” Lance responded dismissively.

  LeMond was taken aback by Armstrong’s cockiness and slight air of disrespect. He left the team bus feeling silly for making the effort to encourage Armstrong, who obviously did not need it.

  The next day, on the final climb, Armstrong found himself in a small group of elite climbers, including Zülle, who was considered his most dangerous competitor. Suddenly, Armstrong got out of the saddle and began sprinting up the mountain. There was something almost eerie about his ascent on that dark and rainy day, his bright yellow jersey dim in the waning light.

  This was the kind of attack that he might have tried up a short climb in Philadelphia, or during one of the classics. But Sestriere is 6,670 feet high. It is a monster. And the next day, the riders would have to do it again up Alpe d’Huez. The attack looked too fast. It looked like Armstrong was being foolish—wasting himself. But he didn’t slow down. He kept blasting up the hill, going so fast that when the road bent, Armstrong had to take the turns wide because he was going so fast—uphill. Armstrong crossed the finish line all alone, wearing his yellow jersey and his blue US Postal cap. He was now leading the race by more than 6 minutes.

  The shot of Armstrong crossing the line that rain-soaked day ended up in newspapers all over the world, and would remain a lasting image in the sport. It was the day Armstrong became famous around the world.

  LeMond was watching the race at a hotel in a nearby town with his group of tourists. As Armstrong conquered Sestriere, everyone in the room, including LeMond, was cheering like mad. Except one man. A former mechanic on the Festina team named Cyrille Perrin tapped LeMond on the shoulder and whispered to LeMond, “sur le jus.”

  LeMond knew what he meant—Armstrong was juicing. But how could the mechanic know this? “What? Why?” LeMond asked, amid the commotion and the cheering.

  “No effort,” Perrin said. “Look at his eyes, his breathing,” he said. Perrin went on to explain that cyclists were now using a powerful cocktail of drugs that propelled them up mountains without effort. “They feel no pain,” he said to LeMond.

  LeMond continued to cheer. He was truly inspired by Armstrong’s comeback and didn’t want to think about him doping. He wanted to believe that after Festina, the sport was cleaning itself up. But he felt strange, although he eventually put Perrin’s comments out of his mind and forgot about it.

  Betsy Andreu had watched the race on television, with her newborn, “Little Frankie.” As she watched Frankie pulling up Sestriere, she couldn’t believe it. She’d never seen her husban
d climb like that in any race. Betsy picked up the phone and called Becky Rast, the wife of one of the Tour de France photographers, James Startt.

  “Are you watching? Do you see Frankie pulling?” she said.

  “Yeah, he’s doing great!” Becky said.

  “He’s not a climber. He shouldn’t be pulling.” Becky was silent on the other line. Betsy had told Becky about the hospital room scene, and now they both knew what Frankie’s superb climbing meant: He was juiced, and Betsy was furious. She called Frankie that night.

  “What’s that about?” she asked.

  “What?”

  “You are not a climber. You fucking gave in, didn’t you? How long has this been going on?”

  “I don’t want to talk about it,” Frankie said.

  “We’re going to talk about it!”

  “I’m too tired.”

  “I’m not going to put up with this. I’m not going to do it,” Betsy said, and hung up the phone.

  The next day, Armstrong extended his lead again by more than a minute. By this time, his lead was so safe that the US Postal team stopped using EPO and other performance-enhancing drugs for the final week of the Tour. They didn’t need it, and it wasn’t worth the risk.

  As Armstrong raced toward victory, the media was eating it up. For a survivor of cancer to prevail in such a grueling race, outperforming not just everyone else in the field but his own past achievements, was extraordinary. The French paper Le Monde hailed it as a major achievement in sports history. The New York Times described it as the equivalent of putting a “man on the moon,” and not simply because Neil and Lance shared the same last name. Armstrong’s own cancer doctors proclaimed it to be a scientific miracle.

  On July 14, the evening after Armstrong protected his lead on Alpe d’Huez, Armstrong invited Abt to join the team for dinner at the ski resort atop the mountain. Armstrong was “eager,” Abt said in an article that ran a couple of days later, to discuss “innuendo” in the European press about his victory. Over two bowls of risotto and blueberry pie, Armstrong explained to Abt that reporters could not accept his performance as legitimate. The Festina affair, Armstrong said, had made everyone suspicious of him. Abt, of course, must have considered Armstrong’s paranoia odd. The European press was hailing Armstrong as the symbol of a new, clean era of cycling.

  But Abt spun the story the way Armstrong wanted. “How else, some of the European news media are asking, can somebody who underwent chemotherapy for testicular cancer two and a half years ago be so dominant now in the world’s toughest bicycle race?” Abt wrote. The truth was, nobody was asking that question. Abt, in his article, offered two examples of this so-called negative coverage. One was a Belgian newspaper headline: ARMSTRONG PUTS A BOMB UNDER THE TOUR. The word bomb, Abt wrote, was code for drugs. The second example: A French newspaper that compared Armstrong’s performance to the 1996 victory of Danish cyclist Bjarne Riis. The comparison made sense. Armstrong and Riis had a similar body type and style and Riis’s win was unexpected. But Abt wrote that Riis had come under suspicion for doping, therefore the comparison was a veiled accusation against Armstrong. It was a ridiculous argument.

  Abt wrote that Armstrong was drug tested every day as the race leader, and proceeded to tout the meaningfulness of his victory to the cancer community. “My story is a success story in the world of cancer,” Armstrong was quoted as saying. “A lot of people relate to my story. In America, in France, in Europe, they relate to this story,” he said. Armstrong said he wouldn’t be stupid enough to take drugs after cancer. “I’ve been on my deathbed,” he said.

  Armstrong’s sudden paranoia wasn’t delusional. It was tactical. He was using Abt to get out in front of a story that was going to come out at some point. The team had known for about a week that a urine sample from the first day of the Tour had been tested and found to contain traces of banned corticosteroids. The result had stayed quiet for nearly two weeks, but the French newspaper Le Monde had found out and was preparing to go to press. If Armstrong’s sample was officially declared “positive,” he could potentially be disqualified from the race. No Tour de France leader had ever been disqualified for doping. Not only would it sully Armstrong’s reputation and his inspiring message of cancer survivorship, but it would destroy the entire atmosphere of the race. It would be cycling’s second major doping scandal in two years. Abt had unwittingly helped Armstrong create a narrative—albeit a fabricated one—that the French were “out to get” him.

  In fact, Armstrong had been injected with the steroids before the race. In previous races that season, the UCI had not tested for the drug. But after the Festina affair, the UCI had been under pressure from the International Olympic Committee to begin testing for the substance, and Armstrong had been ensnared by this unexpected turn of events.

  The USPS team was more concerned about Le Monde than it was about punishment from UCI. The UCI might quietly let the test go, they thought, since it wasn’t in their interest to have the winner test positive only a year after Festina. But if the test results were published, the UCI would have to take some action.

  When they learned that Le Monde was going to publish a story, Armstrong, Gorski, and Weisel gathered around the massage table at the team hotel to discuss their plan of action. Emma O’Reilly, the soigneur who was at the massage table, recalled that they wanted to come up with a story—that the corticosteroid came from some kind of medication. According to O’Reilly’s sworn testimony, the men concocted a plan. Dr. Garcia del Moral would write a prescription for a saddle-sore drug that contained corticosteroids, backdating it so that it would appear as though the prescription had been written long before the test. Gorski and Weisel deny O’Reilly’s account.

  The next day, the story broke in Le Monde, and the team’s public relations guru, Dan Osipow, spent all morning fielding questions from every cycling reporter in the world. He explained that Armstrong had used an ointment that he didn’t know contained a drug that was banned. Later that day, the UCI made its announcement: Armstrong would be cleared of the test because he had produced a doctor’s prescription for the substance.

  Some reporters, including David Walsh of The Sunday Times of London, who up until then had been so admiring, were suspicious. But nobody wanted to believe that the hero of the hour, Lance Armstrong, could have cheated. It was too heartbreaking. Too bleak. Abt’s piece in The New York Times did not question the validity of the “saddle sore” story, and he glossed over the details. The paper ignored the story after that.

  By the time Armstrong won the event’s final time trial in the French theme park Futuroscope, the positive test result had been forgotten. Armstrong was leading the Tour de France by 7 minutes, 37 seconds. It was a trouncing.

  The next day, Armstrong was going to roll into Paris wearing the yellow jersey. An American on an American team. A cancer survivor. This was huge, monumental. It was something to be celebrated, not compromised by some nitpicking concern about a prescription drug. If the official line was that Armstrong had used a simple saddle-sore cream, then the media—and the public—were eager to believe it.

  When the moment arrived, Americans waving American and Texan flags lined the cobblestoned roads of the Champs-Élysées. People had flown over from the United States just to watch the finish. As the peloton entered Paris and headed onto the Champs-Élysées, the US Postal team rode at the front of the pack, keeping Armstrong safe and out of the path of any crashes that could dampen the day. The pack did its traditional ten laps at warp speed around the Champs to cap off the race, while the sprinters hammered it for a chance at one final stage win. But all anybody wanted to see was Armstrong, in his yellow jersey, crossing the line.

  After the win, the team and their managers, including Weisel and Gorski, celebrated by drinking champagne and riding victory laps around the Champs with Armstrong. Weisel had done what no American team owner had ever done before. He had won the Tour de France with an American team—the equivalent, as Borysewicz had told him tw
elve years before, of winning the World Series with a French baseball team.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  LANCE ARMSTRONG INCORPORATED

  A few hours after Armstrong stood atop the Tour winner’s podium, it was time to celebrate. The US Postal team and about two hundred of their friends and sponsors gathered at a huge party in Armstrong’s honor, which was held in the elegant dining salon on the first floor of the Musée d’Orsay, the vast converted train station that houses the world’s greatest collection of Impressionist art.

  The crowd milled around a lavish spread of food, champagne, and fine Bordeaux, and each table was set with a bowl of apples, a tribute to Lance’s perseverance in the mountains. Why apples? As Lance charged up the seven-mile Sestriere, he had shouted, “How do you like them fuckin’ apples?!” into the team radio.

  An ice sculpture of a cyclist had been installed in the main room. There, under a ceiling decorated in magnificent rococo style and hung with dazzling crystal chandeliers, Lance signed autographs and posed for photographs with his mom and Kristin, now nearly seven months pregnant with their first child. President Clinton and Texas governor George W. Bush had both called him earlier to congratulate him.

  The evening fête was paid for by Thom Weisel, who, as an avid art collector, chose the venue. Over the years, Weisel had spent millions of dollars of his own money to keep the team afloat. Finally, his outlay was paying off—in fame and glory if not in money.

  Lance, whose public speaking skills had improved significantly in the year following his cancer treatments, thanks to all the speeches he’d given about his recovery at fund-raisers for his fledgling foundation, stood up to address the team—my team, as he referred to them that night. Lance’s speech was a disarmingly modest tribute to the support he had received from his teammates. He told the crowd that his own role in the Tour win was “equal to just about the zipper” of that jersey. “The rest of the body, the sleeves, the collar” of the yellow jersey were there because of “my team.”