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

by Reed Albergotti

  Armstrong had won his fifth Tour de France in a row, matching the record of Miguel Indurain, the Spanish champion. The victory was a huge turning point for Armstrong. Even with the team weakened by illnesses and injuries, and with the distractions of the Walsh book and his failing marriage, Armstrong had prevailed.

  And now Lance was not just a celebrity, but he was about to be a bachelor celebrity. Although Kristin and their children had joined him at the finish line of the Tour, there was no saving the marriage. By October, he and Kristin finalized their separation, Lance filed for divorce, and they went into mediation to reach a settlement.

  That same month, Armstrong flew to Las Vegas to attend Andre Agassi’s Grand Slam for Children Benefit Concert. His contribution was to donate a bike ride with himself in Austin, which was auctioned off to the highest bidder for $120,000. The concert had a star lineup that featured Elton John, Billy Joel, Sarah McLachlan, and Sheryl Crow. Armstrong, who considered himself single by then, began flirting with Crow. Within a month, the Austin American-Statesman reported that the two were dating. They were keeping the relationship quiet, the story said, because of Armstrong’s pending divorce.

  In the spring of 2004, Armstrong flew to Nike headquarters for a meeting. Its sales executives had an idea. Earlier, one of them had seen Kevin Garnett, a basketball player for the Minnesota Timberwolves, wearing an orange-ish thing resembling a hospital bracelet around his wrist, which he snapped, rubber band–style, to give himself a little sting every time he made a mistake. Soon after, Nike developed a similar product called Baller Bands that became popular with street basketball players.

  To broaden the appeal of the item, some Nike executives came up with the idea of emblazoning the bands with different messages and using them as promotion items. They pitched Armstrong and his people on the idea and suggested putting the Nike swoosh and a slogan that embodied Armstrong’s story on a yellow version of the bracelet. The money would go to his cancer charity, the Lance Armstrong Foundation. They floated a number of possible phrases and finally settled on a single word: Livestrong—a play on Armstrong’s name as well as a motto that seemed to suggest a lifestyle. The message spoke to the cancer survivors Armstrong advocated for, but it could also appeal to people facing many other kinds of challenges.

  Armstrong thought it was a terrible idea that wouldn’t go anywhere. But he agreed to give it a try. Sheryl Crow wore one during a Today show appearance, and later showed up at the Grammy Awards wearing a yellow Roberto Cavalli gown and a Livestrong bracelet on one arm. Then Lance and Sheryl went on Oprah’s TV show to plug the foundation, and 900,000 Oprah viewers bought Livestrong bracelets that same day.

  Ordinary people—not just athletes—began wearing the bracelets. Everyone wanted a piece of Lance.

  CHAPTER TEN

  A NEW GEAR

  Armstrong wasted no time moving on after his marriage. He went to Hollywood, partied with Sheryl Crow, attended movie premieres and Lakers games. He was in the limelight as never before. New York Times sportswriter George Vecsey described Armstrong’s lifestyle as “sybaritic.” Producers were working on a feature film about his life, with Matt Damon rumored to be playing his character, according to Variety and other Hollywood trade publications.

  Lance’s relationship with Sheryl Crow was all over the media, and it actually helped soften the blow to his image caused by his shattered nuptials. It was shocking to some fans that Armstrong would leave his wife. He was an almost Jesus-like figure to them, resurrected from the death grip of cancer so that we might all be inspired. But if he were going to leave his wife and run off with a pop singer, he had picked the right one. Crow was down-to-earth, classy, and grown-up, not some twentysomething starlet.

  Armstrong’s image was further burnished by the role he played as a doting father. After the divorce, Kristin and the children had settled down in Austin, so in order to see his three young children, Armstrong decided to spend more time stateside, training in Texas and California. He told reporters that he would rather lose the Tour de France than be away from his kids. Further reinforcing the idea that he had realigned his priorities, Armstrong called Jan Ullrich the “favorite” in the 2004 Tour de France. Inevitably, the reports got back to Ullrich in Germany, who said Armstrong was using the media to play mind games with him.

  Far from being ready to cede the 2004 Tour to Ullrich or anyone else, the truth was that now that Armstrong had catapulted himself into the stratosphere of celebrity life, he wanted his fame to last. He knew the best way—the only way—to make that happen was to win a record sixth Tour de France. Nobody had done it before, and it was a feat not likely to be repeated. Armstrong was as focused as ever. The previous year’s race, though, had been too close. Armstrong had nearly lost to Ullrich, and now that Ullrich had sensed a slight weakness in Armstrong and gotten a whiff of the smell of victory, he was sure to dedicate himself more seriously to winning. Armstrong had always been able to count on Ullrich showing up to the early-season races overweight and weakened from an off-season of drinking and eating whatever he wanted; but he wasn’t confident he could count on that anymore. So Armstrong had to be proactive—and he began with a radical upgrade of his equipment.

  Armstrong summoned his sponsors to a meeting at the hippest hotel in Los Angeles: the Standard—a white stucco building on Sunset Boulevard. The sponsors walked past the minimalist, modern bar and the outdoor swimming pool, where models and actresses were showing off their perfect bodies. They entered the hotel conference room and sat around a large table, while Armstrong and his agent, Bill Stapleton, explained that the 2003 Tour win had been too close for comfort. There were problems with nutrition, clothing, and bike components, and all these problems had to be resolved. Armstrong wanted his sponsors to coordinate their efforts in order to make sure that every piece of his equipment was designed to fit perfectly with every other piece and be maximally functional as well as comfortable during racing conditions.

  Armstrong instructed Trek, which had become the nation’s largest bike maker and which dedicated 30 to 40 percent of its marketing budget to sponsoring Armstrong, and Japanese component maker Shimano, which sponsored the team as well as outfitting it with equipment, to work together on their designs so that the aluminum and titanium chains, cranks, and cogs matched up perfectly with the structure of the carbon fiber bike frame. Armstrong had already pushed Shimano to add an extra gear to its rear cassettes, and Shimano had obliged.

  Armstrong told sunglass maker Oakley to work with helmet maker Giro so that his glasses fit snugly within the contours of his helmet. He also wanted the sunglass arms to be sized to fit the small holes on the top of the helmet so that he could remove glasses and place them securely atop his head when he got off the bike. And on top of that, he wanted the glasses to look stylish. Interested as ever in the science of everything to do with racing, Armstrong stipulated that the designs should be tested in wind tunnels, which were mainly used by aerospace companies, to ensure that the sunglasses and helmets created the least amount of drag possible.

  Lance wanted something similar to be done with the bikes he rode. He had already spent some time in a wind tunnel at the University of Washington the previous off-season, which had led to the development of a one-piece skin suit designed by Nike for use during time trials. The suit was put together without seams and composed of different types of fabric for specific areas of the body, the aim being to do everything possible to lower Armstrong’s drag in the wind. Armstrong’s new sponsor, chip maker AMD, also got involved, lending computer processing power to the effort to further improve the Nike skinsuit and the aerodynamics of the bikes and other equipment.

  When it came time to test all the newly designed equipment, Johan Bruyneel didn’t want to interrupt Lance’s training schedule, so the sponsors used a body double for the tests—a Canadian triathlete who had the exact same body dimensions as Lance, even down to the slight hump in his back when he was arched forward over the handlebars.

 
; The attempt to combine all of these technological innovations into one comprehensive, carefully integrated program was dubbed F-One, to reflect Lance’s intention for cycling to have access to high-tech equipment that was as outstandingly excellent as that used by a sport like Formula One, the auto racing series featuring the world’s fastest circuit-racing cars. The inspiration for doing the wind tunnel testing had come from the top Formula One team, BMW-Williams, which had begun to use computational fluid dynamics technology (a fancy term for wind tunnel tests) to help its race cars become more aerodynamically efficient.

  Armstrong’s efforts to gain an edge didn’t all revolve around high-tech gadgetry. In the interest of shaving minutes and seconds off his race times, he and his team paid equally obsessive attention to some of the basics. For example, even before the debut of F-One, team mechanic Julien de Vriese had been putting Armstrong’s tires in storage in a cool, dry cellar, and allowing them to stay there for six or seven years to age, like a fine wine. De Vriese’s theory was that the aging process would harden rubber in the tires, making them more resistant to flats.

  F-One was also a brilliant business move because it brought more publicity to Lance’s sponsors and gave them a chance to speak to the world about what went into the making of their products. The glowing newspaper articles and TV shows describing the futuristic technology gave the sponsors invaluable exposure, which they didn’t hesitate to exploit to increase their sales. Thus the extra gear that Shimano added to Lance’s bikes was hailed as such a huge success that it was quickly adopted across the cycling industry. This helped Shimano boost its net profit projections by 42 percent after the 2003 Tour de France, which in turn caused its stock to move upward.

  The cost of the F-One project exceeded $1 million, counting the team’s time and investment. But when Lance took his million-dollar bike out of the wind tunnel and put it on the road . . . well, he didn’t like it much. After riding it in a couple of races, he told Bruyneel that his hips hurt, and that he was thinking about going back to his old bike. Ultimately, that’s what he did, and Bruyneel had to pick up the phone to inform Trek and the rest of the F-One team that Lance was putting the kibosh on the bike they had devoted such extraordinary resources to developing for him.

  F-One was all about the science of Lance’s equipment. But, as the title of his autobiography suggests, the story of his success was not simply “about the bike.” At a time when the American media were grasping for ways to explain to viewers what made Armstrong so remarkable, there was another story to be told—about the science of Lance himself. At least in the United States the media were willing to give Armstrong the benefit of the doubt about doping because of a growing mythology about him as an extraordinary physiological specimen, a man who had come back from a cancer that had nearly killed him and transformed his body into a machine destined for greatness. And Armstrong and his core group of publicists were happy to provide the measurements and statistics to bring that story to life.

  One of their chief weapons was Edward F. Coyle, a professor of sports science at the University of Texas, who had studied Lance in his Austin sports lab over a period of seven years, from 1992 to 1999. Coyle’s findings, which were eventually published in the June 2005 issue of the Journal of Applied Physiology, included his conclusion that, even if Lance were to become completely sedentary, his oxygen-carrying capacity (VO2 max) would match the “highest values normal men can achieve with training.” He also remarked on the size of Armstrong’s heart and its ability to beat fast for an extended period of time, pumping exceptionally high levels of oxygen-rich blood to his muscles.

  Coyle’s research suggested that between the ages of twenty-one and twenty-eight, a time period that included his being diagnosed and treated for cancer, Lance had improved his muscular efficiency and therefore his cycling power production (the amount of power he generated when consuming a given amount of oxygen) by 8 percent—a remarkable advantage, given that only a 1 to 3 percent difference separates the winner from his competitors in most races. And he had accomplished this even while losing weight prior to each of his Tours de France, so that his power per kilogram of body weight ratio improved by 18 percent.

  Another part of the story was that Lance extracted twice as much oxygen from each breath as the average twenty-year-old, while producing less lactic acid—the punishing burn. That meant that when he pushed beyond his aerobic capacity, such as on a sprint, he was able to maintain full power for longer than his competition.

  In terms of the “tactics” Lance used to enhance his performance, there was his routine of training and recovery at high altitudes, to increase his oxygen-carrying capacity. When there’s less oxygen available to the lungs, as there is at high altitudes, the body creates more red blood cells, and more red blood cells increase a rider’s ability to use oxygen.

  These statistics—some of them highly questionable—eventually became the underpinning of America’s understanding of how Lance had come to dominate the Tour de France, and later a key argument for Lance and his lawyers to use against those who accused him of doping.

  Dr. Coyle’s research on Armstrong was later questioned by scientists, and he was forced to admit an error in some of his calculations involving Armstrong’s muscular efficiency. But Coyle stood by his overall findings, even if his math was off, and accused the scientists of targeting him because of a vendetta against Armstrong himself. Armstrong’s heart, it turns out, was not so remarkably large among top athletes, and his VO2 max was normal for high-level endurance athletes. Armstrong may have been a great athlete, but his dominance over his peers couldn’t be explained by one single scientifically measurable thing.

  • • •

  In the off-season leading up to the 2004 Tour, things could not have been going better for Armstrong. He was no longer just the most famous cyclist in the world; he was among the most famous athletes in the world. He was living the life of a globe-trotting celebrity. If all went according to plan and he won a sixth Tour de France, he would become an immortal sports legend by the end of July. Recognizing his economic value to his team, Armstrong approached Weisel with a new demand: He wanted to be given an 11.5 percent ownership stake in Tailwind Sports, the company Weisel had founded and that owned the US Postal Service team. Weisel and his board of directors agreed, voting to transfer shares to Armstrong for a nominal fee, thus diluting their ownership. They also made Lance’s agent, Bill Stapleton, CEO of Tailwind and gave his agency, Capital Sports & Entertainment, its own 11.5 percent stake.

  But even as Lance seemed to just go from one triumph to the next, trouble was looming. David Walsh was making progress on his book. He had a new source—Betsy Andreu, Frankie’s wife. The previous summer, Walsh had called Betsy at her home in Michigan on a tip that she might have some good information. He explained that he was working on a book about Armstrong that was going to prove he had doped to win the Tour de France. Instead of hanging up immediately, as her husband would have wanted her to do, Betsy was intrigued enough to begin speaking with Walsh. She liked him and found his quirky Irish accent engaging. However, she was cautious. She knew that whatever she said about Armstrong could have a ripple effect on her husband. But Walsh had convinced Betsy to allow him to write about the hospital room scene from 1996.

  It wasn’t long before Armstrong got word of Walsh’s conversation with Betsy Andreu. He was furious—and nervous. He and his advisers, namely Bill Stapleton and his business manager, Bart Knaggs, thought they could deflect any allegations from the masseuse, Emma O’Reilly. Armstrong could argue that she had been fired from the team, giving her an apparent motive to make up damning stories about him. Walsh had promised to pay O’Reilly for her many hours spent fact-checking her interview transcripts against her diary. And he told her she would have legal protection, which further compromised her legitimacy as an accuser. Information from Walsh’s other main source to date, Steve Swart, hadn’t made much of a dent. Walsh had published Swart’s allegations in articles in The
Sunday Times—without naming him—and they had drawn little attention.

  But if Betsy Andreu was talking now, that was another matter. After all, she was the wife of someone who knew Armstrong quite well and had been a close friend.

  Frankie tried to play the role of peacemaker. When Armstrong asked him about Betsy’s conversation with Walsh, he told him that Betsy hadn’t meant any harm—she was simply trying to get Walsh off her back, and she had given him the names of other wives to talk to in order to pawn him off on somebody else, an explanation that Armstrong didn’t buy.

  “[T]he more i think about this though, the harder i find it to understand why your wife did what she did,” Armstrong wrote in an e-mail, accusing Betsy of sneaking around behind his back. “i know betsy is not a fan, and that’s fine, but by helping to bring me down is not going to help y’alls situation at all,” Armstrong wrote. “there is a direct link to all of our success here and i suggest you remind her of that.”

  Frankie Andreu tried again to fix the situation: “Lance, I gain absolutely nothing from seeing Walsh try to fuck you. If that was my interest I could have talked with him and told you nothing. I didn’t do that. When Walsh called, I freaked. I really couldn’t believe it because all I ever have heard is how bad this guy [is] and his only point is to take people down. I went off on Betsy to not deal with this guy, she didn’t understand what the big deal was,” he wrote.

  “I don’t want to see you get taken down. I also have a lot at stake, besides my livlihood [sic], my reputation. I’ve always watched your back and it’s no different now. . . . frankie.”