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

by Reed Albergotti

  Bill Bock and Travis Tygart were both regular church goers, but they had vastly different personalities. Tygart tended to display the characteristics of the stern god of the Hebrew Bible, whereas Bock seemed more like the compassionate, New Testament version. Both men viewed doping in sports as a black-and-white issue. Dopers are cheaters and they need to be punished. Bock, however, was fond of saying that he sins every day, and though he’d like to think he would never try performance-enhancing drugs, he couldn’t possibly know what it’s like for professional athletes faced with the decision of whether to dope or risk career-altering consequences.

  USADA was offering Lance a chance for a deal: Come forward and admit to everything and face a relatively modest punishment. USADA intended to strip Armstrong of his final two Tour de France wins—they were within the official eight-year statute of limitations—and suspend him from competition for six months.

  To Bock, it seemed this would be a good, face-saving trade-off for Lance. By coming clean, he could hold on to most of his Tour wins, and he would probably be able to keep at least some of his sponsors. He could then use his role as a crusader against cancer to rehabilitate his public image. Bock told Levinstein that Lance had a limited window of time in which to respond, that he’d have to sit down with him and Travis Tygart in the coming weeks. If he didn’t, they would proceed with a case against him, leaving Lance with only two choices: He could accept whatever further punishment they decided to mete out, or challenge their findings in an arbitration before a three-person panel. Levinstein punted. He told Bock that he didn’t represent Armstrong “for this purpose” and referred Bock to Tim Herman. A few days passed. When Herman didn’t call Bock, Bock began to wonder whether Levinstein had even passed along his message, or whether the delay was an attempt to stall the agency’s case. Finally, Bock called Herman, who made a proposal: He wanted to set up a conference call and put Lance’s entire legal team on the line with Bock.

  Herman reconvened several of the lawyers who had defended Lance in the criminal case. The various attorneys had a wide range of skills and had played different roles during the criminal investigation. Robert D. Luskin, the lawyer referred to him by Karl Rove, took the lead. Lance also again retained the services of John Keker and Elliot Peters of San Francisco. During the criminal investigation, Keker and Peters had accused Novitzky of “repeated and flagrant” disclosures of secret grand jury information to the press and had asked a federal court in Los Angeles to hold law enforcement officials accountable for the leaks. The move was intended to discredit Novitzky in anticipation of a possible indictment by the grand jury.

  Lance’s lawyers were among the who’s who of $1,000-an-hour litigators. When they found themselves on the phone with Bill Bock and USADA’s legal affairs director, Chinwuba “Onye” Ikwuakor, they must have assumed they’d be in the power seat. After all, as general counsel of USADA, Bock was being paid by a nonprofit whose total annual budget was only $14 million, $19 million of which was funded by an annual government grant. USADA’s entire legal budget was less than what a month’s work on a big case by one of Lance’s two primary outside law firms would cost. USADA’s 2011 Form 990 income tax statement showed that it had paid Bock’s Indianapolis law firm $343,054 that year.

  Robert Luskin and John Keker went on the attack immediately, bombarding Bock with accusations of impropriety. They accused USADA of basing its case on witness testimony that was given to the grand jury in secret, which they said USADA should never have gotten their hands on in the first place. Although Novitzky and Tygart had worked together closely during the criminal investigation, Tygart always denied receiving any grand jury information from his friend. For their part, Armstrong’s lawyers denied that their client had ever used performance-enhancing drugs, and threatened a federal lawsuit that would sink USADA in a legal morass and devour its budget, should it take action. By the end of the forty-five-minute conversation, it was clear that Lance wouldn’t be meeting with Bock or Tygart.

  Armstrong was in a no-win situation. USADA wouldn’t tell him the specific punishment it woud dole out if he did come forward and admit everything. Would they ban him for two years? Four years? He had no idea. He knew that if he did come forward, it would surely end his lucrative endorsement deals and sully his public image. Armstrong believed fighting USADA was the better option. Even if he lost, there was a good possibility, he thought, that he could convince the public that he had been wrongly accused and that he had been unfairly targeted by USADA.

  However, with or without Lance, the USADA investigation was going forward. Ten of Lance’s former teammates and team employees, including his close friend George Hincapie, had already testified about doping on the US Postal team and the Discovery Channel team. All of those men had agreed to accept a deal: In exchange for a relatively minor suspension, they had come clean—not only about themselves and about Lance, but also about Johan Bruyneel and the three doctors, Michele Ferrari, Pedro Celaya, and Luis Garcia del Moral, as well as the assistant and drug courier, Pepe Martí.

  And now Lance was about to learn the consequences of refusing to negotiate with USADA on its terms. So was the public.

  On June 13—a day after the Lance Armstrong Foundation began promoting the “Ultimate Kona Ironman Experience with Lance”—Vanessa obtained a copy of USADA’s fifteen-page notice letter from a source with knowledge of the investigation, and the Journal published it, in its entirety, on its website that day. The letter, which was dated June 12 and written by Bill Bock, was addressed to Lance and the five other men, and accused the six of engaging in a conspiracy to cheat, and of pushing dangerous, performance-enhancing drugs on other riders on the team.

  The letter read, in part: “This action is being brought as a single consolidated action because for a significant part of the period from January 1, 1998, through the present, each of the Respondents has been part of a doping conspiracy involving team officials, employees, doctors, and elite cyclists of the United States Postal Service and Discovery Channel Cycling Teams who committed numerous violations of the Applicable Rules. The purpose of the USPS Conspiracy was to engage in the use of doping substances and techniques, which were either undetectable or difficult to detect in routine drug testing in order to advance the athletic and sporting achievements, financial wellbeing and status of the teams and their riders, employees, members and investors . . . as well as to prevent the truth regarding doping . . . from being revealed.” Under the subheading COVER-UP, the letter said that “beginning in 1999 and continuing through the present it has been an object of the Conspiracy to conceal and cover-up the doping conduct. . . . Numerous witnesses will testify that . . . Johan Bruyneel, Pedro Celaya, Michele Ferrari, Lance Armstrong and other co-conspirators engaged in activities to conceal their conduct and mislead anti-doping authorities including false statements to the media, false statements and false testimony given under oath and in legal proceedings, and attempts to intimidate, discredit, silence and retaliate against witnesses.”

  Lance was the lone cyclist who was still clinging to the lie, the letter said. “With the exception of Mr. Armstrong, every other US rider contacted by USADA [the document did not say how many of them there were or name any of the ten] regarding doping in cycling agreed to meet with USADA and to truthfully and fully describe their involvement in doping and all doping by others of which they were aware. Mr. Armstrong was likewise contacted through his legal counsel and given the opportunity to meet with USADA to fully and truthfully disclose all knowledge of anti-doping rule violations committed in the sport of cycling. However, Mr. Armstrong declined USADA’s offer.”

  The letter also cited “data from blood collections obtained by the UCI” in 2009 and 2010 that showed signs that Lance had used EPO or taken blood transfusions during his cycling comeback, too. As punishment for his transgressions, USADA suggested that Armstrong lose all his titles and receive a lifetime ban from competition—and it provided copies of the letter to both the World Triathlon Corpor
ation and the USA Triathlon, the sport’s governing body in this country. It also suggested lifetime bans for Bruyneel, Ferrari, Celaya, del Moral, and Martí.

  With the important Nice event just weeks away, Lance had returned to France to train on the Ironman course. He continued to maintain his innocence after USADA’s notice letter became public, saying in his statement to the press: “I have never doped, and, unlike many of my accusers, I have competed as an endurance athlete for twenty-five years with no spike in performance, passed more than five hundred drug tests and never failed one. . . . Any fair consideration of these allegations has and will continue to vindicate me.”

  On June 23, Lance spoke to Vanessa on the phone, complaining about USADA but acknowledging for the first time—in an indirect way—that he had in fact doped. “Say what you will about what I did or didn’t do ten years ago, they’re not playing by the rules,” he told her. “Here’s the deal: Athletes cheating in sports, that’s bad. But what these guys are doing is far worse!” USADA had a vendetta against him, he insisted. “The levels they have gone to try to fuck me and rig this thing are far worse than any athlete taking a transfusion or some EPO. This is far dirtier.”

  Our conversations with him, as well as with several people close to him, left us with the sense that he was of two minds about the punishment that USADA threatened to hand down. He knew that all seven of his titles were at risk; but he seemed to have convinced himself that that wouldn’t matter because, in the end, people would know who won the Tour de France. After all, his trademark yellow jerseys were everywhere: Seven of them decorated the walls of his foundation; another seven were tucked away in the upstairs media room of his 8,000-square-foot home in Austin, Texas; yet more hung on the walls of Thom Weisel’s San Francisco offices; still others were framed and on display at Mellow Johnny’s.

  However, it was clear to us that there was something else Armstrong wasn’t taking into account. It wasn’t just his titles that were at risk. When USADA sent its letter to Armstrong, along with copies to the World Triathlon Corporation and USA Triathlon, it was setting in motion a series of events that would block Lance from competing in pro-level triathlons. Armstrong had just rediscovered his love for the sport he had competed in as a teenager and was, he told friends, in the best shape of his life. But his plan was about to be scuttled because just after the release of the letter, the two major governing bodies of the sport announced that they were suspending him. According to the rules of both the World and the USA triathlon organizations, any athlete who is facing a sanction from USADA is immediately suspended from competing in events that they sponsor until the doping case is resolved.

  The ban meant that Lance wouldn’t be able to compete in the races that really mattered to him—those that can confer or deliver points toward world champion status. All year, he had been pursuing the dream of a slot in the 2012 Ironman World Championship. Now that was out of the question. No Ironman race would give up its certification by USA Triathlon to embrace Armstrong, and neither would any other competition that hoped to attract world champion contenders. The Chicago Marathon also rejected Armstrong’s bid to run in its October 7 race.

  Lance was furious. He told his friends that he felt like an artist who had been told he couldn’t paint another masterpiece.

  Lance had been stressed, perhaps even scared, during the twenty-one months when Jeff Novitzky was on his trail. The possibility that the grand jury seated in a Los Angeles courtroom might indict him and that the government might choose to go to trial must have been deeply alarming to him. But he had won that battle. That left USADA’s Travis Tygart as his only real opponent. Having retired from cycling, Lance felt initially that there was nothing much USADA could do to hurt him, so he had been relatively indifferent to any threat that Tygart represented. Now he was beginning to understand that Tygart might have it within his power to destroy his plans for the future.

  Lance still held out hope that public sentiment would turn against the USADA—particularly with the 2012 London Olympic Games only weeks away. Perhaps people would read the headlines about the agency’s move to charge him and ask themselves: What? I thought this shit was over and done with in February! With the Olympics about to begin, doesn’t USADA have better things to do?

  Lance also figured that the public would eventually tire of what he himself thought of as USADA’s publicity stunts. Tygart, in his mind, had tried to weasel his way into everything—baseball, football, and even boxing disputes. His charges against Lance, Lance believed, were motivated by his desire for public recognition and were advanced through testimony that Lance argued was bought and paid for by promises of anonymity and immunity for Lance’s former teammates.

  Nonetheless, Lance was seriously worried. He likened the prospect of going through USADA’s arbitration process to looking down the barrel of a shotgun. He knew that, in the ten years that the World Anti-Doping Agency code had been in place, athletes had rarely won in arbitration. The prospect of losing any case where Floyd Landis and Tyler Hamilton would be witnesses against him outraged him. He viewed himself as normal, and saw them as hypocrites, crazies—cycling “wing nuts.” If USADA could make a case, using a mountain of circumstantial evidence, and two of the three arbitrators agreed, he was done for. He’d already spent hundreds of thousands of dollars a month for more than a year on legal bills during the federal criminal investigation, and a lengthy arbitration with USADA would cost him millions more.

  The dilemma for Lance and his lawyers at this point was how to force USADA to operate in a way they believed was “fair.” From the perspective of Armstrong’s lawyers, the agency had way too much power. A three-person arbitration panel doesn’t need the kind of evidence required for a conviction in a criminal case; it just needs two out of three to agree on “a preponderance of evidence” against him, and USADA could strip Armstrong of his titles and deprive him of his livelihood. This was a much lower bar than required to convict someone in a criminal case, where the legal burden of proof consisted of convincing jurors of guilt “beyond a reasonable doubt.” Luskin and Keker were used to operating within the realm of the criminal justice system and federal courts, where they could exploit obscure laws to get cases dismissed and keep evidence away from jurors. Now they were fighting in the realm of arbitrations, where basic common sense ruled and the legal hurdles to such commonsense judgment were nonexistent. And they probably realized that to any person with half a brain, it might seem patently obvious that their client had cheated in cycling. Lance didn’t stand a chance.

  The strategy became simple: In an attempt to sway public opinion to Lance’s side, his lawyers would set out to trash USADA, accusing the agency of not playing fair, and suing it in federal court. The attack team kicked into immediate action. They called USADA’s investigation a witch hunt aimed at bringing down a hero, and accused Tygart and Bock of buying the testimony of riders by offering them reduced suspensions for cooperation. Luskin began publicly blasting USADA, calling its leaders “arrogant and craven.” In his statements to the press, he repeated Lance’s denials that he had ever doped.

  On July 9, Lance’s legal team filed a lawsuit in federal court in Austin, challenging the agency’s effort to bring its charges. The 109-page lawsuit read more like a college thesis on why the agency should not exist. It was filled with personal attacks on Travis Tygart. “Defendant Tygart shares with Agent Novitsky [sic] a well-publicized obsession with ‘getting’ Mr. Armstrong,” the complaint said. “Tygart evidently believes that USADA needs to bring a big case against a ‘big fish’ to justify its existence. One of, if not the primary, goals of this effort is to convince the United States government to continue and increase the tens of millions of dollars of unsupervised grants that the government already provides to USADA.” Tygart and Novitzky, it added, “offered other cyclists corrupt inducements—offers some cyclists could not refuse—to implicate Mr. Armstrong in exchange for saving the cyclists’ careers. If they refused to do so, USADA would work t
o ruin their careers, just as it is now attempting to end Mr. Armstrong’s career.” The lawsuit said that it is “a testament to USADA’s brazenness and callous disregard for its own mission that it seeks to strip Lance of his life’s work and his future livelihood”—elite competitive sport—“absent a single positive test.” The complaint also included massive amounts of information on the Lance Armstrong Foundation, which, it noted, provides free services to cancer survivors with “financial, emotional and practical challenges,” and said that Lance had been the foundation’s biggest individual donor, with contributions of more than $6.5 million. Lance’s legal team referred to the lawsuit strategy as a long shot, but one that was worth it because, in the very least, it sent a message to Lance’s sponsors that they were serious about taking on USADA and it might at least delay the process. The legal strategy turned out to be even less effective than they had hoped.

  Later that very same day, US District Judge Sam Sparks, to whom the case had been assigned, dismissed the suit. The crusty judge called it a “lengthy and bitter polemic” filled with “boilerplate” allegations. Basically, Judge Sparks was telling Armstrong’s lawyers he did not appreciate their use of the federal court’s time to try to advance their public relations agenda. “Armstrong is advised, in the strongest possible terms . . . to omit any improper argument, rhetoric, or irrelevant material from his future pleadings,” Judge Sparks wrote.

  A few days later, Armstrong’s lawyers refiled a significantly shorter suit that focused on challenging the constitutionality of the global Olympic anti-doping infrastructure. They argued that because USADA had worked alongside law enforcement, it should be considered a “state actor” and subject to constitutional restrictions that would prevent it from bringing its case against Armstrong.