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

by Reed Albergotti

  Shortly after filing the lawsuit, Lance enlisted his cancer charity to lobby Congress on his behalf. Armstrong wanted USADA’s $10 million federal grant from the Office of National Drug Control Policy to be yanked. The foundation hired lobbyists from Patton Boggs, Luskin’s law firm, to represent it. On July 12, Wisconsin Republican Jim Sensenbrenner sent a letter—using arguments similar to those in Armstrong’s lawsuit—to the Office of National Drug Control Policy, describing USADA’s right to exert authority over Armstrong as “strained at best.”

  Congressman Sensenbrenner, whose district encompasses the Waterloo, Wisconsin, headquarters of Armstrong sponsor Trek, said that it was the International Cycling Union (UCI), not USADA, that had jurisdiction over his titles. He also pointed to USADA’s eight-year statute of limitations, which he said precluded it from stripping Armstrong’s titles from 2003 and before. “While USADA’s charging letter accuses Armstrong of a vast conspiracy involving numerous riders, the agency has not charged any associated athletes other than Armstrong,” Sensenbrenner wrote.

  Armstrong’s lawyers, meanwhile, turned to yet another attempt to undermine USADA—by going after its review board. All anti-doping cases USADA brings are first approved by an independent review board made up of three panelists chosen from a pool of approved people. Looking for dirt on the review board assigned to Armstrong’s case, the lawyers struck gold. It turned out that one of the members of the board, Minneapolis attorney Clark Calvin Griffith, a seventy-year-old sports lawyer and adjunct professor at the William Mitchell College of Law in Minneapolis—and the son of former Minneapolis Twins owner Calvin Griffith—had been charged with indecent exposure. The previous March, a twenty-four-year-old female student had complained to the college that Griffith had unzipped his pants and told her to touch his penis. She also complained to the police, who subsequently recorded a phone call he made to her, during which he apologized and said he was in “an absolute daze” when “I unzipped.” Shortly afterward, he was charged with indecent exposure, and in July, he entered into a plea agreement in which he admitted no wrongdoing but agreed to undergo sex offender counseling.

  “Wow. @usantidoping can pick em,” Armstrong tweeted to his nearly four million Twitter followers. “Here’s [link to story] 1 of 3 Review Board members studying my case. #protectingcleanathletesandpervs.”

  Tygart knew that American public opinion was mixed—and that some saw him as the bad guy persecuting their hero. He had received three death threats, he said, including a chilling warning that he would get a bullet to his head. But he was not willing to let a celebrity athlete off the hook.

  • • •

  On August 20, Judge Sparks dismissed Armstrong’s lawsuit—this time, for good. He said Armstrong’s central argument—that USADA was a “state actor” and that its appeal process was unconstitutional—had no merit. USADA was part of the widely accepted arbitration process recognized by the United States courts. Judge Sparks said that if Armstrong were truly innocent of USADA’s charges, he should go to arbitration and argue his point. “This court simply has no business telling national and international amateur athletic organizations how to regulate their respective sports,” he wrote. After all his legal and public relations maneuvers, Lance was back to the two choices Bock had originally offered: Fight USADA in arbitration or back down and accept his punishment. Armstrong had three days to make his decision.

  Just a few hours before his midnight deadline, Armstrong bowed out of the fight. His decision not to challenge USADA’s charges—which he said was not an admission of guilt but a protest of its unfair process—seemed, at the time, shrewd. He avoided the embarrassment of an arbitration hearing in which his former teammates were poised to accuse him in person. The agency that night said it would strip him of all results dating back to August 1, 1998. That was roughly a year before his first Tour de France victory, and also included his wins in other races such as the Tour de Suisse and France’s Critérium du Dauphiné Libéré.

  The day after the announcement, donations to the foundation rose to twenty-five times their typical daily levels, and Nike made it clear that it would continue to stand by him: “We are saddened that Lance Armstrong may no longer be able to participate in certain competitions and his titles appear to be impacted,” it said. “Lance has stated his innocence and has been unwavering on this position.” Other sponsors, including Anheuser-Busch and Oakley fell into place, too—in fact, nobody was ready to drop Lance.

  Many journalists and fans continued to back him, too. “Sad day,” tweeted ESPN’s Rick Reilly—an eleven-time Sportswriter of the Year who had defended Lance against doping allegations for fourteen years—adding that he couldn’t believe Lance was “giving into doping charges. Never thought he’d quit.” Graham Watson, an established cycling photographer who published a 2004 pictorial book with Lance, Lance Armstrong: Images of a Champion, also weighed in, writing on his blog, “Lance did what he had to do to win, and he clearly did it very well. . . . All I do know is he’s not the manipulative ‘bully’ certain members of the media have tried to portray him as in their tabloid stories. He was ambitious, ruthless, highly talented, tough, he knew how to lead his teammates and intimidate his rivals to make sure he won. But is he any different from a President, an army General, a corporate leader of industry, a career politician, or any other sporting great?” Sally Jenkins, the Washington Post columnist who coauthored Lance’s autobiography, wrote an editorial sticking up for Lance: “I don’t know if he’s telling the truth when he insists he didn’t use performance-enhancing drugs in the Tour de France—never have known,” she wrote. “I do know that he beat cancer fair and square, that he’s not the mastermind criminal the US Anti-Doping Agency makes him out to be, and that the process of stripping him of his titles reeks.” Author Buzz Bissinger wrote a cover story for Newsweek, saying: “I still believe in Lance Armstrong. I believe his decision had nothing to do with fear of being found guilty in a public setting before an arbitration panel, but the emotional and mental toll of years and years of fighting charges that have never been officially substantiated—despite stemming all the way back to 1999.” Bissinger quoted Lance saying he wouldn’t fight USADA for the sake of his own mental health, for his family, and his foundation, and for cycling. Cycling, Lance told Bissinger, “doesn’t need this.” NASCAR driver Max Papis tweeted to Lance, “Too many people too jealous of what u did. Revenge is always sad to see.”

  Lance even had legislative support. Or perhaps it would be technically more accurate to say that USADA had some serious detractors within government circles. Just after Labor Day, a group of California legislators took aim at USADA, sending a letter to the state’s two US senators, Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer, asking them to launch “a comprehensive review of USADA’s operations and finances, with special attention to USADA’s unilateral changes in rules for dealing with athletes who have never failed a drug test.” The letter, dated September 4 and written by California state senator Michael J. Rubio, didn’t mention Lance, and Rubio said at the time that his interest in the issue grew out of concern for US Olympic athletes. The letter, which noted that USADA receives “a majority of its funding from taxpayer dollars,” was signed by twenty-two other California state senators from both major parties, who were in agreement that the process of suspending athletes was inherently flawed.

  However, the reactions were not all pro-Lance and/or anti-USADA. One person in particular was very troubled by Lance’s apparently Teflon-like ability to deflect charges: Lance’s old Subaru-Montgomery teammate Paul Willerton. He’d assumed that after Lance chose not to fight USADA, his popularity with the public and his corporate sponsors would end. To him, the decision not to fight seemed like a clear admission of guilt and he didn’t understand why others didn’t see it that way. Willerton, who had retired from the sport in 1993 but kept his ties to many of his former teammates, viewed himself as a cycling insider, someone who knew most of the key players, the good guys and the bad guys. As
Willerton monitored the reactions to Lance, he paid particular attention to brand experts who were saying that Lance still had value in the marketplace because Nike still backed him. It bothered him that Nike, which had played such an active role in creating Lance’s image over the years as a squeaky-clean athlete, hadn’t taken a public stance against either Lance or doping—and he decided to try to do something about it.

  Using his girlfriend’s e-mail account, and not disclosing his name, Willerton began e-mailing Nike’s head of corporate communications each week, asking for specifics about Nike’s stance on Lance. Each time, the reply was that Nike would stand by Lance. Willerton, who was friendly with a couple of lower-level executives within Nike, also began calling his two friends, asking them why Nike hadn’t stepped away from Lance. These executives told Willerton that they themselves didn’t get it. Throughout September, Willerton kept on sending e-mails, hoping to erode some of that support.

  Popular and corporate support notwithstanding, Lance was still in a very tough spot—banished from competing in the highest-level triathlons. Lance now turned to small-time races that hadn’t signed on to the World Anti-Doping Agency code and didn’t have to recognize his suspension.

  These triathlons were happy to accept Armstrong because it meant media attention they would otherwise never get. In fact, some events actually gave up their certification with the sport’s governing body, USA Triathlon, so they could allow Armstrong into the race. This was no small thing for these races. Having certification from the USAT lowers insurance rates for race organizers and helps attract higher-level triathletes. But for some, the trade-off seemed worthwhile. Half Full Triathlon in Maryland, for example, decided to allow Armstrong in the race, and enrollment jumped 20 percent.

  The Superfrog Triathlon was still working on getting its USAT certification when Armstrong applied for entry. The race, which raises money for the Navy Seal Foundation, quickly dropped its USAT bid, announced that Armstrong would compete, and saw a spike in registration to a record 825 entrants, at a registration fee as high as $275. When the day came, Lance’s sponsors made their presence known; Nike donated Livestrong T-shirts to race volunteers and spectators; Trek sent a representative to observe.

  The Superfrog, held at Silver Strand State Beach near San Diego, is the longest-running Half Iron distance triathlon in the world, and its events—a 1.2-mile cold Pacific Ocean swim, 56-mile windy bike ride on Highway 75, and 13.1-mile run on soft sand, hard sand, and pavement—are among the world’s most challenging. The course was in territory familiar to Lance, near Ramona, where he had cut his teeth riding with Eddie B when he joined the Subaru-Montgomery team.

  Lance hadn’t swum much since leaving Nice in June. When the event started, he was rolled by a couple of big waves, and by the time he got out of the ocean, he was a couple of minutes behind the event leaders. But he made up for lost time during the bike ride, and by the end of the first mile of the run, he was in the lead. Lance’s 2-hour, 2-minute, and 48-second bike split broke the course record, as did his overall finish time of 3 hours and 49 minutes. After the race, Lance signed the Livestrong T-shirts of spectators. One wore a homemade badge that said F U USADA. Lance added an exclamation point to the end of her badge.

  By continuing to find a welcome into certain nonsanctioned competitions, Lance hoped to be the first athlete to face a serious doping case without losing his popularity. And he was doing reasonably well in them, too. He took first place in a trail marathon in Steamboat Springs, Colorado, finishing in 3 hours, 18 minutes, and 10 seconds in what was only the fourth marathon he had ever run in his life. He entered and, finishing behind a local sixteen-year-old, took second place in a 4-hour mountain bike race near his part-time home in Aspen. In September, he completed the GoldenLeaf Half Marathon, with its 13.1-mile course, from Snowmass ski area down to the town of Aspen in 1 hour, 30 minutes, and 51 seconds, to place fourth.

  Lance continued to hold out hope that his Tour de France titles could be restored to him and the ban on competition lifted. The UCI, which had always backed him in every other drug scandal in the past, still had to ratify USADA’s sanctions for them to become permanent. If the UCI decided to appeal USADA’s decision, USADA and the UCI would then have to argue their respective cases in front of the Court of Arbitration for Sport. Over the years, the UCI had been paid handsome sums of money by Armstrong and his camp—including $150,000 in donations the UCI acknowledges, plus, according to Kathy LeMond’s sworn account of her conversation with Julien de Vriese, another $500,000 that it doesn’t acknowledge. The UCI also helped smooth over at least three suspicious drug tests for Armstrong, which it also denies. Within days of USADA’s charges, the UCI, which referred to the charges as “worrisome,” requested USADA’s “reasoned decision” on banning Armstrong. It said it wanted to see USADA’s evidence before it made its own final decision.

  Meanwhile, Armstrong continued to flout USADA’s power. He kept making statements on Twitter challenging their legitimacy. In late August, for example, he had tweeted a response to what he described as USADA’s “pitiful charade”: “There comes a point in every man’s life when he has to say, ‘Enough is enough.’ For me, that time is now. I have been dealing with claims that I cheated and had an unfair advantage in winning my seven Tours since 1999. Over the past three years, I have been subjected to a two-year federal criminal investigation followed by Travis Tygart’s unconstitutional witch hunt. The toll this has taken on my family, and my work for our foundation and on me leads me to where I am today—finished with this nonsense.”

  By going on the attack in such a public way, Armstrong and his lawyers were unwittingly opening themselves up to a new problem. USADA had been bashed in the press by dopers before. But in the past, its bylaws did not allow its officials to speak publicly about the details of its cases. To combat the public relations dilemma, USADA changed its bylaws during its 2005 battle with Tyler Hamilton over his two-year doping suspension. The change meant that now Tygart and others in the agency could feel free to address any inaccuracies spread by athletes and their representatives.

  Tygart began to have conversations with lawyers for the cooperating cyclists about making USADA’s entire investigation of Armstrong public. And he told them that when he sent the agency’s “reasoned decision” to the UCI, he would release that to the public, too, perhaps along with supporting documents from his witnesses. Tygart quickly asked the witnesses—including Hincapie, Leipheimer, Vande Velde, and Zabriskie—to sign affidavits of doping by Armstrong and the team leaders and doctors. Their affidavits provided numerous graphic accounts of Armstrong’s alleged cheating over a period of fourteen years.

  Christian Vande Velde said Lance had called him in 2002 and asked him to come to his apartment in Girona to discuss his role with the team. When Vande Velde showed up, he found Michele Ferrari there with Lance, and Lance informed him that if he were to continue to ride for the Postal team, he would have to follow Dr. Ferrari’s program to the letter. The conversation left Vande Velde in no doubt that he was in the doghouse and that the only way out was to follow the prescribed doping program. He subsequently began using EPO and testosterone on a schedule prepared by Ferrari.

  Jonathan Vaughters described going to Lance’s hotel room in 1998 to borrow his laptop, when Lance stepped out of the bathroom and injected himself with a syringe in his presence, saying: “Now that you are doing EPO, too, you can’t go write a book about it.”

  Tyler Hamilton described how a personal assistant to the Armstrongs at their villa in Nice—“Motoman,” Philippe Maire—supplied him, Lance, and Kevin Livingston with the EPO they needed during mountain stages. They would put the empty EPO vials in soda cans to be taken away and crushed.

  The affidavit of George Hincapie was particularly damaging, because he was once one of Lance’s closest friends and he hadn’t previously confessed or acknowledged using banned substances. At the time Hincapie provided that affidavit, he was still very much involved in pro cycli
ng, racing in Europe for the BMC racing team, and preparing for a record seventeenth Tour de France—thanks to an arrangement his lawyer had worked out with USADA’s lawyers back in June when they had first approached him about testifying. In his affidavit, he testified that in the early 1990s, after Lance’s team was badly defeated in a race in Italy, Lance had been upset and announced that something needed to be done—which Hincapie understood to mean that Lance felt the team needed to use EPO. Hincapie also stated that he was “generally aware” that Lance was using testosterone throughout the time the two were teammates. On one occasion, during a race in Spain in 2000, he recounted that after Lance had told him he had taken some “oil”—referring to a testosterone-olive-oil mixture Lance had swallowed—he had texted Lance to alert him to the presence of drug testers and Lance then dropped out of the race.

  USADA’s evidence also suggested that while some of the riders’ wives, such as Betsy Andreu, had worked to undermine or expose the doping scheme on the Postal team, Lance’s ex-wife, Kristin, had participated, wrapping cortisone tablets in foil and handing them out to cyclists, and had seen Lance handing testosterone patches to Landis.

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  Bill Bock’s summary of all the evidence compiled by USADA was sent to the UCI on October 10, and released to the public the same day. The agency also set up a website that offered links to thousands of pages of documents, photos, videos, and affidavits from Armstrong’s former teammates. Suddenly, USADA’s investigation came to vivid life. There were riders’ e-mail exchanges, video footage showing doping doctors at team celebrations, and receipts of Armstrong’s payments to Ferrari totaling more than $1 million. The UCI made no immediate response.