Seven Deadly Sins: My Pursuit of Lance Armstrong

by David Walsh

  He didn’t like secrecy in the team over contracts. He didn’t like riders being played one off against the other. He didn’t like the dumb superstitions that riders worked under. The Mennonites back in Lancaster liked to say that they lived in the world but were not of the world. That was Floyd Landis: in the team but not of the team.

  The tale of his first road race is always worth retelling. Determined not to be marginalised as some sort of farm-boy hick with a religious hang-up he showed up in a helmet and visor, a dayglo jersey and a pair of argyle socks. He was wheeling a massive bike. He cleared his throat and announced: ‘If there’s anyone here who can stay with me, I will buy you dinner.’

  That lightened the atmosphere considerably. They thought that Farmboy had made a joke. He cleared that up.

  ‘You shouldn’t laugh because that gets me angry. And if you make me angry, then I’m going to blow you all up.’

  As he cycled away from the leaders that day, he roared back at them: ‘You like my socks? How’d you like them now?’

  Who wouldn’t want to be covering a Tour de France which had Floyd Landis among its prominent riders? Who wouldn’t want a character like that to emerge as clean? Hope against hope. Paul went to the Tour de France. Wrote brilliantly. Got more to write about than he had bargained for.

  All the previews called this one as a wide-open Tour. On 1 July, just before the first Tour of the post-Lance era got underway, the riders who had finished second, third, fourth and fifth in the 2005 Tour were removed from the race because of involvement by them or by their teams in an investigation into illegal blood doping. This was Operación Puerto, the Spanish police in full swing against blood doping. Landis was among the favourites now.

  You wanted to believe in him, and it was a good sign when he said that he didn’t expect to win any mountain stages, he just wanted to be in touch for the final time trial on the day before the Tour finished. He led going into the Alps but relinquished it all very tamely, giving up the lead in the Alps to Óscar Pereiro, who had started the day in 46th place some 28mins 50secs behind.

  In the fifteenth stage he took back the yellow jersey which he had quietly surrendered two stages before. He came up Alpe d’Huez in fourth place. He looked strong. Then came the torture at La Toussuire. Strangely reassuring for those of us watching from afar.

  Landis reached the bottom of the last climb on a day which the riders complained long and bitterly about being too hard, too tough. When he hit the bottom of the climb he had significant company. All his main rivals were there, each of them supported by two or three lieutenants. Landis had just one Phonak teammate and his support vanished at the end of the first mile of an 11-mile ride.

  Landis was as vulnerable as a drunken wildebeest wandering into a barbeque afternoon for a pride of lions. Carlos Sastre, a Spaniard from the CSC team, made a break. Merciless. Landis faded. He started giving up the minutes faster than the minutes could give themselves up. One minute, two, then three, then more. The more minutes he lost the less relevant he became. He looked like death.

  He reached the finish line of the 112-mile stage more than eight minutes behind Sastre and ten minutes behind the winner of the stage, Michael Rasmussen, of Rabobank. Rasmussen had ridden brilliantly, breaking away from the pack with two other riders less than a mile into a stage which included the crossing of the highest point of that year’s Tour, the Col du Galibier. What a slog. The race gains nearly 1.2 miles in altitude, ascending to 8,681 feet above sea level, over the 26-mile pass.

  The previous day Landis had said that he was confident that he could win the Tour. Now he was 11th, more than eight minutes behind the race leader, Óscar Pereiro. If you wanted to believe in Floyd Landis now was the time to buy your shares. When the doping machine is working well there should be no days like these. Doping, by 2006, could make the promise that it would remove the drama from your life.

  ‘I suffered from the beginning, and I tried to hide it,’ he said afterwards. ‘I don’t expect to win the Tour at this point. It’s not easy to get back eight minutes. That was the best I could do.’

  Now, with six riders within four minutes of one another, the race was going to be decided before the final time trial on Saturday, the penultimate day of the Tour. That was the day Landis had marked on the calendar for his big move.

  Before that, though, another killer day loomed. The final mountain stage – a 124-mile slog over four gruelling ascents and a mad seven-mile descent into the town of Morzine.

  And then, having risen from the dead, Landis went out the next day and launched an 80-mile attack over three colossal Alpine passes. He won the final mountain stage of the Tour by nearly six minutes, pulling back about three quarters of the time he had lost the day before. For Jean-Marie Leblanc it was a heart-warming answer to his prayers for no more one-man tours. The Tour director called the performance, ‘The best stage I have ever followed.’

  Afterwards, Floyd Landis’s epic climb on the road to Morzine that day was compared to that of Chiappucci on Sestriere fourteen years previously. If you knew your cycling, this was profoundly depressing, but maybe the comparison was intended to be more apt than complimentary.

  On the way to Morzine, the final ascent, the epic Col de Joux Plane, is plain murderous. It measures 8.1 miles with an average slope of 8.5 per cent. Two of the last three miles of the climb have a slope of 10 per cent. Then that frightening seven-mile plunge to the end. The Col de Joux Plane was one of the few climbs where Lance Armstrong had showed mortality. He nearly collapsed there in 2000, losing two minutes to Jan Ullrich. That same day in 2000, Marco Pantani, with typical abandon, launched an attack at about the same point as Landis launched his. Pantani soon threw in his hand.

  In 2006, Floyd Landis devoured it all.

  Here was drama. In two days Floyd Landis had yo-yoed from first place to 11th and now, back to third. He was now just 30 seconds behind the race leader and his friend, Óscar Pereiro of Spain. Another Spaniard, Sastre, was in second, 12 seconds behind the leader. Three cyclists within 30 seconds of one another. The time trial was restored to its former prominence as the deciding factor in the race.

  In a similar, earlier time trial in the Tour’s first week, Landis had come in second, more than a minute ahead of the two riders now ahead of him in the standings. The only rider who bested Landis in that time trial was now more than an hour behind.

  Landis finished third in the time trial on the penultimate day of the Tour. That was that, really. Tour over. He was 50 seconds ahead of Pereiro and leapt from third to first. The kid from Lancaster County went to Paris in the yellow jersey and wore it to the top of the podium.

  The nightmare began the very next morning when Landis was informed of a slight problem with his urine sample from Morzine. He scrapped his lucrative racing engagements for the week, got himself to a secret location somewhere in Europe and waited for the news to break. Four days later his Phonak team announced the sad tidings to the world. Phonak had been through the Tyler Hamilton bust the year before, so they knew the ropes.

  The urine sample taken from Landis immediately after his epic and unforgettable Stage 17 had come back positive, having an unusually high ratio of the hormone testosterone to the hormone epitestosterone. His T/E ratio was nearly three times the 4:1 limit allowed by World Anti-Doping Agency rules.

  Landis held a short telephone conference with reporters from the US late on the Thursday evening. When Landis began declaring his own innocence it was with a heavy heart. An invisible hand seemed to be guiding him back to the fundamentals of the life he had grown up with.

  ‘I’ll say no,’ he said, when first asked if he had taken drugs. ‘The problem I have here again is that most of the public has an idea about cycling because of the way things have gone in the past. So I’ll say no, knowing a lot of people are going to assume I’m guilty before I’ve had a chance to defend myself.’

  He asked that the reporters cut him some slack, for everybody to take a step back. ‘I don’t
know what your position is now and I wouldn’t blame you if it was sceptical, because of what cycling has been through in the past and the way other cases have gone. All I’m asking for is that I be given a chance to prove that I’m innocent.’

  Floyd Landis was a bad liar, which suggested he might not be a bad person.

  In truth, if you had watched the evolution of doping it seemed a little strange that somebody who had spent so much time in the company of Michele Ferrari should be popped for something as quaint as testosterone. Maybe being done for the wrong thing fortified him as his voice grew stronger in protest against his fate. And his excuses grew more fanciful. So bad that ‘The Late Show with David Letterman’ created one of its famous Top Tens to mock him with:

  10. High altitude in the Alps made Daddy dizzy.

  9. Who can resist Balco’s delicious ‘spicy chipotle’ flavour?

  8. I was trying to impress Sheryl Crow.

  7. Uh . . . global warming?

  6. The world hates Americans already, so does this really matter?

  5. French bastards must have dosed my quiche.

  4. Wanted to give New York Post excuse to run hilarious ‘Fink Floyd’ headline.

  3. Hulk no need excuse.

  2. Frankly, I’d rather be a disgrace than a loser.

  1. Screw you – I’m Floyd ***damn Landis.

  On 14 May 2007 arbitration began between USADA and Landis with regard to the Tour de France doping allegations. On 20 September 2007, the arbitrators found Landis guilty of doping. He took a two-year ban. His title went to Óscar Pereiro.

  I continued coaching, got the book away and continued to enjoy the break from the weekly grind of newspapers. That lasted until 2007; another phone call from Alex.

  ‘Ready to come back?’

  I was.

  20

  ‘I see in him outrageous strength, with an inscrutable malice sinewing it. That inscrutable thing is chiefly what I hate.’

  Herman Melville, Moby Dick

  Lying in a tent at Gorak Shep, 5,170m above sea level in the heart of Nepal, you don’t expect Lance Armstrong to disturb the Himalayan peace. But a text message from a friend had done just that: ‘Landis, sensational confession, dynamite, implicated Armstrong and others.’

  It was Paul Kimmage, of course. You don’t expect texts in the Himalayas. You don’t expect texts from Paul written in the font ‘excitement’. The serenity of the great adventure was fractured for a while.

  It is a six-hour trek down through Lobuche and Dughla, a long hike criss-crossing finely made yak paths and stone walls and ancient stupas, all the way to Pheriche. There is an internet café in Pheriche. This is what cycling has done to me. I am in the most beautiful, the most remote, the most serene place on earth and I have to get to an internet connection to see what Floyd Landis is at. I am a sick man.

  Finally we get to Pheriche. A collection of low-slung buildings with corrugated tin roofs mostly painted blue. The internet café is just beside the Himalayan Rescue Association Clinic and isn’t hard to find. Nothing in Pheriche is.

  An internet café in Pheriche. So strange. There is an odd and shiny sort of modern art installation on the stony street outside. The building is ramshackle, low at the front but extended back and upwards towards where the shoulder of a great mountain runs down toward the Tsola river and a line of washing blows in the breeze. On the gable of the extension is the sign: Pheriche Internet Café. Stay Connected – Wherever You Are. + German Bakery. Inside, it is 600 rupees for ten minutes of slow connection. This better be good.

  One question recurred all the way down: why had Landis done it? He had won the 2006 Tour de France, the first Tour of the post-Lance era, having been Lance’s lieutenant in the latter years. Then he had been disqualified after a positive drug test. He’d raised, it was said, about a million dollars for a Floyd Fairness Fund. Spent maybe twice that. He had also blown two years and $2 million in an unsuccessful attempt to clear his name.

  He had returned to the sport after a two-year ban still preaching his innocence. And now this!

  What had suddenly made him confess what he had for so long denied? D’Angelo Barksdale, a character in David Simon’s iconic TV series The Wire, came to mind. ‘The past is always with us,’ D’Angelo told his fellow prison inmates. ‘Where we came from, what we go through, how we go through it, all this shit matters . . . What came first is who we really are and what happened before is what really happened.’

  And one other question. Was I mad?

  Some time previously the phone had rung at home in Cambridge. I answered to a man with a mild South African accent. He was coming to see me. Thus it was that Lewis Pugh turned up on my doorstep. Lewis Pugh is an environmental campaigner who makes his point through swimming. He has swum in every ocean on earth. He has the ability to control his core body temperature.

  The water at the North Pole was -1.7°C on the day Lewis took off his clothes and, wearing nothing but skimpy Speedo swimming shorts and a cap, jumped in and swum a kilometre. Had he drowned, which was a possibility, his unharnessed body would have dropped 4.5 kilometres into the blackness, right to the bottom of the ocean. Recovery would not have been a possibility. When people wondered what in God’s name he was doing, Lewis asked a different question: what in God’s name are we doing to cause so much Arctic ice to melt?

  There is a lot more to Lewis Pugh than swimming in cold water, though, as I was about to find out.

  At the time he phoned me, somebody else had just finished writing his autobiography. Lewis didn’t like how it was going, so one day he walked into Waterstones, picked up a bundle of ghosted sports biographies and went through them one after the other until he found one that he liked. The winner was Lawrence Dallaglio, It’s in the Blood: My Life. I had been the ghostwriter. Sometimes you win the raffle without buying a ticket.

  Lewis hunted me down, and, fascinated by the man, I helped him write his book. In 2010 he came to me wanting to express his gratitude in a thoughtful way. He was going to swim across Lake Pumori on Mount Everest at an altitude of 5,200 metres and a temperature of 2°C. To get there would require an expedition complete with yaks and Sherpas through the most beautiful country on earth.

  It would be life-changing. Nobody comes back from Nepal without a renewed perspective on existence. Weeks of walking, thinking and serenity are something which everybody should treat themselves to at some stage. I didn’t need persuading.

  It was an incredible time to be in the Himalayas. Nobody can go there without being humbled, but to be in the company of Lewis, as he attempted to bring the world’s attention to our coming crisis over water, was deeply rewarding. Poignantly, the spring of 2010 had brought a strange thaw to the slopes of Everest itself, and the Nepalese were using the opportunity to remove the corpses of so many climbers who had perished there.

  I thought of Yeats: ‘And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow.’

  Forget that. After Paul’s text came the phone call from Alex. He didn’t even ask if I’d brought my laptop. My holidays at the Sunday Times have always been a relative experience, but that is how I’ve wanted it. Just as I am about to discover the secret of eternal happiness, Alex wonders if I’d like to do the Landis story. Eternal happiness can wait.

  Fast forward to a middle-aged man from Slieverue in the county of Kilkenny in Ireland grabbing his laptop and a few belongings and handing these deeply spiritual things to a surprised Sherpa. Down six hours of trail to Pheriche. Find a lodging. Hit the internet café (and German bakery). Start two days’ work about doped riders who live a world away. Writing with the back turned to Everest. Lewis’s historical swim missed and momentarily forgotten. All concern for the watery places of the world evaporated.

  Still, it was good to feel like Ahab again.

  I always tell people that someday I will return to the Himalayas. And next time I’ll do it without taking two days off to write about cycling, and come home in a state of eternal happiness.
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  Anyway to Floyd Landis. This was the story that would be the tipping point. First you had to understand the guy. What made him.

  It’s fair to say that there are two people out there who claim to be Floyd Landis. There is the kid who wanted to escape the strict Mennonite shackles of his rural Pennsylvania background, who defied his parents by sneaking out in darkness to train on the quiet roads around Farmersville. His father, convinced that his son was looking for alcohol or drugs, would follow. On those night pursuits he saw another side to his son. That boy would become a professional, earn a lot of money, take a lot of drugs, tell a lot of lies and live in California. But California wasn’t where Landis came from. He was Floyd, son of Paul and Arlene, devout members of the Mennonite community. They were people who believed in modesty, honesty and the love of God, who didn’t confuse their needs with their wants. For all that he would become, Floyd loved his parents, respected their way of life.

  ‘What came first is who we really are,’ said D’Angelo, and over the past few weeks Landis had hesitantly returned to where he came from. In his only interview since Reed Albergotti’s excellent story in the Wall Street Journal which detailed the kind of life he led when in the Postal team, he told Bonnie Ford of ESPN that he didn’t want to go on ‘being part of the problem any more. I want to clear my conscience.’

  Without his extraordinary backstory this would have been hard to believe. But Floyd Landis is a one-off. One person. Two versions.

  The second Floyd Landis is hard and pragmatic. He surveys the landscape. He works out what is required to cross it. Away he goes. He races to win because, no matter what they tell you as a child, winning is the ultimate.

  In March 2007 he had gone back home to Farmersville. He spoke to three hundred friends and neighbours and his parents in the Performing Arts Center. They gave him a long standing ovation as he rose to speak. He told them of his innocence, of the strength he took from being from this place. At the end everybody prayed. It is hard to imagine what was in Floyd Landis’s mind that night as his entourage gathered up the $35 per head that the people of Farmersville had paid to help with his Fairness Fund.