Seven Deadly Sins: My Pursuit of Lance Armstrong

by David Walsh

  At the time he was operating as the other Floyd Landis. This man who did whatever had to be done.

  The email sent by Landis to cycling and anti-doping officials in Europe and the US wasn’t an attack on his former teammate Lance Armstrong but a frank and heartfelt account of Landis’s own grievous sins. It is not uncommon for cyclists to admit their doping, but generally they try to disconnect their actions from those around them, protecting teammates and team facilitators out of a sense of misguided loyalty.

  Landis spilled everything out. The context in which he doped, the environment, the company. He was burning bridges. He told of the support and the expertise he claims he received from those around him. He offered us plenty of names. For three years, 2002–04, he rode with US Postal. The lessons began early:

  FLOYD LANDIS’S LETTER TO THE UCI AND USA CYCLING

  6 MAY 2010

  2002: I was instructed on how to use testosterone patches by Johan Bruyneel during the Dauphiné Libéré in June, after which I flew on a helicopter with Mr Armstrong from the finish, I believe Grenoble, to St Moritz, Switzerland, at which point I was personally handed a box of 2.5mg patches in front of his wife, who witnessed the exchange. About a week later, Dr Ferrari performed an extraction of half a litre of blood to be transfused back into me during the Tour de France. Mr Armstrong was not witness to the extraction but he and I had lengthy discussions about it on our training rides during which time he also explained to me the evolution of EPO testing and how transfusions were now necessary due to the inconvenience of the new test. He also divulged to me at that time that in the first year that the EPO test was used he had been told by Mr Ferrari, who had access to the new test, that he should not use EPO any more, but he did not believe Mr Ferrari and continued to use it. He later, while winning the Tour de Suisse, the month before the Tour de France, tested positive for EPO, at which point he and Mr Bruyneel flew to the UCI headquarters and made a financial agreement with Mr Verbruggen to keep the positive test hidden.

  This is just the opening section, but it certainly gets the attention. Several colourful birds smitten with one stone. Floyd implicates Armstrong, team manager Johan Bruyneel and various others. It’s not done artfully. The tone is flat and resigned. The words of a man who has been crushed by his own deceit. Something inside has told him: this far and no further.

  By the time I am sitting in Pheriche the allegations have, of course, been denied.

  ‘It’s just our word against theirs, and we like our word. We like where we stand,’ said Armstrong, who at this point can spew out rebuttals like a ticker-tape machine.

  Not for the first time, Armstrong turned his gun on the accuser. ‘I remind everyone that this is a man who wrote a book for profit and now has a completely different version.’

  The question is which version is to be believed? Is a man more credible when his story is told for profit or, in this case, for no material gain? Those whose careers depend on the credibility of cycling were quick to denounce Landis.

  ‘I feel sorry for the guy because I don’t accept anything he says as true,’ said Pat McQuaid, the president of the UCI. There were so many rats shinning up drain pipes looking for the higher ground that a little incaution was to be expected in those less practised than Lance on that climb.

  Perhaps what was worrying Pat McQuaid was the most sinister allegation tossed in near the end, about the failed test being swept under the carpet after Armstrong and Bruyneel’s visit to Hein Verbruggen, UCI president at the time. In fact, Armstrong won the Tour de Suisse in 2001 and did not compete in 2002.56

  McQuaid was insulting our intelligence here when he said that in effect he didn’t believe Landis’s admission of doping.

  Why would any rider say he doped for five years if he didn’t? It is the unadorned detail in the emails that is arresting. Instruction on how to use testosterone patches by Bruyneel. A helicopter ride with Armstrong from Grenoble to St Moritz. The gift of a box of testosterone patches by Armstrong. This exchange was witnessed by Armstrong’s former wife, Kristin. You expect in these stories that every doper will have had a crossroads moment when he had to decide whether to walk away or stay and do a deal with the devil.

  Poor Floyd Landis fell into a team where the culture of doping and the momentum and scale of the doping was already so well established that there was no pause for thought. He did what he did just to survive, just to keep going. The story went on skipping around Europe like a Jason Bourne movie. Spain next.

  2003: After a broken hip in the winter, I flew to Girona, Spain, where this time two units [of blood, half a litre each] were extracted three weeks apart. This took place in the apartment in which Mr Armstrong lived and in which I was asked to stay and check the blood temperature every day. It was kept in a small refrigerator in the closet along with the blood of Mr Armstrong and George Hincapie, and since Mr Armstrong was planning on being gone for a few weeks to train he asked me to stay in his place and make sure the electricity didn’t turn off or something go wrong with the refrigerator. Then during the Tour de France the entire team, on two different occasions, went to the room that we were told and the doctor met us there to do the transfusions. During that Tour de France I personally witnessed George Hincapie, Lance Armstrong, Chechu Rubiera and myself receiving blood transfusions. Also during that Tour de France the team doctor would give my roommate, George Hincapie, and me a small syringe of olive oil in which was dissolved Andriol, a form of ingestible testosterone, on two out of three nights throughout the duration. I was asked to ride the Vuelta a España that year in support of Roberto Heras and, in August, between the Tour and the Vuelta, was told to take EPO to raise my haematocrit back up so more blood transfusions could be performed. I was instructed to go to Lance’s place by Johan Bruyneel and get some EPO from him. The first EPO I ever used was then handed to me in the entry way to his building in full view of his then wife. It was Eprex by brand and it came in six pre-measured syringes. I used it intravenously for several weeks before the next blood draw and had no problems with the tests during the Vuelta. Also during this time it was explained to me how to use Human Growth Hormone by Johan Bruyneel and I bought what I needed from Pepe the team ‘trainer’, who lived in Valencia along with the team doctor at that time. While training for that Vuelta I spent a good deal of time training with Matthew White and Michael Barry and shared the testosterone and EPO that we had and discussed the use thereof while training. Again, during the Vuelta we were given Andriol and blood transfusions by the team doctor and had no problems with any testing.

  In my little cyber shack high in the Himalayas, the weirdness of the life of the professional doper seemed even more pronounced. Here was a Mennonite boy whose father had at one stage given him extra chores hoping that tiredness would end his infatuation with riding; a boy who’d had to struggle with and break away from so much that he loved, just so that he could ride. And he ended up in Spain, babysitting blood in the apartment of the world’s most famous cancer survivor. Perhaps it was Floyd who first tweeted that little joke about Lance and how the steady drip, drip, drip of insinuation and rumour made his blood boil, which is why he kept so much chilled stuff in the fridge.

  In Mennonite communities like Floyd’s in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, a gentle place with many quaint wood-covered bridges, they don’t believe in infant baptism. There is no stain to cleanse. They believe that we are born innocent but with a bent toward sin. From there we grow until we reach an age of accountability. Floyd’s professional life seems to follow that pattern.

  Armstrong loved him. There was something different about Floyd Landis, something out there. But Lance Armstrong’s greatest strength was also his greatest weakness. People. He could impress people, he could charm people, he could cajole people, he could extract love and loyalty. But when he was finished he had no feel for keeping people. He had no sense of the needs they had. Lance could change towards Floyd Landis. But Floyd would never change his view of Lance? Surely.

&nbs
p; After the 2004 Tour, the rival Phonak team made Floyd Landis a good offer. It was more than twice what US Postal was offering. Lance Armstrong could have changed that with one phone call. He didn’t. Floyd walked away. Lance branded him a traitor.

  Five years later and Floyd had won a Tour de France and lost it again to a drug positive. He had served a two-year ban and done what good soldiers do, he had kept the secrets of the peloton. When he came back and pressed his nose against the window and gazed in at the world of cycling, his world, Lance Armstrong ordered that the curtains be drawn.

  Floyd was one casualty too many.

  It isn’t his background and his sincerity which make the emails so fascinating. Here is the rider disqualified after winning the 2006 Tour, the man who looked the world in the eye and said that none of this had happened. Here is a man who has had more, way more, than his own share of troubles, the guy who wrote a book called False Positive. And now he not only admits to years of doping but throws out evidence which could shut the entire operation.

  The truth? You can’t handle the truth!

  It’s too easy to dismiss what he has written as the latest outpouring in the soap opera of a proven liar. Floyd Landis has lied and cheated. He bought into that way of life but, somewhere in the recent past, he has come to the crossroads and decided the deal is off. And now, same as it was when he was a rider, there are no compromises or half measures.

  2004: Again the team performed two separate blood transfusions on me, but this time Bruyneel had become more paranoid and we did the draws by flying to Belgium and meeting at an unknown person’s apartment and the blood was brought by ‘Duffy’, who was at that time Johan’s assistant of sorts. The second transfusion was performed on the team bus on the ride from the finish of a stage to the hotel, during which the driver pretended to have engine trouble and stopped on a remote mountain road for an hour or so, so the entire team could have half a litre of blood added. This was the only time that I ever saw the entire team being transfused in plain view of all the other riders and bus driver. That team included Lance Armstrong, George Hincapie and me as the only Americans.

  2005: I had learned at this point how to do most of the transfusion technicals and other things on my own, so I hired Allen Lim as my assistant to help with details and logistics. He helped Levi Leipheimer and me prepare the transfusions for Levi and me and made sure they were kept at the proper temperature. We both did two separate transfusions that Tour, however my haematocrit was too low at the start so I did my first one a few days before the start so as to not start with a deficit.

  2006: Well, you get the idea . . . One thing of great significance is that I sat down with Andy Riis and explained to him what was done in the past and what was the risk I would be taking and ask for his permission, which he granted in the form of funds to complete the operation described. John Lelangue was also informed by me, and Andy Riis consulted with Jim Ochowicz before agreeing. There are many, many more details that I have in diaries and am in the process of writing into an intelligible story but since the position of USA Cycling is that there have not been enough details shared to justify calling USADA, I am writing as many as I can reasonably put into an email and share with you so as to ascertain what is the process which USA Cycling uses to proceed with such allegations. Look forward to much more detail as soon as you can demonstrate that you can be trusted to do the right thing.

  Floyd Landis

  From Gorak Shep to Pheriche and for two days here in this lodge the thought has kept occurring to me that these accusations don’t exist in a vacuum. They have come at a time when I thought that the entire Lance Armstrong story was dead, that pursuing Lance was a period of my life which I would have to put down to experience.

  What Floyd Landis is saying, though, is interesting: it is direct evidence and it sits on the shelf with what has gone before. Seven years ago I sat in a home near Liverpool with Emma O’Reilly and listened to her tell of her five years in the shadow of Lance. She told those stories about ditching syringes and crossing borders and handing product to Armstrong in the car park of a McDonald’s outside Nice. She told me about disguising the wounds from syringe punctures and about the team backdating a prescription for corticosteroids. She’d put it all under oath back in 2006.

  I sat there in the Himalayas, the room scarcely lit apart from the light from my laptop, and thought of Frankie and Betsy in Detroit. All the calls and the conversations. The stories they had from back in the days of the euro dogs, the young American cyclists on the make and on the break in the old world. They’d put all that stuff down on oath too. Armstrong said that Betsy was bitter, motivated only by her hatred of him. Frankie’s team couldn’t get into competitions that were sponsored by the company that owned the team.

  And that night in October 2003 spent at the Auckland home of Stephen Swart, who rode with Armstrong for the Motorola team in 1994 and 1995. Armstrong, Stephen had said, was the leading pro-doping voice in the team. Swart would later repeat these allegations under oath. Armstrong said Swart was a bitter former teammate.

  I thought, too, of a guy called Mike Anderson, the personal assistant employed by Armstrong for two years, 2003 and 2004. So central was Anderson to the lives of the family that Kristin Armstrong referred to him as H2: husband number two. I met Anderson in Austin, Texas, and he told of the day that changed his view of Armstrong.

  It was the spring of 2004, the Armstrongs had separated. Lance had hooked up with the singer Sheryl Crow and was taking her to the Girona apartment for the first time. According to Anderson, who was in Girona ahead of his boss, Armstrong called and asked him to go through the apartment and ‘de-Kik’ it [Armstrong referred to his former wife as Kik]. While doing that task, Anderson claimed he found a small bottle in a medical cabinet that had the label ‘Androstenone’, and after looking up the list of banned products on his laptop, he was sure his boss was doping.

  Their relationship was never the same after that. When Mike Anderson made public his discovery, Armstrong dismissed him as a bitter former employee.

  I’d stayed in touch with O’Reilly, Swart, the Andreus and Anderson long after the interviews ended. To be slightly melodramatic about it we were like a loose group of survivors. When those around us grew weary of us speaking about Lance and the great heist, we could talk to each other. And one thing always puzzled me: why would all these good people make up vicious lies about Armstrong?

  Now Floyd Landis was adding his story to the shelf.

  Lying in that tent at Gorak Shep, thoughts turned to some of the forerunners. The difference with the Landis emails would be presentation. He offered them not to the public. Instead he slapped them across the face of the cycling authorities and the anti-doping world like a pair of gloves. He was asking for a duel. He was challenging their honour, having just rediscovered his. Whaddya gonna do?

  Word on the yak trail was that the United States Anti-Doping Authority were interested, seriously interested, and federal investigator Jeff Novitzky was about to about to throw his net into the waters where the big fish swam.

  I liked the choice of Novitzky. He lives in Burlingame outside San Francisco just a mile from the Bay Area Laboratory Co-operative. His greatest case, the BALCO case, had unfolded right on his doorstep. His work in the infamous BALCO case, involving steroids being supplied to Major League baseball players, proved one thing. You can get away with lying in lots of places but it’s a bad idea to lie to federal investigators. The feds have more power than us trolls. Floyd Landis, the strangest and most unreadable dude in the entire pack, had opened a can of worms.

  If Jeff Novitzky was ever to conclude that US Postal did run a doping programme, Armstrong and the others could face charges. If Jeff Novitsky was ever to conclude that through Tailwind Sports, the US Postal Service, a federal agency itself, had been defrauded, the charges would get much more serious. The penalties for misusing such funds are draconian.

  Floyd Landis of Lancaster County had lit a fuse that I could s
ee in the Himalayas. In the morning I had a shower, a treat which cost more than the room. I found my smiling $7-a-day Sherpa and set out to rejoin the group who were six hours away. Lewis, it would transpire, had swum 22 minutes across the freezing lake. He had lived and made a point.

  Trekking back, though, I was in my own little world. I was thinking of this long journey through cycling, of the happy innocence of the early days. Paul and I in rue Kléber arguing over coffees and L’Équipe. I was thinking of the first hints that something was wrong with this sport that we loved, the first realisation that our heroes had feet of clay and canisters of pills. We had gone so deep into that world, and in the end I had begun to think that it was inalterable.

  Lewis Pugh, up there on the great mountain, had more chance of making a change than I had. He could save the world. Nobody could save cycling. And yet here, Floyd Landis had leaned into the job with us. Something was moving again.

  I walked through the Himalayas having missed the very thing I had come to see but feeling happier than I’d felt in a long time. Nobody comes down from this place as the same person who went up.

  Thank the gods for the gift of internet! It takes the climb out of the path to enlightenment.

  21

  24 July 2005

  I’m sorry you don’t believe in miracles. But this is one hell of a race. This is a great sporting event and you should stand around and believe it. You should believe in these athletes, and you should believe in these people. I’ll be a fan of the Tour de France for as long as I live. And there are no secrets – this is a hard sporting event and hard work wins it. Lance Armstrong