Seven Deadly Sins: My Pursuit of Lance Armstrong

by David Walsh

  It has been a stormy love affair, but Lance Armstrong is saying goodbye to the Tour de France. After seven consecutive wins following his recovery from testicular cancer, Big Tex is leaving town. As a concession to what he has achieved and as the recognition of a sort of ceasefire with the French public, Armstrong is permitted a farewell speech. Watched by his three children he speaks in romantic terms of the race that he has made his own. He has a word for the wretched of the earth. He feels sorry, he says, for those who can’t dream. He says he wants the Tour to live for ever. He has kind words for old rivals on the podium with him, Jan Ullrich and Ivan Basso. And then he is gone. You can feel the void, the wind blowing tumbleweeds through the ghost towns that are the sports pages. Lance Armstrong has dominated all argument, all rumour, all conjecture and all stages for seven years. He leaves behind a field which lacks a man of his stature. Love him or loathe him, the world of cycling in the age after Lance has just begun. Elvis has left the building.

  27 July 2006

  I declare convincingly and categorically that my winning the Tour de France has been exclusively due to many years of training and my complete devotion to cycling. Floyd Landis

  In France there has been intense speculation since the UCI let it be known on the morning after the Tour de France finished that that an unnamed rider has tested positive in the last week of the Tour. When Floyd Landis, crowned as champion the day before, cancels a race in the Netherlands speculation mounts. Today, four days after his triumph, it is confirmed the Tour winner has tested positive. After seven years of speculation about Lance Armstrong, his successor has been popped virtually on the winner’s podium. Floyd Landis, with the farm-boy shoulders and the red hair and the piece of firewood where his hip should be, readies himself to explain to the world.

  In Italy, meanwhile, the Granfondo Michele Bartoli, a one-day race for medium-level pros, has finished at virtually the same time as the Tour. The Granfondo is an Italian re-creation of the Tour of Flanders, with lots of cobblestones and falls. On Sunday one rider, from the Partizan Whistle team, comes through the old arch into Montecarlo well placed. This is to be his last race. His wife Yuliet has just escaped from Cuba. One more race and he will pack away the dream and find a job that can support them both. But he falls within half a mile of the finish. A routine tumble. He thought little of it till that night in his hotel bed when he noticed that one of his buttocks had become grotesquely swollen. He went to hospital. As Floyd Landis faces his fresh hell, this Thursday morning the rider is on a surgeon’s table somewhere in Tuscany. They are cutting him open in the hope of draining a haematoma and saving his life. It isn’t easy. His haematocrit level is 58. His blood is one quarter sludge from the EPO. The rest is watery from thinners. They look at this mad fool who has risked his life for cycling.

  He’s lucky to be alive.

  Like Floyd Landis he is an American from Pennsylvania. His name is Joe Papp. He is five months older than Floyd.

  Late 2006

  Meet Kayle. He sounds like a character lifted from an Elmore Leonard novel but Kayle Leogrande, the tattoo guy, is real and at the root of Lance’s troubles.

  Kayle was a good junior rider and then he gave it all up at 18. He married, had kids, divorced, became a tattoo artist. If you feel the need to get inked by a guy with a real place in sports history, he owns a shop, downstairs at a strip mall in Upland, California.

  Anyway, after nine prodigal years Kayle came back to biking. He watched Lance on the TV in 2004 and was inspired. He turned pro in 2005 with the Jelly Belly–Kenda crew. Went amateur in 2006. Turned pro again in 2007 with Rock Racing. Rock Racing was a team that seemed to understand that some guys had a past.

  Leogrande bought his first EPO in late 2006 from Joe Papp. Papp was back in the US. Six weeks before his near death in Italy, he had tested positive at the Presidential Cycling Tour of Turkey. The lower you are in the food chain the grubbier doping gets. Being picked for testing on these gigs meant nothing. The team always came up with something. A bribe. Tampering with the sample by flicking in a little piece of chemical stored under the nail. Today they had something different to offer when Joe Papp said he had to take the test. The team wanted to him to catheterise somebody else’s urine into his bladder. Joe said, hmmm, he’d take his chances, thanks. So now he was serving a ban from 31 July 2006 right through to 31 July 2008.

  But he was dealing. The EPO he sold Kayle Leogrande didn’t come with instructions. The first few times Kayle took the stuff he felt sick.

  What has this to do with Lance? They have met only once, after a race in Ojai, California, in 2005. It’s unlikely that Lance remembers the brief chat.

  Kayle does. He was nervous, didn’t know what to say.

  There were cooler things which Kayle might have said. Still, no doubt Lance remembers the name these days.

  When Kayle went pro again, aged 30, he suddenly began to look like a guy who’d left a great future behind him. He won the points classification at the 2007 Redlands Bicycle classic, where he also finished second in the second-stage criterium. He took three stages at the International Cycling Classic-Superweek in Wisconsin. He came home second overall.

  At some stage in that 2007 season he must have begun to wonder about his dealer, because on 18 May 2007 one Joe Papp gives testimony in Pepperdine University, Malibu, California, in the case of Floyd Landis v USADA. Papp, who is at pains to point out that he is testifying as an expert and not testifying against Floyd Landis, describes his experiences with doping, particularly testosterone. His expertise stretches much further, though. He once injected himself with Pot Belge during a race. His words punch a modest hole in the Landis defence position, which is that testosterone is passé and so ineffective as to be beneath the whims of a top cyclist.

  Floyd Landis wasn’t pleased.

  Why did they bring in Joe Papp? Who the fuck is that guy? Floyd Landis

  I’m sure he thought, ‘Who is this stupid tattooed guy?’ Kayle Leogrande

  He would be less pleased when he discovered later that USADA had called an expert who was still in the business of dealing performance-enhancing drugs, a vocation from which Joe Papp was finding it hard to extract himself.

  In 2007, though, Kayle Leogrande was happily amid the pros again, this time with Rock Racing. He had more access to knowledge. He was a good natural rider and with the EPO in his blood he excelled. He was so good that he became paranoid that everybody must know his secret. So that summer, on 26 July 2007, during Superweek in Wisconsin, he panicked when required to take a drug test. He was so sure that bad news was on the way that the next day he told Suzanne Sonye, the soigneur, about his doping. He was sure Suzanne would be okay with it.

  But Suzanne wasn’t okay with it. Kyle Leogrande

  As he told the New York Times later.

  Doh!

  So, in January 2008, Kayle Leogrande switched to a career in litigation. First of all, he was revealed as the hitherto anonymous rider who was suing USADA concerning his insistence that they not test his B-sample from a urine sample taken at Superweek in Wisconsin the previous year.

  There was a kink in the story. Kayle Leogrande’s A-sample had tested negative for any performance-enhancing drugs. USADA wanted to test the B-sample regardless. They had other reasons for believing that the rider had doped. In the end the B-sample was left untouched because without a positive result on the first, they couldn’t test the second. The legal suit was dismissed.

  Joe, 2 boxes G. 100 iu; 7 boxes E. 60,000; $500. I owed you! Thanks, Kayle.

  USADA went ahead and banned Kayle on the basis of sworn testimony from Suzanne Sonye and our friend Frankie Andreu, who was the team director of Rock Racing. The hearing also took into account ancillary evidence such as cell-phone records detailing calls between Leogrande and a guy called Joe Papp. They had a photo of an arm with familiar tattoos and the hand at the end brandishing vials of EPO. Plus a handwritten note from Kayle to Joe Papp.

  Joe Papp provided the evidence
. Kayle Leogrande still got charged with a doping violation. About now Lance Armstrong probably began paying attention. Know your soigneur. Treat your soigneur right.

  There must be gold in them there tattoo parlours because now Kayle Leogrande threw in another couple of lawsuits. A defamation claim against former Rock Racing soigneur Suzanne Sonye, and a similar claim against former pro Matt DeCanio, who was now an anti-doping campaigner. It all wound up with a two-year ban for a non-analytical positive; that is, a doping offence based not on a lab test but on all available evidence. USADA’s first non-analytical positive. The playing pitch was changed.

  Then just when Kayle thought it was all over . . .

  It wasn’t.

  Leogrande moved out of the rental he’d been living in, looking for a new start. He left a stash of EPO behind in the refrigerator in the garage. When his landlady called about it he told her to do with the drugs as she pleased.

  She turned pro.

  No, actually, she turned him in.

  Novitzky: Do ya think Lance is doing this?

  Leogrande: If you were a rider at that level, what would you do?

  A few weeks later an FDA investigator showed up at Leogrande’s door. Not just any fed either. Jeff Novitzky. He had the scalps of Marion Jones and Barry Bonds hanging from his belt, and the sky went dark when the buzzer rang. In a world full of feds Novitzky is the super fed. If he is at your front door you are in more trouble than you ought to be.

  This was early 2008. Leogrande spilled his heart out. Novitzky is tall, lean and handsome and smells of cordite, but he has some of the investigatory style of Lieutenant Frank Columbo about him.

  Leogrande was a small fish. Joe Papp was slightly bigger. Michael Ball, the owner of Rock Racing, slightly bigger again. Ball knew the A-list guys.

  Novitzky knew that the first rule of federal investigation is to never throw anything back into the river. There was a trail here which would lead to bigger names and bigger things. Leogrande’s fridge had opened the door to federal involvement and the chance to have a snoop around the world of Rock Racing, a team with a reputation for being a sanctuary for cycling’s born-again brigade.

  Novitzky knew too that for the bigger fish most of the things that happened in France stayed in France. But many big fish came home and cycled for American teams and the law of omerta didn’t seem to apply with the same force when they were back in a culture where the idea of doping to win a bicycle race was still novel.

  Lance Armstrong and a number of other big fish had sworn oaths in America in 2006 in the SCA case. And many of those big fish had made a good living from a team sponsored by US Postal, a federal agency. There were connections, like Tyler Hamilton, once of Postal, now of Rock Racing. From Leogrande to Lance. Novitzky was in the game.

  Through the investigation USADA received information about individuals who supplied Leogrande and other cyclists with illegal performance-enhancing drugs: Joe Papp’s client list.

  1 December 2008

  Lance Armstrong announces that in 2009 he will once again compete in the Tour de France. At almost exactly the same time, USADA bans Kayle Leogrande, the stupid tattooed guy from Rock Racing, for two years. Leogrande’s case will grow into the lengthy investigation that culminates in Armstrong’s lifetime ban from the sport.

  30 January 2009

  In January of 2009, USADA received information from a variety of sources with information about individuals who may have supplied Mr Leogrande and other cyclists with performance-enhancing drugs. Thereafter, USADA commenced an investigation into drug use and distribution within the Southern California cycling scene and began making inquiries and following up on various leads related to this issue. USADA came to understand that Floyd Landis might have information useful to this effort. USADA

  When I see what’s going on with Lance now, I have to laugh to myself a little bit. Kayle Leogrande

  Without Leogrande, who knows, the Armstrong investigation maybe never would have happened. Travis Tygart

  The back-dated suspension of Floyd Landis comes to an end. Throughout 2008 Landis has been acting as an unofficial consultant for the Rock Racing crew, but now he can hit the road and do what he does best. Now that he is free to ride again, the expectation is that he will leave the past behind and ride the roads with happy abandon. Instead, he seems to wander deeper and deeper into his melancholic world of guilt and denial. In February he comes back to racing properly and competes in the Tour of California. He will ride for the appropriately named Ouch team.

  Meanwhile, something else is brewing in the underworld.

  And in the spring, L’Express, the French magazine, throws a fly into the ointment of Floyd’s happiness. L’Express claims information obtained by hacking into the LNDD (Laboratoire National de Dépistage du Dopage) network was transmitted to a lab in Canada from the computer of Landis’s former coach Arnie Baker. In May, Landis and Baker are summoned to France to testify before French investigators examining the hacking of LNDD data.

  Pierre Bordry, the controversial head of France’s anti-doping agency, knew that his lab had been breached somehow. Bordry was frequently in the wars with his superiors and with the UCI. He needed to know how confidential information from his lab, some of it detailed scientific data, was being leaked into the public domain. So he filed a legal complaint in November 2006, claiming that someone had hacked into the computers of his main laboratory. At the time, the computers were busy analysing the urine samples submitted by Floyd Landis on the Tour that year. Those samples had already tested positive for testosterone and Landis was on his way to being stripped of his Tour de France crown. But the hackers who accessed the lab’s computers played with the files linked to Landis’s case. The altered data were then circulated as evidence that the lab’s work was so sloppy it shouldn’t be trusted as proof against Landis. Just as Landis was getting to move on with his life, the French computer scandal emerged to hobble him. In November 2011, Landis and Baker would receive one-year suspended prison sentences from the French courts. Not bad for a Mennonite raised without TV or radio.

  I declare convincingly and categorically that my winning the Tour de France has been exclusively due to many years of training and my complete devotion to cycling. Floyd Landis

  Throughout 2009 Floyd Landis was acting weird. From the first day of his disgrace he had adhered to his denial. He had not just grown in confidence about it, he had become almost messianic. There had been the book, False Positive, the Fairness Fund, and he’d given so many talks and done so many signings. His marriage was gone. His father-in-law had taken his own life. He took a bit of refuge in drink, but mainly he took his depression neat.

  In early April of 2010 Floyd Landis decided that enough was enough. In his hearing with the anti-doping authorities he had been represented by Maurice Suh and Paul Scott. The latter was a lawyer with some experience as a research chemist. He had designed anti-doping programmes for cycling teams.

  Landis put in a call to Scott, told him that he wanted to come in from the wilderness. He had information. He would hand it over. He just wanted an end to all that was happening to him. His career hadn’t resumed smoothly. He felt isolated. Guys he had doped with, one guy in particular, weren’t just home free, they were refusing to lend a hand.

  Scott was a good choice of conduit. He had a friendship with Dr Dan Eichner, a scientist with USADA. Scott and Eichner had a telephone conversation in which Scott refused to name Landis and Eichner played along, pretending that he couldn’t guess who the putative whistleblower might be.

  12 April 2010

  Two days after first communicating with Scott about the Landis information, Eichner meets with Scott in Scott’s home office. Eichner receives additional information from Scott about the US Postal Service cycling team doping practices. Scott describes in great detail the doping programme on the US Postal Service team, including its use of blood transfusions, and the involvement of Armstrong, Dr Ferrari, Bruyneel, Jose ‘Pepe’ Marti, Dr Luis
Garcia del Moral and a number of riders, including Landis. It is fair to say that Eichner can hardly wait to get to the office the following morning.

  20 April 2010

  After several direct communications with Floyd Landis, a meeting takes place between Travis Tygart of USADA and Landis to discuss his anti-doping rule violations and those of others, and whether or not USADA will handle the information appropriately. USADA assures Landis that all information will be handled as provided under its rules. Floyd Landis gives Travis Tygart the thumbs-up. Landis also says that he has information that Michael Ball, the team owner of Rock Racing, was involved in doping. The anti-doping officials suggest that Landis ‘reach out’ to Novitzky with this information about Ball, because a criminal investigation into Rock Racing is ensuing.

  Subsequently (of his own volition as everybody is at great pains to point out – even though it was a fantastic idea), Landis sent an email to Steve Johnson, the President of USA Cycling. It was 30 April 2010. With its depiction of Johan Bruyneel’s dexterity with a testosterone patch, it was almost certainly the most fascinating opening paragraph of any email that Steve Johnson had ever received.

  On it went, the details of the madness sorted by chronological order, all of it unadorned with opinion or adjectives, just bald declarative statements which could bring down everybody from Lance to the UCI to the Pope.

  May 2010

  I never liked Goodfellas till I went through this shit. Floyd Landis

  Due to the wrath of Landis, Armstrong, it seems, could be facing a related legal challenge. When Landis sent emails to USA Cycling accusing Armstrong and other riders of having doped, it is believed that he also launched a so-called qui tam case. Qui tam suits are brought by whistleblowers who allege that government funds have been misused, fraudulently obtained or stolen. Very few are won without the intervention and support of the US Department of Justice.

  Potentially at stake in the Lance Armstrong–US Postal case would be the issue of whether any of the $32 million in sponsorship contracts for the Postal team was spent on organised doping, in violation of those contracts. The civil division of the Department of Justice conducts its own, separate investigation on qui tam cases independently of any other investigations happening at the time. If Landis won, he could collect up to 30 per cent of what the government recovered. The Department of Justice was said to be thinking about it. Meanwhile Armstrong, as is his practice, has come out swinging. He has released a series of emails sent to him by Floyd Landis in the preceding weeks.