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

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  Copyright © 2013 by Reed Albergotti and Vanessa O’Connell

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  To Sascha, Kathy, Emmett, and Robby—R.A.

  To Eric—V.O’C.

  Starting in the 1860s, Americans grew enamored with the bicycle. Cyclists and racers began to refer to themselves as wheelmen. Bicycle racing later fell out of favor as Americans began to rally around stick and ball sports, and the automobile became king. But starting in the late 1970s, a new generation of wheelmen set out on a mission to restore American glory to the sport.

  Nearly all men can stand adversity,

  but if you want to test a man’s character, give him power.

  —ABRAHAM LINCOLN

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  CAST OF CHARACTERS

  INTRODUCTION

  CHAPTER ONE

  TRUE BLUE

  CHAPTER TWO

  A NEW BEGINNING FOR AMERICAN CYCLING

  CHAPTER THREE

  A RAGE TO WIN

  CHAPTER FOUR

  THE FIRST MILLION

  CHAPTER FIVE

  TEAMWORK

  CHAPTER SIX

  SIT-INS AND SADDLE SORES

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  LANCE ARMSTRONG INCORPORATED

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  HEMATOCRITS AND HYPOCRITES

  CHAPTER NINE

  DOMESTIC DISCORD AND THE DOMESTIQUE

  CHAPTER TEN

  A NEW GEAR

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  ADIEU AND FUCK YOU

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  THE COMEBACK (AGAIN)

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  BETRAYALS

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  THE CHASE

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  SCORCHED EARTH

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  NOT A SNITCH

  EPILOGUE

  PHOTOGRAPHS

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  NOTES AND SOURCES

  INDEX

  CAST OF CHARACTERS

  USADA: United States Anti-Doping Agency—the government-funded nonprofit based in Colorado Springs, Colorado, that oversees anti-doping efforts in Olympic sports in the United States.

  UCI: Union Cycliste Internationale (or International Cycling Union)—the sport’s governing body, in Aigle, Switzerland. It’s set up to promote cycling as a sport but also responsible for the sport’s anti-doping policy.

  Betsy Andreu: Opinionated, feisty wife of Frankie Andreu and a stay-at-home mother to three kids in Dearborn, Michigan.

  Frankie Andreu: Michigan-born Motorola cyclist with a lanky build and a cranky disposition. Andreu lived with Lance in Como, Italy, and became road captain on the US Postal team in 1999.

  Kristin Richard Armstrong: Career-minded public-relations woman from a wealthy family; met Lance in 1997 in Austin, Texas, shortly after he finished his chemotherapy. After they married in 1998, she quit working to raise their son and twin daughters, living in the French Riviera and Girona, Spain. They divorced in 2003.

  Terry Keith Armstrong: Lance’s stepfather; Armstrong adopted Lance soon after marrying Linda Mooneyham in 1974.

  Dr. Arnie Baker: Floyd Landis’s cycling coach and supporter, and a retired San Diego physician.

  Michael Ball: Former track cyclist and Los Angeles fashion mogul; founded, owned, and sponsored Rock Racing in 2007. Ball was targeted by FDA special agent Jeff Novitzky in his investigation into the use of performance-enhancing drugs in cycling.

  Michael Barry: Lance’s teammate from 2002 to 2005; had intimate knowledge of the doping era. Barry wrote a firsthand account of his career with Lance (Inside the Postal Bus) without mentioning the doping on the team.

  William “Bill” Bock III: USADA’s general counsel; a soft-spoken attorney born in Texas and raised in Indiana. Bock represented athletes for years and became the lead attorney for the US Anti-Doping Agency in 2007.

  Edward “Eddie B” Borysewicz: Gruff cycling coach who emigrated from Poland to the United States, bringing Eastern Bloc tactics to America and coaching Greg LeMond and Lance Armstrong, among others. Borysewicz convinced eighteen-year-old Lance to join Subaru-Montgomery in 1990, giving Lance his first cycling contract.

  Johan Bruyneel: Belgium-born former road racer who became the US Postal Service team boss and oversaw operations, with Lance’s input, on Postal, Discovery Channel, Astana, and RadioShack-Nissan teams.

  Chris Carmichael: Coach of the US junior national cycling team, who recruited Lance to the team in 1991 and eventually made a name for himself as Lance’s cycling coach.

  Edward Coyle: University of Texas researcher who studied Lance in a sports lab from 1992 to 1999. His findings that Lance had become a more efficient cyclist post-cancer, with a naturally higher VO2 max than the average male, were widely reported by the media as fact. He admitted in 2008 to a “minor error” in his calculations.

  Rick Crawford: One of Lance’s first (unpaid) cycling coaches and a mentor; became a Dallas-based pro triathlete in 1985.

  Sheryl Crow: Missouri-born musician and songwriter who began a relationship with Lance in 2003 and became engaged to him in 2005. They broke up before a planned wedding in 2006.

  Mark Fabiani: Lance’s crisis management consultant and media point man, hired in 2010; a slick-haired Harvard Law grad who became known as the Master of Disaster when he served as special counsel to President Clinton during the Whitewater investigations in the early 1990s.

  Dr. Michele Ferrari: An Italian sports doctor and mathematician; caused a scandal in a 1994 interview by saying erythropoietin (EPO) was no more dangerous than orange juice. Ferrari became Lance’s personal trainer in 1995.

  Jeffrey C. Garvey: Founding chairman of the Lance Armstrong Foundation and cofounder of Austin Ventures.

  Mark Gorski: General manager of the US Postal Service team and one of the owners of Tailwind Sports, which owned and managed Postal. Gorski first achieved fame after winning gold in the 1984 Olympics in track cycling.

  Edward “Eddie” Gunderson: Lance’s free-spirited biological father, who divorced Linda in 1973, when Lance was
two, after a turbulent and abusive relationship.

  Tyler Hamilton: Lance’s teammate on the US Postal Service team; won a gold medal at the 2004 Olympics but received suspensions and bans from cycling after testing positive for EPO. He admitted to doping before a grand jury in 2010.

  Robert “Bob” Hamman: Founder of SCA Promotions, which insured Tailwind Sports against some of Lance’s bonuses for winning the Tour de France.

  Anna Hansen: Lance’s girlfriend since 2008 and the mother of his two youngest children, Olivia Marie and Maxwell Edward.

  Timothy Herman: Head of Lance’s legal defense team, who started filing lawsuits on Lance’s behalf in 2004.

  George Hincapie: Lance’s New York City–born domestique and teammate first on Motorola, then on the US Postal Service, and later on the Discovery Channel Pro Cycling Team. Relocated to Greenville, South Carolina.

  Steve Johnson: President and CEO of USA Cycling; a former teammate of Lance’s on Subaru-Montgomery and a friend of Thomas Weisel.

  Linda Mooneyham Armstrong Kelly: Lance’s mother, a New Orleans–born, Dallas-raised, high school dropout who gave birth to Lance at age seventeen.

  Bart Knaggs: Lance’s business manager and co-owner of Lance’s bike store, Mellow Johnny’s, and a partner at Capital Sports & Entertainment. Knaggs is also a former cyclist and Lance’s friend and riding buddy in Austin.

  John Korioth: Cofounder of the Lance Armstrong Foundation and best man at Lance’s wedding to Kristin Richard Armstrong.

  Floyd Landis: Winner of the 2006 Tour de France; later admitted to doping and was stripped of his title. A thin, ginger-haired pro cyclist; raised as a Mennonite; became Lance’s friend and protégé when riding for the US Postal Service team from 2002 to 2004 but moved to the rival Phonak team in 2005.

  Levi Leipheimer: Lance’s teammate on the US Postal Service team from 2000 to 2001 who rode again with Lance on Astana and Team RadioShack following Lance’s second cycling comeback.

  Greg LeMond: First American winner of the Tour de France; won the Tour three times before retiring from pro racing in 1994.

  Robert Luskin: A veteran white-collar defense lawyer and member of Lance’s defense team; a key player in Lance’s attack on USADA.

  Stephanie McIlvain: Oakley’s cycling representative and a longtime friend of Lance’s.

  John Thomas “J.T.” Neal: Eccentric and caring mentor; friend and landlord to Lance in Austin, Texas, and his unpaid personal masseur; tended to Lance’s affairs in the United States while Lance competed in Europe.

  Jeff Novitzky: A special agent at the Food and Drug Administration; investigated doping in professional sports, including cycling; formerly worked as an IRS special agent.

  Jim “Och” Ochowicz: Founder, general manager, and coach of two American teams: 7-Eleven, then Motorola, both managed by the South Club Inc.; godfather to Lance’s firstborn child, Luke.

  William “Bill” J. Stapleton III: Lance’s agent and longtime confidant; a black-haired, broad-faced former Olympic swimmer.

  Travis Tygart: Florida-born CEO of USADA, who was previously its director of legal affairs.

  Christian Vande Velde: Teammate on Lance’s 1999 and 2001 Tour de France teams; also worked with Michele Ferrari.

  Jonathan Vaughters: US Postal Service teammate of Lance’s who doped while riding with Lance; later became a team manager, most recently for the Garmin-Sharp team.

  Hein Verbruggen: Dutchman who was president of the UCI from 1991 until 2005, then became UCI’s “honorary president,” remaining on its management committee.

  David Walsh: Irish sports journalist who is chief sports writer of the British newspaper The Sunday Times.

  Thomas W. Weisel: Creator of the Subaru-Montgomery team and founder of Tailwind Sports, which managed the Postal Service team; an übercompetitive alpha male with expensive homes in Ross, California, and Maui; headed the San Francisco investment firm Montgomery Securities for nearly two decades.

  Paul Willerton: Illinois-born cyclist who rode with Lance as an amateur in the early 1990s during two world championship road races; turned pro in 1991 with Greg LeMond’s Team Z.

  David “Tiger” Williams: Part owner of Tailwind Sports and friend of Floyd Landis. Williams is an avid cycling enthusiast and founder of Williams Trading, LLC.

  Dave Zabriskie: Teammate of Lance’s on the US Postal Service team who looked up to team boss Johan Bruyneel.

  INTRODUCTION

  Not long ago, the world witnessed the dramatic downfall of one of America’s most celebrated sports heroes: Lance Armstrong.

  Millions of viewers were riveted by Lance’s confessional interview with Oprah Winfrey in early 2013. Although what he said during that interview was by no means the whole truth, Lance did talk candidly to Oprah about certain subjects. For the first time, he publicly admitted to doping and using blood transfusions for his seven Tour de France victories. He also spoke touchingly about having to ask his thirteen-year-old son, Luke, the oldest of his five children, to stop defending him and telling people that what they were saying about his father wasn’t true—because, unfortunately, it was.

  But his confession raised more questions than it answered, in part because he failed to put any of it in context, to talk about who had helped him dope, where the drugs came from, and how he managed to cover up his activities for so long, despite the hundreds of drug tests he underwent and the vigorous investigations of journalists who did not believe any of his denials.

  This book is an attempt to fill in the gaps he left and tell a much more complete, objective, and nuanced story. It isn’t just about Armstrong as an individual, an athlete, or a cancer survivor. It’s not solely about doping and cheating—or merely about sports. We view this as a business story—a story about a business that, at least in its participants’ eyes, was too big to fail. We will take you behind the scenes, where you will meet many of the cyclists who rode for and against Armstrong, the bureaucrats and businessmen, the sponsors and lawyers who surrounded him during the course of his long career, and finally the investigators who brought him down.

  From the clinics and laboratories of shadowy doctors in Spain to the vertiginous mountain roads of the Tour de France, from secret scenes of doping and blood transfusions in hotel rooms and team buses to extravagant victory celebrations at the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, from Armstrong’s remarkable comeback from a near-fatal testicular cancer to his final fall from grace, what we have provided here is the first in-depth account of what went into the making—and unmaking—of an American icon. It is also a picture of a multinational conspiracy that yielded its many participants hundreds of millions of dollars over the course of a twenty-four-year sweep of time, as it played out in locations as diverse as Austin, Texas; Washington, DC; Greenwich, Connecticut; Idyllwild, California; Nice, France; St. Moritz, Switzerland; and Girona, Spain.

  For most of the past century, Europeans had dominated the sport of cycling, and became its most avid fans. But in Europe cycling was very much a working-class sport. Professional cyclists came from small farm towns or poor urban areas, and their pay reflected it. As recently as the 1970s and 1980s, some of the greatest names in the sport, like Frenchman Bernard Hinault and Belgian Eddy Merckx, made money that would look laughable even to second-tier professionals by the mid-2000s.

  For decades few Americans paid any attention to professional cycling at all. But once that began to change, it would be the Americans—the newcomers to the sport—who would change its economics forever, commanding the richest paychecks the sport had ever seen. Cycling’s first million-dollar salary went, in 1991, to Greg LeMond, an American who won the Tour de France three times after moving to France at age nineteen. Next came Armstrong, riding on teams with big American sponsors—including the US Postal Service and corporations such as television’s Discovery Channel—whose lavish funding helped drive his base pay to $4.5 million and his bonuses to $10 million by 2004. Armstrong’s pay was only a tiny fraction of his overall income becaus
e of the hugely lucrative endorsement deals he signed, worth about $16.5 million that year alone.

  Viewing Armstrong’s rise and fall through the prism of business, we see him as both tool and beneficiary of the ambitions of a small group of Americans who wanted the United States to become a major player in what had been a mainly European sport. These men aimed not just to dominate the sport but to commercialize it and make it into a money machine. Armstrong was perfect for their goals—an extraordinary combination of athletic talent, drive, ambition, and ruthlessness. And once he began winning, he became the chairman and CEO of the business of making himself rich and famous. Aided by a vast, interconnected network of supporters, he kept tight control of his image, presenting himself through the media and through his sponsorships as an all-American hero—sports prodigy, cancer survivor who came back from near death to win his first Tour de France, founder of a multimillion-dollar charity that offered hope, help, and support to thousands of people suffering from cancer.

  Yet Armstrong’s public persona was very different from his private one. The great athlete turned cancer activist and secular saint had a dark side that very few people outside of his inner circle knew about. While he portrays himself as a poor underdog, he came from a reasonably comfortable middle-class home in Plano, Texas, and also was indulged and self-absorbed and arrogant from boyhood. Although Lance seemed to be always searching for a father figure, he struggled to maintain lasting relationships with many of his mentors. He surrounded himself with friends, girlfriends, and business partners, and needed and craved their attention, reassurances, and support. But he had a habit of exploiting those who cared about him.

  This book arose from the more than one hundred interviews we conducted and the many articles we wrote in The Wall Street Journal about Lance and his take-no-prisoners war with former teammates, federal investigators, and anti-doping officials over accusations that he had doped to win the Tour de France. Our work for the Journal was focused on offering the first detailed accounts of the mechanics and culture of the US Postal Service team’s doping program and, as such, it ended up playing a role in the events that culminated in his downfall.