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

  The tipping point for Armstrong and his circle came in early 2010, when his former US Postal Service teammate and protégé Floyd Landis sent explosive e-mails to a small handful of men in the top ranks of professional cycling. In these e-mails, Landis admitted to using performance-enhancing drugs and blood transfusions during his years racing alongside Lance, and accused many of his former Postal teammates of taking part in doping as well. Describing Lance as the ringleader of these doping practices, Landis was saying what a few people in the press had suspected for years, but no one had been able to prove. For a month, Landis’s e-mails remained a closely guarded secret. Federal agents who had learned of their contents and were looking into whether any crimes had been committed had instructed Landis not to go public with his allegations. Through a source close to US cycling officials, Reed—working with Vanessa—discovered the existence of the e-mails, was able to obtain them, verify their authenticity, and publish what turned out to be an exclusive international scoop, the first of many we had during the years we continued to cover the story.

  To interview Landis, Reed spent two weeks in a remote town in Southern California where Landis was living far from the public eye, in a cabin with scenic views of a pine-forested mountainside—and a noticeable array of discarded junk littering the property. It took days for him to persuade Landis to tell his full story—and the cyclist did so despite pressure from many friends and former teammates who beseeched him to remain quiet. Several months later, in August 2010, we broke the news that Landis had filed a whistle-blower lawsuit under the federal False Claims Act, alleging that Lance’s team had defrauded the US Postal Service, which had spent more than $30 million to sponsor the team. During the course of our investigative work for the Journal, we were able to interview at length many of the major figures involved in the story as well as numerous minor ones. We came to know every key player, some of them quite well. But no one, of course, was as mesmerizing as Lance. Lance Armstrong agreed to speak to us several times during the course of our reporting on the investigations against him, although he only very rarely allowed us to quote him or even to attribute what he told us to an anonymous source. The first time came as a surprise. On an August afternoon in 2010, Vanessa had flown to Austin, Texas, to meet with Lance’s lawyer, Tim Herman, at Trio, the restaurant at the Four Seasons Hotel. A few minutes after their lunch began, Lance strolled in and, with his ex-wife seated at a table nearby, joined in a lengthy discussion.

  Even though our conversations with him were always on his terms, and carefully designed to influence our opinion of him, they gave us more of an insight into him than he might have realized. As journalists, we found Lance to be an intriguing mixture of open and withholding, controlling and seemingly vulnerable. He reads extensively, including everything written about him, and he likes to get to know some of the writers who are reporting on him. He knows how to turn on the charm when he wants to, but when he’s angry about something, he can go negative and rip into people with blistering personal attacks, as he did several times with us.

  Thanks to these conversations, as well as interviews conducted with people ranging from his closest friends to his bitterest enemies, this book will allow you to see Lance up close—from his turbulent teenage years to his ascent to the top of his sport, his battle with cancer, and the depths of his disgrace. You will find out what motivated him to take extreme risks and to chase seemingly impossible goals; what fueled his persistent lying and bullying, his contempt for others, and his vendettas against those who spoke the truth.

  While Lance Armstrong is its central character, you will also get to know Travis Tygart, a man we’ve come to see as the idealistic David to Lance’s seemingly unconquerable Goliath. Tygart knew the drastically underfunded US Anti-Doping Agency lacked the resources and the subpoena power he would need to build an airtight case. But after federal prosecutors dropped their criminal investigation without bringing charges, Tygart felt he had no other choice than to carry the weight of challenging Lance. He went into battle armed with what might have seemed only a slingshot compared to Lance and his team of high-paid, high-powered lawyers and publicists, but in the end that slingshot proved very powerful. The story of how this all came to pass is what you will read in the following pages.

  CHAPTER ONE

  TRUE BLUE

  At precisely 11:00 A.M. in Lannemezan, a quiet village in Southwest France, nine men in the dark-blue jerseys of the US Postal team—part of a pack of more than 150 cyclists on twenty-one teams—rolled out of town to begin a painful six-hour journey over seven Pyrenean passes. It was Saturday, July 17, 2004. The temperature was already 78 degrees at the start of stage 13 of the 21-day Tour de France.

  The Tour de France’s brutality is legend. The race lasts for 23 days, including 2 rest days, and is divided into seventeen road “stages,” including the flat stages favored by sprinters, mountain stages for climbers, and medium-mountain stage, plus four “time trials”—individually timed races against the clock—beginning with the “prologue,” which opens the Tour.

  This would be the cruelest day of all. The course ahead stretched 127 miles, winding through the forested Midi-Pyrenees region, where wooded foothills give way to alpine pastures, then to a flat prelude through shaded farmlands, and finally to a series of ever-rising peaks: the gradual Col d’Aspin, the deceptive Col de Latrape, and, finally, the infamous climb to the Plateau de Beille.

  Lance Armstrong began the day in second place, meaning that he was second in the so-called overall standings, computed by adding up the stage times thus far and subtracting any time bonuses that had been earned. He was 5 minutes and 24 seconds behind the melancholy Frenchman Thomas Voeckler. Five minutes are substantial by the standards of any normal race, but in the Tour de France, they could easily disappear. Armstrong’s main rival, the German Jan Ullrich, the man who had the best chance of emerging from the mountains on his tail, trailed him by just 3 minutes and 36 seconds. Armstrong’s aim, and the mission of his US Postal Service team, was to make the time gap between him and the rest of his pursuers insurmountably large.

  After they hit the countryside, the Postal squad assumed its typical formation: eight riders forming a spear to pierce the wind, with Armstrong protected in the center. Every team in the Tour de France has a captain, the man who will finish first. While the captain pursues the yellow jersey, awarded to the rider with the lowest overall time, the rest of the team does cycling’s grunt work: blocking the wind, putting pressure on rivals with clever tactical moves, even dropping back to the team car and picking up bottles of water for the leader. No team in cycling was more single-mindedly focused on its captain than the US Postal team. And no captain expected more loyalty and hard work from his support riders than Armstrong.

  Armstrong’s teammates kept him securely in the sweet spot of the pack: right near the front, behind his Postal Service spear, where there’s no wind and minimal risk of a crash. Armstrong pedaled in their slipstreams, using the momentum of the group, which enabled him to use 30 to 60 percent less energy than if he were riding alone.

  The pack, called a peloton, resembles a graceful amoeba—its perimeter changing shape as it floats down the road. Inside the amoeba, teams elbow each other, jab ribs, and collide wheels in constant combat for the best position. On the twenty-five-mile journey to the base of the day’s first climb, the US Postal squad shot to the front of the peloton, accelerating even on the flat roads where riders typically conserve their energy. Driving the pace on the flats—a technique pioneered by the Postal team—neutralized other squads’ tiny, elflike climbers, whose smaller size offered no advantage on these relatively flat stretches.

  The maneuver came at the direction of team director Johan Bruyneel, a handsome, dark-haired Belgian who trailed the riders in a team car. Watching the broadcast of the race on a television installed on his dashboard, Bruyneel carefully orchestrated every acceleration, attack, or chase. Once the race neared the mountains, Armstrong would rely on the grun
ts, his four most trusted Postal teammates: José Azevedo, George Hincapie, Floyd Landis, and José Luis Rubiera.

  Just forty miles into the stage, the peloton reached the first significant climb—a long, gentle ascent up the eleven-mile Col de Portet d’Aspet. Here, in the climbs, the team faced its most challenging work. Armstrong was big for a cyclist. At 160 pounds, he was about 20 percent heavier than the average climber, weight that had to be carried over the decisive mountain stages.

  But the Blue Train, as they were known, proceeded as fast uphill as they had on the flats. Rivals began falling off the back of the pack like loose debris. Dutch, Belgians, Danes, Russians—they were heroes back home, national champions, endurance machines in the 99th percentile of the human race. Yet today they looked like amateurs. Armstrong had shaved Voeckler’s lead to less than 4 minutes by the end of the first climb.

  It was getting hotter, and empty water bottles shot out of the peloton like popcorn. A bottle an hour for every rider equals about three hundred on the side of the road—free souvenirs for fans. Basque rider Iban Mayo, a top Tour contender, succumbed to the heat and tension on the next climb, the relatively easy four-mile Col de Latrape. Mayo, suffering a deep burning sensation in his legs, simply got off his bike. Orange-clad Basque fans pleaded with him to continue. Slowly, he remounted his bike, his teammates joining onlookers in pushing him up the climb.

  At the front of the pack, meanwhile, Armstrong barely seemed to be exerting himself. And he moved at a breathtaking pace. The Postal team hit the climb at roughly twenty miles per hour, a speed cycling teams had never attained in these conditions. The Americans chalked it up to technology and fitness—but the French, and other squads, had their suspicions. So did some members of the press.

  On the slopes of the Col d’Agnes, 90 miles into the 127-mile stage, Postal led a pack that had now dwindled to about forty riders. Voeckler couldn’t keep up, and Armstrong now trailed him by only 44 seconds in overall time. Sensing the narrowing lead, Voeckler shot down the other side with reckless disregard for the off-camber, hairpin turns, and choppy pavement. Fans winced as he came within inches of launching himself off a thirty-foot cliff. By the start of the final climb, he had regained his advantage over Armstrong: 5 minutes, 24 seconds.

  At the base of Plateau de Beille, a ten-mile climb so steep that most people can hardly walk it, Postal took the lead. By then only about thirty or so riders had managed to hang with them. While the others were visibly suffering, the Postal riders looked positively comfortable.

  George Hincapie raced to the front of the pack. The lanky, almost simian rider, who grew up racing in New York City, had been Armstrong’s most trusted lieutenant through five Tour victories. The two men lived and trained together in Spain, and Armstrong described Hincapie as his best buddy. He executed a technique that was his specialty—the “lead-out”—in which, on the first gentle slopes before the climb, he would accelerate with Armstrong on his tail. Armstrong could rest comfortably in the soft air created by Hincapie’s larger silhouette as they tore through the summer heat. Every rider wanted to be at the front at that moment, but Hincapie was the best. He stretched what was left of the peloton like a piece of gum, then peeled off, exhausted, as the real climb began.

  As the hill pushed to a 6 percent grade—on its way to an eventual 8 percent—Armstrong had only three teammates still supporting him. The others had dropped out. But Ullrich, the square-jawed German who’d won the Tour in 1997, clung to the wheels of the survivors. The year before, Ullrich had been Armstrong’s toughest competitor, his tormentor in the mountains.

  As the riders slowed and began to pant in the heat, the Postal team’s rising star, Floyd Landis, pushed to the front to do the critical work of keeping pace for Armstrong so that Armstrong would get a smooth ride. Tall for a cyclist but rail thin, Landis was a latecomer to the sport. He had joined the team in 2002 and risen to become Postal’s second-best. Landis, who had started out as a mountain biker before switching to road racing, had a cardiovascular capacity that was extremely rare—even more favorable than Armstrong’s, according to calculations by team doctors. As he shepherded his team leader up the climb, Landis felt the attention of the cameras, the television commentators touting his talents. Other teams were courting him, and his performance proved he could be a potential rival to Armstrong. Armstrong counted on Landis’s extraordinary strength to support him in the mountain stages. But Landis was not supposed to have ambitions of his own.

  Slowly, the riders passed one after another of the red-and-white inflatable banners marking the distance to the finish line. With each checkpoint, Armstrong gained ground. Two seconds here, three there. The fans at the top of Plateau de Beille, some of whom had hiked for hours to get a good spot, cheered madly. Some ran alongside the riders, screaming encouragement or, occasionally, epithets. Cries of “doper, doper” could be heard directed at Armstrong from French fans who suspected his performance was drug-fueled. In cycling, whether the fans love you or hate you, the cheers and jeers mostly blend into one savage din—punctuated by cowbells and the occasional air horn.

  Landis, exhausted from knifing through the wind, finally pulled off and gave the lead to his Postal teammate José Luis Rubiera, known as Chechu. The Spanish climber screamed up the switchback turns, clearing the way for Armstrong through crowds waving colorful national flags. “Allez, allez!” “Go, go!” the fans screamed.

  With 6.2 miles still left in the 9.9-mile climb, Ullrich had already lost 40 seconds. Voeckler had lost 1 minute and 41 seconds. The riders passed the 3-mile mark, then the 1-mile mark. Armstrong was alone, far out in front of almost everyone, Ullrich a mere memory at more than 6 minutes behind. The Tour de France was as good as won.

  Only one obstacle remained, and Armstrong, ever the assassin, charged after him. The Italian Ivan Basso was already so far down in the standings that he was merely hoping for a strong finish. Armstrong and Basso reached the summit together, and the roads began to flatten out. With less than one mile to go, Armstrong leaned his bike over at frightening angles around every turn. He knew he had gained so much time that he could not lose the Tour de France now, but still he stuck to Basso’s wheel. He looked angry, grimacing and pushing the pace. He wanted every second. He wanted not just to beat but to crush his competition.

  With 164 yards to go, Armstrong blew past Basso and sprinted across the finish line, raising his arms in the air triumphantly. He was now more than 6 minutes ahead of his closest competition. With a week to go, and only two more mountain stages ahead, it seemed inevitable that—barring some unforeseen disaster—he would win his sixth Tour.

  While his teammates boarded a bus, destined for traffic jams down the mountain, Armstrong boarded a helicopter with girlfriend Sheryl Crow. He may well have been, at that moment, the most thoroughly envied man in the world. His performance that day wasn’t just miraculous and beautiful—it was a seminal moment in the Armstrong legend. He had stared down cancer. He had a beautiful, famous girlfriend. And now he had once again beaten the Europeans at their own game.

  By that point in the 21-day race, Armstrong didn’t need to win another stage in order to win the Tour de France. He could have coasted to Paris without breaking a sweat and still sipped champagne on the Champs-Élysées, wearing the victor’s yellow jersey. But Lance did not want to simply win the race. He wanted to be sure no other cyclist would dare to dream he had a chance of prevailing.

  Over the next several days, Armstrong continued advancing his lead, widening the time gap between himself and his competitors. He won again on the mountain stage from Valréas to Villard-de-Lans. He won the individual time trial—a race against the clock—from the bottom of Alpe d’Huez all the way up the sickeningly steep 9.6 miles of switchbacks. He won the stage from Le Bourg-d’Oisans to Le Grand-Bornand, and he won another time trial—a 34.2-mile flat course around Besançon.

  By July 25, the final day of the race, Armstrong was still 6 minutes and 19 seconds ahead of his competition. The
peloton took off from the suburban French city of Montereau-Fault-Yonne. The course meandered 101.3 miles to Paris. The ride was largely ceremonial for Armstrong. Someone in the US Postal team car cracked open a bottle of champagne, poured it into a flute, and passed it to Armstrong, who stood out in the bright yellow jersey. In front of cameramen on motorcycles, he toasted his own victory, then put down the glass and rode his bike with no hands on the bars, holding up six fingers, one for each of his six Tour de France victories.

  • • •

  Six years later, Floyd Landis was ten pounds heavier. On the verge of confessing what no American cyclist had ever admitted before, he looked as if he hadn’t shaved for a week. A thin, reddish-brown beard sprouted on his pale skin. His eyes were slightly red from lack of sleep, and he wore blue jeans and an old white T-shirt. So much had happened since that day in the 2004 Tour, when the entire world watched him give his all as he shepherded Armstrong over those mountain passes. In those six years, Landis had become a hero, a martyr, a villain—and now he was a broken man. And he was about to tell secrets he knew would tear the sport apart.

  He was sitting in a conference room at the Marriott Hotel in Marina del Rey, California, reliving the 2004 race. But the other men in the room had no interest in his heroics on the road. One of the men was a federal agent named Jeff Novitzky—a tall, bald-headed criminal investigator for the Food and Drug Administration. Another was Travis Tygart, the chief executive officer of the US Anti-Doping Agency (USADA), a nonprofit group in charge of policing doping in sport.

  What had begun as a cathartic truth-telling exercise for Landis had morphed into a full-blown federal investigation with Landis as the chief witness for the government. The conversation wasn’t recorded, but Novitzky and Tygart took careful notes. For the first time in the history of professional bike racing, one of the sport’s biggest stars—a true firsthand witness to cycling’s most heavily guarded secrets—was going to tell the truth about doping.