Cycle of Lies: The Fall of Lance Armstrong (10 page)

Mercier finished that season and his career at the Vuelta a España. Even though he had been a strong climber, the sprinters—known for their bursts of speed on straightaways—were outclimbing him. The
peloton
was flying up mountain passes. He had been in third place going into a massive climb early on in one stage. But one by one, riders were overtaking him, as if he were moving in slow motion.

The Vuelta a España also claimed Baker, whose retreat from the sport was thought to be tragic for the fact that he was considered by many to be an amazing natural talent. Jonathan Vaughters, a rider from Denver who would join the Postal Service team the next year, said Baker was good enough to be a top 10 rider at the Tour—“if he would’ve doped, of course.” At that final Vuelta, Baker himself told Sam Abt of the
New York Times
that he once had been as good as Armstrong. “I was strong most of the time, I was just as strong as Lance Armstrong, maybe even stronger on the climbs. But he was always more hungry for the win than I was.”

Baker knew, when he was selected for the national team, that riders at the top of the sport were doping. “Everybody knew it,” he said, “and everybody talked about it.” Riders recited five-time Tour winner Jacques Anquetil’s famous line—“Leave me in peace, everybody takes dope”—and repeated what Fausto Coppi, a two-time Tour winner, had told a television reporter. He said he only took dope when he needed to, “which is almost all the time.” Baker understood those sayings to be the truth, and he felt pressure to use drugs, but declined.

He had been constantly challenged. At the world championships in 1995, the doctor working with the U.S. national team slipped Baker several pills after Baker complained that other riders seemed so much more energized than he was. Baker did not want to reveal the doctor’s name, but several team members said that the doctor was Max Testa, who worked on Motorola with Armstrong and other top American riders.

“Here, this will help with the pain in your legs,” the doctor told Baker. “It’s just cortisone.”

“Well, isn’t that banned?”

“Yes, but it’s not enough to make you test positive.”

Baker tossed the pills into a trash can.

At the 1997 Paris-Nice race, a high-pitched buzz had sliced through the air inside Baker’s hotel room. He was not amused. He had been fast asleep in his bed when he woke up to see an Italian teammate holding a centrifuge. The guy was testing his own hematocrit. Baker pulled a pillow over his head.

Some French riders had even brought their own doctor to races, and that doctor turned out to be a veterinarian who worked in horse racing. “It was the most ridiculous thing in the world,” Baker said. “The guy didn’t even work with humans!”

Baker lectured teammates about the dangers of doping. “If you red-line an engine forever,” he once said, “it’s not going to be good for your car, and doping isn’t good for your body, either.” Also: “Hormones are what regulate every single thing that happens in your body. When you start messing with those basic building blocks of life, you don’t know what’s going to happen.”

Nobody took him seriously. By then, the management of the team had changed. Systematic doping had already been made part of the Postal team’s strategy.

At the conclusion of the 1997 season, Baker and Mercier packed up their things in their Girona apartment. Baker would move to San Francisco to work in financial services, Mercier to Hawaii to help run one his father’s restaurants, where he made $45,000 a year. He and his wife scraped by with their newborn baby.

It’s unclear whether Kristin Richard thought about how doping would affect her future family when she married Armstrong in May 1998. She did not respond to requests for an interview for this book.

Their whirlwind romance had begun in early 1997 and he proposed just six months later. Immediately afterward, she took over Armstrong’s finances and took control of the household—duties previously handled by Armstrong’s mother and J.T. Neal.

In time, she would profess to being a Catholic with a very strong faith, but Armstrong’s friends didn’t see that side of her early on. Korioth, the former bar manager who became chief of the Lance Armstrong Foundation, had been friends with both Lance and Kristin. “She’d say dirty things to me all the time, crack dirty jokes,” he said. “That’s her shtick—try to become one of the guys and say things that would shock you.”

Korioth saw Kristin Armstrong change from an independent, confident woman into a subservient wife working at her husband’s pleasure. Whatever Armstrong wanted, whenever he wanted it, she was there to make his life easier. At the 1998 world championships, she even helped him dope. But she didn’t stop there. She helped the entire Postal Service team dope. As the riders exited their hotel to head to the race, several teammates saw her wrap cortisone tablets in tinfoil. One by one, she handed them the tiny packages.

Christian Vande Velde, a rider from suburban Chicago, thought it was funny. “Lance’s wife is rolling joints!” he said.

CHAPTER 9

A
rmstrong was in Bend, Oregon, when the biggest drug bust in Tour de France history unfolded five thousand miles away. The Festina team, one of the Tour’s best, had been kicked out of the 1998 race for doping. Willy Voet, one of its
soigneurs
, was caught driving a team car that could have passed for a mobile pharmacy. He carried 234 vials of EPO, 80 doses of human growth hormone and 160 capsules of testosterone.

Armstrong had skipped the Tour that year because he had not been strong enough for a three-week race so soon after his cancer treatments. So, while the top Postal Service team raced in France, Armstrong competed at the Cascade Classic, a multiday stage race in Bend. Officials at the Cascade Classic were excited that a second Postal Service team, starring Armstrong, had come to their event. Without three-time Tour winner Greg LeMond in the sport anymore, cycling’s popularity in the U.S. was at a standstill. The officials hoped that Armstrong, the 1993 world champion, could attract a crowd.

He began the race week with one of his oddest victories. In the lead-up to the Cascade Classic, dozens of children, whose average age was about five, competed in the annual kids’ race. They arrived on tricycles, skateboards and bicycles (most with training wheels). To give the event a big-time feel, Armstrong had been asked to line up with them and usher the kiddie
peloton
down the road.

The starter’s gun kick-started everyone down a short course, a couple of hundred yards long. Some kids swerved diagonally down the road, others meandered toward their parents at the roadside. Some took it so seriously that a group formed at the front, and Armstrong followed.

As that pack moved down the course, Armstrong pedaled alongside the leader, a particularly plucky boy maybe ten years old. Then, with a final quick turn of his pedals, the world champion Lance Armstrong edged the boy at the finish.

Paul Biskup, the Cascade Classic’s technical director, saw it and didn’t believe what had happened. He said to other officials, “Why did that guy have to cross the finish line first? Why didn’t he let that kid beat him?”

They all agreed on one thing: It looked as if Armstrong was such a cutthroat competitor that he simply couldn’t help himself.

He won the Cascade Classic.

From his side of the world, Armstrong joked about Voet’s arrest. “Maybe the reason that they stopped him was because the exhaust pipe was dragging from the weight of the trunk,” he said to teammates at the Oregon race.

In France, no one was laughing. Voet’s arrest spurred the police into an all-out war on drugs in the
peloton
. They raided team buses, hotels and equipment warehouses. In Festina’s headquarters in Lyon, France, they found drugs labeled with riders’ names.

At the start of Stage 8, riders on the Postal Service team had panicked when they saw French police outside a camper used by the team’s top riders. Celaya, a mild-mannered doctor, cursed under his breath.
Mierda. Mierda. Por que? Por que?
Qué debemos hacer? Qué debemos hacer?
He knew a police raid on his team would uncover EPO, testosterone and growth hormone. However condoned in cycling, the drugs were a criminal offense in France. Festina’s team doctor had already gone to jail, and Celaya didn’t want to join him.

The camper had been stocked with $25,000 worth of the team’s doping products. As riders took off down the starting ramp of the time trial nearby, as thousands of fans cheered, the doctor gathered everything—all the EPO, all the testosterone, all the growth hormone and all the cortisone. The word was that the police were raiding teams and he worried that they’d be next. So he was going to flush the drug stash down the toilet.

Before the doctor pressed down the toilet’s lever, though, Hincapie, who was second overall going into Stage 8, took what one rider called “one last huge dose” of EPO. He would need the added boost for the rest of the Tour—a Tour in which some riders would compete clean for the first time because many teams had gotten rid of their drugs one way or another. The prospect of a drug-free ride was so painful that Viatcheslav Ekimov, a Russian rider on Postal who has denied ever doping, joked about diving into the toilet to retrieve the stuff. One teammate looked at the desperate Ekimov and thought, “My God, I thought he’d actually do it.”

Armstrong read the newspapers and received dispatches from Hincapie and other friends at the Tour about the Festina case. He immediately decided Festina had operated so professionally as to make the United States Postal Service team’s drug program seem amateurish. While the drug busts moved some teams to run drug-free, or to at least tone down their programs, the Festina scandal inspired Armstrong to build a more complex operation.

When Celaya received a more lucrative offer to work for another team the next season, Armstrong wasn’t crushed to see him go. He told a teammate, “He wants to take your temperature just to give you a caffeine pill.” For a man who had walked through the valley, in the shadows, Celaya’s attitude about drugs was not aggressive enough.

Jonathan Vaughters was a goofy kid in wool blazers and tight-fitting European pants. He rocked extravagant sideburns—shaved to a sharp point—and plastic-framed nerd glasses, and had raced in Europe since 1994. He and Armstrong had competed against each other since they were teenagers. They also shared the belief that cycling success was built on a foundation of EPO.

He was one of Armstrong’s most trusted acolytes. Another, Christian Vande Velde, was a friendly saxophone-playing Midwesterner who would marry his high school sweetheart. Both were
domestiques
whose job it was to usher Armstrong to a victory.

Both Vaughters and Vande Velde feigned laughter when Armstrong joked about the Festina affair. In truth, they said later, the scandal put them on edge. Vaughters, a world-class climber, and Vande Velde, a rookie, were freaked out that riders and team officials were going to jail because of doping. Vaughters knew that drugs were ingrained in the sport’s culture at the highest levels. Vande Velde was still figuring that out.

The two shared an apartment in Europe. Vaughters one day in mid-1998 blurted out, “Hey, do you want to see EPO?” He opened the refrigerator to show Vande Velde a water bottle containing ice and several tiny glass vials. Already feeling guilty about doping, Vaughters didn’t want to make it worse by lying to his teammate. So he told Vande Velde everything, a veteran’s tutorial about cycling’s secrets. He explained the benefits of EPO and how it raised one’s red blood cell count. He said all the top riders were using the drug.

Vaughters explained to Vande Velde that Celaya prepared water bottles for each rider and that each bottle contained EPO on ice. The bottles were labeled with names and dosages: Armstrong. Livingston. Andreu. Hincapie. Vaughters’s bottle read, “Jonathan—5x2,” meaning the bottle held five vials of EPO with 2,000 units in each.

Vaughters told Vande Velde that riders needed to take other substances to make the EPO more effective. B vitamins. Vitamin C. Testosterone. He showed Vande Velde EPO syringes and testosterone patches. “You’re going to need to do all this stuff one day,” he told him.

“Really, all of it?”

“Yep, pretty much all of it, if you want to keep up. If you want to stay in the sport.”

It was all news to Vande Velde, who’d fallen in love with cycling when he was five years old. His father, a two-time Olympian in track cycling, inflated the tires on their bikes at 6 a.m. so they could ride around their suburban Chicago neighborhood. His elder sister Marisa was a serious cyclist, too.

For the Vande Velde kids, cycling was far more than a hobby. Their father, John, became known in the sport as the P. T. Barnum of track cycling, traveling around the country with what was called “the Vandedrome.” It was his own wood-and-steel velodrome, a circular cycling track on which he held competitions. John Vande Velde even had a bit part in the cult cycling film
Breaking Away
, playing one of the bad guys on the Italian pro cycling squad, Team Cinzano. Christian felt he lived with a real celebrity who took him and his sister on long rides through the Chicago suburbs. He was born to be a bike racer.

Over and over, he watched the pivotal scene in
Breaking Away
when Team Cinzano came to race in Indiana and challenged the local riders. Dave, the protagonist, hangs tough with Team Cinzano until one of them thrusts a tire pump into his wheel, causing him to crash. “Everybody cheats,” Dave says later. “I just didn’t know.”

After Vaughters’s primer on doping, Vande Velde thought back to training camp earlier in the year when he had noticed Armstrong carrying a mysterious thermos in his duffel bag. Odd: Armstrong had never taken a sip.

During that training camp, he’d asked Armstrong if doping was a problem in the sport, but Armstrong just said he shouldn’t worry about it. Looking back, Vande Velde felt stupid for asking. Now he understood why Dylan Casey, a teammate, had scolded him for coming to breakfast one morning at that training camp with a thermos in hand. Casey said, “What the hell are you doing? Are you nuts?” Vande Velde didn’t get it. In his thermos, he actually had
coffee
.

Vaughters taught Vande Velde about doping because he wished someone had done it for him when he first raced for the small professional Spanish team Porcelana Santa Clara.

He had never expected to be faced with the decision of whether or not to dope. The team manager, José Luis Nuñes, was a member of Opus Dei, a conservative group within the Catholic church that focuses on simplicity and piety in daily life. He was celibate and went to Mass twice daily. He had told Vaughters and Vaughters’s parents, Donna and Jim, that his goal was to develop young cyclists naturally and drug-free because that was what God would want. They put their trust in him.

If that had been Nuñes’s goal, he fell short of reaching it. As his team struggled and fell behind on payments to riders, Nuñes gave in to the sport’s reality and allowed the team’s doctors to introduce Vaughters and the team’s other riders to EPO.

“We’re going to use EPO, but we’re not going to do it to increase your hematocrit, OK?” Nuñes told his riders. “We’re just going to keep it from dropping below where it would be normally, you know, as if you were just a normal healthy person. This will help you from getting anemia.”

Vaughters convinced himself to believe the rationalization. “OK, cool, that sounds fair. I’m not cheating anyone.” He agreed to take his first shot of EPO, letting a trainer slip the tiny needle beneath the skin of his arm.

Everyone in the sport knew about the drug and that it was widely used. Vaughters called it “the worst-kept secret ever.”

With no test for EPO, he told me, riders were basically “walking around with it taped to their head.” He’d once heard Spanish riders chatting about EPO during a race, as casually as they might talk about dinner. “How many units of EPO did you take?” “Oh, really, was it good? Hmm, maybe I’ll try that.” Vaughters thought, “Wow, I guess all of these guys are doping.
I guess it’s not that big of a deal.”

Even so, the cheating always bothered Vaughters. He was a churchgoing Lutheran and grew up in a conservative family. His father was a Navy lawyer, his mother a teacher. When he did something wrong as a boy, his parents sat him in a yellow tweed chair in the living room until he came up with a resolution for the problem he had caused. His life was entirely rational.

Vaughters felt so conflicted about doping that he took college classes relating to the choices riders made: Ethics I and II. Morality. Endocrinology. If he had to be a doper, he wanted to study up on it. Like Armstrong, Vaughters knew how the drugs worked, how the body processed them and why riders decided to use them.

When it came to doping, Vaughters was pretty sure Armstrong got more out of it than he did. Vaughters had a naturally high hematocrit level, which fluctuated between 48 and 51 percent depending on whether he was at sea level or a high altitude. That meant his EPO doses had to be small or he would fail a new blood test implemented in the spring of 1997 by the International Cycling Union. (The organization goes by the initials UCI for its French acronym.)

At that point, there was still no test for EPO—it would be four years before one was used at the Tour de France—so to try to limit the drug’s use in the sport, the UCI began taking blood samples from riders at races and testing their hematocrit levels. Any rider with a level of 50 percent or more would receive a fine and a fifteen-day suspension. Hein Verbruggen, the UCI’s president, called it a “health check” because it discouraged riders with dangerously high hematocrits (and thick blood) from competing and possibly risking their health.

Under the new testing, Vaughters could use EPO to improve his hematocrit by only a few points, but Armstrong could gain a much bigger advantage because his normal hematocrit level was 42 or 43. Though each rider’s reaction to EPO was different—some were natural responders to the drug, while others didn’t respond to it at all, Armstrong could improve his level by at least 7 or 8 points, and likely more. That was much more than Vaughters could.

Vaughters could raise his hematocrit with EPO to about 52—an improvement of 4 points at most—then he would temporarily lower it for UCI’s health check by infusing a bag of saline into his blood—a common practice among riders manipulating their blood with EPO. After using the drug, Vaughters saw the numbers tick upward on his power meter, the electronic machine affixed to his bike’s handlebars that measured a rider’s power output.

Vaughters noticed that many times EPO would give him a 4 to 6 percent increase in power. That translated into a few percentage points of speed. That translated into better finishes.

In time, Vaughters would become one of the best climbers in Europe.

And all of that depressed him.

At the 1998 “Festina” Tour de France, as gendarmes swarmed the race, one team hid its EPO in a vacuum cleaner. One rider had his family members smuggle it into his room at the team hotel. Late in the Tour, in an act of carelessness, a Postal rider left a thermos filled with vials of EPO in the refrigerator of the team bus. So much for a clean race.