Cycle of Lies: The Fall of Lance Armstrong (26 page)

At the Tour of California’s news conference, one question stopped him. Paul Kimmage, once a pro cyclist himself and now an award-winning reporter for the
Sunday Times
of London, asked why Armstrong said Landis and Italian rider Ivan Basso should be welcomed back into the sport after serving doping bans.

“What is it about these dopers that you seem to admire so much?” Kimmage asked.

Armstrong recognized Kimmage, an outspoken antidoping advocate who had written a book,
Rough Ride
, about the sport’s doping culture. Stapleton and Mark Higgins, Armstrong’s personal PR man, had seen Kimmage take a seat in the front row of the news conference, and had given Armstrong the heads-up.

Armstrong responded to Kimmage as if he had rehearsed his answer.

“When I decided to come back for what I think is a very noble reason, you said, ‘The cancer has been in remission for four years, but our cancer has now returned,’ meaning me. I am here to fight this disease. I am here so that I don’t have to deal with it, you don’t have to deal with it, my children don’t have to deal with it.”

He then said to Kimmage, “You are not worth the chair that you’re sitting on with a statement like that.”

The season had just begun.

When Landis’s suspension ended, he couldn’t find a job. Even Vaughters, who had remained friendly with him, said no. “I would trust Floyd to babysit my son, which I would say about very few bike racers,” Vaughters said. “If he needs money, I will loan him cash. But I couldn’t hire him as a bike racer.”

Landis finally signed with a lower-level cycling team, the U.S.-based OUCH squad. While he rode in small-time races, Armstrong was back at the Tour, welcomed heartily by thousands. One farmer propped a sign in front of his cornfield: “Armstrong: Pourquoi pas?” (“Armstrong: Why not?”)

Even with nearly four years off, Armstrong rode brilliantly, battling his own teammate, the Spanish rider Alberto Contador, to be Astana’s team leader. Eleven years his junior, Contador would win that battle, but Armstrong still showed his strength by whipping dozens of younger riders. On one stage that ended atop the legendary Mont Ventoux, he finished fifth.

While Contador proved to be better, Armstrong was a serious challenger, once missing out on the leader’s yellow jersey by two-tenths of a second. At the end of the 2,150-mile race, he finished third behind Contador, who had won. Armstrong became the second-oldest rider to finish in the top three in the Tour’s long history.

L’Equipe
, the newspaper that had broken so many doping stories about him, ran a headline, “Chapeau, Le Texan,” which means “Hats Off to the Texan.” French President Nicolas Sarkozy raved about him, saying he “did more in five minutes [at the Tour] than his public relations team did in ten years.” At Tour’s end, Armstrong announced that he’d be starting his own team, sponsored by RadioShack, and would be its lead rider for the 2010 season.

Landis envied Armstrong. Ever since serving his doping ban, he had threatened Armstrong with blackmail if Armstrong didn’t find a job for him in cycling. When that job didn’t materialize, he was so bitter that he began threatening other former Postal Service riders, saying he was going to expose them as dopers. If he had to suffer because he had doped, others were going to suffer with him.

In 2008, he told Zabriskie he intended to expose the universally admired George Hincapie. Zabriskie called Hincapie the night before the legendary Paris-Roubaix race.

“Floyd says he’s going to call the police on you and that they’ll be waiting for you at the finish line,” Zabriskie said. “I wouldn’t have said anything, but I think he might be serious this time . . .”

Hincapie was so unnerved that he finished ninth, more than five minutes back in a race he was favored to win.

Landis also talked about making a video about the doping that occurred on the Postal Service team, and then posting it on YouTube. That threat caught the attention of David “Tiger” Williams, one of the Wall Street financiers who was an early backer of the Postal Service squad.

Williams was a former captain of Yale’s hockey team, a competitive cyclist and an investor in Tailwind Sports, the management company that owned the Postal Service team. He was also a top donor to the Lance Armstrong Foundation and one of the big-time donors to the Floyd Fairness Fund—a pool of money that helped Landis pay the $2 million in legal fees he had incurred while fighting his antidoping case.

At first, Williams did not have confirmation that Armstrong had doped. He had asked Vaughters again and again if there had been doping on the team, but Vaughters never gave him a straight answer.

In 2009, Williams felt bad that Landis was out of work, and had heard the rumors that he was going to expose the doping that occurred in the sport if he remained jobless. So the company Williams co-owned, eSoles, which sold athletic shoe insoles, paid $200,000 to sponsor Landis’s OUCH team. Landis soon told him about the doping on the Postal Service squad.

“We can’t let Floyd be a loose cannon,” Williams told a friend in early 2009.

So Landis kept quiet until Tiger Williams had a reason to use Landis’s firsthand testimony for his own benefit. He once had pledged $1 million to Armstrong’s foundation in exchange for using the “Livestrong” logo on his company’s shoe liners. But in April 2009, Williams learned the deal was off. He was told that Nike, the foundation’s primary sponsor, had nixed it.

When Williams asked what happened, Armstrong responded by e-mail: “To be honest, and I say this as a good friend of yours, I don’t feel like dealing with this right now. I’m afraid it’s up to you guys to sort out. For what it’s worth, and maybe a good solution, is to return you all of your money and let’s all get on down the road.”

Williams had paid only a portion of the pledge. Still, the foundation refused to give that money back, informing Williams that donations had to be made with no strings attached. Williams was livid and vowed to do something about Armstrong’s backing out of the eSoles deal. George Hincapie had known Williams for years and figured the sky was about to fall: “I’d never, ever want to get on Tiger Williams’s bad side.”

Soon enough, Williams told a friend, “Get ready: Big Texas is going down.”

Armstrong had no idea what was in store for him. He was too busy enjoying the fanfare of his comeback year. In October 2009, at the annual Ride for the Roses in Austin, throngs of fans came to ride with him, support Livestrong and celebrate his return to cycling.

Terry Armstrong, his adoptive father, was among them. In the years since divorcing Armstrong’s mother, he had become a staunch Christian. Feeling an inconsolable regret about how his relationship with his son had evaporated, he drove from his Dallas suburb to Austin to ask his son for forgiveness for the pain he had caused him and his mother in another life.

At the Ride for the Roses, he came within a foot of his son at the finish line, close enough to touch his arm and call out, “Lance Edward.”

Armstrong asked Stapleton to have police take him away.

In the fall of 2009, Landis confided in Zabriskie before the Tour of Missouri. He was emotional. He said he had turned into a terrible person and didn’t know what to do with his life. His marriage had fallen apart. He had moved out of his spacious house in Temecula, California, and into a small, bare-bones cabin in Idyllwild, a remote town tucked into the San Jacinto mountains. He loved bike racing, but it had become a dead end. He wanted to race again in Europe. He deserved that chance, right? He was the winner of the freakin’ Tour de France, right? He had maintained cycling’s code of silence for so many years—and for what?

“Remember the conversation we had in our apartment in Girona?” Zabriskie said. “If we ever get caught, let’s not bullshit around, let’s just stop and come clean? So man, maybe you should admit it?”

Zabriskie wasn’t surprised, then, when he received a text message from Landis in the spring of 2010. Landis was apologizing for what he was about to do. He was going to come clean about everything and everyone. He said he was going to tell USADA that he, Armstrong and other top Americans in the sport had used performance-enhancing drugs and blood transfusions.

“Man, can’t you just leave me out of it?” Zabriskie said. “Isn’t this just between you and Lance?”

“No, I’m sorry, man, I’m sorry.”

Landis felt safe enough to come forward because he had Tiger Williams’s support. Landis didn’t have to worry about money or a roof over his head. Williams had a place on Central Park South in Manhattan and a guesthouse in Connecticut.

For Williams, helping Landis was a win-win. He could exact a measure of revenge against Armstrong for reneging on the agreement Williams thought he and eSoles had with the Lance Armstrong Foundation. (Williams had previously denied that revenge played a role in his helping Landis.)

By then, Landis had e-mailed a puzzling array of Led Zeppelin lyrics to Vaughters, words heavy with misery and confusion. He said he was about to let go of everything he’d held inside so long. “I can’t live with this,” he told Vaughters. “I can’t live with this secret.”

Vaughters heard the darkness in Landis’s voice.

“I felt like he was going to commit suicide,” he said, “or tell all.”

CHAPTER 20

N
ight after night in the spring of 2010, Landis sent e-mails to Armstrong, taunting him with what he was about to do, goading him into trying to do something to stop it. Landis would send them past midnight during the Tour of the Gila, a multistage race in New Mexico in which they both were competing. But Landis never said a word to Armstrong at the race itself. It creeped Armstrong out.

The week before, Armstrong had eavesdropped on a phone conversation between Zabriskie and the former Postal Service team manager Johan Bruyneel, in which Zabriskie had called to warn Bruyneel about Landis’s plans to come clean.

Armstrong had never been so jumpy. Landis had long said he was going to go public with his doping claims, but this time he seemed prepared to follow through. While he needled Armstrong, he dared Steve Johnson, the chief executive and president of USA Cycling, to act. On Friday, April 30, 2010, at 5:19 p.m., after the third stage of the five-stage Tour of the Gila, Landis wrote to Johnson under the subject line: “nobody is copied on this one so it’s up to you to demonstrate your true colors . . .”

In that single e-mail laying out the highlights of the doping that occurred on the Postal Service and other pro teams, Landis implicated nearly every top American rider and several cycling officials. It read like a description of a drug ring.

He said that in 2002 Bruyneel had instructed him on how to use testosterone patches. He said that Armstrong had handed him a box of patches in view of Armstrong’s wife; that Ferrari extracted blood from him to be reinfused at the Tour; that Armstrong told him he had made a financial agreement with the former UCI president Hein Verbruggen to hide a positive test for EPO.

More charges: In 2003, Armstrong had asked him to keep an eye on Armstrong’s blood while he was out of town. Landis’s job was to ensure that the temperature inside Armstrong’s refrigerator didn’t fluctuate so that the blood stored there would remain fresh.

During the 2003 Tour, Landis received a blood transfusion alongside Hincapie, Armstrong and another teammate, Chechu Rubiera. The team doctor gave him and Hincapie testosterone oil. Later that season, Bruyneel told Landis to get EPO from Armstrong, who complied when asked for it. Bruyneel also explained to Landis how to use growth hormone, and Landis bought it from the trainer Pepe Martí. Landis’s Postal teammates Matthew White, an Australian, and Michael Barry, a Canadian, shared their testosterone and EPO.

In the e-mail, Landis also wrote that in the 2004 Tour, he and teammates received a transfusion along a mountain road on their way to the team hotel. In 2005, he hired Allen Lim to prepare transfusions and keep the blood cold when Landis performed the transfusions on himself and Levi Leipheimer.

In 2006, Landis told the Phonak team owner, Andy Riis, that he needed money to dope, and Riis granted it. (Riis denies it.)

After all that, Landis told Johnson he had “many, many more details” in diaries. He signed off with an ominous line: “Look forward to much more detail as soon as you can demonstrate that you can be trusted to do the right thing.”

To the others, Landis warned that he was about to drop a bomb. And soon. He wrote to Andrew Messick, the race director of the Tour of California; Bill Stapleton, the agent who’d said the Postal Service team could help him “with further doping”; and UCI president Pat McQuaid, as well as a handful of cycling sponsors. Then he wrote to Armstrong again: “I’ll just come out and say directly that I’m going to accuse you and our former teammates of using blood doping and performance-enhancing drugs to help you to win the three Tours de France in which we raced together. So make no mistake about that.”

He called the doping on those teams “a fraud perpetrated on the public” and said Armstrong could not intimidate him.

“My only goal in enlightening the public and the press regarding these matters is to clear my conscience and thereafter be able to sleep at night,” Landis wrote. “I’m certainly not oblivious to the fact that the thought of this would cause you and many others considerable anxiety and am sympathetic to your reaction but need to remind you that I don’t react well to threats or bullying and see no good outcome if that continues.”

In April 2010, Floyd Landis arranged a lunch meeting with the race director Messick in downtown Los Angeles, at an upscale restaurant called the Farm of Beverly Hills. More than a year had passed since the end of Landis’s suspension.

He liked Messick and wanted to warn him that the sport was about to implode, perhaps within a month, maybe during Messick’s Tour of California in May. He placed a tape recorder on the table and pressed “Record.” He wanted proof that he had told the truth about his doping to someone who was an authority in the sport.

“I used performance-enhancing drugs pretty much throughout my whole pro career,” he said. “I can’t keep the truth inside anymore. It’s going to come out, and soon.”

Messick was dumbfounded. The man who had written a book called
Positively False: The Real Story of How I Won the Tour de France
—a story about Landis’s winning clean, despite his positive drug test—was now admitting that he had lied to the public
for four whole years
? The man who had shouted his innocence and solicited money from donors for his defense was now saying his version of his story was, actually, positively false?

“How do you expect people to believe you when you lied for so long?” Messick said. “Have you told your mother? Have you told Travis Tygart?”

He had not. Telling his mother required more courage than Landis could summon. And Tygart, who had slapped him in 2007 with a two-year ban, was not someone Landis could tolerate helping. (Landis said he spent $2 million, including at least $478,354 in public donations from 1,765 people, and nearly two years fighting his case.)

Though he gave up nothing about Armstrong, Landis told Messick that all the veteran riders referred to their code of silence as “the omertà.”

“When you’re in the Mafia, and you get caught and go to jail, you keep your mouth shut, and the organization takes care of your family,” Landis said. But in cycling, he said, there was no honor among thieves. “You’re expected to keep your mouth shut when you test positive, but you become an outcast. Everyone just turns their back on you.”

Cyclists had violated the omertà in the past, but none had been as high-profile a rider as Landis. Even Frankie Andreu, who had tattled on the sport four years before, had been a mere
domestique
.

In the spring of 2010, Austria’s Bernhard Kohl admitted to a lifetime of doping, saying “it’s impossible to win without doping.” He had finished third at the 2008 Tour, but was stripped of that result because he had tested positive at the race. He said it was easy to get around the drug testing: “I was tested two hundred times during my career, and a hundred times I had drugs in my body,” he told me in 2010. ”I was caught, but ninety-nine other times I wasn’t.”

In 2004, Spain’s Jesús Manzano exposed the systematic doping that occurred on the Kelme team and later admitted that a team doctor at the 2003 Tour had given him the veterinary drug Oxyglobin—bovine hemoglobin, used to treat anemia in dogs. After taking the drug, Manzano collapsed during a stage and had to be airlifted to a hospital.

The revelations of cycling’s dark side weren’t just spokes on the dubious wheel of Lance Armstrong. But the sport in America was about to receive a potent injection of truth-telling, maybe for the first time ever. And Landis was the tip of the needle. He had been abandoned by everyone and everything that had meant something to him: his sport, his wife, his father-in-law, most of his former teammates. The truth, he told Messick, was all he had left.

About a week before the Tour of California, Landis called Tygart, and they planned to meet at the Marriott at the Los Angeles airport a few days later. Tygart knew what to expect. He had heard the basics of Landis’s doping stories from a USADA scientist named Daniel Eichner who two weeks before had heard the details of Landis’s drug use through an anti-doping expert Landis had recruited to be his intermediary. After his lunch meeting with Messick in Los Angeles, Landis had been eager to talk to USADA—yet he didn’t want to confess to Tygart right away because they’d had such a contentious relationship during Landis’s doping case. Telling Eichner his dirty deeds was his first step toward full disclosure.

Sitting across from each other in a conference room at the airport Marriott, both Landis and Tygart were cautious. Learning to trust each other would take time.

“If I’m willing to come forward and be truthful, are you going to do what everyone else would do, or are you going to do your job?” Landis said.

Tygart was surprised at his skepticism. He made a point of looking him straight in the eyes. “We are going to do our job and follow up with whatever evidence is presented. That’s if you tell the truth.”

So Landis told the truth. They sat for hours, with Landis reeling off details of his doping, Armstrong’s doping and other riders’ doping. Tygart tried to keep his jaw from hitting the floor.

“We were all doing it—Lance, me, all the other guys on the team; everybody was doping,” Landis said. “It was just part of the sport.”

“Well, we’re going to try to change that,” Tygart said. “You have a lot of courage for coming forward. I know how tough it is for a single person to speak the truth. You get vilified in the press.”

Landis didn’t name any of the other riders who doped—just Armstrong. For the moment, Zabriskie was in the clear. Landis was trying his best to convince Tygart that his friends—“the guys that want to clear their conscience” about doping—should receive no punishment for their confessions. He didn’t put Armstrong in that category.

After the meeting, Tygart contacted an old friend—Jeff Novitzky, a bald-headed, 6-foot-6 criminal investigator for the Food and Drug Administration who had made a name for himself as the country’s top antidoping cop. Tygart told him that Landis had explosive information about Armstrong’s doping and the doping on Armstrong’s Postal Service team, and suggested that the two of them team up to interview Landis on the record.

Novitzky had been the lead agent in the BALCO steroids case that implicated elite athletes like the slugger Barry Bonds and the sprinter Marion Jones. (Both were convicted of felony crimes stemming from their doping.) He and Tygart had worked closely together on that case, and had since been in touch about the doping problem in cycling and other sports.

Novitzky was already investigating PED use in cycling when Tygart reached out to him about Landis. His investigation had been spurred by the doping case of a rider named Kayle Leogrande, a medium-level cyclist who’d left some EPO behind when he moved out of his Southern California apartment, causing his landlady to call the FDA. Novitzky was working on that case, so he jumped at the opportunity to hear what Landis had to say.

The three of them met in early May at the Marriott in Marina del Rey, not far from the Los Angeles airport. Landis also brought his doctor, Brent Kay, to the meeting because Kay had felt threatened by Armstrong when they had corresponded through e-mails.

Landis recalled detail after detail, and even gave them his diary, in which he had written his doping schedules in code. He wanted to be thorough. What he didn’t want was to lie anymore.

As the Tour of California, the most prestigious road cycling race in the U.S., grew closer, Armstrong became increasingly edgy. He asked Landis’s doctor, Kay, to persuade Landis to reconsider his vendetta. But Landis was stubborn, even when he heard that Stapleton was preparing to sue the cycling shorts off of him. Power had shifted. Now Landis was the bully.

“See all these security guys around here?” Armstrong asked his former teammates Hincapie, Leipheimer and Zabriskie as they gathered for a press event before the Tour of California. “I called these guys in. I’m scared. I’m scared of Floyd. He’s, like, texting me with pictures of him and a gun. That motherfucker’s going to shoot me.” Landis told me in late 2013 that he didn’t remember sending Armstrong such a text.

Four days later, Landis’s doping confession and his accusations that others had doped with him went public. Thanks in part to Tiger Williams, Landis’s mentor, who held a grudge against Armstrong, the contents of several of Landis’s e-mails to Armstrong and top cycling officials—including the naming-all-names note to Johnson—showed up on the
Wall Street Journal
’s Web site several hours before midnight on May 19, the eve of the race’s fifth stage.

Armstrong texted Hincapie: “Check out the
Wall Street Journal
. It’s going to be rough tomorrow.” Vaughters saw the story and called Zabriskie about it right away.

Zabriskie called Bruyneel, who told him, “We have it covered.” Zabriskie then ran to Hincapie’s hotel room.

Hincapie was frazzled. “The FDA is calling me—this Novitzky guy who dealt with Marion Jones and stuff,” he said. “He left a message saying, ‘Please call me.’ ”

Vaughters had heard the rumor that Novitzky was investigating drug use in cycling, and knew it was only a matter of time before he would reach out to his Garmin-Chipotle-sponsored team. Many of the squad’s riders had doped in the past. Vaughters had purposely hired them and given them jobs where there would be no pressure to cheat.

He brought Zabriskie into his hotel room and told him he had his support, that if Novitzky came calling, Zabriskie shouldn’t be afraid to tell the truth about his experience with performance-enhancing drugs.
You will have a job with us, no matter what you say.

Vaughters also spoke to Tom Danielson, another American rider who’d been Armstrong’s teammate, and echoed what he’d said to Zabriskie:
If Novitzky comes calling, don’t be scared to tell him what you know. We will back you up.

Then he gathered his team and instructed everyone, no matter how upset with Landis, to decline comment about the situation.

“Do not call Floyd a drunk. Do not cause a media explosion at the race,” he said. “Let’s just finish the race and figure out what we’re going to say.”