Cycle of Lies: The Fall of Lance Armstrong (4 page)

By the time he was sixteen, he was making $20,000 a year and had turned pro. Eder was acting as his traveling secretary, event negotiator, marketing director and road manager. He compiled triathlon schedules, secured sponsors and budgeted for their races. Eder also arranged for Armstrong to spend two summers training in California with top triathletes.

In all, Eder told me, he traveled with Armstrong to more than twenty-five out-of-town races. He showed me the itineraries he had typed up on his typewriter. The travel—which included stays in expensive hotels like Bermuda’s Princess—was often paid for by the event sponsors. Armstrong was only a kid, and he already was being treated like a superstar. The Armstrongs didn’t need to spend a penny.

Linda has claimed to have been by her son’s side at most of those competitions. Eder differs. “She went to about three,” he says.

He saw the kid as a brawler with a touch of paranoia. If you glanced at him the wrong way, he might say, “What the hell are you looking at?” He’d sneak into a bar, get into a fight, and this underage boy would go back home with a bloodied nose and raw knuckles.

He once threw a Kestrel racing bike—one of the first generations of all-carbon-fiber racing bikes—across several lanes of road after his tire went flat during a Miami triathlon. Kestrel dropped its sponsorship of him. The tantrum had hurt Armstrong’s marketing appeal, especially since it was captured by television cameras.

This reputation preceded him, yet people in the sports world still wanted to glom on. They sensed that he had a great future. But the better Armstrong fared as an athlete, the more of his humility he lost. Already, no one was brave enough to stand up to him. He would get into fights at school. He would drink. He would drive too fast. His coaches and sponsors around town heard all about it, and couldn’t or wouldn’t stop it.

Eder said Armstrong’s relationships with father figures would always go bad for one reason or another. Once, Eder had to convince Jim Hoyt, the owner of the Richardson Bike Mart, that he should continue to sponsor Armstrong despite the teenager’s off-the-bike antics. Hoyt was another early benefactor, one who had been there nearly from the start. Armstrong was kicked out of the store at age twelve because he took gear he never returned, Hoyt told me. Then he was kicked out again at seventeen because Hoyt had co-signed a loan on Armstrong’s new white Chevy Camaro IROC Z28 and Armstrong had abused his generosity. Trying to outrun the police one night, Armstrong abandoned the car at an intersection before sprinting away on foot. Police impounded the car and showed up at Hoyt’s door because his name was on the vehicle’s registration.

“A week later, that little prick came to my house with his friends to actually get the car back,” recalls Hoyt, a Vietnam veteran who earned a Silver Star in combat. “I rolled up my sleeves and said go ahead, just try to get it back from me.” Hoyt reported back to Eder: “Your boy screwed me again.”

It was another ten years before Hoyt spoke to Armstrong again.

By Lance’s senior year of high school, Terry Armstrong was gone. Linda Armstrong had tracked down a mistress. (Terry told me there were so many he didn’t remember this one’s name.) When Terry came home from work one day he found his wife and the other woman sitting together on a couch.

“Who are you?” he asked the mistress.

Terry Armstrong lost both his wife and his son. In the divorce decree, Linda Armstrong was awarded her husband’s Cadillac as well as all the money and retirement accounts in his name. The house was to be sold, with the proceeds divided equally. But Terry Armstrong insisted that his wife and son live there until Lance graduated high school. According to divorce records, he also assumed all the family’s debt, including monthly payments on his wife’s 1986 Buick Skylark and $8,265.78 on credit cards.

Scott Eder said Terry Armstrong would often call and ask about Lance. Many days, Eder saw Terry hiding behind bushes to watch his son train in an outdoor pool. Lance saw him once and told Eder to deliver a warning: If Terry Armstrong keeps stalking him, he’ll kick the crap out of him.

Lance viewed life as increasingly unfair. His senior year, he felt that all of Plano East High School was out to get him. The school wouldn’t let him graduate with his class because he had too many absences: days he took off for triathlons and for training in his specialty, cycling, at the United States Olympic Training Center. He was preparing for the cycling junior world road championships in Moscow, where he amazed everyone by leading the race so forcefully that some of the sport’s top names still remember how his amazing performance caused them goose bumps. (He exhausted himself way too fast, though, and finished back in the pack.)

He and his mother didn’t think he should have to follow a state law that mandated a minimum number of days a student had to attend class. Lance was “that guy with the mom who was always making a stink about him getting out of school,” according to one of his classmates. His mother argued that he should graduate, but school officials wouldn’t budge.

That led them to Bending Oaks in Dallas, a nontraditional private school with about a dozen students per class. It wouldn’t have the same problem with his absences that his last school had. He’d be able to graduate on time, so long as his tuition was paid. And Terry Armstrong, the man whom Armstrong’s mother would call an absentee father, was the one who wrote the check.

In his airy three-bedroom ranch straight out of a Pottery Barn catalog, Terry Armstrong lays a box on the kitchen table. He pulls out card after card, photo after photo. A Father’s Day card: “I didn’t get to pick my dad, but I’m glad my mom picked you.” Inside, in a child’s writing: “Love, Lance.” A photo shows Lance driving Terry’s father’s golf cart. There’s a photo of Lance at the organ in a church where his grandfather preached.

Terry Armstrong shows off a smiling Lance on his grandparents’ couch, and then another with a smiling Linda in the same spot on the same couch. The photos have writing on the back: Christmas 1983. Lance was twelve, a few years from becoming a triathlon star. Though he had lost touch with his son soon after Lance’s cycling career took off, Terry followed him in the newspapers and on television. On his office wall, he kept photos that showed the evolution of Lance from boy to man. The most recent shot is of Lance and Lance’s children that Terry had printed from the Internet and framed. He said Lance’s achievements thrilled him and that his son’s troubles caused him heartache, though not nearly as bad as in 1996, when Lance was diagnosed with cancer, and Terry was not allowed to enter his son’s hospital room in Indianapolis.

After Lance won his first Tour de France, Terry Armstrong was astounded to hear Linda’s claims about their years as a family. He wondered, “Linda was a single mom? Her first two marriages were quick ones? Lance and his mom always had their backs against the wall?” He was sensitive about mistakenly being called Lance’s stepfather, not adoptive father, by news outlets, including CNN.

Terry tried to fight back by writing those outlets to say that they had the story wrong. He sent copies of his marriage certificate and divorce decree, showing that he had been married to Armstrong’s mother for fourteen years. He wanted to set the record straight, but a lawyer discouraged him because Terry “didn’t have the ink,” meaning Lance had the power of the press. Reporters, especially in the United States, were in love with the Lance Armstrong story. Then came Lance’s autobiography,
It’s Not About the Bike
, which cast Terry as a terrible father, and then Linda’s book piled on. Terry called the stories “a constant battery of mistruths.”

He had planned to confront his ex-wife at one of her book readings in 2005. He said he waited until the last minute before walking down the center aisle to take a seat in the front row.

Tami, Terry’s new wife, who had never met Linda, sat apart from her husband so she could ask, “Did you or did you not raise Lance yourself?” Linda said, well, you just need to read the book.

Terry Armstrong said he held his hand up that day, waving it like a kid trying to get the teacher’s attention. But the author ignored him. Only after the reading, as Linda sat at an autograph table, did the former partners in marriage come face-to-face.

“I really enjoyed the book,” Terry told her.

“Really?” Linda said.

“Yes,” he said. “I love fantasy.”

CHAPTER 3

J
ohn Thomas Neal was an independently wealthy real estate investor and massage therapist, a forty-eight-year-old husband and father, who worked as a
soigneur
in elite cycling.
Soigneur
is a French term meaning “one who cares for others.” In cycling, it is a person who gives the riders massages, prepares their lunches and water bottles, cleans uniforms and transports their baggage to and from hotels. A fixer, nurturer and wise counselor, Neal had worked with professional athletes on the beach volleyball tour and swimmers at the University of Texas. But his passion was cycling because he loved the sport and the travel.

He had fled Montgomery, Alabama, after growing up amid the race riots of the ’60s. In Austin, his open mind and eclectic tastes matched the city’s liberal attitude. He once hosted a gay wedding at his home, originally a church on a hilltop overlooking the city’s skyline. Though he had a law degree, legal work didn’t satisfy him and he didn’t stick with it. Anyway, he could afford to quit because he married into money.

Neal, who was maybe 5 foot 8 and had a very slight build, was a huge sports fan—University of Texas football, swimming and volleyball, professional tennis, cycling, you name it—and wanted to find a way he could work in the sports business. He couldn’t coach because he wasn’t the aggressive type, nor had he ever been an athlete. Massage therapy was the answer. The clinical aspects of it fascinated him. He also loved the idea of being trained to cure people’s ills.

Neal was so serious about his new vocation that he traveled to China and spent several months learning Eastern healing techniques, including how to perform acupuncture on the inner ear.

Back in Austin, he volunteered to work with the athletes at the University of Texas. In time, he had made enough connections and had cultivated a reputation in the Olympic sports world for being so good at his job that he was hired to work as a
soigneur
for the Subaru-Montgomery professional cycling team. Former United States Olympic cycling coach Eddie Borysewicz was in charge of it. Thomas Weisel, an investment banker who was a legend in financial circles, was the owner.

When he first signed on, Neal worked races only in the United States and hadn’t heard much about doping in the sport, except that performance-enhancing drug use among cyclists was prevalent in Europe.

He met Lance Armstrong in 1989 at a Texas triathlon after Borysewicz told him to look out for the budding cycling star. Armstrong’s all-out effort at the 1989 junior worlds in Moscow had caught Borysewicz’s eye. The coach convinced him to switch to cycling from triathlon because cycling was an Olympic sport, while triathlon wasn’t.

Armstrong, arguably the hottest up-and-coming cyclist in the world, later landed a spot with the Subaru-Montgomery team. By then, Neal and Armstrong knew each other well.

Nearly a dozen athletes in Austin—both men and women—still say they were closer to Neal than to their own fathers. He brought them into his family and gave them some stability. Lance Armstrong was just the latest athlete in need.

Armstrong was relocating to hilly Austin from flat Plano because the area’s terrain was perfect for training. At a steeply discounted rate, Armstrong moved into an apartment complex owned by Neal. Near downtown—among tall trees, twenty paces from Neal’s office—it was a comfortable, safe place that Armstrong could call home. Later, Armstrong told the
Dallas Morning News
his apartment was “killer . . . s-o-o-o nice!” He and Neal met every day, sometimes several times a day, for massage treatments and meals. It gave Neal satisfaction to know that he could make a positive impact on the life of a teenager who needed some guidance.

Neal’s first impression was that the kid’s ego exceeded his talent. Armstrong was brash and ill-mannered, in desperate need of refinement. But the more he learned of Lance’s home life, the sorrier Neal began to feel for him. He was a kid without a reliable father. Linda Armstrong was pleased that her son now had a responsible male role model in his life, and Neal lent a sympathetic ear to her as well while she dealt with the rocky transition between marriages.

Neal soon recognized that Armstrong’s insecurities and anger were products of his broken family—he felt abandoned by his biological father and mistreated by his adoptive one. Armstrong didn’t like to be alone, so Neal often met him for breakfast at the Upper Crust Café, just down the street from Neal’s house, and for lunch at a sports bar called The Tavern. Armstrong ate dinner with the Neals three or four times a week. The Neals’ three children would be there, along with the occasional Armstrong friend or a student Neal was mentoring. It was nothing fancy—sometimes just slow-cooked beans eaten with plastic utensils out of mismatched mugs, as if they were on a camping trip. But they were a family.

Frances, Neal’s wife, and Armstrong were the group’s jokers. They might chase each other around the dinner table. They might sing parts of the song “Ice Ice Baby,” by the Dallas rap star Vanilla Ice, a song that then sat atop the music charts. One would sing, “Ice ice baby!” and the other would reply, “Too cold, too cold!” On some days, they would bring their show to the Neals’ motorboat, where they would spend the day swimming or water-skiing.

It was arguably the happiest, most uncomplicated time in Armstrong’s life. He no longer had to worry about Terry Armstrong, and his mother’s current marital woes were 215 miles north on Interstate 35, back in Plano. His world centered on Austin and Neal, who gladly opened up his home or apartments to national team cyclists—like future Postal Service teammates George Hincapie, Frankie Andreu, Chann McRae and Kevin Livingston—who wanted to train with Armstrong in the Texas Hill Country.

The day after Armstrong moved into his new apartment, the Neals saw him ride in Lago Vista, thirty-five miles from Austin. Armstrong did poorly and admitted to Neal that he’d been up late the night before, drinking at an Austin strip club named the Yellow Rose. Neal passed it off as Lance’s being just another rambunctious teenager testing his newfound freedom.

The call from Armstrong to J.T. Neal came before dawn on an August morning, 1991. Could Neal come to San Marcos and pick him up? Armstrong wasn’t stranded on the side of the road in the Texas outback. He had not blown out a tire on his bike in a marathon training ride. He was in jail.

The night before, thirty miles from Austin, Armstrong had partied with some coeds from Southwest Texas State University. As they frolicked in an outdoor Jacuzzi at one coed’s apartment complex, they made so much noise that the police came to quiet them down. But that was only Armstrong’s first meeting with cops that night. The second was the big one. Pulled over for driving erratically, he thought he could talk his way out of trouble. So what if he had appeared drunk and refused to take a Breathalyzer test? He was sure the officer would be impressed when he told them who he was—the best young cyclist in the entire country.

Had he been a quarterback, maybe the ploy would have worked. But a Texas police officer could not care less about a guy boasting about his prowess on a bike. No, it was off to the county lockup.

Neal, always concerned about Armstrong’s drinking and driving, came and got him from the San Marcos jail the next day. Months later, upon receiving a notice informing him that his driver’s license could be suspended, Armstrong forwarded the letter to Neal. On the envelope, he wrote, “J.T.—This came today?? Have a great Xmas! Lance.” Now acting as his lawyer as well as his friend, Neal helped Armstrong beat the charges and keep his license.

In turn, Neal received from Armstrong something rare and precious: Armstrong’s trust. Armstrong sent him postcards from training trips and races—such as a note dated August 16, 1991, from Wein-und Ferienort Bischoffingen, Germany:

J.T.—Hows it going? Well, Germany is very nice. As you probably know the worlds are a little over a week away and Im [
sic
] nervous as hell. At least I’m riding good now! Wish you were here! The boys say “hello.” Lance

Neal was an admitted cycling groupie. He was never athletic enough in any sport to be a hotshot jock—he rode a bike, but only recreationally—but now he could walk among those jocks and be accepted and respected by them. He had the job of a cycling fan’s dreams.

Neal loved that the national team riders and American pro cyclists knew who he was. Some even called him for advice. In Hincapie’s case:
I was stopped by customs with a suitcase filled with EPO and other drugs, what should I do?
Some of them, like Armstrong and Hincapie, were open with him about their drug use. Whether Neal was complicit in any of that drug use is unclear. He said, though, that a
soigneur
’s job in the United States was different from that of one in Europe, where the job had long required an intimate knowledge of pharmaceuticals. He had learned that from his fellow
soigneurs
who had done work overseas. Only once did Neal inject Armstrong, Neal said: a vitamin shot in the rear end.

In those early days, Armstrong didn’t hide the fact that he received regular injections. Neal always said that Armstrong never liked to do things for himself, that he felt entitled to have someone wash his car for free or make restaurant reservations. At first, he didn’t like injecting himself, either. A coed named Nancy Geisler, Neal’s office assistant who was close with both men, said that Neal once asked her to give Armstrong a vitamin shot because he’d be out of town and couldn’t do it. She presumed that it was just a part of Armstrong’s training regimen.

Armstrong was nonchalant about it when she filled in. She saw no label on the vial from which the syringe had drawn its liquid. She assumed that Armstrong had been doping and that Neal knew it. Only years later did she think, “Had I been a part of something illegal?”

According to Neal, Armstrong relied on shots and IVs for recovery and a pre-race boost of energy. On the eve of the road race at the 1992 Olympics, fellow Olympian Timm Peddie walked into Armstrong’s hotel room and saw Neal, United States national team coach Chris Carmichael, national team
soigneur
Charlie Livermore and a gaggle of USA Cycling officials standing around Armstrong as he lay on a bed, hooked to an IV. Peddie was astonished at the openness of the procedure. Everyone there stared at the unexpected guest until Peddie left as quickly as he had come in. He hadn’t been sure what he had seen. Maybe a blood transfusion? An infusion of electrolytes or proteins? He only knew that he himself had never received an IV of anything before a race. Armstrong was, evidently, special.

In the early 1990s, U.S. cycling had a single star, Greg LeMond, who in 1986 became the first American to win the Tour de France, a feat he would repeat in 1989 and 1990. But his victories had little impact on the sport in the United States. LeMond had ridden for a European team and his success came primarily in Europe, out of sight of America’s sports fans.

Armstrong, however, came into the sport with the dramatic backstory—the struggling single mother who had dropped out of high school to raise him—and he raced for an American team, Motorola, starting in 1992. Young and charismatic, he was set to be a star, and he wanted fame badly.

He insisted that Steve Penny, the managing director for USA Cycling, sell the hell out of him to raise awareness of the sport. News about cycling had rarely gotten much past the sports pages’ agate section.

Penny persuaded Descente, the federation’s new clothing sponsor, to produce a poster of four top athletes on the national team: Armstrong, Hincapie, Bobby Julich and the 1991 junior road cycling world champion, Jeff Evanshine. The poster featured a dramatic photo of Pikes Peak behind the riders, each of whom carried a look of grim determination on his face. All would go on to admit doping or serve a suspension for breaking anti-doping rules. In the lower left-hand corner of the poster was a list of the “U.S. Team Rules.”

RULE #1: Don’t mess with Lance, Bobby, George and Jeff.

RULE #2: No Whining.

RULE #3: It doesn’t count unless you do it under pressure.

RULE #4: There is no “Back Door.”

RULE #5: There are no rules: Winning the Gold in Barcelona is the only thing that counts.

As much as Armstrong loved being a star, his devotion to celebrity may have run a distant second to his hunger for money. J.T. Neal sensed that early on.

He saw Armstrong driven by money—how to get it, how to keep it and what he had to do, ethically or unethically, to get more of it.

In 1993, Armstrong chased a million-dollar bonus. The pharmacy Thrift Drug offered the prize to a rider who won three big American races—the Thrift Drug Classic in Pittsburgh, the Kmart Classic in West Virginia, and the CoreStates USPRO national championship in Philadelphia. Each required a different strength: Pittsburgh’s was a demanding one-day race, West Virginia’s a grueling six-stager that rewarded the best climbers and Philadelphia’s an event geared toward sprinters.

Armstrong, only twenty-one, won the first race and surprised everyone. Five stages through the second race, he was among the favorites to win. So, with the possibility of a million-dollar payout dangling in front of them, several riders on the Motorola team devised a plan to guarantee victory.

Motorola rider Frankie Andreu allegedly approached a Coors Light rider, Scott McKinley, to propose a $50,000 deal: a flat fee if the Coors Light team would help Armstrong win the million-dollar prize by not challenging him for the victory in the rest of that second race and the entire final race. Coors Light was a strong team with riders who also were among the top contenders.

Later that night, several riders from each team discussed the deal in the hotel room Armstrong shared with his Australian teammate, Phil Anderson. By the time the Coors Light riders left the room, the deal had been done.

If Armstrong won the million, both teams would benefit. Armstrong would receive the prize money—$600,000 taken in a lump sum—and would walk away with $200,000 while the balance would be distributed to his team and other cyclists who had helped him win. Each rider on Coors Light would be given $3,000 to $5,000, according to Stephen Swart, a Coors Light rider in on the discussions.