Cycle of Lies: The Fall of Lance Armstrong (5 page)

As long as America had no idea how it happened, Armstrong’s $1 million jackpot would also give cycling the positive publicity it needed to grow. It was a win-win all around.

The practice of throwing races had existed for decades, and was as much a part of the sport as doping. Joe Parkin, an American who raced in Europe, said so in his book,
A Dog in a Hat
. He wrote that selling victories was a common and accepted practice in Europe in the late 1980s. A rider racing in his hometown might shell out several thousand dollars to win. The losers would get guaranteed, easy money. Everybody left happy, pockets stuffed with cash.

Parkin wrote, “My experience as a pro cyclist in Europe has left me with a somewhat altered moral code, such that many of the things that bother normal people are invisible to me.”

With the Coors Light team on his side, Armstrong won the second race in the million-dollar race series. Then, in the last moments of the Philadelphia race—the final race in the series—Armstrong was in a breakaway of six riders when he took off toward an impossibly steep climb called the Manayunk Wall. None of the other riders in the breakaway chased him, leaving him to win the race in what seemed like a heroic solo effort.

Before the race, Neal thought Armstrong would win because he was the strongest rider. Only after the event did he learn that Armstrong had paid his way onto the top of the winner’s podium. The Coors Light riders had kept their end of the deal. They did not attack Armstrong during the Philadelphia race, making it easier for him to win. But Armstrong had taken an extra step to guarantee his victory.

Armstrong had told Neal that in the race’s waning miles he bribed Italian rider Roberto Gaggioli to ensure the victory. He offered Gaggioli, who had been one of the cyclists in the final breakaway, $10,000 to hold back when Armstrong took off on his solo breakaway. Gaggioli took him up on the offer and later said Armstrong had given him $100,000 in the deal, though that large amount seems improbable. Several other Italian riders in that breakaway also said they had accepted Armstrong’s bribes.

Neal, uncomfortable with the shameless dishonesty, chastised Armstrong for cheating.

“For God’s sake,” he told Armstrong, “stop bragging about it.”

Neal also was upset with Ochowicz, who he thought was in on the deal. He didn’t like Ochowicz very much anyway. He complained that the team manager knew little about cycling tactics and that the only thing he did was gorge himself on the peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches that were kept for him in the team car. He felt that Ochowicz was a bad influence on Armstrong, a kid who didn’t need much prodding to break the rules. It was now evident to Neal that Armstrong’s moral code would be forever altered. Armstrong, according a person with direct knowledge of the situation, would later win the Clásica de San Sebastián race in 1995 only after bribing another rider in the final few miles, but that he was just following the sport’s well-established customs.

If Armstrong ever had a conscience, his bosses had convinced him it didn’t matter. According to Armstrong, Ochowicz had okayed the bribe to win the million dollars and had made the final call. It worked.

In the television broadcast of the prize ceremony, Armstrong summed up the victory with an ironic hint at the fact of the race: “Everybody won today.”

The year of the bribe, 1993, Armstrong’s star rose sharply. Not only did he win the million, he also won his first stage of the Tour de France. In August, at twenty-one, he became the second youngest world road racing champion ever. With Motorola planning to leave cycling, Armstrong’s brilliant season gave his team reason to believe it would gain a new sponsor, probably one with much deeper pockets.

All of a sudden cycling mattered. Reporters from around the world descended upon Austin. ABC News interviewed Armstrong and his mother, calling him a “boy wonder” and playing up Linda Armstrong’s role as a teenage mom.

“Well, being young and pregnant, I was scared,” she said.

Lance said: “We had to overcome a lot of obstacles and a lot of resistance in our lives. And I mean, all these people, they counted her out, counted me out.”

Newspaper stories said he had never met his father and that Linda’s second marriage ended after ten years. Those lies somehow made Armstrong’s story even more attractive to the media.

“Lance is just what our country needs to get excited about cycling,” the USA Cycling marketer, Steve Penny, said in one news report. “If someone is looking for a hero to back, Lance fits the mold.”

Team manager Ochowicz said he was ecstatic about Armstrong’s $1 million victory. “It’s a great day for U.S. cycling.” By year’s end, Armstrong and the cycling team were so good that Motorola signed on for another year. The team did not have to fold after all. Armstrong had a new name for Penny: “Dime.”

Back in Austin, Armstrong paid $70,000 for a new sports car, a black Acura NSX. He then asked Neal to build a garage at the apartment complex. Neal resisted, but only for a moment. For about $50,000, he built the garage. Whatever Armstrong asked, it seemed, J.T. Neal was there to say yes.

At Christmas that year, Armstrong thanked him with several gifts. One was an autographed national champion’s rainbow jersey. In black marker, he wrote, “J.T. I’m very fortunate that our paths have crossed. You’re truly my righthand man! Not to mention my best friend! Lance Armstrong.”

He gave Neal a Rolex watch inscribed with the words “To J.T. From LANCE ARMSTRONG.” Neal accepted the watch as a symbol of Armstrong’s gratitude, even his love. For a number of years, Neal wore it with pride—until the day came that he decided to never put it on his wrist again.

PART TWO

LIES OF THE SPORT

CHAPTER 4

I
n 1992, someone opening the Motorola team’s medicine cabinet would have come across the usual items—Band-Aids, diarrhea medicine and antiseptics for “road rash”—as well as the banned stuff, like cortisone and testosterone alongside household Tylenol. Most riders didn’t consider them to be real doping products. Using those drugs just meant the riders were minding their health in a grueling sport.

Cortisone, which could be injected or swallowed, reduces muscle soreness and is an anti-inflammatory for stiff, aching joints. It remains a staple for cyclists because it alleviates leg pain. Riders liken it to taking an aspirin if you have a headache, and many team doctors write bogus prescriptions for the drug.

Testosterone is a steroid, but isn’t used to help riders bulk up with muscle. Rather, it allows them to recover more efficiently from a workout, so they can rise the next day and train just as hard. Riders treat the drug the way they do getting a massage or staying hydrated.

Those drugs were common in the European
peloton
. Everyone serious about the Tour looked for an edge, whether it was steroids or injectable vitamins like B12, B complex or folic acid.

Performance-enhancing drug use is bound with the history of cycling, especially the Tour de France, a three-week, 2,000-plus-mile race. The event, held every July, is almost impossibly hard, and has been that way since its debut in 1903.

Riders have always found ways to make the race easier. In 1904, cyclists left their bikes and hitched rides in cars, trains or buses to cut miles off the route. Every stage winner and the first four finishers were among twenty-nine riders punished for cheating that year, ushering in the Tour’s dance with dishonesty.

Through the early 1900s, riders relied on substances like ether, cocaine and strychnine to blunt the pain. Some stopped at bars to chug wine and other numbing spirits. They used cocaine-based mixtures to convince their bodies they could go on when their brains said they couldn’t. Riders believed they could breathe easier if first they had taken some strychnine (so highly toxic it is used as rat poison) and/or nitroglycerine (given to heart attack patients to stimulate the heart).

The abuse of those drugs was affirmed by Henri Pélissier and his brother, Francis, French riders who abandoned the 1924 Tour and then gave a blockbuster interview to a journalist, Albert Londres, of
Le Petit Parisien
. The story was titled, “Les Forçats de la Route”—“The Prisoners of the Road.”

Henri Pélissier told Londres, “You have no idea what the Tour de France is like. It’s like martyrdom. And even the Stations of the Cross had only fourteen stations, while we have fifteen stages. We suffer from start to finish.” Pélissier showed the journalist the contents of the bag he had carried throughout the race: cocaine for the eyes, chloroform for the gums, horse ointment for the knees. Pills he called “dynamite.”

Amphetamines became popular in the mid-1940s, and would lead to dangerous accidents. French rider Jean Malléjac collapsed with his bike at the 1955 Tour, six miles from the summit of Mont Ventoux, the famous bald mountain that towers more than 6,200 feet above the Provence region of France, and fell onto boulders at the roadside, with one foot attached to a pedal and the other pawing frantically through the air. He remained unconscious for fifteen minutes in what the Tour doctor deemed an amphetamine-fueled breakdown.

Another French cyclist, Roger Rivière, landed in a tangle of metal at the bottom of a steep slope after crashing over a wall during the 1960 Tour. He broke his back. Doctors found painkillers in his pocket, which could have distorted his judgment and slowed his reflexes so much that he had been unable to apply his brakes. He never regained use of his lower limbs. Just two years later, fourteen Tour riders left the race because they had been sickened by morphine.

The Tour and drugs went hand in hand, despite a growing public concern. Five-time Tour winner Jacques Anquetil was famously open about his own regimen. He once said, “You can’t win the Tour de France on mineral water alone . . . Everybody dopes.” Nothing was illegal.

By 1963, doping had grown so dangerous that a group of cyclists, doctors, lawyers, journalists and sports officials came together to push for drug testing. Two years later, France passed its first national antidoping laws and drug testing began at the Tour.

Led by Anquetil, riders balked. Before the Tour’s first stage, they gathered and chanted, “No pissing in test tubes!” Their protest included walking their bikes for the first fifty meters of that stage. Félix Lévitan, the Tour director, called the riders “a band of drug addicts” bent on “discrediting the sport of cycling.”

Then came one of the blackest days in cycling’s dark history. On July 13, 1967, the British rider Tom Simpson began zigzagging across the road not far from the top of Mont Ventoux. He finally toppled over, then told a British team mechanic, “Get me up, get me up. I want to go on. I want to go straight. Get me up, get me straight.” Spectators helped him back onto his bike, but just one hundred meters later, he crumpled onto the road again, still gripping his handlebars as he went into a coma.

Three hours later, he was dead. An autopsy report said he had died of heat prostration that led to a heart attack. But his jersey pockets told another story. In them were empty vials dusted with amphetamines.

Don Catlin, the man who set up the United States’ first performance-enhancing drug testing laboratory, the UCLA Olympic Analytical Laboratory in Los Angeles, had been studying the drug erythropoietin, called EPO, from the start. It appeared on the market in the United States in 1989 as a drug used for kidney patients and AIDS-related anemia, but athletes long before that had learned of its magical powers. EPO is a powerful hormone that boosts endurance by increasing red blood cell production. More red blood cells mean more endurance. In the sport of road cycling, it turned out to be a miracle potion.

The drug comes in a vial less than an inch and a half tall. But it is filled with several doses. No longer would endurance athletes have to undergo the dangerous and logistically difficult process of receiving blood transfusions to boost their red blood cell count. Now enhancing one’s endurance was as simple as pricking the skin with a needle. Athletes could receive what one unpublished Swedish study said was an average 8 percent boost in aerobic capacity. The study said the drug could cut 30 seconds from a 20-minute run. In cycling, using the drug could mean the difference between winning the Tour de France and not even qualifying for one’s Tour team.

There was a frightening downside, though. EPO raised a rider’s hematocrit level—the proportion of red blood cells in the blood and a measure of blood’s thickness. A man’s hematocrit is usually between 42 and 48 percent of his whole blood.

But with EPO, some cyclists were boosting their hematocrit into the 50s, or even higher. Bjarne Riis, the 1996 Tour champion, was even nicknamed “Mister 60 Percent” because EPO was rumored to have jacked up his hematocrit that high. The practice was inherently dangerous. If athletes overdosed on EPO, the drug would turn their blood to a viscous, sticky sludge that could cause a stroke or heart failure. Dehydration, which often occurs during long races, makes the blood even thicker. By the late 1980s, cyclists were buying the drug on the black market. Then they started dropping dead.

In 1987, five Dutch riders died of heart problems. On August 17, 1988, Connie Meijer, a Dutch rider, passed out and died while competing in a criterium race. Diagnosis: heart attack. She was twenty-five. One day later, Bert Oosterbosch, another Dutch rider, died in his sleep, at thirty-two. Again, a heart attack.

Doctors and blood specialists said EPO abuse might have played a role in the deaths of at least eighteen professional European cyclists in the years from 1988 to 1992. Ten deaths were attributed to heart problems. The cycling magazine
VeloNews
declared that “an atomic bomb” had gone off in the sport. News of the deaths was picked up by mainstream media outlets. The
New York Times
carried a headline: “Stamina-Building Drug Linked to Athletes’ Deaths.”

Catlin sounded an alarm with the International Olympic Committee. As a member of the IOC’s medical commission, he pressed for an investigation. The athletes had taken a drug for which no test had yet been developed. Catlin believed the IOC should do something about it, and right away, because lives were at stake.

He went with an IOC team to Europe on a fact-finding mission. He found no one who would talk about EPO. Family members refused to cooperate. Riders said they’d never heard of it. Basically, they told Catlin to go away. Again and again, he told them,
Don’t be
afraid to talk. We’re trying to save the lives of other cyclists. Please help us.

In reply, he heard nothing. He believed that some people were protecting not only the memory of friends, family and teammates—they were also protecting the sport. Doping scandal followed doping scandal. Something had to be done.

Catlin made his pitch in 1988. But the code of silence that had served cycling for so long could not be broken. Seven years later, Lance Armstrong used EPO for the first time.

When Armstrong signed with the Motorola team in 1992, he had already fallen in with coaches of dubious repute. The first was Eddie Borysewicz.

In 1985, Borysewicz was at the center of one of the biggest doping scandals in U.S. Olympic history. Borysewicz, a Pole, had honed his craft at sports academies in the Eastern bloc. While coach of the U.S. team at the 1984 Olympics, he was accused of pressuring riders to take transfusions of blood to get an increased supply of the oxygen-carrying red blood cells. If such transfusions were not done properly, or if the blood was not stored at the right temperature, blood doping could make a rider ill—or even kill him.

The practice was not expressly prohibited by the International Olympic Committee, but its rules said athletes could not take any medication or undergo any procedures that would unfairly affect the competition. Whether forbidden or not, Borysewicz and other team officials watched seven members of the 1984 Olympic cycling team line up inside a room of the Ramada Inn in Los Angeles to wait their turn to lie on a bed and receive blood from a relative or someone else with the same blood type. Two riders became sick. Four went on to win medals, including a gold.

Months later, the transfusions were made public, marring cycling’s image as well as Borysewicz’s reputation.

“Eddie B. introduced hard-core doping to American cycling, and it’s never been the same,” says Andy Bohlmann, who from 1984 through 1990 was in charge of the antidoping program for the United States Cycling Federation, then the sport’s national governing body.

In 1990, Chris Carmichael, a former rider on the 7-Eleven team, was appointed head coach of the national team, with dozens of cyclists under his command—including Armstrong and three other promising riders from the junior national team system. Those three were Greg Strock, Erich Kaiter and Gerrik Latta.

Each of them would eventually claim that national team officials had doped them without their knowledge when they were teenagers. One pointed his finger at Carmichael. Those riders said they had received injections of substances that team officials claimed were merely vitamins or “extract of cortisone.” They said they were given unidentified pills embedded in candy bars to eat during races, and drank from water bottles spiked with banned performance enhancers.

Years later, in medical school, Strock discovered that there is no such thing as “extract of cortisone.” He realized that his coaches had probably injected him with the real thing, which likely triggered the autoimmune disease that ended his cycling career in 1991. He thought back to the nationals in 1990, when Carmichael had arrived with a briefcase full of drugs and syringes and injected Strock in the buttocks under the supervision of another coach, René Wenzel. Strock remembers seeing Carmichael at other races carrying that briefcase, looking like a pharmaceutical company representative heading to see his clients.

And what did Lance Armstrong think of a coach with this background? He told me they were like brothers. One of Carmichael’s future training videos would feature Armstrong’s photo on the box. Armstrong would write forewords for many of Carmichael’s books. All this work was done on the premise that Carmichael was the brains behind Lance Armstrong’s success. And you, too, could learn from the coach of the world’s greatest cyclists, especially if you attended one of Carmichael’s weeklong training camps. The cost: a cool $15,000.

Throughout the 1990s, J.T. Neal acted as Armstrong’s main
soigneur
at some domestic races and at national team training camps. But in Europe and at the big races, the honor of rubbing down Armstrong went to a man named John Hendershot. Among
soigneurs
in the European
peloton
(another French word, one that refers to professional riders generally as well as the pack during a race), Hendershot was at once the cool kid and the calculating elder. Other
soigneurs
envied the money he made and the cachet that came with the cash. Wherever he walked—through race crowds or at home in Belgium—people turned to catch a glimpse. Teams wanted him. Armstrong wanted him. J.T. Neal said he was “like a god to me” and called him “the best
soigneur
that ever was.”

Hendershot, an American, was a massage therapist, physical therapist and miracle worker. His laying-on of hands would bring an exhausted, aching rider to life. Eating at Hendershot’s direction, sleeping according to his advice, a rider began each morning reborn. He came with all the secrets of a
soigneur
and an unexpected skill developed over the years. In Neal’s words, Hendershot took to cycling’s drug culture “like a duck to water.” But his enthusiasm for and skills in chemistry would be remembered as his special talent.

For most of a decade Hendershot sat at home in Belgium in his makeshift laboratory, preparing for races. There he mixed, matched and mashed up drugs, always with one goal in mind: to make riders go faster.