The Secret Race: Inside the Hidden World of the Tour De France: Doping, Cover-Ups, and Winning at All Costs: Inside the Hidden World of the Tour De France: Doping, Cover-Ups, and Winning at All Costs (38 page)

I watched the show in Marblehead with my family and Lindsay. My family was incredibly supportive, of course, but I had no idea how it was being seen by the larger world. People had spent years believing Lance; it was natural to be pissed at me for telling the hard
truth. Back when Floyd spoke out, some people had showed up at races waving signs with pictures of a rat on them. Would that happen to me?

Over the following days, I could feel people eyeing me, recognizing me. While I waited in the ticket line at the Boston airport, a passenger walked up to me, shook my hand, and congratulated me for telling the truth. Then on the plane, someone from across the aisle passed me a note:
I appreciate your honesty. You did the right thing
. On Facebook, people left dozens and dozens of supportive messages. A few days later, my parents mailed me a two-inch-thick stack of emails and letters they’d received. Keeping to that Hamilton honesty, they didn’t filter the letters. Some people attacked me, said I had to be lying because I’d lied before. But the overwhelming majority were positive. They used words like “courage” and “guts,” words of which I didn’t consider myself remotely worthy. But it felt good to read.

Lance and his team responded, too. Fabiani said I’d duped
60 Minutes
and accused me of “talking trash for cash,” demanded a retraction from CBS (a demand that was soundly rejected), and sang the usual refrain about wasting taxpayer money. They also put together a website called Facts4Lance, on which they tried to attack my and Frankie’s credibility (though not George’s). But in all it was pretty weak stuff; in part because they didn’t have many facts, and also because they failed to reserve the Facts4Lance Twitter name, which was quickly scooped up by friends of Floyd Landis, who then filled the feed with their unique brand of heckling. Before long, Facts4Lance sputtered and was shut down. I found myself a little surprised. I’d expected Lance to attack me personally. The quiet made me wonder: Was he giving up? Had he lost his desire to fight?

I should have known better.

Earlier that spring, I’d accepted an invitation from
Outside
magazine to attend a June 11 event in Aspen, Colorado. I was happy for a chance to promote my training business, and the chance to see some old friends. As the date approached, though, I grew nervous. I knew that Lance was spending a lot of time at his home in Aspen with his girlfriend, Anna Hansen. But just before the event, a friend checked Lance’s schedule and told me he would be riding a 100-mile fundraiser in Tennessee on June 11.

Good
, I thought.
This way our paths won’t cross
.

It was a beautiful day. I led an afternoon ride through the mountains with my colleague, Jim Capra. It was designed for intermediate-to-advanced riders, but we were joined by one ambitious beginner, a young woman named Kate Chrisman, who showed up with tennis shoes and an old bike with toeclips. She rode along, and though she was worried about slowing us down, she did great.

After returning from the ride, Jim and I hung out at the Hotel Sky with the rest of the crew, enjoying the evening sunshine. I ran into my high school roommate and Boulder neighbor Erich Kaiter. We didn’t have any plans for dinner, but an outgoing friend of mine named Ian McLendon asked if we’d like to join him and a few other friends, and we said yes. By 8:15 there were a dozen of us in our party, and, it being Aspen, two of them were reality-television stars: Ryan Sutter and his wife, Trista, from
The Bachelorette
and
The Bachelor
, along with their two kids. Ian chose the restaurant, a little place called Cache Cache, which is French for Hide-and-Seek.

What none of us knew was that Cache Cache was Lance’s favorite restaurant—his hangout. The moment we walked in, the co-owner, a woman named Jodi Larner, recognized me and phoned Lance to tell him I was there. Later, Larner tried to explain her call as a courtesy she gives to Aspen’s divorced couples: if one is in the restaurant, she notifies the other to avoid an awkward encounter. However, her call had the exact opposite effect, because it turned
out Lance had just returned to Aspen from Tennessee. Within moments of getting Larner’s call, he was headed straight toward me.

Later, I thought about the moment when Lance received Larner’s call. I’m sure Lance assumed I’d come to Cache Cache on purpose, and I was daring him to come down, and he responded the only way he knew how. But even so, I’m surprised that Lance would choose to get in his car and come to the restaurant. Because you don’t have to be a lawyer to know that if you’re the target of a major federal investigation, it’s probably not a great idea to seek out contact with likely witnesses.

Unseen by us, Lance walked in with his girlfriend, Anna Hansen, and took a seat on a stool on the left side of the large, crowded U-shaped bar with a few people he knew. He was perhaps thirty feet from our table, where he had a clear view of the back of my head as I joined in the eating, drinking, and laughing. Around ten, Ryan and Trista decided to head home and get their kids to bed. The rest of us were finishing our meals, debating whether we should go grab a drink somewhere else. Around 10:15, I got up to use the bathroom, which was on the opposite side of the bar from where Lance was sitting.

When I came out of the bathroom, I headed back to my table. Then, out of the corner of my eye, I saw someone in the bar area waving to me—Kate Chrisman, the woman from our ride. I decided to say hello, and I started threading my way through the crowd toward Kate.

As I passed the bar, I felt something press hard against my stomach, blocking me like a gate, not yielding a millimeter. At first I thought it was one of my friends joking around—it was too aggressive to be accidental, so I smiled and turned, expecting to see a friendly face.

It was Lance.

“Hey,
Tyler
,” he said sarcastically. “How’s it going?”

My heart jumped to my throat. My brain couldn’t quite register
what was happening. Lance didn’t move his hand, kept it pushed hard against my midsection, relishing the moment. He could see I was stunned. I took a step back to create some distance.

“Hey, Lance,” I said stupidly.

“So what are you doing tonight, dude?” he asked, his tone light, contemptuous.

“I’m, uh, just having some dinner with some friends,” I managed. “How are you?”

Lance’s eyes were shining, his cheeks were pink, a whiff of alcohol on his breath. He looked bigger, thicker through the middle; the lines on his face were deeper. I saw a blond woman sitting next to him; his girlfriend, I figured, along with a few people who, by their approving expressions, appeared to be Lance’s friends.

“Look, I’m really sorry about all this shit,” I said.

Lance didn’t seem to hear. He pointed at my chest. “How much did
60 Minutes
pay you?”

“Come on, Lance. They didn’t—”

“How much did they pay you?” Lance repeated, his voice rising. It was the same slightly-too-loud voice he used to use on the Postal bus, the everybody-listen-to-me voice.

“You know they’re not paying me, Lance,” I said quietly.

“How much are they fucking paying you?”

“Come on, Lance. We both know they’re not paying me.” I fought to keep my voice level.

Lance’s nostrils were in full flare; his face was getting redder and redder. Across the room, I saw Kate Chrisman watching with a concerned look on her face.
^*
I felt this was spiraling out of control; I wanted to defuse it.

“Lance, I’m sorry,” I said.

“What the fuck are you sorry for?”

“It’s gotta be hard on you and your family,” I said. “With all this going on.”

Lance tried to look incredulous. “Dude, I have not lost one minute of sleep over this. I want to know how much they fucking paid you.”

I pointed to my left, toward the restaurant door.

“Why don’t we go outside and we can talk, one on one,” I said.

Lance made a dismissive
phffffff
. “Fuck that. That’ll be more of a scene.”

I looked to my right and spotted a small room off the bar. It was empty. I pointed. “Okay, if we’re going to talk, let’s go in there,” I said.

Inside, I’m thinking,
Lance, you piece of shit. If you really want to do this, let’s get away from your posse and really talk about the truth, man to man
. I gestured to the room again.

Lance lowered his voice. He pointed at me.

“When you’re on the witness stand, we are going to fucking tear you apart,” he said. “You are going to look like a fucking idiot.”

I didn’t say anything. Lance was on a roll now. “I’m going to make your life a living … fucking … hell.”

I stood there, frozen. Later, a lawyer acquaintance told me that I would have been smart to mark the moment by saying in a loud voice, “Did everybody hear that? Lance Armstrong just threatened me.” But I didn’t think to do that, because part of me wasn’t believing that he was so stupid as to threaten me in public, and the other part of me was daring him to keep coming, keep talking, motherfucker, bring it on, give me your best shot. It was our old dynamic: he provokes, and I match him.
Still here, dude
.

Over Lance’s right shoulder, a small round face of a black-haired fiftyish woman appeared: Jodi Larner, the co-owner of the restaurant. Since she’d caused this encounter by phoning Lance, she figured
it was time for her to play a role. She leaned in and pointed her finger at my chest.

“You are no longer welcome in this restaurant,” Larner said. “You will never set foot in this restaurant again for … the … rest … of … your …
life
!” She glanced at Lance, looking for his approval. He nodded; she looked as if she might die from sheer satisfaction.

My mind was churning. The realization was sinking in: I needed to document this encounter, so I asked Larner for her business card. I apologized if we’d caused a disturbance. I was trying hard to keep it civil. Then I turned to Lance.

“Look, if you want to continue this conversation, I’m gonna ask one of my friends to join us. He won’t say a word.”

“Fuck that,” Lance said. “Nobody fucking cares.”

Lance was done. He’d delivered his message, impressed his posse, and rattled me—mission accomplished. He wasn’t going to cooperate with me, so there was no point in trying. I turned to walk back to my table. But before I did, I took one step to my left, toward where Lance’s girlfriend, Anna, was sitting. She was facing the bar, her body slightly turned toward Lance, staring straight ahead. She looked sad, as if she wished this would all just go away.

“Hey, I’m truly sorry for all this,” I said. Anna gave the slightest nod; I could tell that she heard me.

As I walked back to our table; my insides were shaking. My friend Jim later told me that I was as white as a ghost. When I told him what happened, Jim thought I was kidding. Then I told the rest of the table what had happened. We ate the rest of our meal, ordered coffee and dessert, and we didn’t look toward the bar. I knew that Lance would not leave until we did; he would stay there all night if necessary. After all, he had to win. We stayed for forty-five minutes. Ian paid the bill, and then we headed out.

Nine days later I walked into a Denver federal building and gave my sworn account of the encounter to prosecutor Doug Miller and
two federal investigators via teleconference. I told them what had happened, and gave them the names of the various witnesses at the bar. The investigators were interested. They had a lot of questions about who had initiated the contact, what Lance had said, and how he had said it. They said they’d be in touch.

As the weeks and months passed, I tried to act cool on the outside, but in truth I wanted the indictments to come. After the Cache Cache incident, I wanted people (my family, especially) to see the truth; to be vindicated. I’d been told by Novitzky that it would be fairly soon. But as the weeks and months passed, all was quiet.

It wasn’t that nothing was happening—quite the opposite. The investigation was rolling along; Novitzky and Miller were flicking levers on the bulldozer, more witnesses were being called before the grand jury, more evidence was being uncovered. Their challenge, as I understood it, wasn’t that there was too little potential evidence but that there was too much: testimony from teammates, team management, tax stuff, urine samples, possible money transfers to Ferrari, and so on. I couldn’t imagine how long it would take (the Barry Bonds case, which was a simple case of perjury alone, had taken six years so far).