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 (40 page)

United States Attorney André Birotte Jr. today announced that his office is closing an investigation into allegations of federal criminal conduct by members and associates of a professional bicycle racing team owned in part by Lance Armstrong.

The United States Attorney determined that a public announcement concerning the closing of the investigation was warranted by numerous reports about the investigation in media outlets around the world.

I read it three times. Then I walked into the kitchen and punched the refrigerator.

Lance had found a way. Lance’s friends had found a way to beat Novitzky.

I didn’t know what to do. I felt like my brain was short-circuiting, sparking and sputtering. It was like the worst bike crash, but without the satisfaction of the physical pain. I paced around our little house, trying to absorb what this meant—for me, for Lindsay, for my parents. Lindsay tried to comfort me with a hug, but I pulled away. Tanker started barking nervously. I kept circling, pacing the room like a trapped animal; after some hours of this, I fell on the couch and went into a dreamless sleep.

On Monday I talked to Novitzky. His voice was tight, clipped. He did his best to stay professional, but I could feel the anger and frustration beneath.

“Over the weekend, I thought about leaving my job,” Novitzky said.

“I thought about leaving the country,” I said.

“Me too.” Novitzky gave a rueful laugh.

All the news reports said the same thing: it had been an end-around, a surprise move: Birotte, a political appointee, had closed the investigation from the top, without consulting anyone. Birotte informed everyone in an email fifteen minutes before the press release was issued. Neither Doug Miller nor Novitzky was asked for his opinion on the evidence, on the solidity of the case they were building. Twenty months of investigation. Thousands of hours.
Hundreds of pages of grand jury testimony and other evidence, tucked into a box, and filed away as if they never existed.
^*

The next couple of weeks were tough. Some days, I found it hard to get out of bed; other days I had bursts of anger and impatience that I had a hard time controlling. I wasn’t easy to live with. Lindsay was incredibly patient in dealing with me. There was one bright side: overnight, Lindsay and I stopped getting the feeling that we were being watched. Our phones and computers stopped misbehaving. Mysterious people stopped parking outside our house or watching us in the grocery store.

I slept a lot. I stayed indoors; I avoided the coffee shops and restaurants
on Pearl Street where bike racers hung out. I didn’t shave. I didn’t want to go online; I knew the Lance people would be seeing this as a triumph, and taking a victory lap. I saw my phone filling up with messages: from friends, from journalists seeking a comment. I ignored them, shut out the world. What could I possibly say?

Lance knew what to say. In an interview with
Men’s Journal
, he talked about his relief at the closure, and said that he was through fighting. “In my mind, I’m truly done,” Lance said, mentioning he would not fight if USADA attempted to strip him of one or more Tour titles. “It doesn’t matter anymore. I don’t run around bragging, feeling like I have to be a seven-time Tour de France champion. I worked hard for those, I won seven times, and that’s great. But it’s over.”

Lance underlined that point in an interview with former San Francisco mayor Gavin Newsom. “If somebody wants to walk up and say, ‘You know, I think you cheated to win the Tour de France seven times,’ I would literally go, all right. Is there anything else? Because I’m not going to waste any more of
my
time talking about it, and you shouldn’t waste
your
time talking about it. Let’s move on.”

I read his words with mixed emotions. Part of me had sympathy for Lance. I never wanted him to go to jail. I never thought of him as a criminal. But at the same time I did want—I do want—the truth to come out. That’s what was so devastating: the sense of futility, the sense that all of it—my testimony, Novitzky’s work, the risk I and others had taken by speaking out—had come to nothing.

When I did go out again, Boulder was feeling smaller and smaller. Every time we walked into a coffee shop I would get funny looks, or I’d see a yellow wristband, or see some guys in bike jerseys that said DOPERS SUCK. I was feeling suffocated, and Lindsay wasn’t enjoying living inside of my checkered past.

We decided to leave Boulder. We’d been thinking about the idea for a while, and now it seemed more attractive than ever. We needed to start somewhere fresh. Somewhere where we had no past, no
connections, no history dragging us down; somewhere we could maybe start a family. We set our sights on Missoula, Montana. Lindsay had an uncle who worked as a fly-fishing outfitter in Montana; she’d always dreamed of living there. She found a quote in
A River Runs Through It
, wrote it out in black marker on a big piece of paper, and stuck it to the refrigerator.
The world is full of bastards, the number increasing rapidly the further one gets from Missoula, Montana
.

That settled it. We would drive out, leave all this behind. Fresh start. Clean break. Goodbye, cycling; goodbye, Novitzky; goodbye, Lance.

In spring 2012 Lindsay and I moved to Missoula. We loaded up a rented U-Haul with our stuff, and we headed northwest like a couple of old-time pioneers, with Tanker riding shotgun. We rented a modest bungalow within a bike ride of downtown Missoula with a big yard for Tanks, a spare bedroom for our training-business home office, and plenty of squirrels to chase (not to mention the occasional grizzly).

Right away, life felt different. Lighter, more spontaneous, slower. We started taking time to enjoy the simple things: eggs Benedict on a random Tuesday, an early-morning hike, a road trip to Glacier National Park, a glass of wine as we watched the sun set in the Bitterroots. Lindsay and I would occasionally look at each other and just crack up at the craziness of the whole thing: we’re living in Montana!

The world works in strange ways. I know that old saying that when God closes a door He opens a window. I think that saying is really talking about the resilience of truth. I’ve come to learn that truth is a living thing. It has a force inside it, an inner springiness. The truth can’t be denied or locked away, because when that happens, the pressure builds. When a door gets closed, the truth seeks a window, and blows the glass clean out.

Around the time that we moved, my cell phone started to ring. The caller ID showed that the calls were coming from Washington, D.C., and Colorado Springs, headquarters of USADA. I ignored them at first, partly because I was exhausted from all this, and partly because I had a good idea what they wanted.

I’d heard that the Department of Justice’s civil division in Washington had joined Floyd’s case and wanted to find out if Lance and the Postal team owners had defrauded the government by falsely representing the team as clean. The DOJ investigators were assisted by the fact that civil cases are held to a different standard of proof from criminal cases: instead of “beyond a reasonable doubt,” it’s a “preponderance of evidence.”

USADA was pursuing its own case. Unlike civil and criminal prosecutors, USADA didn’t concern itself with laws, only with the rules of the sport. Travis Tygart, the CEO of USADA, had been aware of the federal investigation from the start, participating in some meetings and providing Novitzky and Miller with background information. While neither USADA nor the Justice Department’s civil division would have access to the grand jury testimony, both would possibly have access to the proffers and the other materials the criminal investigation had produced.

In short, it was becoming clear that the bulldozer Novitzky had started was still running. My phone kept ringing, and with each ring the message was louder: the game was still on. USADA and the DOJ wanted to know, would I be willing to cooperate? Would I go under oath and testify?

I thought about it for a while. Then I called them back and told them yes, absolutely. I know it would have been easier to let it all go, to simply move on. But I couldn’t do that. I’d started this race, and I was going to finish it.

In April, in separate interviews over two days, I told USADA and DOJ investigators what I remembered from my years with Postal
and Lance. I gave them everything as precisely and completely as I could. I told the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.

I wasn’t the only one. USADA investigators conducted similar interviews with nine other former Armstrong teammates, with similar results. Every Postal rider USADA contacted agreed to speak openly and honestly. USADA did not tell me who the other teammates were, but I could make a guess. All of us, together again, just like the old days in Nice and Girona. It was a strange feeling, talking to the investigators and knowing that the other guys were telling their stories as well. I found myself remembering those old days—back when we started out, those days in the Dee-Luxe Apartment in the Sky, that moment of innocence before all this craziness started. I wondered if they were feeling it too.

On June 12, 2012, USADA delivered: a simply worded fifteen-page letter charging Lance, Pedro Celaya, Johan Bruyneel, Luis del Moral, Pepe Martí, and Michele Ferrari with anti-doping rule violations, alleging that they had conducted a conspiracy to dope “in order to advance their athletic and sporting achievements, financial wellbeing, and status of the teams and their riders.” Lance was charged with use, possession, trafficking, administration, assisting, and covering up. USADA also said that data from blood collected from Lance during 2009 and 2010 was “fully consistent” with blood manipulation. Furthermore, Lance was immediately banned from participating in triathlon, a sport he’d returned to after his retirement.

The USADA charges changed everything. While Lance might’ve accepted losing one or two Tour titles, he clearly wasn’t prepared to lose all seven, plus his future in triathlon. Lance’s “I’m not gonna fight” stance shifted 180 degrees. His lawyers cranked up the attack machine and aimed it at USADA, attempting to paint it as bitter, vengeful, smug, irrational, etc. Via Twitter and his lawyers, Lance called the process “unconstitutional,” complained about access to
evidence, and issued what might rank as one of the most ironic tweets of all time: “It’s time to play by the rules.”

While Lance has a considerable advantage in legal and PR firepower, he also had a disadvantage: USADA is not a court of law, and so is concerned only with the simple question of whether Lance and the others broke the rules of the sport. Instead of a federal trial, Lance would face an arbitration hearing; instead of being protected by a legal standard of “beyond a reasonable doubt,” he would face the much lower standard of “comfortable satisfaction of the hearing panel.”
^†

At this writing, the outcome is far from certain, but it’s safe to say it’s not going to be pretty. I’m sure Lance is going to do everything he can to attack my credibility, and that of his other teammates who are telling the truth. Lance provided a preview of his strategy on the day the USADA charges became official, when he leaked the identity of a previously anonymous USADA Review Board member, along with that member’s recent arrest on a misdemeanor charge of indecent exposure. In addition, USADA officials told ABC News that they believed Lance had hired private investigators to follow them.
The Wall Street Journal
reported that Livestrong sent a lobbyist to visit U.S. Rep. Jose Serrano (D., NY), who sits on the House Appropriations Committee, in order to talk about USADA and its pursuit of Armstrong. I can see why Lance is using this strategy—after all, it’s worked in the past, and at this point he doesn’t have many other options. And perhaps it will work again;
perhaps the public will keep wanting to believe him; or perhaps they’ll simply get tired of this and wish it would all go away.

One thing’s for sure, though: the truth will keep coming out. More former racers will step forward as they get older, as they realize that it doesn’t make sense to keep living a lie. They’ll experience how good it feels to be honest; they’ll realize it’s okay to be open and let people look at all the facts, and decide for themselves. In the meantime, I’m going to keep telling my story—both in big ways, like this book, but also in my daily life.

Just before we moved to Montana, I was riding through Boulder with my friend Pat Brown. I was wearing jeans and sneakers, riding my town bike, a heavy, beat-up cruiser with upright handlebars and fat tires. Pat and I were waiting at a streetlight when two riders in dark Lycra cruised past us on thousand-dollar racing bikes. They must’ve recognized me, because one of them turned and gave me a long, meaningful look as he passed. As he rode past I could read the words on his jersey, written in big white letters: DOPERS SUCK. I felt the old adrenaline surge. Everything in my mind concentrated into a simple urge: I wanted to catch that guy.