At precisely 11:00 A.M. in Lannemezan, a quiet village in Southwest France, nine men in the dark-blue jerseys of the US Postal team—part of a pack of more than 150 cyclists on twenty-one teams—rolled out of town to begin a painful six-hour journey over seven Pyrenean passes. It was Saturday, July 17, 2004. The temperature was already 78 degrees at the start of stage 13 of the 21-day Tour de France.
The Tour de France’s brutality is legend. The race lasts for 23 days, including 2 rest days, and is divided into seventeen road “stages,” including the flat stages favored by sprinters, mountain stages for climbers, and medium-mountain stage, plus four “time trials”—individually timed races against the clock—beginning with the “prologue,” which opens the Tour.
This would be the cruelest day of all. The course ahead stretched 127 miles, winding through the forested Midi-Pyrenees region, where wooded foothills give way to alpine pastures, then to a flat prelude through shaded farmlands, and finally to a series of ever-rising peaks: the gradual Col d’Aspin, the deceptive Col de Latrape, and, finally, the infamous climb to the Plateau de Beille.
Lance Armstrong began the day in second place, meaning that he was second in the so-called overall standings, computed by adding up the stage times thus far and subtracting any time bonuses that had been earned. He was 5 minutes and 24 seconds behind the melancholy Frenchman Thomas Voeckler. Five minutes are substantial by the standards of any normal race, but in the Tour de France, they could easily disappear. Armstrong’s main rival, the German Jan Ullrich, the man who had the best chance of emerging from the mountains on his tail, trailed him by just 3 minutes and 36 seconds. Armstrong’s aim, and the mission of his US Postal Service team, was to make the time gap between him and the rest of his pursuers insurmountably large.
After they hit the countryside, the Postal squad assumed its typical formation: eight riders forming a spear to pierce the wind, with Armstrong protected in the center. Every team in the Tour de France has a captain, the man who will finish first. While the captain pursues the yellow jersey, awarded to the rider with the lowest overall time, the rest of the team does cycling’s grunt work: blocking the wind, putting pressure on rivals with clever tactical moves, even dropping back to the team car and picking up bottles of water for the leader. No team in cycling was more single-mindedly focused on its captain than the US Postal team. And no captain expected more loyalty and hard work from his support riders than Armstrong.
Armstrong’s teammates kept him securely in the sweet spot of the pack: right near the front, behind his Postal Service spear, where there’s no wind and minimal risk of a crash. Armstrong pedaled in their slipstreams, using the momentum of the group, which enabled him to use 30 to 60 percent less energy than if he were riding alone.
The pack, called a peloton, resembles a graceful amoeba—its perimeter changing shape as it floats down the road. Inside the amoeba, teams elbow each other, jab ribs, and collide wheels in constant combat for the best position. On the twenty-five-mile journey to the base of the day’s first climb, the US Postal squad shot to the front of the peloton, accelerating even on the flat roads where riders typically conserve their energy. Driving the pace on the flats—a technique pioneered by the Postal team—neutralized other squads’ tiny, elflike climbers, whose smaller size offered no advantage on these relatively flat stretches.
The maneuver came at the direction of team director Johan Bruyneel, a handsome, dark-haired Belgian who trailed the riders in a team car. Watching the broadcast of the race on a television installed on his dashboard, Bruyneel carefully orchestrated every acceleration, attack, or chase. Once the race neared the mountains, Armstrong would rely on the grunts, his four most trusted Postal teammates: José Azevedo, George Hincapie, Floyd Landis, and José Luis Rubiera.
Just forty miles into the stage, the peloton reached the first significant climb—a long, gentle ascent up the eleven-mile Col de Portet d’Aspet. Here, in the climbs, the team faced its most challenging work. Armstrong was big for a cyclist. At 160 pounds, he was about 20 percent heavier than the average climber, weight that had to be carried over the decisive mountain stages.
But the Blue Train, as they were known, proceeded as fast uphill as they had on the flats. Rivals began falling off the back of the pack like loose debris. Dutch, Belgians, Danes, Russians—they were heroes back home, national champions, endurance machines in the 99th percentile of the human race. Yet today they looked like amateurs. Armstrong had shaved Voeckler’s lead to less than 4 minutes by the end of the first climb.
It was getting hotter, and empty water bottles shot out of the peloton like popcorn. A bottle an hour for every rider equals about three hundred on the side of the road—free souvenirs for fans. Basque rider Iban Mayo, a top Tour contender, succumbed to the heat and tension on the next climb, the relatively easy four-mile Col de Latrape. Mayo, suffering a deep burning sensation in his legs, simply got off his bike. Orange-clad Basque fans pleaded with him to continue. Slowly, he remounted his bike, his teammates joining onlookers in pushing him up the climb.
At the front of the pack, meanwhile, Armstrong barely seemed to be exerting himself. And he moved at a breathtaking pace. The Postal team hit the climb at roughly twenty miles per hour, a speed cycling teams had never attained in these conditions. The Americans chalked it up to technology and fitness—but the French, and other squads, had their suspicions. So did some members of the press.
On the slopes of the Col d’Agnes, 90 miles into the 127-mile stage, Postal led a pack that had now dwindled to about forty riders. Voeckler couldn’t keep up, and Armstrong now trailed him by only 44 seconds in overall time. Sensing the narrowing lead, Voeckler shot down the other side with reckless disregard for the off-camber, hairpin turns, and choppy pavement. Fans winced as he came within inches of launching himself off a thirty-foot cliff. By the start of the final climb, he had regained his advantage over Armstrong: 5 minutes, 24 seconds.
At the base of Plateau de Beille, a ten-mile climb so steep that most people can hardly walk it, Postal took the lead. By then only about thirty or so riders had managed to hang with them. While the others were visibly suffering, the Postal riders looked positively comfortable.
George Hincapie raced to the front of the pack. The lanky, almost simian rider, who grew up racing in New York City, had been Armstrong’s most trusted lieutenant through five Tour victories. The two men lived and trained together in Spain, and Armstrong described Hincapie as his best buddy. He executed a technique that was his specialty—the “lead-out”—in which, on the first gentle slopes before the climb, he would accelerate with Armstrong on his tail. Armstrong could rest comfortably in the soft air created by Hincapie’s larger silhouette as they tore through the summer heat. Every rider wanted to be at the front at that moment, but Hincapie was the best. He stretched what was left of the peloton like a piece of gum, then peeled off, exhausted, as the real climb began.
As the hill pushed to a 6 percent grade—on its way to an eventual 8 percent—Armstrong had only three teammates still supporting him. The others had dropped out. But Ullrich, the square-jawed German who’d won the Tour in 1997, clung to the wheels of the survivors. The year before, Ullrich had been Armstrong’s toughest competitor, his tormentor in the mountains.
As the riders slowed and began to pant in the heat, the Postal team’s rising star, Floyd Landis, pushed to the front to do the critical work of keeping pace for Armstrong so that Armstrong would get a smooth ride. Tall for a cyclist but rail thin, Landis was a latecomer to the sport. He had joined the team in 2002 and risen to become Postal’s second-best. Landis, who had started out as a mountain biker before switching to road racing, had a cardiovascular capacity that was extremely rare—even more favorable than Armstrong’s, according to calculations by team doctors. As he shepherded his team leader up the climb, Landis felt the attention of the cameras, the television commentators touting his talents. Other teams were courting him, and his performance proved he could be a potential rival to Armstrong. Armstrong counted on Landis’s extraordinary strength to support him in the mountain stages. But Landis was not supposed to have ambitions of his own.
Slowly, the riders passed one after another of the red-and-white inflatable banners marking the distance to the finish line. With each checkpoint, Armstrong gained ground. Two seconds here, three there. The fans at the top of Plateau de Beille, some of whom had hiked for hours to get a good spot, cheered madly. Some ran alongside the riders, screaming encouragement or, occasionally, epithets. Cries of “doper, doper” could be heard directed at Armstrong from French fans who suspected his performance was drug-fueled. In cycling, whether the fans love you or hate you, the cheers and jeers mostly blend into one savage din—punctuated by cowbells and the occasional air horn.
Landis, exhausted from knifing through the wind, finally pulled off and gave the lead to his Postal teammate José Luis Rubiera, known as Chechu. The Spanish climber screamed up the switchback turns, clearing the way for Armstrong through crowds waving colorful national flags. “Allez, allez!” “Go, go!” the fans screamed.
With 6.2 miles still left in the 9.9-mile climb, Ullrich had already lost 40 seconds. Voeckler had lost 1 minute and 41 seconds. The riders passed the 3-mile mark, then the 1-mile mark. Armstrong was alone, far out in front of almost everyone, Ullrich a mere memory at more than 6 minutes behind. The Tour de France was as good as won.
Only one obstacle remained, and Armstrong, ever the assassin, charged after him. The Italian Ivan Basso was already so far down in the standings that he was merely hoping for a strong finish. Armstrong and Basso reached the summit together, and the roads began to flatten out. With less than one mile to go, Armstrong leaned his bike over at frightening angles around every turn. He knew he had gained so much time that he could not lose the Tour de France now, but still he stuck to Basso’s wheel. He looked angry, grimacing and pushing the pace. He wanted every second. He wanted not just to beat but to crush his competition.
With 164 yards to go, Armstrong blew past Basso and sprinted across the finish line, raising his arms in the air triumphantly. He was now more than 6 minutes ahead of his closest competition. With a week to go, and only two more mountain stages ahead, it seemed inevitable that—barring some unforeseen disaster—he would win his sixth Tour.
While his teammates boarded a bus, destined for traffic jams down the mountain, Armstrong boarded a helicopter with girlfriend Sheryl Crow. He may well have been, at that moment, the most thoroughly envied man in the world. His performance that day wasn’t just miraculous and beautiful—it was a seminal moment in the Armstrong legend. He had stared down cancer. He had a beautiful, famous girlfriend. And now he had once again beaten the Europeans at their own game.
By that point in the 21-day race, Armstrong didn’t need to win another stage in order to win the Tour de France. He could have coasted to Paris without breaking a sweat and still sipped champagne on the Champs-Élysées, wearing the victor’s yellow jersey. But Lance did not want to simply win the race. He wanted to be sure no other cyclist would dare to dream he had a chance of prevailing.
Over the next several days, Armstrong continued advancing his lead, widening the time gap between himself and his competitors. He won again on the mountain stage from Valréas to Villard-de-Lans. He won the individual time trial—a race against the clock—from the bottom of Alpe d’Huez all the way up the sickeningly steep 9.6 miles of switchbacks. He won the stage from Le Bourg-d’Oisans to Le Grand-Bornand, and he won another time trial—a 34.2-mile flat course around Besançon.
By July 25, the final day of the race, Armstrong was still 6 minutes and 19 seconds ahead of his competition. The peloton took off from the suburban French city of Montereau-Fault-Yonne. The course meandered 101.3 miles to Paris. The ride was largely ceremonial for Armstrong. Someone in the US Postal team car cracked open a bottle of champagne, poured it into a flute, and passed it to Armstrong, who stood out in the bright yellow jersey. In front of cameramen on motorcycles, he toasted his own victory, then put down the glass and rode his bike with no hands on the bars, holding up six fingers, one for each of his six Tour de France victories.
• • •
Six years later, Floyd Landis was ten pounds heavier. On the verge of confessing what no American cyclist had ever admitted before, he looked as if he hadn’t shaved for a week. A thin, reddish-brown beard sprouted on his pale skin. His eyes were slightly red from lack of sleep, and he wore blue jeans and an old white T-shirt. So much had happened since that day in the 2004 Tour, when the entire world watched him give his all as he shepherded Armstrong over those mountain passes. In those six years, Landis had become a hero, a martyr, a villain—and now he was a broken man. And he was about to tell secrets he knew would tear the sport apart.
He was sitting in a conference room at the Marriott Hotel in Marina del Rey, California, reliving the 2004 race. But the other men in the room had no interest in his heroics on the road. One of the men was a federal agent named Jeff Novitzky—a tall, bald-headed criminal investigator for the Food and Drug Administration. Another was Travis Tygart, the chief executive officer of the US Anti-Doping Agency (USADA), a nonprofit group in charge of policing doping in sport.
What had begun as a cathartic truth-telling exercise for Landis had morphed into a full-blown federal investigation with Landis as the chief witness for the government. The conversation wasn’t recorded, but Novitzky and Tygart took careful notes. For the first time in the history of professional bike racing, one of the sport’s biggest stars—a true firsthand witness to cycling’s most heavily guarded secrets—was going to tell the truth about doping.
Describing the events of that 2004 Tour, Landis told Novitzky and Tygart that one night, after the conclusion of one of the stages—just a few days after Armstrong had climbed into the helicopter with Sheryl Crow—the entire US Postal team, including Armstrong, had been on the team bus, driving along largely deserted mountain roads to a hotel near the start of the following day’s stage, when suddenly, the bus came to an abrupt stop. The driver, an old Belgian man, had gotten out carrying orange traffic cones, as if to indicate that there was a mechanical problem. Great, just what we need. Our legs are aching, our bodies are wasting away, and now we have to sit in a bus on the side of the road and wait for the French equivalent of AAA, Landis had thought to himself.
But soon everyone on board realized what was happening. The bus was being transformed into a secret blood transfusion unit. As had happened before, someone—sometimes a motorcycle driver who had been hired to do it, sometimes the team chef, sometimes a security worker—had delivered the blood immediately prior to the transfusions. Engine trouble was just a ruse designed to outsmart the journalists and the French police who suspected the Postal team of doping.
As the bus driver pretended to work on the engine, the team doctors began handing out blood bags with code names the riders had chosen for themselves. Some riders used the names of their pets; others used nicknames. Landis used his real name. He was too afraid of accidentally infusing a teammate’s blood—a mistake that could end in death—to take the risk.
Landis described to the two investigators what sounded like a well-choreographed, ultrasecret M.A.S.H. unit. As the operation got under way, all the riders, including Armstrong, lay down on the floor of the bus, faceup, while the team doctors, who always rode on the bus, hung the chilled transfusion bags from overhead luggage racks so that gravity could help the blood ease its way into their veins.
The cyclists were gaunt, their faces sunken, the fat burned away by the exertions of the race. Their veins and capillaries had pushed up to the surface of the skin, rising in sinewy, bulging mazes on their arms and legs—the human body’s attempt to supercharge itself by maximizing blood flow. Every day during the Tour, the riders burned up red blood cells like kindling, drastically depleting their ability to bring oxygen to their muscles. The extreme physical demands of the race meant they were wasting away from the inside out. The blood transfusions were to counteract those effects. Boosting the number of red blood cells in the cyclists’ bodies was like injecting fuel into a car cylinder.
Landis described watching as Armstrong’s bag slowly emptied. Normally, he said, Armstrong would squeeze the bag to the last drop, making sure that every possible red blood cell had flowed down the plastic tube and into his veins. This time, though, Armstrong had pulled the needle out of his arm without bothering to squeeze the bag. Landis said he thought it was because Armstrong was in a hurry, or maybe he just didn’t care because he was so far ahead in the race by then.
Landis also explained that, during his US Postal years, blood transfusions had come back in vogue in cycling, because they were less easily detected than performance-enhancing drugs—though the practice was banned from the sport and considered as illegitimate as taking those drugs. The US Postal team usually conducted two blood transfusions during the Tour de France—one for each week and a half of racing, he said. Because the US Postal team was under such intense scrutiny at that time, however, trying to arrange for two blood transfusions in a 21-day period was like trying to get away with two bank heists. What made the challenge even more difficult was the fact that blood stays fresh for only three weeks. As soon as it’s removed from the body, the red blood cells begin to wither and age and eventually explode. And while it might seem like a good idea to remove blood immediately before the Tour de France to ensure its freshness, that would be a strategic mistake, as it would weaken the body just when it needed to be at its strongest.
So in order for every rider to have two fresh blood bags ready by July, which was when the Tour de France took place, the team had to undergo a secret and complicated process that involved months of advance planning. The first blood draws were done in the spring or early summer. The plastic transfusion bags were stored in refrigerators kept at 1 degree Celsius to preserve the blood as much as possible without freezing it. Then every few weeks during the months leading up to the Tour de France, doctors would draw more fresh blood out of the riders’ bodies and re-infuse the old blood into them. The constant swapping ensured the refrigerated blood was always fresh and the red blood cells in the riders’ bodies were not depleted by the stress, and the training stayed steady.
Shortly before the beginning of the 2004 Tour, the US Postal team had the bags of blood smuggled into France in an unmarked camper. Then the bags were transported by motorcycles with refrigerated panniers. One of the most trusted motorcycle drivers was Philippe Maire, who later opened a Trek bike dealership in the south of France.
This kind of top secret operation had become something of the norm for the US Postal team, beginning around 2001, by which time Armstrong was well on his way to superstar status. Working out the logistics fell to team chef Geert “Duffy” Duffeleer. Duffy was a good cook—the riders swore by his spaghetti Bolognese—but he also had a dark streak. According to Landis, he was involved in the black market bike trade, along with team mechanic Julien de Vriese. Duffeleer and de Vriese unloaded US Postal bikes, bikes that were supposed to be used by the riders on the team. Instead, they ended up being sold to shops in Belgium. The off-the-books cash helped fund the team’s purchases of illicit performance-enhancing drugs.
During the 2004 Tour de France, Landis noticed that Duffy had been intensely paranoid. About a week or so before the bus transfusion, during the race’s first rest day, on July 12, Duffy had shown up at the hotel where the team would be staying, to check it out in advance of the arrival of the riders, and he’d gotten a scare when he thought he discovered police reconnaissance equipment in the rooms. Concerned about the possibility of detection, Duffy met the team bus when it arrived at the hotel parking lot, preventing the riders from getting off until he and Bruyneel could discuss what to do. The two men walked out into a nearby field, presumably to avoid any recording equipment that might have been planted by the police, but they remained in full view of the riders on the bus. Though Landis couldn’t hear what they said, he could tell Bruyneel and Duffy were worried about something, and he figured it had to do with doping.
Duffy and Bruyneel eventually decided it was okay for the team to enter the hotel that day. Later that evening, the riders were summoned to a hotel room. Every opening in the room had been taped shut to evade any kind of video surveillance, and the riders were told not to speak in case the room had been bugged with audio equipment. All of the riders then got blood transfusions, while security guards stood outside in the hall. Afterward, Bruyneel cut the plastic transfusion bags into tiny shards and flushed them down the toilet. For the second mass blood transfusion of the Tour, a week later, however, it was decided that doing it in the hotel again was too risky, which was why it was done on the bus.
As Landis told his story in the Marriott conference room that day, there was absolute silence. Other than Landis’s voice, all that could be heard was the sound of scribbling pens. Novitzky had spent years investigating drug use in Major League Baseball and the National Football League. Tygart had devoted a decade of his life to fighting drug use in sports. The two men thought they had heard everything by that stage of their careers, but this was the most vivid picture ever painted of the secret world of professional sports. They stayed in the room for six hours, pushing for details, for context, and the next morning they met with Landis for another two hours.
By the end of the two interview sessions, Tygart and Novitzky felt they understood just about everything about how doping worked on the US Postal team, and how the riders had gotten away with it. They wanted to believe Landis, and they knew they had the makings of a good case. But they couldn’t rely entirely on Landis’s story, because he would be a terribly flawed witness. After all, in the six years since the 2004 Tour de France, Landis had publicly denied doping after failing a drug test, had written a book professing his innocence, and had taken donations from fans who believed he was innocent. In coming clean with Novitzky and Tygart, Landis was completely changing his story.
The investigators also had to wonder about Landis’s motivations. Why was he coming clean now? What was in it for him? It was clear that Landis’s life was in tatters. After the positive test, he had broken up with his wife and moved to a small cabin in Idyllwild, a remote town in the mountains of Southern California full of hippies, gun-toting survivalists, and people living on the fringes of society. There were reports in the press that Landis had taken to heavy drinking. Perhaps most important, his relationship with Armstrong had ended in a bitter feud that was well documented. Because of Landis’s shaky background, Novitzky and Tygart knew that every fact, every detail, every allegation he’d made would have to be corroborated by other sources.
But would anyone else talk?