On a sunny Friday morning in August 1990, Jim Ochowicz sat in a windowless conference room in the Motorola, Inc. corporate headquarters building in Schaumburg, Illinois, wearing a polo shirt with a red-and-green 7-Eleven logo on his chest. Southland Corporation, which owned 7-Eleven, was hemorrhaging money and it had abruptly canceled its decade-long sponsorship of the team. Soon, Team 7-Eleven would be history, and its twenty-two riders, its team mechanics, and its soigneurs, or assistants, would be jobless.
Anxious and desperate, Ochowicz figured he might as well take a chance at pitching Motorola’s head of worldwide advertising to endorse his pro team. Ochowicz knew the tech giant was eager for a way to boost awareness of its brand in countries such as France, Germany, and Britain, and he thought he could make a case for doing so through a title sponsorship.
Sheila Griffin, Motorola’s savvy marketer, was skeptical. She knew almost nothing about pro cycling and whatever she did know came to her through conversations at home with her husband, a civil engineer and avid amateur racer who would sometimes ride one hundred miles in one shot as weekend fun.
Griffin had previously considered the idea of sponsoring the Tour de France itself. For several years, Coca-Cola, a major Tour sponsor, had set up a two-story lounge known as the Coca-Cola pavilion, at the Tour’s finish line, which gave Coke major visibility in Europe. But in her eyes, Motorola couldn’t justify shelling out millions of dollars just to sponsor a single twenty-one-day event. She had agreed to meet Ochowicz purely as a courtesy to one of her husband’s biking buddies, who had known him since childhood. She informed him that he had exactly forty-five minutes to make his pitch.
In his thick Wisconsin accent, Ochowicz began describing himself and his team as American pioneers in Europe, who had successfully brought legitimacy to a sport that for many years had been on the fringes of American athletic culture. Eric Heiden was still riding with the team, drawing crowds of autograph-seeking fans. And in addition to dominating the domestic criterium races, 7-Eleven was also the first US-based team to have a rider who wore the coveted yellow jersey of the overall leader in the Tour de France, and the first to win a stage in a major Tour—an honor in its own right.
Having pillaged competing teams for talented riders such as Andy Hampsten, a thin, curly-haired, bucktoothed kid from North Dakota who was then the team leader, Ochowicz had high hopes for their ability to compete successfully in the European pro peloton. He described in vivid detail the big day earlier that summer, when Hampsten had become the first American to win the Giro d’Italia, cycling’s second-biggest race. Undeterred by the heavy snowfall on the 8,600-foot Passo di Gavia in the Italian Alps, Hampsten had descended those snowy roads like a madman, defeating all the other top contenders in the race, none of whom had the guts or the technical skill to keep up on the treacherous downhill.
The forty-five-minute appointment turned into a five-hour discussion. Ochowicz didn’t have the most sophisticated argument for why it made financial sense for Motorola to invest in a cycling team. But Griffin was moved by his passion. She began to think that sponsoring a pro cycling team whose riders could compete throughout Europe would be a shrewd, and even inexpensive, way to raise the profile of the Motorola brand. The three million dollars Ochowicz thought he needed to accomplish the big things he had in mind didn’t put a big dent in the Motorola marketing budget, and there was plenty of upside: If Ochowicz could use that money to hire a couple of riders strong enough to win stages in cycling’s three Grand Tours—the world’s only three-week stage races—then the Motorola brand, with its bat-wings logo, would be all over the European newspapers and TV. Back in the States, the brand might get a boost, too, if bike enthusiasts, casual riders such as her husband and his buddies, took to donning Motorola jerseys on their Saturday rides.
Two weeks later, Griffin called Ochowicz to inform him that Motorola had decided to underwrite his team. His American team—managed by his nonstock corporation the South Club Inc., of Waukesha, Wisconsin—would set up European headquarters in Hulste, Belgium, a small West Flanders village near the French border. Ochowicz’s bold move had saved his team. What it had done for Motorola was another question.
Team Motorola had a disastrous showing at first, taking 55th place (out of roughly two hundred riders) in its racing debut, the Tour of Lombardy, a one-day Italian “classic” race in Milan, Italy, that fall. But Griffin reassured Motorola executives that its fortunes would turn around soon. And Ochowicz was determined to make sure that happened. Thanks to Motorola’s sponsorship, he had the money he needed to buy himself some more promising young riders. The team was already filled with gifted, naturally talented athletes like Frankie Andreu, a solid veteran from Michigan, and great lead-out man, and Ron Kiefel, the first American to win a stage in a Grand Tour. Now he was on a mission to find the next Greg LeMond, who had just won the 1990 Tour riding for the French Z team. Ochowicz was still disappointed over his failure to sign LeMond himself. He and his 7-Eleven squad had made a hefty multimillion-dollar offer to LeMond, but they were outbid by the French team, which had offered LeMond $4.7 million over three years—one of the largest contracts ever signed in cycling. So Ochowicz was on the lookout for a new star.
In the spring of 1991, Lance was in his second season on Subaru-Montgomery, but he was still angry about the feud he’d had with Eddie B and Thom Weisel earlier that year during the Bergamasca race in Italy. Eddie B had been incensed that, after his win, Armstrong had failed to thank his teammates for their support. He saw it as a further sign that Armstrong was immature and self-centered. Armstrong, in turn, felt betrayed by Eddie B and was worried Weisel might fire him. Given the bad feelings, it seemed highly unlikely that Armstrong would stay with their team for much longer. Lance was effectively in play, and Ochowicz wanted to snap him up for the new Motorola team. Although Armstrong was still a junior, and an amateur with little understanding of the European peloton, he was one of the most coveted young riders on the circuit.
When Ochowicz approached Armstrong about joining his team, he offered him a special arrangement: If he signed with Motorola, he could remain an amateur, receiving a stipend, until after the 1992 Barcelona Olympics, at which time he would immediately become a full-time pro racer and join Motorola’s European squad. Armstrong was thrilled. In his eyes, Och’s team was like the Dallas Cowboys of American cycling. It was one of the top ten or so teams in the world, the kind of team where he wanted to end up.
Now Armstrong had to call Thom Weisel to inform him that, after less than two years with the team, he was quitting Subaru-Montgomery. Weisel was blunt: It was a bad idea. He still had a lot to learn, and if he went over to Europe now, he’d get chewed up and spat out in no time. Weisel also told Armstrong that he could get him to Europe soon but that he’d have to wait until he was ready, and until the team had the budget for it, which it didn’t yet. Armstrong, who respected Weisel for his success and his willingness to support the team, at first found it difficult to defend his choice. But by the end of the phone conversation, after Weisel paused for a moment to reflect on everything that had been said, he told Armstrong that he respected his candor and would support his decision to move on.
The Barcelona Olympics would show the world just how much more Armstrong had to learn. His mother, Linda, and new stepfather, John Walling, used rollers to paint an eight-by-four-foot Texas flag on the pavement of the largest hill of the course. Such roadside graffiti is a tradition in bike racing. Alongside it they painted Texas Flyer, in honor of Armstrong. But Armstrong got stuck in a pack of riders early on in the race—and was still stuck there when the pack crossed the finish line. He ended up in fourteenth place out of roughly two hundred riders, a most unimpressive performance. Armstrong couldn’t explain it. He told reporters he just felt weak that day. Lance was quiet at dinner that night with his mom and stepdad and friends from Plano.
It got worse. About a week after the Olympics road race, Armstrong turned pro, as Ochowicz had promised him he would do, and entered the Clásica San Sebastián, a Spanish one-day road racing “classic,” and one of the races that tend to favor bigger riders like him. Armstrong finished dead last.
Armstrong was learning the hard way about the speed of the European cyclist. The peloton in the highest-level European races never slows down. Instead, it hums along at a blistering pace until someone attacks, causing the entire field to accelerate en masse for several minutes until it goes back to the previous, leg-scorching speed. The lack of lulls in the pace means weaker riders have no opportunities to recover. Armstrong may have been good in the junior ranks, but in the top rung of professional racing, he was one of the weaker riders.
Over the course of just a couple of weeks, Armstrong had gone from an extreme high to a depressing low. Despite what he might have believed, he was not superhuman. He had to come to grips with the reality that there were cyclists out there who were faster and tactically smarter. In fact, there were a lot of them. Armstrong had to come back to earth and the reality that he needed to work harder. He spent the off-season in Austin and Florida, riding 500 to 600 miles, 25 to 30 hours a week, preparing for his first full season as a professional on the Motorola squad. To simulate racing, Lance would ride in the slipstream of J.T. Neal’s motor scooter, often for hours at a time.
The training paid off. By 1993, Armstrong was starting to realize his potential. He came in second in the Tour DuPont, a prestigious eleven-day stage race in the United States, which attracted many of the sport’s top cyclists, and he became a contender for a $1 million prize, available to any rider who could manage to sweep the three races that were held in succession over the course of a couple of weeks. This trio of events, held in Pittsburgh, West Virginia, and Philadelphia, was known as the Thrift Drug Triple Crown. Armstrong easily won the Pittsburgh race, which he had also won in 1992.
During the West Virginia race, a 493-mile, six-stage race in the hills, Armstrong won the opening Morgantown prologue time trial—a race against the clock—by just under 2 seconds. The second day of the race brought a 100-mile mountain course in the Monongahela National Forest near Elkins, a small town. After Armstrong won again, his lead in the overall standings was 14 seconds, with Michael Engleman of the rival Coors Light team in second place.
With the $1 million prize on the line, Armstrong then turned to an age-old tactic to boost his chance of winning. He sent a Motorola teammate to approach Scott McKinley, one of the captains of the Coors Light squad, with a business proposition. Stephen Swart, another Coors team captain, later recalled, under oath during a lawsuit deposition, the following proposition: Would Engleman and his Coors Light teammates be open to a payoff in exchange for agreeing not to challenge Armstrong in what remained of the “Triple Crown”?
Swart, a stocky New Zealander, testified that he met Armstrong in a hotel room to discuss it. In fact, such deals were common in the strange sport of professional cycling, and not seen as entirely unsportsmanlike. The riders quickly came to an agreement, Swart said. If the Coors team riders backed off and didn’t challenge Armstrong, and if Armstrong won the $1 million, he would pay the Coors team a total of $50,000. While the payment wasn’t a huge amount of money, the Coors riders hadn’t won the first leg of the Triple Crown in Pittsburgh, so they weren’t in the running for the $1 million anyway. They all agreed to keep it quiet, Swart said in his testimony, knowing that if the insurance company that paid out the $1 million bonus found out, it might refuse to pay up.
Engleman’s lead over Armstrong slipped to 45 seconds and he didn’t challenge Armstrong for the remainder of the race. Armstrong won the second leg of the Triple Crown. Engleman finished second. Swart testified that even if the Coors team had wanted to challenge Armstrong, doing so may not have been possible because Armstrong was so strong.
The third event in the series, the USPRO National Championships, was one of the few events of that era in American cycling that drew large numbers of fans to the course. Many came to watch the bikers ride up the “Manayunk Wall,” a steep climb in Northwest Philadelphia. Fans would pack the sidewalks, cheering, beer in hand. With Armstrong racing for $1 million, the crowds were even larger than usual that year. Newspapers and television stations all over the country were covering Armstrong’s potential payday.
Shortly after the start of the race, Armstrong and a group of eight riders—most of them no-names—got out ahead of the rest of the pack. Then, on the final ascent up the Manayunk Wall, Armstrong got out of the saddle and took off, smashing down the pedals, his bike and body swaying from side to side with effort, as he ground his bike uphill. None of the other riders stayed with him, including Roberto Gaggioli, a member of the Coors Light team. By the time Armstrong reached the top, he was far enough ahead that he could coast the final stretch to the finish line. He sat up with no hands on the bars and slowly rolled toward the line, blowing kisses to the tipsy fans.
It was the highlight of his career so far. The sports press ate it up. “Armstrong makes his first million,” proclaimed the Agence France-Press. “Armstrong feels like a million bucks,” said The New York Times. “Just when it seemed the earnings of athletes couldn’t go anymore haywire,” added the Associated Press.
A few months after the race, the Coors Light team was paid in cash for their lack of effort in the races.
Following his $1 million payday, Armstrong headed back to Europe to start his education in the Tour de France. At twenty-one, he would be the youngest competitor in the race that year. He viewed his first Tour de France sort of like he was Joe Namath arriving in Miami to take on Johnny Unitas and the Colts. Photographers, reporters, the room full of people, the electricity—this was just his style, he decided.
Ochowicz had, since the mid-1980s, set up a training base for his riders at Como, Italy, about forty miles north of Milan, beneath the snowcapped Alps. A town of silk factories, medieval churches, and tourism, Como is considered the spiritual home of cycling and is near the infamous twenty-seven-mile-long Passo del Mortirolo, a climb of nearly 4,400 feet, one of the most difficult mountains a cyclist can face in Italy. It was also the hometown of the 7-Eleven team’s first physician and trainer, Massimo Testa, who set up a sports performance lab there, and later became doctor to the Motorola team.
When Lance arrived in Como, he shared an apartment on the fourth floor of a six-story building with Frankie Andreu, a native of Detroit who was five years older. For coaching and fitness testing, Lance relied on the doctor, Testa, who assigned Lance training rides through Passo del Ghisallo, a moderately difficult climb at the tip of the lake’s peninsula—with a chapel dedicated to cycling at the summit—and to the Pian del Tivano, with its long, scenic descent.
Far from home, Lance began practicing his Italian, sunbathing on the apartment balcony, and spending hours on the dial-up Internet. Frankie, a lanky cyclist with a sometimes-cranky demeanor, became Lance’s mentor. Frankie’s girlfriend, Betsy, a petite University of Michigan theater grad with thick brown hair, sometimes snapped at him when he was rude to people.
One night, the three of them went out for pizza at a small restaurant on one of Como’s charmingly narrow hillside streets. The waiter at the restaurant was taking forever to bring them their wine and pizzas, and Lance grew impatient. “These fucking Italians!” he shouted. “Can’t they bring the fucking wine?!”
“Lance, they understand what you’re saying,” Betsy said, explaining to Lance that Europeans weren’t as quick with the service as Americans.
“I don’t fucking care.”
“You’re not in Texas. If you don’t like it, don’t go out to eat,” she shot back.
Betsy thought Lance had some behavioral problems, but she liked him, and she thought Lance respected her and listened when she tried to steer him in the right direction. But Betsy visited Como only occasionally. She was in the process of leaving her sales job and opening an Italian espresso bar in Detroit.
Considering that Armstrong had not yet won a single major European professional race, his cocky smile and full-of-himself personality was a turnoff to some of the top pros, who viewed him as condescending. In France, Germany, Belgium, and Spain, bike racing was considered a blue-collar vocation. Europeans rode bikes because they didn’t want to work in a steel mill or sweat it out on some farm. They kept their heads down, raced their bikes hard, did what they were told, and hoped their meager paychecks would actually arrive. The glitz and glamour of American professional sports were as alien to them as the US tax code.
The man who would probably have been the top contender for that year’s Tour de France, three-time winner LeMond, decided to pull out just before the start of the race. He told reporters who were covering the Tour that he was suffering from major fatigue. But privately, LeMond told friends and family that he believed that new, powerful blood-boosting drugs had so dramatically improved the abilities of the riders who used them that it had become impossible for riders who weren’t doping to compete.
The Motorola team knew comparatively little about the sport’s doping culture, which by then had become quite advanced among the European teams. The new drug that was sweeping the peloton and increasing the speeds of the races by double-digit percentage points—the one that caused LeMond to decide to drop out of the Tour—was recombinant erythropoietin, which the riders called EPO for short. A synthetic version of a natural hormone in the body that causes bone marrow to produce red blood cells, it had been developed in the lab to help patients who had developed anemia because of chronic kidney disease and was prescribed off label for anemic cancer patients. For endurance athletes, whose grueling long-haul exertions turn their bodies into fiery furnaces that burn red blood cells at an astonishing rate, EPO was a godsend—even more powerful than the anabolic steroids that had become commonplace in athletics in the 1970s and 1980s. As LeMond knew, any riders going into the Tour without the advantage of EPO would be at a considerable disadvantage.
The first seven race days of the 1993 Tour de France were uneventful for Armstrong. But on the eighth racing day, a short 114-mile jaunt from a quaint French village, Châlons-sur-Marne, to the town of Verdun, he found himself in a small breakaway group—ahead of all the others. Armstrong, who wore a special American-flag-themed Motorola jersey, an honor for winning the USPRO National Championship, rocked slightly on the bike and worked hard to keep up his pace. As the group of six men approached the finish, huge crowds, kept at bay by red barriers with Coca-Cola logos, lined the sides of the road.
With 200 meters—656 feet—to go, Armstrong seemed to be at a severe disadvantage, with three riders blocking him from moving up ahead of the pack. Frenchman Ronan Pensec of the Novemail team drove his legs into an all-out, point-of-no-return sprint toward the finish line. But suddenly, Pensec swerved slightly to the left, opening a tiny gap between him and the barriers. Armstrong seized the opportunity immediately, sprinting at full power through the gap. Armstrong’s handlebars nearly bumped a security official standing against the barriers and he came within inches of hitting an oversize replica of a Coke can. But he made it through the tiny gap without crashing, which was fortunate because he was not wearing a helmet. It’s traditional not to do so on stages that involve mountain climbs—and if he had hit the barrier at thirty-five miles per hour, it would have been a horrific crash. As he crossed the finish line, he threw his hands in the air, swerved left, and nearly knocked a rival off his bike. And with that, Armstrong had become the youngest American to win a stage in the Tour de France.
But he dropped out of the Tour shortly after that. He wasn’t ready yet for the long and arduous climbs over the Alps and the Pyrenees, and leaving the Tour early was part of the team’s plan for him. He wasn’t a skilled climber, and it wouldn’t do him any good to endure that kind of pain. He was also competing against teams with sophisticated doping programs. Motorola had no organized doping at that time. It was up to the riders to find their own way.
J.T. Neal had arrived at the Tour de France to collect Lance, and drove him back to Como the next day. Armstrong put the time off to good use: He spent the rest of July and early August in Como, near the home of the Italian team physician, who helped Lance map out a training routine. Lance also shed some weight as he began preparing for cycling’s World Championships, a one-day event at the end of August. By now, he had begun using low-octane doping products—such as cortisone and testosterone. Cortisone gave a temporary boost of energy during one-day races. Testosterone aided recovery. Much like the Olympics, the annual World Championship road race is a competition between nations. Riders ditch their team kits, the uniforms featuring their sponsors, and put on their national colors for the day to become teammates with their countrymen.
The 1993 World Championship was held in Oslo, Norway, on an urban road course 160 miles long, with one medium-size climb and a bunch of sharp turns through city streets and highways. Lance’s mother, Linda, traveled to the event from Plano, Texas, and sat in the metal bleachers near the finish with Stephanie McIlvain, a young, earnest Oakley rep assigned to sponsorships for several pro cyclists, including LeMond, and now Armstrong. The late August weather in Oslo was horrific. The cold downpour made the roads slick. After the race began, many riders slipped and fell. Armstrong himself went down twice.
On the last lap, Armstrong accelerated on the climb and broke away from the pack, solo. The crowd began to buzz with surprise. Armstrong had so little experience, he didn’t know how long he could stay ahead of the field at his current speed. But that was what made him different. Most young and inexperienced riders would have erred on the side of caution, waiting in the pack and conserving energy. Armstrong just went and didn’t think twice about it. There was a chance he’d implode and get caught by some of the world’s best riders who were trailing him—men like Claudio Chiappucci and Miguel Indurain. But Armstrong kept his lead. He slowed down in the turns, taking the bends carefully, as he approached the final three miles. On the final straightaway, on a large four-lane highway, Armstrong ducked his head and shot into the driving rain, occasionally peeking behind him to look for the Chiappuccis and the Indurains. They weren’t there. With 0.9 miles to go, the riders behind Armstrong had given up any hope of actually catching him and were now just looking at each other, wondering which one of them would finish second.
As he approached the finish line, the onlookers standing in the cold rain—many of whom previously had no idea who Lance Armstrong was—began cheering him on. When he was still about 0.6 miles from the finish line, he lifted his hands off the handlebars to signal his victory. The Texan was champion of the world. After the race, he hugged his mom. They both wept.
A representative for King Harald of Norway soon approached them and invited Armstrong to the royal viewing area so that the king could congratulate him in person. Armstrong grabbed Linda, bringing her along. They were stopped at a security checkpoint and Linda was told to wait while Armstrong went on to see the king. Armstrong looked at the guard and shot back: “I don’t check my mother at the door!” They both strolled right in. Lance would later be quoted as saying of the king, “I’m sure he’s great and everything, but I just wanted to get out of there and go party with the guys.” And that’s exactly what he did.
With the victory, Armstrong became the undisputed star of the team. His résumé now included a Tour de France stage and a World Championship. The majority of professional cyclists would have considered those career-defining achievements. Armstrong was only getting started. One benefit of his success was that he began collecting huge appearance fees—typically $20,000 to $25,000 per race—just for showing up at races in France and elsewhere in Europe. Often the payments were made in cash.
Despite Armstrong’s growing success, higher-ups at Motorola were scratching their heads. Why, exactly, was Motorola sponsoring the puny sport of cycling? some of them asked. Sheila Griffin, who traveled to Europe to support the team and often rode in the “pace car” during the Tour, vehemently defended the sponsorship and insisted it would pay dividends over time as riders like Armstrong matured and as the team began winning bigger events. While Lance had racked up two big wins, the team still hadn’t won any big races. But to ensure that they did, Griffin wanted to be certain the team had every edge. She even began investing in a new technology for the team, which they called the peloton communications system, the first two-way radio connection between cyclists and team directors. A Motorola engineer created a prototype by soldering a tiny radio earpiece into Motorola team helmets. After the Motorola team began using it, other teams quickly followed suit. Eventually, it became standard technology for the sport. Motorola decided to extend its sponsorship for just one more year.
But there was huge pressure on Ochowicz to deliver big results. When Armstrong heard rumors that Motorola might end its sponsorship, he was concerned about what that would mean for him personally. He knew that even the great Greg LeMond had had to spend a year playing the role of a domestique on the La Vie Claire squad, helping the team’s lead rider, the Frenchman Bernard Hinault, before being given his own chance to win the Tour de France. If the Motorola team folded and Armstrong signed onto another team, it seemed likely that he’d have to do the same—riding as a domestique to help out a more famous rider. If so, it might take him years to climb up the totem pole to lead rider. Whereas if things kept going well with Motorola, Armstrong felt sure he would soon become its unrivaled leader and a star in the sport. He was not interested in anything less.
As Armstrong’s stature in the sport grew, so did his ego. Motorola had earned a top-five world ranking, a first for an American team. It already was paying Armstrong $500,000 a year, plus bonuses. But he was becoming increasingly demanding of the team management and of his teammates. As a world champion, he believed he should be pampered. He griped about the food riders ate and the team’s choice of hotels. “Michael Jordan wouldn’t stay at a place like this,” he complained. Additionally, he was jealous of Andy Hampsten, the team’s leader and star. There was room for only one leader on the team and Armstrong wanted to be it. He expected his teammates to be completely subservient, abandoning their own ambitions for the sake of his glory.
When Lance returned to Austin that September, he was a twenty-one-year-old with a lot of money and a narcissistic streak. Had he been an up-and-coming star in baseball or football, the US media would have been all over him. He would have had his pick of groupies and celebrity friends. But Americans weren’t particularly aware of his cycling accomplishments. Some US cycling safety activists had even chastised him for riding in the Worlds without a helmet. Back in Austin, Lance began a relationship with Sonni Evans, an old high school friend in Plano who had graduated from Southwest Texas State University. His relationship with Sonni reassured him, because they had met long before he became a world champion. Soon, she was living with him in Como.
He also asked his former coach, Chris Carmichael, to relocate from Colorado Springs, Colorado, to Austin, where he could train him. But Carmichael declined, wary of Lance’s potential demands on him.
For support in Austin, Lance turned again to J.T., who had continued serving as Lance’s personal masseur while he rode for Motorola, and who had provided Lance with advice on what to do with his growing assets. An eccentric and opinionated man, with a deep empathy for others, J.T. saw himself as a father figure to Lance, keeping in touch with Linda, helping Lance manage his newfound wealth, and looking after his affairs while he was racing in Europe. J.T also volunteered to act as Lance’s personal soigneur at no charge and monitored his training, scolding him for drinking too much beer or not drinking enough water on rides, and making sure Lance ate proper meals. J.T. also gave Lance the use of his speedboat on Lake Austin, for Lance’s other passion at the time: waterskiing. For Lance, the relationship was more transactional—J.T. gave him some good tips and advice. He was more like a stock broker than a dad.
Eventually, even Linda became concerned by Lance’s attitude and sought out advice about how to handle him. Linda knew that Greg LeMond had a lot in common with Armstrong. He was very young when he went to Europe and had won the World Championship at almost exactly the same age. Linda asked LeMond and his wife, Kathy, if she and J.T. Neal could visit them in Minnesota to talk to them about her son. Over coffee, Linda laid out her concerns. But the LeMonds didn’t know what to say. Greg certainly had his issues. He could be demanding to the point of being a jerk. He had character flaws, and he knew it. But LeMond felt he was nothing like Armstrong, who sometimes seemed to be mean simply for the sake of being mean. And Greg, at the time, seemed to have an inner stability very different from Armstrong’s volatile nature. He had met his wife, Kathy, at a very young age and they (so far) had stayed happily married throughout all the ups and downs of LeMond’s career. Linda left with the sympathy of the LeMonds but few answers.
To kick off the 1994 season, Armstrong raced in Mexico and then did some of the minor tune-up races in Europe in February before flying back to the United States. Armstrong was anxious about the coming season. He knew the public now expected more of him. Despite considerable training, Armstrong’s season was marked with a major trouncing in March in Milan–San Remo, a 180-mile single-day race that is usually won by cyclists with incredible endurance capacity and the ability to sprint. It was a major blow to Armstrong’s ego. In April, he went to Belgium and raced in the famous Liège–Bastogne–Liège, a spring classic that had been around since 1892. He finished second in the 160-mile course, which winds through the hilly Ardennes region of Belgium. It was an impressive show of strength, but a disappointing finish that showed Armstrong’s still immature tactical sense. Russian Evgeni Berzin, who was racing for Ferrari’s Gewiss team, caught Armstrong by surprise with a late solo attack for the win. In May, Armstrong finished second in the Tour DuPont for the second year in a row. Armstrong needed to win—not finish second—in big races. And if he wanted to be considered one of cycling’s greats, he needed to think about training to win the Tour de France. But endurance riding—the kind needed to win a race like that—still was not his strength.
When Lance returned to Como for the racing season, he brought along Sonni, who had graduated with a degree in fashion merchandising. The couple lived in Lance’s two-bedroom apartment there. To build up his endurance on the bike, Lance spent his days doing long training rides through Bergamo with his teammates Frankie Andreu and George Hincapie. But Lance, who was prone to lose his temper during training rides, would often get into heated arguments with Italian drivers. Sonni recalls that Lance struggled that season, even bailing out of a couple of European races and heading back to Como early. Just before the end of the season, Lance informed Sonni that they had to break up. He told her that his team manager, Ochowicz, felt he was slacking and that Ochowicz and Lance’s mother, Linda, thought Sonni was too much of a distraction. Heartbroken, she packed her belongings and headed home. Lance moved on quickly, however. Within months, he began a serious romance with beautiful young Dutch cyclist Danielle Overgaag, whom he met at the Interbike trade show in Las Vegas. The daughter of a chrysanthemum grower, Danielle stayed with him in Como, teaching him how to swear in Dutch. When Lance returned to the States, Danielle came along, moving into the apartment Lance rented from J.T. Neal.
The highlight of the 1994 Tour de France was not a race but Motorola’s decision to renew its sponsorship, keeping the American team alive for at least another year or two. Shortly after, Armstrong signed a two-year contract that was estimated at a whopping $850,000 a year—the highest of anyone on the team. Despite Armstrong’s less than stellar season, Motorola was willing to invest in the rising star.
As Armstrong rose up, Greg LeMond was struggling during the most difficult period of his career. A mysterious weakness was still holding him back and he dropped out of the Tour de France early in the race. LeMond had improved his training and hoped to perform well in the race, and was extremely disappointed at how it turned out.
When LeMond dropped out of the race, Kathy LeMond was at their house in Belgium, where they lived during the cycling season. The day after Greg’s withdrawal, the phone rang and Kathy picked up. “Hi, it’s Lance.”
“Lance who?” Kathy asked, not thinking that it might be the young up-and-coming American star.
“It’s Lance Armstrong,” he said. “I’d like to rent your house in Belgium.”
“What?” Kathy asked, perplexed.
“Well, Greg’s done. I’d like to rent your house,” he said.
“Well, our house isn’t for rent,” Kathy said. At the time, the LeMonds had three kids, all of whom were living there. Besides, Greg wasn’t even sure he wanted to retire yet. The phone call left the LeMonds feeling insulted and surprised.
At the end of that year, Greg LeMond announced he was retiring from the sport, and the inevitable stories comparing LeMond and Armstrong circulated around the world. The word was that LeMond was “passing the torch” to Armstrong. Armstrong offered the obligatory praise to LeMond but was annoyed by the comparisons. “I’m not the next Greg LeMond,” he took to saying during interviews with the press. “I’m the first Lance Armstrong.”
Armstrong headed back to Europe for the beginning of the 1995 season. In early March, Armstrong entered Paris–Nice, one of the stage races that Grand Tour contenders often use as spring training. The eight-day stage race is nicknamed the Race to the Sun because it goes from chilly, rainy Paris to warm, sunny Nice in the south. Armstrong nabbed the fifth stage of the race—an uphill finish. The win gave him a good boost for the season. Viatcheslav Ekimov, Armstrong’s rival from the Tour DuPont the previous season, was less than a second behind Armstrong, in fourth place.
A week after Paris–Nice, the Motorola team returned to Milan–San Remo, the long, grueling Italian road race. Armstrong and his teammates were again annihilated. On the way home from the race, Armstrong started complaining to his teammates about other teams using EPO. He felt the Motorola team had done so poorly because they were competing with riders who were pumped to the gills with the stuff. George Hincapie understood Armstrong’s message clearly. His buddy Armstrong wanted him and the other Motorola riders to start using EPO, too. If they didn’t, they wouldn’t be strong enough to support him in the big races.
Hincapie, who was living in Como, Italy, found out from Frankie that EPO was available at a pharmacy in Switzerland, not far from the apartment he shared with several other teammates. In fact, Frankie made trips to pick up supplies for himself. And Hincapie rode over to the pharmacy himself, spending $450 or so for a month’s supply of the miracle drug. And it was clear that EPO was working.
Armstrong in particular could ride stronger, for longer. He discovered endurance capacity he’d never had. Armstrong was convinced that EPO—sometimes referred to by riders as Edgar Allan Poe—was safe. But he wondered about the health effects of human-growth hormone, or HGH, which sped up his recovery, and helped Armstrong get leaner, more muscular.
By mid-1995, Armstrong ranked fourteenth in the world cycling standings. He had won the Tour DuPont, the highest-profile race in the United States. To capitalize on his achievements and help him raise his profile, he decided he needed an agent, and, after interviewing several candidates, he ultimately settled on Bill Stapleton. A native of St. Louis, Stapleton had been an Olympic swimmer, though he never quite reached the top of his sport. After leaving the world of competitive athletics, he had gotten business and law degrees at the University of Texas at Austin, then taken a job as an associate at the large Austin law firm Brown McCarroll & Oaks Hartline. Bored by corporate law, Stapleton approached the law firm with his plans for a sports-management practice and convinced the partners to allow him to carve out a sports agency within the firm.
Per the agreement he made with Armstrong, his law firm got a 3 to 5 percent fee on Armstrong’s employment contract. On top of that, Stapleton himself would take in 15 to 25 percent of any endorsement and marketing deals he made on Armstrong’s behalf, and he quickly began lining them up. He negotiated new endorsement deals with Nike, helmet maker Giro, and Milton Bradley, all within his first year of representing Armstrong. He also negotiated a lucrative extension with Oakley and signed an individual deal with Motorola. The endorsement deals with Oakley, Nike, and Giro stipulated that Armstrong would get an immediate $1 million bonus from each of them—plus another $2 million in possible long-term endorsements—if he won a gold medal in the upcoming 1996 Olympics in Atlanta. The Olympics had recently changed its rules to allow professionals into the competitions, meaning Armstrong would get another shot at a gold medal. Flush with endorsement and prize monies on top of his large salary, Armstrong began work on what would be a $1 million, 4,300-square-foot white Mediterranean-style villa on the banks of Lake Austin. J.T. had helped Lance find and purchase the plot of land, and helped to oversee construction of the villa, while Lance was off racing overseas for most of the year. Lance put his mother, Linda, in charge of finding a designer and hiring the movers. Though Linda hadn’t gotten a college degree, she had attended night school to get her real estate license while working as a secretary at Ericsson Telecommunications.
Lance named the villa Casa de Linda after her. Even before the lakeside dock was built, Lance had picked out a name for his boat: Pedal Faster. J.T. loved palm trees, and so, to honor him, Lance planted twenty-six palm trees along the property.
As the date of the 1995 Tour de France drew closer, Armstrong was feeling good. He was stronger than he had been the previous year, and his team was stronger, thanks to EPO. George Hincapie noticed that most of the riders on the team were now carrying thermoses that made a clinking sound when they moved around, and he knew what was inside the thermoses—vials of EPO. Before the 1995 Tour de France, Motorola team doctor Massimo Testa gave the riders a talk about the dangers of EPO. Testa believed that if riders took too much of it, their blood would become thick and syrupy and could overload the heart, or cause a dangerous blood clot, possibly resulting in death. So, during the Tour, Testa borrowed a blood centrifuge from another team doctor, which he used to test the riders’ blood to make sure their hematocrits—a measure of the ratio of red blood cells to overall blood volume—were not dangerously high. Nobody on the team had taken too much EPO, but most of their hematocrits were unnaturally high, though not yet dangerously, considering the amount of exercise they were doing. The percentage of red blood cells to overall blood volume tends to go down with hard training, especially during grueling races like the Tour de France.
The 1995 Tour de France turned tragic for the Motorola team. One of its riders, twenty-four-year-old Italian Fabio Casartelli, crashed on a mountain road and died of head injuries. Casartelli had won the gold medal in the men’s road race in the 1992 Olympics—Armstrong’s last race as an amateur, in which he finished a disappointing fourteenth. Two days after Casartelli’s death, on stage 18 from Montpon-Ménestérol to Limoges, Armstrong attacked alone and crossed the finish line by himself. He pointed skyward in honor of his fallen teammate. Armstrong would later say it was the most meaningful moment of his own career. Two days later, Armstrong finished the Tour de France for the first time, in 36th place.
Two weeks later, Armstrong won his first major professional European bike race, the Clásica San Sebastián, the same race in which he had finished dead last in 1992, shortly after the Olympics. No American had ever won one of cycling’s “classics” races, but this year, Armstrong was red hot.
In late 1995, Lance took another major step in his career. He flew to Ferrara, Italy, to meet an Italian sports doctor named Michele Ferrari. Lance was introduced to Ferarri by Eddy Merckx, the retired Belgian cycling legend. Merckx’s bike company sponsored the Motorola team, and all of its riders used Merckx bikes. Merckx’s son, Axel, was a rider on the Motorola team, and Lance noticed that Axel had improved significantly in the 1995 season. Lance attributed the improvement to Axel’s work with Ferrari.
Ferrari lived largely in the shadows of the sport. He never attended races or official team events. He wore thick glasses and drove an old beat-up station wagon or a camper. He apparently needed nothing for happiness but his Excel spreadsheets and a calculator.
Ferrari’s one brush with the public spotlight did not go so well. In 1994, he had served as team doctor for Gewiss-Ballan, an Italian-based cycling team that debuted in 1993. After three Gewiss-Ballan riders took the top three places in one of the major spring classics—a bit like one country winning every Olympic medal in a single sport—one journalist directly questioned Ferrari about the use of EPO. Ferrari proceeded to wax eloquent about EPO’s safety. “EPO is no more dangerous than orange juice,” he said. Ferrari seemed to be justifying, even advocating, the use of a powerful hormone for performance-enhancing benefit. After the statements, Ferrari was fired from the team.
Of course, when Ferrari made his comments, he and everyone else in the sport knew that EPO was banned in cycling. But there was no test for it. The International Olympic Committee, which at the time oversaw the anti-doping effort in sports, had commissioned a respected sports doctor to develop a test to detect it in urine. Their choice was Francesco Conconi, who had been one of Ferrari’s university professors in Italy and had himself been involved in the doping of Italian Olympic athletes. The irony that Conconi, the proverbial fox, was now charged with guarding the henhouse wasn’t lost on some of the European press at the time, which pointed out his connection to Ferrari.
But the controversy, which was not covered in a single major newspaper in the United States, might as well have been an advertisement for Ferrari. He was about to become the most coveted secret doctor in professional sports. Armstrong always liked to be on the cutting edge—of music, fashion, technology, and, most of all, sports science. Lance quickly came to regard Ferrari as a genius.
Lance didn’t tell his Motorola teammates, such as Frankie Andreu, about the meeting with Ferrari, as he wasn’t ready to share that information. Not every rider on the team could afford to work with Ferrari, whose fees were often based on a percentage of a rider’s salary and ranged from $15,000 to more than $375,000, including bonuses. Motorola certainly wasn’t going to foot the bill.
Armstrong’s cycling prowess was about to get a major boost, but trouble was brewing with the Motorola sponsorship. By the end of 1995, Sheila Griffin was under pressure from her European-based colleagues to move the Motorola sponsorship over to a soccer team, which they believed would give the brand more visibility than cycling. Ochowicz hoped for a last-minute rescue and worked for months to identify a new sponsor, but nothing materialized.
Lance, meanwhile, lived as if he didn’t have a care in the world. He dumped Danielle and she returned to the Netherlands, heartbroken. When Betsy asked Armstrong what happened, he just shrugged. He explained that he was now dating a bathing suit model, who Armstrong crassly explained was clean shaven—everywhere. With no serious relationship, Armstrong had plenty of time to hang out at Austin bars, drinking Shiner Bock and meeting girls. Lance began spending his evenings with John Korioth, then the manager of the Cactus Room, one of Austin’s most popular bars. He also began a casual relationship with Stephanie McIlvain.
One time, when McIlvain visited Como, Betsy heard one of the guys make a crack about Stephanie. “Lance is going to get his blow job,” the teammate said.
“Who is Stephanie?” Betsy asked Frankie, who explained.
“But he has another girlfriend,” Betsy said. Frankie told her this was more casual than that.
“So is that what’s going on here? Women just come here and service you guys?” Betsy asked angrily.
“No, that’s not what’s going on here. That’s just what’s going on with Lance,” Frankie said.
The beginning of Armstrong’s 1996 season was marked by the biggest win in his professional career—a victory in Belgium’s prestigious Flèche Wallonne, a one-day race through the hilly Ardennes region of Belgium known for its constant up-and-down climbs and technical curves. He followed that victory with another second place in Liège–Bastogne–Liège. He had just missed first in a close sprint to the line. Back in the United States in May, he won five stages of the Tour DuPont and snagged his second victory in a row.
Michele Ferrari’s training seemed to be paying off big-time for Armstrong. The program he devised was perhaps the most carefully monitored, intensive, and unusual training regimen in the history of cycling, if not all sports. And he was well compensated for his efforts. During 1996, Lance paid Ferrari $14,000 in February, $28,500 in May, and $42,000 in July, according to Ferrari’s bank records. The July payment came from an account Lance shared with his mother. As Armstrong trained, Ferrari followed his climbs in a battered station wagon, stopping to check how much power Armstrong was putting to the pedals and checking his blood for minute changes in the amount of lactic acid coursing through his veins. He monitored the wattage Armstrong was able to produce per kilogram of his body weight, and the number of vertical feet he ascended per minute, or VAM. And when Ferrari looked down at his spreadsheets through his thick-rimmed glasses, he saw what he considered to be an extraordinarily promising physical specimen. Ferrari had pioneered the use of calculations to predict an athlete’s performance potential, and he was convinced that science could transform Armstrong from a bulky and inconsistent athlete into a Tour de France winner.
By early summer, however, Armstrong was showing signs of strain and fatigue. After his Tour DuPont win in May, he took nearly a month off and returned to Austin. It was unusual for Armstrong to take so long a break. During his training for the Tour of Switzerland in June, Armstrong needed a few days of recovery time after each “hard” day, unusual for a guy who could usually ride hard for several days straight. During the race itself—an eleven-day stage race through the Swiss Alps, which some riders use as a tune-up for the Tour de France—he was clearly struggling. He had started the race as a favorite but finished nowhere near the top of the standings.
Then, Armstrong pulled out of the Tour de France during the sixth stage of the race, complaining of bronchitis and a cold. The kid who never got sick was letting a little flu knock him out of the most important race of the year—one that was supposed to be the key to his preparation for the Atlanta Olympics later that month.
In the Olympics, Armstrong finished twelfth in the road race and sixth in the time trial. Respectable? Sure. But nowhere near his potential. And nowhere near the level of performance he needed to claim the millions of dollars’ worth of sponsorship bonuses that Stapleton had negotiated for him.
It was a disappointing end to what began as a spectacular season. Armstrong had won the Tour DuPont, a major stage race. Then, he became the first American to win one of the prestigious spring classics, the Flèche Wallonne. Even more impressive, he had nearly completed the Ardennes double with a second-place finish in Liège–Bastogne–Liège. Even after dropping out of the Tour and missing out on another gold medal, Armstrong considered 1996 the best season of his career.