Lance’s decision to settle down with Kristin Richard shocked some, primarily because he had previously lacked the mind-set of a traditional family man. Before he got sick, he seemed to think of little but sex. Even when he was a teenager and doing the triathlon circuit, there were times when his managers had to pull him off women at hotels. While cycling, he would often chase the “podium girls”—the women who give stage winners and jersey competition leaders awards each day in a multiday race. Lance’s pals called him FedEx because the company’s slogan, “When it absolutely, positively has to be there overnight,” seemed to describe his sex drive.
Richard was the daughter of a kindergarten-teacher mother and a dad who had worked as an IBM executive for three decades. She had a down-home Midwestern accent and a broad smile. When she and Lance met, she was twenty-five, about his age, unlike the women in their thirties whom he had often chased in his late teens. She had a bachelor’s degree in marketing from Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, a successful career, and a convertible, and she had recently purchased her first home. She dreamed of becoming a writer.
After dumping Lisa, who had been by Lance’s bedside throughout his cancer treatments, he and Kristin dated for only four months before getting engaged in October 1997. They planned a wedding in Santa Barbara, near her parents’ summer home, for May 1998.
The woman-chasing Armstrong, the one with the rough edges and unchecked cockiness, seemed to have disappeared along with his cancer. The new Armstrong thought about adult things—family, long-term happiness, the meaning of life. He worked on his golf game, ate tacos, sat on the couch, strummed on his guitar, and played with his kitten, Chemo. He even spent a week on tour in North Carolina with Jakob Dylan and the Wallflowers band. New York Times reporter Samuel Abt, who built a career as Armstrong’s unofficial post-cancer propagandist, described this period of his life as a soul-searching awakening that included every kind of trope of self-discovery except a pilgrimage to Tibet.
After his fifteenth-place showing in the Ruta del Sol in February, he did consider retiring, but he felt obliged to fulfill his contract to ride for the Postal team. His next big competition was the eight-day stage race Paris–Nice in March. Two years earlier, before Armstrong had been diagnosed with cancer, he had finished second overall. So he knew the course, and was confident going in.
But on day two of the race, a 100-mile stage, Armstrong began to struggle. The weather was wet and windy, with driving rain making the road dangerous and uncomfortable. Things got worse after he was asked to play the role of domestique for George Hincapie, who was now one of the strongest members of the US Postal team. The team’s new director, Johnny Weltz, instructed Armstrong to help pace—or lead—Hincapie to a breakaway group that had gotten far ahead of the pack. Armstrong had rarely worked for another cyclist, but he also thought there was something off about Weltz’s tactical strategy. Why had he waited so long and allowed the Postal riders to fall so far behind the pack?
Armstrong’s mind began to wander and leave the race. He pictured life back in Austin, where the weather was perfect right now, and his sprawling home on the lake. He could fire up the barbecue, invite a few friends over, and drink some beer. Besides, hadn’t he already proven himself to the cancer community by his showing in the Ruta del Sol? Hadn’t he made his point? What was he going to do—ride around Europe for five years, finishing fifteenth place in every major bike race until people got it through their thick skulls that he had beaten cancer? He’d won. Cancer had lost. Wasn’t it time to end this charade?
Ignoring Weltz’s instructions, he drifted back, allowing the other riders to pass him until he was the last one in the pack. He pulled over to the right side of the road and raised his arm. The US Postal team car pulled up. Armstrong got off his bike and got in. He was done. He called Kristin in Nice. He was coming back, he told her. He would explain all when he got home.
Back in Nice, Lance told Kristin that he was thinking about retiring and going home to Austin. Kristin had given up her job and settled into a school to learn French. She wasn’t happy about leaving. But after all that Armstrong had been through, she felt she couldn’t push back.
After they moved back to Austin, they both felt disconnected from the world, without purpose. Armstrong wasn’t interested in cycling at all. He didn’t even bother to let his new team know his whereabouts. He drafted a retirement statement, and didn’t unpack his bike for three weeks. When Kristin asked about his plans for the future, he was evasive. And he played a lot of golf.
Eventually, his informal team of advisers—his mom; his agent, Bill Stapleton; and his former coach, Chris Carmichael—intervened. They persuaded him to try just one more race. In April, he spent ten days off the grid training with Carmichael and Bob Roll, Carmichael’s affable thirty-eight-year-old former 7-Eleven teammate, in the college town of Boone, North Carolina, in the Appalachian Mountains.
All day, every day, Lance rode his bike, sometimes through pouring rain. He rode up Beech Mountain, a 5,000-foot climb that had been part of the route of the Tour DuPont. Chris would periodically measure Lance’s progress at the Appalachian State University training center, where they could test his wattage using a digital odometer. His VO2 max, which had measured at more than 80, was now at 64.
During those days, Lance also did some soul-searching. He reflected on his childhood and his early career. He thought about what was behind his desire to compete in Europe, and how his victories in cycling had satisfied his inner need.
By the end of the ten days, Armstrong decided that he did want to regain his stature in the sport. If he was going to really go full throttle, he knew it had to be about more than just cancer. Professional cyclists don’t ride for causes. They ride because it’s their job and they love it. Cancer just wasn’t enough of a motivation.
He was going to have to feel the old passion again, to rediscover his motivational fuel. For Armstrong, that was his bitter anger, the burning rage he felt toward those who he believed had treated him unfairly. It was indignation toward a biological father who ditched him, resentment toward his adopted father, Terry, for cheating on his mother and for insinuating that he and Linda had been a burden. It was fury over the way Eddie B expected him to give up his own chance at winning in order to help another rider take first place. It was his hatred of the Cofidis team for dropping him because they didn’t believe in him.
He empathized with his mother. He believed that since she was seventeen, people had told her she was a loser who couldn’t raise a kid alone, who would never make it.
On May 8, 1998, Lance and Kristin married at a Catholic church in Santa Barbara. Linda attended the wedding with her third husband, John. Lance had always liked John and felt he brought a welcome feeling of love and humor into Linda’s home. But John was battling alcoholism and Linda recalls him becoming visibly drunk at the rehearsal dinner, an elegant affair at a restaurant on the beach, even breaking a glass. “Mom, you gotta take him home,” Lance beseeched. She enlisted her father to carry John back to the hotel.
The honeymoon for Kristin and Lance was modest in deference to the cycling season. Armstrong had races to prepare for. They spent a few days in a beach house while Lance trained. Later that month, they returned to Austin for the Ride for the Roses, benefiting his foundation to raise money to fight urological cancers. Miguel Indurain and Greg LeMond showed up at the event to show their support.
For his first race back in Europe with the US Postal team, he selected the Tour de Luxembourg in June. Though the four-day race was a grueling 105-mile-a-day ride, it hadn’t drawn a strong field of rivals, and Lance won.
By then, Lance and Kristin had rented a small apartment in Nice. The US Postal team was putting together its nine-man roster for the Tour, and Gorski asked Armstrong whether he would like to participate. Armstrong hadn’t even considered it, and he told Gorski he’d sit it out. In July 1998, as the top nine riders on USPS raced in the Tour, Armstrong went back to the States and raced in the Cascade Cycling Classic, a stage race centered around Bend, Oregon, that included high-level amateurs and some professionals. Armstrong, helped by a handful of teammates, including Jonathan Vaughters, a twenty-five-year-old native of Colorado who had turned pro about four years earlier, won the race handily.
During the race, Armstrong was interviewed by a small newspaper in the area. When the reporter made a comparison to Greg LeMond, Armstrong went on a rant, calling LeMond a fat ass. LeMond had been dabbling in auto racing and generating publicity after some limited success. Armstrong told the reporter that LeMond should get out of his car and give back to cycling. A friend mailed the article to LeMond, who was shocked that Armstrong would take a potshot at him, attacking him unprovoked. Hadn’t LeMond made a volunteer appearance at Armstrong’s Ride for the Roses just a couple of months earlier? LeMond felt stung, but he quickly put it out of his mind, chalking up Armstrong’s comments to some sort of frustration stemming from his cancer recovery.
• • •
The 1998 Tour de France began in Dublin, Ireland. Occasionally, the Tour holds legs of the race outside of France in order to increase the international appeal of the event. The US Postal team and all of its equipment, including its team cars, traveled to Ireland on a ferry from Belgium, which was scheduled to arrive late at night. Emma O’Reilly, an Irish masseuse and team assistant, or soigneur, planned to meet the team at the Dublin port.
As O’Reilly was waiting for the boat, she noticed several Irish customs agents patrolling the area, and she asked them what they were looking for. The agents explained that they planned to search the Postal team cars after the ferry arrived from Belgium. O’Reilly was anxious. She knew some of the Postal riders used banned drugs, but she tried to play it cool with the customs agents. A young, effervescent brunette from a Dublin suburb, who had trained as an electrician before becoming a massage therapist, she turned on her charm. The people she worked for were top-level professional athletes, she told them. It was already late—close to 2:00 A.M. If these top riders arrived tired and were forced to have to wait for some silly customs search, they might get angry and the agents “would have a riot on their hands.” Playing to their sympathy, she said that she, in particular, didn’t want to have to deal with them when they were cranky. The customs agents seemed to buy her story. They obliged O’Reilly and left the Postal riders—and their vehicles—alone.
Soigneurs play a crucial role in cycling. They are like personal assistants, charged with everything from massaging riders’ legs after long rides to filling up water bottles to—in some cases—smuggling performance-enhancing drugs across borders. Suddenly, some of these formerly anonymous assistants to cycling teams were about to have their fifteen minutes of fame, caught in the glare of the international spotlight. The day after the ferry arrived, O’Reilly heard from someone on the Postal team that Willy Voet, a Belgian physiotherapist and soigneur from the rival Festina team, had been stopped by customs agents while driving into France from Belgium on his way to the Tour. After they searched his car and found four hundred vials of illegal drugs, including EPO, they arrested him.
At first, Voet insisted that the drugs were for his own use, a ridiculous position to take given the quantity the agents found. A few days later, he changed his story and admitted that he was bringing EPO and other drugs to Festina team riders who were participating in the Tour de France. The French watchmaker Festina had lavished its team with major dollars so they could recruit top talent, and Voet was part of their investment. Now he sat languishing in a jail cell somewhere in France.
The race stayed in Ireland for three days, and when it entered France, about a week after Voet’s arrest, police officers there raided the hotel rooms of the Festina team and brought its riders in for questioning. In France, it’s a crime to use performance-enhancing drugs to cheat in sports, even if some of the drugs, such as EPO, were not expressly illegal. The riders and team officials weren’t just facing disqualification from the event; they were facing the threat of criminal charges. Even the Tour de France organizers were called in for questioning by French police, who wanted to know whether the officials were aware of the doping taking place right under their noses.
The events triggered a wave of fear among riders and staffers on the Postal team. As they were heading back to Europe on a ferry, they decided to dump some of their stash of drugs overboard. Later, the Postal team doctor, Pedro Celaya, and other staff members flushed the remainder of the stockpile down the toilet of the team bus as it sat in the middle of a field somewhere in France.
As the race progressed, tensions flared between the French police and the riders. One morning, before the twelfth stage of the race, the entire field of roughly 150 Tour de France cyclists decided to sit down on the road with their bicycles to protest. French rider Laurent Jalabert announced that the riders were refusing to ride the stage, due to harassment by French police.
But the protest didn’t seem to deter the police. Just a few days later, the officers raided the hotel rooms of the Dutch TVM squad. There, they discovered masking agents that could disguise drugs in urine samples. They called several riders in for questioning, interrogating them about their drug use.
The riders again pushed back. The next day, during stage 17, dozens of members of the peloton stopped racing, tore off their race numbers, and rode the rest of the stage together, crossing the finish line in a single pack. The stage was nullified. By stage 18, only fifteen of the twenty-one teams remained in the race. The remainder had either been kicked out or left the Tour de France in protest.
No Postal riders or staffers had been busted or eliminated from the event. But the Tour was a near disaster for the team. Thom Weisel had invited Margot Myers, a media relations executive for the US Postal Service, to join him in the team car to watch the events close-up. He had hoped to give her an education in the beauty of the sport her organization was sponsoring. What she got, instead, was a window into the all-out war between cyclists and French officials over doping. It was like a 1960s-style sit-in, except instead of hippies, the strikers were professional athletes wearing spandex.
The French police investigation may have been the main topic of conversation during that year’s race, but Myers still managed to have a good time. She was, after all, in France, being wined and dined by Weisel and others at some of the country’s best restaurants. Myers got to meet some of the sport’s greatest legends, including Eddy Merckx, the Belgian five-time winner of the Tour de France, and Miguel Indurain, who won the race five times in a row.
Toward the end of the race, shortly after the sit-in, Myers was sitting with Weisel at an outdoor patio of a top-rated French restaurant. They were drinking wine, eating some of the best food in the world. During their meal, Greg LeMond, who happened to be at the same restaurant, spotted them and walked up to the table to say hello. LeMond would later recount the conversation under oath in a deposition. He was in France, leading a cycling tour for wealthy Americans. For Myers, then in her mid-forties and responsible for the Postal Service employee communications program, meeting LeMond at a fancy restaurant in France was certainly more exciting than meeting Merckx or Indurain. LeMond was famous, the only true American cycling celebrity, and he had come over to the table specifically to meet her. As LeMond would later recall under oath, the conversation led to an interesting window into Weisel’s views on doping.
“Thank you for your support of the sport,” LeMond said.
“Oh, we are just thrilled to be able to sponsor this team,” she responded.
“Listen, I am really sorry that you have to see this mess this year. The sport obviously has a lot of work to do, but it is cleaning up,” LeMond said.
Weisel interjected. “I think this is bullshit,” he said. “Riders should be able to take whatever they want.”
Myers didn’t flinch, and LeMond assumed this was the kind of thing Weisel had been saying to her as the Festina scandal unfolded. LeMond was taken aback, shocked that a team owner would be so open about his acceptance of doping—an American, no less, and in front of an American sponsor. (In fact Weisel had told Myers that the Postal team was clean, and she had believed him, she later told us.)
LeMond left the table with a sick feeling in his stomach. He worried about the future of the sport, and the health of the riders involved. Like many people in that world, he saw the Festina doping busts as a crossroads for cycling, the point at which the major players would have to make a decision—either cycling had to clean itself up, or the cyclists had to be much more careful about being caught.
After his conversation with Weisel at the restaurant, LeMond felt relieved that he had nothing to do with the US Postal team. He had been close to becoming part of it, but Gorski had reneged on the deal he made with LeMond in Minnesota. At first, LeMond felt he had been screwed over. Now he felt he had dodged a bullet.
LeMond had also pulled all of his money out of Weisel’s investment bank, despite the hefty annual returns. He and Kathy had visited Weisel at his bank in the TransAmerica Tower in San Francisco. Weisel had bragged about his multimillion-dollar art collection that covered the office walls. Both Kathy and Greg left with a bad feeling about Weisel, and decided to invest elsewhere.
While Lance was rebuilding his endurance, his training was more important than ever. He’d become obsessive about everything he ate, how long he rested between workouts, and exactly how far and how hard he rode every day. And he really needed to rebuild muscle. Chemo and his lack of exercise had robbed him of much of his muscle mass, which he was working to rebuild.
That loss of muscle had the potential to help Armstrong. It was the equivalent of a forest fire, which clears away all the unnecessary brush and dead trees. Through the training designed by Ferrari, he was now developing only the muscles essential for cycling. By August, he found that he could climb slightly faster at a more sustained pace than he had in the past.
Lance and Kristin felt optimistic enough about his cycling comeback that they purchased a villa situated on a wooded hillside in Nice, France. Armstrong kept his EPO in the butter compartment of his refrigerator, so he code-named it butter. If the French police came knocking and wanted to search the house, presumably, Kristin or Lance could warn each other to throw out the “butter.”
Though Armstrong and his teammates feared the French police catching them with EPO, they were unconcerned about getting caught via a drug test, since there was still no test that could directly detect it in the body. But the UCI had implemented a new blood test that screened riders for high hematocrits. Since the highest natural hematocrit was about 50 percent, the UCI said that any rider found to have a higher percentage would be suspended from racing for fifteen days. The team had a plan for that, too. As a general practice, riders and staff were given enough advance warning before the tests that the team doctors could inject the riders’ veins with a saline solution, which caused their hematocrit levels to drop temporarily. These invaluable advance warnings suggested that the UCI wasn’t serious about curbing EPO use—it simply had a public relations problem on its hands and needed to appear to be reacting.
In late August, Ferrari told Armstrong that he was strong enough to race the 1998 Vuelta a España. It would be his first Grand Tour after cancer, and he really just wanted to finish. He had no expectations about how well he’d do. But Armstrong had one thing going for him that set him apart from most of the other participants in the event, who had raced an entire, grueling season: He was relatively well rested.
The Vuelta began in September. By the end of the first week of the race, Armstrong was in twentieth place. But by the end of the second week, he surged ahead, ranking between fourth and sixth. On most stages, he felt good, and his US Postal teammates were mobilized to help him keep his position.
One night, about midway through the race, Lance’s teammate Vaughters went to Lance’s hotel room to borrow his laptop. While he was there, Lance went into the bathroom to brush his teeth, then emerged, toothbrush still in hand and—in what Vaughters took to be a show of bravado—pulled out a syringe full of EPO and injected it into his stomach. Vaughters had never seen him do this, but it was no secret that both men were on the drug. Celaya kept all the riders’ hematocrit levels on his spreadsheet, and Armstrong enjoyed keeping track of his teammates’ data so he’d know who was using EPO. Without EPO, a rider’s hematocrit could drop by as much as 30 percent during a long race like the Vuelta; with EPO, the hematocrits recorded in Celaya’s notebook stayed consistent throughout the race.
Armstrong was holding on to his position in the Vuelta. He was in ninth place on September 25, before the final mountain stage, a 130-mile monster that finished atop the 6,200-foot Alto de Navacerrada. The weather was cold and rainy, with temperatures on the mountain peaks reaching only 34 degrees. Riding a bicycle in 34 degrees is a bit like jumping into a lake in Minnesota in February: It’s painful. Armstrong decided that this day—the most painful day—was going to be his day.
He began at the base of the climb with some of the best riders in the world around him—Roberto Heras, José María Jiménez, Fernando Escartín, Andrei Zintchenko. But Armstrong remained steady, staying on their wheels and alongside them as he crossed the finish line in the cold rain. By the end of the stage, Armstrong had moved up in the standings, to sixth place. After finishing third in the time trial the next day, he was in fourth place overall, where he remained.
Those who had seen Armstrong race before cancer could tell from the way he raced the Vuelta that he was a different rider. He waited for the right moments to attack, and conserved energy whenever he could. He was a more mature rider, more tactical. Though he had lost the explosive power that had helped him to win one-day races, he had gained the mental fortitude that enabled him to keep up on long, steady climbs that went on day after day.
In addition to boosting his confidence, Armstrong’s success at the Vuelta and in the other minor stage races in Europe boosted his bottom line. In order to incentivize Armstrong to do more races in Europe, his Postal contract offered him bonus money for gaining UCI points, which he earned by placing well in certain races. In the past, that money would have been paid by Montgomery Securities, Thom Weisel’s investment bank. But in 1997, Montgomery Securities was acquired by NationsBank, which had then acquired BankAmerica (which became Bank of America). Weisel had become locked in a power struggle over control of various divisions in what had been his company. In September of 1998, while Armstrong was in the middle of his amazing Vuelta performance, Weisel finally resigned from the company he had once owned and was all too happy to inform Bank of America that they now owed Lance Armstrong, a cyclist they had probably never heard of, more than $1 million. Weisel then bought Montgomery Sports from Bank of America for $1, and promptly merged it with Disson Furst and Partners, the company Steve Disson had founded years earlier.
During the Vuelta, Johan Bruyneel, a former competitor, walked up to Armstrong at the end of one stage and said, “Whew, some result.” Armstrong was gracious. The exchange was a short one, but long enough for Bruyneel to see in Armstrong’s intensely focused eyes something he had never observed during the years he had raced against him: a desire to win that ran deep, all the way to Armstrong’s soul. In the past, Bruyneel thought of Armstrong’s competitiveness as shallow—like that of a crazy uncle who wants to beat his nephew at Ping-Pong, or a teenager with his first car who wants to beat his friend in a drag race. But now, Armstrong’s eyes revealed an intensity of will that was new.
The next day, Bruyneel’s phone rang. It was Lance. Emboldened by his strong finish, he told Bruyneel that he felt the team needed more structure. The Postal team lacked vision, he said. “Can I have Gorski call you?” Armstrong asked. Bruyneel wasn’t sure what Armstrong had in mind, but he figured that he might be proposing some sort of consulting gig. Sure, he replied.
Just a few weeks earlier, Bruyneel had been a cyclist like Armstrong. He had been in the Tour de France while the Festina scandal was erupting and had been one of the riders sitting on the pavement, protesting the police raids and the crackdown on doping. Raised in cycling-crazed Belgium, Bruyneel grew up racing. Although nobody ever thought he had superstar potential, he was strong enough to become a known quantity in the junior racing circuit, and later, to Bruyneel’s surprise, in 1992, he had been given a spot on Spain’s ONCE team.
A day or two later, Bruyneel got a call from Mark Gorski: “So Lance says you’re interested in becoming the director of our team?” This was not what Bruyneel was expecting to hear. The job he was being offered was already held by Johnny Weltz, Eddie B’s replacement. Armstrong wasn’t impressed with Weltz, whom he thought lacked tactical savvy. So Armstrong was determined to give Weltz’s job away, insisting to Weisel and Gorski that the team had to hire Bruyneel as directeur sportif. The term, translated from French, means simply “sport director” but is the cycling equivalent of a head coach. The sport director decides everything from what the hotels should serve the team for dinner to what tactical role each rider on the team will play.
For Bruyneel to get this job was sort of akin to the second-string quarterback of the New England Patriots retiring, and then a few days later being hired as the head coach of the New York Jets. Astonished by this sudden change of fortune, Bruyneel accepted the offer.
As a rider, Bruyneel was considered a master of strategic thinking. He began competing before cyclists used radios to communicate with a team director. This meant that most of the information he got about the status of a given race came either from witnessing it firsthand or from motorcycles that carried chalkboards with information written on them. If a group of riders was in a breakaway up the road, the motorcycle drivers would drive up ahead, use a stopwatch to record the gap, and then write the number on the chalkboard. In order to assess who the overall leader was at any given moment and make strategic decisions about when to hang back and when to try to sprint forward, riders had to keep track of where each rider stood in the general classification (the GC) and be smart enough to figure out the math in their heads. For instance, if a breakaway contained a rider who was two minutes down in the GC, and the breakaway was three minutes up the road, that rider would be, in effect, winning the race by only one minute, and therefore a target. On the other hand, if all the riders in the breakaway were more than fifteen minutes down in the GC, the top riders in the race wouldn’t have any reason to chase them down. This was a lot of thinking and strategizing for riders under extreme physical duress. But Bruyneel had been a master of it.
Bruyneel immediately began talking to Armstrong about his goals for the following season. Armstrong figured he would target the same races he had won before his cancer—the one-day classics and the world championships. But Bruyneel had another thought: If Armstrong could finish fourth in the Vuelta, who was to say he couldn’t win the Tour de France? Armstrong had once struggled just to finish the race. “Win it?” he asked incredulously.
Bruyneel explained his reasoning. In the past, Armstrong had won stages in the Tour, which showed that he could compete at that level. He lacked only the endurance capacity to keep up in the mountains. But he had never trained for the Tour in the correct way. He had always tired himself out with a racing schedule focused on the classics and the world championships. Now that he had, quite by accident, discovered his potential by resting during the 1998 season and then racing the Vuelta fresh, imagine: What could he do if he consciously focused all his energies on the Tour de France?
A cancer survivor who had seen death up close coming back to win the Tour de France—the prospect of such an astonishing outcome was worth the gamble. Armstrong had just earned $1 million in bonuses while still building his strength post-cancer. If he won the Tour de France, he would earn multiples of that, including endorsements.
It did not take long for Armstrong to convince himself that winning the Tour de France was a sure thing, even if the rest of the world thought he had long odds. In the late winter of 1998, Armstrong was in Minneapolis visiting Kristin’s parents when Greg and Kathy were invited over for dinner at the Richards’ house. About midway through dinner, Armstrong announced to the other five people at the table that he planned to win the 1999 Tour de France. “My goal is to win the Tour de France four times,” he said.
“Wow,” LeMond said, not sure what to say. LeMond had watched Armstrong develop as a bike racer, knew Armstrong’s physiology, and thought there was no way Armstrong had a chance at winning the world’s biggest race. But he tried to play along, encouraging Armstrong.
On the way home, Greg turned to Kathy. “I feel sorry for him,” he said. “He’s delusional.”
Meanwhile, Lance distanced himself from several of the people who invested the most time and effort in his success—including his mother, whose third marriage was falling apart, and J.T. Neal, who was fighting for his life and undergoing chemo. He also had a significant falling-out with John Korioth, his best friend and cycling buddy, who had put his heart into building the foundation, which by then had three full-time employees and rental space in a downtown Austin house. Korioth had a disagreement with the foundation’s board, which was forcing him out. When Lance took the side of the board without first reaching out to him to hear his own version of events, Korioth felt rejected and hurt. He had developed a brotherly love for Lance, particularly when Lance was recovering from cancer. The two men wouldn’t speak again for three years.
Armstrong and Bruyneel spent the off-season preparing a plan and training for the race, with Ferrari as part of the team. Ferrari observed Armstrong riding up mountain passes and equipped his bike with a set of sensors that measured the wattage, or power output, he was producing with each pedal stroke. After each climb, he would record the average wattage generated on the climb and divide it by Armstrong’s weight, entering the resulting number on his spreadsheets and using it to prescribe the next workout. A typical cyclist might put out 2 or 3 watts per kilogram of body weight. To win the Tour de France, Ferrari calculated that Armstrong needed to generate about 6.5 watts per kilo—a number he arrived at through his intimate knowledge of many of the top riders in the peloton. Aside from his spreadsheet skills, Ferrari was good at his job because he understood what performance-enhancing drugs could and couldn’t do. They couldn’t turn mediocre endurance athletes into great ones. But what these drugs could do was allow an athlete to keep pushing at his maximum pace for a longer period of time. For instance, Armstrong may have been able to push 400 watts for a half hour up a mountain climb, but could he do it on every climb during the 21-day Tour de France? Probably not. With a steady dose of EPO, or blood transfusions, however, he might be able to maintain that pace.
Armstrong needed to put thousands of difficult training miles in to reach this goal. He needed to get stronger, and to lose weight as the July start date for the Tour de France got closer. So in the months leading up to the race, his life consisted of bike riding and sleep. It was a difficult, solitary life, away from his wife. While Armstrong stayed in Nice, Kristin stayed in Austin, where she was attempting to get pregnant via in vitro fertilization treatments, using sperm that Armstrong had banked before his chemotherapy. She also began keeping a journal of Armstrong’s comeback story that she hoped to show their future child.
During the spring months, Armstrong rode many of the same climbs that would be included in the 1999 Tour de France. When riding up a mountain, cyclists learn very quickly that the roads do not go up and up at a constant gradient. The road is steeper in some sections, and flattens out in others. The road twists and turns, and the quality of the pavement also determines the difficulty of the road. Every cyclist has preferences. Some prefer steeper roads, some like more gradual ones. Ferrari and Bruyneel wanted to know which roads Armstrong favored, so they could decide where it would be wise to attack. And Armstrong needed to ride the roads he didn’t like over and over again, to train for his weaknesses. Those were the little things that would give Armstrong a mental edge over his competitors, many of whom might be riding the roads for the first time during the race.
On April 24, Armstrong entered Amstel Gold and finished in second place, losing in a sprint to Dutchman Michael Boogerd. The strong finish was a good sign, but at the race, Armstrong’s relationship with Frankie Andreu, who was to play a key part in Lance’s plan for the Tour, began to fracture.
The row began days earlier when Betsy, who was pregnant, sent an e-mail to Kristin, telling her about an anonymous person on a cycling Internet message board who had written a post questioning what kind of mother Kristin would be and whether she would hire a nanny to look after her new son. Betsy had jumped on the message board to defend her friend, arguing that Kristin would never be one of those moms who practically lets a nanny raise her kids. But when Kristin read Betsy’s e-mail, she started to cry and called Lance, who then picked up the phone, steaming mad, and called Frankie. He yelled at Frankie for indirectly making Kristin cry. So Frankie picked up the phone and called Betsy, who tried to explain.
“There’s got to be more to it than that,” he said to Betsy, who showed him the e-mail exchange.
Now Frankie was pissed off at Lance for overreacting and causing a huge stir over nothing. For days, both men brooded, hashing out the problem.
On April 21, Betsy sent Lance a scathing e-mail.
Don’t even get me started. You can be disrespectful to so many people and so many people put up with it. I won’t and don’t have to. Kristin and I don’t have a problem with what happened; it’s cleared up.
Sorry, Lance, I’m not going to not stand up to you like so many others.
As both men were getting ready for Amstel Gold to start, Lance bumped into Frankie.
“Sorry,” he said.
“Fuck you!” Frankie shot back.
“What’s your problem?” Lance asked.
“You made such a huge deal out of something so small,” Frankie said. “You blew it out of proportion. It’s fucking dumb.”
“Dumb?” Lance said. “I’ll fuck you.”
Both men began yelling obscenities. And then Lance crossed a line and began to threaten and taunt Frankie.
“You’ll regret messing with me! I’ll make you pay!” he shouted. “I’ll make sure you’re not on the Tour team. I have the power. I can!”
“You don’t scare me,” Frankie said.
After the race, the two men didn’t speak for nearly two months. When Frankie’s son was born in Michigan, Frankie sent out a mass e-mail to the entire team announcing the birth but left Armstrong off the distribution list. Lance was pissed off, and thought Frankie was acting unprofessionally. Then, a couple of weeks before the Tour, Armstrong sent Frankie an e-mail.
As we approach the Tour and Johan is trying to decide on the selection I can tell you that you are not, yes I said NOT, currently doing the Tour de France. I have been focusing on the Tour all year and am ready for a big ride so of course my input matters. While I am very pissed about the last few months I realize that I need all the help/support in July and I know that you are one of the strongest guys on the team. Why are you not selected? Because, and this has nothing to do w/ me, others have seen your deteriorating attitude this year and they question you [sic] commitment to the team. I can’t believe you have all of a sudden become selfish. I know you must have been stressed as hell w/ the baby coming and all but is that the only reason for your unhappiness? Whatever the reason it has showed.
Frankie, I am not willing to scrap a relationship of 7 years because of a couple of bad months and I know you want to be a part of this team for the Tour and for next year but we have to know you are committed.
Armstrong then followed up by forwarding Betsy’s April 21 e-mail. “While I was disgusted at the time I realized it wasn’t even worth a response however in the future [sic] I suggest your wife keep her opinions to herself,” Armstrong wrote.
Frankie sent back a long e-mail, ending with, “If the team has a problem with my attitude, commitment, selfishness or whatever and don’t [sic] want me to help them at the Tour then tell Johan to book me a ticket home. I have a new born [sic] baby waiting for me. I’ve only been getting online every few days. Call if you want or I’ll see you in Nice if you want to talk.”
Eventually, the two men worked out their differences, and Frankie was added to the Tour team. He was the most experienced veteran Tour rider on the team, and Armstrong needed him. Frankie also needed the extra pay that came with being on the Tour de France team. But the relationship had cooled. Frankie thought he’d gotten a glimpse of the real Lance Armstrong, and he didn’t like what he saw. And Lance had begun to wonder whether he could trust Frankie.
In the lead-up to the race, all the teams faced a new dilemma over whether to continue using performance-enhancing drugs while taking ever greater precautions against being caught, or to quit. The already strict French laws had been tightened even further, and stiff penalties awaited anyone caught with EPO or other banned drugs. Some French teams figured they would play it safe and had asked their riders to quit doping cold turkey before the Tour de France.
But Armstrong and Bruyneel had no intention of racing clean. EPO was a central part of their plan to hand Armstrong the team victory. And neither of them believed the other teams were going to race clean, either, despite the propaganda to that effect. For US Postal, the doping arms race was very much on.
Ahead of the 1999 season, the team let go of Pedro Celaya, whom Armstrong felt was too conservative for their approach. Though Celaya had helped the team with doping, he also tried to encourage riders to see how much they could get out of themselves without drugs. “Might as well race clean,” Armstrong once remarked to Jonathan Vaughters, referring to Celaya’s stinginess with drugs. “He wants to take your temperature to give you even a caffeine pill.” Armstrong was so concerned that his teammates weren’t getting adequate quantities of drugs from Celaya that during the 1998 World Championships in the Netherlands, he’d enlisted Kristin to do what he considered Celaya’s job: She wrapped cortisone tablets in tinfoil and handed them out to Vaughters and others on the team.
For the 1999 season, Bruyneel brought in a new team doctor, Luis Garcia del Moral—whose nickname was El Gato Negro, or the black cat. Every European professional team at that time was required to have a staff doctor, there for the ostensibly legitimate purpose of caring for all the riders on the team, while often playing a role in the increasingly sophisticated doping programs. Only the top riders such as Armstrong could afford their own doctors, although Armstrong paid Ferrari to work with Hamilton, too. The rest of the team had del Moral, who was based in the town of Valencia, not far from where Bruyneel lived when he was racing for ONCE. The doctor ran a small clinic that doubled as a rehab center for sports injuries, and a sort of drug distribution center. After years of working with cyclists, soccer players, and tennis stars, he had become an expert in doping.
Less conservative than Celaya, del Moral was fascinated by the way drugs affected cyclists’ bodies. He relished the possibility of taking a cyclist who was struggling to make it in the pro peloton and boosting him to another level with a cocktail of proprietary injections and pills. In his mind, this was the pinnacle of medicine, and it sure beat what he saw as the role of general practitioners and family doctors—handing out antibiotics and placebos to make hypochondriacs feel better.
Del Moral was charged with making sure the US Postal team riders were kept “topped off,” or supercharged, throughout the season. When he showed up at the team’s preseason training camp, he was armed with spreadsheets detailing each rider’s comprehensive season-long doping program. The team devised a system for the administration of the drugs. Every third or fourth day during the Tour, the riders would gather in the camper. Then del Moral or his assistant, Jose “Pepe” Martí would pop into the camper, bringing syringes with EPO. After the injections, the riders stuffed the syringes into soda cans. Del Moral would quickly leave, disposing of the cans. In addition to EPO, del Moral was also injecting the riders with cortisone and Actovegin, an extract made from calf’s blood that he believed improved oxygen flow to the muscles.
In case the French police decided to raid team vehicles, Armstrong and some of the other riders on the team, including Americans Tyler Hamilton and Kevin Livingston, took extra measures to ensure the secrecy and safety of their drugs. They hired a Frenchman named Philippe Maire, who had worked as a gardener at Armstrong’s villa in Nice, to make secret deliveries of EPO. The riders called Maire Motoman because he drove around on a motorcycle to deliver the EPO, chilled in refrigerated panniers on the side of the motorcycle.
As the race neared, Armstrong was, for the first time, entering a Grand Tour with a long-range goal. If he wanted an overall victory, he had to think strategically about when he wanted to move and how he wanted to conserve energy throughout the race.
The Tour de France changes every year. In 1999, it began with a 4.2-mile prologue time trial. The first few stages were flat. The eighth stage was a 34.8-mile time trial. Then the mountains began. There were two significant stages in the Alps. The first ended with a climb to Sestriere and the second ended with a climb up Alpe d’Huez, one of the most famous climbs of the Tour. In the third week, there were two stages in the Pyrenees, followed by an individual time trial on the second-to-last day. The good news for Armstrong heading into the race was that the two previous winners, Jan Ullrich and Italian Marco Pantani, weren’t racing. Ullrich, who won in 1997, was injured. Pantani, embroiled in controversy for going over the 50 percent hematocrit rule in the Giro d’Italia, had withdrawn.
Armstrong began the Tour with a shocking win of the July 4 prologue time trial in the town of Le Puy du Fou. When Armstrong pulled on the leader’s yellow jersey, Bill Stapleton’s eyes welled up with tears, while his wife, Laura, cried like a baby. With all Armstrong had endured, it seemed to Stapleton the most life-affirming moment he had ever witnessed. And the drama was just about to begin.
Armstrong lost the yellow jersey the following day, but that was to be expected. The real race for the victory didn’t begin for a week.
The time trial in the town of Metz was supposed to be a close one. Even before cancer, Armstrong had never been the strongest time trial rider. But now he turned in an astonishing performance, winning the race by 58 seconds, crushing his closest competitor, Alex Zülle of Switzerland. Armstrong had again slipped into the lead in the Tour by 2 minutes, 20 seconds. Nobody in France could believe what was happening.
Neither could Greg LeMond, who was in France leading a group of mostly American cyclists on rides along the Tour de France route. When LeMond saw Armstrong dominate the time trial at such high speeds, he began to think that maybe Armstrong wasn’t crazy when he said he thought he could win the Tour de France.
LeMond knew that the mountains began two days later, after a rest day, and he began to worry that Armstrong perhaps doubted his ability to climb. LeMond wanted to encourage him, so he traveled to the start of the first mountain stage and found the US Postal team bus, where Gorski told him he could find Lance. LeMond climbed aboard the bus and found Armstrong.
“Man, you are just flying up there. Unbelievable,” he said. “I am so happy for you.”
“Thanks,” Lance responded.
“I’ve got to tell you, your capability of doing that time trial, that’ll translate directly into climbing,” LeMond said. “Don’t let anybody tell you that you’re a time trialist and not a climber. If you can time trial like that, you can win the Tour,” LeMond said.
“I know,” Lance responded dismissively.
LeMond was taken aback by Armstrong’s cockiness and slight air of disrespect. He left the team bus feeling silly for making the effort to encourage Armstrong, who obviously did not need it.
The next day, on the final climb, Armstrong found himself in a small group of elite climbers, including Zülle, who was considered his most dangerous competitor. Suddenly, Armstrong got out of the saddle and began sprinting up the mountain. There was something almost eerie about his ascent on that dark and rainy day, his bright yellow jersey dim in the waning light.
This was the kind of attack that he might have tried up a short climb in Philadelphia, or during one of the classics. But Sestriere is 6,670 feet high. It is a monster. And the next day, the riders would have to do it again up Alpe d’Huez. The attack looked too fast. It looked like Armstrong was being foolish—wasting himself. But he didn’t slow down. He kept blasting up the hill, going so fast that when the road bent, Armstrong had to take the turns wide because he was going so fast—uphill. Armstrong crossed the finish line all alone, wearing his yellow jersey and his blue US Postal cap. He was now leading the race by more than 6 minutes.
The shot of Armstrong crossing the line that rain-soaked day ended up in newspapers all over the world, and would remain a lasting image in the sport. It was the day Armstrong became famous around the world.
LeMond was watching the race at a hotel in a nearby town with his group of tourists. As Armstrong conquered Sestriere, everyone in the room, including LeMond, was cheering like mad. Except one man. A former mechanic on the Festina team named Cyrille Perrin tapped LeMond on the shoulder and whispered to LeMond, “sur le jus.”
LeMond knew what he meant—Armstrong was juicing. But how could the mechanic know this? “What? Why?” LeMond asked, amid the commotion and the cheering.
“No effort,” Perrin said. “Look at his eyes, his breathing,” he said. Perrin went on to explain that cyclists were now using a powerful cocktail of drugs that propelled them up mountains without effort. “They feel no pain,” he said to LeMond.
LeMond continued to cheer. He was truly inspired by Armstrong’s comeback and didn’t want to think about him doping. He wanted to believe that after Festina, the sport was cleaning itself up. But he felt strange, although he eventually put Perrin’s comments out of his mind and forgot about it.
Betsy Andreu had watched the race on television, with her newborn, “Little Frankie.” As she watched Frankie pulling up Sestriere, she couldn’t believe it. She’d never seen her husband climb like that in any race. Betsy picked up the phone and called Becky Rast, the wife of one of the Tour de France photographers, James Startt.
“Are you watching? Do you see Frankie pulling?” she said.
“Yeah, he’s doing great!” Becky said.
“He’s not a climber. He shouldn’t be pulling.” Becky was silent on the other line. Betsy had told Becky about the hospital room scene, and now they both knew what Frankie’s superb climbing meant: He was juiced, and Betsy was furious. She called Frankie that night.
“What’s that about?” she asked.
“What?”
“You are not a climber. You fucking gave in, didn’t you? How long has this been going on?”
“I don’t want to talk about it,” Frankie said.
“We’re going to talk about it!”
“I’m too tired.”
“I’m not going to put up with this. I’m not going to do it,” Betsy said, and hung up the phone.
The next day, Armstrong extended his lead again by more than a minute. By this time, his lead was so safe that the US Postal team stopped using EPO and other performance-enhancing drugs for the final week of the Tour. They didn’t need it, and it wasn’t worth the risk.
As Armstrong raced toward victory, the media was eating it up. For a survivor of cancer to prevail in such a grueling race, outperforming not just everyone else in the field but his own past achievements, was extraordinary. The French paper Le Monde hailed it as a major achievement in sports history. The New York Times described it as the equivalent of putting a “man on the moon,” and not simply because Neil and Lance shared the same last name. Armstrong’s own cancer doctors proclaimed it to be a scientific miracle.
On July 14, the evening after Armstrong protected his lead on Alpe d’Huez, Armstrong invited Abt to join the team for dinner at the ski resort atop the mountain. Armstrong was “eager,” Abt said in an article that ran a couple of days later, to discuss “innuendo” in the European press about his victory. Over two bowls of risotto and blueberry pie, Armstrong explained to Abt that reporters could not accept his performance as legitimate. The Festina affair, Armstrong said, had made everyone suspicious of him. Abt, of course, must have considered Armstrong’s paranoia odd. The European press was hailing Armstrong as the symbol of a new, clean era of cycling.
But Abt spun the story the way Armstrong wanted. “How else, some of the European news media are asking, can somebody who underwent chemotherapy for testicular cancer two and a half years ago be so dominant now in the world’s toughest bicycle race?” Abt wrote. The truth was, nobody was asking that question. Abt, in his article, offered two examples of this so-called negative coverage. One was a Belgian newspaper headline: ARMSTRONG PUTS A BOMB UNDER THE TOUR. The word bomb, Abt wrote, was code for drugs. The second example: A French newspaper that compared Armstrong’s performance to the 1996 victory of Danish cyclist Bjarne Riis. The comparison made sense. Armstrong and Riis had a similar body type and style and Riis’s win was unexpected. But Abt wrote that Riis had come under suspicion for doping, therefore the comparison was a veiled accusation against Armstrong. It was a ridiculous argument.
Abt wrote that Armstrong was drug tested every day as the race leader, and proceeded to tout the meaningfulness of his victory to the cancer community. “My story is a success story in the world of cancer,” Armstrong was quoted as saying. “A lot of people relate to my story. In America, in France, in Europe, they relate to this story,” he said. Armstrong said he wouldn’t be stupid enough to take drugs after cancer. “I’ve been on my deathbed,” he said.
Armstrong’s sudden paranoia wasn’t delusional. It was tactical. He was using Abt to get out in front of a story that was going to come out at some point. The team had known for about a week that a urine sample from the first day of the Tour had been tested and found to contain traces of banned corticosteroids. The result had stayed quiet for nearly two weeks, but the French newspaper Le Monde had found out and was preparing to go to press. If Armstrong’s sample was officially declared “positive,” he could potentially be disqualified from the race. No Tour de France leader had ever been disqualified for doping. Not only would it sully Armstrong’s reputation and his inspiring message of cancer survivorship, but it would destroy the entire atmosphere of the race. It would be cycling’s second major doping scandal in two years. Abt had unwittingly helped Armstrong create a narrative—albeit a fabricated one—that the French were “out to get” him.
In fact, Armstrong had been injected with the steroids before the race. In previous races that season, the UCI had not tested for the drug. But after the Festina affair, the UCI had been under pressure from the International Olympic Committee to begin testing for the substance, and Armstrong had been ensnared by this unexpected turn of events.
The USPS team was more concerned about Le Monde than it was about punishment from UCI. The UCI might quietly let the test go, they thought, since it wasn’t in their interest to have the winner test positive only a year after Festina. But if the test results were published, the UCI would have to take some action.
When they learned that Le Monde was going to publish a story, Armstrong, Gorski, and Weisel gathered around the massage table at the team hotel to discuss their plan of action. Emma O’Reilly, the soigneur who was at the massage table, recalled that they wanted to come up with a story—that the corticosteroid came from some kind of medication. According to O’Reilly’s sworn testimony, the men concocted a plan. Dr. Garcia del Moral would write a prescription for a saddle-sore drug that contained corticosteroids, backdating it so that it would appear as though the prescription had been written long before the test. Gorski and Weisel deny O’Reilly’s account.
The next day, the story broke in Le Monde, and the team’s public relations guru, Dan Osipow, spent all morning fielding questions from every cycling reporter in the world. He explained that Armstrong had used an ointment that he didn’t know contained a drug that was banned. Later that day, the UCI made its announcement: Armstrong would be cleared of the test because he had produced a doctor’s prescription for the substance.
Some reporters, including David Walsh of The Sunday Times of London, who up until then had been so admiring, were suspicious. But nobody wanted to believe that the hero of the hour, Lance Armstrong, could have cheated. It was too heartbreaking. Too bleak. Abt’s piece in The New York Times did not question the validity of the “saddle sore” story, and he glossed over the details. The paper ignored the story after that.
By the time Armstrong won the event’s final time trial in the French theme park Futuroscope, the positive test result had been forgotten. Armstrong was leading the Tour de France by 7 minutes, 37 seconds. It was a trouncing.
The next day, Armstrong was going to roll into Paris wearing the yellow jersey. An American on an American team. A cancer survivor. This was huge, monumental. It was something to be celebrated, not compromised by some nitpicking concern about a prescription drug. If the official line was that Armstrong had used a simple saddle-sore cream, then the media—and the public—were eager to believe it.
When the moment arrived, Americans waving American and Texan flags lined the cobblestoned roads of the Champs-Élysées. People had flown over from the United States just to watch the finish. As the peloton entered Paris and headed onto the Champs-Élysées, the US Postal team rode at the front of the pack, keeping Armstrong safe and out of the path of any crashes that could dampen the day. The pack did its traditional ten laps at warp speed around the Champs to cap off the race, while the sprinters hammered it for a chance at one final stage win. But all anybody wanted to see was Armstrong, in his yellow jersey, crossing the line.
After the win, the team and their managers, including Weisel and Gorski, celebrated by drinking champagne and riding victory laps around the Champs with Armstrong. Weisel had done what no American team owner had ever done before. He had won the Tour de France with an American team—the equivalent, as Borysewicz had told him twelve years before, of winning the World Series with a French baseball team.