With Thom Weisel firmly in control of the sport in their home country, and their finances vastly improved, the mood on the US Postal team was more relaxed. The new infusions of money meant that there were more staffers on the team, more mechanics, and extra bikes and other state-of-the-art equipment, much of it custom-made to the riders’ specifications. No longer struggling so hard to hold on to its dominance, the Postal team could focus on its strengths: winning bike races. The 1999 Tour de France had proved to the world what Armstrong and his teammates were capable of, and now they had to show the world that it hadn’t been an anomaly.
For 2000, the team had set high goals, including a strong showing in the spring classics and, of course, a defense of the yellow jersey by Lance. The team hired five new riders to back their superhuman superstar, including Viatcheslav “Eki” Ekimov, who had left the team in 1998 for a richer offer but would return to become a fixture in all of Armstrong’s remaining Tour de France runs.
Before the 2000 Tour de France began, there were rumors in the peloton that a new prototype test for EPO had been discovered and would be used during the race. This was the test that the International Olympic Committee had commissioned Francesco Conconi, the so-called fox in the henhouse, to develop. Concerned about being found out, cyclists were even more afraid of using EPO than they had been in 1999. But that didn’t deter the US Postal Service team.
Armstrong bragged to friends that he had inside knowledge of how to get around the test, thanks to the fact that Conconi had been the mentor to his longtime doping doctor, Michele Ferrari. From Ferrari, the US Postal Service team learned that if the riders injected EPO directly into their veins instead of just below the skin—which was the typical method—the drug would leave their system in around twelve hours instead of a few days. Armstrong also knew that the EPO test, still in its infancy, was far from exact. Even if a rider were to be tested a few hours after an EPO injection, the test would likely be inconclusive.
Thanks to its growing budget, the team could also afford to begin to implement a more complicated but less detectable method of doping: blood transfusions. Doctors carried out a blood doping program for all three of its climbers: Lance; Tyler Hamilton, a blue-eyed twenty-nine-year-old prep school graduate who had attended the University of Colorado at Boulder; and Kevin Livingston, a twenty-seven-year-old originally from St. Louis, who was known for his near perfect pedal stroke. About a month before the 2000 Tour, as Johan Bruyneel explained, 500 cc of blood—the equivalent of two cups—would be withdrawn from each of them, then reinfused a few weeks later during the Tour. Since there was no reliable test for blood transfusions, there would be no way for the riders to be caught unless someone witnessed the reinfusion firsthand, or caught them with the blood bags in their possession.
In mid-June, Armstrong, Hamilton, and Livingston stepped aboard a private jet in Nice to fly to Valencia. There, they were driven to a hotel for the extraction. The whole process took about an hour and then the three men went for a training ride down the coast. Fatigued from the loss of blood, they struggled during the training ride to make it up some small hills. But they knew that after the blood was reinfused, they would be able to power up the Tour’s climbs.
During that year’s Tour, Armstrong was neck and neck with the bald thirty-year-old Italian Marco Pantani, a fan favorite in the late 1990s for his aggressive style, and brown-haired former Tour de France winner and race favorite, twenty-seven-year-old Jan Ullrich of Germany, until the tenth stage—a 127-mile mountain expedition from Dax to Lourdes Hautacam. On the morning before the stage, rain was pouring down and it was cold. These were conditions most cyclists hate, but Armstrong had grown to love them because they brought out the best in him. The course included three major climbs: the Col de Marie-Blanque, the Col d’Aubisque, and the agonizing 8.3-mile Hautacam. Armstrong, Ullrich, and Pantani stayed together until the base of the Hautacam. As the climb began, Pantani jumped up and took off on an attack, opening up a small gap between him and the riders behind him. Armstrong took off after him and, within seconds, caught and passed him. Ullrich was left far behind. By the time he reached the top of the Hautacam, Armstrong had moved into the race lead, with Ullrich in second place, 4 minutes and 14 seconds behind. With such a large lead, Armstrong’s second straight victory in the Tour was all but sealed.
Yet the team was taking no chances. On the night of July 11, following the eleventh stage, Lance, Kevin, and Tyler gathered in a Provence hotel room where their blood bags were suspended on picture hooks on the walls. Lying faceup on the bed, the riders were reinfused with their own blood. The next day was a rest day before the twelfth stage, which finished with a climb up Mont Ventoux, where Armstrong’s performance would make him a cycling legend.
Ventoux has long been fetishized by cycling fans. Its thirteen-mile road is steep, with grades of up to 10 percent, and it is also extremely windy, making it even more challenging. During the 1967 Tour, British cyclist Tommy Simpson died on Ventoux, pushing himself beyond his limits in a drug-induced daze. But in cycling lore, it wasn’t so much the drugs that killed Simpson—it was Ventoux. He’s memorialized by a sculpture placed at the very spot where he collapsed—a symbol of the sport’s romantic fatalism and the Tour’s unparalleled suffering.
A crowd of 300,000 fans lined the cold, blustery road up. The pack of 161 cyclists dwindled to seven of the best climbers, including Armstrong, Pantani, and Ullrich. The crowd roared as they passed. Then, with about three miles to go, Pantani attacked. He was ten minutes down in the GC (the general classification) and was only going for the stage win, so none of the lead riders chased him—except Armstrong. He got up out of the saddle and chased after Pantani, leaving Ullrich behind. In a show of incredible strength, he caught Pantani in seconds. Now Armstrong and Pantani were dueling up the mountain, looking at each other and trading massive accelerations up the slope. Armstrong was happy because Ullrich was far behind, losing more time. As the two men approached the finish line, Armstrong slowed down, and Pantani, exhausted, was able to nudge his bike forward and cross the finish line first. It was clear to anyone that Armstrong—by far the stronger rider—let Pantani win. Armstrong didn’t need the stage victory. Pantani had helped him put time into Ullrich, and Armstrong felt he deserved the win that day. Armstrong’s gift to Pantani became a topic of debate among cycling fans. Had Armstrong done the gentlemanly thing by letting Pantani win? Or had he disrespected the Tour by not attempting the stage win? Pantani was furious. He didn’t want or need gifts. Weisel was also angry that Armstrong had given up a win. For fans, the controversy added delicious drama to the cinematic display of athletic talent. The day would live on forever in the collective imagination of cycling fans. Pantani got one more stage win before dropping out of the race. Armstrong’s lead was secure and insurmountable by any of his opponents. He held the yellow jersey all the way to Paris.
Armstrong had done the unthinkable: won a second consecutive Tour de France. This second win also set off discussions about his legacy—whether he had eased past three-time Tour winner Greg LeMond to become the top cyclist in US history, and whether he could go on to win the Tour de France three times, or even five times, to equal the records of Miguel Indurain of Spain, Bernard Hinault of France, and Eddy Merckx of Belgium, the men regarded as the world’s greatest riders, the crème de la crème of cycling.
In September, Lance went to compete in the 2000 Olympics, which were being held in Sydney. Lance’s presence there was a very big story, and he expected—and received—all kinds of deluxe treatment in accordance with his superstar status. He asked USA Cycling for extra bikes, extra mechanics, and special accommodations.
He had hoped for a gold medal in the time trial, but he finished third, taking bronze behind his Postal teammate, Eki, who took the gold, and Ullrich, who took silver (as well as winning a gold medal in the cycling road race).
For Armstrong to have done even as well as he did was impressive, given that he had been racing injured. A few weeks before the Olympics, while on a training ride on a remote, narrow road in the hills above Nice, he had taken a blind left-hand curve and piled into an oncoming car. He was lucky to be alive, but he had fractured one of the vertebrae of his spine, the link between his back and his neck, and the injury hadn’t entirely healed by the time he got to Sydney.
Trouble soon followed, however. During the Tour, investigative reporters working for the TV station France 3 had trailed the US Postal’s team doctors and filmed them secretly dumping medical waste at a highway rest stop miles from their hotel. The packaging contained bloody bandages, used syringes, and packaging for a drug known as Actovegin, the blood doping drug made from calf’s blood. Actovegin had been developed in both an injectable form and a cream for use by stroke patients and diabetics, and it and similar products have been used in the treatment of acne, rashes, burns, ulcers, eye problems, tendinitis, circulatory disorders, and senility. Among cyclists, the common belief was that the injectable form of Actovegin could help speed oxygen to the muscles and improve the metabolism of glucose, enhancing both energy and recovery.
As the French TV station investigated, debating whether the contents of the trash bags were newsworthy, someone sent an anonymous letter to the prosecutor’s office in Paris about what the crew had found. The letter convinced the prosecutor’s office to conduct an inquiry, and word of the investigation leaked to the press in late fall, with a story airing on television in France as well.
There was some disagreement among the various sporting agencies about whether Actovegin was actually a banned substance. It was not specifically named on anyone’s list of forbidden substances, but similar products were banned. A couple of months after news of the investigation surfaced, the International Olympic Committee officially banned it. The UCI, however, did not. To the contrary: Hein Verbruggen and the UCI fully backed Armstrong, saying that the product was not a banned substance.
Though cleared by the UCI, members of the Postal team could still face criminal charges in France if they were found to have used performance-enhancing drugs to cheat, and the French prosecutor’s investigation continued.
Armstrong, indignant over what he considered to be harassment, categorically denied that the US Postal team had ever used Actovegin for performance-enhancing purposes, and made an elaborate show of not even knowing how to spell it. “Activ-o-something,” he wrote on his website in December 2000. He said he would skip the 2001 Tour de France if the investigation continued.
Mark Gorski, meanwhile, was floating a carefully concocted story in interviews with the press. He admitted the team carried Actovegin but said it was used for two completely legitimate purposes: to treat skin abrasions and to treat the diabetes of Julien de Vriese, the team mechanic. He called the accusations that it was used for performance-enhancing purposes a “preposterous rumor.”
Jonathan Vaughters hadn’t realized that Actovegin was derived from calf’s blood. He immediately began to worry that he may have exposed himself to mad cow disease, which was going around Europe. In a panic, he called Gorski, who assured Vaughters he had nothing to worry about. “Don’t worry, you’ll be fine,” Gorski said.
When LeMond read the reports about the Actovegin, he was stunned. He knew nothing about this oddly named drug, but he believed Gorski was lying. During the 2000 Tour de France, LeMond had dinner with de Vriese, who had also served as the team mechanic on the Z team. It was the ten-year anniversary of LeMond’s first victory on the team, and everyone met in France for an informal reunion.
At dinner, surrounded by a handful of old riders as well as Greg and Kathy LeMond, de Vriese began to talk about the doping on the USPS team. De Vriese said he had been at training camp with the team in the Pyrenees and witnessed the use of doping products. It went beyond the occasional pill or injection, de Vriese said. The team bus was like a hospital. “This isn’t cycling anymore,” de Vriese told LeMond.
De Vriese also told Kathy he had learned that Armstrong arranged for $500,000 to be wired to the UCI after his positive corticosteroid test in 1999. The money, he believed, came from either Thom Weisel or Nike.
De Vriese said he was so disgusted by the doping that he’d resigned. But soon after his resignation, Armstrong called him personally and asked him to stay, offering him a hefty raise. De Vriese accepted the offer—mainly because he needed the money—on one condition: He didn’t have to work on the main Tour de France squad. De Vriese knew the doping program was amplified during the Tour, and he didn’t want to be around it.
So when LeMond read that Gorski was using de Vriese as the smoke screen, he knew it was bullshit. De Vriese’s diabetes couldn’t account for several trash bags full of Actovegin packaging, and it couldn’t explain why the team doctor and head masseuse had driven fifty miles away from the race just to dump the trash bags at a random rest stop.
LeMond was beginning to feel convinced that the team was running a sophisticated doping program, and that Armstrong was a cheat. He’d heard the story of Armstrong’s hospital room admission about using drugs, but he’d written it off as rumor. But now, he believed it wholeheartedly.
• • •
Despite his threats to skip the Tour in the wake of the Actovegin investigation, Armstrong never seriously considered missing it. To prepare for the race, he spent the early part of the 2001 season at a number of smaller races in Spain and, despite the ongoing investigation by French prosecutors, he even raced in the French stage race Circuit de la Sarthe in April.
In June, however, Armstrong skipped the Dauphiné Libéré, the weeklong French stage race that many riders use as a tune-up. Instead, he competed in the Tour de Suisse, which he won. But if Armstrong had avoided the Dauphiné in order to evade French law enforcement, he was out of luck. Testers working for the UCI collected urine samples from many of the riders at the Tour de Suisse, including Armstrong. The samples were sent directly to an anti-doping lab in Lausanne. One of the samples showed signs of synthetic EPO.
The EPO test used was the one developed by Conconi. It involved dropping a small amount of urine onto a gel that separated synthetic EPO from the natural version of the hormone produced by the body. Testers had to determine if there was enough synthetic EPO present to constitute a positive result, but because the test was so new, testers tended to err on the side of caution and give riders the benefit of the doubt. This test, though, was right on the edge.
The samples were identified only by rider numbers, not names, so the lab had no idea whose test they were looking at. But they notified the UCI of the suspicious test and provided the rider number.
Since the UCI had the records to match names to numbers, it soon knew that the urine test was Lance Armstrong’s. It would have been the UCI’s responsibility as to whether or not to sanction Armstrong. By this time, UCI President Verbruggen must have been feeling embattled by all the doping problems, and the European press and the French authorities seemed obsessed with it. To Verbruggen, every news story about doping, every police raid on a cyclist’s hotel, probably felt like an attack on the sport, and on his livelihood as well.
The UCI notified Armstrong of the suspicious EPO result but informed him that he would not be punished because the test was too close to call. Armstrong’s inside information on the EPO test had been right on the money. Had he taken his EPO injections just under the skin, as he had in 1999, instead of directly into his veins, he would surely have registered a more conclusively positive test.
Having gotten away with little more than a slap on the wrist, Armstrong did not hesitate to launch self-righteous attacks on all those other cyclists he said were bringing down his sport. After winning the Tour de Suisse, he chastised those cheaters who “bring shame” on cycling, referring to several riders by name. “These guys must be thrown out of the sport without a backward glance,” Armstrong told reporters. “They don’t respect the sport, the champions of the past, or the fans.”
Just weeks later, Armstrong entered the 2001 Tour de France, seeking his third straight win, a feat only four other cyclists had ever managed. Armstrong’s main competition was, again, Jan Ullrich of Germany, who’d won gold and silver medals in the 2000 Olympics. The first day in the mountains came on the tenth day of the race—a 130-mile stage that finished atop the famed Alpe d’Huez. Armstrong blasted up the steep switchbacks to claim his first stage victory of the race. The next day, he won the twenty-mile individual time trial. On stage 13, which finished atop another famous climb, the Pla d’Adet, Armstrong won his third stage and the overall race lead. After the individual time trial on stage 18, Armstrong was ahead of Ullrich by over 6 minutes. It was another decisive victory. Armstrong coasted the rest of the way to Paris in the yellow jersey. That ceremonial victory lap around the cobblestones of the Champs-Élysées was turning into an annual ritual.
After winning the race, Armstrong was called into a meeting with UCI doctors in Aigle, who, in their thick Swiss accents, informed him that they would watch him more carefully now. If the meeting was meant as a warning, Armstrong didn’t see it that way. The very fact that he was being let off with only a warning seemed to be evidence to him that he was indeed invincible. His brand was too strong, too valuable, to be ruined with a positive test result.
Whatever Armstrong may have felt about his invincibility even while he was tackling those precipitous alpine climbs, the suspicions about his doping were being voiced in the press once again—reawakened by the scrutiny now being directed at cycling, and specifically at Michele Ferrari. At the time of the 2001 Tour, Ferrari was facing criminal charges in Italy for allegedly administering performance-enhancing drugs. The charges against him stemmed from an investigation that went back at least to 1998, when his name was found on prescriptions for performance-enhancing drugs discovered in the possession of professional athletes. Prosecutors in Bologna had opened an inquiry, and Ferrari’s home had been raided several times by investigators. Testimony from cyclists who were questioned during the probe led to Ferrari being charged in 2001. Ferrari was eventually convicted by an Italian court of malpractice and sporting fraud for advising riders on the use of performance-enhancing drugs. Two years later, an appeals court threw out the verdict, acquitting him of malpractice and ruling that the statute of limitations had expired on the sporting-fraud conviction.
Once the European press linked the two men, Armstrong was forced to admit that he’d worked with Ferrari in the past. The admission came after persistent inquiries from Sunday Times reporter David Walsh, who was covering the Tour. Armstrong defended his work with the doctor as legitimate, explaining that Ferrari had been training him to break the one-hour record on the track—a measure of how far a cyclist can travel in exactly sixty minutes. Armstrong denied ever using EPO and, as usual, lashed out at those in the press who expressed suspicion of him.
When LeMond read about Armstrong’s links to Ferrari, he no longer had any doubt that Armstrong was doping. In the early 1990s, when LeMond was struggling with health problems and getting weaker on the bike, sports doctors had suggested that he see Ferrari, but he had refused. LeMond knew he’d competed against doped riders. He had no desire to become one.
LeMond sent an e-mail to Walsh. “Great work, David. You’re on the right track,” he wrote. Soon after the e-mail, Walsh called LeMond and asked for a quote on Ferrari, but LeMond had no desire to get in the middle of the controversy. He didn’t want to directly accuse Armstrong, so he settled on what he thought was a less controversial approach. He gave an interview to Walsh, in which he was quoted as saying, “When I heard he was working with Michele Ferrari, I was devastated. . . . If Lance is clean, it is the greatest comeback in the history of sports. If he isn’t, it would be the greatest fraud.”
Lance responded by telling reporters he was “surprised” and “upset” by LeMond’s comments, and then called LeMond, who recalls that Lance threatened to use his clout to ruin his reputation. He reiterated this threat to friends as well. A few weeks after the Tour, Armstrong was having dinner with Frankie and Betsy Andreu and a few other friends when he vowed to take revenge against LeMond. “I’m going to take him down,” he said. By making one call to the owner of Trek bicycles, he said, he could “shut him up.” He even began to lean on Trek to talk to LeMond.
LeMond also began getting phone calls from Armstrong’s supporters. One of the first was from Weisel. “You know, what you’re saying about Lance isn’t good for you. You better be careful.”
John Burke, the president of Trek bikes, got caught in the middle. Burke contacted LeMond and tried to get him to agree to issue a statement retracting his comments. After more than a week of negotiations, an apologetic press release was sent by Trek to USA Today. It had been written by Bill Stapleton. Without even calling LeMond for comment, USA Today printed the article on August 15. LeMond regretted going along with the idea of a press release. He was furious and clearly in no mood to issue an apology.
In an effort to keep Eddy Merckx from getting roped into the Ferrari scandal, Armstrong concocted a story that he and his coach, Chris Carmichael, had met Ferrari during a training camp in San Diego, California, in 1995 and that Ferrari’s role had always been “limited.” Ferrari, Lance said, uses only “natural methods of improvement,” including altitude tents and diet. “I feel he’s honest and innocent,” Lance added. For those who might have wondered why Lance would need to work with Ferrari, given that Carmichael was his coach, Lance explained that since Carmichael couldn’t be in Europe on an ongoing basis, Ferrari played an important role by doing Lance’s physiological tests there, and sending Carmichael his data.
Within days of Lance’s defense of Ferrari, the Italian edition of GQ magazine printed statements the Italian rider Filippo Simeoni had given to Italian police. Simeoni said Ferrari—nicknamed Il Mito, or “the myth,” by Italian cyclists—advised him to use EPO, testosterone, and human growth hormone to improve his performance. Diaries kept by Simeoni recorded the substances he took between 1992 and 1999, the year he was questioned by Italian police, and recounted the advice Ferrari had given him about how to pass the hematocrit blood test used by the UCI. “Dr. Ferrari advised me to use two alternatives: Hemagel [a blood thinning agent] on the morning of the control, albumin [an element contained in white blood cells] on the evening before a possible control.”
Responding to the quotes in the GQ article, Lance said: “It’s a story that is three years old. Anyone can print old articles.”
Lance conceded, however, that his association with Ferrari might look suspicious. “People are not stupid,” he told reporters at a press conference during the Tour. “They will look at the facts. They will say: ‘Here’s Lance Armstrong. Here’s a relationship. Is it questionable? Perhaps.’ But people are smart. They will say: ‘Has Lance Armstrong ever tested positive? No. Has Lance Armstrong ever been tested? A lot.’ I have a questionable reputation because I’m a cyclist. People love to single out cycling. . . . The [drug] problems are not exclusive to cycling or the Tour de France or Lance Armstrong. I think this is a clean Tour.” Armstrong didn’t know that LeMond had also told Walsh about the Indiana hospital room. Walsh was now on the hunt to confirm it.
• • •
As Armstrong battled his critics in the press, the Lance Armstrong Foundation was getting a new president: Steve Whisnant, a well-respected fund-raiser in the nonprofit world. There was one complicating factor. Whisnant was good friends with Greg LeMond. A recent cancer survivor, Whisnant was inspired by Armstrong’s story. He had accepted the job just a couple of months before LeMond’s controversial comments about Armstrong.
Whisnant wasn’t completely blindsided by the allegations. Before he accepted the job, Whisnant had called people close to the foundation and Armstrong, including John Bucksbaum, and asked them pointed questions.
“But what about the drugs in the sport?” Whisnant had asked Bucksbaum. “There have been allegations about Armstrong and I don’t want this to blow up in my face.”
“I know about the allegations,” Bucksbaum said. “Lance has the potential to do so much good. You just have to give him the benefit of the doubt.”
Despite his concerns, Whisnant decided to take the job. He repeated Bucksbaum’s advice in his head. “Give him the benefit of the doubt,” he told himself.
Just before the Tour de France in 2001, Whisnant called up LeMond and told him he had accepted the job. LeMond was upset.
“Steve, you can’t take this job,” he said.
“Why?” Whisnant said. “I know there have been questions about drugs.”
LeMond was cryptic. He didn’t want to tell Whisnant everything he knew. He felt they were, at least at this point, just allegations and he didn’t want to repeat them to Whisnant. “Listen, you just have to trust me, Steve. This is a bad idea.”
“Look, I’ve already taken the job, Greg. This thing has so much potential. I have to do this.”
“Steve, I understand. But I don’t think you’re going to last six months there. This guy, he’s not someone you want to get involved with.”
Before starting in his new job, Whisnant traveled with Lance, Kristin, and Luke to Nike headquarters in Oregon, where the company was naming its fitness center after Lance. The night before the ceremony, Armstrong and Whisnant sat down alone together and had a beer. Whisnant decided it was the right time to ask a tough question.
Looking Armstrong in the eyes, he said, “Lance, I am going to ask you a question, and I need you to look me in the eyes and answer honestly. Is there anything I need to know about that could come out? Anything at all that might embarrass you, me, or harm the mission of the foundation?”
Armstrong knew exactly what Whisnant was getting at.
“No. Absolutely not,” Armstrong said, looking straight into Whisnant’s eyes. Whisnant replayed Bucksbaum’s advice in his head. Give him the benefit of the doubt.
Once in Austin, Whisnant went out to lunch with Jeff Garvey at a Chinese restaurant. He casually asked Garvey, “Jeff, do you think Lance was doping before cancer?”
Garvey paused. And then he answered, “Yeah, I think he probably was.”
Whisnant left the restaurant shell-shocked. He thought that if Armstrong had taken performance-enhancing drugs, it might have led to his cancer, making the idea behind the foundation a big lie.
Even before LeMond made his public comments about the link between Armstrong and Ferrari at the Tour de France, Whisnant had heard murmurs at the foundation about bad blood between Lance and Greg. At a meeting in early July with top employees of the charity, including Garvey and Doug Ulman, the new director of survivorship, the discussion turned away from cancer and became focused on LeMond. Some staffers began to recite what seemed to Whisnant to be talking points meant to discredit Greg. He was an “alcoholic,” they said. He was “emotionally disturbed” and was out to get Armstrong due to some deranged feeling of jealousy.
Finally, Whisnant spoke up. “That’s just not true!” he said, defending his friend. Everyone at the meeting turned and looked at him as if were a traitor. Whisnant was confused and had a sinking feeling in his stomach that he might have made a big mistake taking this job. But he stuck with it in the hopes that he could make it work.
After LeMond’s comments about Ferrari broke in the press in late July, things became outright hostile at the foundation because of his relationship with LeMond. Whisnant checked his voice mail to discover a message from Lance. “I’m not sure this is going to work out,” Lance said.
Soon after, Jeff Garvey burst into Whisnant’s office, fuming mad.
You need to make a decision. It’s either Lance Armstrong or Greg LeMond,” Garvey said.
Garvey stormed out of the office. Whisnant was distraught and worried he had made a huge, career-altering blunder by taking the job. He immediately called Bill Stapleton, who was, to Whisnant’s surprise, calm and reassuring. “Listen, it’s okay,” he said. “We really need you in this job. Jeff was out of control and he owes you an apology,” Stapleton said.
The apology took place at Garvey’s house in Austin, where Stapleton and Garvey attempted to convince Whisnant to stay. “Sorry that happened,’’ Garvey said. “That isn’t what the foundation is about. We want you to stay and Lance is completely behind you,” he said.
It was too little, too late. Whisnant called some of his mentors and discussed the situation and came to the conclusion that he needed to resign. He knew it would hurt his career to leave so abruptly. He had just sold the house, and it would cost him a lot of money to undo his real estate transactions. But six weeks after moving to Austin, Whisnant resigned and walked out on Lance and the foundation.
• • •
In the spring of 2001, in part because of his problems with French law enforcement, Armstrong moved his European base of operations from Nice to the Spanish town of Girona, where a tight-knit contingent of American bicycle racers had lived for years. He and Kristin still owned their French villa, as well as two homes in Austin, but now they also had the first floor of what had once been a small palace in one of the most historic streets of Girona, a two-thousand-year-old city of about eighty thousand people in northeast Catalonia. Located on a narrow cobblestone footpath, the apartment had a wrought iron terrace and Gothic arches and cornices, as well as small gardens and a small family chapel with a wooden altar. Lance had picked out their new Girona home on his own while Kristin remained in Austin, trying to become pregnant again through in vitro fertilization. In April she called to tell him she was pregnant with twins.
The Girona location brought him into closer contact with his teammates, including George Hincapie and Tyler Hamilton, who lived in a complex of apartments there during the racing season. The migration of American cyclists to Girona had begun in 1997, when Weisel and Johnny Weltz were putting together a European-style team capable of winning a spot in the Tour de France.
By 2001, following the Postal team’s successes, some of the American riders had earned enough in salary and bonuses to be able to afford to bring their wives and girlfriends to Spain, too. “You can’t go outside without seeing a wife, a rider, a girlfriend, a soigneur, a director, a team car,” Haven Hamilton, then Tyler Hamilton’s wife, wrote in an e-mail to Betsy Andreu. “You should see it here in Girona—grand central station,” she added.
Girona also had the advantage of being a short train ride to Valencia, where team doctor Luis Garcia del Moral had his sports medicine clinic. That meant that Armstrong and the other riders could go there for treatment without crossing international borders and arousing suspicion.
Girona became a sort of hub for performance-enhancing drugs. Laws against doping in Spain at the time were much more relaxed than they were in France, and there was a pharmacist in town who was more than willing to fulfill practically any prescription for any drug on the market. If a cyclist had been prescribed a round of EPO by a team doctor, all he had to do was stroll down to the pharmacy and order it. If drug testers came to town, the first rider to notice the tester would alert other riders by text message: “The vampires are here.” Riders who knew they had drugs in their system would hide, or inject themselves with masking agents and other substances to fool the tests. The US Postal riders, and other Americans riding for other teams, felt emboldened to do whatever they wanted in Spain.
However, the doping began taking a toll on some of the wives and girlfriends. The women talked to each other about the health risks of the drugs. They told each other they wished the men did not have to take these substances, some of them mysterious and with unknown side effects.
Kristin resented the drug testers, or “doping control officers (DCOs),” who would show up at the Armstrong home in Austin during the off-season. The Austin-based testers were typically a husband and wife team, and they were hired by the US Anti-Doping Agency to administer unannounced tests.
In 2000, USADA began these “surprise” out-of-competition visits to cyclists’ homes. Cyclists were required to inform USADA of their whereabouts and when they’d be in the States. Lance hated having to fax or e-mail the testers about his movements. He felt he was “under constant surveillance.”
The testers in Austin would ring the bell, and when Lance or Kristin opened the door, they’d say, “Random drug control,” and hand Lance a piece of paper instructing him of his rights. If he declined the test, it would be considered an automatic positive. The procedure took fifteen or twenty minutes. First, at least one inspector would accompany Lance into the bathroom, where he’d urinate in a container. His pants would have to be down around his knees, and his shirt yanked up to his chest, so the tester could see that no device was being used to somehow switch samples. He would then distribute his pee into two other containers, the A sample and B sample. Generally, the testers would immediately check the pH of the urine. A high pH, for instance, could indicate a cyclist was taking sodium bicarbonate to mask something. These visits often involved paperwork to document the circumstances of the urine sample collection, and then the sample was mailed by the testers to a lab for analysis. Generally, Lance’s urine samples were sent to a lab in Los Angeles.
That year, the day before Thanksgiving, Kristin had a routine prenatal checkup, where the obstetrician told her to call Lance, get home to pack a bag, then go immediately to the hospital to prepare to give birth. Lance was standing in the foyer, holding their bags, when the drug testers suddenly arrived at their front door. “My wife is in labor. So it better be fast,” Lance told them.
Then, when the twins, Grace and Isabelle, were about a week old, the drug testers showed up again, at about 7:00 A.M. The babies were sleeping and Armstrong’s small white Maltese, Boone, started barking. Kristin opened the door. “It’s seven in the morning!” she said. The woman tester handed her the paperwork. Lance came to the door. “What are you doing?” he asked. After they tested Lance and completed the paperwork, Kristin, visibly upset, walked the drug testers to the front door. When they reached the doorway, Kristin threw her arm out as a barricade, leaned into the woman’s face, and snarled, “I don’t want you coming over here early in the morning like this and disrupting this family ever again.”
• • •
As the allegations about Lance mounted and his stature grew, he built an intricate layer of protection around himself, with a circle of influential friends and associates. The companies that sponsored him, his doctors, and most of his close confidants closed ranks around him. Nike, for example, consistently backed him. In 2000, they began airing commercials in which Armstrong is shown taking a blood test in front of reporters and then saying, “What am I on? I’m on my bike, busting my ass six hours a day.”
After having put their friendship on deep freeze, in 2001 during the Tour de France, Lance reached out to his old best friend and biking buddy John Korioth. He’d seen a story in the July Texas Monthly magazine in which Korioth was quoted as defending Lance. Korioth said, “Beyond the health reasons for not doing it, Lance has to say, ‘What does something like that do to my reputation?’ US Postal would drop him. He’d lose his sponsorships. He has everything to lose and nothing to gain.” So Lance deputized Stapleton’s assistant, then in France, to call his old buddy, reaching him at home in Austin. “Look, Lance is racing in the Tour de France right now, otherwise he would have called you himself,” the assistant said. Lance, she told him, would like to fly him to Paris to see the last two days of the Tour. Korioth thought it over. He had been disappointed in how Lance had treated him when he was forced out of the foundation. But he decided to go.
The night he arrived in France, Korioth met Stapleton at a dinner party. “What the fuck am I doing here?” he asked Stapleton, who told him Lance would explain later. The next day, Korioth went to the start of the race and boarded the Postal team bus. He sat down next to Lance, and the two men talked about their feud. “Man, that was a tough time,” Lance said, adding that he was confused after listening to the complaints of the foundation board members. “You’re listening to people give you advice. You don’t know what’s right. You don’t know what’s wrong.”
“Well, you could have always called me,” Korioth responded.
They agreed to renew their friendship, but Korioth told Lance he wouldn’t work for him or his foundation ever again. Years later, Lance invested in a couple of bars Korioth was running in Austin, and another potential enemy was made an ally.
• • •
Once the Postal team embarked on an organized, systematic doping program, Lance’s most important defenders may have been his own domestiques. They had a vested interest in his success, especially since it was customary for the Tour winner to divide the $400,000 prize money among his teammates. On top of that, Lance would double the amount, using his personal money to add to their winnings.
His domestiques also had a very personal reason for being discreet, since several of them were working with Michele Ferrari. Johan Bruyneel had facilitated this during a meeting at the Postal training camp in late 2000. He told the riders that each of them could meet with Ferrari, but if they decided to hire him, they would be responsible for paying him out of their own salaries.
George Hincapie was among those who hired Ferrari, paying him $15,000 for his services during the 2001 season, and keeping him on for five years after that. Hincapie reached out to Ferrari because he felt Ferrari could help him figure out a training plan incorporating blood transfusions instead of primarily EPO. As far as Ferrari was concerned, Armstrong’s close call with testing positive for EPO during the 2001 Tour de Suisse had been the last straw. So he was now pushing transfusions. In fact, Ferrari thought, if transfusions were done in combination with small, undetectable doses of EPO, that combination could be even more effective at delivering oxygen to the muscles than just the EPO. Floyd Landis was another rider on the US Postal team who eventually became involved in doping. At the end of the 2001 season, Hamilton left the Postal team to pursue his own ambitions as a team leader, joining the Danish Team CSC. To replace Hamilton, the team brought in Floyd Landis, who arrived at the team’s training camp for new riders in December 2001. Landis had just signed a $60,000-a-year contract to race for the team, and he was thrilled by the chance to be on a team led by such a heroic athlete. But the Lance he got to know in those early days didn’t line up with the Lance he’d only read about. Most of what Landis knew about his hero, he had read in Lance’s bestselling memoir, It’s Not About the Bike. He’d devoured the chronicle of Lance’s comeback from cancer, and some things in the book stood out to him more than others, like the fact that Armstrong called himself a devoted family man, even going so far as to say he was offended by pornography. Lance had made that remark at a point in his book where he was describing being offered a girlie magazine at a sperm bank when he was storing sperm before chemo. Even to Landis, who had been raised in a Mennonite family in Pennsylvania’s Amish country and who used to race mountain bikes in sweat pants because spandex was too risqué, Armstrong’s portrayal of himself as such a straight arrow came across as a bit extreme.
And once he got to know him, he realized just how far from the truth that depiction was. One night during the training camp, Landis and a few of the other new riders on the team piled into a black Suburban with Lance behind the wheel. They were headed to the Yellow Rose, a gentleman’s club in Austin. Armstrong was driving so fast, running so many stoplights and stop signs, that Dave Zabriskie, another of the new riders, turned to Landis and asked, “Are there no cops in this town?” The US Postal team got its own booth at the strip club, and took turns getting lap dances from the scantily clad women. After leaving the Yellow Rose, Armstrong drove the riders to Bill Stapleton’s office. More dancers arrived. As the men partied into the early morning hours, Armstrong retreated to one of the private offices. He sat at a desk with two completely naked women beside him. Landis noticed what looked like cocaine on the desk. When Armstrong looked up and saw Landis staring at him, he shut the door, and that was the last he saw of him that evening.
Landis’s eye-opening training camp seemed to him an appropriate time to broach another topic at odds with Armstrong’s image in the United States: performance-enhancing drugs. He met Johan Bruyneel in the lobby of the Four Seasons Hotel, where he and most of the rest of the team were staying and, in vaguely worded language, asked what he would be expected to do beyond simply training and racing. Landis had, of course, heard stories about the use of drugs in the pro peloton and assumed he would be asked to use them, too. According to Landis, Bruyneel responded, “Look, just keep training and when the time comes, if it’s necessary, we’ll figure that out.”
“The fact that he didn’t totally dismiss it was all I really needed to know,” Landis later said.
And within a year, his time would indeed come.