Armstrong said the 2005 Tour de France would be his last. He would retire from cycling shortly after the race, whether he won or lost, and then embark on the next phase of his life, which would consist of campaigning for cancer awareness—and, of course, enjoying the good life of a retired athlete with a ton of money in the bank.
But there were people in cycling who thought that for Armstrong to attempt a seventh Tour de France win was greedy, that he was disrespecting the sacred race by dominating it for too long. Armstrong had six victories under his belt. It was a record that might stand forever. Why go for seven? Armstrong himself had considered retiring after his sixth. In fact, he and some partners (including his friend John Korioth) had opened a loft-style bar called Six in Austin’s downtown district, which seemed to suggest an ending.
Even Armstrong’s sponsor thought it was time to call it quits. When the US Postal Service bowed out, Tailwind Sports got the Discovery Channel to sign on as the new sponsor. Tailwind also needed to replace a number of riders. Former teammates such as Bobby Julich, Tyler Hamilton, Levi Leipheimer, Dave Zabriskie, and of course Floyd Landis—all Americans—had all left over the years, having ultimately fallen out with Lance. Tailwind wasn’t able to replace those riders with other Americans. There was simply a shortage of talent in a country whose cycling culture was tiny. By the time Armstrong was planning to go for his seventh Tour win, there was only one other American left on the team’s Tour de France squad: George Hincapie. The other seven riders were mercenaries from Italy, Spain, Ukraine, and the Czech Republic. Though the team still called itself American, because it was technically based in the United States, it was American in name only, and largely operated out of Belgium and Spain.
The Discovery Channel attempted to market the other cyclists on the team as up-and-coming superstars looking to fill Armstrong’s shoes when he retired, and to create suspense around the competition. But the marketing effort was a dud. American fans weren’t interested in Armstrong’s replacement if that replacement wasn’t American; they had been passionate about the Postal team because it was an essentially American team, headed up by an American cyclist—so American that it had counted two US presidents, Bill Clinton and now George W. Bush, among its fans. Bush was such a fan that when a knee injury forced him to give up his jogging routine for a while, he had invited Lance to join him for a mountain bike ride on his Texas ranch.
At the Tour de Georgia in April of that year, the team showcased its newest up-and-comer, American Tom Danielson. The twenty-seven-year-old was known for his physiological gifts—a high VO2 max and an ability to climb amazingly fast. He had joined the team that year, and Armstrong was riding in support of Danielson in the race. Discovery’s biggest competitor was Landis. The rivalry climaxed on the fifth and penultimate stage with a brutal climb up the exceedingly steep Brasstown Bald. Landis was leading the six-day race by one minute. On the final climb, Armstrong played the role of domestique and set a blistering pace, towing a small group of riders behind him. The effort tired out Landis, and Danielson attacked, leaving Landis and Armstrong behind. As Landis lost time to Danielson, Armstrong stayed right on Landis’s wheel, marking his former teammate. At the top of the climb, Armstrong sprinted around Landis and pointed at the big clock above the finish line, which showed Landis had lost the lead and now trailed Danielson by 9 seconds. It was an old-fashioned taunt.
After the race, Armstrong commented to reporters that he helped Danielson out because he was a loyal teammate. Landis got the message. Armstrong was still bitter that Landis had left the team. It confirmed Landis’s opinion of Armstrong: that he was a selfish asshole. Landis had given everything he had to Armstrong in the three years he was on the team. His contract was up, and he left for a better opportunity. Armstrong, he felt, had no reason to treat Landis with any disrespect.
As the Tour de France kicked off in 2005, the race took on a different feel. It didn’t have the suspense of previous races. It felt more like a victory lap for Lance.
In the race’s opening time trial, Armstrong was given the honor of going last—an advantage always extended to the defending champion. By the time he approached the starting gate, the fastest time of the day belonged to another American—shy twenty-six-year-old Dave Zabriskie, now racing for the Danish team CSC (Computer Sciences Corporation).
Zabriskie had bought his first bike after seeing the old 1970s movie Breaking Away. He started out riding a mountain bike in junior high in order to develop muscles in his chicken legs, and at age fifteen, he attended a meeting held by a local cycling club where he met and befriended Steve Johnson (who later went on to become president of USA Cycling). The cycling club’s long, hard training rides of fifty to sixty miles provided Zabriskie with an escape from his difficult home life. His father had a long history of substance abuse, and after watching him deteriorate because of his drug addiction, Zabriskie vowed to himself that he would never take drugs. He saw cycling as a healthy, wholesome hobby that would keep him from following in his father’s footsteps. In 1998, while still an amateur, he was invited to ride with Lance and Kevin Livingston. The ride was an initiation of sorts. Armstrong and his pals had their eyes on Zabriskie. After turning pro, Zabriskie joined the Postal team in 2000, where he remained until the end of the 2004 season. For his entire first year, Zabriskie, whose form was near perfect in time trials, refrained from doping. At hotels, he had seen his teammates and roommates getting injections from team doctors, but he had refused. He didn’t know what these riders were taking, but he was worried that the injections might in fact be a doping product. But in 2002, after having a lackluster season, he began accepting what his teammates called “recovery” injections, which were provided by the team doctors. Eventually, despite his aversion to needles, he began injecting himself. He didn’t really know what was in the syringes; the only ingredients listed on the package, which he read carefully, were vitamins.
In 2003, when Zabriskie was starting to show some real promise, Johan Bruyneel and Garcia del Moral summoned him, and then teammate Michael Barry, to a café in Girona, Spain, where they provided the two young cyclists with injectable liquids—“recovery,” as well as EPO. Zabriskie was shocked. He hadn’t expected this. He questioned them about the health risks of using EPO: Would he be able to have children? Was it safe? Would it cause any physical changes? The cheating aspect was of lesser concern, since it seemed as though the entire peloton was using.
“Everyone is doing it,” Bruyneel told him, adding that if EPO were dangerous, no pro cyclists would be having kids. Zabriskie was terrified. But ultimately he ran out of questions and caved.
Then Bruyneel explained that EPO worked better in combination with testosterone, and he and Garcia del Moral left a box of testosterone patches behind for the two riders to split. Afterward, Zabriskie went home, called his mom, and cried.
Zabriskie’s disillusionment with Bruyneel and the Postal team, and some bad luck with crashes, prompted him to consider giving up the sport. But in October 2004, he signed a two-year contract with CSC, becoming a key support rider for Italian Ivan Basso—one of Lance’s major rivals in the 2005 Tour. While on the CSC team, Zabriskie used testosterone patches and took growth hormone and EPO, but he felt less pressure from CSC team management to use banned substances. In fact, the drugs he used at that time were provided to him by his friend and former Postal teammate, Floyd Landis, who was now riding for Phonak.
The 2005 Tour de France again opened with a prologue time trial, and Zabriskie had posted the best time of the day so far. Armstrong, as the defending champion, went last, and most people assumed that he would beat the time and put on the yellow jersey. But after Armstrong’s final sprint across the finish line, the clock showed that he was 2 seconds behind Zabriskie. For the first time in more than a decade, an American other than Armstrong was wearing the yellow jersey. Armstrong was shocked. Zabriskie held on to the yellow jersey for the next three stages, all of them flat.
The Tour de France had scheduled a team time trial for the fourth day. Team time trials are entertaining spectacles. The riders wear high-tech aerodynamic skinsuits and long, pointy helmets to break the wind, and mount special, space-age bikes that look like human-powered fighter jets. And all the riders on a team stay together, taking turns being at the front of the line, heading into the oncoming winds.
Zabriskie’s team was on track to potentially beat the Discovery Channel team when his bike accidentally touched the wheel of the rider in front of him, causing his front wheel to wobble. Zabriskie fell to the left, smacking into the metal barriers. The two teammates behind him swerved around him, and his team carried on. They were only 0.9 miles from the finish and they were still going for the win. They crossed the finish line 2 seconds behind Discovery. Armstrong was now the race leader. However, it wasn’t the way Armstrong wanted to take the yellow jersey, and he informed Tour organizers that he would refuse to wear it. It’s considered bad form in the Tour to capitalize—at least directly—on another’s misfortune. The Tour de France, though, was trying to capitalize on Armstrong and they wanted him in the yellow jersey. They rejected his gambit and told him that if he didn’t wear the jersey, he would be booted from the race.
Armstrong wore the yellow jersey until the ninth stage, when German Jens Voigt attacked on a mountain stage and gained enough time on him to take it.
By the fifteenth stage, although he hadn’t won any of the individual stages, Armstrong was so comfortably in the overall lead that, in a rare move, he gave other riders on the team a chance to show off their skills. As they rode from Lézat-sur-Lèze to Saint-Lary-Soulan, George Hincapie saw an opportunity to get into an early breakaway. Hincapie clung to the wheel of another rider all the way up the mountain roads to conserve as much energy as possible. As the two men neared the finish line, Hincapie sprinted around the other rider with ease, winning the stage. Hincapie placed his hands atop his head in disbelief and seemed to be close to tears. It was as if he never expected to actually win a stage in the Tour de France, much less a mountain stage. He was known as more of a sprinter—good on the flats, not so good in the mountains. EPO had given him the power to climb. But Hincapie didn’t feel he benefited from an unfair advantage. Any rider he beat probably was also on EPO, he figured. It was an equal playing field. The stage win was huge for his career, and he later thanked Armstrong for giving him the opportunity.
By the time the penultimate stage came around—a 34-mile time trial around the town of Saint-Étienne—Armstrong was so far ahead of everyone else that he could have walked the last mile and still won the Tour de France. But Armstrong felt he had to prove that he was still the fastest man in the race—that it wasn’t just his strong team that was propelling him to his seventh win. Wearing his yellow Nike skinsuit, he darted out of the starting gate and headed on his way. As his smooth, aerodynamic silhouette blazed through the country roads, Armstrong rocked slightly back and forth on his bike, giving it every bit of energy he had. The effort was good enough to beat Ullrich by 23 seconds. It was Armstrong’s only stage win of the race, and it was a sweet one. He led the general classification by 4 minutes, 40 seconds over Italian Ivan Basso.
On the final day of the race, the peloton left the town of Corbeil-Essonnes and took its leisurely time riding toward Paris. Armstrong again lifted a glass of champagne and posed for the cameras before crossing the finish line.
After the race, Armstrong gave a speech. The Tour de France had never before allowed the winner of the race to make remarks from the podium on the Champs-Élysées, and they probably regretted making that exception. Armstrong’s words were bitter, aimed at those who doubted him, like David Walsh. “Finally, the last thing I’ll say to the people who don’t believe in cycling, the cynics and the skeptics: I’m sorry for you. I’m sorry that you can’t dream big. I’m sorry you don’t believe in miracles. But this is one hell of a race. This is a great sporting event and you should stand around and believe it. You should believe in these athletes, and you should believe in these people. . . . And there are no secrets—this is a hard sporting event and hard work wins it. So vive le Tour forever!”
About a week later, those words would seem oddly prescient. It was as if Armstrong had been telegraphing what was about to come—this time courtesy of the French press.
Damien Ressiot, of L’Équipe, had finally figured out a way to identify the anonymous rider who had tested positive for EPO on six urine samples from the 1999 Tour de France. He first contacted Armstrong’s camp and asked them if Armstrong had any medical exemptions relating to his cancer that allowed him to take performance-enhancing drugs. Armstrong, through a spokesman, denied that he had ever taken any drugs using a medical exemption. Ressiot pressed the issue, by asking Armstrong to prove it. Armstrong agreed to give Ressiot permission to go to UCI headquarters in Aigle, Switzerland, to look up his medical forms from the 1999 Tour de France. Those forms contained Armstrong’s rider number—which, just as Ressiot had suspected, matched the number on the six positive samples.
After Ressiot’s story came out in L’Équipe, Armstrong denied the accusation. He called L’Équipe a sleazy French tabloid and he accused the French lab of spiking his samples with EPO and then leaking the results to the press.
Armstrong had many friends in the media, who either largely ignored the story or flat-out defended him.
The New York Daily News ran an article comparing the European and American commentary on the matter. Americans tended to blame the results of the urine tests on some French nationalistic desire to take down Armstrong.
“Because he didn’t show up with a red wine hangover every morning, he was cheating,” said Tucker Carlson on CNN. “I defend the Frogs at every turn, as you know. But this is a case of envy,” he said.
“They don’t mind us when we’re buying their wine or storming German pillboxes. But aside from that, they don’t really care for us,” said Mike Lopresti of USA Today. “They have never been able to accept their sporting jewel being dominated by an American.”
“It doesn’t take a French poodle to sniff out the reasons why the laboratory leaked the results,” wrote Gil LeBreton of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. “The French, by nature, are skeptical of outsiders who come in and do what the French say can’t be done.”
Needless to say, the story didn’t get much traction in the United States. The New York Times ran the to-the-point headline, A TOP U.S. CYCLING GROUP IS STANDING BY ARMSTRONG.
The six positive tests, though, didn’t help Armstrong’s ongoing case against SCA Promotions, which was still refusing to pay his $5 million in bonuses. Armstrong’s lawyers had supplied SCA with paperwork that said he had undergone the proper drug testing. He had followed the rules. He deserved his bonus. End of story.
At an early procedural meeting in a downtown Dallas courtroom, both sides had agreed to have the case settled by an out-of-court arbitration panel. While the arbitration hearing was supposed to remain confidential, Armstrong and his advisers knew there was no way the case could be kept quiet. Perhaps it would be better for Armstrong’s image to let it go. But that would mean giving up $5 million, and Armstrong was quite serious about getting that money.
Bob Hamman was aggressively pursuing every possible lead in his investigation. He first called Betsy Andreu in the fall of 2004. Hamman was serious over the phone, speaking in his deep, deliberate, almost guttural voice. Betsy was hesitant at first, but eventually grew to trust Hamman. Betsy’s father owned a jewelry store in Detroit, and she sympathized with Hamman as a small business owner who, she felt, got screwed by Armstrong. The two began to talk often. Betsy would pass on any rumor or story she heard about Armstrong, and Hamman would try to chase it down. Hamman had a nickname for Betsy: Captain Ahab. “Captain Ahab, it’s nice to hear your smiling voice, kid,” he would say over the phone. “Have you found anything new? Anyone else who could tell the truth?”
In one conversation, Betsy brought up another potential witness: Stephanie McIlvain.
Andreu had persuaded McIlvain to speak with David Walsh and she became a significant source for Walsh’s book and his reporting. McIlvain also spoke to ESPN, confirming the hospital room incident.
For McIlvain, it was one thing to tell David Walsh and ESPN about the hospital room scene. They protected her name and she felt comfortable that nobody would ever find out she was the source. It was another thing entirely to get involved in a lawsuit where she might have to testify on the record. McIlvain and her husband, Pat, still worked for Oakley, which still sponsored Armstrong. When Betsy called Stephanie and asked her to speak with Hamman, she balked. Eventually, SCA subpoenaed McIlvain to testify. She notified executives at Oakley, including its billionaire founder, Jim Jannard, of the subpoena.
Just days before Frankie’s scheduled deposition, he received a phone call from Lance, telling him that Craig Nichols, his primary oncologist at the hospital in Indianapolis where he had been treated for cancer, was going to sign an affidavit saying that his hospital confession never happened. Lance didn’t make any threats against Frankie, except to suggest that any testimony would be meaningless compared with a doctor’s affidavit. But Betsy felt the call was an attempt to intimidate him—that the unspoken message was: I’m watching you. I’m in control.
In October 2005, Betsy showed up alone for her deposition, which was held in a conference room in a nondescript hotel in Romulus, near Detroit. Two surprise visitors walked in: Lance and Bart Knaggs. Betsy freaked out. “Oh my God! Oh my God! Oh my God!” she kept saying in a quiet whisper. But she went on to recount the hospital room scene—including Lance’s admissions and her subsequent dramatic threat to break off her engagement to Frankie—while Lance sat on the opposite side of the conference table, alternately staring at her and looking down at his cell phone to send frequent texts.
Once Betsy finished her testimony, Lance and Knaggs left the room and headed to a small airport, boarding a private jet to New York, where Lance joined Sheryl to tape an appearance on Saturday Night Live. Lance was included in a skit in which he fended off a fake Frenchman who demanded a urine sample and screamed, “It’s our race. Stop winning it! J’accuse!”
Betsy got a call from Stephanie McIlvain, who was upset. Stephanie said her husband had been called into a meeting by an Oakley executive. If Stephanie testified about the hospital room scene, the executive said, she and her husband would lose their jobs at Oakley.
Frankie and Betsy were devastated. They had been counting on at least one other person to back them up. Now they’d be exposed, isolated. It would be easy for Armstrong to discredit them as disgruntled crazies.
A few weeks later, Lance showed up at the downtown Austin office of his lawyer, Tim Herman, for his own deposition, dressed casually in a shirt with the cuffs left unbuttoned. He was ornery and difficult that day, and everything Jeff Tillotson asked him left him in a state of high agitation.
When Tillotson asked Armstrong if he thought Frankie, his old friend, was lying about the hospital room, Armstrong responded, “One hundred percent. But I feel for him.”
“What do you mean by that?” Tillotson asked.
“Well, I think he’s trying to back up his old lady,” Armstrong said.
Armstrong said the hospital room scene never happened. “How could it have taken place when I’ve never taken performance-enhancing drugs?” he said.
“Okay,” Tillotson said.
“How could that have happened?” Armstrong asked again.
“That was my point. You’re not—it’s not simply, you don’t recall. Just—”
“How many times do I have to say it?!” Armstrong asked.
“I’m just trying to make sure your testimony is clear,” Tillotson shot back.
“Well, if it can’t be any clearer than ‘I’ve never taken drugs,’ then incidents like that could never have happened,” he said. “How clear is that?”
In fact, Lance seemed so genuinely infuriated at being asked questions about his use of performance-enhancing drugs that Tillotson began to question the case. Is he pathological? Or could it be that we have it wrong?
Armstrong said he would never dope, never take a banned substance, never reinfuse his own blood—and it was preposterous to suggest otherwise. Outraged by the suggestion that he was a doper, he provided a touching rationale for why he had remained clean:
Doping would destroy the hopes of millions of his American fans. It “would all go away,” Armstrong said. The “faith of all of the cancer survivors around the world. So everything I do off the bike would go away, too. And don’t think for a second that I don’t understand that. It’s not about money for me. Everything. It’s also about the faith that people have put in me over the years. So all of that would be erased. So I don’t need it to say in a contract, you’re fired if you test positive. That’s not as important as losing the support of hundreds of millions of people.”
Despite Armstrong’s denials, the testimony in the SCA arbitration did seem damning. Frankie and Betsy Andreu had both sworn under oath that they witnessed Armstrong telling his doctors in Indiana that he had used human growth hormone, EPO, testosterone, steroids, and cortisone. Stephen Swart, his former Motorola teammate, said in a videotaped deposition that Armstrong was the instigator in the team’s EPO use. Kathy LeMond, Greg’s wife, said she attended a dinner party in France at which Armstrong’s mechanic, Julien de Vriese told her Armstrong had paid $500,000 to get out of a positive drug test. De Vriese guessed the money must have come from Nike. And of course the recent story in L’Équipe was another powerful indicator that Armstrong had been doping at least as far back as 1999.
As the arbitration hearings entered the final phase, in January 2006, Lance’s lawyers cited material from Dr. Edward F. Coyle’s article in the Journal of Applied Physiology, extolling Armstrong’s extraordinary physical gifts, to explain how he had been able to make such a spectacular comeback from cancer and go on to have such a remarkable string of successes. And they showed the arbitrators the 2005 Discovery Channel documentary The Science of Lance Armstrong, which also went into detail about Lance’s superhuman physiology.
On a later day during those January hearings, Lance was called to give testimony. Speaking before a panel of three lawyers who were serving as arbitrators, Lance displayed a demeanor dramatically different from his behavior during the deposition in his lawyer’s office in Austin. He was polite, even charming. When cross-examined about some pills he was alleged to have shown Frankie Andreu, Lance demurred, “I have to confess—if you want a confession—I’m a little bit of a coffee fiend,” and asserted that what Andreu had seen were caffeine pills (which at the time were allowed at low doses).
Lance also cited the book Lance Armstrong’s War, which Dan Coyle wrote after spending the 2004 season in Girona, Spain, with Armstrong, Hincapie, and Landis. “As you can see from that book, for a bunch of people that are trying to hide [something], there really wasn’t a lot of hiding going on,” Lance asserted.
To prove that Lance had been tested for drugs and found to be clean, his lawyers also submitted a 2005 affidavit from Travis Tygart, then the general counsel of the US Anti-Doping Agency, stating that Lance had taken part in USADA’s testing program and was under its jurisdiction. What the panel didn’t hear was that the two men had never met in person, though in 2004, Tygart had heard from Bill Stapleton, who offered the agency a donation of $250,000. Tygart had rejected the funds, saying that the agency’s ethics policy prohibited it from taking gifts from people it might be testing in the future.
For its part, in addition to the depositions, SCA included testimony from an Australian scientist named Michael Ashenden, who questioned the validity of the science behind Edward Coyle’s study. Ashenden who, like Coyle, was a paid consultant, said he didn’t buy Coyle’s conclusions. “There’s inconsistencies there which, to my mind, make me question the validity of it,” he said. “I still haven’t seen any data that suggests there was an improvement in efficiency and, therefore, as a scientist, I couldn’t take that as an explanation,” he said. In part because of pressure from Ashenden, Coyle would later be forced to write a letter admitting errors in his math.
Ashenden noted several other inconsistencies in the myth of Armstrong versus the reality. Armstrong’s oxygen uptake—the sheer rate at which his body is able to use oxygen—was only mediocre compared to many other top-level endurance athletes. “It struck me that, gee, that’s lower than what I would have expected,” he said.
Ashenden pointed out that Armstrong’s body weight was about the same before and after cancer. “Something that I’d always read about Armstrong is his explanation for this improvement in performance is that during the cancer, he remodeled his body,” Ashenden said. “I was given a pretty brief opportunity to review his medical records,” he said. “I can’t see where he lost his body weight and when, and none of the data that I’ve seen would make me think any different. He’s virtually the same weight.” Ashenden said Coyle’s slide showing Armstrong to be a one-in-a-billion human being was “baseless. There was no scientific rationale for the conclusions that he reached.”
Powerful as its case might have seemed, SCA’s legal position was flawed. Even if the evidence against Armstrong showed overwhelmingly that he had doped, he had not been stripped of his titles. Unless the UCI, the sport’s official governing body, concluded that Armstrong doped, SCA was unlikely to win its case, regardless of the evidence.
Making things more problematic for SCA was a ruling by the arbitration panel that said the company should be treated as a traditional insurance company. Under Texas law, that meant that if SCA lost the case, it would be liable for triple damages. Facing the possibility of financial catastrophe, in February 2006, Bob Hamman decided to drop the case, despite the fact that he still believed in its validity. Opting to settle, SCA was required to pay $7 million, the amount of the contested bonus plus legal expenses—the most Armstrong and Tailwind could’ve gotten from SCA without bankrupting it.
Lance had won, leaving Hamman furious.
The SCA case was but one of many lawsuits Tim Herman and other members of Armstrong’s legal team were handling on his behalf, and it wasn’t the only one in which they were successful. For example, the suit they had filed against The Sunday Times for an article based on David Walsh and Pierre Ballester’s book, L.A. Confidentiel, resulted in the paper making a £300,000 settlement offer after the High Court ruled that the article had wrongly left readers with the impression that Lance was a fraud, a cheat, and a liar.
Lance’s lawsuit didn’t stop Walsh from working on a new book incorporating additional evidence of Lance’s doping, including the material about his positive EPO tests during the 1999 Tour de France. But it seemed as though Lance was going to get away with that, too, thanks to UCI president Hein Verbruggen. Within weeks of the appearance of Damien Ressiot’s story about the EPO tests, UCI announced it was hiring an independent inspector—the lawyer Emile Vrijman, who happened to be a friend of Verbruggen’s—to look into the accusations in L’Équipe. When Vrijman’s report finally came out in June 2006, it ignored the overwhelming evidence of doping by Armstrong and instead focused mainly on how the lab hadn’t followed the rules when it retested old samples. It did not actually refute the claims by the French journalist. It merely said the samples couldn’t be used for an “official” positive.
Most newspapers reported that Armstrong had been exonerated. “Report clears Armstrong of doping in 1999 Tour de France,” the Associated Press said. Lance “got a boost yesterday toward clearing his name of doping allegations connected with his triumph in the 1999 Tour de France,” reported The New York Times. “Vrijman stated that there was no proof that Armstrong had used EPO,” the article said, citing the independent report. Armstrong’s chief mythologists must have been breathing huge sighs of relief.
Despite all the serious allegations being leveled at Armstrong, nothing was having an effect on his marketability or on his reputation. Lance was on top of the world, at the height of his fame, and the money was rolling in. He still had hugely lucrative endorsement deals with Nike and Oakley and many others. He continued to serve on the White House cancer panel. He was jet-setting around the globe, meeting with world leaders to talk about cancer awareness.
In cycling circles, Armstrong’s name was beginning to be sullied. On cycling message boards, anonymous posters debated the possibility that Lance had raced clean. But the debate was confined largely to those forums. The mainstream press had moved on.
Lance meanwhile had embarked on a new Casanova phase of his life. In February 2006, he and Sheryl Crow called off their engagement. She had put her career on hold for a while to support his bid for global cycling supremacy, joining him on the podium after his seventh Tour victory, and once he retired and she went back to singing, he had joined her at her concerts and TV appearances. But Lance said he didn’t want more children; she did (and adopted a baby boy about fifteen months later).
In early 2006, SCA’s Jeff Tillotson and his wife went to a football game in Austin, where he saw Lance seated on the sidelines with a brunette beauty. Tillotson snapped a photo of Lance and his date and sent it over to Lance’s lawyer, Sean Breen. The two had developed a cordial relationship during the course of the hearings, despite their being on opposite sides of the case. Breen, who is Tim Herman’s partner, replied a day later by sending Tillotson a link to a Penthouse magazine centerfold photo of the woman in question. He also told Tillotson via e-mail that things were now “so over” between Lance and Sheryl.
• • •
With Armstrong out of professional cycling, the Tour de France was wide open for the taking. And Floyd Landis believed he had a shot, all but his last. He had been through three hip surgeries, and doctors were telling him that, at the end of the season, he would need to have a complete hip replacement. Landis could barely walk. The only physical activity he could do, actually, was ride a bike. Of course he’d been doing that with the help of doping, and he would need to keep doping if he were to have a chance of winning the Tour. But doping had become increasingly problematic for him, as the Phonak team had no organized system for it. This meant he had had to make his own arrangements, and they hadn’t always worked out so well. Midway through the stages of the 2005 Tour, for example, he’d had a near fatal catastrophe involving a transfusion. After an elaborately choreographed top secret delivery of blood, Landis connected the bag to a coat hanger in his hotel room, and inserted a needle. The next day, a rest day, Landis began to feel strange. He had trouble breathing, felt dizzy, and his entire body was in intense pain. Landis was secretly rushed to the hospital, where he was treated for serious complications stemming from the transfusion. Nobody ever found out about his brush with death, and he was back in time for the beginning of the next stage. Landis never found out what happened. Did he get someone else’s blood? Was the blood tainted in some way? Landis felt he was lucky just to be alive.
Understandably concerned about avoiding such incidents in the future, Landis met with the owner of Phonak, Andy Rihs, prior to the 2006 season, to talk about his Tour de France aspirations—and what he felt he needed in order to fulfill them. Rihs is a boisterous, overweight business mogul and one of the richest men in Switzerland. In the meeting, Landis told Rihs that he believed he could win the Tour de France. But to help him do it, he wanted the team to operate more like the US Postal team—by which he meant that it should have an organized doping program. During the previous season, Landis had arranged for all of his own doping, but it was too stressful, too time consuming, and too expensive. He couldn’t keep doing it alone, and he couldn’t afford it. He asked Rihs if he would fund a doping program for Phonak. Rihs agreed. By asking Rihs to bring the doping in-house, Landis may have dodged a bullet. He had been thinking about hiring Eufemiano Fuentes, who operated a blood-doping clinic in Madrid. That June, Fuentes became the center of the biggest doping scandal since the Festina affair. His clinic, which he ran out of an apartment in an upscale residential building, was raided by Spanish police in what became known as Operación Puerto. Dr. Fuentes was caught with an apartment full of blood plasma belonging to half of the professional peloton in Europe. Many of the cyclists had used code names on their blood bags, but they weren’t exactly mastermind criminals, and the names they had come up with were often easy for the investigators to decipher—sometimes by simply reading their blogs. Other riders used the names of their pets. The probe nabbed two of the biggest stars in professional cycling: Jan Ullrich and Ivan Basso. Also discovered was a fax sent by Fuentes to Haven Parchinski, the maiden name of Tyler Hamilton’s wife, listing how much Hamilton had paid and still owed Fuentes for his treatments.
Puerto’s aftermath, which brought a temporary halt to the careers of many of cycling’s greatest athletes, meant Landis’s chances of winning the Tour de France had improved significantly. Some cycling fans now considered him the overall favorite.
To stateside fans, Floyd Landis was still relatively unknown. It wasn’t until late June 2006, just a few weeks before the Tour, that any of the American media began to pay much attention to him, when The New York Times Magazine ran a long piece, authored by Daniel Coyle, centered around his upcoming hip surgery. But even in a piece that was ostensibly about Landis, the underlying story was about whether another American would be able to fill Armstrong’s shoes. It described Landis as “one of America’s hopefuls in the race now that Lance Armstrong has retired from the sport.” The article made little mention of the news of the massive doping scandal—Operation Puerto—that had just broken in Europe.
Landis’s Tour de France effort began disastrously. In the opening time trial, when it was his turn to go, he wasn’t there. The clock ticked down. Beep, beep, beeeeeeep! No Landis. Suddenly, he appeared, running frantically to the starting gate with his bike. He’d gotten a flat just as his turn was coming up, and he was still changing the tire when the clock chimed. Under the Tour de France rules, there are no exceptions during time trials. So Landis would be docked precious seconds from his total time.
Landis was able to redeem himself on the second time trial of the race, where he finished second, and secured a spot near the top of the standings. On stage 11, the race finally hit the mountains, and Landis found himself at the front of a small pack of riders. Top climber Michael Rasmussen put in a hard attack on the final ascent in an attempt to help his Rabobank teammate, Denis Menchov. Landis clung to Rasmussen’s wheel. With him was Levi Leipheimer, the former Postal team member, now racing for the German-based Gerolsteiner team. By the time they were approaching the summit, it was only Landis, Menchov, and Leipheimer. Landis knew all he had to do was stick to Menchov’s wheel. He didn’t care about a stage win. Just time. But his performance was strong enough that he won the stage anyway.
When Landis donned the yellow jersey at the top of the mountain pass, Armstrong was nearby, watching as a spectator and as part owner of the Discovery Channel team. Later that day, during the Phonak team dinner, one of the Phonak riders gave Landis some disturbing information. Armstrong had offered $20,000 to any rider who could ensure that Landis would not win the Tour de France. Landis didn’t know whether Armstrong had made the offer to intimidate him or mess with his head, or if he was actually taking out the cycling equivalent of a “hit” on him. He decided to keep the news within the small circle of riders at the dinner table, instead of reporting the incident to the UCI or going to the press.
During the next few days, Landis went in and out of the lead, alternating with Spaniard Óscar Pereiro. On stage 13, Landis fell behind and missed the winning breakaway. He was now 1 minute, 29 seconds behind Pereiro. But on stage 15, Landis regained the lead and the yellow jersey. He looked as if he might maintain the lead all the way to Paris.
Stage 16 was a grueling day in the mountains that included four climbs over a 113-mile course. With an average grade of 6 percent, the final climb of the day, La Toussuire, was not particularly steep, but at 11.43 miles, it was long. Landis began the climb well, keeping up with all the other top riders. But something wasn’t right with him. He felt flat. As the climb began, Pereiro and the other riders pulled out ahead. Spaniard Carlos Sastre attacked, getting out of the saddle and challenging the group to a mountain duel. Landis fell behind immediately. Landis looked like he was in pain, and was “cracking,” as they say in cycling. By the end of the day, his Tour de France hopes seemed to be over. Having lost a whopping 10 minutes of time, he was now 8 minutes behind race leader Pereiro.
When Landis went back to the team hotel, his hip was killing him and he considered abandoning the race. Severely depressed over the day’s performance, he was sure his next surgery would dash any future hope of winning the biggest race on the planet. That night he did something few had done during the Tour de France since the 1930s, when alcohol was viewed as the best way to ease the pain of bike racing: He downed a couple of shots of whiskey and a beer. He felt he deserved it. Besides, what was the point of abstinence? Calmed by his “meds,” Landis decided to stay in the race. And he decided to try something crazy.
Stage 17 went from Saint-Jean-de-Maurienne to Morzine. It included five climbs over 123 miles. As always, it was assumed that the race leaders would stay together until the final climb, where they would race all-out to the summit finish. On the first climb, less than two hours into the five and a half hour day, Landis took off and attacked. The other riders in the pack looked at each other, perplexed. Landis had no teammates with him. He was all alone. It looked as if Landis, dejected from the previous day’s performance, was going out on a suicide mission—but giving up in style. As he pedaled in front of the pack, his lead grew. One minute, two minutes, five minutes.
Then, he was more than 8 minutes ahead of the pack, which included Pereiro. This wasn’t necessarily good, because at some point the pack riders, who could hear in their radios how far up the road Landis was getting, were going to start organizing themselves to chase him down.
Since Pereiro was wearing the yellow jersey and had the most to lose, he was expected to organize the chase. But on this hot summer day, there was confusion in the peloton. Pereiro’s team was relatively weak, and wanted riders from other teams to aid in the chase. But they all refused. Their message: You don’t want to lead the chase? Fine, then don’t. But you’ll lose the yellow jersey.
The in-fighting delayed the pursuit of Landis long enough that as the final climb approached, he was so far ahead that he actually had a chance to come back into the race lead. However, as he began to pedal up the Col de Joux Plane, his lead shrunk rapidly. It was 8 minutes, then 7 minutes and 30 seconds, then 7 at the top of the climb.
Landis still had to descend from the top of the Joux Plane into the town of Morzine. He tucked himself into an aero position and took every risk possible on the downhill to regain as much time as he could. As he crossed the finish line, he pumped his fist in the air. And then he waited as the clock ticked down. By the time Pereiro crossed the line, his lead over Landis had diminished from over 8 minutes to 31 seconds. Landis was in third place, and by all calculations, he would be able to regain the lead during the final time trial.
Two days later, Landis donned his skinsuit and aerodynamic bike for the final time trial. This time, he didn’t get a flat tire at the start, and beat Pereiro handily, taking the yellow jersey with a lead of 59 seconds.
On the final day, on the ride into Paris, it was Landis’s turn to sip champagne and pose for the cameras—his turn to take a victory lap around the Champs-Élysées.
As Landis stood on the winner’s podium, he was truly happy. Not so much because he wanted to be a hero, or famous, but because the win meant money. His bills, his mortgage, his cars, his Harley-Davidson, would all be paid off now. With the endorsement money that was sure to follow his victory, he could support his family in style and comfort. The glory of it all was secondary.
The giddy feeling lasted only a few days. Floyd was in Holland to participate in a criterium race when he got the devastating call. His urine sample after the seventeenth stage of the Tour de France had registered abnormally high for testosterone. He was on the verge of being given a positive test and being stripped of his title.
Landis discussed his predicament with the team owner, Andy Rihs, and with Jim Ochowicz, who was still consulting for Phonak. Before they even had time to come up with a plan, news of the test had already been leaked to the press. It was too late.
A day after the news came out, Landis held a press conference in Spain. He showed up unprepared, not sure what he should say. When asked whether he had used banned substances, he hesitated and finally answered: “I’ll say no.”
The answer was a red flag—a bombshell of an answer that almost counted as an admission. Fifteen minutes after the press conference, Landis’s phone rang. It was Armstrong calling with some advice. “Look . . . when people ask you . . . did you ever use performance-enhancing drugs, you need to say absolutely not.” Landis agreed. He would steadfastly deny doping from that point forward.
Landis flew back to the United States and tried to figure out what to do next. He spoke with a number of confidants. For a while, he stayed in the Manhattan home of Doug Ellis, a wealthy and successful financial industry software engineer who was considering starting a cycling team. At Ellis’s suggestion, Floyd met with Jonathan Vaughters, who was now team director for a semipro cycling team. Vaughters saw no easy way out of it, though. He knew that the anti-doping machinery had become too powerful. Landis would never make it through. Floyd’s best option, Vaughters suggested, was to admit everything. To lay everything on the table, even if that meant blowing up the sport. If he did that, Vaughters said, the story would become about cycling, and not about Floyd. It would lift an enormous weight off of Floyd’s shoulders. If he fought, as Hamilton had, he would lose, and discredit and bankrupt himself.
Vaughters of course had his own secrets, and knew all about the weight of carrying them. Having lied to his friends and family about doping for years, he was dying to disclose the truth about his own doping. But the closest he had come to doing so was to allow the New York Times reporter Juliet Macur to quote him anonymously in a story she had written about Frankie Andreu. In the story, she reported that both Andreu and an unnamed rider had admitted using EPO, but that neither had seen Armstrong do so. In fact, Vaughters had told Macur that he would not answer that particular question—which he thought was a clear way of saying, “Yes, I saw Armstrong dope. I’m not going to deny it, but I’m not going to confirm it, either.”
Landis began to seriously consider coming clean. But when he spoke again with Armstrong as well as other people in the cycling industry, they all advised him to fight the charges. He couldn’t admit to doping, they said, because a revelation could expose the entire team as well as its support staffers. Landis still hoped to get back into the sport, and bombshell allegations would eliminate that possibility.
About a month after Landis’s positive test, his father-in-law and best friend, David Witt, committed suicide, shooting himself in the head. The co-owner of a local restaurant and an avid bodybuilder, Witt had become one of Landis’s drug suppliers. Witt got prescriptions in his own name for the drugs Landis needed—including testosterone and human growth hormone. Though Witt had long suffered from depression, Landis was certain his own disgrace had at least contributed to Witt’s suicide.
Landis was devastated and depressed. It felt as if his life were in the middle of a massive mudslide, wiping away everything in its path.
Anguished and desperate, Landis again reached out to Jim Ochowicz. He figured Ochowicz was one of the few people who would understand the situation he was in and be able to advise him about what to do. Ochowicz had been there in St. Moritz when Landis and Armstrong were training with Michele Ferrari. And Ochowicz knew everything there was to know about the cycling world. Not only was he still the president of USA Cycling, and still an employee of Thom Weisel’s, but he knew all the key players, including of course Lance Armstrong, with whom he was close.
When Landis called, Ochowicz was staying in the Hollywood home of Sheryl Crow. She was a good friend, and had remained so even after she and Armstrong split up. Ochowicz invited Landis to come and talk. Landis drove his Harley-Davidson up from Temecula. Crow brought the two men drinks and sandwiches, then left the house about ten minutes later. As they sat on her veranda overlooking downtown L.A., Landis said, “Listen, you know what’s going on in cycling. You and I both know about the doping programs on every team you’ve ever run, certainly the US Postal team.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Ochowicz responded.
“I can’t fight it anymore,” Landis said. “I don’t want to be broke and feel guilty, and that’s what’s about to happen. I don’t mind being broke, but I’m not going to feel shitty anymore,” he said. “My two choices here are either fight this or just admit to it and clear my conscience. I’ll tell you what I’m not going to do. I’m not going to take the fall for this sport and walk away and just get beaten up the rest of my life. At the very least, I’m going to clear my conscience.”
Ochowicz gave Landis some firm advice: He should say nothing. Nobody would believe him anyway. The allegations would drag down the entire sport and ruin not only his career but the careers of others. The only option was to fight the charges in every way he could, Ochowicz said. Floyd didn’t explicitly ask Ochowicz for money, but it was clear that was what Floyd needed if he were to continue his denials. “Look, I need some support,” Landis pleaded.
“Let me make some phone calls and I’ll let you know,” Ochowicz said.
A few days later, Landis got a call from Bill Stapleton, who demanded to know why Floyd had asked Ochowicz for money. Floyd explained that he was short on cash and could use some help. Over and over, Stapleton kept asking him, “Why should we help you out?” Landis felt that Stapleton was trying to goad him into threatening them with extortion if they didn’t give him money.
Despite Stapleton’s call, Armstrong did arrange to help Floyd. Not directly—Armstrong couldn’t risk the association—but he connected Landis to some of his own wealthy backers, like Thom Weisel and John Bucksbaum. Tiger Williams, whom Landis already knew, also helped out.
If Landis stayed quiet about the doping, there was an enticing carrot: money to help him fight the US Anti-Doping Agency.
But if he came clean in order to clear his conscience, he knew there was a giant stick: the wrath of Armstrong. Lance, Stapleton, and their powerful friends would try to discredit and destroy him.