In February 2012, Lance joined some of the world’s fastest and most masochistic athletes, including several Olympians, for a triathlon in Central America. Donning goggles and a bright yellow swim cap, he freestyled 1.2 miles in a strong current on the banks of the Panama Canal. After getting caught in a pack behind American Matty Reed, a 2008 Olympian, he managed tenth place in the swim, in 19 minutes and 22 seconds. Peeling off his black swimskin, he then biked fifty-six miles through the jungle and rain forest on his new Trek Speed Concept, wearing a tight, black custom-made Nike triathlon suit. Unsure of how to pace himself, he came in second on the bike course. Next he ran 13.1 miles on a sunbaked oceanside causeway. After just a few miles, he picked up his pace, flying past pro Chris Lieto to take the lead. For most of the run, it seemed Lance might win. But around the ninth mile, his pace slowed, and in the final mile, an Olympic triathlon bronze and silver medalist overtook him. New Zealander Bevan Docherty crossed the finish line in 3 hours, 50 minutes, and 13 seconds—42 seconds ahead of Lance, who was runner-up. Not too shabby for his first professional triathlon since his retirement from cycling.
Triathlons, Lance figured, would now be his calling—his future livelihood and the source of renewed athletic glory. He felt he was on his way to proving to the world that he was not just the best cyclist of all time but a badass swimmer and runner, too. Lance vowed to himself that he would lose a little weight and work on his stride. He also changed his diet, going vegan for breakfast and lunch. That spring, he entered five middle-distance events, showing up for them with his posse of coaches and handlers, his own personal photographer, and sometimes his girlfriend, Anna, and his kids in tow. Fans mobbed him at the finish lines. His popularity, he gloated to himself, must be driving Novitzky nuts.
In May, he traveled to the small town of Haines City, in the heart of central Florida. Competing against two thousand other participants, he came out of the swim in Lake Eva in fifth place. Then he biked through rural Polk County, easily passing the top four competitors, before running laps at Lake Eva Park. He won, beating his nearest competitor, a Ukrainian pro, by 11 minutes.
Two weeks later, he competed against a field of triathlon veterans in Kailua-Kona, Hawaii—considered the spiritual home of the sport and Lance’s new favorite retreat. He completed the entire event in just 3 hours, 50 minutes, and 55 seconds overall, breaking the course record by nearly 7 minutes.
The next goal: to win the Ironman World Championship, the culminating event in the season’s series of Ironman competitions, to be held in Kailua-Kona that October, when he would be forty-one years old. It begins with a 2.4-mile swim, followed by a 112-mile bike leg and then a 26.2-mile run—double the distances of any of the run-bike-swim events in which Lance had competed to date. His cancer foundation had formed a partnership with the World Triathlon Corporation, a privately held company that owns all the Ironman events. Their deal would raise more than $1 million for the foundation, which would bring hefty financial benefits for Lance, too. He would score payments ranging from $3,000 to $120,000 for every event he won. Even more important, the world championship would bring him an entirely new fan base, making him attractive to sponsors, especially because the Ironman has the most desirable demographic in sports, drawing a disproportionate share of wealthy entrepreneurs, CEOs, doctors, and lawyers—just the kind of sports enthusiasts who happily spend thousands of dollars on high-end athletic gear, equipment, and training. Still solidly behind Lance as he planned for the Ironman, Nike provided him with a series of custom-made triathlon suits in gray and black, with LIVESTRONG down the front and yellow Nike swooshes. Because of Lance’s participation, NBC made plans to broadcast two hours of the championships, up from the usual ninety minutes. It would show the event on the airwaves in October instead of December, as it had in the past.
Lance had been a part-time resident in Kukio, Hawaii, with its golf and beach club surrounded by white sands and lava rock, since 2008. Once he went into training for the Ironman, he and Anna and their young kids relocated to a friend’s luxury private home in Kona. He planned to spend at least six weeks of 2012 there, arranging to have his older kids—Luke, Isabelle, and Grace—flown in from Austin on his Gulfstream, during their spring breaks.
To train, Lance rode over the Kohala volcano into the Pololu Valley, with its black sand beach, and alongside the Queen Ka’ahumanu Highway, the stretch of road that comprises a key part of the Hawaiian Ironman, sometimes passing his triathlon rival, the pro Chris Lieto, or his friend Michael Dell, the founder and CEO of Dell Inc., on their bikes. Lance swam in Kailua Bay, an inlet on the west coast of the Big Island of Hawaii, with his coach, Jimmy Riccitello, nearby on a stand-up paddleboard. He also became a member of the Kona Masters elite swimming team, adding pool workouts at the Kona Community Aquatic Center of between 2,000 and 3,000 yards three days a week.
For Lance to earn one of the 1,700 slots in the Kona championships, he would have to participate in one of the 140.6-mile qualifying events. He selected the France Ironman to be held in Nice in June. Wanting to familiarize himself with the course beforehand, he flew to Kortrijk, Belgium, on his Gulfstream jet in April, met up with Johan Bruyneel, who was then the manager of the RadioShack-Nissan team, and they both headed south to Nice. The France Ironman course took Lance through seventeen towns and into the mountains near the French Riviera, while Johan rode in a follow car beside him.
Now that the US attorney in Los Angeles had dropped the criminal fraud investigation against Armstrong, life returned to the Lance version of normal. He rented a villa in Cap-d’Ail for the month of April and returned to the States briefly in May, to deliver a keynote speech at a corporate event and to train and compete in Half Ironmans in the States.
However, the legal battles were far from over. Lawyers with the Justice Department’s Civil Division in Washington, DC, were still considering whether to join Floyd Landis’s whistle-blower lawsuit. One of those lawyers was Robert Chandler, from the department’s Commercial Litigation Branch, who had worked closely with the US Postal Service Office of Inspector General in connection with the civil case for at least a year. In June 2011, the USPS OIG had issued Lance a subpoena, asking him to provide, among other things, a long list of records related to his business relationship with Tailwind Sports and Capital Sports & Entertainment from the mid-1990s to 2004, when the USPS sponsored Lance’s cycling teams. The subpoena also requested Lance’s correspondence with Michele Ferrari, and with any employees of the US Anti-Doping Agency, the World Anti-Doping Agency, testing laboratories, the USPS, and “any person (including any companies or other organizations) that at any time manufactured or distributed any substance believed to have the potential to enhance an athlete’s ability to compete in endurance sports.” On top of all that, it also sought Lance’s training journals and medical records, including hematocrit and hormone levels, and any financial records reflecting payments to Ferrari, the UCI, USA Cycling, WADA or USADA, and any USPS employees, including fellow riders.
But Lance still hadn’t answered the government’s request for documents. His lawyers sought—unsuccessfully—to quash the subpoena, and then later tried to sidestep it, arguing that complying with the subpoena during the criminal investigation would have violated Lance’s Fifth Amendment rights against self-incrimination. In mid-2012, nearly a year later—and several months after the threat of criminal investigation ended—Lance’s lawyers now fought vigorously to keep the court record from public view. If the public found out that Lance had intended to assert his Fifth Amendment rights, well, that in itself would damage Lance’s reputation, his lawyers asserted.
Thom Weisel had received a similar subpoena, and on the advice of his lawyer at Sullivan & Cromwell, he had complied, providing documents, including evidence that Weisel had lost a significant amount of money on his backing of the team. Weisel’s lawyers said he hadn’t known about any doping by Lance or others on the team.
Johan Bruyneel was subpoenaed when he flew back to San Francisco in mid-May for the start of the Amgen Tour of California, in which RadioShack-Nissan was competing. He was served at the airport, and later met with federal investigators, providing a videotaped deposition. What he said during the taped deposition hasn’t been made public so far.
While he was a pro cyclist, Lance had developed a lucrative side business of hosting so-called once-in-a-lifetime Ride with Lance experiences. Small groups of fifteen to fifty people paid $5,000 to $20,000 apiece for the privilege of working out with Lance for an hour or a morning, with all proceeds going to various charities, or so many participants thought. Some donors who neglected to read the fine print were angry when they learned that Lance himself was pocketing some of the money in the form of appearance fees, and collecting anywhere from $75,000 to $400,000. And now, Lance agreed to spend Memorial Day weekend hosting Swim Bike Run with Lance & Friends, a training camp to be held at a Kona resort hotel whose golf course was situated on the running leg of the Ironman course. Up to fifty participants would pay $25,000, not including the cost of getting to Hawaii, with the proceeds going to a juvenile diabetes charity in Hawaii. Uniforms emblazoned with the name Mellow Johnny’s were to be courtesy of his shop in Austin. Lance was to be paid handsomely to participate in the weekend event, which also advertised Ironman stars Dave Scott and Chrissie Wellington, both new friends of Lance’s, as guest coaches.
Other events were in the works, too. The Lance Armstrong Foundation began crafting a plan to take bids on eBay for the Ultimate Kona Ironman Experience with Lance Armstrong, to be held during the world championships in October. The package included a coveted spot in the race, five nights in a hotel, and a chance to go on a training ride, swim, or run, and dinner, with Lance. Bidding would start at $40,000.
Anheuser-Busch, which used Lance to promote its Michelob Ultra line, meanwhile began planning a sweepstakes that it would advertise in two-page spreads in Sports Illustrated and Runner’s World magazines. Entrants had the chance to win a $19,000 package highlighted by a trip to Kona to “hike, kayak or even take a ride” with Lance at some point between October 13 and 18. The tagline for the campaign seemed intended to taunt Jeff Novitzky: “Ultra invites you to catch Lance . . . if you can.”
The organizers of the Kona training camp ended up canceling it, however, blaming low enrollment of fewer than twenty people due to too many overlapping events occurring during and around the Memorial Day weekend. That may have been disappointing, but Lance’s long-range plans were about to encounter a much more serious obstacle, in the form of a roadblock thrown up by Travis Tygart’s US Anti-Doping Agency.
Earlier that May, USADA’s general counsel, Indiana-based Bill Bock, had placed a phone call to Lance’s longtime attorney Mark Levinstein of Williams & Connolly in Washington, DC. Levinstein had represented Lance for many years. When it surfaced that Lance’s urine samples from the 1999 Tour had tested positive for EPO in 2005, Levinstein, together with Lance and Bill Stapleton, had launched a fusillade of unverifiable accusations, including sabotage, against multiple targets. This was a man who was unafraid to go on the attack.
When Bock reached Levinstein on the phone, he said that it was clear to USADA that there had been a massive doping scheme and conspiracy on the US Postal team, and that they wanted Lance to come clean about his role. “We’re prepared to bring a case but we’d like to give him an opportunity to be on the right side of this thing, and to tell the truth, and to be a part of cleaning up the sport, like some former teammates of his have done.” Bock didn’t name the teammates.
Bill Bock and Travis Tygart were both regular church goers, but they had vastly different personalities. Tygart tended to display the characteristics of the stern god of the Hebrew Bible, whereas Bock seemed more like the compassionate, New Testament version. Both men viewed doping in sports as a black-and-white issue. Dopers are cheaters and they need to be punished. Bock, however, was fond of saying that he sins every day, and though he’d like to think he would never try performance-enhancing drugs, he couldn’t possibly know what it’s like for professional athletes faced with the decision of whether to dope or risk career-altering consequences.
USADA was offering Lance a chance for a deal: Come forward and admit to everything and face a relatively modest punishment. USADA intended to strip Armstrong of his final two Tour de France wins—they were within the official eight-year statute of limitations—and suspend him from competition for six months.
To Bock, it seemed this would be a good, face-saving trade-off for Lance. By coming clean, he could hold on to most of his Tour wins, and he would probably be able to keep at least some of his sponsors. He could then use his role as a crusader against cancer to rehabilitate his public image. Bock told Levinstein that Lance had a limited window of time in which to respond, that he’d have to sit down with him and Travis Tygart in the coming weeks. If he didn’t, they would proceed with a case against him, leaving Lance with only two choices: He could accept whatever further punishment they decided to mete out, or challenge their findings in an arbitration before a three-person panel. Levinstein punted. He told Bock that he didn’t represent Armstrong “for this purpose” and referred Bock to Tim Herman. A few days passed. When Herman didn’t call Bock, Bock began to wonder whether Levinstein had even passed along his message, or whether the delay was an attempt to stall the agency’s case. Finally, Bock called Herman, who made a proposal: He wanted to set up a conference call and put Lance’s entire legal team on the line with Bock.
Herman reconvened several of the lawyers who had defended Lance in the criminal case. The various attorneys had a wide range of skills and had played different roles during the criminal investigation. Robert D. Luskin, the lawyer referred to him by Karl Rove, took the lead. Lance also again retained the services of John Keker and Elliot Peters of San Francisco. During the criminal investigation, Keker and Peters had accused Novitzky of “repeated and flagrant” disclosures of secret grand jury information to the press and had asked a federal court in Los Angeles to hold law enforcement officials accountable for the leaks. The move was intended to discredit Novitzky in anticipation of a possible indictment by the grand jury.
Lance’s lawyers were among the who’s who of $1,000-an-hour litigators. When they found themselves on the phone with Bill Bock and USADA’s legal affairs director, Chinwuba “Onye” Ikwuakor, they must have assumed they’d be in the power seat. After all, as general counsel of USADA, Bock was being paid by a nonprofit whose total annual budget was only $14 million, $9 million of which was funded by an annual government grant. USADA’s entire legal budget was less than what a month’s work on a big case by one of Lance’s two primary outside law firms would cost. USADA’s 2011 Form 990 income tax statement showed that it had paid Bock’s Indianapolis law firm $343,054 that year.
Robert Luskin and John Keker went on the attack immediately, bombarding Bock with accusations of impropriety. They accused USADA of basing its case on witness testimony that was given to the grand jury in secret, which they said USADA should never have gotten their hands on in the first place. Although Novitzky and Tygart had worked together closely during the criminal investigation, Tygart always denied receiving any grand jury information from his friend. For their part, Armstrong’s lawyers denied that their client had ever used performance-enhancing drugs, and threatened a federal lawsuit that would sink USADA in a legal morass and devour its budget, should it take action. By the end of the forty-five-minute conversation, it was clear that Lance wouldn’t be meeting with Bock or Tygart.
Armstrong was in a no-win situation. USADA wouldn’t tell him the specific punishment it woud dole out if he did come forward and admit everything. Would they ban him for two years? Four years? He had no idea. He knew that if he did come forward, it would surely end his lucrative endorsement deals and sully his public image. Armstrong believed fighting USADA was the better option. Even if he lost, there was a good possibility, he thought, that he could convince the public that he had been wrongly accused and that he had been unfairly targeted by USADA.
However, with or without Lance, the USADA investigation was going forward. Ten of Lance’s former teammates and team employees, including his close friend George Hincapie, had already testified about doping on the US Postal team and the Discovery Channel team. All of those men had agreed to accept a deal: In exchange for a relatively minor suspension, they had come clean—not only about themselves and about Lance, but also about Johan Bruyneel and the three doctors, Michele Ferrari, Pedro Celaya, and Luis Garcia del Moral, as well as the assistant and drug courier, Pepe Martí.
And now Lance was about to learn the consequences of refusing to negotiate with USADA on its terms. So was the public.
On June 13—a day after the Lance Armstrong Foundation began promoting the “Ultimate Kona Ironman Experience with Lance”—Vanessa obtained a copy of USADA’s fifteen-page notice letter from a source with knowledge of the investigation, and the Journal published it, in its entirety, on its website that day. The letter, which was dated June 12 and written by Bill Bock, was addressed to Lance and the five other men, and accused the six of engaging in a conspiracy to cheat, and of pushing dangerous, performance-enhancing drugs on other riders on the team.
The letter read, in part: “This action is being brought as a single consolidated action because for a significant part of the period from January 1, 1998, through the present, each of the Respondents has been part of a doping conspiracy involving team officials, employees, doctors, and elite cyclists of the United States Postal Service and Discovery Channel Cycling Teams who committed numerous violations of the Applicable Rules. The purpose of the USPS Conspiracy was to engage in the use of doping substances and techniques, which were either undetectable or difficult to detect in routine drug testing in order to advance the athletic and sporting achievements, financial wellbeing and status of the teams and their riders, employees, members and investors . . . as well as to prevent the truth regarding doping . . . from being revealed.” Under the subheading COVER-UP, the letter said that “beginning in 1999 and continuing through the present it has been an object of the Conspiracy to conceal and cover-up the doping conduct. . . . Numerous witnesses will testify that . . . Johan Bruyneel, Pedro Celaya, Michele Ferrari, Lance Armstrong and other co-conspirators engaged in activities to conceal their conduct and mislead anti-doping authorities including false statements to the media, false statements and false testimony given under oath and in legal proceedings, and attempts to intimidate, discredit, silence and retaliate against witnesses.”
Lance was the lone cyclist who was still clinging to the lie, the letter said. “With the exception of Mr. Armstrong, every other US rider contacted by USADA [the document did not say how many of them there were or name any of the ten] regarding doping in cycling agreed to meet with USADA and to truthfully and fully describe their involvement in doping and all doping by others of which they were aware. Mr. Armstrong was likewise contacted through his legal counsel and given the opportunity to meet with USADA to fully and truthfully disclose all knowledge of anti-doping rule violations committed in the sport of cycling. However, Mr. Armstrong declined USADA’s offer.”
The letter also cited “data from blood collections obtained by the UCI” in 2009 and 2010 that showed signs that Lance had used EPO or taken blood transfusions during his cycling comeback, too. As punishment for his transgressions, USADA suggested that Armstrong lose all his titles and receive a lifetime ban from competition—and it provided copies of the letter to both the World Triathlon Corporation and the USA Triathlon, the sport’s governing body in this country. It also suggested lifetime bans for Bruyneel, Ferrari, Celaya, del Moral, and Martí.
With the important Nice event just weeks away, Lance had returned to France to train on the Ironman course. He continued to maintain his innocence after USADA’s notice letter became public, saying in his statement to the press: “I have never doped, and, unlike many of my accusers, I have competed as an endurance athlete for twenty-five years with no spike in performance, passed more than five hundred drug tests and never failed one. . . . Any fair consideration of these allegations has and will continue to vindicate me.”
On June 23, Lance spoke to Vanessa on the phone, complaining about USADA but acknowledging for the first time—in an indirect way—that he had in fact doped. “Say what you will about what I did or didn’t do ten years ago, they’re not playing by the rules,” he told her. “Here’s the deal: Athletes cheating in sports, that’s bad. But what these guys are doing is far worse!” USADA had a vendetta against him, he insisted. “The levels they have gone to try to fuck me and rig this thing are far worse than any athlete taking a transfusion or some EPO. This is far dirtier.”
Our conversations with him, as well as with several people close to him, left us with the sense that he was of two minds about the punishment that USADA threatened to hand down. He knew that all seven of his titles were at risk; but he seemed to have convinced himself that that wouldn’t matter because, in the end, people would know who won the Tour de France. After all, his trademark yellow jerseys were everywhere: Seven of them decorated the walls of his foundation; another seven were tucked away in the upstairs media room of his 8,000-square-foot home in Austin, Texas; yet more hung on the walls of Thom Weisel’s San Francisco offices; still others were framed and on display at Mellow Johnny’s.
However, it was clear to us that there was something else Armstrong wasn’t taking into account. It wasn’t just his titles that were at risk. When USADA sent its letter to Armstrong, along with copies to the World Triathlon Corporation and USA Triathlon, it was setting in motion a series of events that would block Lance from competing in pro-level triathlons. Armstrong had just rediscovered his love for the sport he had competed in as a teenager and was, he told friends, in the best shape of his life. But his plan was about to be scuttled because just after the release of the letter, the two major governing bodies of the sport announced that they were suspending him. According to the rules of both the World and the USA triathlon organizations, any athlete who is facing a sanction from USADA is immediately suspended from competing in events that they sponsor until the doping case is resolved.
The ban meant that Lance wouldn’t be able to compete in the races that really mattered to him—those that can confer or deliver points toward world champion status. All year, he had been pursuing the dream of a slot in the 2012 Ironman World Championship. Now that was out of the question. No Ironman race would give up its certification by USA Triathlon to embrace Armstrong, and neither would any other competition that hoped to attract world champion contenders. The Chicago Marathon also rejected Armstrong’s bid to run in its October 7 race.
Lance was furious. He told his friends that he felt like an artist who had been told he couldn’t paint another masterpiece.
Lance had been stressed, perhaps even scared, during the twenty-one months when Jeff Novitzky was on his trail. The possibility that the grand jury seated in a Los Angeles courtroom might indict him and that the government might choose to go to trial must have been deeply alarming to him. But he had won that battle. That left USADA’s Travis Tygart as his only real opponent. Having retired from cycling, Lance felt initially that there was nothing much USADA could do to hurt him, so he had been relatively indifferent to any threat that Tygart represented. Now he was beginning to understand that Tygart might have it within his power to destroy his plans for the future.
Lance still held out hope that public sentiment would turn against the USADA—particularly with the 2012 London Olympic Games only weeks away. Perhaps people would read the headlines about the agency’s move to charge him and ask themselves: What? I thought this shit was over and done with in February! With the Olympics about to begin, doesn’t USADA have better things to do?
Lance also figured that the public would eventually tire of what he himself thought of as USADA’s publicity stunts. Tygart, in his mind, had tried to weasel his way into everything—baseball, football, and even boxing disputes. His charges against Lance, Lance believed, were motivated by his desire for public recognition and were advanced through testimony that Lance argued was bought and paid for by promises of anonymity and immunity for Lance’s former teammates.
Nonetheless, Lance was seriously worried. He likened the prospect of going through USADA’s arbitration process to looking down the barrel of a shotgun. He knew that, in the ten years that the World Anti-Doping Agency code had been in place, athletes had rarely won in arbitration. The prospect of losing any case where Floyd Landis and Tyler Hamilton would be witnesses against him outraged him. He viewed himself as normal, and saw them as hypocrites, crazies—cycling “wing nuts.” If USADA could make a case, using a mountain of circumstantial evidence, and two of the three arbitrators agreed, he was done for. He’d already spent hundreds of thousands of dollars a month for more than a year on legal bills during the federal criminal investigation, and a lengthy arbitration with USADA would cost him millions more.
The dilemma for Lance and his lawyers at this point was how to force USADA to operate in a way they believed was “fair.” From the perspective of Armstrong’s lawyers, the agency had way too much power. A three-person arbitration panel doesn’t need the kind of evidence required for a conviction in a criminal case; it just needs two out of three to agree on “a preponderance of evidence” against him, and USADA could strip Armstrong of his titles and deprive him of his livelihood. This was a much lower bar than required to convict someone in a criminal case, where the legal burden of proof consisted of convincing jurors of guilt “beyond a reasonable doubt.” Luskin and Keker were used to operating within the realm of the criminal justice system and federal courts, where they could exploit obscure laws to get cases dismissed and keep evidence away from jurors. Now they were fighting in the realm of arbitrations, where basic common sense ruled and the legal hurdles to such commonsense judgment were nonexistent. And they probably realized that to any person with half a brain, it might seem patently obvious that their client had cheated in cycling. Lance didn’t stand a chance.
The strategy became simple: In an attempt to sway public opinion to Lance’s side, his lawyers would set out to trash USADA, accusing the agency of not playing fair, and suing it in federal court. The attack team kicked into immediate action. They called USADA’s investigation a witch hunt aimed at bringing down a hero, and accused Tygart and Bock of buying the testimony of riders by offering them reduced suspensions for cooperation. Luskin began publicly blasting USADA, calling its leaders “arrogant and craven.” In his statements to the press, he repeated Lance’s denials that he had ever doped.
On July 9, Lance’s legal team filed a lawsuit in federal court in Austin, challenging the agency’s effort to bring its charges. The 109-page lawsuit read more like a college thesis on why the agency should not exist. It was filled with personal attacks on Travis Tygart. “Defendant Tygart shares with Agent Novitsky [sic] a well-publicized obsession with ‘getting’ Mr. Armstrong,” the complaint said. “Tygart evidently believes that USADA needs to bring a big case against a ‘big fish’ to justify its existence. One of, if not the primary, goals of this effort is to convince the United States government to continue and increase the tens of millions of dollars of unsupervised grants that the government already provides to USADA.” Tygart and Novitzky, it added, “offered other cyclists corrupt inducements—offers some cyclists could not refuse—to implicate Mr. Armstrong in exchange for saving the cyclists’ careers. If they refused to do so, USADA would work to ruin their careers, just as it is now attempting to end Mr. Armstrong’s career.” The lawsuit said that it is “a testament to USADA’s brazenness and callous disregard for its own mission that it seeks to strip Lance of his life’s work and his future livelihood”—elite competitive sport—“absent a single positive test.” The complaint also included massive amounts of information on the Lance Armstrong Foundation, which, it noted, provides free services to cancer survivors with “financial, emotional and practical challenges,” and said that Lance had been the foundation’s biggest individual donor, with contributions of more than $6.5 million. Lance’s legal team referred to the lawsuit strategy as a long shot, but one that was worth it because, in the very least, it sent a message to Lance’s sponsors that they were serious about taking on USADA and it might at least delay the process. The legal strategy turned out to be even less effective than they had hoped.
Later that very same day, US District Judge Sam Sparks, to whom the case had been assigned, dismissed the suit. The crusty judge called it a “lengthy and bitter polemic” filled with “boilerplate” allegations. Basically, Judge Sparks was telling Armstrong’s lawyers he did not appreciate their use of the federal court’s time to try to advance their public relations agenda. “Armstrong is advised, in the strongest possible terms . . . to omit any improper argument, rhetoric, or irrelevant material from his future pleadings,” Judge Sparks wrote.
A few days later, Armstrong’s lawyers refiled a significantly shorter suit that focused on challenging the constitutionality of the global Olympic anti-doping infrastructure. They argued that because USADA had worked alongside law enforcement, it should be considered a “state actor” and subject to constitutional restrictions that would prevent it from bringing its case against Armstrong.
Shortly after filing the lawsuit, Lance enlisted his cancer charity to lobby Congress on his behalf. Armstrong wanted USADA’s $10 million federal grant from the Office of National Drug Control Policy to be yanked. The foundation hired lobbyists from Patton Boggs, Luskin’s law firm, to represent it. On July 12, Wisconsin Republican Jim Sensenbrenner sent a letter—using arguments similar to those in Armstrong’s lawsuit—to the Office of National Drug Control Policy, describing USADA’s right to exert authority over Armstrong as “strained at best.”
Congressman Sensenbrenner, whose district encompasses the Waterloo, Wisconsin, headquarters of Armstrong sponsor Trek, said that it was the International Cycling Union (UCI), not USADA, that had jurisdiction over his titles. He also pointed to USADA’s eight-year statute of limitations, which he said precluded it from stripping Armstrong’s titles from 2003 and before. “While USADA’s charging letter accuses Armstrong of a vast conspiracy involving numerous riders, the agency has not charged any associated athletes other than Armstrong,” Sensenbrenner wrote.
Armstrong’s lawyers, meanwhile, turned to yet another attempt to undermine USADA—by going after its review board. All anti-doping cases USADA brings are first approved by an independent review board made up of three panelists chosen from a pool of approved people. Looking for dirt on the review board assigned to Armstrong’s case, the lawyers struck gold. It turned out that one of the members of the board, Minneapolis attorney Clark Calvin Griffith, a seventy-year-old sports lawyer and adjunct professor at the William Mitchell College of Law in Minneapolis—and the son of former Minneapolis Twins owner Calvin Griffith—had been charged with indecent exposure. The previous March, a twenty-four-year-old female student had complained to the college that Griffith had unzipped his pants and told her to touch his penis. She also complained to the police, who subsequently recorded a phone call he made to her, during which he apologized and said he was in “an absolute daze” when “I unzipped.” Shortly afterward, he was charged with indecent exposure, and in July, he entered into a plea agreement in which he admitted no wrongdoing but agreed to undergo sex offender counseling.
“Wow. @usantidoping can pick em,” Armstrong tweeted to his nearly four million Twitter followers. “Here’s [link to story] 1 of 3 Review Board members studying my case. #protectingcleanathletesandpervs.”
Tygart knew that American public opinion was mixed—and that some saw him as the bad guy persecuting their hero. He had received three death threats, he said, including a chilling warning that he would get a bullet to his head. But he was not willing to let a celebrity athlete off the hook.
• • •
On August 20, Judge Sparks dismissed Armstrong’s lawsuit—this time, for good. He said Armstrong’s central argument—that USADA was a “state actor” and that its appeal process was unconstitutional—had no merit. USADA was part of the widely accepted arbitration process recognized by the United States courts. Judge Sparks said that if Armstrong were truly innocent of USADA’s charges, he should go to arbitration and argue his point. “This court simply has no business telling national and international amateur athletic organizations how to regulate their respective sports,” he wrote. After all his legal and public relations maneuvers, Lance was back to the two choices Bock had originally offered: Fight USADA in arbitration or back down and accept his punishment. Armstrong had three days to make his decision.
Just a few hours before his midnight deadline, Armstrong bowed out of the fight. His decision not to challenge USADA’s charges—which he said was not an admission of guilt but a protest of its unfair process—seemed, at the time, shrewd. He avoided the embarrassment of an arbitration hearing in which his former teammates were poised to accuse him in person. The agency that night said it would strip him of all results dating back to August 1, 1998. That was roughly a year before his first Tour de France victory, and also included his wins in other races such as the Tour de Suisse and France’s Critérium du Dauphiné Libéré.
The day after the announcement, donations to the foundation rose to twenty-five times their typical daily levels, and Nike made it clear that it would continue to stand by him: “We are saddened that Lance Armstrong may no longer be able to participate in certain competitions and his titles appear to be impacted,” it said. “Lance has stated his innocence and has been unwavering on this position.” Other sponsors, including Anheuser-Busch and Oakley fell into place, too—in fact, nobody was ready to drop Lance.
Many journalists and fans continued to back him, too. “Sad day,” tweeted ESPN’s Rick Reilly—an eleven-time Sportswriter of the Year who had defended Lance against doping allegations for fourteen years—adding that he couldn’t believe Lance was “giving into doping charges. Never thought he’d quit.” Graham Watson, an established cycling photographer who published a 2004 pictorial book with Lance, Lance Armstrong: Images of a Champion, also weighed in, writing on his blog, “Lance did what he had to do to win, and he clearly did it very well. . . . All I do know is he’s not the manipulative ‘bully’ certain members of the media have tried to portray him as in their tabloid stories. He was ambitious, ruthless, highly talented, tough, he knew how to lead his teammates and intimidate his rivals to make sure he won. But is he any different from a President, an army General, a corporate leader of industry, a career politician, or any other sporting great?” Sally Jenkins, the Washington Post columnist who coauthored Lance’s autobiography, wrote an editorial sticking up for Lance: “I don’t know if he’s telling the truth when he insists he didn’t use performance-enhancing drugs in the Tour de France—never have known,” she wrote. “I do know that he beat cancer fair and square, that he’s not the mastermind criminal the US Anti-Doping Agency makes him out to be, and that the process of stripping him of his titles reeks.” Author Buzz Bissinger wrote a cover story for Newsweek, saying: “I still believe in Lance Armstrong. I believe his decision had nothing to do with fear of being found guilty in a public setting before an arbitration panel, but the emotional and mental toll of years and years of fighting charges that have never been officially substantiated—despite stemming all the way back to 1999.” Bissinger quoted Lance saying he wouldn’t fight USADA for the sake of his own mental health, for his family, and his foundation, and for cycling. Cycling, Lance told Bissinger, “doesn’t need this.” NASCAR driver Max Papis tweeted to Lance, “Too many people too jealous of what u did. Revenge is always sad to see.”
Lance even had legislative support. Or perhaps it would be technically more accurate to say that USADA had some serious detractors within government circles. Just after Labor Day, a group of California legislators took aim at USADA, sending a letter to the state’s two US senators, Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer, asking them to launch “a comprehensive review of USADA’s operations and finances, with special attention to USADA’s unilateral changes in rules for dealing with athletes who have never failed a drug test.” The letter, dated September 4 and written by California state senator Michael J. Rubio, didn’t mention Lance, and Rubio said at the time that his interest in the issue grew out of concern for US Olympic athletes. The letter, which noted that USADA receives “a majority of its funding from taxpayer dollars,” was signed by twenty-two other California state senators from both major parties, who were in agreement that the process of suspending athletes was inherently flawed.
However, the reactions were not all pro-Lance and/or anti-USADA. One person in particular was very troubled by Lance’s apparently Teflon-like ability to deflect charges: Lance’s old Subaru-Montgomery teammate Paul Willerton. He’d assumed that after Lance chose not to fight USADA, his popularity with the public and his corporate sponsors would end. To him, the decision not to fight seemed like a clear admission of guilt and he didn’t understand why others didn’t see it that way. Willerton, who had retired from the sport in 1993 but kept his ties to many of his former teammates, viewed himself as a cycling insider, someone who knew most of the key players, the good guys and the bad guys. As Willerton monitored the reactions to Lance, he paid particular attention to brand experts who were saying that Lance still had value in the marketplace because Nike still backed him. It bothered him that Nike, which had played such an active role in creating Lance’s image over the years as a squeaky-clean athlete, hadn’t taken a public stance against either Lance or doping—and he decided to try to do something about it.
Using his girlfriend’s e-mail account, and not disclosing his name, Willerton began e-mailing Nike’s head of corporate communications each week, asking for specifics about Nike’s stance on Lance. Each time, the reply was that Nike would stand by Lance. Willerton, who was friendly with a couple of lower-level executives within Nike, also began calling his two friends, asking them why Nike hadn’t stepped away from Lance. These executives told Willerton that they themselves didn’t get it. Throughout September, Willerton kept on sending e-mails, hoping to erode some of that support.
Popular and corporate support notwithstanding, Lance was still in a very tough spot—banished from competing in the highest-level triathlons. Lance now turned to small-time races that hadn’t signed on to the World Anti-Doping Agency code and didn’t have to recognize his suspension.
These triathlons were happy to accept Armstrong because it meant media attention they would otherwise never get. In fact, some events actually gave up their certification with the sport’s governing body, USA Triathlon, so they could allow Armstrong into the race. This was no small thing for these races. Having certification from the USAT lowers insurance rates for race organizers and helps attract higher-level triathletes. But for some, the trade-off seemed worthwhile. Half Full Triathlon in Maryland, for example, decided to allow Armstrong in the race, and enrollment jumped 20 percent.
The Superfrog Triathlon was still working on getting its USAT certification when Armstrong applied for entry. The race, which raises money for the Navy Seal Foundation, quickly dropped its USAT bid, announced that Armstrong would compete, and saw a spike in registration to a record 825 entrants, at a registration fee as high as $275. When the day came, Lance’s sponsors made their presence known; Nike donated Livestrong T-shirts to race volunteers and spectators; Trek sent a representative to observe.
The Superfrog, held at Silver Strand State Beach near San Diego, is the longest-running Half Iron distance triathlon in the world, and its events—a 1.2-mile cold Pacific Ocean swim, 56-mile windy bike ride on Highway 75, and 13.1-mile run on soft sand, hard sand, and pavement—are among the world’s most challenging. The course was in territory familiar to Lance, near Ramona, where he had cut his teeth riding with Eddie B when he joined the Subaru-Montgomery team.
Lance hadn’t swum much since leaving Nice in June. When the event started, he was rolled by a couple of big waves, and by the time he got out of the ocean, he was a couple of minutes behind the event leaders. But he made up for lost time during the bike ride, and by the end of the first mile of the run, he was in the lead. Lance’s 2-hour, 2-minute, and 48-second bike split broke the course record, as did his overall finish time of 3 hours and 49 minutes. After the race, Lance signed the Livestrong T-shirts of spectators. One wore a homemade badge that said F U USADA. Lance added an exclamation point to the end of her badge.
By continuing to find a welcome into certain nonsanctioned competitions, Lance hoped to be the first athlete to face a serious doping case without losing his popularity. And he was doing reasonably well in them, too. He took first place in a trail marathon in Steamboat Springs, Colorado, finishing in 3 hours, 18 minutes, and 10 seconds in what was only the fourth marathon he had ever run in his life. He entered and, finishing behind a local sixteen-year-old, took second place in a 4-hour mountain bike race near his part-time home in Aspen. In September, he completed the GoldenLeaf Half Marathon, with its 13.1-mile course, from Snowmass ski area down to the town of Aspen in 1 hour, 30 minutes, and 51 seconds, to place fourth.
Lance continued to hold out hope that his Tour de France titles could be restored to him and the ban on competition lifted. The UCI, which had always backed him in every other drug scandal in the past, still had to ratify USADA’s sanctions for them to become permanent. If the UCI decided to appeal USADA’s decision, USADA and the UCI would then have to argue their respective cases in front of the Court of Arbitration for Sport. Over the years, the UCI had been paid handsome sums of money by Armstrong and his camp—including $150,000 in donations the UCI acknowledges, plus, according to Kathy LeMond’s sworn account of her conversation with Julien de Vriese, another $500,000 that it doesn’t acknowledge. The UCI also helped smooth over at least three suspicious drug tests for Armstrong, which it also denies. Within days of USADA’s charges, the UCI, which referred to the charges as “worrisome,” requested USADA’s “reasoned decision” on banning Armstrong. It said it wanted to see USADA’s evidence before it made its own final decision.
Meanwhile, Armstrong continued to flout USADA’s power. He kept making statements on Twitter challenging their legitimacy. In late August, for example, he had tweeted a response to what he described as USADA’s “pitiful charade”: “There comes a point in every man’s life when he has to say, ‘Enough is enough.’ For me, that time is now. I have been dealing with claims that I cheated and had an unfair advantage in winning my seven Tours since 1999. Over the past three years, I have been subjected to a two-year federal criminal investigation followed by Travis Tygart’s unconstitutional witch hunt. The toll this has taken on my family, and my work for our foundation and on me leads me to where I am today—finished with this nonsense.”
By going on the attack in such a public way, Armstrong and his lawyers were unwittingly opening themselves up to a new problem. USADA had been bashed in the press by dopers before. But in the past, its bylaws did not allow its officials to speak publicly about the details of its cases. To combat the public relations dilemma, USADA changed its bylaws during its 2005 battle with Tyler Hamilton over his two-year doping suspension. The change meant that now Tygart and others in the agency could feel free to address any inaccuracies spread by athletes and their representatives.
Tygart began to have conversations with lawyers for the cooperating cyclists about making USADA’s entire investigation of Armstrong public. And he told them that when he sent the agency’s “reasoned decision” to the UCI, he would release that to the public, too, perhaps along with supporting documents from his witnesses. Tygart quickly asked the witnesses—including Hincapie, Leipheimer, Vande Velde, and Zabriskie—to sign affidavits of doping by Armstrong and the team leaders and doctors. Their affidavits provided numerous graphic accounts of Armstrong’s alleged cheating over a period of fourteen years.
Christian Vande Velde said Lance had called him in 2002 and asked him to come to his apartment in Girona to discuss his role with the team. When Vande Velde showed up, he found Michele Ferrari there with Lance, and Lance informed him that if he were to continue to ride for the Postal team, he would have to follow Dr. Ferrari’s program to the letter. The conversation left Vande Velde in no doubt that he was in the doghouse and that the only way out was to follow the prescribed doping program. He subsequently began using EPO and testosterone on a schedule prepared by Ferrari.
Jonathan Vaughters described going to Lance’s hotel room in 1998 to borrow his laptop, when Lance stepped out of the bathroom and injected himself with a syringe in his presence, saying: “Now that you are doing EPO, too, you can’t go write a book about it.”
Tyler Hamilton described how a personal assistant to the Armstrongs at their villa in Nice—“Motoman,” Philippe Maire—supplied him, Lance, and Kevin Livingston with the EPO they needed during mountain stages. They would put the empty EPO vials in soda cans to be taken away and crushed.
The affidavit of George Hincapie was particularly damaging, because he was once one of Lance’s closest friends and he hadn’t previously confessed or acknowledged using banned substances. At the time Hincapie provided that affidavit, he was still very much involved in pro cycling, racing in Europe for the BMC racing team, and preparing for a record seventeenth Tour de France—thanks to an arrangement his lawyer had worked out with USADA’s lawyers back in June when they had first approached him about testifying. In his affidavit, he testified that in the early 1990s, after Lance’s team was badly defeated in a race in Italy, Lance had been upset and announced that something needed to be done—which Hincapie understood to mean that Lance felt the team needed to use EPO. Hincapie also stated that he was “generally aware” that Lance was using testosterone throughout the time the two were teammates. On one occasion, during a race in Spain in 2000, he recounted that after Lance had told him he had taken some “oil”—referring to a testosterone-olive-oil mixture Lance had swallowed—he had texted Lance to alert him to the presence of drug testers and Lance then dropped out of the race.
USADA’s evidence also suggested that while some of the riders’ wives, such as Betsy Andreu, had worked to undermine or expose the doping scheme on the Postal team, Lance’s ex-wife, Kristin, had participated, wrapping cortisone tablets in foil and handing them out to cyclists, and had seen Lance handing testosterone patches to Landis.
• • •
Bill Bock’s summary of all the evidence compiled by USADA was sent to the UCI on October 10, and released to the public the same day. The agency also set up a website that offered links to thousands of pages of documents, photos, videos, and affidavits from Armstrong’s former teammates. Suddenly, USADA’s investigation came to vivid life. There were riders’ e-mail exchanges, video footage showing doping doctors at team celebrations, and receipts of Armstrong’s payments to Ferrari totaling more than $1 million. The UCI made no immediate response.
The public did, however. Hundreds of thousands of people around the world logged on to read USADA’s reasoned decision, and the hundreds of pages of additional testimony, in the hours after it was released. Cycling bloggers and journalists, including us, dug through it, and used Twitter accounts to share bits of the new information with one another. “Dave Z affidavit is disturbing. Avoided drugs as they had killed his adict [sic] father. . . . Pushed by Johan until he broke,” tweeted Race Radio, a cycling blogger. “Hey triathlon, @lancearmstrong continued to use Ferrari to prepare for tri’s. page 86. Sure you still want him?” wrote nyvelocity. “OH but wait!!! @johanbruyneel gets in on the act. He has Lance’s money! How does Michele want it? Oh my,” tweeted another blogger, who included a link to a November 4, 2009, e-mail from Bruyneel to Ferrari, in which Bruyneel wrote that “our boy has some cash for you,” asking Ferrari whether he preferred cash or a wire transfer.
Not all of the Twitter and blogosphere reaction was negative, however. There were those who stood up for Armstrong. Some persisted in seeing Lance as one of the greatest athletes of all time; others noted that Lance’s description in his first book of his fight to recover from cancer and his wife’s ordeal of going through IVF treatments had helped them during difficult times in their own lives.
Amazingly, most of Lance’s sponsors stuck by him at first. RadioShack and Anheuser-Busch, among others, said they would keep on backing him, prompting Bill Stapleton to proclaim that the authenticity of Lance’s achievements shouldn’t even be questioned. “Lance’s primary sponsors have been incredibly supportive and have remained supportive throughout,” Stapleton told the Financial Times. “Brands are looking for an authentic endorser and at the end of the day they depend on the authenticity of the athlete,” he added.
Lance himself, who was back in Austin, holed up in his Spanish-style mansion, pronounced himself to be “unaffected,” saying in a Tweet after the documents were released that he was currently spending time with his family and getting ready for the upcoming celebrations of the fifteenth anniversary of his foundation—an evening gala, a bike ride, and a University of Texas football game against Baylor University, to be cosponsored by Nike.
His relationship with Nike in the days leading up to the USADA report’s release was as close as ever. He spent October 2, the sixteenth anniversary of his cancer diagnosis, at Nike’s Beaverton, Oregon, headquarters, delivering a speech to hundreds of Nike employees, who hung on his words and seemed to adore him. While he was there, Nike executives sought Lance’s views on new Livestrong merchandise, as well as on the 17,000 black, yellow, and orange Livestrong T-shirts it had agreed to provide free to those attending the University of Texas “cancer awareness” football game. Before he left, he also had the opportunity to pop in at the Lance Armstrong Fitness Center, on Nike’s campus, to admire the plaque Nike had put up for him, praising his “fearlessness and confidence.”
It seemed that none of this enthusiasm was diminished by the USADA decision. In fact, on the day the decision was made public, Nike rushed to rerelease the same exact statement it had first issued in August. “Nike plans to continue to support Lance and the Lance Armstrong Foundation,” it said.