Lance Armstrong’s fourteen-year-long deception was an elaborate, many-tentacled enterprise requiring complicated logistics, scores of people to execute them, and an iron-willed determination to keep it going. Lance relied on his teammates, doctors, lawyers, financial backers, sponsors, assistants, and associates to help him cheat—or at the very least to ignore the evidence that he was doing so—and on the complacent, hero-worshipping media to celebrate his victories without looking into how he achieved them. The few who did raise questions were publicly attacked, sued for large sums of money, and generally vilified by Lance and his well-trained army of supporters.
Some of the people in his network of allies directly aided and abetted him in his doping. And everyone from his ex-wife to his friends, sponsors, and former girlfriends turned a blind eye to it—until almost the end. Of course, once the USADA decision was released, the defections were virtually unanimous—the proverbial rats fleeing the sinking ship.
During the glory years, agencies like UCI, which is specifically charged with keeping the sport clean, and USA Cycling, which promotes the sport, were co-opted to Lance’s ends. And ironically, the drug testers themselves turned out to be one of Lance’s most persuasive defenses against his accusers. Lance figured out, shrewdly, that most Americans put a lot of stock in the effectiveness of drug testing, so all he had to do was cite the hundreds of times he had been tested, and people would believe he was clean. Indeed Lance was tested hundreds of times—if not as many times as he claimed. Though he told us on many occasions that he had passed more than 500 doping tests in his career, USADA’s records indicate he was tested no more than 250 times. John Burke, the president of Trek bikes, once said publicly that Lance had passed more than 800 tests. These figures became a key pillar supporting Lance’s big lie. Of course the number of times he was tested is irrelevant if, as has proved to be the case, he and his doctors knew how to manipulate some of the test results, and he and his handlers were able to suppress other results that revealed truths he couldn’t manipulate.
The question is why so many people would have participated in this elaborate scheme for so long. And the answers are not hard to find. For many of his teammates and coaches, it was all about glory—and money, too, of course. They did what it took to win and, in some cases, just to stay on the team, because if they refused to dope, they risked Lance’s disapproval and the possibility of being fired from the team.
For Lance’s financial backers and sponsors, it was all about money—and the glory of it, too, of course. Lance Inc. was big business. Sponsors such as Nike, Oakley, Trek, and others actively advanced Lance’s career, fame, and wealth, capitalizing on what they stood to gain from his successes. When Lance’s critics accused him of cheating to win—and over the years, there were many such allegations—the sponsors asked no questions. Instead, acting as enablers, they offered Lance their unwavering support and continued to feature him in their marketing efforts, making him ever more visible in the public eye. In the weeks after Lance’s Oprah confession, some of Lance’s sponsors and supporters, including John Burke of Trek and Doug Ulman, CEO of the Livestrong Foundation, conceded that they had never once asked Lance directly if he had doped. Only when the anti-doping officials of USADA released their mountain of evidence against Lance, tainting his public image irrevocably, did his sponsors finally dump him.
What will happen to Lance in the years to come is impossible to say. It’s true that, F. Scott Fitzgerald to the contrary, there are second acts to American lives, but it’s hard to imagine Lance making a comeback to the world of sports, given the legal obstacles he still faces—not least of them the lifetime ban against elite competition. In responding to some of those suits, he may end up doing even greater damage to his reputation—whether by admitting to what he has so long denied, by outing others, or by stonewalling. None of these options look good for him. By early 2013, Lance’s lawyers were negotiating with the US Department of Justice lawyers about the possibility of his providing evidence against some of the people in his inner circle, including Johan Bruyneel and his former partners at Tailwind Sports. But those talks fell apart, and by late April, the government joined the whistle-blower suit, filing claims seeking $30 million. Its complaint accused Lance and Bruyneel of “unjust enrichment,” and their former Tailwind partners of breach of contract for failing to take action against riders who used prohibited substances. Much of the government’s case, which alleges that the Postal Service was defrauded of $40 million, is based on Floyd’s testimony.
Floyd’s claims against Tailwind had put scrutiny on Thom Weisel. But Weisel’s lawyers maintained that he didn’t know about the doping, and pointed out that he had, in fact, lost millions of dollars over the years while he bankrolled Tailwind and the Postal team. If the Justice Department case goes to trial, then it’s possible the government may call Lance to give testimony under oath. Lance may also be subpoenaed as a witness in a case that Tygart is currently planning to bring against Bruyneel.
But it could be many years—if ever—before Lance provides full and specific details to the general public about what he did, and who helped him do it. Lance has long had a psychological aversion to examining his past mistakes, a trait he has said he inherited from his mother, who didn’t like to talk about her teenage pregnancy and other difficulties. Justifying his reluctance to come clean, Lance has told many people that he prides himself on being loyal to his friends—including Michele Ferrari, whom he continues to regard as a genius. In the weeks following his confessional interview with Oprah, Lance proudly proclaimed to Adam Wilk that, despite all he had been through in recent months, he had never “ratted anybody out.” Some of Lance’s supporters cite his stated revulsion against betrayal as evidence that Lance has a moral core. Yet that runs counter to Lance’s private actions over the years, when Lance dropped many people who loved him and who dedicated themselves, sometimes without compensation, to helping him succeed.
The whistle-blower suit isn’t the only legal battle he’s facing. Within just a couple of months of the sit-down with Oprah, just as his lawyers feared would happen, he was hit with two more lawsuits. One alleges that Lance and FRS, a nutritional drink maker for which Lance served as a spokesman, had engaged in false advertising by linking his Tour victories to FRS drinks. The second was filed by another prize insurance company, Acceptance Insurance, which is suing him for $3 million for bonuses paid to him after he won the Tour de France races from 1999, 2000, and 2001.
Lance’s financial future is also a big question, given the millions he has already spent on legal bills, the claims on what remains of his fortune, and the loss of sources of income from both sponsors and competitions. His friends say that he has told them he has enough money to live comfortably for the rest of his life, though his mother, Linda, has worried about his financial future. In mid-April, he sold his Spanish-style villa, valued at $3 million, and within weeks purchased a 1924 Mediterranean-style home in Austin’s Old West neighborhood. The home is on county tax rolls for $2.7 million.
What role, if any, Lance can play in public life is another issue still to be resolved—though Lance himself seems optimistic. In early 2013, he told friends that he would like to become involved in his cancer foundation again. Because of the foundation’s work on behalf of cancer survivors, many people viewed him as a humanitarian, and many still do. And Lance clearly sees himself that way, too.
Certainly, to many of those suffering a cancer diagnosis, Lance’s foundation has been a valuable resource, and Lance himself something like the second coming of Christ. Through numerous private gestures he has made over the years, which he did not try to publicize, he boosted the spirits of strangers living through their darkest moments, and sometimes offered concrete assistance, too. Responding to messages from cancer patients, he has sent personal e-mails and practical advice, often with specific recommendations about which doctors to consult. Occasionally, he’d go beyond that. If a testicular cancer patient couldn’t get in to see the best doctors, well, he might send an e-mail or a text to the doctor himself, paving the way for a patient to get an appointment.
Yet a return to his foundation seems unlikely in the near term. In fact, the foundation has taken yet more steps to distance itself from Lance. In early 2013, it moved its yearly Livestrong Day from the October 2 anniversary of Lance’s cancer diagnosis, to the May 11 date when Nike introduced its yellow Livestrong wristband.
The foundation’s effort to create an identity completely separate from Lance may be a necessary part of its survival strategy. Due to flat contributions, the foundation board slashed its 2013 budget by about 10 percent, forcing it to end its title sponsorship of the Austin Marathon just three years into what was a planned ten-year partnership. CEO Doug Ulman told Vanessa that he felt certain the foundation would survive, but that for a while it was likely that things would be “bumpy, challenging, turbulent.”
And that was before the most recent round of bad news, which was delivered in late spring. With consumers starting to turn against the Livestrong brand, Nike executives made the decision to pull the Livestrong clothing and sneakers line. Since the foundation had licensed the Livestrong brand to Nike, in an arrangement that had accounted for about a quarter of its average yearly revenue from 2004 to 2012, this will constitute a formidable blow to its budget.
For a long time, Americans just couldn’t get enough of Lance. His yellow bracelet was ubiquitous; his sayings like “Pain is temporary, quitting lasts forever” were quoted like gospel. His relationships were constant tabloid fodder. Millions persisted in believing in him until it became impossible to do so. Why?
That may be a question harder to answer than why his teammates and coaches, his sponsors and financial backers, collaborated in the lie. But society’s gullibility in the face of ever-mounting evidence probably has something to do with its need for a certain kind of hero. Looked at this way, Lance is the inevitable product of our celebrity-worshipping culture and the whole money-mad world of sports gone amok. This is the Golden Age of fraud, an era of general willingness to ignore and justify the wrongdoings of the rich and powerful, which makes every lie bigger and widens its destructive path. Having put Lance up on a pedestal, the public was reluctant to depose him, until, of course, it had to—at which point it fell upon him with such fury that even Travis Tygart and Bill Bock were shocked by the rapidity with which he was toppled, the speed of the desertions.
Within our culture, there is a tendency to instantly vilify those whom we have idolized, and that is certainly what has happened to Lance. But as we hope our book has made clear, Lance does not bear sole responsibility for the enterprise that became Lance Inc. And the fact that he is the villain of the moment doesn’t mean that he is necessarily finished, either. Just as Lance said to Travis Tygart in a moment of fury back in December 2012, he really does hold the keys to his own redemption. Whether he will use them, for the sake both of his own soul and the soul of the sport he once loved so much, remains to be seen. He is a man of great strength, determination, and resilience, and we truly hope that he will use those qualities to make a moral comeback as complete as the physical comeback he effected from the cancer that nearly killed him. Time will tell.