Lanced: The Shaming of Lance Armstrong (15 page)

Landis had spoken about doping with some old pros at Mercury. "At this point I was still completely against it. I didn't like the idea [of it]. It didn't represent what I felt cycling was to me."

During that first camp in Austin, he arranged a meeting with Johan Bruyneel, the Postal team director, and informed him of his ambition to race in the Tour with Armstrong and that he would do whatever he needed to do to be at his best. He says the subtext — that he was willing to dope — was clear to the team director. Landis says: "I figured the only way he'd be open with me was if I were happy to do anything." Bruyneel denies this conversation ever took place.

In the spring of 2002, Floyd moved to Girona, where Armstrong and a number of the Postal team were based. His apartment was small and cramped but was brightened by the wit of his zany team-mate Zabriskie. On the morning after their cappuccino binge, he got a call from Lance.

"Tomorrow, you're going to do five hours with me and we're going to have a little talk."

The lecture, on the perils of caffeine, began as they rode into the hills. "He takes me on a ride and starts instructing me on how to behave and how to train, and I wasn't going to argue," Landis says. "I mean, here's Lance Armstrong telling me how to train… I'm not going to say, 'I already train hard. I've worked hard to get here.' I wasn't going to debate it. But all I really got out of the conversation was, 'I've just got to fit in here. I'd better not be seen as the crazy guy.'" Armstrong advised him to move his family from California. He found a plain two-bedroom on the edge of town, rented a car and drove to Ikea in Barcelona to buy furniture. "We don't have the money for this," Amber said. "What are we going to do, sit on the floor?”

“Don't worry, babe. It's going to work out."

Those first six months were a struggle. He was 26 years old, earning $5,000 a month and owed $60,000 on his credit cards. The money he insisted he was owed from his Mercury contract still hadn't been paid and the injustice burned like a festering sore. He bombarded the UCI with emails and seized every opportunity to berate them in the press. But this, as Verbruggen had warned, was not how the game was played.

In late May, a few weeks before the Tour, he joined Armstrong for a high-altitude boot camp in St Moritz. According to Landis, Armstrong counselled a change of strategy. "He said, 'Look, Floyd, I'm sure you're telling the truth, but it doesn't matter. You have to apologise. I'll call Jim Ochowicz [the president of USA Cycling] and he'll arrange a phone call with Verbruggen. You don't want to make these guys mad.'" A few days later, Floyd says, he doped for the first time, applying a testosterone patch to his stomach to shorten his recovery time. Two days later, he did it again. A week later, he says, a half-litre of blood was extracted from his arm. On July 6, 2002, he started his first Tour de France and had the extracted blood transfused during a rest stage. Three weeks later, Lance Armstrong won the Tour de France — his fourth win — and Floyd was rewarded with $50,000 as his share of the prize and a $40,000 bonus.

The use of corticosteroids, testosterone patches and blood transfusions is banned by the UCI, and cheats are punished with a two-year suspension. But if Landis got his clearance times and paperwork right, he could have laughed all the way to the bank. He was still waiting for his money from Mercury — finally paid in 2004 — but had returned to Amber in Girona with $90,000 in his pocket. So why did he do it? "I've tried to explain this a hundred times," he says, "but it always comes out sounding like I am either blaming someone or trying to justify what I did. I don't point fingers. Nobody forced me to do what I did. If I had any reason to believe that the people running the sport really wanted to fix it, I may have said, 'If I wait long enough, I'll have my chance to win without doping.' But there was no scenario in my mind where I was ever going to get the chance to race the Tour de France and win clean. There was no good scenario. It was either cheat or get cheated. And I'd rather not be the guy getting cheated."

Once he had made the decision, there was no turning back, and during the four seasons that followed, Floyd Landis became a fully paid-up member of the Brotherhood of the Needle.

To reach Floyd Landis today, you drive two hours west from Los Angeles to a small, sparsely furnished cabin near Idyllwild in the San Jacinto mountains. A bike stands just inside the doorway; some training vests hang from a clotheshorse in the kitchen/living room; the cupboards are bare; the carpet is worn. It's been a while since the president called.

Five hours have passed since he began telling his story, and we've reached the plush hotel in Holland, three days after his winning ride in the 2006 Tour de France, and his manager has just delivered the bad news. "I didn't want to tell Amber, but by the look on my face she knew something was wrong. I sat beside her and told her I'd tested positive, and she started crying. I tried to be reassuring and did my best to promise her that we'd both be okay, but she could see in my face that we would not be okay."

They checked out and drove to Paris for a meeting with Andy Rihs, the team owner, and his lawyers. Floyd was shaken and conflicted. He had tested positive for testosterone, a drug he had used before every Tour he had raced since 2002, but never during the Tour. He had been mindful of the clearance times. How had it shown up in a sample after stage 17 but not in the samples taken before? It didn't make sense.

Rihs' lawyers didn't want to know. This was his problem, not theirs; Floyd was on his own. The following evening, during a telephone conference with US reporters, he was asked: "Have you ever used performance-enhancing drugs before?" It hit like a kick in the crotch.

"I hadn't, in my own mind, committed to lying at that point," he explains, "but I wasn't strong enough to say yes. I was too exhausted to even consider it, and I knew, if I did, that there would be a million other questions. But I couldn't bring myself to say no either, so I just said the first thing that came into my head."

"I'll say no," he replied.

Five minutes after the press conference, he says, he received a call from Armstrong, who allegedly advised: "Just say 'no' and stop talking, or 'absolutely not'." Armstrong insists he did not say this to Landis.

Once Landis started denying, it became harder to turn back. He returned to California, hired a hugely expensive legal team and announced his intention to fight the charge.

Three weeks after they had embraced on the Champs Elysées, David Witt, his best friend and father-in-law, who had always suffered from depression, committed suicide. A year later, in deep financial trouble and with his marriage crumbling, he received a call from his lawyer announcing they had lost the case. He put down the phone, walked upstairs and ripped the Tour de France trophy from a cabinet.

"I had walked by that thing a hundred times, and every single time I wanted to smash it… and so I just grabbed it. I felt better for about five minutes and didn't ever regret it… It represented a turning point in my life where I had to lie, and I didn't want to lie, not like that. That wasn't me."

He did not close his eyes that night, but as his life continued to unravel, the problem was not his sleep but his dreams. He dreamt about his epic performance on the 17th stage of the Tour, to Morzine; the crowds cheering him on, the legend Eddy Merckx shaking his hand; commentators singing his praise — "Is this the greatest ride ever in the history of the Tour de France?" He dreamt about David, the best friend he had ever had, sitting alone in his car with a pistol to his head. His excitement two weeks earlier on the Champs Elysées: "You always said you'd do it, Floyd." Winning the Tour had been David's dream too. What did it matter? He dreamt about Amber pleading with him — "No, Floyd!" — and trying to cool his rage as he raced towards the trophy cabinet. How good it had felt to smash it; how bad it had felt listening to her tears as she gathered the fragments in a box. She was right; it was all they had left.

He dreamt about his mother and her panic on the phone when her house came under siege after the bomb dropped. "Floyd, you're my son," she said, "and I love you no matter what, so it doesn't make any difference to me. Just tell me. If you did something, why don't you just confess it and get it out of the way. Great, great men have made mistakes, so if you did it, just say you're sorry and go on with your life."

He hadn't listened. He dreamt about the doping arbitration hearing, and that first morning in court when he was called to take the stand. His father watching from the gallery as he raised his right hand: "I swear by almighty God to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth."

He lied.

After separating from Amber, he moved to their cabin in the mountains and started riding and competing again when his suspension expired in February 2009. "I had this idea that I would feel better once I started to race again, but I didn't. Some days I was okay and I would race okay, and other days I just didn't like who I was. I felt like I was completely disconnected from the world, like I was looking at things from the outside, just watching them happen. I couldn't think forward, that was too much, or think backward, but I knew that nothing that happened in front of me could hurt me."

He started to self-medicate with alcohol.

"I had a few drinks every day for quite some time, and it got to the point where I realised I had to stop. I went to some therapy and realised I was just trying to avoid thinking again, except that this time I was using alcohol rather than riding my bike. The process of talking to somebody helped. I realised, 'I am not going to be all right if I've got to keep living like this. I'm not going to be all right if I just keep avoiding it. I can't go back and make it different. I can't change the facts.' " Darkness is falling on the mountain. The only winner in the history of the Tour de France to be disqualified for doping rises from his chair and flicks on a lamp. For nine months, since his emails were leaked to the press, he has lived and moved like a fugitive. He still races his bike but the fire merely flickers now. People are generally kind but he feels awkward in their gaze.

The walls are bereft of portraits or mementos of his glories. He is 35 years old, broke, unemployed and owes $80,000 to lawyers. Newspapers refer to him as "the proven liar and drugs cheat", and there is a chance he may be jailed for perjury. He feels guilty about that and the pain he has inflicted on family and friends.

"You know," he says, "my parents were right about a lot of things. At some level, whatever life you live, you have to accept things before you can be happy — whether that's having very little, like they prefer, or having everything. Until you are content with what you've got, you are always chasing something, or running from something, neither of which is good."

Where are you? "I'm stuck in the middle between chasing something and running for something and at the same time trying to be content."

What about the outcome of the federal investigation? What's a happy ending? He laughs. "Well, one thing about life is that there is no happy ending, the ending is never good. But in terms of the investigation and other people getting hurt, that's not going to make me feel better. There needs to be something better for the next guy that comes along, so he doesn't have to face the decisions I had to face. But in terms of me being okay with me? That's up to me, that's not up to someone else."

A cycle of deceit

David Walsh

May 22, 2011

"

Betsy Andreu called her husband and said she didn't believe he was clean any more. He was too wasted to argue

"

It now seems so far from the days of summer; those dog-day afternoons of the mid-90s in Como when three young Americans, Lance Armstrong, Frankie Andreu and George Hincapie, could leave their apartment and make the short journey to the Café Hardy on Via Masai. A quick double espresso before training made you ride faster but, alas, caffeine wouldn't be enough. Not by some way.

They were in their twenties then, eager to make something of their cycling careers but determined to enjoy the ride. George made them smile. Every time they went to eat, he would ask for the pizza margherita, reducing Italian cuisine to one dish. They called George Margherita in deference to his dietary taste and though amused by his predictability, they warmed to the lack of pretension.

But boys of summer grow older. Frankie married Betsy, Lance got cancer and George went on ordering pizza margherita.

When Lance recovered, everyone was older, life was tougher and professional cycling had gone through the trauma of the Festina scandal and that 1998 Tour de France when French customs and police exposed the sport's drug-riddled underbelly.

Wherever the authorities looked, they found dope and teams with systematic doping programmes. The tribunal of inquiry lasted two years, it should have been a catharsis but it changed nothing and the team for which Lance, Frankie and George now rode, US Postal Service, fully understood that. Without EPO, many thought there was no point in turning up. US Postal turned up at the 1999 Tour expecting to win.

It was Armstrong's first victory and the upbeat story the sport craved. Not just a guy winning a three-week bike race but a triumph for the human spirit.

Throughout that Tour, a young French rider, Christophe Bassons, spoke bravely about his belief that nothing in cycling had changed, that there was still as much doping in the 1999 race as in the previous year.

"We are racing at an average speed of more than 50km per hour, as if the roads of France are nothing more than one gigantic descent," Bassons said. He also claimed there was no way that a clean rider could hope to finish in the top six of that Tour de France.

Armstrong despised Bassons and on the road, they argued. "You know, what you're saying to journalists, it's not good for cycling," Armstrong said.

"I am simply saying what I think. I have said there is still doping," Bassons replied.