Lanced: The Shaming of Lance Armstrong (19 page)

In 2008, Leogrande received a two-year ban and once he had lost his livelihood, he had to leave his apartment in Calabasas, California. After his departure, his landlord saw what he guessed were performance enhancing drugs in the fridge and recalled reading of Leogrande's two-year ban imposed by the USADA.

The landlord called the agency and asked what he should do with the drugs and was told to leave them where they were. The agency did not have the right to enter that apartment and take away evidence of Leogrande's involvement in doping so it asked the Food and Drug Administration to get involved.

That was in 2008 and Leogrande's decision not to remove his EPO from that fridge brought the FDA special agent Jeff Novitzky into the drug poisoned world of professional cycling. It started with Leogrande and the small team who had employed him, Rock Racing, but the investigation soon switched to the biggest players in world cycling, Lance Armstrong and his teams. Novitzky was not surprised by the depth and organised nature of the corruption.

The federal case into Armstrong and the US Postal team was dropped without explanation in February this year, a decision that caught Novitzky and his team by surprise. They believed they had a very strong case against Armstrong and his associates.

The reprieve for Armstrong was temporary because Travis Tygart, the USADA's chief executive, had been asked by some cyclists to sit in while they were interviewed by federal agents and he knew what they had revealed. Riders then repeated their evidence to the USADA and gave the agency the information to process the case against Armstrong and five named associates in cycling. Three of the six accused, Armstrong and two of his former team doctors, Michele Ferrari and Luis del Moral, opted not to contest the charges brought against them. The other three, former team director Bruyneel, former team doctor Pedro Celaya and former soigneur Jose "Pepi' Marti, have indicated a desire to have their cases heard before an independent panel. But after Armstrong's decision not to fight, they may follow suit.

Whether there will be a sting in the tail of the Armstrong story depends upon the UCI. It has asked to see the USADA's full explanation for the decision to strip the seven-time Tour champion of his titles. The UCI has the right to have the case reviewed by the International Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) and says it will study the USADA report before deciding. The report will be delivered within two weeks.

Already, the president of the World Anti-Doping Agency (Wada), John Fahey, has called Armstrong "a drug cheat" and should the UCI defy Wada, cycling's governing body runs the risk of having its riders kicked out of the Olympics.

Tygart is convinced the USADA's actions will be vindicated by other organisations. "We've seen all the evidence," he said, "and we know the truth. I think Mr Armstrong also knows the truth and instead of a fact-by-fact, pieceby-piece examination happening in an open court, he decided his better move was not to contest and hold on to some baseless soundbites about witch hunts and vendettas."

What happened at the US Postal team in Armstrong's time was, said Tygart, "one of the most sophisticated drug conspiracies we've ever seen".

Over the past three days Emma O'Reilly has watched the breaking story of Armstrong's fall from grace and noted with some amusement the condemnation of so many. "I've listened to them and laughed, thinking to myself, 'Where were you in 2004 or 2005? What were you saying then. It's sure not what you're saying now'."

'I hope Lance can tell the truth. We were part of a screwed-up world'

David Walsh

September 23, 2012

"

Up until cycling got dirty for me, I was a pretty honourable guy

"

We have come to a place in the mountains near Missoula, Montana. Forest-fire smoke hangs in the air and in the dulled sunlight I tell him something that's been on my mind for eight or nine years.

"Of all the guys in the US Postal team who lied, your lies were the hardest to stomach," I say. There is sadness in his eyes, a feeling that Tyler Hamilton can't find words for.

Unlike Lance Armstrong, he couldn't simply mouth the non-denials ("I've been tested x-number of times"), the evasions ("I've performed at the same level throughout my career"). No, Tyler Hamilton wanted us to understand he would not take drugs because he was a good man. He would say: "Anyone who knows me knows I could never do that." His honesty was more apparent than real.

"I'd forgotten I'd denied it like that," he says. "When I lied I did try to tug on people's heart strings. It's sad. I'm not proud of it. I tried hard to lie well, I guess. I was very passionate about denying it. Being seen as honourable, that's always been the most important thing to me. Up until cycling got dirty for me, I was a pretty honourable guy."

He tells a story from his youth when downhill skiing was his sport. Accomplished and fiercely courageous, he made the New Hampshire state team and at the end-of-year awards, he and two buddies were each given a pass that would allow them to ski free anywhere in the state through the following year.

"We were high school kids, didn't have a lot of money and one day during spring break, conditions got windy at the area where we were and we went to another. On the way out we sold our tickets, made $20 each. We drove to a different mountain, got our tickets, sold them, went to another and made another 20. Then in the last place, we got greedy, we went to the two ticket windows, one on the east side, the other on the west, and we got caught.

"My dad came from Boston and brought me home. It was the most disappointed I've ever seen him. We talked about it and went through all the people I had let down. I said I would write letters to each one. I sat at home and hand-wrote 40 letters. The sentiments were heartfelt and apologetic."

How come a kid like that ended up being a sports cheat? WHAT do you do when your training partner edges the front wheel of his bike a fraction ahead? You press harder on the pedals until you are alongside. When he again nudges ahead, you respond. You don't give him an inch. If this keeps happening and you never give in, you are Tyler Hamilton. This stubbornness was what he had, the DNA of his soul.

He went to Europe. They doped, and to keep up he doped. They doped some more; he doped more. In the US Postal he became an elite cyclist and a Class A doper.

Eventually he would get caught and sound like Mother Teresa's picked-upon grandnephew when questioned. One evening in June 2010 his mobile phone buzzed. The text was matter-of-fact. "I'm Jeff Novitzky, an investigator with the FDA [the Food and Drug Administration in America]. I'd like to talk to you; please call me on this number." Novitzky told Hamilton he could voluntarily submit to interview or be forced to appear before a grand jury.

They set aside four hours for his grand jury appearance but when that elapsed, there was more he wished to tell them. For three more hours, he continued to describe the minutiae of US Postal's doping culture and what went on within the sport of professional cycling.

Around this time the writer Daniel Coyle suggested to Hamilton they write a book. The Secret Race is a brilliantly detailed inside account of how doping works in professional sport. We feel the chill in our veins when a bag of Hamilton's refrigerated blood is dripped back into his body. We feel his panic when blood begins to seep from the syringe-made hole in his arm after he has left the surgery of Dr Eufemiano Fuentes in Madrid.

What we read is too detailed to be mistrusted, too full of insight to have been concocted. How could you know that when the sun tanned your arms, it highlighted needle scars? Hamilton tells the story of his own doping with such intimacy and detail that you feel you could pinpoint that part of his stomach where he injected the EPO. The book is a bestseller in both Britain and the United States.

Sales figures, Hamilton says, don't matter to him. "For me what mattered was getting it out there. If we sold one or one hundred or one million copies, it didn't really matter. Writing the book was the hardest thing I've done in my life. I'm proud that I've done it but I'm not proud of what's in there. It's hard reading about yourself doing the things I did.

"Going over the drafts was painful. Dan would call me up, 'What do you think of what I've sent you?', and I would say, 'I'm only on page 20'. It was hard to stomach.

"Now people come and say, 'I love the book, man, crazy stories'.

I would prefer if they said, 'Well done for being truthful, it must have been hard'. What we were doing was disgusting, those crazy stories are repulsive."

Pointing to a room beyond the kitchen of the Missoula home he now shares with his wife, Lindsay, he says: "The book is there but I don't think I will ever read it. It was a disgusting world. When you're in it, things happen so fast you don't have time to think. When Jeff Novitzky called, I was forced to reflect on everything and it was like I had all this stuff buried inside me and I realised, 'Wow, what a f*****-up world we were part of'."

I remind him of the people who told the truth and had their careers cut short or their characters assassinated. The idealistic young French rider Christophe Bassons, driven out of the 1999 Tour de France by the leader of Hamilton's US Postal team, Armstrong. Bassons' crime was to tell the truth about doping.

"I kind of knew what was going on with Bassons and knew it was in my best interests not to talk to him. Looking back, it was wrong, same with Filippo Simeoni in 2004."

When the former US Postal soigneur Emma O'Reilly spoke honestly of her time as Armstrong's masseuse, he made scurrilous and untrue allegations against her character.

By the time O'Reilly's story was made public, Hamilton had left US Postal but still he didn't stand up for O'Reilly. "I didn't know about the personal stuff that Lance brought up. If I had, I would have backed Emma 100%.

"Emma was the best soigneur I ever had. A great, great person, you can see it in her eyes, she's the salt of the earth and everyone on the team knew that. When she came out with the doping stuff about Lance, I couldn't be seen to support her but I knew what she was saying was true. And I liked it in a strange way: 'The asshole', I thought, 'is getting some heat'. I kind of felt he deserved it."

The Armstrong portrayed in The Secret Race has few redeeming characteristics. "Everything in the book is the truth," Hamilton says. "Obviously he's got some great qualities. If he was leading by five or six minutes going into the last week of the Tour de France, he would be in a good mood and could be very funny."

A story of how Armstrong chased and beat up a motorist is far from amusing. "We all have our darker side, a lot of mine is in the book and I felt it was fair to share some of the stories about Lance. Sometimes he went way beyond where the majority of people would go. In that incident with the motorist, if I had done what he did I would feel bad for that guy for the rest of my life."

For the three Tours from 1999 to 2001, Hamilton and Armstrong rode in the same US Postal team and he charts the team leader's doping almost as meticulously as his own: the red eggs (testosterone), the Edgar Allan Poe (EPO) and the BBs (blood bags for transfusions).

Before the 1999 Tour, Hamilton obtained EPO from Armstrong's stash in the fridge at his (Armstrong's) home in Nice. Later they would have their blood drawn before the 2001 Tour.

It is all there: the time it took to re-infuse a bag of blood, the many ways to beat drug tests, the greed that led Fuentes, the doping doctor, to take on too many clients, Hamilton's absolute conviction that Armstrong ratted on him to the UCI in 2004, which led to cycling's world governing body warning Hamilton about his suspicious blood values.

In the early years Hamilton tried to convince himself that with most people doping, the playing field was level. "It's not true, though. Drugs affect everyone differently, some react to them better than others. If you've not got that much money, that affects how much you can dope. It is a rich man's game. And there were guys who just didn't want to do it, some for moral reasons; others because they didn't want to take the risk.

"Most people prepared for the Tour with EPO, showed up at the start with haematocrits around 47 but it was what happened during the race that really mattered. In 2003 and 2004 I had blood bags delivered at different points because I had the money and the connection to Fuentes. But it wasn't a level playing field. If Frankie [Andreu] had taken the same amount of EPO that we had, and used transfusions during the race, he would have finished in the top 20, maybe the top 15."

I ask a question. "If no-one had doped, how many Tours would Armstrong have won?" "Look what he did in his four Tours before his cancer. He never competed in the mountains. With no-one doping, he couldn't have won seven. Maybe he could have won one. Maybe, I don't know."

"Will he tell the truth?" "From the bottom of my heart, I hope he does. I really mean that. I wouldn't wish the kind of suffering I've had, holding these secrets, getting accused of all this stuff, and just denying, denying, denying. I hope he comes clean because his life will improve if he does. I understand he could ask a hundred different lawyers and each one would say, 'Don't tell the truth because there could be serious financial consequences'. But I think it would be worth it. It's his way to freedom."

At a key moment in a May 2011 interview given to the 60 Minutes programme on CBS, Hamilton looked host Scott Pelley in the eye and asked what he, Pelley, would have done if faced with the dilemma Hamilton had in the late 90s. Dope or go home? Pelley's body language suggested he might well have taken the same path. It made it seem that what Hamilton had done was almost natural, the only choice he had.

The day before the interview he and Lindsay had said they would like to start a family.

"Imagine," I say now, "you have a son and he is a 25-year-old pro cyclist. He calls you from Europe and says, 'Dad, if I don't dope I can't get to ride the Tour de France'. What do you say?" Hamilton doesn't have to think. "'Come home', I would say. If he insisted that as an adult he had the right to make up his own mind, I would beg and plead, make him read my book. I would never let up. If he persisted in doping, it would be pretty serious between us, a very difficult thing for our relationship."