Seven Deadly Sins: My Pursuit of Lance Armstrong (39 page)

Floyd Landis

From Gorak Shep to Pheriche and for two days here in this lodge the thought has kept occurring to me that these accusations don’t exist in a vacuum. They have come at a time when I thought that the entire Lance Armstrong story was dead, that pursuing Lance was a period of my life which I would have to put down to experience.

What Floyd Landis is saying, though, is interesting: it is direct evidence and it sits on the shelf with what has gone before. Seven years ago I sat in a home near Liverpool with Emma O’Reilly and listened to her tell of her five years in the shadow of Lance. She told those stories about ditching syringes and crossing borders and handing product to Armstrong in the car park of a McDonald’s outside Nice. She told me about disguising the wounds from syringe punctures and about the team backdating a prescription for corticosteroids. She’d put it all under oath back in 2006.

I sat there in the Himalayas, the room scarcely lit apart from the light from my laptop, and thought of Frankie and Betsy in Detroit. All the calls and the conversations. The stories they had from back in the days of the euro dogs, the young American cyclists on the make and on the break in the old world. They’d put all that stuff down on oath too. Armstrong said that Betsy was bitter, motivated only by her hatred of him. Frankie’s team couldn’t get into competitions that were sponsored by the company that owned the team.

And that night in October 2003 spent at the Auckland home of Stephen Swart, who rode with Armstrong for the Motorola team in 1994 and 1995. Armstrong, Stephen had said, was the leading pro-doping voice in the team. Swart would later repeat these allegations under oath. Armstrong said Swart was a bitter former teammate.

I thought, too, of a guy called Mike Anderson, the personal assistant employed by Armstrong for two years, 2003 and 2004. So central was Anderson to the lives of the family that Kristin Armstrong referred to him as H2: husband number two. I met Anderson in Austin, Texas, and he told of the day that changed his view of Armstrong.

It was the spring of 2004, the Armstrongs had separated. Lance had hooked up with the singer Sheryl Crow and was taking her to the Girona apartment for the first time. According to Anderson, who was in Girona ahead of his boss, Armstrong called and asked him to go through the apartment and ‘de-Kik’ it [Armstrong referred to his former wife as Kik]. While doing that task, Anderson claimed he found a small bottle in a medical cabinet that had the label ‘Androstenone’, and after looking up the list of banned products on his laptop, he was sure his boss was doping.

Their relationship was never the same after that. When Mike Anderson made public his discovery, Armstrong dismissed him as a bitter former employee.

I’d stayed in touch with O’Reilly, Swart, the Andreus and Anderson long after the interviews ended. To be slightly melodramatic about it we were like a loose group of survivors. When those around us grew weary of us speaking about Lance and the great heist, we could talk to each other. And one thing always puzzled me: why would all these good people make up vicious lies about Armstrong?

Now Floyd Landis was adding his story to the shelf.

Lying in that tent at Gorak Shep, thoughts turned to some of the forerunners. The difference with the Landis emails would be presentation. He offered them not to the public. Instead he slapped them across the face of the cycling authorities and the anti-doping world like a pair of gloves. He was asking for a duel. He was challenging their honour, having just rediscovered his. Whaddya gonna do?

Word on the yak trail was that the United States Anti-Doping Authority were interested, seriously interested, and federal investigator Jeff Novitzky was about to about to throw his net into the waters where the big fish swam.

I liked the choice of Novitzky. He lives in Burlingame outside San Francisco just a mile from the Bay Area Laboratory Co-operative. His greatest case, the BALCO case, had unfolded right on his doorstep. His work in the infamous BALCO case, involving steroids being supplied to Major League baseball players, proved one thing. You can get away with lying in lots of places but it’s a bad idea to lie to federal investigators. The feds have more power than us trolls. Floyd Landis, the strangest and most unreadable dude in the entire pack, had opened a can of worms.

If Jeff Novitzky was ever to conclude that US Postal did run a doping programme, Armstrong and the others could face charges. If Jeff Novitsky was ever to conclude that through Tailwind Sports, the US Postal Service, a federal agency itself, had been defrauded, the charges would get much more serious. The penalties for misusing such funds are draconian.

Floyd Landis of Lancaster County had lit a fuse that I could see in the Himalayas. In the morning I had a shower, a treat which cost more than the room. I found my smiling $7-a-day Sherpa and set out to rejoin the group who were six hours away. Lewis, it would transpire, had swum 22 minutes across the freezing lake. He had lived and made a point.

Trekking back, though, I was in my own little world. I was thinking of this long journey through cycling, of the happy innocence of the early days. Paul and I in rue Kléber arguing over coffees and
L’Équipe
. I was thinking of the first hints that something was wrong with this sport that we loved, the first realisation that our heroes had feet of clay and canisters of pills. We had gone so deep into that world, and in the end I had begun to think that it was inalterable.

Lewis Pugh, up there on the great mountain, had more chance of making a change than I had. He could save the world. Nobody could save cycling. And yet here, Floyd Landis had leaned into the job with us. Something was moving again.

I walked through the Himalayas having missed the very thing I had come to see but feeling happier than I’d felt in a long time. Nobody comes down from this place as the same person who went up.

Thank the gods for the gift of internet! It takes the climb out of the path to enlightenment.

21

24 July 2005

I’m sorry you don’t believe in miracles. But this is one hell of a race. This is a great sporting event and you should stand around and believe it. You should believe in these athletes, and you should believe in these people. I’ll be a fan of the Tour de France for as long as I live. And there are no secrets – this is a hard sporting event and hard work wins it.
Lance Armstrong

It has been a stormy love affair, but Lance Armstrong is saying goodbye to the Tour de France. After seven consecutive wins following his recovery from testicular cancer, Big Tex is leaving town. As a concession to what he has achieved and as the recognition of a sort of ceasefire with the French public, Armstrong is permitted a farewell speech. Watched by his three children he speaks in romantic terms of the race that he has made his own. He has a word for the wretched of the earth. He feels sorry, he says, for those who can’t dream. He says he wants the Tour to live for ever. He has kind words for old rivals on the podium with him, Jan Ullrich and Ivan Basso. And then he is gone. You can feel the void, the wind blowing tumbleweeds through the ghost towns that are the sports pages. Lance Armstrong has dominated all argument, all rumour, all conjecture and all stages for seven years. He leaves behind a field which lacks a man of his stature. Love him or loathe him, the world of cycling in the age after Lance has just begun. Elvis has left the building.

27 July 2006

I declare convincingly and categorically that my winning the Tour de France has been exclusively due to many years of training and my complete devotion to cycling.
Floyd Landis

In France there has been intense speculation since the UCI let it be known on the morning after the Tour de France finished that that an unnamed rider has tested positive in the last week of the Tour. When Floyd Landis, crowned as champion the day before, cancels a race in the Netherlands speculation mounts. Today, four days after his triumph, it is confirmed the Tour winner has tested positive. After seven years of speculation about Lance Armstrong, his successor has been popped virtually on the winner’s podium. Floyd Landis, with the farm-boy shoulders and the red hair and the piece of firewood where his hip should be, readies himself to explain to the world.

In Italy, meanwhile, the Granfondo Michele Bartoli, a one-day race for medium-level pros, has finished at virtually the same time as the Tour. The Granfondo is an Italian re-creation of the Tour of Flanders, with lots of cobblestones and falls. On Sunday one rider, from the Partizan Whistle team, comes through the old arch into Montecarlo well placed. This is to be his last race. His wife Yuliet has just escaped from Cuba. One more race and he will pack away the dream and find a job that can support them both. But he falls within half a mile of the finish. A routine tumble. He thought little of it till that night in his hotel bed when he noticed that one of his buttocks had become grotesquely swollen. He went to hospital. As Floyd Landis faces his fresh hell, this Thursday morning the rider is on a surgeon’s table somewhere in Tuscany. They are cutting him open in the hope of draining a haematoma and saving his life. It isn’t easy. His haematocrit level is 58. His blood is one quarter sludge from the EPO. The rest is watery from thinners. They look at this mad fool who has risked his life for cycling.

He’s lucky to be alive.

Like Floyd Landis he is an American from Pennsylvania. His name is Joe Papp. He is five months older than Floyd.

Late 2006

Meet Kayle. He sounds like a character lifted from an Elmore Leonard novel but Kayle Leogrande, the tattoo guy, is real and at the root of Lance’s troubles.

Kayle was a good junior rider and then he gave it all up at 18. He married, had kids, divorced, became a tattoo artist. If you feel the need to get inked by a guy with a real place in sports history, he owns a shop, downstairs at a strip mall in Upland, California.

Anyway, after nine prodigal years Kayle came back to biking. He watched Lance on the TV in 2004 and was inspired. He turned pro in 2005 with the Jelly Belly–Kenda crew. Went amateur in 2006. Turned pro again in 2007 with Rock Racing. Rock Racing was a team that seemed to understand that some guys had a past.

Leogrande bought his first EPO in late 2006 from Joe Papp. Papp was back in the US. Six weeks before his near death in Italy, he had tested positive at the Presidential Cycling Tour of Turkey. The lower you are in the food chain the grubbier doping gets. Being picked for testing on these gigs meant nothing. The team always came up with something. A bribe. Tampering with the sample by flicking in a little piece of chemical stored under the nail. Today they had something different to offer when Joe Papp said he had to take the test. The team wanted to him to catheterise somebody else’s urine into his bladder. Joe said, hmmm, he’d take his chances, thanks. So now he was serving a ban from 31 July 2006 right through to 31 July 2008.

But he was dealing. The EPO he sold Kayle Leogrande didn’t come with instructions. The first few times Kayle took the stuff he felt sick.

What has this to do with Lance? They have met only once, after a race in Ojai, California, in 2005. It’s unlikely that Lance remembers the brief chat.

Kayle does. He was nervous, didn’t know what to say.

There were cooler things which Kayle might have said. Still, no doubt Lance remembers the name these days.

When Kayle went pro again, aged 30, he suddenly began to look like a guy who’d left a great future behind him. He won the points classification at the 2007 Redlands Bicycle classic, where he also finished second in the second-stage criterium. He took three stages at the International Cycling Classic-Superweek in Wisconsin. He came home second overall.

At some stage in that 2007 season he must have begun to wonder about his dealer, because on 18 May 2007 one Joe Papp gives testimony in Pepperdine University, Malibu, California, in the case of Floyd Landis v USADA. Papp, who is at pains to point out that he is testifying as an expert and not testifying
against
Floyd Landis, describes his experiences with doping, particularly testosterone. His expertise stretches much further, though. He once injected himself with Pot Belge during a race. His words punch a modest hole in the Landis defence position, which is that testosterone is passé and so ineffective as to be beneath the whims of a top cyclist.

Floyd Landis wasn’t pleased.

Why did they bring in Joe Papp? Who the fuck is that guy?
Floyd Landis

I’m sure he thought, ‘Who is this stupid tattooed guy?’
Kayle Leogrande

He would be less pleased when he discovered later that USADA had called an expert who was still in the business of dealing performance-enhancing drugs, a vocation from which Joe Papp was finding it hard to extract himself.

In 2007, though, Kayle Leogrande was happily amid the pros again, this time with Rock Racing. He had more access to knowledge. He was a good natural rider and with the EPO in his blood he excelled. He was so good that he became paranoid that everybody must know his secret. So that summer, on 26 July 2007, during Superweek in Wisconsin, he panicked when required to take a drug test. He was so sure that bad news was on the way that the next day he told Suzanne Sonye, the
soigneur
, about his doping. He was sure Suzanne would be okay with it.

But Suzanne wasn’t okay with it.
Kyle Leogrande

As he told the
New York Times
later.

Doh!

So, in January 2008, Kayle Leogrande switched to a career in litigation. First of all, he was revealed as the hitherto anonymous rider who was suing USADA concerning his insistence that they not test his B-sample from a urine sample taken at Superweek in Wisconsin the previous year.