Cycle of Lies: The Fall of Lance Armstrong - Juliet Macur

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on the peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches that were kept for him in the team car. He felt that Ochowicz was a bad influence on Armstrong, a kid who didn’t need much prodding to break the rules. It was now evident to Neal that Armstrong’s moral code would be forever altered. Armstrong, according to a person with direct knowledge of the situation, would later win the Clásica de San Sebastián race in 1995 only after bribing another rider in the final few miles, but that he was just following the sport’s well-established customs.

      If Armstrong ever had a conscience, the sport’s established customs helped convince him that it didn’t matter.

      In the television broadcast of the prize ceremony, Armstrong summed up the victory with an ironic hint at the fact of the race: “Everybody won today.”

      That year, 1993, Armstrong’s star rose sharply. Not only did he win the million, he also won his first stage of the Tour de France. In August, at twenty-one, he became the second youngest world road racing champion ever. With Motorola planning to leave cycling, Armstrong’s brilliant season gave his team reason to believe it would gain a new sponsor, probably one with much deeper pockets.

      All of a sudden cycling mattered. Reporters from around the world descended upon Austin. ABC News interviewed Armstrong and his mother, calling him a “boy wonder” and playing up Linda Armstrong’s role as a teenage mom.

      “Well, being young and pregnant, I was scared,” she said.

      Lance said: “We had to overcome a lot of obstacles and a lot of resistance in our lives. And I mean, all these people, they counted her out, counted me out.”

      Newspaper stories said he had never met his father and that Linda’s second marriage ended after ten years. Those lies somehow made Armstrong’s story even more attractive to the media.

      “Lance is just what our country needs to get excited about cycling,” the USA Cycling marketer, Steve Penny, said in one news report. “If someone is looking for a hero to back, Lance fits the mold.”

      Team manager Ochowicz said he was ecstatic about Armstrong’s $1 million victory. “It’s a great day for U.S. cycling.” By year’s end, Armstrong and the cycling team were so good that Motorola signed on for another year. The team did not have to fold after all. Armstrong had a new name for Penny: “Dime.”

      Back in Austin, Armstrong paid $70,000 for a new sports car, a black Acura NSX. He then asked Neal to build a garage at the apartment complex. Neal resisted, but only for a moment. For about $50,000, he built the garage. Whatever Armstrong asked, it seemed, J.T. Neal was there to say yes.

      At Christmas that year, Armstrong thanked him with several gifts. One was an autographed world champion’s rainbow jersey. In black marker, he wrote, “J.T. I’m very fortunate that our paths have crossed. You’re truly my righthand man! Not to mention my best friend! Lance Armstrong.”

      He gave Neal a Rolex watch inscribed with the words “To J.T. From LANCE ARMSTRONG.” Neal accepted the watch as a symbol of Armstrong’s gratitude, even his love. For a number of years, Neal wore it with pride—until the day came that he decided to never put it on his wrist again.

PART TWO

       CHAPTER 4

      In 1992, someone opening the Motorola team’s medicine cabinet would have come across the usual items—Band-Aids, diarrhea medicine and antiseptics for “road rash”—as well as the banned stuff, like cortisone and testosterone alongside household Tylenol. Most riders didn’t consider them to be real doping products. Using those drugs just meant the riders were minding their health in a grueling sport.

      Cortisone, which could be injected or swallowed, reduces muscle soreness and is an anti-inflammatory for stiff, aching joints. It remains a staple for cyclists because it alleviates leg pain. Riders liken it to taking an aspirin if you have a headache, and many team doctors write bogus prescriptions for the drug.

      Testosterone is a steroid, but isn’t used to help riders bulk up with muscle. Rather, it allows them to recover more efficiently from a workout, so they can rise the next day and train just as hard. Riders treat the drug the way they do getting a massage or staying hydrated.

      Those drugs were common in the European peloton. Everyone serious about the Tour looked for an edge, whether it was steroids or injectable vitamins like B12, B complex or folic acid.

      Performance-enhancing drug use is bound with the history of cycling, especially the Tour de France, a three-week, 2,000-plus-mile race. The event, held every July, is almost impossibly hard, and has been that way since its debut in 1903.

      Riders have always found ways to make the race easier. In 1904, cyclists left their bikes and hitched rides in cars, trains or buses to cut miles off the route. Every stage winner and the first four finishers were among twenty-nine riders punished for cheating that year, ushering in the Tour’s dance with dishonesty.

      Through the early 1900s, riders relied on substances like ether, cocaine and strychnine to blunt the pain. Some stopped at bars to chug wine and other numbing spirits. They used cocaine-based mixtures to convince their bodies they could go on when their brains said they couldn’t. Riders believed they could breathe easier if first they had taken some strychnine (so highly toxic it is used as rat poison) and/or nitroglycerine (given to heart attack patients to stimulate the heart).

      The abuse of those drugs was affirmed by Henri Pélissier and his brother, Francis, French riders who abandoned the 1924 Tour and then gave a blockbuster interview to a journalist, Albert Londres, of Le Petit Parisien. The story was titled, “Les Forçats de la Route”—“The Prisoners of the Road.”

      Henri Pélissier told Londres, “You have no idea what the Tour de France is like. It’s like martyrdom. And even the Stations of the Cross had only fourteen stations, while we have fifteen stages. We suffer from start to finish.” Pélissier showed the journalist the contents of the bag he had carried throughout the race: cocaine for the eyes, chloroform for the gums, horse ointment for the knees. Pills he called “dynamite.”

      Amphetamines became popular in the mid-1940s, and would lead to dangerous accidents. French rider Jean Malléjac collapsed with his bike at the 1955 Tour, six miles from the summit of Mont Ventoux, the famous bald mountain that towers more than 6,200 feet above the Provence region of France, and fell onto boulders at the roadside, with one foot attached to a pedal and the other pawing frantically through the air. He remained unconscious for fifteen minutes in what the Tour doctor deemed an amphetamine-fueled breakdown.

      Another French cyclist, Roger Rivière, landed in a tangle of metal at the bottom of a steep slope after crashing over a wall during the 1960 Tour. He broke his back. Doctors found painkillers in his pocket, which could have distorted his judgment and slowed his reflexes so much that he had been unable to apply his brakes. He never regained use of his lower limbs. Just two years later, fourteen Tour riders left the race because they had been sickened by morphine.

      The Tour and drugs went hand in hand, despite a growing public concern. Five-time Tour winner Jacques Anquetil was famously open about his own regimen. He once said, “You can’t win the Tour de France on mineral water alone … Everybody dopes.” Nothing was illegal.

      By 1963, doping had grown so dangerous that a group of cyclists, doctors, lawyers, journalists and sports officials came together to push for drug testing. Two years later, France passed its first national antidoping laws and drug testing began at the Tour.

      Led by Anquetil, riders balked. Before the Tour’s first stage, they gathered and chanted, “No pissing in test tubes!” Their protest included walking their bikes for the first fifty meters of that stage. Félix Lévitan, the Tour director, called the riders “a band of drug addicts” bent on “discrediting the sport of cycling.”

      Then came one of the blackest days in cycling’s

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