LITMIR.BIZ

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him. Armstrong wanted him. J.T. Neal said he was “like a god to me” and called him “the best soigneur that ever was.”

      Hendershot, an American, was a massage therapist, physical therapist and miracle worker. His laying-on of hands would bring an exhausted, aching rider to life. Eating at Hendershot’s direction, sleeping according to his advice, a rider began each morning reborn. He came with all the secrets of a soigneur and an unexpected skill developed over the years. In Neal’s words, Hendershot took to cycling’s drug culture “like a duck to water.” But his enthusiasm for and skills in chemistry would be remembered as his special talent.

      For most of a decade Hendershot sat at home in Belgium in his makeshift laboratory, preparing for races. There he mixed, matched and mashed up drugs, always with one goal in mind: to make riders go faster.

      The mad scientist conjured up what he called “weird concoctions” of substances like ephedrine, nicotine, highly concentrated caffeine, drugs that widen blood vessels, blood thinners and testosterone, often trying to find creative ways to give riders an extra physical boost during a race. He’d pour the mix into tiny bottles and hand them to riders at the starting line. Other times, he’d inject them with it. He wasn’t alone in this endeavor. Soigneurs all across Europe made their own homemade blends of potentially dangerous mixes and first drank or injected those potions into themselves. They were their own lab rats.

      Hendershot, who had no formal medical or scientific training, learned the art of doping riders by observing the effects on a human test subject—himself. He knew a formulation was way off when he felt his heart beating so fast and loud it sounded like a runaway freight train. That wouldn’t work for riders already under extreme physical stress. He wanted “amped up,” but not to the point of a heart attack.

      If Hendershot was his own lab rat, it wasn’t long before he tried his potions and pills on the riders, including Armstrong. When Armstrong went professional after the 1992 Olympics, he signed a contract with Motorola, one of the two major American teams. Because Armstrong wanted the best soigneur, he was immediately paired with Hendershot. It was a match made in doping heaven. Both soigneur and rider were willing to go to the brink of safety.

      “What we did was tread the fine line of dropping dead on your bike and winning,” Hendershot says.

      Hendershot said the riders on his teams had a choice of whether to use drugs. They could “grab the ring or not.” He said he didn’t know a single professional cyclist who hadn’t at least dabbled. The sport was simply too difficult—and was many times impossible, as at the three-week-long Tour de France—for riders who didn’t rely on pharmaceutical help.

      Hendershot believed cyclists had at most four years of clean riding before they could no longer remain in the sport. As a drugged-up peloton went faster, the clean riders could help the team leader for maybe the first week of a race, maybe by riding in front of the pack to set the pace or by delivering water bottles from the team car, but then would have to drop out from exhaustion. A career like that was short-lived.

      When Armstrong arrived at Motorola in 1992, a system that facilitated riders’ drug use was firmly in place on the team—and likely in the entire sport. Hendershot said he would take a list of drugs and bogus prescriptions for them to his local pharmacist in Hulste, Belgium, to get the prescriptions filled and to obtain other drugs, too.

      Cycling was always big in Belgium—for generations, it has been one of the country’s most popular sports—and the pharmacist didn’t question Hendershot about the request for such a massive amount of drugs. In exchange, Hendershot would give the pharmacist a signed team jersey or allow him to show up at big races, where he would be a VIP with an all-access pass. Then he would leave the drugstore with bags filled with EPO, human growth hormone, blood thinners, amphetamines, cortisone, painkillers and testosterone, a particularly popular drug he’d hand to riders “like candy.”

      By 1993, Armstrong was using all of those substances—like almost everyone else on the team, Hendershot said. He remembered Armstrong’s attitude from the remark, “This is the stuff I take, this is part of what I do,” and that Armstrong joined the team’s program without hesitation because everyone was doing it.

      “It was like eating team dinner,” Hendershot says, adding that he had a hunch that virtually everyone involved in the team knew about the doping—“doctors, soigneurs, riders, team managers, mechanics—everyone.” He called the drug use casual and said he never had to hide any of it. After injecting the riders at a team hotel, he’d toss a trash bag filled with syringes and empty drug vials right into the hotel’s garbage can.

      While Hendershot never administered EPO or growth hormone to Armstrong, he did administer them to other riders on the team and was aware that Armstrong was using those drugs. Hendershot said a stash of those two drugs was driven from Belgium to the team’s 1995 training camp in southern France.

      Riders like Armstrong could get drugs in several different ways—from Hendershot, from their personal doctor or a doctor that worked with the team, or by buying them over the counter themselves. Each rider would bring those drugs to Hendershot and he would administer them by injecting them into the rider, by mixing a potion of them for the rider to drink or inject, or by injecting them into IVs the rider would receive, based on the doctor’s instructions. Sometimes the drugs would also come in pill form, and Hendershot would dole those out, too.

      In the early 1990s, by Hendershot’s estimation, less than half the teams in the pro peloton had a doctor on staff. Those teams were ahead of the curve. “Drugs level the playing field, but the better your doctor is, the better you are going to be,” Hendershot says, adding that in his opinion he believes that almost all of the doctors had to be administering drugs to their riders considering the sport’s drug culture.

      Still, Hendershot was constantly worried that something he was giving the riders would hurt them—or even possibly kill them—especially when he was administering substances that riders had injected into the IV bags themselves or when the riders’ personal doctors would prepare concoctions for Hendershot to give. He was concerned that he would be culpable if anything ever went wrong, but was constantly rationalizing his actions. Even as he provided drugs to riders, Hendershot said, he told himself, “You’re not a drug dealer. This isn’t organized. This is no big deal.”

      He knew he was lying.

      He rationalized the lie by saying the process was overseen by Max Testa, an Italian who, as of December 2013, still works in the sport and runs a sports medicine clinic in Utah. In 2006, Testa told me that he gave his riders the instructions to use EPO, but never administered drugs to those riders. So if drug use was not mandated by the team, it was at least quasi-official. Hendershot trusted Testa to make sure the riders were staying safe, believing that Testa—unlike other doctors in cycling—actually cared for the riders’ health, and cared less about winning or money. Hendershot put it this way, though: a doctor who refused to give riders drugs wouldn’t last in the sport.

      Armstrong liked Testa so much that he moved to Italy to be near the doctor’s office in the little town of Como, north of Milan. Not long after joining Motorola, Armstrong began to live in Como during the racing season. He brought along his close friend Frankie Andreu, and in time several other riders joined them, including George Hincapie, a New Yorker, and Kevin Livingston, a Midwesterner. All became patients of Testa. All would later become riders on Armstrong’s United States Postal Service Tour de France winning teams.

      Hendershot said all those riders likely believed they were doing no wrong by doping. The definition of cheating was flexible in a sport so replete with pharmacology: It’s not cheating if everybody is doing it. Armstrong believed that to be the dead-solid truth. For him, there was no hesitation, no second-guessing, no rationalizing. As Hendershot had done, Armstrong grabbed the ring.

      April 20, 1994. Three riders from the Italy-based Gewiss-Ballan team stood atop the podium in their light blue, red and navy uniforms after dominating the Flèche Wallonne, a one-day race in Belgium’s hilly Ardennes region. Two held bouquets of flowers above their heads as they waved to the crowd. Armstrong seethed. The Gewiss riders were flaunting their

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