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of the sport’s inner workings.

      Often when Ochowicz was asked about Armstrong and EPO, or other performance-enhancing drugs, he took on a look as if to say, How could you even think such a thing? He would smile nervously and say, “I have no idea how to respond” (2005) or “I don’t know what the answer is” (2009) or “The answer is that I haven’t a clue” (2010). He has denied involvement or knowledge of any cheating on the team. Over the course of seven years, I would walk away time and again thinking Ochowicz was either a practiced liar or the most oblivious man ever to walk in cycling’s clink-clink world.

      It seems to be a stretch to say that Ochowicz wouldn’t have known about the team’s doping—rumours of it, or the reality of it. He was a member of Armstrong’s inner circle, a man Armstrong professed to be his “surrogate father.” Ochowicz stood up for Armstrong at his wedding and is the godfather to his first son.

      Hendershot said he would consider Ochowicz the most unethical person on the Postal Team if Ochowicz did know about the doping but turned a blind eye to it. If that were the case it would have effectively meant Ochowicz was relying on the doctors and soigneurs to make sure the cyclists didn’t overdose and drop dead, Hendershot said.

      Armstrong said Motorola’s EPO use began in May 1995 at the Tour DuPont, America’s best-known multistage race. Armstrong, who had finished runner-up the previous two years, became the second American winner after Greg LeMond. With his victory came a big payday, $40,000. Including bonus money, Armstrong collected $51,000. He shared it with his teammates.

      Swart said he received Testa’s EPO instructions in the spring of 1995 and that he and Andreu subsequently went to Switzerland to buy the drug. They used it for the Tour of Switzerland, which ran shortly before the Tour de France. Swart said he used EPO for the last time after the prologue of the 1995 Tour. Every morning and every night at that Tour, team employees showed up at the team hotel with bags of ice for riders’ thermoses, and were sometimes exhausted after an all-day hunt in countries that mostly serve their drinks at room temperature.

      During one rest day of that 1995 Tour de France, Armstrong and many of his Motorola teammates gathered in one of the squad’s hotel rooms to give blood samples that they would test in a centrifuge. That centrifuge spun the blood to separate it into three categories: plasma, red blood cells and white blood cells. Once the blood was divided, the riders could test their hematocrit levels. Too high a hematocrit level meant they had used too much EPO and might be placing themselves in danger of a heart attack. (Riders had heard stories of some cyclists setting alarms to wake up in the middle of the night to exercise, so that their EPO-thickened blood wouldn’t cause them to suffer cardiac arrest in their sleep.)

      With half of the Tour and so many punishing miles behind them, the riders’ hematocrit levels should have dropped well below normal. With the EPO they had used, though, their bodies were making new red blood cells at that very moment. Their hematocrits soared, as if they had not pedaled a mile. They were fresh.

      Swart saw that most of his teammates had hematocrits of more than 50. His, he recalled, was the lowest of everyone’s, at 47 percent. He remembered the others’ numbers: Andreu’s was at about 50. Andrea Peron, an Italian, had the highest, at 56. (There have been no findings that Peron ever doped.) Armstrong’s was either 52 or 54, at least ten percentage points above his norm. Even with that edge, Armstrong, the strong one-day racer, would go on to finish 36th in that Tour, nearly an hour and a half slower than Miguel Indurain, the winner.

      The telephone call came to Kathy LeMond in the middle of the night. The wife of the American cycling star Greg LeMond heard screaming and crying when she picked up the receiver in their home in Belgium. Then she heard a voice say, “He’s dead! He’s dead! I tried to help him, but he’s already dead! I touched him—he’s cold! He’s dead!”

      The voice was that of Annalisa Draaijer, the American wife of the twenty-six-year-old Dutch cyclist Johannes Draaijer. That night at the Draaijers’ home in Holland, three days after her husband had returned from a race, Annalisa heard Johannes make a gurgling sound as they lay in bed. She tried to wake him, but his body was limp. He had died beside her. She knew no one else to turn to.

      Greg LeMond had raced with Draaijer on the Dutch team, PDM. Their wives bonded because both spoke English. Now their friend was dead. As soon as news of Draaijer’s death became public, there was speculation that EPO use had caused the cyclist’s blood to thicken into mud and cause a heart attack. No one ever proved Johannes Draaijer died because he was on EPO. But to Greg LeMond, nothing seemed more obvious.

      “He died for what?” LeMond asks. “For nothing … Everybody knew what was going on, but nobody stopped it. Nobody.”

       CHAPTER 5

      In the fall of 1995, Lance Armstrong went in search of Dr. Michele Ferrari. He wanted to work with the man who had transformed the Gewiss-Ballan bikes at Flèche Wallonne into flying machines.

      But Ferrari had become a kingmaker in cycling and had grown increasingly selective about his clientele. So even strong riders like Armstrong needed to undergo a physical before any deal was closed. Because he was afraid of going anywhere alone, Armstrong convinced his girlfriend, Monica Buck, a former Miss Hawaiian Tropic from Texas, and J.T. Neal to accompany him to Ferrari’s office in Bologna. They climbed into Armstrong’s car for the two-and-a-half-hour drive from Como on autostrada A1, due southeast.

      It wasn’t the most comfortable ride. Neal didn’t want him to go, and was cross that he’d gone ahead and made the appointment. All he said, in his soft Southern drawl, was, “Lance, don’t get greedy now.”

      Only twenty-four years old, Armstrong had nearly $750,000 in the bank. But Neal knew that Armstrong idolized people like Ochowicz, the Motorola team manager who ate at the best restaurants, stayed at five-star hotels and ordered only the priciest wines. Armstrong could see only one route to get there—and that was with Ferrari leading the way. He claims he had asked Eddy Merckx, the five-time Tour champion from Belgium, to introduce him to the doctor, and says that Merckx obliged.

      Buck, meanwhile, was a petite, voluptuous aspiring actress who had come from Texas to visit Armstrong. Neal worried about her. Lance had a way with women. He had dumped Buck’s predecessor, Danielle Overgaag, a top Dutch cyclist who had lived with him in Austin, because she’d been “too opinionated.” Neal had the feeling that Armstrong would never have gone to see Ferrari if Overgaag had still been in the picture. But at summer’s end, in 1995, Armstrong had Neal remove Overgaag’s belongings from the Como apartment to make room for Miss Hawaiian Tropic, who seemed already to be straining her welcome.

      Ferrari’s office, in the basement of the doctor’s Bologna house, was a chaos of wires, tubes, bicycles and machines. Armstrong had heard about some of Ferrari’s clients, including Eddy Merckx’s son, Axel. Axel had suddenly ridden faster than ever, and Armstrong had asked him if he had a secret. Yes, Merckx apparently said.

      Ferrari, the tall, thin Italian with a receding hairline and avian features, had studied at the University of Ferrara under Francesco Conconi, a scientist considered the grandmaster of Italian sports medicine. Conconi, a former member of the International Olympic Committee’s antidoping commission, knew his way around EPO. The IOC had paid him handsomely for his research into developing a test for it. But he was double-dealing. Even as the IOC paid him to develop the test, he delivered EPO to Italian skiers and cyclists.

      Ferrari learned from Conconi. Now Armstrong wanted to be the hematocrit-rich Plato to Ferrari’s Socrates. After evaluating him, Ferrari praised Armstrong as “amazing, amazing, so amazing.” But he told him he could improve only if he followed his advice and his plan, never straying. “I will train you,” he said, “and together, we can do great things.”

      Ferrari charged Armstrong $10,000 for the consultation and commanded 10 percent of his salary. Even Armstrong, who guarded money as if he were as penniless as his poor mother said she once was, thought the deal was worth it for what he could earn later, and agreed to it.

      The

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