LITMIR.BIZ

Скачать книгу

by Italian authorities for sporting fraud and for doping his riders. He dealt in cash and wrote little down so that he would leave a minimal paper trail. Over time, though, Ferrari grew lax about his rules.

      On Armstrong’s happy drive back to Como, he talked nonstop about how his career would skyrocket with Ferrari’s training and doping help. (Ferrari, however, denies doping any of his riders.) All Buck wanted to talk about was the two-hour shopping trip she and Neal took while waiting for Ferrari to be done with Armstrong. In a kind of lonely melancholy, Neal saw that Armstrong felt no guilt. Neal felt that Armstrong had forgotten the trip they’d taken to see the family of Fabio Casartelli, Armstrong’s teammate on Motorola who had been killed during the 1995 Tour. Armstrong had held Casartelli’s infant son in his arms and had embraced his widow.

      During one stage of the Tour, Casartelli had crashed and hit his head on a cement block along the road. Testa, who allegedly had been overseeing the doping on the Motorola team, allegedly persuaded the forensic doctor in France not to conduct an autopsy because he said it was obvious how Casartelli had died.

      Armstrong would eventually say that the day Casartelli died is the day he learned what it meant to ride the Tour. “It’s not about the bike,” Armstrong said. “The Tour is not just a bike race, not at all. It is a test. It tests you physically, it tests you mentally, it even tests you morally. I understood that now. There were no shortcuts, I realized.”

      No shortcuts—unless you consider a secret deal with Europe’s most famous and infamous doping doctor a shortcut.

      From Austin, Armstrong talked for hours by phone with Ferrari. He took training tips and grilled the doctor relentlessly. Once a week, in the middle of the night, the fax machine in Neal’s office would come alive with Ferrari’s training and doping calendars: when to take EPO, human growth hormone or testosterone so as to avoid testing positive.

      Though much of the public thought Chris Carmichael was the coach solely responsible for preparing Armstrong, that relationship was just a cover. Not that Carmichael would admit it. In 2006, he told me he was Armstrong’s main coach, then more recently failed to return several of my phone calls and e-mails asking for comment.

      As for getting the drugs, Armstrong had different methods. He could coax teammates into buying them for him from pharmacies in Switzerland, or buy them there himself. The soigneur Hendershot could procure drugs from his black market sources. Whatever they had to do, however much they had to risk, the winning would make it all worthwhile.

      By 1995, Neal, Armstrong’s unofficial business manager, couldn’t handle Armstrong’s contracts alone. Companies wanted to produce Armstrong trading cards. Others wanted endorsements. Neal needed help. Keeping tabs on Armstrong was near impossible. That’s where Bill Stapleton came in.

      Stapleton, a former Olympic swimmer who had competed at the University of Texas, had a fledgling sports practice at the Austin law firm Brown McCarroll and he needed clients. He needed Armstrong.

      When Armstrong reached out in the spring of 1995, Stapleton promised he would shower him with personal attention. He offered a low commission rate: 15 percent of Armstrong’s marketing deals. Other agents, including the high-profile super-agent Leigh Steinberg, had asked for 20 percent.

      He took Armstrong out for beers to woo him.

      “You’ll be a big fish in a small pound,” Stapleton told him. “There will never be a time when your calls go unanswered. You will be what my world revolves around.”

      “You’ll be there for anything, whenever I need you?” Armstrong said.

      “Yes, for anything, all the time.”

      “For anything?”

      “Yes, absolutely anything.”

      That was exactly what Armstrong wanted to hear. He loved being the most important person in the room.

      Back home, Linda Armstrong’s third marriage was crumbling because her husband, John Walling, drank too much and was missing work, and Neal thought Armstrong should help his mother with money—a suggestion Armstrong refused.

      For some reason unknown to Neal, Armstrong grew increasingly angry at his mother, long his greatest ally, the creator and perpetuator of the fantastic myth that the cycling world had come to embrace. Now he wanted nothing to do with her.

      When Armstrong had bought his land in Austin in 1994 for about $240,000, he could have used his mother, a real estate agent, and spread some of the commission to her. But he didn’t. The mother-son relationship was so worrisome that Neal and Linda tried to convince him to see a sports psychologist and channel that anger into his riding. Again, Armstrong passed. This was an Armstrong that Neal didn’t know or like. He worried that Lance started every relationship thinking, “What can you do for me?”

      The year before, Linda Armstrong and Neal had flown to Minneapolis to seek Greg and Kathy LeMond’s advice on negotiating Lance’s contracts. At the kitchen table in the LeMonds’ lakeside estate, they also asked how to rein in the kid’s ego.

      “How do I get Lance to be less self-centered and actually care about other people during all this?” Linda asked.

      The LeMonds didn’t know what to say. For a few awkward seconds, they sat speechless. Did they hear her right? Was Linda Armstrong telling them her son had no empathy? That he was out of control? They believed she was genuinely scared. They stuck to business advice—keep a close watch on him, don’t let him stray, carefully choose his partners.

      Two years after the Gewiss team swept Flèche Wallonne and suggested to the world that its riders were doping—and doing so under Ferrari’s watch as the team doctor—Armstrong took the top spot on that podium, the first American to win the famed spring race. That year, 1996, he also won the Tour duPont for the second year in a row. He was the runner-up at Paris-Nice, a one-week race, and his skills as a sprinter and time-trial rider were improving. All that was left to be considered a Tour contender was to boost his performance as a climber.

      But as the summer of 1996 progressed, Armstrong could feel himself slow down. He dropped out of the Tour de France after just five days because of a sore throat and bronchitis. He told reporters, “I couldn’t breathe.”

      Neal also hadn’t been feeling like himself. Soon, the reason became clear: Neal had cancer. He was diagnosed with multiple myeloma, a rare cancer of the plasma cells that inhibits the production of healthy blood cells. It hit Armstrong like a sinkhole in his path. Doctors gave Neal only two years to live.

      Still, an exhausted Neal went to the 1996 Atlanta Olympics with Armstrong. An electric pump fed chemotherapy drugs into his chest. He slept on the floor of the house Armstrong rented for the Games.

      “He needed it for privacy,” Neal said of the house. “He needed it for all the damn shots he was getting. You needed the privacy because the other players were not on the drug program. They were not getting shots. It looked like a pharmacy in the bedroom.”

      Neal watched as Hendershot showed up with a bag filled with vials of liquid, syringes and IV bags and tended to Armstrong as if he were the cancer patient. He saw Hendershot give Armstrong an IV before and after the races. Armstrong was already using testosterone, growth hormone and EPO, but Neal wasn’t sure what substances Armstrong had received at those Summer Games. Whether he took banned drugs at those Olympics, or to prepare for them, Armstrong won’t say. When asked about it, Hendershot can’t remember the specific substances he gave Armstrong for those Summer Games, but said, “I would be totally surprised if he wasn’t” using banned drugs.

      Hendershot told me that it was common to give riders different cocktails of steroids with EPO, and to give them aspirin or pharmaceutical-grade blood thinners to make sure their blood didn’t turn to sludge. But whatever Hendershot had given Armstrong at those Olympics, it produced no miracle rides. Armstrong finished 12th in the road race and 6th in the time trial, feeling inexplicably gassed as he struggled in each event.

      Armstrong ended the professional season ranked seventh in the world, enough to secure a lucrative contract with the highly

Скачать книгу