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a privilege granted to only the most elite riders.

      By that time, Armstrong also had a stable of sponsors, including Nike, Giro, Oakley and Milton Bradley. His bank account overflowed. Stapleton said that Armstrong was a very wealthy young man who he estimated would make between $2 million and $3 million that year.

      It was time for Armstrong to grow up. He finally moved out of the apartment he had rented from Neal for seven years and headed for a bachelor pad commensurate with his paycheck. Armstrong built a Mediterranean-style, 4,950-square-foot house on Lake Austin, with a pool, hot tub, two boat slips and twenty-nine palm trees. Gone was his beloved $70,000 NSX, replaced by a much cooler stable of toys: a $100,000 Porsche 911, a Harley-Davidson motorcycle, a Jet Ski and a powerboat. He threw himself a lavish twenty-fifth birthday party in his new mansion. But something was wrong.

      He’d returned from Europe feeling weak, as if he had the flu. His headaches resisted even a handful of ibuprofen, and sometimes as many as three migraine pills. On his birthday, he blamed it on too many margaritas, but a few days later, he coughed up blood. His personal physician said it was likely that Armstrong’s sinuses were bleeding, from allergies.

      On October 2, 1996, about 1 p.m., Armstrong and Neal had lunch at their usual haunt, The Tavern in Austin. Afterward, they headed to a mall to find a pair of shoes for Neal. This time Armstrong complained about a pain in his stomach.

      “I’m having trouble walking,” Armstrong said, doubling over.

      Neal told Armstrong that the first doctor’s assessment of an allergy attack didn’t seem right. He warned Armstrong that it could be serious, that he shouldn’t wait to see another doctor. He called one for him. Armstrong was in that doctor’s office before 3 p.m., as Neal waited nervously back home.

      Doctors checked out Armstrong with an ultrasound, then a chest X ray, then gave him the bad news. “Well, this is a serious situation,” the doctor, Jim Reeves, said. “It looks like testicular cancer with a large metastasis to the lungs.”

      Between 5:30 and 5:45 p.m., Neal’s cell phone rang. It was Armstrong.

      “I have testicular cancer,” he said. “I don’t know what to do.”

      Armstrong was distraught, Neal shocked. Now both of them had cancer.

      Within days, doctors discovered that Armstrong’s cancer had spread to his abdomen and brain. By month’s end, he was admitted to the Indiana University Cancer Center in Indianapolis to have the tumors removed. His chance of surviving the cancer was less than 50 percent, according to his doctors.

      The news made everyone in the sport jittery. Ferrari was worried that the drugs he’d encouraged Armstrong to take had given him cancer, or had hastened its spread. Armstrong didn’t buy into that theory. If doping caused cancer, then many other riders would be dropping dead. All he would say is that he regretted taking growth hormone. “It’s bad. It probably caused the cancer to spread more quickly,” he told friends. He claims that he never took it again.

      Still, as Ferrari had, everyone wondered if Armstrong had dealt himself a fatal hand—especially Hendershot, who said he immediately thought, “What have I done?”

      All of the shots, all of the concoctions, the potions and the cleansers he had injected into Armstrong for three years and more must have had something to do with the cancer. “It doesn’t take a leap of faith,” the soigneur told me. “You have to be monumentally fooling yourself to think that it wasn’t a factor. It was certainly putting himself at greater risk.”

      Now Armstrong could die, and it terrified Hendershot that he might be forced to live with the burden of a young man’s death.

      “I didn’t feel guilty,” Hendershot says. “I felt complicit.”

      But everybody knew about Armstrong’s doping, Hendershot said. The riders. The team managers. The soigneurs. Those guys washing the bike wheels. They all knew. And no one stopped it, certainly not Hendershot.

      He and his wife did the only thing they could think of to make themselves feel better. They dumped his supply of drugs. They packed up their personal things. They left cycling. Hendershot never called Armstrong about the cancer. He never called him again, period.

      Hendershot simply disappeared.

       CHAPTER 6

      A year before Armstrong and the Motorola riders discussed plans to use EPO, two years before Armstrong’s cancer was diagnosed, Frankie Andreu met a fresh-faced brunette at Buddy’s pizzeria in their hometown of Dearborn, Michigan. It was 1994. She was twenty-seven and sold water filters while preparing to open an Italian coffee shop. He was the same age and just back from the spring cycling season in Europe.

      A quick survey of Andreu’s physique—he was 6 feet 3 inches and 165 pounds, with about 4 percent body fat—made the brunette, Betsy Kramar, pause.

      “Um, why are your arms so skinny?” she said, pointing to his spindly biceps.

      He blushed. “Oh, I’m a professional cyclist.”

      “A what? So, that’s your job, riding a bike? I didn’t know people could do that for a living.”

      He was handsome, with golden brown hair, green eyes and a sexy smile. She was smitten, even though they seemed to have little in common.

      She had graduated from the University of Michigan with a degree in theater. He’d only taken a few courses at a community college while pursuing his cycling career. She was outgoing, with a cutting sense of humor. He was more serious. Both were headstrong and opinionated (Andreu’s nickname in cycling was Ajax, for his abrasive mien). Each had a parent who had fled Communism—Andreu’s father left Cuba, Kramar’s left the former Yugoslavia.

      Early on, Kramar realized Andreu fulfilled her three criteria for a husband. Catholic? Check. Conservative? Check. Pro-life? Check. She had grilled him on those subjects the night they met. Her inquisition might have scared off other men, but Andreu was attracted to her confidence and straight-shooting nature.

      Soon, Kramar was pulled into cycling. Andreu brought her to races and introduced her to his friends. She learned that Andreu had always been a domestique—a rider who works to help the team leader win—and that Andreu’s team leader was a kid named Lance Armstrong.

      She met Armstrong at a race in Philadelphia, and thought he was just another cyclist. But he was already an American star in the sport, for whatever that was worth in 1994. Greg LeMond was then in the final year of his great career, and cycling’s popularity in the United States had waned.

      Other than through LeMond’s success in the Tour de France, Americans knew about professional cycling mainly through a 1979 movie, Breaking Away. In it, a recent high school graduate falls in love with the sport and becomes obsessed with the Italian national cycling team, shaving his legs because he’s heard that’s what Italian riders do and adopting an Italian accent.

      When Kramar and Armstrong had been introduced, she treated him the way she treated everyone else—as an opponent in a debate. She argued with him about his agnosticism, trying to convince him that belief in God is the core to a person’s happiness.

      “You can’t control everything in your life, you know,” she said, “because that’s what God’s for.”

      “Betsy, that’s bullshit, I control my own fate,” he told her.

      After religion, they argued politics. Though he could be charming for a Democrat, she found him cocky and self-centered. When she visited Andreu in Como, they often would go out to eat pizza. Once, she made risotto at Armstrong’s lakeside apartment and he pitched in. He called her a wonderful cook, and he asked for recipes and ingredients. Though she knew he was being nice just so she would cook for him again, she fell for the flattery anyway.

      In the summer of 1994, Armstrong loaned his

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