LITMIR.BIZ

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here! The boys say “hello.” Lance

      Neal was an admitted cycling groupie. He was never athletic enough in any sport to be a hotshot jock—he rode a bike, but only recreationally—but now he could walk among those jocks and be accepted and respected by them. He had the job of a cycling fan’s dreams.

      Neal loved that the national team riders and American pro cyclists knew who he was. Some even called him for advice. In Hincapie’s case: I was stopped by customs with a suitcase filled with EPO and other drugs, what should I do? Some of them, like Armstrong and Hincapie, were open with him about their drug use. Whether Neal was complicit in any of that drug use is unclear. He said, though, that a soigneur’s job in the United States was different from that of one in Europe, where the job had long required an intimate knowledge of pharmaceuticals. He had learned that from his fellow soigneurs who had done work overseas. Only once did Neal inject Armstrong, Neal said: a vitamin shot in the rear end.

      In those early days, Armstrong didn’t hide the fact that he received regular injections. Neal always said that Armstrong never liked to do things for himself, that he felt entitled to have someone wash his car for free or make restaurant reservations. At first, he didn’t like injecting himself, either. A coed named Nancy Geisler, Neal’s office assistant who was close with both men, said that Neal once asked her to give Armstrong a vitamin shot because he’d be out of town and couldn’t do it. She presumed that it was just a part of Armstrong’s training regimen.

      Armstrong was nonchalant about it when she filled in. She saw no label on the vial from which the syringe had drawn its liquid. She assumed that Armstrong had been doping and that Neal knew it. Only years later did she think, “Had I been a part of something illegal?”

      According to Neal, Armstrong relied on shots and IVs for recovery and a pre-race boost of energy. On the eve of the road race at the 1992 Olympics, fellow Olympian Timm Peddie walked into Armstrong’s hotel room and saw Neal and a gaggle of USA Cycling officials standing around Armstrong as he lay on a bed, hooked to an IV. Peddie was astonished at the openness of the procedure. Everyone there stared at the unexpected guest until Peddie left as quickly as he had come in. He hadn’t been sure what he had seen. Maybe a blood transfusion? An infusion of electrolytes or proteins? He only knew that he himself had never received an IV of anything before a race. Armstrong was, evidently, special.

      In the early 1990s, U.S. cycling had a single star, Greg LeMond, who in 1986 became the first American to win the Tour de France, a feat he would repeat in 1989 and 1990. But his victories had little impact on the sport in the United States. LeMond had ridden for a European team and his success came primarily in Europe, out of sight of America’s sports fans.

      Armstrong, however, came into the sport with the dramatic backstory—the struggling single mother who had dropped out of high school to raise him—and he raced for an American team, Motorola, starting in 1992. Young and charismatic, he was set to be a star, and he wanted fame badly.

      He insisted that Steve Penny, the managing director for USA Cycling, sell the hell out of him to raise awareness of the sport. News about cycling had rarely gotten much past the sports pages’ agate section.

      Penny persuaded Descente, the federation’s new clothing sponsor, to produce a poster of four top athletes on the national team: Armstrong, Hincapie, Bobby Julich and the 1991 junior road cycling world champion, Jeff Evanshine. In the years to come, all would admit doping or serve a suspension for breaking anti-doping rules. The poster featured a dramatic photo of Pikes Peak behind the riders, each of whom carried a look of grim determination on his face. In the lower left-hand corner of the poster was a list of the “U.S. Team Rules.”

RULE #1:	Don’t mess with Lance, Bobby, George and Jeff.
RULE #2:	No Whining.
RULE #3:	It doesn’t count unless you do it under pressure.
RULE #4:	There is no “Back Door.”
RULE #5:	There are no rules: Winning the Gold in Barcelona is the only thing that counts.

      As much as Armstrong loved being a star, his devotion to celebrity may have run a distant second to his hunger for money. J.T. Neal sensed that early on.

      He saw Armstrong driven by money—how to get it, how to keep it and what he had to do, ethically or unethically, to get more of it.

      In 1993, Armstrong chased a million-dollar bonus. The pharmacy Thrift Drug offered the prize to a rider who won three big American races—the Thrift Drug Classic in Pittsburgh, the Kmart Classic in West Virginia, and the CoreStates USPRO national championship in Philadelphia. Each required a different strength: Pittsburgh’s was a demanding one-day race, West Virginia’s a grueling six-stager that rewarded the best climbers and Philadelphia’s an event geared toward sprinters.

      Armstrong, only twenty-one, won the first race and surprised everyone. Five stages through the second race, he was among the favorites to win. So, with the possibility of a million-dollar payout dangling in front of them, several riders on the Motorola team allegedly devised a plan to guarantee victory.

      They allegedly offered to pay some riders on the Coors Light team a flat fee of $50,000 to help Armstrong win the million-dollar prize by not challenging him for the victory in the rest of that second race and the entire final race. Coors Light was a strong team with riders who also were among the top contenders.

      Later that night, several riders from each team discussed the deal in Armstrong’s hotel room.

      If Armstrong won the million, both teams would benefit. Armstrong would receive the prize money—$600,000 taken in a lump sum—and would walk away with $200,000 while the balance would be distributed to his team and other cyclists who had helped him win. Each rider on Coors Light would be given $3,000 to $5,000, according to Stephen Swart, a Coors Light rider who claimed to be in on the discussions.

      As long as America had no idea how it happened, Armstrong’s $1 million jackpot would also give cycling the positive publicity it needed to grow. It was a win-win all around.

      The practice of throwing races had existed for decades, and was as much a part of the sport as doping. Joe Parkin, an American who raced in Europe, said so in his book, A Dog in a Hat. He wrote that selling victories was a common and accepted practice in Europe in the late 1980s. A rider racing in his hometown might shell out several thousand dollars to win. The losers would get guaranteed, easy money. Everybody left happy, pockets stuffed with cash.

      Parkin wrote, “My experience as a pro cyclist in Europe has left me with a somewhat altered moral code, such that many of the things that bother normal people are invisible to me.”

      Armstrong won the second race in the million-dollar race series. Then, in the last moments of the Philadelphia race—the final race in the series—Armstrong was in a breakaway of six riders when he took off toward an impossibly steep climb called the Manayunk Wall. None of the other riders in the breakaway chased him, leaving him to win the race in what seemed like a heroic solo effort.

      Before the race, Neal thought Armstrong would win because he was the strongest rider. Only after the event did he learn that Armstrong had paid his way onto the top of the winner’s podium.

      Armstrong told Neal that in the race’s waning miles he bribed Italian rider Roberto Gaggioli, so Gaggioli would let him win. He offered Gaggioli, one of Armstrong’s top opponents, $10,000 to hold back when Armstrong took off on his solo breakaway, and the Italian agreed to the bribe. Gaggioli later said Armstrong had given him $100,000 in the deal, though that amount seems improbable.

      Neal, uncomfortable with the apparent shameless dishonesty, said that he chastised Armstrong for cheating.

      “For God’s sake,” he told Armstrong, “stop bragging about it.”

      Neal also was upset with Ochowicz, who he suspected was in on the deal. He didn’t

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