Floyd Landis, the cyclist who had denied doping for years despite being stripped of the 2006 Tour de France title for failing a drug test, went to a lunch meeting in April 2010 with the director of the Tour of California cycling race. As they sat down at a table at the Farm of Beverly Hills restaurant in Los Angeles, Landis placed a tape recorder between them and pressed record.
Landis finally wanted to tell the truth: He had doped through most of his professional career. He was recording his confessions so he would later have proof that he had blown the whistle on the sport.
Lance Armstrong never came up, but the meeting would eventually be seen as the first significant crack in Armstrong’s gilded foundation, a critical turning point in anti-doping officials’ quest to penetrate the code of secrecy that endured in cycling.
“How do you expect people to believe you when you lied for so long?" Andrew Messick, the race director, asked Landis. “Have you told your mother? Have you told Travis Tygart?"
Landis, raised as a Mennonite, said he had not yet told his mother. Nor had he told Tygart, the chief executive of the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency, with whom he had clashed for more than two years as Landis publicly fought his doping case.
But, Landis said, it was time.
“Lance Armstrong never came up," Messick confirmed in an interview last week. “But he did make a comment on the mafia. He said, ‘When you’re in the mafia and you get caught and go to jail, you keep your mouth shut, and the organization takes care of your family. In cycling, you’re expected to keep your mouth shut when you test positive, but you become an outcast. Everyone just turns their back on you."
Anti-doping officials on multiple continents had pursued Armstrong for years, often quixotic efforts that died at the wall of silence his loyal teammates built around him as the sport’s global king. Armstrong kept the dark side of his athletic success quiet, investigators and cyclists said, by using guile and arm-twisting tactics that put fear in those who might cross him.
But the lunch conversation between Landis and Messick may have set in motion a series of events that led to the stark revelation that Armstrong, the seven-time Tour de France winner, and his U.S. Postal Service team were engaged in what anti-doping officials called the most sophisticated doping program in history — one covered up by cyclists who banded together to protect themselves, one another and the ugly, deceitful underbelly of the sport.
Armstrong, who vehemently denies ever doping, did not fight the charges the anti-doping agency brought against him. Last week, in the wake of anti-doping officials’ making public their evidence in the case, Armstrong stepped down as chairman of his cancer foundation and lost nearly all his endorsements — a decline so unceremonious and severe that a precedent in recent sports history is elusive.
On Monday, cycling’s world governing body is expected to announce whether it will appeal the anti-doping agency’s ruling, which Armstrong has called unfair and flawed. If the group does not appeal, Tour de France organizers will officially strip Armstrong of his Tour titles.
Interviews with more than a dozen riders, their wives, lawyers involved in the case, anti-doping officials and team executives revealed that Armstrong’s undoing was the culmination of an inquiry that played out over more than two years — but that dramatically turned over the course of several weeks this summer as more and more cyclists contributed their own damning stories to the investigation.
At that point, anti-doping officials hardly had an airtight case. Tygart was hurriedly approaching cyclists from Armstrong’s United States Postal Service teams.
“Look, the system of doping in the sport is coming down, and all the riders, including Lance Armstrong, are going to be given an opportunity to get on the lifeboat," he told them. “Are you on it?"
Rider after rider asked, “Am I going to be the only one?"
It would take months for them to find out.
A federal investigation
The anti-doping agency knew its case against Armstrong had the potential to be a blockbuster. Landis’ doping confession and claim that Armstrong and other Postal Service riders were involved in team-organized doping became public in May 2010, at the Tour of California. A federal investigation into Armstrong regarding doping-related crimes, including fraud and drug trafficking, ensued.
Two days after the race ended, David Zabriskie — a five-time national time-trial champion and one of Armstrong’s former teammates — showed up on the doorstep of the federal courthouse in Los Angeles, finally ready to tell his story. He had requested that Tygart be in the room — he was one of two riders who did so — and what Tygart heard was chilling.
Zabriskie said he had gone through some bad things in life, but being pushed to use drugs was one of the worst. The day he first used the banned blood booster erythropoietin, or EPO, he said, Johan Bruyneel — the Postal Service team director and longtime Armstrong confidant — had told him “everyone is doing it." Hearing that had crushed him.
His father had been an alcoholic, drug user and drug dealer and died young because of it, Zabriskie said Thursday in his first interview since his testimony in Armstrong’s case was made public.
Cycling became a refuge. Bruyneel took Zabriskie under his wing shortly after Zabriskie’s father died in 2002 from a failing liver. Soon, he was pressing Zabriskie to use performance-enhancing drugs, Zabriskie said.
“What Johan did to me, I consider it a form of abuse because it was so horrible and affected me for the rest of my life," Zabriskie said, choking up. “I know I was the first person to tell my story because Johan, he doesn’t need to be around young cyclists."
Bruyneel has been charged by anti-doping officials with administering the doping program on Armstrong’s teams. He has consistently denied all doping charges; his case is going to arbitration. He could not be reached for comment.
By the time Zabriskie told his story, Armstrong was trying to keep his former teammates from cracking. He listened in on at least one call his former teammates made to Bruyneel about the investigation, Zabriskie said. He assured his former teammates that everything would be OK.
In public, he seemed unfazed. After Landis’ accusations came out, Armstrong responded indignantly. “It’s just our word against his," he said at the Tour of California. “And we like our word."
Within days, though, unbeknown to Armstrong, that would no longer be true. Zabriskie and at least one other rider had quietly taken Landis’s side. The evidence against Armstrong was mounting, though slowly.
Tygart and the anti-doping agency backed off from their investigation while the federal authorities moved ahead. Riders offered their testimony to prosecutors, but some — like Tyler Hamilton and Levi Leipheimer — opened up only when a subpoena for a grand jury compelled them to.
Early on, George Hincapie, the only rider who was at Armstrong’s side for all seven of his Tour de France victories, retained a lawyer in California but quickly learned that the lawyer was a fan of Armstrong’s and a supporter of his Livestrong charity. Hincapie decided to hire a new lawyer — one based in New York, said one person with direct knowledge of the situation.
Hincapie met with federal investigators voluntarily in August 2010 to tell them he had doped and that Armstrong had used blood transfusions, EPO and testosterone.
Armstrong asked Hamilton, one of his former top lieutenants, to enter a joint defense agreement, Hamilton’s lawyer said. He sent an email message to Michael Barry, a Canadian rider, asking if he would be willing to testify that there was no doping on the Postal Service team, Barry said. Neither complied.
After Leipheimer testified to the federal grand jury, he said, Armstrong had sent his wife a text message saying, “Run, don’t walk," which Leipheimer took as a threat.
All those riders kept quiet about their testimony and waited — and waited — to see what would come of it.
Nothing came of it.
Without explanation, Andre Birotte, the U.S. attorney for the Central District of California, dropped the federal inquiry in early February, stunning Tygart and the riders — and even the investigators involved in the case. The riders, who believed they had risked their reputations to confess their doping to help shed light on their tarnished sport, were disheartened. Armstrong, who had fought off doping accusations for more than a decade, had won again, some said.
For Tygart, time was running out. The London Olympics were fewer than three months away, and some of the former Postal Service riders were likely candidates for the U.S. team. He could not let those riders compete at the London Games if their doping history would soon become public as part of Armstrong’s case.
The anti-doping agency started calling the riders they knew had cooperated with the federal case. Jonathan Vaughters, a former teammate of Armstrong’s and now the team manager of the Garmin-Sharp team, decided that it was time to urge his riders to deliver on a promise.
He knew that Zabriskie, Tom Danielson and Christian Vande Velde — former Postal Service riders — had used performance-enhancing drugs and had hired them despite it. Vaughters himself had used performance-enhancing drugs while on the Postal Service team and had once seen Armstrong inject EPO, he said.
The floodgates open
In the months leading to the Tour of California in 2010, Vaughters said he received increasingly desperate emails from Landis, who had just come off his two-year doping suspension and could not find a job in the sport. “I felt like he was either going to commit suicide or tell all," said Vaughters, who knew the truth about Landis’ doping.
Vaughters was right. Less than a week after Landis had lunch with Messick, Landis described the doping that occurred while he was on the Postal Service team and said he was aware that other riders, including Armstrong, Hincapie, Leipheimer and Zabriskie, had doped.
This spring, those and other riders were invited to help the anti-doping agency in its investigation. Tygart and Bill Bock, the anti-doping agency’s general counsel, wanted them to come clean.
Hincapie, Leipheimer, Vande Velde and Zabriskie agreed to take their names out of consideration for the Olympics. They and Danielson agreed to a six-month suspension that would begin Sept. 1, after the cycling season.
In the weeks afterward, Armstrong pressed to know the names of the witnesses, but the anti-doping agency would not release them, fearing he would intimidate and silence them before they could testify at an arbitration hearing.
In August, Armstrong gave up. He said he would not fight the charges.
At the last minute, the anti-doping agency contacted one more cyclist — Michael Barry — because he had recently retired. Barry joined the others and told his doping tale.
“Ultimately, I was living a lie," Barry said last week. “I guess I have to apologize to Floyd for calling him a liar. Because he was telling the truth the whole time."
