The Secret Race: Inside the Hidden World of the Tour De France: Doping, Cover-Ups, and Winning at All Costs: Inside the Hidden World of the Tour De France: Doping, Cover-Ups, and Winning at All Costs (37 page)

I was immediately wary, because I wasn’t sure whose side Stephanie was on. In public, and under oath, she’d said that she hadn’t heard Lance admit to drug use in that hospital room. But in private, she’d told a different story—she admitted that she’d indeed heard Lance’s confession, and that he’d pressured her to keep quiet.
^*

Stephanie seemed eager to talk. She asked for my phone number, and I gave it to her. An hour later, she started texting me, urging me to come over so we could visit some more. I begged off, saying I was busy. Then Stephanie sent another text. And another. Then another. Then she told me that another old friend, Toshi Corbett, who’d worked for the helmet company Giro, had come over and I should see him.

That made me even more wary. I presumed Toshi was firmly on Lance’s side. I began to wonder if Stephanie and Toshi wanted me to come over so they could gather some intelligence and report it to Lance.

So I didn’t text Stephanie back. I felt bad ignoring her, but I didn’t want to take any risks; I didn’t want Lance to know about my testimony. The next day, I headed back to Boulder, feeling like I was being watched.

I was now in the middle of things, smack between Novitzky and Lance, the hunter and the hunted. Not a day went by that I didn’t think about both of them, picture their faces, or feel their presence in my life. They were playing chess, and I felt like one of the pieces.

In November 2010, Novitzky and his team traveled to Europe to gather evidence. They met at Interpol headquarters in Lyon with cycling and doping officials from France, Italy, Belgium, and Spain; the officials pledged they would help. To close the case, Novitzky was apparently seeking the original samples from the 1999 Tour, still frozen in a French laboratory. For me, it was surreal: Novitzky was hunting down that same EPO we’d used in 1999, the same molecules that had traveled across France on Motoman’s motorcycle, the same batch of EPO that I’d shared. This made it clear to everyone that this wasn’t an ordinary investigation, and Novitzky wasn’t an ordinary investigator. “The Justice Department would not ordinarily spend [this] type of time and money without an extreme seriousness of purpose,” said Matthew Rosengart, a former federal prosecutor.

Lance got the message. He also got out the checkbook and started loading up his team, hiring the guy known as the Master of Disaster, Mark Fabiani, who had defended President Bill Clinton during the Whitewater scandal and Goldman Sachs during its SEC fraud case. He also hired John Keker and Elliot Peters, trial lawyers who’d gone up against the government in major-league baseball drug cases, and they joined a team that already consisted of guys like Tim Herman, Bryan Daly, and Robert Luskin, who had defended President
George W. Bush adviser Karl Rove in the Valerie Plame leak case. In short, Lance brought in the best lawyers money could buy.

This was his new Postal team, and it appeared that he was driving them hard, just like he’d pushed us. They issued statements wondering why the U.S. government should care about ten-year-old bike races in France, and complaining about the waste of taxpayer money. Meanwhile, Lance kept applying pressure through the media and his connections. He golfed with Bill Clinton and never missed an opportunity to meet a head of state, a celebrity, or a CEO. He invited influential members of the cycling media to his house for private conversations, and he kept sending upbeat tweets to his more than three million followers. The strategy was one that media advisers call “brazening it out”: you simply keep going, pretending that the investigation doesn’t exist.

Occasionally, though, Lance’s old instincts got the better of him. When Novitzky traveled to Europe, Lance sent out a tweet:
Hey Jeff, como estan los hoteles de quatro estrellas y el classe de business in el aeroplano? Que mas necesitan?
(Translation: How are the four-star hotels and business class in the airplane? What more do you need?) Classic Lance: kinda funny but a couple notches too cocky, especially considering that Novitzky was flying coach, and staying in such inexpensive hotels that one of his fellow investigators slept in his suit rather than risk getting bedbugs.

The trickle kept coming. In January, Selena Roberts and David Epstein of
Sports Illustrated
did a major, well-sourced story on the investigation that uncovered some interesting new material, including:

    • An account from Motorola teammate Stephen Swart of how Lance urged the team to begin taking EPO in 1995. Swart also recalled that Lance had a hematocrit of 54 or 56 on July 17, 1995, four days before he won a Tour de France stage.

    
• A 2003 incident in a St. Moritz airport, when Lance and Floyd were unexpectedly searched by Swiss customs agents. (One of the benefits of private jets, the story noted, was the lack of stringent customs checks.) Inside a duffel bag, agents discovered a cache of syringes and drugs labeled in Spanish. After persuading the agents that the drugs were vitamins and the syringes were for vitamin injections, they were allowed to pass.

    • Floyd’s account of Ferrari relating his worries that steroids had given Lance testicular cancer in the first place.

    • An account, from a source familiar with the government’s investigation, that Lance had, in the late 1990s, gained access to a blood booster called HemAssist, a new drug which was in clinical trials at the time. “If somebody was going to design something better than EPO, this would be the ideal product,” said Dr. Robert Przybelski, who was director of hemoglobin therapeutics at Baxter Healthcare, which developed the drug.

Via Twitter, Lance responded to the story in the usual way: first with a casual shrug (on his Twitter account, he wrote,
“that’s it?”
), and then a shot of brazenness:
“Great to hear that @usada is investigating some of @si’s claims. I look forward to being vindicated.”

I checked in with Novitzky occasionally; he didn’t tell me all that much—he was careful to stay professional in that way. But as the months passed, we got to be comfortable with each other. He was always warm and relaxed and helpful; we talked about more than the case. We talked about his daughter’s volleyball tournaments, his own athletic career (he’d been a high jumper and had once cleared seven feet). He said “bullshit” a lot; he called me “dude.”

You might think that Novitzky hated Lance, but whenever we talked about Lance, Novitzky became the cool professional; he
never got emotional or offered his opinion on Lance’s character, never called him a name or cursed. I know that Novitzky has sympathy for dopers in general. He’d met enough of us to realize that most of us aren’t bad people; he certainly treated my situation with empathy. But did that empathy extend to Lance? I don’t think so. When Lance’s name came up, Novitzky was cold, factual, focused. I think he disliked what Lance represented: the idea that one person could use his power to flout the rules, lie to the world, make millions, and walk away scot-free.

In March, I was contacted by
60 Minutes
producers working on a major investigative piece on Armstrong. According to their sources, indictments were on the way soon; the producers said that my going on
60 Minutes
would be a good chance to tell my side of the story. After weeks of hesitation, I agreed to fly to California in mid-April and sit down with
60 Minutes
correspondent and CBS News anchorman Scott Pelley for an interview. Before I could do that, however, there was something I had to do first, something I’d been dreading: tell my mom the truth.

I’d told my dad earlier; I’d just blurted it out to him one night earlier in the year, when I’d been visiting home. He didn’t believe me at first—then, all at once, he did. He tried to keep his chin up in the best Hamilton tradition, but I could see the pain on his face; I felt like I’d stabbed him in the gut. After talking about it more—after hearing about the investigation and the coming indictments—he’d seen the logic; he’d understood, and he’d seen how much better I felt. Still, Dad had suggested we hold off telling Mom for a while, and I had agreed.

But now I couldn’t hold off anymore; my interview was a few days away. The moment came during a family gathering at my parents’ house in Marblehead. I was nervous, almost trembling, trying to pick the right time. It felt like that moment in a crash when you’re still falling and there’s nothing you can do to stop it. So I did
what I did then: I shut my eyes and just got ready for impact. Toward the end of the party, everyone was eating chocolate cake, and there was a pause in conversation. I took a deep breath.
Now
.

I’ve got something I want to tell you guys. Something big.

Their first reaction was to smile—was Lindsay pregnant? Then they saw the expression on my face, and they froze.

Something I should have told you all a long time ago.

I think in their hearts they knew what was coming. They probably knew subconsciously all along. But it didn’t make it any easier. The fact was, they’d all worked so hard for me all these years, defended me, loved me. Believed in me.

I started to tell them, and then I lost it when I looked at my Mom’s eyes, which were filling up with tears. I took some deep breaths, looked away. I told it as quickly and plainly as I could. I told them about the investigation, and the trial, and how all the secrets were coming out. I told them that I needed to tell the truth for myself, for the sport. I told them that sometimes before you can go forward, you have to take a step back. I told them I had so much more to tell them, that I knew they couldn’t really understand now, but that someday I hoped they would. Then my mom gave me a hug.

I felt the hug, and I realized: she’d never cared if I won the Tour or came in last. All she cared about was one question. She asked it now: “Are you okay?”

My smile showed her the answer.
I’m okay
.

A few days later I flew out to California. Being interviewed by
60 Minutes
is a combination of luxury and torture. You’re taken to a five-star hotel, you sit in a cushy chair surrounded by super-nice production people who do their best to make you relaxed and comfortable, and then—
click!
—the lights come on, and they steadily begin peeling back your life layer by layer. Pelley asked all the tough questions, and I told him the truth as best I could. He was focused like a laser on Lance, of course, and I did my best to redirect him
toward the bigger picture, to tell him that Lance didn’t do much the rest of us weren’t doing, to show him the world we were living in.

At one point, we were talking about my decision to dope back in 1997. I told Pelley how I had been so close to my goal of riding a Tour, how it had felt like an honor to be asked to dope by the team doctor, how I felt like my choice was to either quit or join. I asked Pelley:
What would you do?

I’m glad I asked him that question, because I think everybody who wants to judge dopers should think about it, just for a second. You spend your life working to get to the brink of success, and then you are given a choice: either join in or quit and go home. What would you do?

*
In the 2005 SCA Promotions hearing, McIlvain testified under oath that she had never heard Armstrong admit to doping. In a tape-recorded conversation recorded secretly the previous year by Greg LeMond, however, McIlvain says that she heard Armstrong confess in the hospital room. “So many people protect [Armstrong] that it’s sickening,” she said.

In September 2010, McIlvain testified for seven hours in front of the grand jury. Afterward, her attorney, Tom Bienert, said she had “a very emotional day” and that she had testified that she had never seen, or heard of, Armstrong using performance-enhancing drugs. Whether that was true or not remains to be seen; as
Bicycling
columnist Joe Lindsey sensibly pointed out, if it was a simple denial, why did it take seven hours?

Chapter 15
 
HIDE-AND-SEEK

60 MINUTES
AIRED ITS REPORT on May 22, 2011. Along with my interview, the broadcast included details of George Hincapie’s proffered testimony, in which he allegedly told investigators he had shared EPO with Lance. (George did not deny the report.) Frankie Andreu appeared, telling about the high speeds of the EPO-fueled peloton, saying, “If you weren’t taking EPO, you weren’t going to win.”
60 Minutes
also gave details behind Lance’s suspicious EPO test at the 2001 Tour of Switzerland, and the UCI-instigated meetings Lance and Johan had with the lab director that helped make the test disappear. Lance was offered the chance to come on air and tell his side; he refused. A few days before the broadcast, I gave my Olympic gold medal to USADA, until such time as they could decide where it belonged.