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 (39 page)

I got on with my life. In August, three months after the
60 Minutes
report aired, I did something I hadn’t done in a long time: I attended a bike race as a spectator. The USA Pro Cycling Challenge came near Boulder, and many of the top American pros were there. It was strange to be on the other side of the looking glass.

I stood by the road and watched the peloton go by. I felt the breeze as they cruised past me. I saw how powerful they were, skinny as blades, their bodies humming through the air, almost like they were flying. I saw them after the race, looking completely destroyed.
I used to be like that
.

People recognized me, and most of them were nice. I must’ve
signed thirty autographs; people told me they were proud of me for being honest. One father told me that he’d made his kids watch the
60 Minutes
interview four times. (I feel sorry for your kids, I joked.)

Often when I saw someone from the product side of the industry, things got strange. They would hesitate, stammer, and brush me off. Some were simply cold; they’d barely look me in the eye. I understood why. These people couldn’t afford to piss Lance off. Their incomes depended on keeping the myth alive. But it didn’t make it any easier. I was still an outcast; still a stranger in my own sport.

But the encounter that meant the most happened after the race, when I spotted Levi Leipheimer riding past me on his way to doping control. I said, “Hey Levi, Tyler!”

Levi recognized my voice, stopped, turned around. We talked for two minutes. Levi knew the score: he’d been subpoenaed; he knew a lot of the things I knew, and I assumed he’d told the truth. We didn’t talk about much on the surface, but just connecting with him felt great. He couldn’t have been more friendly, asking a couple of times how I was doing, wishing me well. It felt good to know that, at least in Levi’s eyes, our brotherhood was still strong.

Life went on, as we waited for the indictments to be announced. Lindsay and I, who were now engaged, decided to spend the fall in Boston as she finished up her master’s degree. Tanker and I moved into her cool little apartment in Cambridge, within an hour’s drive of my folks in Marblehead. It was great to be back on the old home turf. We could root for the Red Sox, see old friends, and spend time with both our families. There was just one nagging thing: an increasing feeling that we were being watched.

It was small things at first. We’d notice people watching us in the grocery store or on the street. One time there were two guys who sat in a tan Ford Astro van on the street in front of our apartment for several hours, then reappeared the following day in a different
car. Some mail disappeared from our front hallway, including some tax forms.

More disturbing, our computers and phones started behaving strangely: we’d be reading our emails on Gmail and suddenly we would find ourselves signed out, as if someone else had signed in. We heard strange beeps on our phones. We’d send a text, and find that it had sent two copies, not one. We changed our passwords, and told ourselves it was nothing. But as time went by, it continued. If there were hackers, they had a sense of humor: we began to see pop-ups for the Lance Armstrong Foundation all over the place, even when we were on sites that were unrelated to anything that might be connected to Lance or the foundation. I shared my concerns that our phones had been hacked with my dad, who did his part by ending our telephone conversations with “… and by the way, fuck you, Lance.”

After a few weeks of this, I phoned Novitzky to tell him about these incidents. He was utterly unsurprised; in fact, it sounded as if he had been expecting it. Novitzky said that similar things happened to all the witnesses in the Barry Bonds case. Hiring a private investigator to follow potential witnesses was apparently standard operating procedure by the defense in these cases: the more information they had on me, the easier they could attack my credibility in the trial. Novitzky promised he had our backs: if we ever felt threatened, we should get in touch right away. He gave me a special number to call in emergencies, twenty-four hours a day. His support was professional, but done in an easy, friendly way we appreciated. He even sent a smiley face at the end of one of his texts. Lindsay and I got a kick out of that—the big, tough government investigator, using emoticons.

Fall reminded me why Boston is my favorite city on earth. It’s not just the colors; it’s the feeling of life busting out at the seams, a feeling
of something falling away and some new surprise getting ready to show itself. While Lindsay spent her days studying, Tanker and I spent our days exploring. We met a neighborhood teenager named James, who attended a special-needs school. James and Tanker took to one another like wildfire, and James started coming by to take Tanker on walks.

Before long, James and I were going on bike rides, with Tanker running alongside. We rode up Heartbreak Hill, the famous ascent of the Boston Marathon, and James did great; he was strong and determined. When we got to the top, James was as stoked as if he’d just climbed Alpe d’Huez. I was, too.

I kept visiting Dr. Welch, the therapist, and enjoying our talks. As our time went on, I opened up more and more to him. As the weeks passed, I realized that I was experiencing a strange feeling. I felt strangely light, almost giddy. I’d find myself chatting with people I ran into, or just standing stock-still on the sidewalk with James and Tanker, enjoying the feeling of the sun on my skin. That’s when I realized what the unfamiliar feeling was: I was happy. Genuinely, deeply happy.

Here’s what I was learning:
secrets are poison
. They suck the life out of you, they steal your ability to live in the present, they build walls between you and the people you love. Now that I’d told the truth, I was tuning in to life again. I could talk to someone without having to worry or backtrack or figure out their motives, and it felt fantastic. I felt as if I were back in 1995, before all the bullshit started; back when I had that little house in Nederland, Colorado, just me and my dog and my bike and the big world.

Lindsay’s place was filled with books—philosophy, psychology, sociology. I started reading them, feeling a side of my brain stretch for the first time in a long time. We watched less television, drank a lot of tea, did yoga. One evening, when I bent over to pick something up, I felt something strange in my midsection—a small roll of fat, for the first time in years. I pinched it, and it felt good. Normal.

I sometimes thought about what would happen if Lance went to trial. I always figured that it’d come down to a trial—Lance didn’t seem inclined to cop a plea. Knowing him, he’d keep raising the stakes rather than settle. And knowing Novitzky, he wouldn’t let up either, and the whole thing would wind up in court. It figured to be a zoo; the biggest sports-crime trial ever. The media would have a field day; it would make the Bonds and Clemens trials look like traffic court. People would know the truth about our sport, and they could make up their own minds. They could forgive Lance, or they could hate him for lying, for abusing his power. But whatever they did, at least they’d have a chance to learn the truth and decide for themselves.

One afternoon, I was doing some business research on the Internet, looking at training websites. As happened sometimes, an ad with a photo of Lance popped up. Usually, seeing his face made me wince, and I’d click the window closed. But this time, for some reason, I found myself staring at his face, noticing that Lance had a big smile, a nice smile. It made me remember how he used to be, how good he was at making people laugh. Yes, Lance could be a bona fide jerk, a huge tool. But he’s also got a heart in there, somewhere.

I studied the picture, trying to reconnect with that feeling, and to my surprise, I found myself feeling sorry for Lance. Not completely sorry—he deserved a lot of what was coming to him; he’d made his bed and now he would have to lie in it. But I was sorry in the largest sense, sorry for him as a person, because he was trapped, imprisoned by all the secrets and lies. I thought:
Lance would sooner die than admit it, but being forced to tell the truth might be the best thing that ever happened to him
.

*
Chrisman, who was seated about ten feet away, said, “I couldn’t hear what [Armstrong and Hamilton] were saying, but you could tell it was very ugly, and very tense. Lance was leaning forward, being the aggressor, Tyler was sort of shrinking, as if he wanted to get away. I remember feeling kind of scared, realizing that Lance Armstrong is totally freaking out, right here.”

Chapter 16
 
THE END-AROUND

LINDSAY AND I WERE MARRIED in Boston just before Thanksgiving 2011, and we started making plans to move back to Boulder. We weren’t sure we were going to stay forever; I had so much history there, and the endurance-sports scene is so intense—only in Boulder are retired cyclists celebrities—that it sometimes felt stifling. But we’d try it out for a while; and Lindsay, as usual, was game. In late December, we hitched a trailer loaded with our few belongings to our SUV, and drove out of Boston, headed west. We traveled the southern route, through Charlottesville and Knoxville and Chattanooga, listening to Johnny Cash turned up full blast—“Monteagle Mountain,” “Orange Blossom Special,” “Folsom Prison Blues,” “I Walk the Line.” We watched the countryside roll past, opened our windows and felt the warm air on our skin. We felt like we were headed for the beginning of a brand-new life.

Lindsay and I arrived in Boulder in early January. We moved into a bungalow on Mapleton Avenue, and I set about building the training business, introducing Lindsay to my friends, getting on with
life. Or, I should say, I mostly did all those things. Part of my mind was always hovering apart, waiting for word of the indictments. Plus, we started getting that same eerie feeling that we were being followed: problems with the computer and phone, strange people sitting in cars outside our house. We ignored it as best we could, but after the Cache Cache incident, we felt vulnerable, especially with Lance a few hours away in Aspen. We tucked a baseball bat by the front door, just in case.

Friday, February 3, was a clear, bright day, and Lindsay and I were looking forward to a quiet weekend. We’d go for a hike with Tanker, meet up with some friends, and root for our New England Patriots against the New York Giants in the Super Bowl. We were coming back from the hike that afternoon when I got a text and saw a link to an article.

Feds Drop Armstrong Investigation

I felt like I was going to get sick to my stomach.

I tapped my phone with a trembling finger. It had to be a prank. Then I saw the other headlines; they matched. It was true. I typed out a tweet:
Are you F-ing kidding me?
Then I deleted it—better to stay cool until I found out more.

I drove home, feeling frantic. I flipped on the computer and read more stories. They all said the same thing:
Case closed, no explanation
. I called Novitzky; no answer. I read Lance’s short statement where he expressed his gratitude. I scanned the stories, which all said the same thing: a U.S. attorney named André Birotte Jr. had issued a press release at 4:45 p.m. Eastern Time, the ideal time to make sure it got as little attention as possible, a moment when sports journalists were focused on the Super Bowl.