Читать книгу Cycle of Lies: The Fall of Lance Armstrong - Juliet Macur, Juliet Macur - Страница 12

In 1992, someone opening the Motorola team’s medicine cabinet would have come across the usual items—Band-Aids, diarrhea medicine and antiseptics for “road rash”—as well as the banned stuff, like cortisone and testosterone alongside household Tylenol. Most riders didn’t consider them to be real doping products. Using those drugs just meant the riders were minding their health in a grueling sport.

Cortisone, which could be injected or swallowed, reduces muscle soreness and is an anti-inflammatory for stiff, aching joints. It remains a staple for cyclists because it alleviates leg pain. Riders liken it to taking an aspirin if you have a headache, and many team doctors write bogus prescriptions for the drug.

Testosterone is a steroid, but isn’t used to help riders bulk up with muscle. Rather, it allows them to recover more efficiently from a workout, so they can rise the next day and train just as hard. Riders treat the drug the way they do getting a massage or staying hydrated.

Those drugs were common in the European peloton. Everyone serious about the Tour looked for an edge, whether it was steroids or injectable vitamins like B12, B complex or folic acid.

Performance-enhancing drug use is bound with the history of cycling, especially the Tour de France, a three-week, 2,000-plus-mile race. The event, held every July, is almost impossibly hard, and has been that way since its debut in 1903.

Riders have always found ways to make the race easier. In 1904, cyclists left their bikes and hitched rides in cars, trains or buses to cut miles off the route. Every stage winner and the first four finishers were among twenty-nine riders punished for cheating that year, ushering in the Tour’s dance with dishonesty.

Through the early 1900s, riders relied on substances like ether, cocaine and strychnine to blunt the pain. Some stopped at bars to chug wine and other numbing spirits. They used cocaine-based mixtures to convince their bodies they could go on when their brains said they couldn’t. Riders believed they could breathe easier if first they had taken some strychnine (so highly toxic it is used as rat poison) and/or nitroglycerine (given to heart attack patients to stimulate the heart).

The abuse of those drugs was affirmed by Henri Pélissier and his brother, Francis, French riders who abandoned the 1924 Tour and then gave a blockbuster interview to a journalist, Albert Londres, of Le Petit Parisien. The story was titled, “Les Forçats de la Route”—“The Prisoners of the Road.”

Henri Pélissier told Londres, “You have no idea what the Tour de France is like. It’s like martyrdom. And even the Stations of the Cross had only fourteen stations, while we have fifteen stages. We suffer from start to finish.” Pélissier showed the journalist the contents of the bag he had carried throughout the race: cocaine for the eyes, chloroform for the gums, horse ointment for the knees. Pills he called “dynamite.”

Amphetamines became popular in the mid-1940s, and would lead to dangerous accidents. French rider Jean Malléjac collapsed with his bike at the 1955 Tour, six miles from the summit of Mont Ventoux, the famous bald mountain that towers more than 6,200 feet above the Provence region of France, and fell onto boulders at the roadside, with one foot attached to a pedal and the other pawing frantically through the air. He remained unconscious for fifteen minutes in what the Tour doctor deemed an amphetamine-fueled breakdown.

Another French cyclist, Roger Rivière, landed in a tangle of metal at the bottom of a steep slope after crashing over a wall during the 1960 Tour. He broke his back. Doctors found painkillers in his pocket, which could have distorted his judgment and slowed his reflexes so much that he had been unable to apply his brakes. He never regained use of his lower limbs. Just two years later, fourteen Tour riders left the race because they had been sickened by morphine.

The Tour and drugs went hand in hand, despite a growing public concern. Five-time Tour winner Jacques Anquetil was famously open about his own regimen. He once said, “You can’t win the Tour de France on mineral water alone … Everybody dopes.” Nothing was illegal.

By 1963, doping had grown so dangerous that a group of cyclists, doctors, lawyers, journalists and sports officials came together to push for drug testing. Two years later, France passed its first national antidoping laws and drug testing began at the Tour.

Led by Anquetil, riders balked. Before the Tour’s first stage, they gathered and chanted, “No pissing in test tubes!” Their protest included walking their bikes for the first fifty meters of that stage. Félix Lévitan, the Tour director, called the riders “a band of drug addicts” bent on “discrediting the sport of cycling.”

Then came one of the blackest days in cycling’s dark history. On July 13, 1967, the British rider Tom Simpson began zigzagging across the road not far from the top of Mont Ventoux. He finally toppled over, then told a British team mechanic, “Get me up, get me up. I want to go on. I want to go straight. Get me up, get me straight.” Spectators helped him back onto his bike, but just one hundred meters later, he crumpled onto the road again, still gripping his handlebars as he went into a coma.

Three hours later, he was dead. An autopsy report said he had died of heat prostration that led to a heart attack. But his jersey pockets told another story. In them were empty vials dusted with amphetamines.

Don Catlin, the man who set up the United States’ first performance-enhancing drug testing laboratory, the UCLA Olympic Analytical Laboratory in Los Angeles, had been studying the drug erythropoietin, called EPO, from the start. It appeared on the market in the United States in 1989 as a drug used for kidney patients and AIDS-related anemia, but athletes long before that had learned of its magical powers. EPO is a powerful hormone that boosts endurance by increasing red blood cell production. More red blood cells mean more endurance. In the sport of road cycling, it turned out to be a miracle potion.

The drug comes in a vial less than an inch and a half tall. But it is filled with several doses. No longer would endurance athletes have to undergo the dangerous and logistically difficult process of receiving blood transfusions to boost their red blood cell count. Now enhancing one’s endurance was as simple as pricking the skin with a needle. Athletes could receive what one unpublished Swedish study said was an average 8 percent boost in aerobic capacity. The study said the drug could cut 30 seconds from a 20-minute run. In cycling, using the drug could mean the difference between winning the Tour de France and not even qualifying for one’s Tour team.

There was a frightening downside, though. EPO raised a rider’s hematocrit level—the proportion of red blood cells in the blood and a measure of blood’s thickness. A man’s hematocrit is usually between 42 and 48 percent of his whole blood.

But with EPO, some cyclists were boosting their hematocrit into the 50s, or even higher. Bjarne Riis, the 1996 Tour champion, was even nicknamed “Mister 60 Percent” because EPO was rumored to have jacked up his hematocrit that high. The practice was inherently dangerous. If athletes overdosed on EPO, the drug would turn their blood to a viscous, sticky sludge that could cause a stroke or heart failure. Dehydration, which often occurs during long races, makes the blood even thicker. By the late 1980s, cyclists were buying the drug on the black market. Then they started dropping dead.

In 1987, five Dutch riders died of heart problems. On August 17, 1988, Connie Meijer, a Dutch rider, passed out and died while competing in a criterium race. Diagnosis: heart attack. She was twenty-five. One day later, Bert Oosterbosch, another Dutch rider, died in his sleep, at thirty-two. Again, a heart attack.

Doctors and blood specialists said EPO abuse might have played a role in the deaths of at least eighteen professional European cyclists in the years from 1988 to 1992. Ten deaths were attributed to heart problems. The cycling magazine VeloNews declared that “an atomic bomb” had gone off in the sport. News of the deaths was picked up by mainstream media outlets. The New York Times carried a headline: “Stamina-Building Drug Linked to Athletes’ Deaths.”

Catlin sounded an alarm with the International Olympic Committee. As a member of the IOC’s medical commission, he pressed for an investigation. The athletes had taken a drug for which no test had yet been developed. Catlin believed the IOC should do something about it, and right away, because lives were at stake.

He went with an IOC team to Europe on a fact-finding mission. He found no one who would talk about EPO. Family members refused to cooperate. Riders said they’d never heard of it. Basically, they told Catlin to go away. Again and again, he told them, Don’t be afraid to talk. We’re trying to save the lives of other cyclists. Please help us.

In reply, he heard nothing. He believed that some people were protecting not only the memory of friends, family and teammates—they were also protecting the sport. Doping scandal followed doping scandal. Something had to be done.

Catlin made his pitch in 1988. But the code of silence that had served cycling for so long could not be broken. Seven years later, Lance Armstrong used EPO for the first time.

When Armstrong signed with the Motorola team in 1992, he had already fallen in with coaches of dubious repute. The first was Eddie Borysewicz.

In 1985, Borysewicz was at the center of one of the biggest doping scandals in U.S. Olympic history. Borysewicz, a Pole, had honed his craft at sports academies in the Eastern bloc. While coach of the U.S. team at the 1984 Olympics, he was accused of pressuring riders to take transfusions of blood to get an increased supply of the oxygen-carrying red blood cells. If such transfusions were not done properly, or if the blood was not stored at the right temperature, blood doping could make a rider ill—or even kill him.

The practice was not expressly prohibited by the International Olympic Committee, but its rules said athletes could not take any medication or undergo any procedures that would unfairly affect the competition. Whether forbidden or not, Borysewicz and other team officials watched seven members of the 1984 Olympic cycling team line up inside a room of the Ramada Inn in Los Angeles to wait their turn to lie on a bed and receive blood from a relative or someone else with the same blood type. Two riders became sick. Four went on to win medals, including a gold.

Months later, the transfusions were made public, marring cycling’s image as well as Borysewicz’s reputation.

“Eddie B. introduced hard-core doping to American cycling, and it’s never been the same,” says Andy Bohlmann, who from 1984 through 1990 was in charge of the antidoping program for the United States Cycling Federation, then the sport’s national governing body.

In 1990, Chris Carmichael, a former rider on the 7-Eleven team, was appointed head coach of the national team, with dozens of cyclists under his command—including Armstrong and three other promising riders from the junior national team system. Those three were Greg Strock, Erich Kaiter and Gerrik Latta.

Each of them would eventually claim that national team officials had doped them without their knowledge when they were teenagers. One pointed his finger at Carmichael. Those riders said they had received injections of substances that team officials claimed were merely vitamins or “extract of cortisone.” They said they were given unidentified pills embedded in candy bars to eat during races, and drank from water bottles spiked with banned performance enhancers.

Years later, in medical school, Strock discovered that there is no such thing as “extract of cortisone.” He realized that his coaches had probably injected him with the real thing, which likely triggered the autoimmune disease that ended his cycling career in 1991. He thought back to the nationals in 1990, when, he claims, Carmichael had arrived with a briefcase full of drugs and syringes and allegedly injected Strock in the buttocks under the supervision of another coach, René Wenzel. Strock remembers seeing Carmichael at other races carrying that briefcase, looking like a pharmaceutical company representative heading to see his clients.

Strock, Kaiter and Latta all sued USA Cycling, with Strock and Kaiter settling out of court. (The outcome of Latta’s case is unknown.) Carmichael allegedly paid Strock $20,000 to keep his name out of the lawsuit.

And what did Lance Armstrong think of Carmichael? He told me they were like brothers. One of Carmichael’s future training videos would feature Armstrong’s photo on the box. Armstrong would write forewords for many of Carmichael’s books. All this work was done on the premise that Carmichael was the brains behind Lance Armstrong’s success. And you, too, could learn from the coach of the world’s greatest cyclists, especially if you attended one of Carmichael’s weeklong training camps. The cost: a cool $15,000.

Throughout the 1990s, J.T. Neal acted as Armstrong’s main soigneur at some domestic races and at national team training camps. But in Europe and at the big races, the honor of rubbing down Armstrong went to a man named John Hendershot. Among soigneurs in the European peloton (another French word, one that refers to professional riders generally as well as the pack during a race), Hendershot was at once the cool kid and the calculating elder. Other soigneurs envied the money he made and the cachet that came with the cash. Wherever he walked—through race crowds or at home in Belgium—people turned to catch a glimpse. Teams wanted him. Armstrong wanted him. J.T. Neal said he was “like a god to me” and called him “the best soigneur that ever was.”

Hendershot, an American, was a massage therapist, physical therapist and miracle worker. His laying-on of hands would bring an exhausted, aching rider to life. Eating at Hendershot’s direction, sleeping according to his advice, a rider began each morning reborn. He came with all the secrets of a soigneur and an unexpected skill developed over the years. In Neal’s words, Hendershot took to cycling’s drug culture “like a duck to water.” But his enthusiasm for and skills in chemistry would be remembered as his special talent.

For most of a decade Hendershot sat at home in Belgium in his makeshift laboratory, preparing for races. There he mixed, matched and mashed up drugs, always with one goal in mind: to make riders go faster.

The mad scientist conjured up what he called “weird concoctions” of substances like ephedrine, nicotine, highly concentrated caffeine, drugs that widen blood vessels, blood thinners and testosterone, often trying to find creative ways to give riders an extra physical boost during a race. He’d pour the mix into tiny bottles and hand them to riders at the starting line. Other times, he’d inject them with it. He wasn’t alone in this endeavor. Soigneurs all across Europe made their own homemade blends of potentially dangerous mixes and first drank or injected those potions into themselves. They were their own lab rats.

Hendershot, who had no formal medical or scientific training, learned the art of doping riders by observing the effects on a human test subject—himself. He knew a formulation was way off when he felt his heart beating so fast and loud it sounded like a runaway freight train. That wouldn’t work for riders already under extreme physical stress. He wanted “amped up,” but not to the point of a heart attack.

If Hendershot was his own lab rat, it wasn’t long before he tried his potions and pills on the riders, including Armstrong. When Armstrong went professional after the 1992 Olympics, he signed a contract with Motorola, one of the two major American teams. Because Armstrong wanted the best soigneur, he was immediately paired with Hendershot. It was a match made in doping heaven. Both soigneur and rider were willing to go to the brink of safety.

“What we did was tread the fine line of dropping dead on your bike and winning,” Hendershot says.

Hendershot said the riders on his teams had a choice of whether to use drugs. They could “grab the ring or not.” He said he didn’t know a single professional cyclist who hadn’t at least dabbled. The sport was simply too difficult—and was many times impossible, as at the three-week-long Tour de France—for riders who didn’t rely on pharmaceutical help.

Hendershot believed cyclists had at most four years of clean riding before they could no longer remain in the sport. As a drugged-up peloton went faster, the clean riders could help the team leader for maybe the first week of a race, maybe by riding in front of the pack to set the pace or by delivering water bottles from the team car, but then would have to drop out from exhaustion. A career like that was short-lived.

When Armstrong arrived at Motorola in 1992, a system that facilitated riders’ drug use was firmly in place on the team—and likely in the entire sport. Hendershot said he would take a list of drugs and bogus prescriptions for them to his local pharmacist in Hulste, Belgium, to get the prescriptions filled and to obtain other drugs, too.

Cycling was always big in Belgium—for generations, it has been one of the country’s most popular sports—and the pharmacist didn’t question Hendershot about the request for such a massive amount of drugs. In exchange, Hendershot would give the pharmacist a signed team jersey or allow him to show up at big races, where he would be a VIP with an all-access pass. Then he would leave the drugstore with bags filled with EPO, human growth hormone, blood thinners, amphetamines, cortisone, painkillers and testosterone, a particularly popular drug he’d hand to riders “like candy.”

By 1993, Armstrong was using all of those substances—like almost everyone else on the team, Hendershot said. He remembered Armstrong’s attitude from the remark, “This is the stuff I take, this is part of what I do,” and that Armstrong joined the team’s program without hesitation because everyone was doing it.

“It was like eating team dinner,” Hendershot says, adding that he had a hunch that virtually everyone involved in the team knew about the doping—“doctors, soigneurs, riders, team managers, mechanics—everyone.” He called the drug use casual and said he never had to hide any of it. After injecting the riders at a team hotel, he’d toss a trash bag filled with syringes and empty drug vials right into the hotel’s garbage can.

While Hendershot never administered EPO or growth hormone to Armstrong, he did administer them to other riders on the team and was aware that Armstrong was using those drugs. Hendershot said a stash of those two drugs was driven from Belgium to the team’s 1995 training camp in southern France.

Riders like Armstrong could get drugs in several different ways—from Hendershot, from their personal doctor or a doctor that worked with the team, or by buying them over the counter themselves. Each rider would bring those drugs to Hendershot and he would administer them by injecting them into the rider, by mixing a potion of them for the rider to drink or inject, or by injecting them into IVs the rider would receive, based on the doctor’s instructions. Sometimes the drugs would also come in pill form, and Hendershot would dole those out, too.

In the early 1990s, by Hendershot’s estimation, less than half the teams in the pro peloton had a doctor on staff. Those teams were ahead of the curve. “Drugs level the playing field, but the better your doctor is, the better you are going to be,” Hendershot says, adding that in his opinion he believes that almost all of the doctors had to be administering drugs to their riders considering the sport’s drug culture.

Still, Hendershot was constantly worried that something he was giving the riders would hurt them—or even possibly kill them—especially when he was administering substances that riders had injected into the IV bags themselves or when the riders’ personal doctors would prepare concoctions for Hendershot to give. He was concerned that he would be culpable if anything ever went wrong, but was constantly rationalizing his actions. Even as he provided drugs to riders, Hendershot said, he told himself, “You’re not a drug dealer. This isn’t organized. This is no big deal.”

He knew he was lying.

He rationalized the lie by saying the process was overseen by Max Testa, an Italian who, as of December 2013, still works in the sport and runs a sports medicine clinic in Utah. In 2006, Testa told me that he gave his riders the instructions to use EPO, but never administered drugs to those riders. So if drug use was not mandated by the team, it was at least quasi-official. Hendershot trusted Testa to make sure the riders were staying safe, believing that Testa—unlike other doctors in cycling—actually cared for the riders’ health, and cared less about winning or money. Hendershot put it this way, though: a doctor who refused to give riders drugs wouldn’t last in the sport.

Armstrong liked Testa so much that he moved to Italy to be near the doctor’s office in the little town of Como, north of Milan. Not long after joining Motorola, Armstrong began to live in Como during the racing season. He brought along his close friend Frankie Andreu, and in time several other riders joined them, including George Hincapie, a New Yorker, and Kevin Livingston, a Midwesterner. All became patients of Testa. All would later become riders on Armstrong’s United States Postal Service Tour de France winning teams.

Hendershot said all those riders likely believed they were doing no wrong by doping. The definition of cheating was flexible in a sport so replete with pharmacology: It’s not cheating if everybody is doing it. Armstrong believed that to be the dead-solid truth. For him, there was no hesitation, no second-guessing, no rationalizing. As Hendershot had done, Armstrong grabbed the ring.

April 20, 1994. Three riders from the Italy-based Gewiss-Ballan team stood atop the podium in their light blue, red and navy uniforms after dominating the Flèche Wallonne, a one-day race in Belgium’s hilly Ardennes region. Two held bouquets of flowers above their heads as they waved to the crowd. Armstrong seethed. The Gewiss riders were flaunting their success at his expense. He had finished 36th, fully 2 minutes and 32 seconds behind the leaders.

About fifty kilometers from the finish of that Flèche Wallonne, the Gewiss riders had broken away from the pack and, as Armstrong put it later, “demoralized everyone.” They pedaled faster as the peloton diminished into a tiny speck on the horizon behind them. They had raced along the narrow, dipping roads to the final climb up the Mur de Huy, a steep ascent with gradients as high as 26 percent. They rode up the Wall as if it were tabletop-flat. Moreno Argentin crossed the finish line first, while teammates Giorgio Furlan and Evgeni Berzin finished two-three.

It was there, in Belgium, in 1994, that the exhausted peloton realized what many people in the sport believed to be the amazing power of EPO. The winning team’s doctor told them about it. In fact, he told the world. After the race, a reporter from the French sports newspaper L’Equipe, Jean-Michel Rouet, interviewed the doctor, Michele Ferrari, and asked him if his riders used EPO.

“I don’t prescribe this stuff,” Ferrari said. “But one can buy EPO in Switzerland, for example, without a prescription. And if a rider does that, don’t scandalize me. EPO doesn’t fundamentally change the performance of a racer.”

The reporter said, “In any case, it’s dangerous! Ten Dutch riders have died in the last few years.”

Then Ferrari, who has long denied doping any of his athletes, said something that would haunt him for years. “EPO is not dangerous, it’s the abuse that is. It’s also dangerous to drink ten liters of orange juice.”

In other words, it’s all part of a balanced breakfast.

But to the uninitiated, confusion reigned. Armstrong, Andreu, Hincapie and Livingston—four riders who would become the core of American cycling—threw questions at their own team doctor, Testa. What does EPO do? Is it dangerous? Do you think other teams are using it? Can you help us use it?

Testa tried to convince them they didn’t need the drug. He said the riders’ natural abilities would be enough for them to succeed in the sport, and that it was just a rumor that all riders used EPO. “People are trying to make money off of this, you don’t need it. Studies show that it apparently doesn’t help very much.”

Still, Testa felt EPO use was inevitable. So he gave up trying to keep his riders from it. One day, he handed each rider an envelope containing studies about EPO and instructions on its use. The literature he gave them told the riders how much EPO to take and when to take it, so they wouldn’t take too much and hurt themselves or, perhaps, even kill themselves. “If you want to use a gun, you had better use a manual, rather than to ask a guy on the street,” he told me. While he admitted to facilitating the drug use, Testa denies ever dispensing any doping products.

The training ride was a leisurely spin during which the Motorola riders cruised along for hours, loosening their legs. It was March 18, 1995. The day before, on the way home from Milan-San Remo—where he finished 73rd—Armstrong grumbled to Hincapie, a longtime friend, “This is bullshit. People are using stuff. We’re getting killed.”

Armstrong pushed the issue while the team pedaled alongside Lake Como the next day. He was twenty-three and already a world champion, and had won a single stage of the 1993 Tour de France. But he considered that only the beginning. Growing brasher by the day, he wasn’t going to let a bunch of European pussies kick the crap out of him because they were using a wonder drug and he wasn’t.

Armstrong approached rider after rider. “I’m getting my ass kicked and we’ve got to do something about it. We need to get on a program.” They knew what he meant. They agreed it was time for EPO. The new drug was ubiquitous. Riders carried thermos jugs packed with ice and tiny EPO glass vials. Clink, clink, clink. You could hear the vials rattle against the ice. Clink, clink, clink. In this era of cycling, it was the soundtrack of the sport.

Armstrong might have chosen to use EPO on his own, but it wouldn’t have done him much good. Cycling, despite appearances, is a team sport. There is usually one leader on each team who sets the agenda and whom the other riders support. On Motorola, that man was Armstrong, arguably the best all-around rider.

The rest of the squad are domestiques—secondary riders. Domestique is the French word for “servant,” and those servants sacrifice themselves to help the leader win, partly with team tactics and partly with aerodynamics. They take turns with other domestiques and ride in front of their leader—or to the side, if there is a crosswind—to punch a hole in the air and allow the leader to tuck in behind and save energy. The leader is being swept along in their draft, and expends up to 40 percent less energy than he would riding alone.

The goal is to deliver the team leader as fresh as possible to the crucial point in the race. From there, he can take off and win the stage or take off and gain time on his competition in the overall race for the yellow leader’s jersey.

Eventually, though, the domestiques burn themselves out and often peel off from their leader before struggling to finish the stage. So the stronger a leader’s domestiques are, the better his chances to win because they will be able to hang on and help him as the finish line grows closer.

In 1995, Armstrong presented his domestiques with an ultimatum: If they wanted to be considered for the Tour team that year, they had to start using EPO. Don’t want to? Well, there’s the door. Armstrong was taking control. It was his success at stake. The Motorola program had been built around him. Finishing 73rd in a big race would not inspire sponsors to sign on. Motorola had already said it was ending its sponsorship at the end of the season. The pressure was on, then, to attract another sponsor to cover most of the team’s bills.

When Hendershot took over as Armstrong’s soigneur, J.T. Neal became Armstrong’s personal assistant. In Como, he ran errands and generally made life easier for Armstrong while he raced or trained. When Armstrong dropped out of the Tour de France early—in 1993, 1994 and 1996—Neal picked him up for the trip to Como. He moved Armstrong from apartment to apartment between seasons. He ran the household. He once paid the bill to get the apartment’s electricity turned on after Armstrong and Andreu had let a bill go unpaid. He repaired the clothes dryer.

When Armstrong arrived in Como after a Tour, Neal began massage sessions to prepare him for the fall’s world championships. The men stuck together. Neal introduced Armstrong to art in Milan’s museums. Sometimes, they simply sat outside Armstrong’s place overlooking Lake Como, sharing low-calorie meals like tuna with balsamic vinegar and olive oil.

A visit to Testa was often on the day’s to-do list. Though the soigneur Hendershot said he injected Armstrong with performance-enhancing drugs soon after Armstrong signed with Motorola in 1992, Armstrong himself claims he didn’t start doping until the 1993 world championships. He said Testa gave him Synacthen, a drug that stimulates the adrenal glands to secrete glucocorticoids. Riders say Synacthen makes them feel stronger and takes away some of the pain of a difficult ride. The drug was available on the Motorola team even before Armstrong pushed his teammates to use EPO. Hendershot said Armstrong was “as clean as he ever was” at those worlds.

Neal figured Testa’s job was to inject Armstrong with every needle within reach. Testa was constantly giving Armstrong IVs with substances the doctor called “liver cleansers,” though the official names of those substances—and whether they were banned or not—are unclear. Stephen Swart, a teammate from New Zealand who had first raced in Europe in 1987, didn’t live in Como and see Testa regularly like the American riders did, but had heard about Armstrong’s drug use because the sport was so insular and rumors—especially pertaining to doping—traveled fast.

Swart, a stern, strapping guy, thought Armstrong was mandating what the team’s directors wouldn’t. Jim Ochowicz, a two-time Olympian in track cycling who is considered the godfather of American cycling, had founded the 7-Eleven team, the first American team to race in Europe, and stayed with the team when Motorola came on as its sponsor. It was Ochowicz who first imagined Americans challenging the European old guard, and it was Ochowicz who had made it happen.

In 1986, 7-Eleven became the first U.S. team to compete in the Tour, and one of its riders, Davis Phinney, even won a stage. For years, Ochowicz was the point person in the U.S. for international cycling, the negotiator dealing with sponsors and the European race directors. With journalists, for some reason, he liked to play down his knowledge of the sport’s inner workings.

Often when Ochowicz was asked about Armstrong and EPO, or other performance-enhancing drugs, he took on a look as if to say, How could you even think such a thing? He would smile nervously and say, “I have no idea how to respond” (2005) or “I don’t know what the answer is” (2009) or “The answer is that I haven’t a clue” (2010). He has denied involvement or knowledge of any cheating on the team. Over the course of seven years, I would walk away time and again thinking Ochowicz was either a practiced liar or the most oblivious man ever to walk in cycling’s clink-clink world.

It seems to be a stretch to say that Ochowicz wouldn’t have known about the team’s doping—rumours of it, or the reality of it. He was a member of Armstrong’s inner circle, a man Armstrong professed to be his “surrogate father.” Ochowicz stood up for Armstrong at his wedding and is the godfather to his first son.

Hendershot said he would consider Ochowicz the most unethical person on the Postal Team if Ochowicz did know about the doping but turned a blind eye to it. If that were the case it would have effectively meant Ochowicz was relying on the doctors and soigneurs to make sure the cyclists didn’t overdose and drop dead, Hendershot said.

Armstrong said Motorola’s EPO use began in May 1995 at the Tour DuPont, America’s best-known multistage race. Armstrong, who had finished runner-up the previous two years, became the second American winner after Greg LeMond. With his victory came a big payday, $40,000. Including bonus money, Armstrong collected $51,000. He shared it with his teammates.

Swart said he received Testa’s EPO instructions in the spring of 1995 and that he and Andreu subsequently went to Switzerland to buy the drug. They used it for the Tour of Switzerland, which ran shortly before the Tour de France. Swart said he used EPO for the last time after the prologue of the 1995 Tour. Every morning and every night at that Tour, team employees showed up at the team hotel with bags of ice for riders’ thermoses, and were sometimes exhausted after an all-day hunt in countries that mostly serve their drinks at room temperature.

During one rest day of that 1995 Tour de France, Armstrong and many of his Motorola teammates gathered in one of the squad’s hotel rooms to give blood samples that they would test in a centrifuge. That centrifuge spun the blood to separate it into three categories: plasma, red blood cells and white blood cells. Once the blood was divided, the riders could test their hematocrit levels. Too high a hematocrit level meant they had used too much EPO and might be placing themselves in danger of a heart attack. (Riders had heard stories of some cyclists setting alarms to wake up in the middle of the night to exercise, so that their EPO-thickened blood wouldn’t cause them to suffer cardiac arrest in their sleep.)

With half of the Tour and so many punishing miles behind them, the riders’ hematocrit levels should have dropped well below normal. With the EPO they had used, though, their bodies were making new red blood cells at that very moment. Their hematocrits soared, as if they had not pedaled a mile. They were fresh.

Swart saw that most of his teammates had hematocrits of more than 50. His, he recalled, was the lowest of everyone’s, at 47 percent. He remembered the others’ numbers: Andreu’s was at about 50. Andrea Peron, an Italian, had the highest, at 56. (There have been no findings that Peron ever doped.) Armstrong’s was either 52 or 54, at least ten percentage points above his norm. Even with that edge, Armstrong, the strong one-day racer, would go on to finish 36th in that Tour, nearly an hour and a half slower than Miguel Indurain, the winner.

The telephone call came to Kathy LeMond in the middle of the night. The wife of the American cycling star Greg LeMond heard screaming and crying when she picked up the receiver in their home in Belgium. Then she heard a voice say, “He’s dead! He’s dead! I tried to help him, but he’s already dead! I touched him—he’s cold! He’s dead!”

The voice was that of Annalisa Draaijer, the American wife of the twenty-six-year-old Dutch cyclist Johannes Draaijer. That night at the Draaijers’ home in Holland, three days after her husband had returned from a race, Annalisa heard Johannes make a gurgling sound as they lay in bed. She tried to wake him, but his body was limp. He had died beside her. She knew no one else to turn to.

Greg LeMond had raced with Draaijer on the Dutch team, PDM. Their wives bonded because both spoke English. Now their friend was dead. As soon as news of Draaijer’s death became public, there was speculation that EPO use had caused the cyclist’s blood to thicken into mud and cause a heart attack. No one ever proved Johannes Draaijer died because he was on EPO. But to Greg LeMond, nothing seemed more obvious.

“He died for what?” LeMond asks. “For nothing … Everybody knew what was going on, but nobody stopped it. Nobody.”