Читать книгу Cycle of Lies: The Fall of Lance Armstrong - Juliet Macur, Juliet Macur - Страница 15

In the picture they are a team. J.T. Neal and Lance Armstrong: two smiling, bald-headed cancer patients. Neal cherished the photo. It was proof they each had someone to lean on through the uncertainty of a grave illness, someone who every day confronted the frailty of life.

In the fall of 1996, Neal had guided his young charge through cancer treatments at the Southwest Regional Cancer Center in Austin. Neal knew the nurses and doctors from his own stint there, knew the cancer ward layout and arranged a private room for Armstrong.

The seclusion of the private room was perfect for Lisa Shiels, Armstrong’s new girlfriend, a college senior who was serious about her schoolwork. She could study and give him the support he needed.

Among the friends and family who rallied to Armstrong’s side, only a few thought beyond his survival. Bill Stapleton did. To keep Armstrong looking to the future, Stapleton suggested he establish a cancer charity in his name, so he could remain in the news during his recovery. Armstrong and some of his cycling buddies—Bart Knaggs, John Korioth, and Austin chiropractor Gary Seghi—thought it was a brilliant idea and talked it through during dinner one night. The foundation was a good PR move, but it could also raise awareness for testicular cancer, something that Armstrong felt could keep others from suffering his same fate. If he had known something about the disease, if he had caught it earlier, if his testicle hadn’t grown to the size of a lemon before he did anything about it, the cancer likely wouldn’t have spread to his abdomen or his brain. He thought the foundation could help save others from their own neglect.

In 1997, Stapleton filed official papers with the Texas secretary of state that established the Lance Armstrong Foundation. Korioth, a bar manager in Austin and one of Armstrong’s closest friends, stepped up to run it. Knaggs encouraged some of his rich friends, including Jeff Garvey, a venture capitalist in Austin who was heavily involved in USA Cycling, to join the board of directors.

Armstrong wanted all of his friends to help him in his new, off-the-bike endeavor. In searching for a headquarters for the foundation, he decided one of J.T. Neal’s renovated apartments would be perfect. Though the apartment may very well have had a market value of $650 a month, he offered $200—and Neal was offended.

Neal didn’t want to give Armstrong another cut-rate deal. Armstrong was rich. Besides, Neal wanted to save money for his family’s future. Going through chemotherapy in Austin, he had seen death up close, had known people who didn’t make it. His own end was coming, maybe not next week, maybe not next month, but soon.

So Neal said no to the $200 offer, and Armstrong was furious. He claimed Neal wasn’t doing everything he could to help build the foundation. Neal expected that reaction, because he had seen everyone in Armstrong’s life become yes men: Stapleton, Carmichael, Korioth, Ochowicz. He’d also seen all of them benefit financially and/or professionally from their association with Armstrong.

“He had all the people coming around who liked money and who wanted to impress and he wanted to impress, and he got a lot of values and deals from people like that,” Neal said. “It was nothing I could handle.”

The Lance Armstrong Foundation’s first fund-raiser was a race in Austin called the Race for the Roses, which eventually became the Ride for the Roses. The name suggested that Armstrong had learned the hard way about the need to stop and smell the flowers. Korioth’s cold calls seeking sponsorships were met by a surprising ignorance: Rare was the person on the other end who had ever heard of Lance Armstrong. But Michael Ward, a guitarist with the rock band the Wallflowers and an avid cyclist, contacted Korioth to say he wanted to help out with the fund-raiser by having his band play there. Korioth quickly agreed. For the fledgling foundation, it was a huge coup.

Armstrong had not yet won the Tour de France, nor was he in the clear with cancer. The one-year mark with no reappearance of cancer would be a key date in his recovery. But Armstrong didn’t think that far ahead. No time for that. Besides continuing treatments and assuring the success of the Race for the Roses, he brought a new woman into his life.

He met Kristin Richard at a news conference announcing his fund-raising event. As a public relations account executive, her job was to promote the race. Armstrong liked her looks, but he particularly loved that she was working so hard for him. She was his official cheerleader, paid to convince people to pay attention to him, his foundation and his big cycling event.

He told Neal he had met this “hot new girl” from a stable, well-to-do family. Her father was a business executive. The family owned a home near New York City. To Armstrong, the Richard family seemed too perfect to be true. He told Neal that he liked the family’s normalcy as much as he liked Kristin.

Shiels was history. Neal’s oldest daughter, C. C., bumped into her a few months after the breakup and told her she was sorry that the relationship hadn’t worked out. Shiels burst into tears. She had sacrificed basically her entire senior year of college for Armstrong and felt he had discarded her when she was no longer of use. Neal’s wife, Frances, said, well, that was Armstrong for you. “He treats people like bananas. He takes what he needs, then just tosses the peel on the side of the road.”

Heartbreak notwithstanding, the Race for the Roses event succeeded beyond Korioth’s early hopes. To the casual U.S. sports fan, Armstrong’s accomplishments—a world championship and a couple stages won at the Tour de France—might not have meant much. But to cyclists, Armstrong was a big-time celebrity. Nearly three thousand riders showed up, including the Olympic speed-skating-legend-turned-cyclist Eric Heiden and Dan Jansen, a speed skater who won a Gold Medal at the 1994 Olympics. In the end, Korioth realized he should have expected a large turnout.

Korioth saw how Armstrong’s fans felt as if they knew him intimately. They understood the agony of ascending a steep climb, the monotony of traversing long, endless roads. “It’s a very personal connection,” Korioth says. “They feel like they could go on a ride with him. And the thing is, they probably could.”

Armstrong’s cancer deepened those emotional connections, intertwining the circle of cycling fans with cancer survivors. It brought together people who looked to him for inspiration, both as an athlete and a symbol of resilience.

And so began Armstrong’s surge into the pantheon of American sports heroes. He had risen from his deathbed to a secular sainthood, and Americans were all but salivating to claim him as their own. He was someone the country could cheer for and be proud of, a man on a classic hero’s journey that had all the elements of a boy-done-good story. Not only could American cancer patients beat their disease, but in time they would realize that they also could go on to beat the damned French at their own game, the Tour de France. Armstrong would become a cancer-kicker, a France-kicker and an all around ass-kicker, and Americans are suckers for a sympathetic tough guy.

In one sense, Armstrong satisfied a primal human need to create models for our sanctification. He was an underdog-turned-superhero, first in a cancer ward, later on a bike. Those who believed in him saw only the good side, or convinced themselves that was all there was.

Just after Armstrong had been diagnosed with cancer, Kevin Kuehler, a competitive mountain biker, visited a doctor because he had experienced symptoms similar to Armstrong’s.

That doctor said it wasn’t cancer, but four months later, Kuehler sought a second opinion. That time, yes, it was cancer. On the way home that day, Kuehler spoke to Armstrong on a call-in radio show.

While nervously trying to explain his experience, Kuehler heard Armstrong cut him off. “Did you call for my advice,” Armstrong said, “or did you call just to talk?”

Armstrong advised Kuehler to have the affected testicle removed, a surgery that he said would save Kuehler’s life. Two years later, Kuehler reached out to Armstrong again when the cancer reappeared in his lungs. That time, Armstrong arranged a conversation between his main oncologist, Dr. Larry Einhorn of the Indiana University School of Medicine, and Kuehler. Within forty-five minutes, Einhorn was on the phone with Kuehler, discussing a treatment option Kuehler hadn’t considered.

That new treatment worked, and Kuehler survived to testify before the nation: “I think it’s phenomenal, what he’s doing. He could be cured and go on with his life, but he has chosen to go the more difficult route and help other people. Most guys don’t feel comfortable talking about what’s going on in their pants. But with this kind of cancer, the more you learn, the more you’re comforted. That gives Lance a mission.”

Other believers would come to include people like a man named Jim from Nashville, Tennessee, whose wife had been diagnosed with leukemia. On his blog, he wrote words that many other Armstrong followers considered the truth: “Clearly, God is working through Lance Armstrong.”

As the world’s Kevin Kuehlers came to worship Armstrong, J.T. Neal waited for his protégé at the Austin airport, calling his cell phone repeatedly with no answer. It was the spring of 1997, and Armstrong was on his way to a full recovery from the testicular cancer. Fans of his, many of them cancer patients, wanted to meet him, talk to him, even just touch him as he walked by. They sent tons of letters to his Nike representative, saying Armstrong was their hero and begging for Armstrong’s autograph. His friends had come to call him “Cancer Jesus.” Armstrong hated it.

“I don’t like that big frenzy,” he says. “I don’t like crowds. I don’t like people. I don’t like strangers in general.” Neal thought he was closing himself off.

Still, people liked him. They saw in him what they hoped to see in themselves: a generosity, kindness and, above all, courageousness necessary to survive cancer and return to work—and life.

Neal was on his way to Arkansas for his second bone marrow transplant, which he knew would make him gag and vomit and give him oral thrush, a yeast infection of the mouth common in infants. It would further weaken his body. The transplant might even kill him.

He needed help, someone to feed him and drive him to and from the hospital during the weeklong procedure. Trying to spare his own family the pain of seeing him so ravaged, he asked Armstrong to come with him. Armstrong agreed. He would stay at his side for the whole seven days. Until he wouldn’t.

At the airport, Neal’s cell phone finally rang.

“Where are you?” Neal said.

“Um, I can’t make it, sorry,” Armstrong said.

He had backstage passes to the Wallflowers (heck, they’d played at the Race for the Roses and all) and didn’t want to give them up. Neal felt betrayed. He had been there when Armstrong needed him. They had gone through cancer treatments together. He had brought him into his family and had kept his mouth shut about all the drugs he took in cycling, the EPO, the injections of who knows what else. He—not Stapleton, not the Wallflowers—was the one Armstrong called before the 1996 Olympics to help figure out how to get the EPO out of a hotel room refrigerator in Milan because Armstrong had accidentally left it there. He had listened to Armstrong’s deepest fears and secrets, including those about his biological and adoptive fathers. He had been his business manager and lawyer, without ever charging a fee. Later, Neal would say, “This is not the treatment I deserved or that anyone deserved.”

Some of Neal’s friends had called their cancer doctors for him and helped him investigate alternative treatment programs. “But not Lance,” he said. “He has not done that.”

The more Neal thought about Armstrong standing him up at the airport, the more hurt he felt. He took off the Rolex that Armstrong had given him. It stayed off for good.

One day in late summer 1997, Armstrong sat down with Carmichael, who had flown to Austin to meet him. Carmichael wanted Armstrong to start racing again, and convinced Stapleton to argue the point, too. Both men had a financial stake in a comeback.

Carmichael, who had been replaced by Ferrari in 1995 as Armstrong’s main coach, said it would be a shame for Armstrong to quit when he was still so young. Stapleton told Armstrong a comeback could mean big money. Sponsors would flock to him, and not just any sponsors—Fortune 500 companies. Armstrong could very well transcend the provincial roots of the sport.

Though Armstrong knew he’d have to dope again, he told me it didn’t scare him because he felt safe in the hands of Ferrari and knew from experience that he would use only a fraction of the EPO that he had—ironically—taken as part of his chemotherapy. He doubted his drug use had caused the cancer. So he agreed to get back on his bike.

Problem was, he had nowhere to go.

Cofidis, the French team, had terminated his $2.5 million, two-year contract. Instead, it offered $180,000, plus incentives that would pay him more for an unexpected return to form. The team wasn’t confident that Armstrong would be the same rider.

The offer, insulting in Armstrong’s eyes, flipped a switch of anger. Those “Eurobastards” had screwed him. A master at holding grudges, he vowed to get even.

Armstrong had one shot at a better deal: the United States Postal Service team. The U.S.-based squad was owned by Thomas Weisel, a San Francisco investment banker whom several Postal Service riders called “a jock sniffer”—a derogatory term for someone who loves to hobnob with elite athletes. He was a good athlete himself. Competing in his age group, Weisel was a national champion speed skater, a world champion cyclist and a competitive skier. His next athletic goal was to build the country’s preeminent cycling team.

Armstrong had ridden for Weisel in 1990 and ’91 as an amateur on the Subaru-Montgomery cycling team, which Weisel had bankrolled. Weisel had seen his raw talent. With that in mind, Weisel accepted Stapleton’s proposal of a $215,000 base salary for Armstrong, heavy with performance-based bonuses.

That was October 1997, about a year after Armstrong’s cancer diagnosis. The cancer would turn out to be a financial boon for Armstrong—and for Stapleton, too. Stapleton wasn’t embarrassed to call a postcancer Armstrong a marketer’s dream. An autobiography was in the works. People who had paid no attention to cycling now wanted to know about its superhero.

“Lance isn’t just a cyclist anymore—because of the cancer, the Lance Armstrong brand has a much broader appeal,” Stapleton told the Austin American-Statesman. “Our challenge is to leverage that now. He’s on the verge of being a crossover-type spokesman. He could be just like an athlete who does a Pepsi or Gatorade commercial. If his comeback has success, we hope to take him to a Kodak or Sony and hope they will turn him into a corporate pitchman.”

With Stapleton and Carmichael pushing Armstrong to the brink of international fame, J.T. Neal tried to keep him grounded. Perhaps because he faced imminent death, he wasn’t dazzled by the portrayal of Armstrong as the poster boy for cancer awareness. He was dealing with Armstrong, as always, as a father would.

A family friend had taken Armstrong’s place as Neal’s caregiver in Arkansas for his second bone marrow transplant. That whole week, Neal had wondered where he and Armstrong’s mother had gone wrong with Lance. He had long recognized the selfishness inherent in Armstrong’s naked ambition, but this time, in dismissing Neal when Neal most needed him, he had gone too far But Neal had kind of seen it coming.

Armstrong had ignored those doctors and nurses who had been at his bedside during his cancer treatments in Austin, and then he used his recovery to make money. It was hypocritical for Armstrong to be a spokesman for cancer awareness, Neal said. “Look how he got it in the first place,” Neal would say later. “How he flaunts the rules. It’s like, ‘I have cancer and I’m a good guy’ and ‘I will use all means to justify the ends.’”

Neal knew Armstrong was doping again. While Armstrong was raising money for his foundation, he was looking for a way to get EPO in the United States after he’d stopped using the drug to fight his cancer. Armstrong went so far as to ask for the EPO that Neal was using in his cancer treatment. Eventually, when Neal repeatedly refused to share the drug, Armstrong said he had developed a source in the southwestern United States.

As weary of Armstrong’s machinations as he was, Neal continued asking him to help his mother, Linda. Neal asked him to give her $10,000 a year. Armstrong refused.

So Neal eventually asked Garvey, the foundation’s chairman of the board, to push Armstrong. When Armstrong again refused, Garvey offered to front the money himself. But he had a public relations problem. If news got out that Armstrong wouldn’t help his mother in need, how would it look for the foundation? What if America learned that Lance Armstrong was not a selfless hero?