Читать книгу Cycle of Lies: The Fall of Lance Armstrong - Juliet Macur, Juliet Macur - Страница 16

Two years before Armstrong showed up on the Postal Service team, there was a big shake-up in its organization. After the 1996 season, team director Eddie Borysewicz, the 1984 Olympic coach and Armstrong’s former mentor, was not asked to return for another season. Prentice Steffen, the team’s doctor, wasn’t invited back, either.

Steffen had been in a team hotel room during the 1996 Tour of Switzerland when two Postal riders—Tyler Hamilton and Marty Jemison—approached him to talk. Jemison brought up the team’s medical program. He said the team wasn’t getting anywhere with the current program—the riders were getting crushed at that race, the team’s first big European competition—and asked Steffen’s advice.

“Do you think there is something more you could be doing to help us?” he said.

Steffen considered this a euphemism, and felt that Jemison was asking for performance-enhancing drugs. He remembers it as a wink-and-nod conversation that he knew would not go anywhere because, having conquered substance abuse himself, he was against the use of drugs.

“No, I can’t really get involved in that sort of thing,” Steffen answered.

Hamilton has denied that the conversation ever happened. Jemison said they had spoken with Steffen that day, but that they were asking for legal products, things like vitamins and amino acids. Whatever transpired, Steffen felt that the riders and team management began distancing themselves from him. Mark Gorski, the team’s general manager and a 1984 Olympian, stopped returning his calls and e-mails. The next thing he knew, he had been replaced by a Spanish doctor, Pedro Celaya.

Steffen had been with the team for several years and was hurt by his unceremonious departure. There were no formal good-byes; the team just let his contract lapse. Fuming, he wrote a letter to Gorski. “What would a Spanish doctor, completely unknown to the organization, offer that I can’t or won’t? Doping is the fairly obvious answer.”

The team’s response came from its law firm. In it, Steffen was threatened with a lawsuit if he made public his accusations.

Borysewicz had also lost his job with the team. Though he had been caught up in the blood doping scandal of the 1984 Summer Games, several of his riders on the Postal Service team said he never offered them anything of the sort. He had told them that he didn’t want to be involved in another doping scandal. He was replaced in 1997 by Johnny Weltz, a Dane and a former rider who had spent most of his career with the Spanish ONCE team, which was known as one of the dirtiest teams in the sport. Weltz would join Celaya, a doctor who some riders claimed knew his way around the doping of athletes. (The United States Anti-Doping Agency would eventually slap Celaya with a lifetime ban for doping athletes, but Celaya denied being involved with any drug use. The case was in arbitration in early 2014.)

A new regime was in place that would lay the foundation for Armstrong’s return to the team the next year after he survived cancer. Nothing about the sport’s doping culture had changed since he left.

As soon as their teammates left their apartment in Girona, Spain, Darren Baker and Scott Mercier went to work. They looked under beds, in drawers, inside jacket pockets—any and all possible hiding places inside the bedrooms of Tyler Hamilton and George Hincapie, their roommates and fellow Americans on the United States Postal Service team. Finally they stumbled upon a shoebox filled with small pill bottles at the bottom of Hincapie’s closet. Tucked among bottles of vitamins was a small tan bottle of testosterone.

“No way!” Mercier said.

“What? That’s it? I was sure there would be more,” Baker said.

That’s all they found, but they’d found an answer to their question: Were their teammates doping? Yes. At least one of them was.

In 1997, Hincapie was only twenty-three, but had long been one of the top cyclists in the United States. The son of Colombian immigrants, he grew up in Queens and began cycling when he was eight. His father, Ricardo, had been a competitive cyclist. George Hincapie would train with his older brother, Rich, in Central Park. On weekends, the Hincapies drove to races in New Jersey, Connecticut and all over New York. Unlike Armstrong, who was a late bloomer as a pure cyclist because he had been concentrating on triathlons, Hincapie was only twelve when he won his first national championship.

In school, he daydreamed about racing in Europe, maybe even in the Tour de France. Ignoring homework, he planned training schedules. He tried one semester of college, at Hofstra University, but decided academics weren’t for him.

He took his first vitamin shots with the United States national team, in Italy. In Europe, he said, injecting vitamins was so common that supermarkets sold syringes “next to the apples.” At the 1992 Olympics, he received injections from national team trainer Angus Fraser—later accused of doping young riders, though Fraser denies ever doping anyone—but Hincapie assumed his injections were legal supplements, like vitamins B12 and C.

Early on as a pro on the Motorola team, he saw a teammate inject what he assumed was EPO. Another teammate had a drawerful of drugs that he bequeathed to Hincapie when he left the team with an injury. The team’s soigneurs, including Hendershot, gave Hincapie injections, but he never questioned what was in them. He said his mentor, Frankie Andreu, who’d already been a pro for several years and later raced for the Postal Service team, introduced him to EPO.

“It was just standard,” Hincapie says, referring to the doping in Europe’s pro peloton. “It was shocking, but I didn’t have a Plan B. At that time, it wasn’t like, ‘Well, shit, I’ve got to cheat.’ It was, like, ‘I’m not going to let myself get cheated. I have to do this.’”

At his first Grand Tour—the Vuelta a España in 1995, when he was still clean—Hincapie struggled to stay with “the fattest, most out-of-shape guy in the race; that’s how hard it was.” He realized then that no matter how hard he worked, he would never succeed unless he doped.

For thirty years, his father woke up at 4 a.m. to work in the baggage department for United Airlines at LaGuardia Airport. His mother drove a city school bus for ten years. “That focus and commitment to something was really passed on to me,” he said. “I was going to do what I wanted to do, one hundred percent.”

So when faced with the decision of whether or not to take performance-enhancing drugs, Hincapie followed his close friend Armstrong’s lead: He went all in. In a year’s time, Armstrong would be back on a team with Hincapie and the two would race together and dope together. It was a partnership that would take them places they’d never imagined—places marked with both glory and grief.

Baker and Mercier were two riders on the Postal Service team—perhaps the only two top riders—who said no to doping. Though they had never seen their teammates use performance-enhancing drugs, they were suspicious that their roommates, Hamilton and Hincapie, had gained ground on the EPO-fueled Europeans. How could they do that?

Hincapie, the tall, lanky sprinter whose strength was his speed and power on flat roads, had grown stronger in the mountains. Hamilton, a small guy with freckles, icy blue eyes and wavy auburn hair, had also been climbing better than ever.

Neither had seemed like the type who would dope. Hincapie, nicknamed Big George, was quiet and an all-around nice guy who was as well liked in the peloton as he was with fans.

Hamilton might have been plucked from a J. Crew advertisement featuring a boy and his golden retriever. He was a New Englander and former prep school ski racer whose family dressed him in button-down shirts and taught him to be kind and polite. At a glance, Hamilton came across less as a professional athlete and more as a teenager on a bike who tossed your morning newspaper onto the roof instead of the porch.

Armstrong would join the team in 1998. In his year or so away from the sport, the doping culture had not changed. Just because the squad was sponsored by the Postal Service, an independent agency of the United States government, didn’t mean the team would follow the rules. Perhaps the opposite held, with the high-profile sponsor putting even more pressure on riders. In charge was Weisel, the financial wizard with a fierce competitive streak, so fierce that he has been said to hire some employees not for their financial acumen but for their ability to help his company win corporate track-and-field competitions.

Baker said one night he and a top Russian rider debated whether there was any justification to dope. The Russian had a good argument. He had been shipped to a sports camp when he was around eleven or twelve, leaving his family and friends behind. He was fine with it, considering the alternative, which would have been a factory job. At camp, three shifts of kids rode ten bikes, and those kids dutifully took “vitamins.” It was a life chosen for them. Most American cyclists, for that matter, had nothing to fall back on if they failed. Only a handful attended college.

Baker and Mercier were a couple of rare exceptions. Baker had been a finance major at the University of Maryland, Mercier an economics major at the University of California, Berkeley. So they didn’t look at doping as a life-or-death decision. They were in the sport because they loved it.

“It’s a bike race,” Mercier says. “It’s a fun way to make a living, but it’s a bike race, c’mon!”

Hincapie hated hearing that, and he hated Mercier because of it. Sure, Mercier had options, but riders like him and Armstrong did not—at least, they felt they didn’t. Armstrong feared that he’d have to work at Starbucks if cycling didn’t work out for him.

While teammates cursed them under their breath, Mercier and Baker joked about the rampant drug use. Mercier would shake the locked refrigerator on the team truck to hear the glass vials rattling inside. “Hmm, I wonder what’s in there? Oh, the special lunch. These are my special B vitamins,” he’d say to Baker, laughing as EPO vials made their cheater’s music.

To Baker and Mercier, it was obvious the sport had been taken over by doping. Mercier noticed riders in their twenties and thirties with acne, a common side effect of steroids, and some who seemed to have developed big brow bones, a possible side effect of human growth hormone.

At the Tour DuPont in 1994, Mercier had walked into a bathroom and noticed two Spanish riders sharing a stall. He heard one say, “Poco más, poco más,” then saw a syringe fall at the riders’ feet. “I thought it was gross,” Mercier says. “It felt to me like heroin addicts. I felt like, wow, if I have to do that, this is not the sport for me.”

At the same race, Mercier had pulled up at the start of one stage along Armstrong, who had such brawny arms that he had to cut his jersey sleeves. His legs rippled with muscles. Mercier said, “Man, Lance, you could be a linebacker, you’re so huge. You could play for the Cowboys.”

Armstrong’s answer: “You think?”

Three years later, Mercier was confronted with doping head-on. At the Postal Service team’s training camp in 1997, the Spanish team doctor Pedro Celaya withdrew blood from the riders so he could test their hematocrit levels. Mercier’s was 40.5.

“To be professional in Europe, maybe 49, 49.5,” Celaya told him.

“Gracias, Pedro, how do I do that?”

“Special B vitamins. We can talk later, OK?”

Mercier walked away from it knowing EPO was in store.

In the spring of that year, Mercier had a four-week break during which he was going to his wife’s home country, South Africa. He would travel there after competing in the Tour of Romandie, in Switzerland, take two weeks off and train for two weeks. Before the race ended, he met Celaya in a hotel room to discuss the upcoming training schedule.

Celaya handed him a calendar with several little circles and stars marked on certain dates. Next, according to Mercier, came a Ziploc bag filled with pills and vials of liquid. Though Celaya says he was never involved in doping, Mercier claims that Celaya was very much a part of the team’s doping scheme. Mercier said he could recall exactly the exchange he had with Celaya when the doctor allegedly handed him the bag of pills and vials.

“What’s this, Pedro?” Mercier asked.

“These are steroids,” the doctor answered.

“Are these going to make my balls shrink up?”

“No, no,” Celaya said, laughing. “You go strong like bull. No racing, for sure you test positive. But it will make you go stronger than ever before.”

Mercier alleges that Celaya told him to buy some syringes once he arrived in South Africa, and showed him how to extract liquid from the glass vial. Then he advised Mercier to put the drugs in his front pocket for his flight. If a customs officer stopped him, Celaya said, just say the drugs were vitamins.

Mercier made it to South Africa without incident. Once his training was supposed to begin, he took out the bag of drugs and the calendar that told him what to take and when. On some days, he was supposed to take the green pills first thing in the morning, then later in the evening. Some days at lunch, too. The instructions told him to stop taking the pills on a Sunday before a race in the United States the following Saturday. That’s how fast the drugs would exit his system; he wouldn’t test positive. Getting away with doping would be easy, if he decided to take that step.

Mercier’s wife, Mandie, said she couldn’t make that decision for him. She didn’t want her feelings about it to taint their relationship. He looked at her and said, “I’m not going to take these.”

Mercier lasted only three days on Celaya’s training program. The fourth day, he could only get his heart rate to 70 percent of its maximum instead of the 85-95 percent the program required. His legs were shot. For days after that, he was so exhausted and sore that he could do only 80 percent of his workouts.

Then he needed to take a few days off. There was no way he could make it through the two weeks of workouts without drugs. With steroids, he would’ve recovered from each hard workout and train to his body’s full extent the very next day.

Struggling through those workouts, he knew if he raced the next season, he had to be a doper. Hincapie was right. Riders simply couldn’t race clean and be competitive anymore. The drugs seemed necessary. Besides, taking them had a huge upside: better results and bigger paychecks.

But Mercier decided to quit the sport. He’d finish the season, but would turn down a contract extension from the Postal Service. His dream was over.

While people have called him courageous and morally strong because of that decision, he is, on one level, embarrassed. He says quitting the sport showed that he was too weak to resist temptation.

“I don’t think I’d ever be able to stop doping,” he says. “I thought it was a slippery slope.”

Mercier finished that season and his career at the Vuelta a España. Even though he had been a strong climber, the sprinters—known for their bursts of speed on straightaways—were outclimbing him. The peloton was flying up mountain passes. He had been in third place going into a massive climb early on in one stage. But one by one, riders were overtaking him, as if he were moving in slow motion.

The Vuelta a España also claimed Baker, whose retreat from the sport was thought to be tragic for the fact that he was considered by many to be an amazing natural talent. Jonathan Vaughters, a rider from Denver who would join the Postal Service team the next year, said Baker was good enough to be a top 10 rider at the Tour—“if he would’ve doped, of course.” At that final Vuelta, Baker himself told Sam Abt of the New York Times that he once had been as good as Armstrong. “I was strong most of the time, I was just as strong as Lance Armstrong, maybe even stronger on the climbs. But he was always more hungry for the win than I was.”

Baker knew, when he was selected for the national team, that riders at the top of the sport were doping. “Everybody knew it,” he said, “and everybody talked about it.” Riders recited five-time Tour winner Jacques Anquetil’s famous line—“Leave me in peace, everybody takes dope”—and repeated what Fausto Coppi, a two-time Tour winner, had told a television reporter. He said he only took dope when he needed to, “which is almost all the time.” Baker understood those sayings to be the truth, and he felt pressure to use drugs, but declined.

He had been constantly challenged. At the world championships in 1995, he claims that the doctor working with the U.S. national team slipped Baker several pills after Baker complained that other riders seemed so much more energized than he was. Baker did not want to reveal the doctor’s name, but several team members said that the doctor was Max Testa, who worked on Motorola with Armstrong and other top American riders.

“Here, this will help with the pain in your legs,” Baker claims the doctor told him. “It’s just cortisone.”