Floyd Landis, the cyclist who had denied doping for years despite being stripped of the 2006 Tour de France title for failing a drug test, went to a lunch meeting in April 2010 with the director of the Tour of California cycling race.
As they sat down at a table at the Farm of Beverly Hills restaurant in Los Angeles, Landis placed a tape recorder between them and pressed record.
Landis finally wanted to tell the truth: He had doped through most of his professional career. He was recording his confessions so he would later have proof that he had blown the whistle on the sport.
“How do you expect people to believe you when you lied for so long?” Andrew Messick, the race director, asked Landis. “Have you told your mother? Have you told Travis Tygart?”
Landis, raised as a Mennonite, said he had not yet told his mother. Nor had he told Tygart, the chief executive of the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency, with whom he had clashed for more than two years as Landis publicly fought his doping case.
But, Landis said, it was time.
“Lance Armstrong never came up,” Messick said. “But he did make a comment on the mafia. He said, ‘When you’re in the mafia and you get caught and go to jail, you keep your mouth shut, and the organization takes care of your family. In cycling, you’re expected to keep your mouth shut when you test positive, but you become an outcast. Everyone just turns their back on you.”
Ruling to come Monday
The lunch conversation set in motion a series of events that led to the stark revelation that Lance Armstrong, the seven-time Tour de France winner, and his U.S. Postal Service team were engaged in what anti-doping officials called the most sophisticated doping program in history.
Armstrong, who vehemently denies ever doping, did not fight the charges the anti-doping agency brought against him. Last week, in the wake of anti-doping officials’ making public their evidence in the case, Armstrong stepped down as chairman of his cancer foundation and lost nearly all his endorsements — a decline so unceremonious and severe that a precedent in recent sports history is elusive.
On Monday, cycling’s world governing body is expected to announce whether it will appeal the anti-doping agency’s ruling, which Armstrong has called unfair and flawed. If the group does not appeal, Tour de France organizers will officially strip Armstrong of his Tour titles.
A federal investigation
The anti-doping agency knew its case against Armstrong had the potential to be a blockbuster.
Landis’ doping confession and claim that Armstrong and other Postal Service riders were involved in team-organized doping became public in May 2010, at the Tour of California. A federal investigation into Armstrong relating to doping-related crimes, including fraud and drug trafficking, ensued.
Two days after the race ended, David Zabriskie — a five-time national time-trial champion and one of Armstrong’s former teammates — showed up on the doorstep of the federal courthouse in Los Angeles, finally ready to tell his story. He had requested that Tygart be in the room — he was one of two riders who did so — and what Tygart heard was chilling.
Zabriskie’s
father had been an alcoholic, drug user and drug dealer and died young because of it, Zabriskie said.
Cycling became a refuge. Johan Bruyneel — the Postal Service team director and longtime Armstrong confidant — took Zabriskie under his wing shortly after his father died in 2002 from a failing liver.
Soon, he was pressing Zabriskie to use performance-enhancing drugs, Zabriskie said.
“What Johan did to me, I consider it a form of abuse because it was so horrible and affected me for the rest of my life,” Zabriskie said, choking up. “I know I was the first person to tell my story because Johan, he doesn’t need to be around young cyclists.”
Bruyneel, who has an open doping case against him, could not be reached for comment.
Slowly making a case
The evidence against Armstrong was mounting, though slowly.
Tygart and the anti-doping agency backed off from their investigation while the federal authorities moved ahead. Riders offered his testimony to prosecutors, but some — like Tyler Hamilton and Levi Leipheimer — opened up only when a subpoena for a grand jury compelled them to.
Meanwhile, Armstrong or his representatives worked to wrestle control of the situation. They reached out to former Postal Service riders to offer legal representation, according to lawyers involved in the case.
Early on, George Hincapie, the only rider who was at Armstrong’s side for all seven of his Tour de France victories, retained a lawyer in California but quickly learned that the lawyer might not be serving his best interest — the lawyer was a fan of Armstrong’s and a supporter of his Livestrong charity — so he hired one based in New York, said one person with direct knowledge of the situation.
Hincapie met with federal investigators voluntarily in August 2010 to tell them he had doped and that Armstrong had used blood transfusions, EPO and testosterone.
Without explanation, Andre Birotte Jr., the U.S. attorney for the Central District of California, dropped the federal inquiry in early February, stunning Tygart and the riders — and even the investigators involved in the case.
A manager and his team
The anti-doping agency started calling the riders they knew had cooperated with the federal case.
Jonathan Vaughters, a former teammate of Armstrong’s and now the team manager of the Garmin-Sharp team, decided that it was time to urge his riders to deliver on a promise.
The night Landis’ accusations became public in May 2010, Vaughters had gathered his cyclists in his hotel room in Visalia, Calif., a stop in the Tour of California, and said they should tell the truth if they were contacted by any cycling, anti-doping or government authority.
He knew that Zabriskie, Tom Danielson and Christian Vande Velde — former Postal Service riders — had used performance-enhancing drugs and had hired them despite it. Vaughters himself had used performance-enhancing drugs while on the Postal Service team and had once seen Armstrong inject EPO, he said.
In the months leading to the Tour of California in 2010, Vaughters said he received increasingly desperate emails from Landis, who had just come off his two-year doping suspension and could not find a job in the sport.
“I felt like he was either going to commit suicide or tell all,” said Vaughters, who knew the truth about Landis’ doping.
Wall of silence is broken
This spring, those and other riders were invited to help the anti-doping agency in its investigation. Tygart and Bill Bock, the anti-doping agency’s general counsel, wanted them to come clean.
“We are here to dismantle the dirty system that still exists in cycling, so this won’t ever happen to another rider again,” Tygart and Bock told them.
Vaughters said their motivation sounded genuine.
“My guys were going to be honest, no matter what. But it wasn’t easy because they had never even told their families.”
Bock, Tygart and the agency’s legal affairs director, Onye Ikwuakor, visited rider after rider in May and June, gathering testimonies filled with unimaginable details.
Zabriskie talked. Vaughters, Danielson and Vande Velde talked. Even Leipheimer and Hamilton talked.
Among the final witnesses was Hincapie, one of the most respected riders in cycling. Anti-doping officials met with him in June, just days before the anti-doping agency notified Armstrong of his potential doping violation.
When Hincapie confessed and said Armstrong had doped and encouraged it, the anti-doping agency knew it had its case.
Hincapie, Leipheimer, Vande Velde and Zabriskie agreed to take their names out of consideration for the Olympics. They and Danielson agreed to a six-month suspension that would begin Sept. 1, after the cycling season.
In the weeks afterward, Armstrong pressed to know the names of the witnesses, but the anti-doping agency would not release them.
In August, Armstrong gave up. He said he would not fight the charges. It sent the anti-doping agency scrambling yet again to gather sworn affidavits from the riders who were supposed to provide live testimony at the arbitration hearing. They managed to do so in just over two weeks.
At the last minute, the anti-doping agency contacted one more cyclist — Michael Barry — because he had recently retired. Barry joined the others and told his doping tale.
“Ultimately, I was living a lie,” Barry said last week, adding that he should have been honest from the start, but he felt trapped because he would have lost his job for coming clean.
“I guess I have to apologize to Floyd for calling him a liar,” Barry said. “Because he was telling the truth the whole time.”
