Dark Turn in the Tale of a First Title
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Version 0 of 1. Just before the 1999 Tour de France, a teammate pointed out that Lance Armstrong had a bruise on his upper arm caused by a syringe. According to a doping investigation, Armstrong cursed and said, “That’s not good.” A public weigh-in of the riders was to be attended by the news media. A team masseuse found some makeup, and Armstrong’s bruise, and the doping that investigators assert caused it, was ultimately concealed. The 1999 Tour was supposed to be one of renewal after a doping scandal engulfed the 1998 race. Instead, Armstrong won his first of his seven Tours by using the prohibited blood-boosting agent EPO and the steroid hormone testosterone, according to a 200-page report released Wednesday by the United States Anti-Doping Agency. While Armstrong has long protested his innocence, retroactive testing found EPO in six of Armstrong’s urine samples from the 1999 race, according to the report. In addition, the report said, five fellow riders on Armstrong’s 1999 United States Postal Service team — George Hincapie, Frankie Andreu, Tyler Hamilton, Jonathan Vaughters and Christian Vande Velde — provided affidavits testifying to firsthand knowledge that Armstrong violated antidoping rules, the report said. The evidence that Armstrong used EPO in the 1999 race was overwhelming, the report said, adding, “No other conclusion is even plausible.” The tale behind Armstrong’s first Tour triumph, an achievement that made him an instant celebrity, is laid out in the investigative report in almost novelistic fashion. It involves a man on a motorcycle who delivered drugs to Armstrong’s team, an Italian doctor who was famous for helping riders dope, a training regimen designed to avoid drug testing, and the active complicity of the team masseuse. The 1999 racing season began, the report said, with an unlikely goal for Armstrong, a cancer survivor: to win the Tour de France. He would skip many of the buildup races to concentrate on his sport’s major event. And for fuel, the report said, he would rely on banned substances. A new team director, Johan Bruyneel, and team doctor, Luis Garcia del Moral, were hired that year for the Postal Service team. Armstrong called the team the Bad News Bears. He wanted a new team, according to the affidavit by Vaughters, his teammate, because the outgoing doctor, Pedro Celaya, “had not been aggressive enough for Armstrong in providing banned products.” Bruyneel and del Moral, on the other hand, had formerly been associated with a racing team widely known, the report said, for “its organized team doping.” Cyclists who wanted to dope had two main advantages in 1999, the report noted. Cycling’s international governing body had no organized out-of-competition drug testing program — considered the only effective way to catch those using banned substances. The governing body also did not require riders to make their whereabouts known during training so that they could be screened. Much of Armstrong’s pre-Tour training in 1999 was spent along remote mountain roads of the Alps and the Pyrenees. Two teammates — Hamilton and Kevin Livingston — assisted him with arduous climbing, the report said. A regular attendee at these training camps, the report said, was an Italian sports doctor named Michele Ferrari, who would later be accused by American doping officials of trafficking in banned substances. Hamilton was first injected with EPO in 1999 by Ferrari during training at Sestriere, an Italian ski village that would be a mountaintop finish during the Tour, the report said. Andreu said in an affidavit that he received EPO injections at races that year from del Moral, the Postal Service team doctor. Pepe Marti, the Postal Service team trainer, also provided EPO to riders in 1999, the report said. At a late dinner in Nice, France, Betsy Andreu, Frankie’s wife, said that Marti arrived to provide what she was told was EPO to Armstrong. The dinner was held late, she said, because Marti was traveling from Spain and considered it “safer to cross the border at night.” Armstrong took a brown paper bag from Marti, held it up and, according to Andreu, called it “liquid gold.” In May 1999, Emma O’Reilly, the team masseuse, made an 18-hour round-trip drive from Nice to Spain to deliver a bottle of pills to Armstrong that, according to the report, “she understood to be banned drugs.” That same month, Hamilton was at Armstrong’s villa in Nice, and received a vial of EPO from Armstrong that had been stored in Armstrong’s refrigerator, the report said. On June 10, 1999, less than a month before the Tour began, Armstrong’s hematocrit level — the percentage by volume of oxygen-carrying red blood cells in whole blood — hovered at 41 percent, below the allowable race limit of 50 percent, the report said. When O’Reilly, the masseuse, asked Armstrong how he would optimize his performance, the report said that he responded, “What everybody does.” O’Reilly understood this to mean Armstrong would use EPO, the report said. The Tour de France opened July 3, 1999, and ran through July 25. Armstrong won the prologue, but a few days later, he received notice of a positive test for a corticosteroid, a chemical that helps regulate inflammation, metabolism and electrolyte levels. Because Armstrong did not have medical authorization to use corticosteroids, the report said, a story was fabricated to backdate a prescription for cortisone cream and claim that the medication had been prescribed to treat a saddle sore, the report said. According to the report, Armstrong told O’Reilly, the masseuse, “Now, Emma, you know enough to bring me down.” During the first two weeks of the Tour, Armstrong, Hamilton and Livingston used EPO every third or fourth day in their camper or hotel rooms, the report said. Armstrong, Hamilton and Livingston traveled in a newer, bigger camper during that Tour, while other Postal Service riders shoehorned into a smaller, older vehicle. Hamilton and Livingston also shared a hotel room so they could speak openly with Armstrong about doping, the report said. The three riders would “inject quickly and then put the syringes in a bag or Coke can and Dr. del Moral would get the syringe out of the camper as quickly as possible,” the report said. Because security was tight, the EPO was smuggled to the Postal Service team by a personal assistant and handyman for Armstrong, the report said. He was a motorcycle enthusiast who followed the Tour on his motorcycle, and the riders who knew his purpose gave him the nickname Motoman. Armstrong also used testosterone, which builds muscle and aids recovery from exertion, during the 1999 Tour, the report said. He mixed it with olive oil in a concoction that was taken orally. After one stage, the report said, Armstrong squirted the “oil” in Hamilton’s mouth. After relinquishing the yellow jersey, Armstrong reclaimed first place in a time trial, then rode to a dominant mountaintop finish in Sestriere, the Italian ski village. He was not then known as a great climber, and Christophe Bassons, a French rider, noted in a newspaper column that the peloton had been “shocked” by Armstrong’s ride up to Sestriere. At the race’s end, however, Armstrong proclaimed his innocence. He won the Tour six more times. |