Seven Deadly Sins: My Pursuit of Lance Armstrong (36 page)

Tillotson: Two hundred thousand dollars?

Armstrong: No.

Tillotson: Or one hundred and fifty thousand dollars?

Armstrong: No.

Tillotson: I mean, it could be thirty or forty, or it could be twenty, is what I’m asking.

Armstrong: It could be. I don’t think it’s that. But I think it’s no more than thirty.

Tillotson: Was it by personal cheque?

Armstrong: I don’t remember.

Tillotson: Did you tell the UCI you were going to make it before you did?

Armstrong: I don’t recall, but I don’t think so. I don’t know.

Tillotson: You gave twenty-five thousand dollars, or approximately twenty-five thousand dollars, to the UCI, but you don’t remember if you told them beforehand that you were sending them a cheque?

Armstrong: I don’t recall.

Tillotson: Had you ever given any money to UCI before?

Armstrong: No.

Tillotson: Have you ever given any money since?

Armstrong: I have pledged money since, but I don’t think I’ve done it yet.

Tillotson: When did you pledge money?

Armstrong: I don’t remember. Between now and then.

Tillotson: No. I meant when did you make the pledge?

Armstrong: Between now and then. I don’t recall exactly.
⁵³

Tillotson: Who did you give the money to?

Armstrong: Well, if you sent a cheque or a wire, I don’t know who received it, but—

Tillotson: I mean, like . . . is it literally like one day the UCI guy comes in, opens up the mail, and there’s a cheque from you for twenty-five thousand dollars?

Armstrong: I mean, I don’t know. I wasn’t in the mail room.

Tillotson: Okay. But did you let anyone know this is coming?

Armstrong: I told you, I don’t remember.

Tillotson: Okay. Have you spoken to anyone at the UCI regarding your donation?

Armstrong: Yeah.

Tillotson: Who?

Armstrong: I have spoken to Alain Rumpf, Hein Verbruggen, perhaps others.

Tillotson: Do you know what they’ve done with the money?

Armstrong: I just told you, I don’t know.

Tillotson: Okay. Like, they didn’t buy some specific equipment or something with it that you’re aware of? It wasn’t earmarked—

Armstrong: Which part of ‘I don’t know’ do you not understand?

Tillotson: So you have no idea why you gave twenty-five thousand dollars to the UCI at all. And you don’t even know if you called anyone before—

Armstrong: I don’t know. Personally – now, this is going to shock you – but my style is different than David Walsh’s. My approach has been more of an internal one, to support clean racing, to support clean sport. My idea of the best tactic is not to slander and defame everybody, and bite the hand that feeds you, and piss in the soup; but my fight and my commitment has always been there.

Look back and study Lance Armstrong at that time and you are looking at a man who figured that he was virtually home and clear. He was in retirement. His enemies were being quietened or smitten by lawyers. He was an icon. He had this one last inconvenience to get through and he’d collect his money and go surfing. Everything would be on the record for ever but, if he won, he won big. And for ever. So he enjoyed the entire experience.

On 8 February 2006 a settlement was reached. SCA Promotions paid Armstrong and Tailwind Sports $7.5 million – the $5 million bonus plus interest and lawyers’ fees. Armstrong’s statement came later, when news of the depositions began to leak: ‘The allegations were rejected,’ he said. ‘It’s over. We won. They lost. I was yet again completely vindicated.’

Not quite the case. While the ‘final arbitration award’ noted that the arbitrators settled after ‘having considered the evidence and testimony’, the panel produced no findings of fact. The business was settled without a ruling. Bob Hamman has always said, ‘The panel did not rule on the case.’

The SCA business was an ending in a way. Or so it seemed. Lance Armstrong had retired. All the evidence had been put on oath. Everybody had gone in there risking perjury if they lied. It was the only time in the entire Lance saga that people got to swear under oath.
⁵⁴
But nothing happened. For years the twelve volumes of depositions and questions lived in retirement, taking up a huge chunk of space on my computer. Then, like Lance, they came back to active life.

I sometimes wonder if that’s what Bob Hamman had intended all along. He’s a man whose life’s work has been a study of chance and probability. People who have played bridge with Bob (and lost) say that what most strikes fear into them is his ability to read what is in their mind and what they have in their hand. He himself says he has what he terms ‘an inferring state of mind’.

My theory is that the entire season of depositions and hearings was Bob’s way of clearing the fog and getting to see what his opponent was holding. There is a manoeuvre in bridge known as ‘the psyche’. It’s a complex form of bluff. A player conveys one thing while planning another. It’s Bob’s trademark.

He must have known from early on that once the arbitrators made up their mind about the nature of the relationship between SCA and Tailwind that all Lance had to do in order to claim his money was to prove that he was the official winner of the relevant Tours. Bob, though, pressed ahead; he let the interest mount up and the lawyers’ fees mount up until the time came to settle up. He picked up his tab but by then everything, for the first and only time, was down under oath.

I think Bob created a time capsule that he could always come back to and dig up. A month after the release of the USADA report in October 2012, I read that Lance’s lawyers had made an offer to SCA of $1 million to ensure that the case didn’t come back to haunt them. The offer was politely turned down. SCA want more than that.

Pierre and I have looked back sometimes at
L.A. Confidentiel
and the modest waves it caused. For a while we never saw the big picture. The book gave Bob Hamman the chance to get twelve volumes of sworn testimony down.

You can say that in the end Bob Hamman got lucky. Lance came out of retirement, unexpectedly, and didn’t have the emotional intelligence to appreciate the need to keep Floyd Landis on his side. You can say too that Bob’s refusal to pay the $5 million bonus in 2004 simply cost him an extra $2.5 million in legal fees to Armstrong and another $1.7 million to his own lawyers.

That’s a lot of money to pay for volumes of sworn testimony and Bob wasn’t certain he had done the right thing when writing the cheques. So, did he just get lucky? I prefer to think that he did the right thing when refusing to pay $5 million to a man he believed to be a cheat and because he did the right thing, he earned his reward.

In the end, Bob looked down and found that he was holding a hand that he liked.
L.A. Confidentiel
was right in there, a key player in a high-stakes game.

19

‘The good people sleep much better at night than the bad people. Of course, the bad people enjoy the waking hours much more.’

Woody Allen

I took 2006 as my gap year. My sabbatical, sort of. Time to go away and plug myself into a recharger, and finally write a book in English about this whole saga. It pleased me that
From Lance to Landis: Inside the American Doping Controversy at the Tour de France
was published by Ballantine Books, an imprint of Random House in New York. In the Arctic world that is home to trolls, the ice was melting.

That was also the year the SCA arbitration finished, the year the
Sunday Times
settled with Lance, the year that the Tour de France took off without its winner for the last seven years.

The Tour. No Lance. No me. I was okay with that. Paul covered the event for the
Sunday Times
. I did other things. I coached a boys’ football team. I wrote my book, stayed at home and it was easier than I thought it would be.

Then Floyd Landis won the Tour de France. And a day later, as the riders would say, they popped him. Did I feel a little jealous of Paul? No. A lot jealous? Yes.

In Floyd Landis we could see the genes that would let Lance continue. More squat, more muscular, less handsome, less cunning, but Floyd was Floyd and he had a will that sometimes made Lance look like a kitten. Certain people in life you don’t want to mess with.

Floyd broke his hip in 2003 on a ride just north of San Diego. He didn’t just break it as normal people would understand things: there was no crack, no hairline fracture. Nope, he broke the top right off his femur.

For most people that would be the hint to go and do something else. Floyd had some titanium pins inserted, each of them four inches long, and they held the top of the bone in place. They also snagged his muscles and ligaments as they moved over the bone while he trained. So he had them replaced. Next day he headed to Europe to join the boys at training camp for the Tour. He rode the Tour all the way home. Not a problem that his hip was just rotting away like a damp fire-log.

Not normal. Nothing about Floyd Landis was normal.

He came from the most unusual of backgrounds. Lancaster County in Pennsylvania has a large congregation of devout Mennonites, which makes it a no sex, no drugs, no rock and roll type of place. Every writer wanted to write a portrait of the cyclist as a young man.

Floyd was reared in Farmersville, as a Mennonite with all the trimmings: church three times a week, no television, no sport, no exertion on Sundays, no dancing, no revealing clothing, no mingling with the unrighteous. His early races he couldn’t wear shorts less the wrath of God hindered him. Finally Floyd decided that God had other things to be worrying about.

Young Floyd Landis developed a passion for mountain bike racing. Slightly sinful but he was good at it. At the age of 16, his parents had taken him aside for a little chat: ‘If you continue competitive cycling, your soul will burn for eternity.’ Floyd didn’t believe that. Maybe Paul and Arlene Landis didn’t really believe it either. They became their son’s greatest fans.

Floyd moved to California at the age of 19. He’d seen one movie,
Jaws
. He’d never tried coffee, alcohol or sex. He caught up. He started road racing in 1999 and signed for US Postal just three years later. Straight in under the wing of Lance.

Landis was both odd and straight up. In Girona, where the Postal boys were living, he kept an apartment which would have been small for an impoverished student. For a pro biker it was a joke. He got about the town on a skateboard. He worked like a lunatic. He questioned everything. He made people laugh. He had the word ‘winner’ stamped all over him.

Nothing could stop him, not even that hip he busted up in 2003. He could only mount the bike from one side, couldn’t cross his legs when sitting and was in pain most of the time. Who cared about hell for eternity when cycling was purgatory on earth?

Lance ushered Landis into the inner sanctum with unprecedented haste. Soon he and Floyd were off riding together for long stretches. Big bro. Little bro. He could see what the kid had. In 2002 and again in 2003, Landis spent five weeks before the Tour down in St Moritz in the company of Lance Armstrong and Michele Ferrari.

Floyd was inside and still he was outside. Unimpressed. When something offended his sensibilities he couldn’t handle it. He could rationalise doping. Other things he couldn’t tolerate.
⁵⁵

He didn’t like secrecy in the team over contracts. He didn’t like riders being played one off against the other. He didn’t like the dumb superstitions that riders worked under. The Mennonites back in Lancaster liked to say that they lived
in
the world but were not
of
the world. That was Floyd Landis:
in
the team but not
of
the team.

The tale of his first road race is always worth retelling. Determined not to be marginalised as some sort of farm-boy hick with a religious hang-up he showed up in a helmet and visor, a dayglo jersey and a pair of argyle socks. He was wheeling a massive bike. He cleared his throat and announced: ‘If there’s anyone here who can stay with me, I will buy you dinner.’

That lightened the atmosphere considerably. They thought that Farmboy had made a joke. He cleared that up.

‘You shouldn’t laugh because that gets me angry. And if you make me angry, then I’m going to blow you all up.’

As he cycled away from the leaders that day, he roared back at them: ‘You like my socks? How’d you like them now?’

Who wouldn’t want to be covering a Tour de France which had Floyd Landis among its prominent riders? Who wouldn’t want a character like that to emerge as clean? Hope against hope. Paul went to the Tour de France. Wrote brilliantly. Got more to write about than he had bargained for.

All the previews called this one as a wide-open Tour. On 1 July, just before the first Tour of the post-Lance era got underway, the riders who had finished second, third, fourth and fifth in the 2005 Tour were removed from the race because of involvement by them or by their teams in an investigation into illegal blood doping. This was
Operación Puerto
, the Spanish police in full swing against blood doping. Landis was among the favourites now.