Cycle of Lies: The Fall of Lance Armstrong

Dedication

To my two greatest loves, Dave and Allegra To my heroes, Mama and Tata

This is my body. And I can do whatever I want to it. I can push it, study it, tweak it, listen to it. Everybody wants to know what I’m on. What am I on? I’m on my bike, busting my ass six hours a day. What are you on?

—LANCE ARMSTRONG

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Epigraph

Prologue

Part One: Lies of the Family

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Part Two: Lies of the Sport

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Part Three: Lies of the Media

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Part Four: Lies of the Brotherhood

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Part Five: Lies of the American Hero

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Part Six: The Truth

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Epilogue

Picture Section

Notes

Selected Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Copyright

About the Publisher

PROLOGUE

The $10 million estate of Lance Armstrong’s dreams is hidden behind a tall, cream-colored wall of Texas limestone and a solid steel gate. Visitors pull into a circular driveway beneath a grand oak tree whose branches stretch toward a 7,806-square-foot Spanish colonial mansion.

The tree itself speaks of Armstrong’s famous will. It once was on the other side of the property, fifty yards west of this house. Armstrong wanted it at the front steps. The transplantation cost $200,000. His close friends joke that Armstrong, who is agnostic, engineered the project to prove he didn’t need God to move heaven and earth.

For nearly a decade, Lance Armstrong and I have had a contentious relationship. Seven years have passed since his agent, Bill Stapleton, first threatened to sue me. Back then, I was just one of the many reporters Armstrong had tried to manipulate, charm or bully. Filing lawsuits against writers who dared challenge his fairy-tale story was his quick-and-easy way of convincing people that writing critically about him wasn’t worth it. Over the years, he came to consider me an enemy, one of the many he and his handlers had to keep an eye on.

Only now, after he has fallen, have we agreed to something approaching a truce. Though he’d deny it, I know that he has chosen to sit down with me because he thinks he might be able to control the direction of my book. No chance, I’ve told him. After multiple criminal and civil investigations into whether Armstrong orchestrated a sophisticated doping regime to win seven Tour de France titles; after all the testimonies from riders who knew him better than anyone else, and who contradicted under oath every public defense Armstrong had ever given; after he lied, lied and lied some more, the most notorious athlete of our generation realizes I’m suddenly holding a lot of rope. And I realize that, even now, he imagines himself to occupy a position of almost absolute power.

“You can write what you want,” he tells me in one of our many conversations. “But your book is called Cycle of Lies? That has to change.”

I’ve interviewed him one-on-one in five different countries; on team buses that smelled of sweat-soaked Lycra at the Tour de France, in swanky New York City hotel rooms, in the backs of limos, in soulless conference rooms; and for hours by telephone.

Now, in the spring of 2013, after his whole world has come crashing down and moving trucks are en route to dismantle his beloved estate, I’ve come to visit him at home in Austin, Texas, for the first time.

Yes, fine, come on out, he said. Beset by endless obituaries of his celebrated (and now fraudulent) career, he wanted to ensure that I wrote “the true story.”

So here I am parking beneath the grand oak that Armstrong had moved because, why not? I look at the house and think of his yellow jerseys. A month after the United States Anti-Doping Agency released 1,000 pages of evidence against Armstrong and stripped him of his Tour titles, he had Tweeted a photo of himself lounging, arrogance itself, on an L-shaped couch in this house, his seven yellow jerseys hanging ceremoniously behind him: “Back in Austin and just layin’ around.” That was November 2012. Seven months later, will I find him still defiant?

Before I can pull the keys from my car’s ignition, a cherubic face under tousled, curly brown hair appears at my window and two small preschooler hands slap the glass. It’s Lance’s youngest son, Max.

Armstrong stands behind him in flip-flops, wearing a black T-shirt over black basketball shorts that brush his scarred knees. His eyes are hidden by dark sunglasses.

“Say hi to Juliet, Max,” Armstrong says.

“Hi, Joo-leee-ette!” Max says. Then he turns to his dad and asks for ice cream, a request that makes his father giggle, something I’d never seen him do before.

“Yes, you get ice cream,” Armstrong says. “You’ve been good, buddy, really good.”

We walk up the front steps until Armstrong stops at the door. He moves his eyes to the tree, the house, the life he has enjoyed.

“Great place, right?” he says.

“Yes,” I say, “are you going to miss it?”

Armstrong doesn’t want to move, he has to. His sponsors have abandoned him, taking away an estimated $75 million in future earnings. He would owe more than $135 million if he were to lose every lawsuit in which he is a defendant. To “slow the burn rate,” as he calls it, he has stopped renting a penthouse apartment on Central Park in Manhattan and a house in Marfa, Texas. Next to go is this Austin estate, traded in for a much more modest abode near downtown.

His former sponsors—including Oakley, Trek Bicycle Corporation, RadioShack and Nike—have left him scrambling for money. He considers them traitors. He says Trek’s revenue was $100 million when he signed with the company and reached $1 billion in 2013. “Who’s responsible for that?” he asks. “Fucking right here.” He pokes himself in the chest with his right index finger. “I’m sorry, but that is true. Without me, none of that happens.”

After his sponsors cast him aside, he tossed their gear. There’s a chance you could catch a glimpse of one of his Dallas friends wearing Armstrong’s custom-made yellow Nike sneakers, with “Lance” embroidered in small yellow block letters on the shoes’ black tongues. A Goodwill outlet in Austin is replete with his former Nike clothes and Oakley sunglasses. The movers, who packed up his guesthouse a week before I visited, will have to contend with whatever brand-name gear is left in his garage: black Livestrong Nike caps, black Nike duffel bags with bright yellow swooshes, Oakley lenses and frames and a box of caps suggesting “Yes on Prop 15,” a 2007 Texas bond plan for cancer research, prevention and education supported by Armstrong.

It was 1989 when Armstrong moved to Austin from Plano, a suburb of Dallas, showing up in this progressive town as a rough, combative and pimply-faced teenager, with frosted wavy brown hair, a gold hoop in his pierced left ear, a silver chain around his neck with a dangling pendant in the shape of Texas, and a fake ID.

On an income of $12,000 a year, and with the help of a local benefactor named J.T. Neal who had taken Armstrong in, he lived in a studio apartment for $200 a month. He dressed it up with an oversized black leather couch, a matching chair and, above the fireplace, a red-white-and-blue colored skull of a Texas longhorn.

From a cramped studio to a sprawling estate: a reflection of Armstrong’s ascension into modern American sainthood—a cancer survivor who beat the world’s best cyclists in a grueling race, dated anyone he wanted and made millions in the process.

Armstrong loves this house. He loves its open spaces and floor-to-ceiling windows. He loves the lush, landscaped yard where his kids play soccer, and the crystalline pool (a “negative-edge pool, not an infinity pool, get it right”). Behind the house are rows of towering Italian cypresses.

He moved here in 2006 after winning a record seventh Tour de France. He once said the place was his safe house—inside it, “nobody’s going to mess with me.” Having eluded near-constant attempts to expose his doping, he could take a left down the main hallway, then a quick right, and disappear into his walk-in wine closet to grab a bottle of Tignanello and toast his good luck.

On a table next to a couch is a 36-inch model of the Gulfstream jet that had been Armstrong’s favored means of long-distance flight. It’s white with black and yellow racing stripes. He and his buddies often stood up when the plane took off, “surfing” as it rocketed into the sky. Armstrong had sold the plane for $8 million in December 2012, as he braced himself for the inevitable legal fees that would follow USADA’s exposé of his cheating.

Just as we settle into his media room on the big house’s second floor, his twin daughters, Grace and Isabelle, burst in. The preteen girls are replicas of their mother, Kristin: beautiful and blonde. Their open smiles reveal gleaming silver braces.

“Hi, Dad! Did you buy those skirts for us off the Internet?” Isabelle asks as she and her sister use the couch as a trampoline.

“Yeah, Dad, did you buy the skirts?” Grace seconds.

“No, not yet,” Amstrong says. “It’s almost time I had a beer. It would be nice if one of you ladies got me a beer. Shiner Bock.”

Grace shouts, “Shiner Bock! Don’tcha know, it’s a beer—that’s B-O-C-K. It’s not a twist-off.”

Once he has the beer in hand, Armstrong looks at me and says, “So this is my awful life. Just so awful.”

He says how much he likes having kids in the house—children are transparent and pure, too young to con him. I ask if he feels like people have taken advantage of him, if he feels used.

“Uh, yeah,” he says.

“Who?”

“Everybody. Get in line.”

The kid who once decorated his living room with a steer head has become a collector of sophisticated, expensive art. His sensibilities are apparent, if perplexing. Upon entering his house you see a panel of stained glass eleven feet tall and five feet wide that, upon closer inspection, is actually a panel comprised of hundreds of colored butterflies—a Damien Hirst piece called The Tree of Life. Hirst is known for his provocative installations (e.g., a severed cow’s head being feasted on by maggots in a glass case). In 2009, when he decorated an Armstrong racing bike with butterflies, the animal rights group People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals called the work “horrific barbarity.”

The more I see of Armstrong’s art throughout the house, the odder his curatorial eye seems. To call his choices dark is to be kind, to call them controversial is too simple. All Armstrong will say of any of them is that they are “fucking cool.”

Look, though: Above the fireplace in the expansive formal dining room, flanked by marble bowls made to contain a church’s holy water, is a photograph of urine and blood called Piss and Blood No. VII. It is by Andres Serrano, the photographer made infamous for his 1987 photo of a plastic crucifix in the artist’s urine. There is something harmonic in being in the same room as both the photograph and an athlete who claims to have passed hundreds of urine and blood drug tests.

On the far side of the room is Armstrong’s office, dimly lit, built of dark shades of wood: a spot to brood. Sitting at his desk in a corner, Armstrong has a direct view of his Tour de France trophies—seven deep purple porcelain cups with delicate gold designs—perched high on the wall atop bookshelves, each in its own spotlight, each luminescent.

To the left of his desk is artwork that may speak to his broken relationships with family, friends, lovers, teammates. A sepia-hued photograph by Luis González Palma shows a man and a woman in an embrace, dancing. Or are they really? A second look and I see spikes protruding from their backs. Armstrong would admit only that the piece is gloomy.

And then there is the Jesus art.

To the right of his desk is a seventeenth-century Spanish painting of the crucifixion that takes up nearly the entire wall. Four women pray at the feet of Christ, his head slung and crowned by a glowing gold halo. Years ago, the painting hung inside the chapel Armstrong had built for his ex-wife, a Catholic, inside their home in Girona, Spain. He himself is not a religious man. He says he considers organized religion to be gatherings of hypocrites.

Around the corner from his office, overlooking a stairwell, there is another vision of the crucifixion. The piece’s full effect is apparent only from certain angles, where an image of Christ nailed to the cross comes into view.

“One man has taken the blame for a thousand sins,” Armstrong says. But even in the presence of these crucifixes, he is talking about himself. Like he wants me to write that he has been made a martyr for cycling’s century of dopers and this is the way to make sure I do.

He walks over to a coffee table in his office and picks up a sculpture—an arm from hand to elbow. The sculpture, by Japanese artist Haroshi, is made with many layers of pressed skateboards. The sculpture’s middle finger is sticking up.

“This is pretty much the story of my life,” he says. Then he shoves the sculpture in my face. I notice Armstrong’s hands. On each palm, there is a small wound where he’ll tell me a doctor burned away a couple of cysts. I think of the stigmata.

“Fuck you,” he says, laughing.

Seven years ago, he told his three oldest children from his failed marriage—Luke, Grace and Isabelle—that they would graduate from high school while living in the house by the big oak tree. He owed them that. They had followed him from Texas to France to Spain countless times. At last they could plant some roots. “I promise,” he said. “Dad’s not moving again.” They would live six minutes from their mother, Kristin, and could count on the familiarities of the giant kitchen table surrounded by black-and-white photos of their family. They knew where Dad would be on most weeknights—on a couch in front of the TV, watching CNN’s Anderson Cooper 360°. In the summer of 2012, Armstrong built an addition onto the first floor so his growing family would have a seventh bedroom. Already, the house was his headquarters. He lived there with his girlfriend, the willowy blonde Anna Hansen, and their two children, four-year-old Max and two-year-old Olivia, a Shirley Temple lookalike. Armstrong and his clan had planned to stay here, safe and happy, for a long time.

But now the movers are coming. It’s June 6, 2013, five years before Luke’s expected graduation. In the morning, a line of black trucks will pull into his driveway and out will spill workers in black short-sleeved shirts. Already, the atmosphere is funereal. The movers have already emptied out the 1,633-square-foot guesthouse, a mini-mansion, with its matching tan façade and burnt orange roof.

On June 7, I return to see those workers clear the main house. They take Armstrong’s Tour trophies from their illuminated shelves, cover them with green bubble wrap and place them in blue boxes. In a moving box marked #64, one mover places a silver frame containing a 5×7 photograph of Armstrong’s 2005 Discovery Channel team sitting at a dinner table after his seventh and final Tour victory. He, his teammates and longtime team manager Johan Bruyneel are holding up seven fingers. A yellow rubber Livestrong bracelet hangs from each man’s wrist. A table is littered with half-empty wineglasses. A former life.

Box #64 goes onto the truck with the rest. I follow the movers into the media room. Wearing white cotton gloves, they take down the seven yellow Tour leader’s jerseys framed above the couch. The day before, as Armstrong and I sat in this room, he had an idea. He asked if I wanted to lie on the couch, if I wanted to pose for a photograph under the jerseys that were still left.

“It’ll be funny,” he said.

I didn’t get the joke.

In the dark before dawn, Armstrong left the big house for good. At 4:15 a.m. on June 7, 2013, with Hansen and his five children, he drove to Austin/Bergstrom International Airport for a commercial flight to the Big Island in Hawaii, where they would remain for the first part of the summer.

Armstrong tells me he didn’t look back at the house he had built. He says sentiment has never been his thing. The move means only that part of his life has ended and another will begin. That’s all it is, he says. Maybe he believes the words coming out of his mouth. Maybe he doesn’t.

Several days later, only two of his possessions remained on his estate. One couldn’t fit in the moving truck: a 1970 black Pontiac GTO convertible given him by the singer Sheryl Crow, with whom he had a very public romance that ended when he pedaled away just before she got cancer. The car, with its evocations of another Armstrong failure, carries a price tag of $70,000.

And, finally, left over in the living room of the guesthouse was a fully assembled drum kit. Just another piece of the man’s discarded life. Oh beat the drum slowly and play the fife lowly, I thought while I looked at the set, words of a song I know from my time working in Texas,

Take me to the valley, and lay the sod o’er me,

For I’m a young cowboy and I know I’ve done wrong.

PART ONE

CHAPTER 1

Lance Armstrong’s mother, Linda, is always the hero of her own story. As she tells it, the two of them—she and Lance—struggled to survive in Dallas’s Oak Cliff neighborhood in the hardscrabble projects on the wrong side of the Trinity River. They had only each other. The boy never met his father; she raised him alone. She said she taught him to ride a bike, encouraged him as an athlete, paid for his equipment, bought their home, traveled to all his races, secured his sponsorships and was out the door with him at 7 a.m. every Saturday so he could administer a beating to yet another set of, say, prepubescent middle-distance runners.

In her autobiography, No Mountain High Enough: Raising Lance, Raising Me, she revels in the constant question, “How did a single teenage mom manage to raise a real live superhero?” In the author’s note, before the story unfolds, she warns of her “totally biased, subjective, slanted, rationalized, and confabulated” account. She even says, “Someone else might have a different perspective.” She dared those people to write their own book.

She used pseudonyms for her three ex-husbands: Eddie Gunderson, Terry Armstrong and John Walling. She calls Lance’s father “Eddie Haskell” after the sweet, conniving character in the 1950–’60s television show Leave It to Beaver. The Gundersons were Lance Armstrong’s first family. Eddie Gunderson and Linda Mooneyham married while they were in high school. The baby came seven months later.

The shotgun wedding united two troubled families. Both of Armstrong’s grandfathers had been heavy drinkers whose wives fled with their children after one sodden mishap or another. His paternal grandfather was so mean that he would put kittens in fruit jars to smother them. Armstrong’s father was an alcoholic with as many wives as his mother would have husbands—four.

By the age of twenty, Armstrong had had three different fathers: one biological, one adoptive and one step. (In her book, Linda Armstrong writes of the failures of her love life as having been the result of “stupid, self-undermining, counterintuitive and utterly stinko” choices.) After that, Lance was tossed about in the tumult of a dozen stand-in fathers of his choosing.

As a motivational speaker, Linda has made a living off bromides of her struggles to raise the greatest cyclist the world has ever seen, telling her audience, “We had everything against us,” and “It was about survival.” She talks about how Lance once showed up at a race in the mountains of New Mexico without a long-sleeve shirt and how, while the other racers had fancy gear, he had to borrow her tiny pink windbreaker to stay warm. He broke the course record.

She talks about going “from poverty with no money to personal success” and emphasizes that she played an integral role in her son’s accomplishments. “I really believe that your children are a product of you.”

By her telling, she has been the single constant presence in his life. Early on, she made it clear that she, and only she, would shape her son. The first step in that process began when she removed him from the Gunderson family. Armstrong’s mother has told her side of that story for years. It’s a story that a lifetime later brings Willine Gunderson Harroff, Eddie’s mother, and his sister, Micki Rawlings, to tears.

Linda Armstrong has said she was alone in raising Lance, that others in Lance’s life played only bit parts no matter what they contributed or how long they were involved. She called herself a single mother though she was only without a husband for a year before Lance was sixteen and a half—and even then her first husband’s family said they helped her get by, babysitting while she worked. Over time, the media played up the tragedy and triumph of it all: that one of the greatest athletes in history was a product of a teenage mother who had struggled for survival with no one to lean on but her young son.

Linda’s mythmaking didn’t sit right with the rest of Lance’s family, according to Willine Gunderson.

The Gundersons had their own version of Lance’s childhood to tell. For one thing, they called Lance’s father Sonny. He was a handsome, blue-eyed rebel with shiny brown hair, a mischievous grin and a willingness to help friends steal tape decks from parked cars. He once rode his motorcycle through the back door and into the kitchen of a high school girlfriend’s house, causing her parents to call the police.

In their neighborhood of Wynnewood, a middle-class area of the city—nothing like “the projects of Dallas” proclaimed by the promotional videos for Linda’s public speaking—the Gundersons were neighbors with another family, the Mooneyhams.

Linda Mooneyham was a high school homecoming princess and a star on the school’s drill team. Sonny asked her for a date. Soon enough, they were going steady and cruising around town in his souped-up Pontiac GTO. He had a bad-boy charm that caused him, one night in the winter of 1970, to whisper to Linda, “Make love, not war.” That evening, she got pregnant. When a sixteen-year-old Linda refused to get an abortion, her mother told her to leave the house. Far from being left on her own—with “everything against us”—she found a family that took her in. She lived in Sonny’s house. She became, in effect, an adopted daughter of Willine Gunderson, whom family members called “Mom-o.”

Willine was a single mother with an ex-husband always late on child support payments, when he sent them at all. For forty-three years, she worked at Dallas’s First National Bank. Her sense of family was so strong, she says, that she insisted her two daughters and Sonny go to church together three times a week. She never criticized her absent ex-husband because she wanted her children to make up their own minds about him. She and Linda became as close as best friends during Linda’s pregnancy.

On Linda’s seventeenth birthday, she and seventeen-year-old Sonny were married in a Baptist church packed with fellow high schoolers, some no doubt noticing the bride’s baby bump beneath her flowing, pleated white dress. That was February 1971. The boy arrived in September.

He was named after Lance Rentzel, the Dallas Cowboys star wide receiver who the year before was arrested for exposing himself to a ten-year-old girl. At the window of the maternity ward, his father saw that the newborn’s head was misshapen: too long, too narrow. His mother, a petite woman, delivered him at 9 pounds, 12 ounces.

“What’s wrong with his head?” his father asked, as tears rolled down his cheeks.

“It’ll get better,” one of his sisters said. “It’ll be fine, I know it will.”

Linda took a part-time job at a grocery store. Sonny worked at a bakery and delivered newspapers, but fatherhood didn’t bring with it a sudden maturity. As a minor, he had made frequent appearances in juvenile court. In 1974, when his son was two and a half, and he and Linda had already divorced, Sonny Gunderson spent his first night in jail as an adult. He had been arrested for breaking into a car.

Their marriage lasted for just over two years. Linda would claim in her book that Sonny had been so rough with her that her neck and arms were bruised. Years later, the ex-husband admitted that he had slapped her, but only once.

Gunderson told his family that he spent months after the divorce in a zombie-like state. He wanted to fix what he had broken, but had no idea how. He often sat across the street from his son’s day care center and watched the boy play on the playground. He couldn’t pay the child support, or wouldn’t. He ignored the demand notes as they piled up in his mailbox, accusingly.

To his father’s family, Armstrong was Lance Edward Gunderson. They still saw him at Christmases and other family gatherings, where he played with his cousins. They still have photos of him, yellowed and fading. His grandmother has a 4×4-inch photo album made for her by Armstrong’s mother. Linda signed the album with her boy’s name, “To Mom-o Willine. Love, Lance.”

Willine “Mom-o” Gunderson is Armstrong’s paternal grandmother. In nearly every photo of her with the infant Lance, she is kissing him, her eyes closed, the kind of moment a grandmother wants to last forever. Her son is partly to blame for how short-lived it really was.

Whenever he saw Lance, Gunderson acted like a kid himself. While his mother and two sisters watched, he gave the boy rides on his ten-speed bike and motorcycle. Inevitably, some outings ended with acrimony. Lance once came home with a quarter-sized burn on his calf where it had rubbed against the motorcycle’s exhaust pipe. Another time, he suffered a bloody toe when his foot became tangled in the spokes of a bicycle. Linda blamed Sonny for his neglect and chastised Willine for allowing the boy to get hurt while in her care.

Willine told the young mother, “You can’t keep him in a golden cage his whole life.”

Linda snapped back, “I’m the one that knows what’s best for him.”

“She was maternal,” Willine says, “but she was so young, she didn’t understand that babies love more than one person in their life. She didn’t want him to love anybody but her. But babies love anybody that will love them. That doesn’t take from the love that they have for their mother.”

When Linda filed for divorce—on February 15, 1973—she just couldn’t stand Sonny anymore. She married Terry Armstrong, a salesman, in May 1974, a year after her divorce papers were signed. Though Sonny couldn’t know it at the time, his life with Lance would soon be over.

The Armstrongs would eventually move away, ending any contact with the Gundersons, and Terry officially adopted Lance as his son. Linda said in her autobiography that Willine agreed it was best for Lance to never see the Gundersons again. But whenever someone suggests as much to Willine her mouth drops open. “Ooh, no, no,” she says.

Willine last had direct contact with Linda and her family when Lance was five or six. She had gone to his maternal grandmother’s house with Christmas gifts for him. “Linda told me not to take anything more from you,” the grandmother told Willine. “What little stuff you give him is not worth the trouble Linda has with Lance after he has had some contact with you.”

Shaking with distress, Willine quietly said, almost to herself, “You’ve got no right to tear a family apart,” and walked away with the presents in her hands and tears in her eyes.

For years after Lance was gone, Willine and Micki kept his picture inside oval gold lockets that hung around their necks. In his grandmother’s locket, he is an infant, maybe ten months old, wearing a fire-engine-red romper. In his aunt’s, a toddler with a goofy smile.

To this day, Willine is haunted by the last time she saw Lance. She was babysitting him, and he was about four. His mother swung by to pick him up, and found him under the Gundersons’ dining room table. The grandmother remembers the boy saying, happily, “I’m just going to live under here. I won’t take up too much room. I’m just going to live under this table.” But his mother grabbed Lance by the arm and led him through the front door, the boy crying as they went. She slammed the door. The grandmother never saw the boy again.

The Gundersons had no idea that the Armstrongs were living in Richardson, a northern suburb of Dallas, and had no money to hire a lawyer or investigator to find him. The Gundersons held out hope that Armstrong would come looking for them someday, maybe when he had children of his own. At their church—Four Mile Lutheran, which his relatives helped found and build east of Dallas 165 years ago—the congregation for years had prayed for Armstrong every Sunday.