Cycle of Lies: The Fall of Lance Armstrong

The Gundersons wrote to Armstrong occasionally, but he never answered. They rarely called Linda’s family, and when they tried they heard only the click of a phone being put back into its cradle.

Linda’s brother, Alan, felt sorry for Sonny and was the Gundersons’ only source of information about the boy. He once came over to Sonny’s place and gave him a school picture of Armstrong, a color 8x10. The Gundersons inspected Lance’s face closely, the first time they had seen it in more than five years.

He had the same deep blue eyes as his father, and the same high cheekbones. They wondered if he possessed other family traits: Would Lance be hard and stubborn? Did he have problems with authority? Did he see the world in extremes? Did he hold grudges?

Armstrong’s grandmother is now nearly ninety. When she turned eighty, she moved in with Micki, who resides in one of Dallas’s most exclusive neighborhoods, among mansions and estates with guardhouses. Her husband, Mike Rawlings, was elected mayor in 2011.

Willine’s thick brown hair has turned snowy white. Her once rod-straight posture has become permanently bent. She uses a walker and needs thick glasses and bright lights to see. Her hearing is going, too, but her mind is sharp. Next to her bed she has photos of six of her seven grandchildren and six of her eleven great-grandchildren—but not a single photo of Lance Armstrong at any age, nor photos of any of his five children. It’s as if Lance Armstrong had never existed in her family.

CHAPTER 2

The last name is all that remains of Terry Armstrong. Just as she had erased Eddie Gunderson, Linda removed Terry. Divorce records show they were married fourteen years, until Lance was nearly seventeen. Linda, meanwhile, continues to represent herself as a single mother who raised her son alone.

In her career as a motivational speaker –that pays her as much as $20,000 a pop—there is hardly a word about Terry’s involvement in Lance’s life. (Some newspapers have quoted her saying the marriage lasted only until Lance was thirteen. She declined to be interviewed for this book.) In her autobiography, she never uses Terry’s name. She calls him “the Salesman” or “Sales.” The best allowance she makes for him is that “Sales coached Lance’s Little League team, he did do that. He gets some credit for effort there, but I’m not sure how much he enjoyed it. Lance wasn’t the budding baseball star Sales would have liked him to be.”

In truth, Terry Armstrong could not have been more different from Eddie Gunderson. One had been the cool bad boy in the Pontiac GTO spending late nights at R&B clubs rather than with his wife and newborn child. The other was the twenty-two-year-old son of a minister, a churchgoer with a steady job and an eagerness to be a father.

A wholesale food salesman who hawked barbecued meats and corn dogs to schools and businesses, he had met Linda Mooneyham Gunderson at a car dealership and was smitten with the cute, spunky brunette. He looked like the kind of guy who could buy a car with cash, which was its own sort of handsome. They started going steady and it fast-tracked into a marriage proposal. With Linda, Terry married into the role he had always wanted: father to a son. With Terry, Linda had found a solid, stable provider.

According to divorce records, and Terry himself, the two were married for most of the boy’s formative years—ages two through sixteen. In that time, Lance learned how to compete in his trademark way: as an irritable, cocky bruiser.

Both father and son were driven by an intensity that often turned to ruthlessness. Lance saw it when Terry coached his football teams and advised him in his early efforts in bike racing. Terry could be demanding, especially when his son didn’t meet his expectations.

At the boy’s first BMX bike race, Lance fell and started crying. Terry marched over to the fallen child and said, “That’s it, we’re going.” Then he grabbed Lance’s bike. “We’re done. No kid with my name’s gonna quit.” Properly admonished, or frightened, Lance got back on his bike and competed in another race. Terry thought it was proof of his son’s toughness.

When Lance was seven and then eight, he played for the Oilers, a team in a YMCA tackle football league in Garland, Texas. Terry Armstrong was one of the coaches. At the team’s first practice, Terry gathered the players and the fathers around him.

“Let me tell y’all about this football team we’re gonna have here,” he said. “If your kid’s not any good, he ain’t playing. This is not just a show-up-and-run-around situation. We’re going to win.”

Against the league’s rules, he videotaped other teams’ workouts and held after-school practices in the privacy of his backyard to gain an edge. His idea of a bedtime story for Lance was an old copy of a Vince Lombardi fire-and-brimstone speech about winners and losers. Once, when he believed Lance had loafed through a football game’s fourth quarter, he didn’t talk to him for a week. Lance would come to the dinner table, and he’d say, “You’re just a loser—you didn’t put the effort out.” Meanwhile, his team of eight-year-olds went undefeated through eleven games.

Terry and Linda never were a perfect match. Neither claims to have ever been madly in love, or even that love was the foundation for their union. Neither Linda Armstrong in her book, nor Terry Armstrong in interviews, can remember any details of their wedding.

Several of Lance’s pals say that his mother was more of a friend to him than a parent. They remember Lance once asking her to get dolled up so she could ride around in the limo he had rented for his prom, making it quite an uncomfortable trio—Lance, his prom date and his mother. Lance’s friends and some of his former coaches say Linda was a permissive parent who indulged her son’s every wish. (Example: He drove himself alone to his driver’s license test.)

So, according to Terry Armstrong, he became the disciplinarian by default. When Lance disobeyed or mouthed off—both frequent occurrences—Terry had a routine. He waited for Linda to come home. He armed himself with his fraternity paddle before telling Lance, “Grab your ankles!” Then he used the paddle against the growing young man’s rear end.

If Lance didn’t clean his room—not so much as a sock out of place, per the protocol of Kemper Military School in Boonville, Missouri, where Terry had been wrapped in a blanket and viciously beaten by other cadets—Terry administered two licks. Talk back? Two licks. Years later, Lance described those spankings as traumatic, saying that the pain was more emotional than physical.

Terry and Linda often fought about Lance’s schoolwork. Terry remembers, “I would say, ‘You can’t go outside until you get your homework done,’ and she would say, ‘Well, he’s my son and I make the rules.’ I would ask for his report card, and she would say, ‘I’ll handle it, he’s my son.’”

One perhaps inevitable result of the parental disagreements was that Lance became an angry, aggressive child. Classmates from middle school said he was a classic bully, “picking on people that were vulnerable and harassing them on a daily basis.” He always seemed to be fighting something or someone.

As he entered high school, Armstrong remained an outsider, a short, slight kid with Brillo Pad hair and a cowlick that could not be conquered by comb or brush. He was arrogant in sports, but less confident socially—at least partly because he had stopped playing football. It was Texas, after all, where football sopped up everyone’s attention.

Terry Armstrong said his son quit football in middle school because he became furious when teammates failed. He gravitated toward individual sports like running and swimming, where he alone could control the outcome. He was a natural there and his father pushed him because he didn’t think Lance would get to college based on his academics. “One thing I’ll always say about my son, and I still love him to death, but he’s not the brightest tool in the shop,” Terry says. “He did not have the discipline to go to school. That’s the one reason I pushed him so hard in athletics. I knew athletics was going to be his way to school. He was lazy. He didn’t want to study. He wanted to go run. He wanted to go ride his bike. He wanted to go play.”

Terry made sure Lance had all the advantages in sports and other extracurricular activities. The best catcher’s mitt. A brand-new drum set. Top-of-the-line bikes. A red Fiat convertible. “What Lance wanted, Lance got,” said Armstrong’s neighbor and close friend Adam Wilk.

Lance worked out with a small coterie of pals that included several future high-level athletes like Chann McRae, who became a cyclist on the Postal Service team with Armstrong. Though the young athletes mostly delighted in pushing each other to perform better, Lance’s joy did not come in winning competitions by an inch. He needed to humiliate his opponents. Wilk recalls him saying, “Did you wear your panties today? You are a weak pussy. You suck—why did you even show up?”

Although Lance did poorly in school, Linda was proud of his athletic accomplishments. Wilk said, “If it wasn’t for sports, you would look back and say Linda did a crappy job raising Lance.” Wilk didn’t know what Armstrong would have done with his life if it hadn’t been for his athletic gifts. “A juvenile delinquent, maybe in jail?” he said. “I can’t remember him having any other interests. He was focused on winning, and to me, he’s still fixated on it.”

Lance Armstrong was fourteen when he learned about Terry’s secret life. They were traveling to a swim meet in San Antonio. He saw Terry writing, then tossing away pieces of crumpled paper. The boy picked up a sheet of the paper and saw the beginnings of his father’s love letter to a mistress. To spare her the pain, he didn’t tell his mother. But Terry became an enemy to be crushed—another lost father.

Right away, Armstrong found a replacement: Rick Crawford, a professional triathlete. Crawford didn’t know what was in store when he met the fourteen-year-old Armstrong at a Dallas pool. They were swimming laps in adjacent lanes. Armstrong went all out to beat him. Crawford was impressed.

He’s not sure how it happened exactly, but Crawford—twelve years older, never a coach—helped Armstrong launch his triathlon career. Armstrong promptly became a star in the niche sport, someone race directors wanted at their event. They marketed him as a prodigy, a boy threatening to challenge the sport’s best athletes. Crawford was astonished at how quickly Armstrong excelled. His national triathlon ranking improved by the day, Crawford says, the number dropping “like shit through a goose.” They trained together for eighteen months.

Crawford says he was taken aback by Armstrong’s combativeness. He heard him at races tell competitors, “I’m going to kill you. You are pathetic.” He would say those things at the starting line and the finish. Crawford remembers telling him, “Lance, no. Not cool. Buddy, let your legs do the talking.”

On training rides, Crawford had to keep an eye on Armstrong, who saw every motorist as a threat. In a kind of bike rage, he would chase down cars that had come too close to him in order to curse and threaten the driver. He wouldn’t temper his emotions for anybody. Crawford noticed that was especially true when it came to the way Armstrong treated his father.

At first, nothing stood out to Crawford as unusual at the Armstrong residence in the Los Rios neighborhood, a solidly middle-class section of Plano. The Armstrongs lived in a simple brick ranch-style house: three bedrooms, 1,500 square feet, a patch of lawn, a couple green shrubs.

Then Crawford began to hear Armstrong’s stories of his family’s problems. He heard about Armstrong and his father taking swings at each other and landing on a glass coffee table, smashing it. “He was encouraged to be bad,” Crawford says. Family friends saw a teenager out of control.

While Linda and Terry Armstrong argued at home, Crawford spent more time with their son, training and traveling to events where they both were treated to free airfare and fancy hotel rooms because of their athletic abilities. That, too, was a learning experience. The night before a triathlon in Bermuda, Armstrong “borrowed” a scooter that Crawford had rented and returned it to the rental company hours late. Later, in a bungalow that housed several other professional triathletes, Armstrong broke glasses and bottles when he took a cricket bat and smacked a ball into the place’s wet bar.

Crawford had had enough. He was tired of doing the job of this kid’s parents who, in his view, were lousy. He pinned Armstrong against a wall and growled, “You’re done, dude.”

“Screw off,” Armstrong said, “you’re not my dad! Don’t ever talk to me again.”

As he had with his biological father and Terry Armstrong, he left Crawford behind.

“I guess you couldn’t blame him,” Crawford says. “He was already staying in five-star hotels and having people adore him.”

Crawford remembers Armstrong’s behavior as Oedipal. He says most of the father figures in Lance’s life have ended up as villains and that every girl he has ever dated looks exactly like his mother.

In turn, Armstrong calls Crawford a bitter, “crazy and angry” guy. He also points out that Crawford went on to help athletes dope. In 2012, years after he split from Armstrong, Crawford admitted to helping pro cyclists Levi Leipheimer and Kirk O’Bee of the United States Postal Service squad use performance-enhancing drugs. Crawford said he did it only because Armstrong had set the team’s standard of doping. He said those riders were neophytes who heard that Armstrong and other elite riders on the team were taking part in a sophisticated drug program. They only wanted to keep up. Still, Crawford later was fired from his coaching job at Colorado Mesa University for allegedly doping an athlete there, a charge he denies. As for the matter of Armstrong’s doping—might Crawford have ever helped a young triathlete bend the rules?

“No,” he said. “I would never put drugs into a young kid.”

Linda Armstrong always looked for people who could help Lance—and along came Scott Eder, a local sports promoter working for the sneaker company Avia. He crossed paths with Armstrong in 1986 at a biathlon in Dallas. After Armstrong won the event, Eder delivered a free pair of Avias to his house, and—one imagines—walked away with exactly what he was after.

Linda asked Eder, “Can you watch over my son, kind of act like his agent?”

Eder became, as Lance said later, “a coach meets agent meets big brother.”

Armstrong had already proven himself to be an amazing athlete. He was only thirteen when he won his first triathlon, an IronKids event, and was second in that year’s IronKids national championship. At fourteen, he was sneaking into races for adults, with Terry Armstrong changing the date on his birth certificate to make him eligible. The next year, he competed for the second time in the President’s Triathlon in Dallas, an event featuring many of the sport’s stars, like Mark Allen, an eventual six-time Ironman world champion.

A fifteen-year-old Armstrong wasn’t far behind the top competitors. He beat Allen in the swim. In the bike portion of that 1987 race, he pedaled alongside Allen and got his attention. “Are you Mark Allen?” Armstrong said. When Allen said yes, Armstrong remained by his side for nearly the rest of the event. Armstrong finished sixth, but made a name for himself as the next big thing in the sport.

Allen later told the President’s Triathlon race director, Jim Woodman, that the young Armstrong’s abilities were uncanny. “He couldn’t shake him, and that freaked him out,” Woodman said. The next year, Armstrong won the triathlon. He also won the Texas state championship, beating his own former mentor, Crawford, for the title. Triathlete magazine claimed that he would be one of the greatest athletes in the history of the sport.

By the time he was sixteen, he was making $20,000 a year and had turned pro. Eder was acting as his traveling secretary, event negotiator, marketing director and road manager. He compiled triathlon schedules, secured sponsors and budgeted for their races. Eder also arranged for Armstrong to spend two summers training in California with top triathletes.

In all, Eder told me, he traveled with Armstrong to more than twenty-five out-of-town races. He showed me the itineraries he had typed up on his typewriter. The travel—which included stays in expensive hotels like Bermuda’s Princess—was often paid for by the event sponsors. Armstrong was only a kid, and he already was being treated like a superstar. The Armstrongs didn’t need to spend a penny.

Linda has claimed to have been by her son’s side at most of those competitions. Eder differs. “She went to about three,” he says.

He saw the kid as a brawler with a touch of paranoia. If you glanced at him the wrong way, he might say, “What the hell are you looking at?” He’d sneak into a bar, get into a fight, and this underage boy would go back home with a bloodied nose and raw knuckles.

He once threw a Kestrel racing bike—one of the first generations of all-carbon-fiber racing bikes—across several lanes of road after his tire went flat during a Miami triathlon. Kestrel dropped its sponsorship of him. The tantrum had hurt Armstrong’s marketing appeal, especially since it was captured by television cameras.

This reputation preceded him, yet people in the sports world still wanted to glom on. They sensed that he had a great future. But the better Armstrong fared as an athlete, the more of his humility he lost. Already, no one was brave enough to stand up to him. He would get into fights at school. He would drink. He would drive too fast. His coaches and sponsors around town heard all about it, and couldn’t or wouldn’t stop it.

Eder said Armstrong’s relationships with father figures would always go bad for one reason or another. Once, Eder had to convince Jim Hoyt, the owner of the Richardson Bike Mart, that he should continue to sponsor Armstrong despite the teenager’s off-the-bike antics. Hoyt was another early benefactor, one who had been there nearly from the start. Armstrong was kicked out of the store at age twelve because he took gear he never returned, Hoyt told me. Then he was kicked out again at seventeen because Hoyt had co-signed a loan on Armstrong’s new white Chevy Camaro IROC Z28 and Armstrong had abused his generosity. Trying to outrun the police one night, Armstrong abandoned the car at an intersection before sprinting away on foot. Police impounded the car and showed up at Hoyt’s door because his name was on the vehicle’s registration.

“A week later, that little prick came to my house with his friends to actually get the car back,” recalls Hoyt, a Vietnam veteran who earned a Silver Star in combat. “I rolled up my sleeves and said go ahead, just try to get it back from me.” Hoyt reported back to Eder: “Your boy screwed me again.”

It was another ten years before Hoyt spoke to Armstrong again.

By Lance’s senior year of high school, Terry Armstrong was gone. Linda Armstrong had tracked down a mistress. (Terry told me there were so many he didn’t remember this one’s name.) When Terry came home from work one day he found his wife and the other woman sitting together on a couch.

“Who are you?” he asked the mistress.

Terry Armstrong lost both his wife and his son. In the divorce decree, Linda Armstrong was awarded her husband’s Cadillac as well as all the money and retirement accounts in his name. The house was to be sold, with the proceeds divided equally. But Terry Armstrong insisted that his wife and son live there until Lance graduated high school. According to divorce records, he also assumed all the family’s debt, including monthly payments on his wife’s 1986 Buick Skylark and $8,265.78 on credit cards.

Scott Eder said Terry Armstrong would often call and ask about Lance. Many days, Eder saw Terry hiding behind bushes to watch his son train in an outdoor pool. Lance saw him once and told Eder to deliver a warning: If Terry Armstrong keeps stalking him, he’ll kick the crap out of him.

Lance viewed life as increasingly unfair. His senior year, he felt that all of Plano East High School was out to get him. The school wouldn’t let him graduate with his class because he had too many absences: days he took off for triathlons and for training in his specialty, cycling, at the United States Olympic Training Center. He was preparing for the cycling junior world road championships in Moscow, where he amazed everyone by leading the race so forcefully that some of the sport’s top names still remember how his amazing performance caused them goose bumps. (He exhausted himself way too fast, though, and finished back in the pack.)

He and his mother didn’t think he should have to follow a state law that mandated a minimum number of days a student had to attend class. Lance was “that guy with the mom who was always making a stink about him getting out of school,” according to one of his classmates. His mother argued that he should graduate, but school officials wouldn’t budge.

That led them to Bending Oaks in Dallas, a nontraditional school with about a dozen students per class. As a private school, it didn’t have to follow public school rules and wouldn’t have the same problem with Armstrong’s absences that his last school had. He’d be able to graduate on time, so long as his tuition was paid. And Terry Armstrong, the man whom Armstrong’s mother would call an absentee father, was the one who wrote the check.

In his airy three-bedroom ranch straight out of a Pottery Barn catalog, Terry Armstrong lays a box on the kitchen table. He pulls out card after card, photo after photo. A Father’s Day card: “I didn’t get to pick my dad, but I’m glad my mom picked you.” Inside, in a child’s writing: “Love, Lance.” A photo shows Lance driving Terry’s father’s golf cart. There’s a photo of Lance at the organ in a church where his grandfather preached.

Terry Armstrong shows off a smiling Lance on his grandparents’ couch, and then another with a smiling Linda in the same spot on the same couch. The photos have writing on the back: Christmas 1983. Lance was twelve, a few years from becoming a triathlon star. Though he had lost touch with his son soon after Lance’s cycling career took off, Terry followed him in the newspapers and on television. On his office wall, he kept photos that showed the evolution of Lance from boy to man. The most recent shot is of Lance and Lance’s children that Terry had printed from the Internet and framed. He said Lance’s achievements thrilled him and that his son’s troubles caused him heartache, though not nearly as bad as in 1996, when Lance was diagnosed with cancer, and Terry was not allowed to enter his son’s hospital room in Indianapolis.

After Lance won his first Tour de France, Terry Armstrong was astounded to hear Linda’s claims about their years as a family. He wondered, “Linda was a single mom? Her first two marriages were quick ones? Lance and his mom always had their backs against the wall?” He was sensitive about mistakenly being called Lance’s stepfather, not adoptive father, by news outlets, including CNN.

Terry tried to fight back by writing those outlets to say that they had the story wrong. He sent copies of his marriage certificate and divorce decree, showing that he had been married to Armstrong’s mother for fourteen years. He wanted to set the record straight, but a lawyer discouraged him because Terry “didn’t have the ink,” meaning Lance had the power of the press. Reporters, especially in the United States, were in love with the Lance Armstrong story. Then came Lance’s autobiography, It’s Not About the Bike, which cast Terry as a terrible father, and then Linda’s book piled on. Terry called the stories “a constant battery of mistruths.”

He had planned to confront his ex-wife at one of her book readings in 2005. He said he waited until the last minute before walking down the center aisle to take a seat in the front row.

Tami, Terry’s new wife, who had never met Linda, sat apart from her husband so she could ask, “Did you or did you not raise Lance yourself?” Linda said, well, you just need to read the book.

Terry Armstrong said he held his hand up that day, waving it like a kid trying to get the teacher’s attention. But the author ignored him. Only after the reading, as Linda sat at an autograph table, did the former partners in marriage come face-to-face.

“I really enjoyed the book,” Terry told her.

“Really?” Linda said.

“Yes,” he said. “I love fantasy.”