Dear Lance 
Game Over 
Lance Armstrong Has Something to Get Off His Chest
He doesn't use performance-enhancing drugs, he insists, no matter what his critics in the European press and elsewhere say. And yet the accusations keep coming. How much scrutiny can the two-time Tour de France winner stand?
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Lance talked about teams, how, although riding a bike is a solo activity, cycling itself is a team sport. His eight US Postal teammates work for him, literally (the French call the support riders domestiques). "Normally I've got a couple of guys who just stay with me," he said. His teammates are there to protect him—from enemy cyclists (who will try to isolate him and wear him down) and, usually, the wind. Lance showed me this on a last unholy hill, riding to the front and the side, blocking the gusts, which were blowing at 15 miles per hour. "That's just me in front of you," he said. "Imagine seven guys. It makes a big difference." What about the sprinting, when you break away from everyone and leave them in your dust? "That's only the last five or ten miles of the stage or race. I'm not doing anything until that point. The team leader should never be out front in the wind. If he is, that means the race is at a really critical moment, and it's down to one on one." Which is the part he likes best.
We stopped at an intersection somewhere way out east, and it was obvious that my learning experience was over. His training ride, a light one that day, was maybe a quarter done. Later, over beers at a popular bar on Lake Austin called the Hula Hut, I asked him about the latest drug allegations and his war with the doubters. "It's a war I will never win," he said. "Even if they found a foolproof test for everything, which I would love, these guys are always gonna come up with something. If it's not EPO, then it's ABC, XYZ, or MNO. I think if I pass all those tests, they're still gonna say, 'It's something—the seaweed, the chemotherapy.'" The truth is, if Lance hadn't so cavalierly dominated the Tour for the past two years, those allegations would never have been made. The French have been in a slump: A local hasn't won since 1985, and their most popular rider is the drug-scandal-plagued Richard Virenque.
But the French also don't like Lance's attitude, especially about their language: He refuses to speak it. When Tour director Jean-Marie Leblanc suggested last year that he try as a way of breaking the ice with French media and fans, Lance, who seems to get a kick out of pushing their buttons, responded, "The Tour is a bike race, not a popularity contest." He told me that last year when he did try, they took advantage of him, putting words into his mouth and asking hard questions. Perhaps what really rubs Frenchmen raw is that, unlike them, Lance didn't grow up obsessed with the Tour de France, yet he owns it. This would be like little Pierre deciding, at fifteen, to learn to play basketball and then twelve years later schooling Michael Jordan in the NBA Finals. Again and again.
"Everyone Dopes Himself"
Cycling is brutal. To be great you need a killer instinct, like a boxer. You need to go one on one with another rider, a guy you know intimately, and after hours of riding your heart out, pounce on any weakness he shows and ruthlessly put him away. You need a certain meanness. "It's a hard sport," Lance told me. "It isn't basketball, it's not football, it's not baseball. It's five, six hours in the hills and mountains. And you know what? You gotta love it.
"Forty million French people watch the Tour de France on TV; ten million line the roads. It is cycling's Kentucky Derby, and for an American team like US Postal, it's the only race that matters. The Tour also happens to be the most beastly sporting event in the history of the world, at least when you're talking about sports in which contestants are not intentionally killed—although riders have died since the race began, in 1903. Some two hundred riders form the "peloton," or pack, that races about 2,300 miles over three weeks in July, with two days off. The race is, literally, a tour of France, with 20 or 21 stages of varying distances, though every year the route changes. There is plenty of status in winning a stage, but the real prize during the Tour is to wear the maillot jaune, or "yellow jersey," which indicates the overall time leader. Riders power up 8,700-foot mountains and then roar down at 70 miles per hour, sometimes in rain and snow. They crash into cars, hurl their bikes in frustration, talk trash, and attack each other in anger. Their bodies undergo almost unimaginable strain; it's no wonder they turn to chemicals for help. As five-time winner Jacques Anquetil famously said, "You can't ride the Tour de France on mineral water."
Few do. To even begin to understand the drug allegations against Lance, you have to grasp one undeniable truth: Doping is as important to professional cycling as the air in the tires. "Cycling," says UT-Austin professor John Hoberman, who has written about sports and doping for more than a decade, "is the single most drug-drenched sport in history." For the first fifty or sixty years, riders used strychnine, alcohol, cocaine, morphine, amphetamines, anything to give them—or that seemed to give them—an edge over the competition. "I dope myself," Anquetil said in 1967, referring to his use of speed. "Everyone dopes himself. Those who claim they don't are liars."
Then came steroids and, in the eighties, human growth hormone and EPO, the superdrug. EPO is a reproduced version of a natural hormone that stimulates the production of red blood cells, the ones that deliver oxygen to the muscles and tissues. It is used to help dialysis, AIDS, and cancer patients like Lance, but since the late eighties—it was banned in 1990 by the International Olympic Committee (IOC)—EPO has also been supercharging the blood of endurance athletes, especially cyclists, helping them go longer, faster, and with less fatigue. Cyclists can train twice or even thrice as hard on EPO, stop taking it a week or two before the race, and still feel the positive effects, mostly in their ability to recover from daily one-hundred-mile rides. Says Mark Heintz, a former pro cyclist who returned to the peloton in 1999 to do a study on ethics and cycling: "You have a bottle of water and a plate of pasta and you're ready to go again." EPO, shot up like heroin, can boost an athlete's oxygen supply 10 percent; it can help him go 3 miles per hour faster, which is like a basketball player adding four inches to his vertical leap—every player would want it.
And most riders wanted EPO. Jean-Michel Rouet and Phillippe Bouvet, cycling writer-editors for L'Equipe, a French sports daily, allege that a minimum of 90 percent of the professional peloton was using EPO between 1994 and 1998. Others, like former Festina team trainer Antoine Vayer, say it was more like 100 percent. Vayer says that in the mid-nineties, in hotel rooms at night, the Tour looked like a hospital, with all the injections and IV drips. It didn't matter that EPO was eclipsing the skills and strategy of cycling. It worked. A handful of refuseniks opted out for religious or health reasons. EPO is not without its dangers—it thickens the blood and is thought to have caused some four dozen heart attacks and strokes in cyclists. It can literally stop your heart, especially at night, but that doesn't stop riders who, according to Heintz, wear alarms that monitor their pulse as they sleep. Team managers regularly wake them in the middle of the night and walk them around to get their circulation going.
The risk, generally, is worth it. Cycling is big business and cyclists earn big money (Lance won about $335,000 for last year's Tour), and if you don't use EPO, you are almost certainly behind everybody else. "It's not a game anybody wants to play," a former pro rider told me, "but you have to if you really want to succeed. Each individual is responsible for his own decision." EPO abuse was, until recently, undetectable, and the only gauge to possible use was a person's hematocrit level, the percentage of red blood cells in the blood. Usually that level is about 43 or 44 percent; if it went over 50, the cyclist was booted from the Tour. But the riders have always been a step ahead of the testers. Heintz wrote of cyclists hooking themselves up to IV drips containing a saline solution to dilute, in twenty minutes, the hematocrit level. He also wrote of riders injecting themselves in the testicles with masking agents to hide the presence of other drugs.
EPO abuse almost shut down the 1998 Tour de France, when Willy Voet, a Festina team trainer-masseur, was caught red-handed with 234 doses of it as well as other drugs. The Festina team was kicked out, and six other teams left in protest. Voet later talked about his involvement and wrote a book about the scandal, revealing a system in which the riders had no choice but to take EPO—only dopes didn't use dope, and he alleged that between 60 and 90 percent of the riders did. He showed daily logs and schedules and told how doctors tinker with each rider's chemical needs for that day's ride. Riders even had their own centrifuges to monitor their hematocrit to keep it below 50 percent, he said. Nobody thought of it as cheating.
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