On the whole, he’s really not a remarkable guy. If you look at his physiological profile, his body isn’t anything special. Socio-economically, he grew up the only child of a teenage mother. So how did Lance Armstrong become one of the most powerful men in professional cycling and the ringleader of the biggest organised doping conspiracy that the world has ever seen?
Evidence suggests that it started early. When he was diagnosed with testicular cancer in October 1996, Armstrong was 25 years old and had been racing professionally for five years. Shortly prior to his diagnosis, he had even signed a contract with one of the best pro teams in the world. Though comparatively young, he was already considered the next big thing in American cycling, and it seems that someone in Armstrong’s inner circle decided to ‘invest’ in the Texan’s future early.
Among the statements from 11 of Armstrong’s former teammates on the US Postal Service Team (the evidence that eventually brought Armstrong down) is an account by Frankie Andreu and his wife Betsy of an episode in a hospital room shortly after his diagnosis. The cyclist reportedly admitted having used erythropoietin (EPO), testosterone, human growth hormone, cortisone and steroids. Andreu also mentioned that at the team training camp in 1996, Armstrong had “bulked up considerably” in his upper body. He was already on an organised doping programme.
After 14 months of chemo, recovery and intensive training, Armstrong joined the US Postal Service Team for the 1998 racing season. His US Postal teammate Tyler Hamilton writes in his 2012 autobiography, The Secret Race, that Armstrong was even more intense as both a rider and a person during his comeback. He was ready to start winning again. Hamilton also notes that Armstrong had signed for the “relatively small amount of $200,000 plus bonuses”. Hamilton himself was getting paid much less at this point. Armstrong was already a big enough rider to demand the big bucks. By Hamilton’s account, Armstrong was now the top rider in the team, the one destined to bring the best results, and since keeping him happy was crucial to bringing in those results, he had a lot of influence. Additionally, Armstrong co-owned the company that managed the team, so it was only a few years before he was running the show at US Postal. As Hamilton recounts in detail, no one was hired or fired without Armstrong’s say-so. Equipment, training methods, doctors; everything was under his control. He was the boss, and the other riders simply accepted this – to go against Armstrong and risk his displeasure would have meant being sacked from the team. It was easier and safer for them to simply accept Armstrong’s authority and do their jobs. So when Armstrong started hand-picking riders to join an organised doping programme to lead him to Tour de France victory, they just went along.
By the 2000s it wasn’t just the team that Armstrong had under his thumb – his influence extended throughout the cycling world. In two well-known incidents, Armstrong chased down Italian rider Filippo Simeoni in a race after he testified against him in court, forcing Simeoni to submit if he wanted to ride a race again without being chased down. Armstrong also pressured French rider Christophe Bassons into abandoning the 1999 Tour de France after he wrote a column for French sporting paper L’Equipe speaking out against doping.
There was more. Armstrong was the golden boy of cycling; a role model, an idol, the best advertisement that the sporting world could have asked for. So when he tested positive for Cortisone at the 1999 Tour de France and again at the 2005 Tour de Suisse (as attested by Hamilton), the UCI accepted a manufactured excuse the first time, and then simply covered the whole thing up. As Hamilton says, the UCI didn’t want to catch Lance Armstrong. By then he had become so feared, so respected and so powerful, that to speak out against him was worth your career, and to bring him down was worth the entire sport of cycling. No one was game to attempt it.
That is, until one day, a man named Jeff Novitzky from the United States Food and Drug Administration got a phone call. The sky was about to fall on Lance Armstrong’s head.
