Cycle of Lies: The Fall of Lance Armstrong. Juliet Macur

had been diagnosed with leukemia. On his blog, he wrote words that many other Armstrong followers considered the truth: “Clearly, God is working through Lance Armstrong.”

      As the world’s Kevin Kuehlers came to worship Armstrong, J.T. Neal waited for his protégé at the Austin airport, calling his cell phone repeatedly with no answer. It was the spring of 1997, and Armstrong was on his way to a full recovery from the testicular cancer. Fans of his, many of them cancer patients, wanted to meet him, talk to him, even just touch him as he walked by. They sent tons of letters to his Nike representative, saying Armstrong was their hero and begging for Armstrong’s autograph. His friends had come to call him “Cancer Jesus.” Armstrong hated it.

      “I don’t like that big frenzy,” he says. “I don’t like crowds. I don’t like people. I don’t like strangers in general.” Neal thought he was closing himself off.

      Still, people liked him. They saw in him what they hoped to see in themselves: a generosity, kindness and, above all, courageousness necessary to survive cancer and return to work—and life.

      Neal was on his way to Arkansas for his second bone marrow transplant, which he knew would make him gag and vomit and give him oral thrush, a yeast infection of the mouth common in infants. It would further weaken his body. The transplant might even kill him.

      He needed help, someone to feed him and drive him to and from the hospital during the weeklong procedure. Trying to spare his own family the pain of seeing him so ravaged, he asked Armstrong to come with him. Armstrong agreed. He would stay at his side for the whole seven days. Until he wouldn’t.

      At the airport, Neal’s cell phone finally rang.

      “Where are you?” Neal said.

      “Um, I can’t make it, sorry,” Armstrong said.

      He had backstage passes to the Wallflowers (heck, they’d played at the Race for the Roses and all) and didn’t want to give them up. Neal felt betrayed. He had been there when Armstrong needed him. They had gone through cancer treatments together. He had brought him into his family and had kept his mouth shut about all the drugs he took in cycling, the EPO, the injections of who knows what else. He—not Stapleton, not the Wallflowers—was the one Armstrong called before the 1996 Olympics to help figure out how to get the EPO out of a hotel room refrigerator in Milan because Armstrong had accidentally left it there. He had listened to Armstrong’s deepest fears and secrets, including those about his biological and adoptive fathers. He had been his business manager and lawyer, without ever charging a fee. Later, Neal would say, “This is not the treatment I deserved or that anyone deserved.”

      Some of Neal’s friends had called their cancer doctors for him and helped him investigate alternative treatment programs. “But not Lance,” he said. “He has not done that.”

      The more Neal thought about Armstrong standing him up at the airport, the more hurt he felt. He took off the Rolex that Armstrong had given him. It stayed off for good.

      One day in late summer 1997, Armstrong sat down with Carmichael, who had flown to Austin to meet him. Carmichael wanted Armstrong to start racing again, and convinced Stapleton to argue the point, too. Both men had a financial stake in a comeback.

      Carmichael, who had been replaced by Ferrari in 1995 as Armstrong’s main coach, said it would be a shame for Armstrong to quit when he was still so young. Stapleton told Armstrong a comeback could mean big money. Sponsors would flock to him, and not just any sponsors—Fortune 500 companies. Armstrong could very well transcend the provincial roots of the sport.

      Though Armstrong knew he’d have to dope again, he told me it didn’t scare him because he felt safe in the hands of Ferrari and knew from experience that he would use only a fraction of the EPO that he had—ironically—taken as part of his chemotherapy. He doubted his drug use had caused the cancer. So he agreed to get back on his bike.

      Problem was, he had nowhere to go.

      Cofidis, the French team, had terminated his $2.5 million, two-year contract. Instead, it offered $180,000, plus incentives that would pay him more for an unexpected return to form. The team wasn’t confident that Armstrong would be the same rider.

      The offer, insulting in Armstrong’s eyes, flipped a switch of anger. Those “Eurobastards” had screwed him. A master at holding grudges, he vowed to get even.

      Armstrong had one shot at a better deal: the United States Postal Service team. The U.S.-based squad was owned by Thomas Weisel, a San Francisco investment banker whom several Postal Service riders called “a jock sniffer”—a derogatory term for someone who loves to hobnob with elite athletes. He was a good athlete himself. Competing in his age group, Weisel was a national champion speed skater, a world champion cyclist and a competitive skier. His next athletic goal was to build the country’s preeminent cycling team.

      Armstrong had ridden for Weisel in 1990 and ’91 as an amateur on the Subaru-Montgomery cycling team, which Weisel had bankrolled. Weisel had seen his raw talent. With that in mind, Weisel accepted Stapleton’s proposal of a $215,000 base salary for Armstrong, heavy with performance-based bonuses.

      That was October 1997, about a year after Armstrong’s cancer diagnosis. The cancer would turn out to be a financial boon for Armstrong—and for Stapleton, too. Stapleton wasn’t embarrassed to call a postcancer Armstrong a marketer’s dream. An autobiography was in the works. People who had paid no attention to cycling now wanted to know about its superhero.

      “Lance isn’t just a cyclist anymore—because of the cancer, the Lance Armstrong brand has a much broader appeal,” Stapleton told the Austin American-Statesman. “Our challenge is to leverage that now. He’s on the verge of being a crossover-type spokesman. He could be just like an athlete who does a Pepsi or Gatorade commercial. If his comeback has success, we hope to take him to a Kodak or Sony and hope they will turn him into a corporate pitchman.”

      With Stapleton and Carmichael pushing Armstrong to the brink of international fame, J.T. Neal tried to keep him grounded. Perhaps because he faced imminent death, he wasn’t dazzled by the portrayal of Armstrong as the poster boy for cancer awareness. He was dealing with Armstrong, as always, as a father would.

      A family friend had taken Armstrong’s place as Neal’s caregiver in Arkansas for his second bone marrow transplant. That whole week, Neal had wondered where he and Armstrong’s mother had gone wrong with Lance. He had long recognized the selfishness inherent in Armstrong’s naked ambition, but this time, in dismissing Neal when Neal most needed him, he had gone too far But Neal had kind of seen it coming.

      Armstrong had ignored those doctors and nurses who had been at his bedside during his cancer treatments in Austin, and then he used his recovery to make money. It was hypocritical for Armstrong to be a spokesman for cancer awareness, Neal said. “Look how he got it in the first place,” Neal would say later. “How he flaunts the rules. It’s like, ‘I have cancer and I’m a good guy’ and ‘I will use all means to justify the ends.’”

      Neal knew Armstrong was doping again. While Armstrong was raising money for his foundation, he was looking for a way to get EPO in the United States after he’d stopped using the drug to fight his cancer. Armstrong went so far as to ask for the EPO that Neal was using in his cancer treatment. Eventually, when Neal repeatedly refused to share the drug, Armstrong said he had developed a source in the southwestern United States.

      As weary of Armstrong’s machinations as he was, Neal continued asking him to help his mother, Linda. Neal asked him to give her $10,000 a year. Armstrong refused.

      So Neal eventually asked Garvey, the foundation’s chairman of the board, to push Armstrong. When Armstrong again refused, Garvey offered to front the money himself. But he had a public relations problem. If news got out that Armstrong wouldn’t help his mother in need, how would it look for the foundation? What if America learned that Lance Armstrong was not a selfless hero?

       CHAPTER 8