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

Author:Macur, Juliet [Macur, Juliet]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2014-03-04T00:00:00+00:00

Tygart knew just how far other elite athletes would go to succeed. He was heavily involved in the doping cases that stemmed from the Bay Area Laboratory Co-Operative steroids investigation, in which the company claimed to have supplied elite athletes with legal supplements and vitamins when it was actually dealing performance-enhancing drugs to them.

The slugger Barry Bonds and the sprinter Marion Jones were two of the athletes who received drugs from BALCO. Another athlete caught in that scandal was track cyclist Tammy Thomas, once a silver medalist at the world championships. She had been barred from competition for life after testing positive for steroids in 2002.

In one of the most bizarre doping cases ever, she had insisted on her innocence, but one glance at her suggested otherwise. Broad-shouldered and buff, she had a five o’clock shadow, a receding hairline and a deep gravelly voice.

Just thinking about Thomas’s case made it obvious to Tygart that cycling had major doping problems, and that Armstrong might not be clean after all. What made him particularly suspicious about the Postal Service team was that several of its former riders had tested positive. Some of the tests were administered by USADA, some by the UCI.

In 2002, Kirk O’Bee failed a test for testosterone. In 2004, Hamilton failed a test for a blood transfusion and fought like mad to get out of it, a process that took nearly two years and ate up a significant amount of Tygart’s time. And there would be others.

No matter how much Tygart wanted to believe in Armstrong’s courageous comeback from cancer to win the Tours, he couldn’t ignore the mounting pile of clues that Armstrong had probably doped. Every time a former Postal Service rider was caught doping, Tygart tried his hardest to convince that cyclist to talk about the culture of drugs in professional cycling. He wanted someone to squeal on the sport and on his former teammates, for the good of the younger riders who might someday be faced with the same decision of whether to dope or not.

He tried to convince Hamilton to talk about the doping that may have occurred on his teams by saying, “We understand that you aren’t alone in this.” While Hamilton suspected that Tygart wanted him to turn on Armstrong, Tygart never uttered Armstrong’s name. He was fishing for a lead, but riders like Hamilton—who were loyal to the sport’s code of silence—wouldn’t bite.

Chris Carmichael, Armstrong’s coach (at least on paper), gave Tygart even more reason to doubt cycling’s hero incarnate. Tygart and Carmichael were friends from Colorado Springs because their children had attended the same school. At a kids’ birthday party one day, Carmichael brought up Betsy Andreu’s claim that Armstrong had confessed to doping, Tygart said, adding that Carmichael then “vilified her” at great length. The insults were so “over the top and so nasty” that Tygart thought it was obvious Carmichael was overcompensating. “You just knew there was more to it, because he wouldn’t have reacted the way he did.

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