Authors: Jeremy Whittle
The members of the Champions Club are among road cycling’s new elite, the super-rich. They have little time for century-old European tradition. Robson Walton, one of the family that own K Mart, Bennett Dorrance, the heir to the Campbell’s soup kingdom, George Battle, formerly executive chairman of Internet search engine Ask Jeeves, and Hollywood actor Robin Williams, a close friend of Armstrong, have all ridden with the Champions Club.
One of the club’s early members, Ed McCall, first discovered cycling at the 1999 Tour de France. As Lance rode towards his first success, McCall ended up working as an impromptu bodyguard for the Texan.
‘Knocking these French photographers on their ass,’ he told
Outside
magazine, ‘was a blast.’ The luckier members of the Champions Club get to hang out with Lance and, every now and then, even to ride with him.
Williams, star of
The World According to Garp
, was one of the principal cheerleaders in The World According to Lance. The Hairiest Man in Hollywood was always good copy, and was the most high profile of America’s new cycling superfans. He was a regular VIP guest at the finish of the Tour in Paris, where he held court as Lance sealed another success. Gales of indulgent laughter rippled outwards from the huddle around him as the demob-happy peloton tore up and down the Champs-Elysées.
We’d interviewed him for
procycling
when he had been on set in Alaska with Al Pacino making the thriller
Insomnia
. In a bid to make Williams feel more at home, we detailed the effervescent Andy Hood, at that time in London, to the interview. We gathered around, switched on the speakerphone and sat back as Hood jauntily cried: ‘Hey Robin! It’s Andy Hood here in London.’ Between takes, Williams’ deep, disembodied voice floated down the phone line. It was like interviewing sixteen different people. Within seconds, Hood was doubled up in mirth, gripped by hysteria, clutching his sides, dropping the phone, stamping the floor. A torrent of accents and mimicry cascaded down the line. Effortlessly, Williams switched from one persona to the next. Listening in wasn’t, in truth, that funny. It was uneasy listening. What was funnier was watching Hood dissolve.
Williams did gay Floridian pet-shop owner: ‘Oh exc
uuuu
se me, Mr Armstrong sir, but how often do you shave your legs?’ Hood cackled and snorted.
Williams did enraged Texan redneck: ‘Boy, dem Lycra shorts look too dang tight to me …’ Hood’s shoulders shook uncontrollably.
Williams did crazed Italian sports doctor: ‘Signor Ferrari meet Signor Cecchini, Signor Punto meet Signor Tipo …’ Tears rolled down Hood’s cheeks and he slammed his palm into the desk in submission.
The monologue echoed through the office for thirty minutes until Hood finally managed to splutter ‘Thank you, Robin’ and
put
the phone down. It had been a virtuoso performance. We used the cover line ‘Lance says I’m bike-sexual’.
Williams may have been the best-known member of the Champions Club, but perhaps the most influential is Thomas Weisel, an investment banker from San Francisco, whose most successful speculation was on a former cancer sufferer and apparently washed-up cyclist called Lance.
Weisel looms large over the recent revolution in American cycling. He founded and funded the team that became US Postal, and he hired its two most high-profile riders, Armstrong and Tyler Hamilton. When Armstrong couldn’t get a sponsor after his recovery from cancer, Weisel took the Texan on, but only after striking a hard bargain and telling the Texan to sharpen up his act and start behaving like a real captain of industry.
‘He hadn’t been enough of a leader,’ Weisel has said. ‘He was not very respectful of other riders and the support system around him.’ For once, Lance was contrite. It was, he said later, ‘probably the most brutal conversation I’ve ever had’.
Weisel is the alpha male of the Champions Club. He appears to be just as driven as Armstrong, perhaps because Weisel’s relationship with his father mirrored Lance’s own troubled childhood. Weisel wrote in
Capital Instincts
, his autobiography published in 2003, that his father used a stick for ‘beating the shit’ out of him. Both men like having the odds stacked against them.
Between them, Weisel and Armstrong had changed Middle America’s perception of road cycling. They made it appear aspirational, healthy and intelligent. Middle-aged cycling fans don’t have to be tubby, balding Europeans in Lycra plodding their way slowly through the Alps or Dolomites, but can instead be silver-haired CEOs with white teeth, tight abs and an SUV support vehicle, touring Colorado or Tuscany.
Weisel is passionate about cycling. He brought a corporate intelligence to a sport that used to be sponsored by shopkeepers and car salesmen. He is a fixer, a dynamic money man with an
obsessive’s
eye. If he sees something is wrong, he has to wade in, straighten it out, do it his way. That was the case with the American national federation, USA Cycling.
Since he dug it out of the red in 2000, USA Cycling has been made in Weisel’s image. He shored up their cash crisis with an injection of his own. He also brought in some of his own people who saw things the Weisel Way. This later led to accusations of Weisel as self-serving.
One such character was Steve Johnson, who was brought in as CEO of USA Cycling. Bob Stapleton said that Johnson and Weisel went back a long way. Unsurprising perhaps, then, that Johnson sprung to the defence of fellow Weisel protégé, Champions Club icon and Discovery Channel team owner Lance Armstrong, when in 2005
L’Equipe
alleged that Armstrong had EPO in his blood during the 1999 Tour. Despite USA Cycling’s important role as a disciplinary body over doping violations, Johnson gave the French allegations extremely short shrift.
‘This is an issue for the French people,’ Johnson told Reuters. ‘They seemed very concerned about it, and frankly I don’t care what they think. And I don’t think Lance does either. This is just a publication in a French tabloid newspaper. That’s our perspective.’
Other Weisel acolytes assumed key roles within USA Cycling. Jim Ochowicz, another long-time friend, associate and coach of Armstrong (and Tyler Hamilton and Floyd Landis) – and a broker for Thomas Weisel Partners – became president of USA Cycling.
Ousted by the Weisel regime was Johnson’s predecessor as USA Cycling CEO, Gerard Bisceglia – fired by Ochowicz and USA Cycling’s board in 2006. I first met Bisceglia at the World Track Championships in Los Angeles in 2005. A burly, immediately likable man, Bisceglia gave me a ride from the Home Depot velodrome – a stone’s throw from David Beckham’s new home at the LA Galaxy stadium – to the Long Beach Sheraton, where we were both staying.
On the drive across LA, we talked about a young American
rider
who had been made offers by several ProTour teams. Bisceglia had doping on his mind. He was anxious that the rider had made the right choice. As he pulled up outside the hotel, the conversation moved on to Tyler Hamilton’s choices, for better or worse.
‘Seemed such a good kid,’ Bisceglia said, shaking his head in dismay.
‘You feel pretty strongly about doping then?’ I ventured.
‘You bet,’ he said. ‘When I talk to younger riders, I tell them, “If you dope, I will fucking kill you …”’
After he retired from racing, Frankie Andreu became part of the USA Cycling establishment. Andreu had enjoyed a respectable, if low-key, career, with Motorola, Cofidis and US Postal. Much of his racing had been spent working for his team leader and close friend, Lance Armstrong. Outwardly, Andreu had long appeared to be a bastion of the Texan’s clan, but Frankie had a guilty conscience that he could not ignore. Eventually, it overpowered him.
In 2006, supported by his wife Betsy, he confessed to doping himself with EPO while racing as Armstrong’s teammate. Maybe, if he hadn’t been subpoenaed and definitively opposed Lance as a result of the SCA investigation, maybe if he’d been kept close to the Texan and his entourage rather than slowly exiled, things would have been different. Maybe then Frankie would have kept his mouth shut, just as he had done after retiring from racing in December 2000 and taking up a job in TV, his years on the road, bitching about the hotels, the food, the travelling, finally behind him.
But then, as he watched his old friend Lance become an icon and his former teammates get richer, the years spent as cannon fodder in the peloton stuck in his throat. So when Juliet Macur of the
New York Times
stood in his kitchen and asked, out of the blue, ‘Frankie – did you dope?’ he couldn’t hold back any more. Frankie gave her a straight answer. ‘Yes,’ he said.
When the
New York Times
ran their story there was another anonymous confession alongside Frankie’s; that of one of his US Postal teammates from 1999.
It had happened, they both said, in 1999, training for the Tour – in Andreu’s case, he said, EPO injections, three times. Frankie may have been a great
domestique
, but he was never good enough to win any big European races. So he had specialised in helping others, particularly his friend Lance, to win – and to win big. In the press room, ‘Crankie Frankie’ had a reputation as a bullshit-free zone, unpretentious, pragmatic, straight-talking – and on occasion, downright rude.
But this time, the more he talked, the more damaging his words became. Like so many others, Andreu had respected the
omerta
. Like so many others, he’d just been ‘doing his job’, being a good pro, by embracing the simple and readily available deceit of doping. That was why it came as such a shock when he decided to tell the truth. His confession, six years after his retirement, was totally unexpected.
Frankie said he felt little fear of either the doping controls or the haematocrit check as he topped up his blood.
‘The controls just said stay below fifty per cent. That was what much of the peloton had been doing for years. But I wasn’t trying to approach those levels – I was just trying to feel
normal
in the peloton again.’
He had learned about the powers of EPO and its use through ‘gossip, the papers, magazines. It was a very hot topic during the 1990s,’ he said. There was, he says, no peer pressure. ‘My job would be on the line if I didn’t perform but that was the case for everyone. I had internal pressure that I put on myself. I knew there were riders taking EPO before I did, but it’s an individual choice in the end.’
He denied that there was a structured culture of doping within the US Postal team. ‘On any team, anybody who did anything did it individually, so there was no way of knowing if anybody else was doing anything. I’m speaking about personal choices
that
I made. I was not put under pressure or told to do it.’ Frankie said that EPO gave him an amazing improvement in performance. He estimated that using it made him perform ‘twenty per cent better’ as a professional athlete. ‘I was able to be a bike racer again instead of being a pack filler.’
So why, after all these years, had he decided to confess? What was the point? ‘Because of what has been going on in the sport,’ he replied. ‘I realised that I had done something wrong in the past too, and that I couldn’t speak freely or feel good about it until I admitted that I got caught up in it. I was asked point blank if I did it and I thought, “It’s time to make a decision here. Now’s the time to stop covering up things, to stop lying and to tell the truth.” So I answered the question truthfully.
‘There’s been no closure to a lot of these cases. People keep denying and lying. So I’m trying to change that.’
Johan Bruyneel, his old team manager at US Postal, was not impressed. The Belgian described Andreu’s admission as ‘pitiful’. Frankie was not surprised by Bruyneel’s reaction.
‘I was disappointed that he made that remark instead of looking at the positive side of trying to clean up the sport and of trying to make the sport better. Obviously, he only thinks about himself and his team. Johan Bruyneel is in charge of himself, so he can live with his words.’
Andreu’s confession split the US Cycling community. While some, like Bisceglia, were sympathetic, others condemned him. ‘I expected some negative reaction,’ Frankie says, ‘because what I did was wrong, but the positive responses were overwhelming. People are sick of the deceit so I think it was a refreshing change for the truth to come out.
‘I had some positive response from riders. Anybody who gives me a negative response is missing the point. I truly believe that every single rider racing now would like to be able to race clean.’
The US Postal team’s management company, Tailwind Sports,
co-owned
by Thom Weisel and Armstrong – both, like Andreu, in senior positions within the USA Cycling hierarchy – reacted strongly and lobbied for sanctions against their former employee.
‘Team management will be investigating this issue and considering all legal options and trust that the relevant authorities (USA Cycling, USADA and the UCI) will be doing the same,’ said a press release.
Meanwhile, Bisceglia, who worked with Andreu during their time together at USA Cycling, watched developments from his home in Colorado.
‘Frankie’s a retired rider – what are you gonna do to him? I like Frankie. I never doubted any of the things he told me. I was disappointed and shocked when I heard about his admission of EPO use. Not in him, but in the sport, because I thought of him as one of the good guys.’
Bisceglia knew that Andreu had nothing to gain by coming clean. ‘He’ll pay a heavy price for his admission; this code of silence, the
omerta
,’ he said scornfully, ‘it’s like the Mafia … what does that tell you about the sport?’
Yet it was the banality of Andreu’s confession that was its most shocking characteristic. EPO had not made him into a champion, but merely helped him survive. Even with a twenty per cent lift to his performance, his best results from his EPO season are hardly memorable. In 1999, he finished in twenty-first place at both Paris-Roubaix and the Tour of Luxembourg, his highest finishes of the season. He placed sixty-fifth in that year’s Tour de France and would have received a share of Armstrong’s winnings for overall victory.