Men's Journal

In a series of scandalous emails, Floyd Landis admits to doping and accuses Lance Armstrong of doing the same.

By Bill Gifford

Inside the sport of cycling, it’s fair to say, Floyd Landis’s admission of doping — and his accusations against former U.S. Postal Service teammates including Lance Armstrong — surprised exactly nobody. It only managed to take everyone by surprise because Landis had finally gotten around to making good on what had begun to seem an empty threat.

For months now you’d hear rumors, generally originating in some bar after a race, that Floyd was preparing to “blow the lid off everything.” He was going to come clean and name names. Big names. In December Landis tweeted, “Planning something for 2010 that will change the cycling world forever!” ————–Then… crickets.

Even today visitors to Floydlandis.com are invited only to read about “An American Hero” who was wrongly convicted of using testosterone during the 2006 Tour de France, a race he won.

But then, kaboom.

In a series of e-mails to top cycling officials he sent starting April 30 but that leaked out only Wednesday night (first to the Wall Street Journal), Landis not only admitted doping, but also laid out in riveting detail the who, where, when, and how of a well-orchestrated doping program that allegedly kept Armstrong and his U.S. Postal Service team on top of the cycling world. According to one e-mail, Landis says he started doping in 2002, when he came onto the USPS team. There he was introduced first to testosterone patches, then erythropoieitin (EPO), the steroid Andriol, and when new testing made EPO use too risky, blood transfusions. He stored blood in Armstrong’s apartment in Girona, Spain, he claims, along with blood from Armstrong; the blood would be reinfused at key points before and during the Tour de France that Armstrong won that year, as he had every year since 1999.

According to Landis the doping program was overseen by current RadioShack team boss Johan Bruyneel and by Dr. Michele Ferrari, Armstrong’s Italian sports doctor. Other Postal riders participated, including three-time Tour of California rider Levi Leipheimer, longtime Armstrong lieutenant George Hincapie (who has denied the charges), and Landis’s own (no doubt former) best friend Dave Zabriskie, now wearing the leader’s yellow jersey in California. He also implicates trainer Allen Lim, who now works for Armstrong’s RadioShack team. (You can read excerpts from the e-mails here.)

The most amazing revelation of all has been buried: that Armstrong allegedly tested positive for EPO in 2002, but that he and Bruyneel flew to Switzerland to sort things out with then-UCI president Hein Verbruggen. According to Landis, Verbruggen agreed to ignore the positive test in exchange for a “financial arrangement.” In other words, a bribe. (Armstrong denied making any contribution, but UCI head Pat McQuaid said he had given $100,000, for “anti-doping” equipment.)

This is not the first time this has happened in cycling, obviously. In fact the reaction to these kinds of accusations now follows a familiar, two-part pattern.

First, the accuser is attacked, his credibility and motives questioned. Floyd lives in a major glass house here: He is (now) a proven liar, and as far as motivation is concerned, it’s pretty clear this is some sort of last-gasp effort to have a future as a cyclist. His comeback, which he began last year, has been going nowhere, and in the media, “disgraced” is practically his new first name.

In part two — after the accused parties have howled indignation, the cycling establishment has circled the wagons, and the story dies down — nearly everything the whistleblower says turns out to be true. This happened back in 2005 with a Spanish rider named Jesus Manzano, who keeled over and passed out during a mountain stage of the 2003 Tour. It turned out he’d been given a bad transfusion, and he blabbed, which got him excommunicated from the sport. But information he provided led to the exposure of the Operation Puerto doping ring, in which a Madrid gynecologist supervised blood-transfusing, doping, and training programs by dozens of top professional cyclists, many of whom were suspended. It’s also happened in doping scandals in France and Germany. The messenger is shot, and then he turns out to be right.

So far, part one has been executed to perfection.

Pat McQuaid, of the UCI, has accused Landis of seeking “revenge” and trying to “destroy cycling” (a refrain often used by Armstrong partisans). “I have to question the guy’s credibility,” McQuaid said yesterday. Armstrong himself declared the allegations “not even worth getting into” in a news conference outside the RadioShack team bus before the start of Stage 5 of the Amgen Tour of California. “Floyd lost his credibility a long time ago,” he added, although up until that moment, Armstrong had ranked among Landis’s defenders. (Ten miles into the stage, Armstrong was involved in a crash and left the race, but his full remarks can be read here.)

Former Postal rider Frankie Andreu doesn’t see it that way. “When you have that kind of detail like Floyd’s throwing out there, you can’t just make that stuff up,” says Andreu. In 2006 Andreu admitted using EPO while riding for Postal in 1999. In 2005 he had been part of an instant-message exchange with another former teammate, in which they discussed Floyd’s involvement in blood-doping and Landis’s allegation that Armstrong and Bruyneel had flushed his “rest day bag” down the toilet.

Landis only deviated from the script in one way: He named names. Most confessing dopers do what Nixon’s press spokesman used to call a “modified limited hang-out,” revealing enough spicy details to satisfy the press, but not the whole dripping enchilada (and never, ever implicating others). In a later interview with Versus blogger Neil Browne, Landis explained that he never intended the e-mail to become public and that he had intended to negotiate some sort of amnesty with the named, still-active riders.

So much for that. Right now, there’s a mushroom cloud over the sport and intense anticipation. Will other Postal teammates speak up? Or will they stay silent, leaving Landis on his own? Will his training diaries or other documentation appear to back him up?

In his own book, Positively False, Landis revealed that U.S. anti-doping officials pressured him to give information on Armstrong in exchange for a more lenient suspension. He refused, adamantly. “If I do [come clean,]” he allegedly told Greg LeMond at the time, “I’ll hurt all my friends.” Instead he spent hundreds of thousands of dollars of his own money, plus another estimated $500,000 from the “Floyd Fairness Fund,” which he set up to solicit donations for his legal defense. He lost his house, his wife, and his job prospects; at last report, he was living behind a car wash in Southern California. It’s not quite clear how this is going to help him now.

It might end up helping cycling fans, though. And cycling journalists. It hasn’t been a whole lot of fun to cover the sport over the last 10 years. There’s been this oppressive cone of silence, an omerta about doping — whose chief enforcer has been Armstrong himself. It’s been like trying to cover the Genovese family as if it were some sort of genteel family waste-management enterprise.

But here’s the thing about dopers: Most of them, I’d say 90 percent, would prefer not to be doing it. They would just as soon compete clean and look forward to long, healthy lives. But they can’t. Or couldn’t. I’ve interviewed some genuinely nice guys who had basically turned their bodies into science experiments. The ones who stopped all became happier overnight and didn’t even care that they went from finishing fifth to 59th. “You have to look at yourself in the mirror every day,” one of them told me. “You know what kind of ethics you have.”

Floyd was part of the 10 percent. “I don’t feel guilty at all about having doped,” Landis told ESPN.com. “I did what I did because that’s what we [cyclists] did, and it was a choice I had to make after 10 years or 12 years of hard work to get there, and that was a decision I had to make, to make the next step. My choices were, do it and see if I can win, or don’t do it and I tell people I just don’t want to do that, and I decided to do it.”

He told ESPN that he simply got tired of lying about it. The hardest part, he said, was having to call his mom and tell her the truth. But even so, Landis can lay claim to having helped clean up cycling, just not in the way he intended. His 2006 positive test, the first time a Tour winner was stripped of his title, was a major catalyst for change. Beefed-up testing programs have caught dozens of cheaters, including many onetime top riders, and have helped foster a new moral climate that rewards clean riders and is generally kinder to those who speak up. “The sport was spiraling out of control and nothing was happening to correct it,” says Andreu, who admitted doping in September 2006, in part as a reaction to Landis’s positive. “Floyd’s trying to do the same thing,” he believes. “It just took him a lot longer to come around to it.”

Check out the Wall Street Journal’s latest comments on the scandal.