Read an Excerpt
PROLOGUE
Monday, July 19, 1999. It is a rest day on the Tour de France and the race’s three-thousand-strong entourage has set up camp in the Pyrenean town of Saint-Gaudens. After two weeks on the road, it is an opportunity for the Tour’s traveling community to draw breath before the final push north to Paris. For Benoît Hopquin, a journalist with the French daily newspaper Le Monde, it is another day at the office. He attends the press conference of the champion-elect Lance Armstrong and is at the pressroom later in the afternoon when he takes a phone call from a source in Paris. They disagree over something Hopquin wrote a few days before, but things soon cool down and they talk about the Tour. During the first week of the race there had been a story about riders testing positive for corticoids and a rumor that Armstrong had been one. Hopquin tells his source about the press conference and Armstrong’s insistence that he has never used corticoids and didn’t have a medical exemption for any banned product. “Ce n’est pas vrai” (It’s not true), says the source, teasingly, because he is in a position to know. “What are you saying?” asks Hopquin. The source refuses to elaborate, preferring to leave the journalist with an impression. Hopquin’s impression is that Armstrong has tested positive for corticoids.
Hopquin spoke with his Le Monde colleagues, Yves Bordenave and Philippe Le Coeur, and they began calling contacts who might know the truth. They rang a source at the French Ministry of Youth and Sport, they called the national anti-doping laboratory at Châtenay-Malabry, they left two messages for the head of the medical commission of Union Cycliste Internationale (UCI), Leon Schattenberg, but they couldn’t confirm the story. They tracked down UCI president Hein Verbruggen, who said he had not been advised about a positive test for Armstrong. The following morning, the journalists went back to Hopquin’s original source. He agreed to meet a representative of the newspaper and to show him the medical report forms of the riders who had tested positive for corticoids. A senior editor from Le Monde went to the rendezvous and saw a medical report for Armstrong that showed he had tested positive for corticoids following a drug test on the first weekend of the race. The journalist looked down the form to the part where it said Médicaments Pris (medications taken), and the word néant (none) was written. Le Monde believed it was on to an important story.
From the newspaper’s point of view, Armstrong’s insistence that he did not have a therapeutic exemption was critical. Corticoids are banned but may be legally taken if supported by a doctor’s prescription. At the previous day’s press conference and in an answer to a journalist from L’Equipe eleven days before, Armstrong categorically said he did not have any medical exemptions. Journalists from Le Monde contacted U.S. Postal Service team spokesman Dan Osipow and were told the team would wait for an official declaration from UCI before making any comment.
Twelve days before, the U.S. Postal Service team had been told about the presence of cortisone in Armstrong’s drug test. Selected at random, Postal rider Kevin Livingston was accompanied to the medical caravan by the team’s directeur sportif, Johan Bruyneel. There, the two men heard about the positive test, and then for twelve days, there was nothing, until Le Monde’s journalists started asking questions. On the day after the rest day, the Tour riders left Saint-Gaudens on the race to the Pyrenean ski station at Piau-Engaly. It was a tough leg, won by the Spaniard Fernando Escartin, and it was also a good day for race leader Armstrong. He crossed the line fourth and tightened his grip on the race. That day, Le Monde published its story alleging he had tested positive for the corticoid triamcinolone acetonide. If the story were substantiated, Armstrong’s dream of winning the Tour de France would be over.
That evening Armstrong traveled by helicopter from the top of the mountain to the team hotel. By the time he got around to his evening massage, it was late and two high-ranking U.S. Postal Service team officials were in the room. They spoke with the rider about Le Monde’s story and discussed how they would counter it.
At stake was the greatest comeback story in the history of sport.
Chapter 1
THE KID FROM THE CORNFIELDS
It was one of the tougher moments in Greg Strock’s unfulfilled career in cycling: the moment when he had to accept it was over. The dream of becoming a professional cyclist had ended much too soon. He was just twenty-one. At the same time, the 1993 Tour de France was winding its way south toward the Alps, and he was in Madison, Wisconsin, riding among fellow Americans in a race that slipped under the sport’s radar. Though he now felt a long way from the elite peloton, there had been a time when Strock imagined himself among them. At the age of seventeen, he had been offered a place in the amateur squad of Spain’s Banesto team. He thought he would go there, impress the locals, and earn a place on a top professional team. But that was then, before illness sucked away his energy, drained away his ambition.
He waited almost two years for his body to recover. Ever so slowly, it did. It improved enough, anyway, for him to feel normal and to try to resurrect his career. And though his second coming had its moments, in the end he couldn’t get back to where he’d been. One day he felt strong, rode well, believed it was possible. The next morning his body spoke to him, not so much of aches and pains but of overwhelming tiredness. To be successful, a cyclist needs to recover fast. Now Strock knew he wasn’t going to be a successful racer, and on that July afternoon in Madison, he let it go. “I can’t do this anymore,” he said to his coach, René Wenzel, on a street not far from the finish line. “I’m going to go to medical school, because I can’t do this anymore.”
This wasn’t what Wenzel wanted to hear. Part of the reason he had taken the assistant team director’s job with Saturn was so he could work again with Strock. He’d had him as a junior in the U.S. squad three years before and liked him. Though Strock was now telling him it was over, he didn’t accept that. What’s wrong with persevering? “This will come right,” he told Strock. “You can still get back. You can be very good again.” What began as a heart-to-heart conversation ended as a full-blown argument. Wenzel yelled as Strock stuck by his decision. In the midst of the coach’s accusations and the rider’s stubbornness, Wenzel saw tears well in Strock’s eyes, and that made him emotional but he didn’t want to cry, not in front of his rider, and so he kept shouting. Eventually, emotions calmed, and with that came the certainty that it was over. Wenzel had to accept that one of his favorite riders was leaving the sport. That evening they shared a beer and tried to end things the right way.
After that they went their separate ways and over the following years they would drift apart. Accepted into medical school at Indiana University, Strock wasn’t left with a lot of free time. Wenzel continued with the Saturn cycling team, got laid off, then got rehired; to better make ends meet, he started his own business, Wenzel Coaching, from his home in McKenzie Bridge, Oregon. Coaching bike riders was something he was good at. But, seven years on from that angst-ridden scene in Wisconsin, Strock reentered his life. Wenzel was in Bermuda with a women’s team due to race the Bermuda Grand Prix when his wife, Kendra, called. “Your buddy Strock is going to sue you,” she said.
You could have knocked him over with a feather.
