On the eve of the 2007 Tour, new revelations about doping in cycling, including a book that implicates Lance Armstrong, have removed the last vestiges of the sport's credibility

Austin Murphy

What a grand spectacle it will be ! On July 7 the first rider will roll down the ramp for the prologue of the Tour de France. This year's Grand Boucle, or Big Loop, begins in London. Cycling fans are advised to focus on the pageantry of the brightly costumed athletes or on the Gothic grandeur of the Palace of Westminster, not far from the starting line.

Better that, of course, than to dwell on the grim reality that on the eve of its Super Bowl, this sport finds itself at its nadir -- lower, even, than it sank in 1998, when a masseur for the Festina team was caught driving a car that contained a dispensary's worth of doping products. The Tour de Dopage, as the '98 race came to be called, pulled back the curtain on a sport gone horrifically awry, with riders pooling their earnings for black-market purchases of EPO, amphetamines and human growth hormone, to name just a few performance-enhancing drugs.

Nearly a decade later cycling has yet to heal itself. "The current situation is worse than in '98," says three-time Tour winner Greg LeMond, "for the simple reason that '98 happened and nothing has changed."

That's not entirely true. Whereas the red-blood-cell booster EPO was all the rage in the '90s, advances in testing have limited its use. Now, leading riders have turned to good old-fashioned blood doping: storing their own blood, spinning it in a centrifuge to rid it of plasma, then reinjecting the "packed" red blood cells to dramatically increase stamina. In May, Ivan Basso of Italy, the runner-up in the 2005 Tour, allowed that, yes, his was among the estimated 200 bags of blood found a year earlier in the offices of Eufemiano Fuentes, the doctor at the center of the Spanish doping investigation called Operación Puerto. Basso was suspended for two years by the Italian cycling federation.

But let's not forget synthetic testosterone, a pharmacological staple of many riders -- including, apparently, Floyd Landis, who tested positive for that banned hormone during his unbelievable (as in not believable) victory in the 2006 Tour. Basso's confession came one week before the start of Landis's arbitration hearing, which came to resemble a lost episode of One Life to Live. The night before LeMond was to testify about a phone conversation he'd had with Landis after the positive test, he got a call from Landis's business manager, Will Geoghegan, who impersonated a pedophile and threatened to discuss LeMond's childhood sexual abuse, which LeMond had earlier admitted, privately, to Landis. The next day LeMond recounted the conversation in his testimony, and only then did Landis, who had been present when Geoghegan made the phone call, fire him. (The arbitrators have yet to rule on whether to uphold the positive test and strip Landis -- who has vehemently proclaimed his innocence -- of his Tour title.)

A week after that surreal scene, Danish hero Bjarne Riis admitted that he'd doped to win the 1996 Tour de France. Riis, now the director of Team CSC, won that Tour riding for Team Telekom, which in 2004 became T-Mobile. His confession capped a week in which a half-dozen former Telekom and T-Mobile riders conceded that they'd doped during their careers. Not fessing up was that team's best-known rider, the now retired Jan Ullrich, whose protestations of innocence were undercut by a former Telekom trainer who told reporters in May that he'd injected Ullrich with EPO.

The Diesel, as Ullrich was known, powered his way to victory in the 1997 Tour. A year later the Tour de Dopage was redeemed -- such, at least, was the popular story line -- by the panache of il Pirata (the Pirate), Marco Pantani, a pure climber who scored the difficult double of winning both the Giro d'Italia and the Tour de France. Alas, Pantani died of a cocaine overdose in 2004. In the book The Death of Marco Pantani, author Matt Rendell writes, "There is incontrovertible evidence that Marco's entire career was based on [EPO] abuse."

This drug-drenched sport has been so dirty for so long that the question is no longer, Who will win the Tour? It is, Can anyone win it clean? Cycling is "reaping what it has sown," says Dick Pound, chairman of the World Anti-Doping Agency and a critic of the sport's governing body, the Union Cycliste Internationale (UCI). Doping, Pound asserts, has been "so endemic" and the UCI so "unable or unwilling to control it that now, every time [a cyclist] does something really spectacular, instead of celebrating it, you're left to wonder."

Pound believes the time may be ripe for, in his words, "a South Africa-type truth-and-reconciliation program" such as the one chaired by Archbishop Desmond Tutu to heal the wounds of apartheid. "You pick a date and say, 'If you come forward before this time, say what you did, who did it, how you got it, then you are dealt with mercifully.' After the date, if we catch anybody, you're toast."

The seven years between Pantani and Landis constituted the Rule of Lance Armstrong, an interregnum of wholesome, drug-free victories. Right? Armstrong was a cancer survivor -- no way he'd put that crap in his body. Would he? Of course not, he assures SI. Asked if he won his Tours clean, Armstrong replies, "Absolutely. One hundred percent. I won the Tour de France once, twice, seven times because I was the most talented person in the field. I agree there are some f -- -- -- rats out here, with all the stuff we've seen. But sometimes, people come along with 12 cylinders."

Those forceful assertions of innocence by the 12 Cylinder Man are being tested by a disturbing new book, From Lance to Landis, by David Walsh, the Irish investigative journalist whom Armstrong has called a "little troll." Such antipathy is understandable: It was Walsh's last book, LA Confidentiel, which was published in French but not English, that persuaded a company called SCA Promotions to withhold a $5 million bonus the Texan had been promised if he won his sixth straight Tour in 2004. Armstrong sued and got his money -- plus $2.5 million in punitive damages. But the confidential depositions in that case, widely leaked, gave Walsh a rich source of grist for this latest book.

From Lance to Landis contains no smoking gun, but it repeatedly implicates Armstrong and his teammates in doping activities. There is Armstrong giving Emma O'Reilly, masseuse for his U.S. Postal Service team, a bag of used syringes (which, Walsh admits, could have been used to inject vitamins) and asking her to dispose of them on the road because he doesn't want them left at their hotel; there is O'Reilly delivering testosterone to another USPS rider and, on a different occasion, covertly being handed a bottle of unidentified pills for Armstrong by USPS director Johan Bruyneel.

What Walsh establishes beyond doubt is the doping culture that surrounded Armstrong from early in his international cycling career. In the first chapter we meet Greg Strock, a former rider for the junior squad of the U.S. Cycling Federation (USCF). Strock later recalls being injected in a motel room in 1990, when he was 17, with what he was told was "extract of cortisone" by a young USCF coach named Chris Carmichael, who would go on to greater renown as Armstrong's personal trainer. Strock would later discover that there's no such thing as "extract of cortisone," and he assumes he was injected with cortisone, which was banned as a performance enhancer. (USCF coach René Wenzel told Walsh, "Chris Carmichael gave a vitamin injection, nothing more.")

We meet the members of the talented Motorola team, for which Armstrong rode from 1992 though '96, frustrated by their inability to win races against European teams that used EPO. Thus does Walsh lay the groundwork for Armstrong's decision, following the '95 season, to work with the notorious Italian doctor Michele Ferrari, who'd said of EPO, "I don't prescribe this stuff. But . . . if a rider [uses it], that doesn't scandalize me. . . . EPO is not dangerous; it's the abuse that is. It's also dangerous to drink 10 liters of orange juice." Former Armstrong teammate Steve Swart tells Walsh that in early 1995 some members of the Motorola team made the decision to take EPO. "No one forced us to dope, but in the end you were either in or out: You couldn't survive in the sport without doing it."

We hear Prentice Steffen, former team doctor for the USPS team, which Armstrong joined in 1998, recall being approached by two Postal riders, Marty Jemison and Tyler Hamilton, and being told by Jemison, "We need to talk about the medical program. . . . As a team we are not going to be able to get where we want to go with what we're doing." Walsh writes that Steffen refused to accommodate what he construed to be a request for performance-enhancing drugs and was subsequently let go. (Jemison says he has no memory of the conversation, Walsh notes, and Hamilton, who has served a two-year suspension for doping, denies it took place.)

Later in the book an unnamed USPS rider recalls the day that about $25,000 worth of medical products were disposed of in a team camper van during the 1998 Tour. "The gendarmes were all over the field, and at one moment it seemed as if they were all moving toward our camper," says the rider, "and so the stuff was flushed down the toilet."

If Armstrong is ever proved to have doped, he will have abetted his own unmasking. On Oct. 25, 1996, doctors opened Armstrong's skull to cut two cancerous lesions off his brain. Two days later the 25-year-old cyclist was in a conference room at the Indiana University Hospital. His Motorola teammate Frankie Andreu and Andreu's fiancée, Betsy Kramar, were among some half dozen of the Texan's friends in the room. When two doctors entered, Betsy's inclination was to give Armstrong his privacy, but, she testified at the SCA hearing, he bade her to stay.

One of the doctors, Betsy recalled in her testimony, asked Armstrong, "Have you ever used any performance-enhancing drugs?" Recalling the scene for SI, Betsy says that Armstrong was seated, gazing downward and holding his IV stand with his left hand, as he ticked off five drugs: EPO, growth hormone, cortisone, steroids, testosterone. Frankie Andreu, who married Betsy in December 1996, backed up her testimony.

Armstrong dismisses the Andreus' account as "100-percent" fabricated. Betsy, he claims, is motivated by "bitterness, jealousy and hatred" -- she says Armstrong pushed Frankie out of USPS in 2000 -- while Frankie, Armstrong says, is "a good guy" but has been forced to perjure himself in order to support his wife.

Also in the hospital room that day was Stephanie McIlvain, a friend of Armstrong's who worked for Oakley, one of his sponsors. She testified that she never heard Armstrong give that list. But SI is in possession of a recorded telephone conversation between McIlvain and LeMond in which she says, "I was in that room. I heard it." Asked to reconcile her conflicting accounts, McIlvain told SI, "Yes, I do stand by my [court] testimony." She says that at the time of the taped conversation with LeMond (who had told her he was not recording the call), she was "in a bad place in my life.. . . The whole thing was a complete nightmare, and I don't want to relive it." Finally she volunteers, "I've never seen Lance Armstrong do drugs, never heard of him doing drugs."

Armstrong responded to a list of questions from SI with a query of his own. Pointing to the hundreds of drug tests he passed, he asked, "If I cheated, how did I get away with it ?"

That question may have been answered by Jonathan Vaughters, a former teammate of Armstrong's, in the following exchange of instant messages with Frankie Andreu in the summer of 2005, shortly after Armstrong won his final Tour.

Cyclevaughters: yeah, it's very complex how [they] avoid all the [doping] controls now, but it's not any new drug or anything, just the resources and planning to pull of [sic] a well devised plan

Cyclevaughters: it's why they all got dropped on stage [8] -- no refill yet -- then on the rest day -- boom 800 ml of packed cells

FDREU: they have it mastered...

Cyclevaughters: they draw the blood right after the dauphine

FDREU: how do they sneak it in, or keep it until needed

FDREU: i'm sure it's not with the truck in the frig

Cyclevaughters: motorcycle -- refridgerated [sic] panniers

Cyclevaughters: on the rest day

Cyclevaughters: floyd has a photo of the thing

FDREU: crazy ! it' [sic] just keep going to new levels

This spicy little back-and-forth was printed by Betsy Andreu and entered into evidence at the SCA hearing. What it suggests is that members of Armstrong's team had their own blood drawn after the Dauphiné Libéré, a warmup race before the Tour de France; that they saved it to reinject during the Tour; that they did poorly in Stage 8 of the Tour because they hadn't received their blood packets; and that the blood was brought in by motorcycle, in refrigerated panniers, and injected into the riders on their rest day.

Soon after the IM exchange came to the attention of Armstrong's people, Vaughters heard from one of the Texan's lawyers and hastily produced an affidavit explaining that he'd just been passing on second- and third-hand gossip.

It is cycling, unfortunately, that cannot be taken seriously. Vaughters's recantation does not change the fact that his sport is awash in pharmaceuticals and doped blood. Vaughters, in fact, has emerged as a powerful force against doping in cycling. "Obviously the sport is enormously tarnished," he recently allowed. "This is, beyond doubt, the darkest time since I've been in cycling."

But there is hope. Vaughters retired from racing in 2003, at age 29. With $50,000 of his own money he started a team of young U.S. riders. Four years later Team Slipstream, based in Boulder, Colo., is generating serious buzz in velo circles. Yes, it races in the equivalent of Triple A cycling, but it's also drawing praise for an antidoping program that is considered a model for the sport.

All of Slipstream's riders submit, at least once a week, to blood and urine tests administered by the independent Agency for Cycling Ethics. "It's nothing scheduled," Vaughters explains. "You get a call, you have this many hours to go in." The tests establish baseline blood levels for each rider. Should any of his levels fluctuate suspiciously, the rider faces suspension.

Among the teams that will take the start in London on July 7, only CSC and T-Mobile have similar in-house testing programs. Which means that 19 other teams don't. So there will definitely be doped riders in the race. Again. What's a cycling fan to do ?

I'm going back to the Tour. It is that intoxicating. For all of cycling's pathologies, I can't think of a more inspiring sight than a group of climbers clawing their way over the Col du Galibier. And when I'm looking for a sport with more integrity, I'll grab the remote and surf for some pro wrestling.

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