Blood Brothers
Floyd Landis, Lance Armstrong and Doping Allegations - WSJ.com
Cyclist Floyd Landis gives an exclusive tour through what he and others say is a culture of systematic doping in the sport.
By REED ALBERGOTTI And VANESSA O'CONNELL
Nine days into the 2004 Tour de France, the U.S. Postal Service cycling team, led by Lance Armstrong, checked into a hotel near the village of Saint-Léonard-de-Noblat.
It was July 12, one of two rest days on the Tour—the rare breaks that give riders a chance to rest and gird themselves for the punishing climbs and sprints that make this the most depleting event in professional cycling.
According to one of the U.S. Postal team's most prominent riders at the time, Floyd Landis, one room at the hotel had been set aside for a secret procedure.
Outside its door, Mr. Landis said, team staff members were stationed at each end of the hall to make sure nobody showed up unannounced. The riders were told before they went into the room not to talk when they got inside, he said. The smoke detectors had been taken down, he said, plastic was taped over the heater and the air-conditioning unit, and anything with a hole in it was taped over. The purpose, Mr. Landis figured, was to obscure the view of any hidden camera.
The riders on the team who participated in this procedure lay down on the bed, two at a time, Mr. Landis said, with a doctor on each side. Mr. Landis said he got a blood transfusion. He said he also saw Mr. Armstrong and two other team members, George Hincapie and José Luis Rubiera, taking blood. He said he didn't see any other riders getting transfusions that day.
The procedure, which enhances performance by boosting a rider's red-blood-cell counts, is considered cheating by the International Cycling Union, the sport's governing body.
Mr. Landis said that he isn't sure what happened to the empty blood bags, but that on other occasions he had seen team staffers dispose of them by cutting them into tiny pieces and flushing them down the toilet.
On July 25, after more than 2,000 miles of racing, the U.S. Postal team rode down the Champs-Élysées in Paris and over the finish line. Mr. Armstrong, the team's lead rider, had won by a dominant margin of more than six minutes. It was Mr. Armstrong's sixth victory in a row, a record.
Mr. Landis won't be riding in this year's Tour de France, which begins Saturday. He has few friends left in professional cycling. This spring, he launched an effort to expose what he says is the sordid reality of the sport. In hours of interviews with The Wall Street Journal in May, Mr. Landis detailed how he had used performance-enhancing drugs extensively during his career, and alleged that Mr. Armstrong and some others had done the same.
Three other former U.S. Postal riders told the Journal in interviews that there was doping on the team during the time Mr. Armstrong was its lead rider, and one of them admitted that he himself had doped. Several other riders said they had never observed such activity during their time with the team.
Doping is a scourge in professional athletics, and pro cycling has seen numerous scandals and suspensions over the past decade. The picture painted by Mr. Landis in the interviews, and in a series of emails he wrote to cycling sponsors in May, provides the most detailed view yet of what may be one of the biggest and most intricately coordinated cheating conspiracies in sports history. It involves blood transfusions taken in a bus on a remote alpine road, riders wearing testosterone patches to bed, and an operative posing as an autograph-seeking fan to deliver a bag of blood to a rider after a race.
Messrs. Armstrong, Hincapie and Rubiera didn't respond to requests for comment about Mr. Landis's allegations of doping. Speaking to reporters in May, Mr. Armstrong dismissed the accusations in Mr. Landis's emails as untrue, though he said he wasn't going to comment on specific claims.
"Floyd lost his credibility a long time ago," Mr. Armstrong said. "We have a person who has been under oath several times with a completely different version, written a book with a completely different version, someone that took money. He said he has no proof. It is his word versus ours. We like our word. We like where we stand and we like our credibility."
Mr. Landis was stripped of his 2006 Tour de France victory for doping, then lied about what he had done in his 2007 book, "Positively False," in which he also said he had no evidence that Mr. Armstrong had doped.
Mr. Armstrong and his advisers said Mr. Landis used the threat of going public with his accusations to try to get a job riding on Team Radio Shack, Mr. Armstrong's current team. Mr. Landis said he did ask for a job on the team last winter, but made no threats in the process.
Federal investigators are looking into Mr. Landis's allegations. The probe is being led by Jeff Novitzky, a special agent for the Food and Drug Administration's Office of Criminal Investigations who led the investigation of the Bay Area Laboratory Cooperative case that implicated many professional athletes in steroid use. Investigators are examining whether the U.S. Postal team defrauded its sponsors by using performance-enhancing drugs while vowing to race cleanly. Mr. Landis said he has shared with investigators details of many of the incidents he described in interviews with the Journal.
Chad Gerlach, who rode with the U.S. Postal team before Messrs. Armstrong and Landis were on it, said he's inclined to believe Mr. Landis's account of widespread doping based on what he saw during his own career. "I believe it because I have seen it personally," he said. "I am not ready to out my friends or provide names. I just saw it. It's just a systematic thing."
Mr. Landis's introduction to the elite ranks of professional cycling came in late 2001 when he was offered a contract to race for the U.S. Postal team. As a first step, he'd been invited to Austin, Texas, to participate in a training camp where the team members could get to know each other.
One evening during the camp, a handful of team members piled into a black Chevrolet Suburban for a night on the town, with Mr. Armstrong serving as the master of ceremonies.
Mr. Landis had met Mr. Armstrong briefly in the past, but most of what he knew about the world's most famous cyclist was what he'd read in Mr. Armstrong's 2000 memoir, "It's Not About the Bike." Mr. Landis had devoured the book, in which Mr. Armstrong chronicled his comeback from testicular cancer and portrayed himself as a modest and devoted family man.
Mr. Armstrong took the wheel of the Suburban and roared off through the streets. Stop signs didn't rate more than a tap of the brake, Mr. Landis said. Some traffic signals were wholly ignored and speed limits went unheeded. In the middle of the trip, Mr. Landis said, another rider asked, jokingly, "Are there no cops in this town?"
The journey ended at the Yellow Rose, a strip club on the north side of town. Don King, the club's general manager, said Mr. Armstrong and other cyclists on his teams have been coming to the club for about a decade. The riders were ushered into a booth. They ordered drinks and mingled with the dancers.
Later that night, some of the cyclists drove downtown to the offices of the agency that represents Mr. Armstrong. There, the party accelerated, according to Mr. Landis. Four strippers arrived at the offices with two bouncers and began performing a private show for the cyclists and others, he said. Mr. Landis and another young rider who attended, Walker Ferguson, said some people were snorting what appeared to be cocaine.
Mr. Armstrong didn't respond to requests for comment about Mr. Landis's description of the party. His lawyer, Tim Herman of Austin, said: "Mr. Armstrong had no contact with strippers or cocaine."
He was once one of Lance Armstrong's trusted teammates. Now Floyd Landis alleges that Armstrong's US Postal Service cycling team was involved in an elaborate doping scheme. WSJ's Simon Constable talks to reporter Reed Albergotti about the story.
Mr. Landis said he was surprised that Mr. Armstrong would be at such a party, but not offended. Mr. Landis had been raised by a Mennonite family in Pennsylvania's Amish Country but had distanced himself from the strict morality of his upbringing. If Mr. Armstrong was different in private than he was in public, he said, he could live with that.
"I made up my mind at that point that he's got his image, and then he's got the reality," Mr. Landis said. "He was the best bicycle racer in the world. I could respect that part, and I was happy to be around him for that."
By the time of the 2001 camp, Mr. Landis had been a professional cyclist for three years. He'd heard that the elite cyclists at the most grueling races used exotic and prohibited blood additives and synthetic drugs. Far from being repelled by this, he said, he had come to assume doping was part of the sport and, if he joined a top team, would be part of his job.
During the camp, Mr. Landis said, he had a private conversation with Mr. Armstrong's team director, Johan Bruyneel. Mr. Landis said he told Mr. Bruyneel that he wanted to be one of the eight riders who would ride with Mr. Armstrong in the Tour de France and that whatever he needed to do to improve beyond the typical training, he was willing to do. According to Mr. Landis, Mr. Bruyneel told him to just keep training, and when the time came, if it was necessary, they would figure it out.
Though nothing explicit was said about doping, Mr. Landis said, he believed the subtext—that Mr. Landis was willing to take performance-enhancing drugs—was clear to Mr. Bruyneel. "The fact that he didn't totally dismiss it was all I really needed to know."
Mr. Bruyneel did not respond to requests for comment. In a press conference in May after the publication of Mr. Landis's emails, which implicated Mr. Bruyneel in doping, Mr. Bruyneel said: "I absolutely deny everything he said."
The job of the eight riders Mr. Armstrong would select as his Tour de France "domestiques," or help riders, would be to shield him from head winds, insulate him from encroaching riders and fetch water bottles from team cars—anything they could to preserve his energy.
In May 2002, Mr. Landis said, Mr. Armstrong told him there was a chance he might be tapped to ride at the Tour. He offered to rent Mr. Landis an apartment in St. Moritz, the Swiss resort town where he was living during the cycling season.
Nearly every day for weeks the two men went on punishing rides in the mountains where, Mr. Landis recalled, he often had trouble keeping up. Mr. Armstrong's training adviser, an Italian doctor named Michele Ferrari, followed behind in an old station wagon stocked with food, water and warm clothes for the descents. At the top of a climb, Dr. Ferrari would pull over to analyze the wattage meters on their bikes that measured how much power they were putting into the pedals.
By June, Mr. Landis had shown great improvement. He finished second to Mr. Armstrong in the seven-day Critérium du Dauphiné Libéré, a warm-up race for the Tour de France. After the race, Mr. Landis said, he was packing to leave the hotel when Mr. Bruyneel, the team director, knocked on the door.
Mr. Landis said Mr. Bruyneel congratulated him and gave him the news he'd been hoping for—that he would likely be named to the nine-man Tour de France team.
According to Mr. Landis, Mr. Bruyneel told him that when he arrived back in St. Moritz, Mr. Armstrong would give him something to shorten his recovery time in the weeks leading up to the Tour. Mr. Landis said Mr. Bruyneel told him they were small patches that contained testosterone and that Mr. Landis should stick one on his stomach two out of every three nights before going to bed.
During this conversation, Mr. Landis said, Mr. Bruyneel also told him that before the Tour, Mr. Landis would have some blood extracted—blood that would then be put back in his body during the race. That process would boost his blood's ability to carry oxygen to his muscles.
Both testosterone patches and blood transfusions are banned by the World Anti-Doping Agency, which oversees drug testing in many international sports. If evidence of their use is found in the blood or urine of a cyclist, it usually results in a two-year suspension.
Mr. Landis said the conversation with Mr. Bruyneel didn't come as a surprise, and that he agreed without hesitation. He said he was motivated by the prospect of making more money as a racer, and was happy he was being introduced to doping by somebody he trusted.
That day, Mr. Landis boarded a helicopter with Mr. Armstrong for a flight back to St. Moritz. It was the first time Mr. Landis had been in a helicopter and he said he was awed by the view of the French Alps. "It was fun, man. Riding around with Lance was fun. We lived big."
When he arrived back in St. Moritz, Mr. Landis said, he went to a penthouse where Mr. Armstrong was living with his wife, Kristin, and his three children. While he was sitting at the kitchen table drinking espresso with Mr. Armstrong and his wife, Mr. Landis said, Mr. Armstrong handed him roughly 20 testosterone patches in silvery foil. According to Mr. Landis, Mr. Armstrong didn't say what the patches were.
Mr. Landis said he put them in his backpack. That night, he said, he put one on his stomach. It was the first time he had done anything that wasn't allowed under the rules of cycling, he said.
According to Mr. Landis, a few days later Dr. Ferrari, Mr. Armstrong's training adviser, asked him to lie down on a bed in Mr. Armstrong's St. Moritz apartment. He said Dr. Ferrari stuck a needle into his arm and extracted a half-liter of blood. Mr. Landis said the doctor told him blood would be transfused back into his body at the height of the Tour de France, when his body would be depleted of red blood cells.
A lawyer for Dr. Ferrari said he was unavailable for comment. In 2004, Dr. Ferrari was convicted by an Italian court of malpractice and sporting fraud for advising riders on the use of performance-enhancing drugs. Two years later, an appeals court threw out the verdict, acquitting him of malpractice and ruling that the statute of limitations had expired on the sporting-fraud conviction.
During their training rides in St. Moritz, Mr. Landis said, Mr. Armstrong explained the complicated logistics of transfusions, which involved carrying coolers with hidden blood bags across international borders. He said Mr. Armstrong told him that cyclists used to use erythropoietin, or EPO, a drug that controls red-blood-cell production, to enrich their blood during the Tour. But that substance was now detectable in tests, so riders had turned to transfusions.
In July 2002, with help from Mr. Landis, Mr. Armstrong won the Tour de France, claiming his fourth title, and the team rode with champagne through the streets of Paris. Mr. Landis, who said he'd received one transfusion during the Tour, collected a $40,000 bonus. His performance prompted the team to offer him a contract that would pay him over $200,000 a year for two years.
Less than nine months after having few prospects, and having considered selling his house to pay his bills, Mr. Landis was now an established rider with a bright future in the sport.
For the 2003 cycling season, Mr. Landis and many other American riders had rented apartments in Girona, Spain. Mr. Landis said blood that had been extracted from him, Mr. Armstrong and their teammate Mr. Hincapie was being stored in a refrigerator in the closet of Mr. Armstrong's Girona apartment. Before Mr. Armstrong left town, Mr. Landis said, he asked Mr. Landis to stay in the apartment and to monitor a digital thermometer to make sure the blood stayed at the optimal temperature just above freezing—around two degrees Celsius.
Mr. Hincapie did not respond to requests for comment. After Mr. Landis's emails, which described the blood storage, Mr. Hincapie, through a spokesman, denied the allegations.
The 2003 Tour de France proved a struggle for the U.S. Postal team. Mr. Landis, who had broken his hip in an accident in the off-season, wasn't as strong as he'd been the year before. Mr. Armstrong dueled for days with his main rival, the German Jan Ullrich, before securing what would become his fifth Tour victory.
For Mr. Landis, the race was the high point of his friendship with, and admiration for, Mr. Armstrong. "He's a fighter," Mr. Landis said. "He's a bad-ass bicycle racer. All the things I say about him, I don't in any way wish to take away from that."
By 2004, in his third full season with the team, Mr. Landis began to rival Mr. Armstrong in strength and fitness. He also began to get frustrated, he said, with the way the team revolved around Mr. Armstrong.
During an eight-day race in France in early March, Mr. Landis said, he was in position to win the sixth stage when his carbon-fiber bike frame snapped, nearly sending him over the handlebars. He said he complained to Mr. Bruyneel about not having access to newer bikes like the one Mr. Armstrong rode. Later, at a team gathering, he said, he groused: "There's a guy on the team that has a jet, and I can't get a bike?"—a reference to Mr. Armstrong's occasional use of a private jet.
By calling the team's equipment sponsors, Mr. Landis said, he was able to figure out that not all of the bicycle frames and equipment the team was given each year were going to the riders: About 60 bikes were not accounted for. He said he found out that some of the bikes were being sold for cash. Mr. Landis said Mr. Bruyneel told him that the money raised from the sales helped fund the team's doping program.
Federal investigators have contacted one of the team's sponsors, Trek Bicycle Corp., and asked about the sale of bikes, according to a person familiar with the matter.
Robert Burns, Trek's general counsel, said in an interview that the company was aware that bikes meant for U.S. Postal riders were being sold, but said it didn't know what the money was used for. "Occasionally, you'd see a bike on the Internet somewhere where it would surprise us," he said. "We didn't want to see that stuff getting sold on the market. It should be going to a better use than that." He declined to comment about whether Trek had been contacted by investigators.
According to some teammates, Mr. Landis began to grate on Mr. Armstrong and Mr. Bruyneel. "Landis is pushy," said David Clinger, a teammate on the 2002 U.S. Postal squad. Former teammate Benoit Joachim recalled that Mr. Landis had "no middle ground" emotionally. He was "either really, really funny and enjoying life, or aggressive and angry."
Later that season, Mr. Landis said, Mr. Bruyneel was giving a talk about team tactics before a race in France. When he got to Mr. Landis's role in the race, Mr. Armstrong wisecracked that Mr. Landis thought he was a world champion and deserved a jet. Mr. Landis said he shot back: "Not a jet, I want a bicycle. That's not too much to ask for."
After that exchange, Mr. Landis said, he didn't expect to be on the team much longer.
Using performance-enhancing drugs at the Tour de France is especially risky. There are frequent blood and urine tests on top riders. French police and customs agents are on the lookout for doping products, and have repeatedly confiscated them in raids. Journalists rummage through teams' garbage looking for incriminating evidence.
The transfusions in the hotel room near Saint-Léonard-de-Noblat weren't the only occasion during the 2004 Tour when some team members transfused blood, Mr. Landis said. The second time, he said, was an even stranger scene. After one day's stage, the team bus stopped on a remote alpine road. The driver opened the back of the bus to make it appear as though something was wrong, and set about pretending to fix it.
The bus had long benches on each side, and a couple of riders lay down on each one, Mr. Landis said. The doctors hooked them up, taping their blood bags to the sides of the bus, he said. Mr. Armstrong took his transfusion lying on the bus floor, he said. Mr. Landis said the process took about an hour.
At his press conference in May, Mr. Armstrong said: "What's gone on at U.S. Postal…and all of those Tours, we have nothing to hide." As for the specific allegations and claims, he said, "they are not even worth getting into."
During the 2004 Tour, Mr. Landis said, other cycling teams began courting him. Phonak Cycling Team, sponsored by a Swiss hearing-aid manufacturer, had approached him with a $500,000 contract, he said. U.S. Postal made a counteroffer, he said, but he rejected it and signed with Phonak.
Mr. Landis faced a number of challenges in the 2005 season. One of them was recovering from off-season hip surgery. Another, he said, was that his new team, Phonak, didn't have a doping program. He said he was never quite sure which doping methods worked or how a program was administered. But he said he didn't want to risk losing the edge doping might give him.
Organizing his own program, Mr. Landis said, was expensive and time-consuming. Much of the time he wasn't on the bike he was dealing with the logistics of his doping schedule and the transportation of blood and drugs. Mr. Landis said he teamed up with cyclists on other teams, such as fellow American Levi Leipheimer, on the logistics and transportation of blood. Mr. Leipheimer, who now rides for Mr. Armstrong's Radio Shack team, did not respond to messages seeking comment.
Mr. Landis said he hired a Spanish doctor in Valencia to take transfusions, and paid one person $10,000 to make two separate deliveries of half-liter bags of blood during the 2005 Tour de France. Each time, the person posed as a fan who wanted a jersey signed at the end of a stage. Mr. Landis signed it and the man handed him a nondescript package containing the blood, which Mr. Landis put in his jersey pocket, he explained. Mr. Landis said he transfused the blood himself.
Mr. Landis finished ninth in the 2005 Tour, more than 12 minutes behind Mr. Armstrong, who won his seventh title and then announced his retirement.
Before the 2006 season, Mr. Landis thought he had a good chance to win the Tour de France. That winter, Mr. Landis said, he sat down with Andy Rihs, owner of the Phonak team, and told him that to win the Tour he would need to carry out the same kind of blood doping he had done with U.S. Postal. Mr. Landis said Mr. Rihs supported the plan, and agreed to pay for Mr. Landis's program.
After Mr. Landis made that allegation in his emails, Mr. Rihs said in a statement: "Neither I nor the management of the team knew that Floyd Landis was doped." He denied that Mr. Landis informed him of any doping plan. A spokeswoman for Mr. Rihs said he declined to comment further.
Mr. Landis said money from Mr. Rihs allowed him to hire more people to handle logistics such as transporting blood.
On July 13, 2006, after stage 11 of the Tour, Mr. Landis's overall time was the fastest of any rider. For the first time in his career, he was awarded the yellow jersey that denotes the race leader.
Days later, Mr. Landis faltered badly. During the tour's 16th stage, he fell so far behind the Spaniard Oscar Pereiro that it looked as though he had no chance to win. The next day, however, Mr. Landis broke away from the pack in the mountains, leaving the Spaniard so far behind that he gained back nearly all of the lost time. He took back the yellow jersey in the final time trial against the clock and rolled into Paris with the overall win.
Then Mr. Landis's fortunes turned. Word leaked that a urine test after his miraculous mountain breakaway had revealed an abnormally high testosterone ratio. While another test still needed to be done, Mr. Landis's image had been badly damaged.
Mr. Landis said he had taken testosterone while training for the Tour. But, as he told officials for his Phonak team, he hadn't done so during the race. The next day, Mr. Landis said, team officials advised him to give a press conference to deny taking testosterone during the race. Mr. Landis flew to Spain, where a pair of Spanish lawyers had arranged what he thought was a meeting with a single reporter. Instead, he said, they ushered him into a giant press conference and handed him a statement that had been translated from Spanish. Mr. Landis tripped on the odd wording as he read the statement aloud. He said he realized immediately he had come off badly.
Minutes after the press conference ended, Mr. Landis said, he got a phone call. It was Mr. Armstrong.
Mr. Armstrong's message was simple, Mr. Landis said: If anyone asked if he had taken performance-enhancing drugs, he should respond "absolutely not," and stop talking. Mr. Landis said Mr. Armstrong advised him to get a lawyer and to not say anything else.
On the heels of the press conference, Mr. Landis said, Jonathan Vaughters, a former U.S. Postal rider, invited him to fly to New York and lie low for a while. There, Mr. Vaughters urged Mr. Landis to come clean—about everything he'd done.
Mr. Landis was conflicted. If he told the truth about taking blood transfusions, including the one he said he'd just taken during the Tour, he said he would have looked like a "lunatic" for giving that press conference. He said he was concerned the truth would not only jeopardize the careers of his friends and teammates, but might end his own.
At the same time, he felt wronged by the testing system. "I felt the punishment I received for what had happened was unfair, especially considering the magnitude of the problem and the people who were never punished."
By that fall, Mr. Landis had decided to appeal the drug test, he said, because he hadn't taken testosterone during the Tour. That, he believed, meant the whole testing protocol must have been scientifically unsound.
Pat McQuaid, president of the International Cycling Union, which usually oversees testing at the Tour, said Mr. Landis's subsequent appeals resulted in rulings that validated the testing protocol.
During a May 2007 arbitration hearing before the U.S. arm of the World Anti-Doping Agency, Mr. Landis repeatedly lied to a three-lawyer panel. He denied using testosterone or performance-enhancing substances while on the U.S. Postal team, and denied doping while on the Phonak team.
That September, Mr. Landis said, he was about to take a morning bike ride in Temecula, Calif., when his phone rang. His lawyer, Maurice Suh, told him the panel was about to make its decision. Mr. Landis said he went into the garage and cracked open a beer. "If there was ever a time to drink in the morning," he said, "that was it."
A couple of hours later, Mr. Suh told him he'd lost.
Mr. Landis said he walked upstairs to find his Tour de France trophy. With the iconic purple chalice in hand, he walked onto the balcony overlooking his driveway, hoisted the trophy over his head and threw it as hard as he could. It hit the pavement and shattered into hundreds of pieces.
In 2008, Mr. Landis appealed his case to the Court of Arbitration in Sport. He lost that appeal, too.
In February 2009, Mr. Landis came back to cycling after a two-year suspension. That same year, Mr. Armstrong also decided to return to the sport after a 3½-half-year retirement. Their experiences could not have been more different. Mr. Armstrong's team was invited to compete in the Tour de France, and he finished third.
Mr. Landis had a terrible showing at the 2009 Tour of California. Later, he fell off a ladder while painting his house and injured his leg. Mr. Landis said he began seeing a therapist—and discovered how liberating it was to tell the unvarnished truth about his career in cycling.
For the 2010 season, Mr. Landis joined the OUCH-Bahati Foundation cycling team, a lower-division club, and set his sights on the Tour of California, the biggest race the team could have participated in. But in March, Mr. Landis said, he found out his team would not be invited to take part. For Mr. Landis, it was the last straw. He decided to go public about cycling.
On a sunny, cool morning in late May, Mr. Landis sat on the deck of a small cabin in the San Jacinto Mountains southeast of Los Angeles, drinking coffee and eating an omelette. The cabin, which he bought in 2007, sits among pine trees near the end of a narrow, bumpy road wide enough for one car.
The living room, with its mismatched couches, looked somewhat bare—like a college student's first apartment. A Cannondale bike leaned against a window in the kitchen. On the refrigerator, there were nine stickers—U.S. Anti-Doping Agency notices of passed drug tests, all given since Mr. Landis's return to cycling.
Mr. Landis was about to go for a bike ride. He said he wasn't sure what he was going to do next. He had no races, nothing to compete for. He said he was planning to watch the Tour de France on television.
Floyd Landis, Lance Armstrong and Doping Allegations - WSJ.com
Cyclist Floyd Landis gives an exclusive tour through what he and others say is a culture of systematic doping in the sport.
By REED ALBERGOTTI And VANESSA O'CONNELL
Nine days into the 2004 Tour de France, the U.S. Postal Service cycling team, led by Lance Armstrong, checked into a hotel near the village of Saint-Léonard-de-Noblat.
It was July 12, one of two rest days on the Tour—the rare breaks that give riders a chance to rest and gird themselves for the punishing climbs and sprints that make this the most depleting event in professional cycling.
According to one of the U.S. Postal team's most prominent riders at the time, Floyd Landis, one room at the hotel had been set aside for a secret procedure.
Outside its door, Mr. Landis said, team staff members were stationed at each end of the hall to make sure nobody showed up unannounced. The riders were told before they went into the room not to talk when they got inside, he said. The smoke detectors had been taken down, he said, plastic was taped over the heater and the air-conditioning unit, and anything with a hole in it was taped over. The purpose, Mr. Landis figured, was to obscure the view of any hidden camera.
The riders on the team who participated in this procedure lay down on the bed, two at a time, Mr. Landis said, with a doctor on each side. Mr. Landis said he got a blood transfusion. He said he also saw Mr. Armstrong and two other team members, George Hincapie and José Luis Rubiera, taking blood. He said he didn't see any other riders getting transfusions that day.
The procedure, which enhances performance by boosting a rider's red-blood-cell counts, is considered cheating by the International Cycling Union, the sport's governing body.
Mr. Landis said that he isn't sure what happened to the empty blood bags, but that on other occasions he had seen team staffers dispose of them by cutting them into tiny pieces and flushing them down the toilet.
On July 25, after more than 2,000 miles of racing, the U.S. Postal team rode down the Champs-Élysées in Paris and over the finish line. Mr. Armstrong, the team's lead rider, had won by a dominant margin of more than six minutes. It was Mr. Armstrong's sixth victory in a row, a record.
Mr. Landis won't be riding in this year's Tour de France, which begins Saturday. He has few friends left in professional cycling. This spring, he launched an effort to expose what he says is the sordid reality of the sport. In hours of interviews with The Wall Street Journal in May, Mr. Landis detailed how he had used performance-enhancing drugs extensively during his career, and alleged that Mr. Armstrong and some others had done the same.
Three other former U.S. Postal riders told the Journal in interviews that there was doping on the team during the time Mr. Armstrong was its lead rider, and one of them admitted that he himself had doped. Several other riders said they had never observed such activity during their time with the team.
Doping is a scourge in professional athletics, and pro cycling has seen numerous scandals and suspensions over the past decade. The picture painted by Mr. Landis in the interviews, and in a series of emails he wrote to cycling sponsors in May, provides the most detailed view yet of what may be one of the biggest and most intricately coordinated cheating conspiracies in sports history. It involves blood transfusions taken in a bus on a remote alpine road, riders wearing testosterone patches to bed, and an operative posing as an autograph-seeking fan to deliver a bag of blood to a rider after a race.
Messrs. Armstrong, Hincapie and Rubiera didn't respond to requests for comment about Mr. Landis's allegations of doping. Speaking to reporters in May, Mr. Armstrong dismissed the accusations in Mr. Landis's emails as untrue, though he said he wasn't going to comment on specific claims.
"Floyd lost his credibility a long time ago," Mr. Armstrong said. "We have a person who has been under oath several times with a completely different version, written a book with a completely different version, someone that took money. He said he has no proof. It is his word versus ours. We like our word. We like where we stand and we like our credibility."
Mr. Landis was stripped of his 2006 Tour de France victory for doping, then lied about what he had done in his 2007 book, "Positively False," in which he also said he had no evidence that Mr. Armstrong had doped.
Mr. Armstrong and his advisers said Mr. Landis used the threat of going public with his accusations to try to get a job riding on Team Radio Shack, Mr. Armstrong's current team. Mr. Landis said he did ask for a job on the team last winter, but made no threats in the process.
Federal investigators are looking into Mr. Landis's allegations. The probe is being led by Jeff Novitzky, a special agent for the Food and Drug Administration's Office of Criminal Investigations who led the investigation of the Bay Area Laboratory Cooperative case that implicated many professional athletes in steroid use. Investigators are examining whether the U.S. Postal team defrauded its sponsors by using performance-enhancing drugs while vowing to race cleanly. Mr. Landis said he has shared with investigators details of many of the incidents he described in interviews with the Journal.
Chad Gerlach, who rode with the U.S. Postal team before Messrs. Armstrong and Landis were on it, said he's inclined to believe Mr. Landis's account of widespread doping based on what he saw during his own career. "I believe it because I have seen it personally," he said. "I am not ready to out my friends or provide names. I just saw it. It's just a systematic thing."
Mr. Landis's introduction to the elite ranks of professional cycling came in late 2001 when he was offered a contract to race for the U.S. Postal team. As a first step, he'd been invited to Austin, Texas, to participate in a training camp where the team members could get to know each other.
One evening during the camp, a handful of team members piled into a black Chevrolet Suburban for a night on the town, with Mr. Armstrong serving as the master of ceremonies.
Mr. Landis had met Mr. Armstrong briefly in the past, but most of what he knew about the world's most famous cyclist was what he'd read in Mr. Armstrong's 2000 memoir, "It's Not About the Bike." Mr. Landis had devoured the book, in which Mr. Armstrong chronicled his comeback from testicular cancer and portrayed himself as a modest and devoted family man.
Mr. Armstrong took the wheel of the Suburban and roared off through the streets. Stop signs didn't rate more than a tap of the brake, Mr. Landis said. Some traffic signals were wholly ignored and speed limits went unheeded. In the middle of the trip, Mr. Landis said, another rider asked, jokingly, "Are there no cops in this town?"
The journey ended at the Yellow Rose, a strip club on the north side of town. Don King, the club's general manager, said Mr. Armstrong and other cyclists on his teams have been coming to the club for about a decade. The riders were ushered into a booth. They ordered drinks and mingled with the dancers.
Later that night, some of the cyclists drove downtown to the offices of the agency that represents Mr. Armstrong. There, the party accelerated, according to Mr. Landis. Four strippers arrived at the offices with two bouncers and began performing a private show for the cyclists and others, he said. Mr. Landis and another young rider who attended, Walker Ferguson, said some people were snorting what appeared to be cocaine.
Mr. Armstrong didn't respond to requests for comment about Mr. Landis's description of the party. His lawyer, Tim Herman of Austin, said: "Mr. Armstrong had no contact with strippers or cocaine."
He was once one of Lance Armstrong's trusted teammates. Now Floyd Landis alleges that Armstrong's US Postal Service cycling team was involved in an elaborate doping scheme. WSJ's Simon Constable talks to reporter Reed Albergotti about the story.
Mr. Landis said he was surprised that Mr. Armstrong would be at such a party, but not offended. Mr. Landis had been raised by a Mennonite family in Pennsylvania's Amish Country but had distanced himself from the strict morality of his upbringing. If Mr. Armstrong was different in private than he was in public, he said, he could live with that.
"I made up my mind at that point that he's got his image, and then he's got the reality," Mr. Landis said. "He was the best bicycle racer in the world. I could respect that part, and I was happy to be around him for that."
By the time of the 2001 camp, Mr. Landis had been a professional cyclist for three years. He'd heard that the elite cyclists at the most grueling races used exotic and prohibited blood additives and synthetic drugs. Far from being repelled by this, he said, he had come to assume doping was part of the sport and, if he joined a top team, would be part of his job.
During the camp, Mr. Landis said, he had a private conversation with Mr. Armstrong's team director, Johan Bruyneel. Mr. Landis said he told Mr. Bruyneel that he wanted to be one of the eight riders who would ride with Mr. Armstrong in the Tour de France and that whatever he needed to do to improve beyond the typical training, he was willing to do. According to Mr. Landis, Mr. Bruyneel told him to just keep training, and when the time came, if it was necessary, they would figure it out.
Though nothing explicit was said about doping, Mr. Landis said, he believed the subtext—that Mr. Landis was willing to take performance-enhancing drugs—was clear to Mr. Bruyneel. "The fact that he didn't totally dismiss it was all I really needed to know."
Mr. Bruyneel did not respond to requests for comment. In a press conference in May after the publication of Mr. Landis's emails, which implicated Mr. Bruyneel in doping, Mr. Bruyneel said: "I absolutely deny everything he said."
The job of the eight riders Mr. Armstrong would select as his Tour de France "domestiques," or help riders, would be to shield him from head winds, insulate him from encroaching riders and fetch water bottles from team cars—anything they could to preserve his energy.
In May 2002, Mr. Landis said, Mr. Armstrong told him there was a chance he might be tapped to ride at the Tour. He offered to rent Mr. Landis an apartment in St. Moritz, the Swiss resort town where he was living during the cycling season.
Nearly every day for weeks the two men went on punishing rides in the mountains where, Mr. Landis recalled, he often had trouble keeping up. Mr. Armstrong's training adviser, an Italian doctor named Michele Ferrari, followed behind in an old station wagon stocked with food, water and warm clothes for the descents. At the top of a climb, Dr. Ferrari would pull over to analyze the wattage meters on their bikes that measured how much power they were putting into the pedals.
By June, Mr. Landis had shown great improvement. He finished second to Mr. Armstrong in the seven-day Critérium du Dauphiné Libéré, a warm-up race for the Tour de France. After the race, Mr. Landis said, he was packing to leave the hotel when Mr. Bruyneel, the team director, knocked on the door.
Mr. Landis said Mr. Bruyneel congratulated him and gave him the news he'd been hoping for—that he would likely be named to the nine-man Tour de France team.
According to Mr. Landis, Mr. Bruyneel told him that when he arrived back in St. Moritz, Mr. Armstrong would give him something to shorten his recovery time in the weeks leading up to the Tour. Mr. Landis said Mr. Bruyneel told him they were small patches that contained testosterone and that Mr. Landis should stick one on his stomach two out of every three nights before going to bed.
During this conversation, Mr. Landis said, Mr. Bruyneel also told him that before the Tour, Mr. Landis would have some blood extracted—blood that would then be put back in his body during the race. That process would boost his blood's ability to carry oxygen to his muscles.
Both testosterone patches and blood transfusions are banned by the World Anti-Doping Agency, which oversees drug testing in many international sports. If evidence of their use is found in the blood or urine of a cyclist, it usually results in a two-year suspension.
Mr. Landis said the conversation with Mr. Bruyneel didn't come as a surprise, and that he agreed without hesitation. He said he was motivated by the prospect of making more money as a racer, and was happy he was being introduced to doping by somebody he trusted.
That day, Mr. Landis boarded a helicopter with Mr. Armstrong for a flight back to St. Moritz. It was the first time Mr. Landis had been in a helicopter and he said he was awed by the view of the French Alps. "It was fun, man. Riding around with Lance was fun. We lived big."
When he arrived back in St. Moritz, Mr. Landis said, he went to a penthouse where Mr. Armstrong was living with his wife, Kristin, and his three children. While he was sitting at the kitchen table drinking espresso with Mr. Armstrong and his wife, Mr. Landis said, Mr. Armstrong handed him roughly 20 testosterone patches in silvery foil. According to Mr. Landis, Mr. Armstrong didn't say what the patches were.
Mr. Landis said he put them in his backpack. That night, he said, he put one on his stomach. It was the first time he had done anything that wasn't allowed under the rules of cycling, he said.
According to Mr. Landis, a few days later Dr. Ferrari, Mr. Armstrong's training adviser, asked him to lie down on a bed in Mr. Armstrong's St. Moritz apartment. He said Dr. Ferrari stuck a needle into his arm and extracted a half-liter of blood. Mr. Landis said the doctor told him blood would be transfused back into his body at the height of the Tour de France, when his body would be depleted of red blood cells.
A lawyer for Dr. Ferrari said he was unavailable for comment. In 2004, Dr. Ferrari was convicted by an Italian court of malpractice and sporting fraud for advising riders on the use of performance-enhancing drugs. Two years later, an appeals court threw out the verdict, acquitting him of malpractice and ruling that the statute of limitations had expired on the sporting-fraud conviction.
During their training rides in St. Moritz, Mr. Landis said, Mr. Armstrong explained the complicated logistics of transfusions, which involved carrying coolers with hidden blood bags across international borders. He said Mr. Armstrong told him that cyclists used to use erythropoietin, or EPO, a drug that controls red-blood-cell production, to enrich their blood during the Tour. But that substance was now detectable in tests, so riders had turned to transfusions.
In July 2002, with help from Mr. Landis, Mr. Armstrong won the Tour de France, claiming his fourth title, and the team rode with champagne through the streets of Paris. Mr. Landis, who said he'd received one transfusion during the Tour, collected a $40,000 bonus. His performance prompted the team to offer him a contract that would pay him over $200,000 a year for two years.
Less than nine months after having few prospects, and having considered selling his house to pay his bills, Mr. Landis was now an established rider with a bright future in the sport.
For the 2003 cycling season, Mr. Landis and many other American riders had rented apartments in Girona, Spain. Mr. Landis said blood that had been extracted from him, Mr. Armstrong and their teammate Mr. Hincapie was being stored in a refrigerator in the closet of Mr. Armstrong's Girona apartment. Before Mr. Armstrong left town, Mr. Landis said, he asked Mr. Landis to stay in the apartment and to monitor a digital thermometer to make sure the blood stayed at the optimal temperature just above freezing—around two degrees Celsius.
Mr. Hincapie did not respond to requests for comment. After Mr. Landis's emails, which described the blood storage, Mr. Hincapie, through a spokesman, denied the allegations.
The 2003 Tour de France proved a struggle for the U.S. Postal team. Mr. Landis, who had broken his hip in an accident in the off-season, wasn't as strong as he'd been the year before. Mr. Armstrong dueled for days with his main rival, the German Jan Ullrich, before securing what would become his fifth Tour victory.
For Mr. Landis, the race was the high point of his friendship with, and admiration for, Mr. Armstrong. "He's a fighter," Mr. Landis said. "He's a bad-ass bicycle racer. All the things I say about him, I don't in any way wish to take away from that."
By 2004, in his third full season with the team, Mr. Landis began to rival Mr. Armstrong in strength and fitness. He also began to get frustrated, he said, with the way the team revolved around Mr. Armstrong.
During an eight-day race in France in early March, Mr. Landis said, he was in position to win the sixth stage when his carbon-fiber bike frame snapped, nearly sending him over the handlebars. He said he complained to Mr. Bruyneel about not having access to newer bikes like the one Mr. Armstrong rode. Later, at a team gathering, he said, he groused: "There's a guy on the team that has a jet, and I can't get a bike?"—a reference to Mr. Armstrong's occasional use of a private jet.
By calling the team's equipment sponsors, Mr. Landis said, he was able to figure out that not all of the bicycle frames and equipment the team was given each year were going to the riders: About 60 bikes were not accounted for. He said he found out that some of the bikes were being sold for cash. Mr. Landis said Mr. Bruyneel told him that the money raised from the sales helped fund the team's doping program.
Federal investigators have contacted one of the team's sponsors, Trek Bicycle Corp., and asked about the sale of bikes, according to a person familiar with the matter.
Robert Burns, Trek's general counsel, said in an interview that the company was aware that bikes meant for U.S. Postal riders were being sold, but said it didn't know what the money was used for. "Occasionally, you'd see a bike on the Internet somewhere where it would surprise us," he said. "We didn't want to see that stuff getting sold on the market. It should be going to a better use than that." He declined to comment about whether Trek had been contacted by investigators.
According to some teammates, Mr. Landis began to grate on Mr. Armstrong and Mr. Bruyneel. "Landis is pushy," said David Clinger, a teammate on the 2002 U.S. Postal squad. Former teammate Benoit Joachim recalled that Mr. Landis had "no middle ground" emotionally. He was "either really, really funny and enjoying life, or aggressive and angry."
Later that season, Mr. Landis said, Mr. Bruyneel was giving a talk about team tactics before a race in France. When he got to Mr. Landis's role in the race, Mr. Armstrong wisecracked that Mr. Landis thought he was a world champion and deserved a jet. Mr. Landis said he shot back: "Not a jet, I want a bicycle. That's not too much to ask for."
After that exchange, Mr. Landis said, he didn't expect to be on the team much longer.
Using performance-enhancing drugs at the Tour de France is especially risky. There are frequent blood and urine tests on top riders. French police and customs agents are on the lookout for doping products, and have repeatedly confiscated them in raids. Journalists rummage through teams' garbage looking for incriminating evidence.
The transfusions in the hotel room near Saint-Léonard-de-Noblat weren't the only occasion during the 2004 Tour when some team members transfused blood, Mr. Landis said. The second time, he said, was an even stranger scene. After one day's stage, the team bus stopped on a remote alpine road. The driver opened the back of the bus to make it appear as though something was wrong, and set about pretending to fix it.
The bus had long benches on each side, and a couple of riders lay down on each one, Mr. Landis said. The doctors hooked them up, taping their blood bags to the sides of the bus, he said. Mr. Armstrong took his transfusion lying on the bus floor, he said. Mr. Landis said the process took about an hour.
At his press conference in May, Mr. Armstrong said: "What's gone on at U.S. Postal…and all of those Tours, we have nothing to hide." As for the specific allegations and claims, he said, "they are not even worth getting into."
During the 2004 Tour, Mr. Landis said, other cycling teams began courting him. Phonak Cycling Team, sponsored by a Swiss hearing-aid manufacturer, had approached him with a $500,000 contract, he said. U.S. Postal made a counteroffer, he said, but he rejected it and signed with Phonak.
Mr. Landis faced a number of challenges in the 2005 season. One of them was recovering from off-season hip surgery. Another, he said, was that his new team, Phonak, didn't have a doping program. He said he was never quite sure which doping methods worked or how a program was administered. But he said he didn't want to risk losing the edge doping might give him.
Organizing his own program, Mr. Landis said, was expensive and time-consuming. Much of the time he wasn't on the bike he was dealing with the logistics of his doping schedule and the transportation of blood and drugs. Mr. Landis said he teamed up with cyclists on other teams, such as fellow American Levi Leipheimer, on the logistics and transportation of blood. Mr. Leipheimer, who now rides for Mr. Armstrong's Radio Shack team, did not respond to messages seeking comment.
Mr. Landis said he hired a Spanish doctor in Valencia to take transfusions, and paid one person $10,000 to make two separate deliveries of half-liter bags of blood during the 2005 Tour de France. Each time, the person posed as a fan who wanted a jersey signed at the end of a stage. Mr. Landis signed it and the man handed him a nondescript package containing the blood, which Mr. Landis put in his jersey pocket, he explained. Mr. Landis said he transfused the blood himself.
Mr. Landis finished ninth in the 2005 Tour, more than 12 minutes behind Mr. Armstrong, who won his seventh title and then announced his retirement.
Before the 2006 season, Mr. Landis thought he had a good chance to win the Tour de France. That winter, Mr. Landis said, he sat down with Andy Rihs, owner of the Phonak team, and told him that to win the Tour he would need to carry out the same kind of blood doping he had done with U.S. Postal. Mr. Landis said Mr. Rihs supported the plan, and agreed to pay for Mr. Landis's program.
After Mr. Landis made that allegation in his emails, Mr. Rihs said in a statement: "Neither I nor the management of the team knew that Floyd Landis was doped." He denied that Mr. Landis informed him of any doping plan. A spokeswoman for Mr. Rihs said he declined to comment further.
Mr. Landis said money from Mr. Rihs allowed him to hire more people to handle logistics such as transporting blood.
On July 13, 2006, after stage 11 of the Tour, Mr. Landis's overall time was the fastest of any rider. For the first time in his career, he was awarded the yellow jersey that denotes the race leader.
Days later, Mr. Landis faltered badly. During the tour's 16th stage, he fell so far behind the Spaniard Oscar Pereiro that it looked as though he had no chance to win. The next day, however, Mr. Landis broke away from the pack in the mountains, leaving the Spaniard so far behind that he gained back nearly all of the lost time. He took back the yellow jersey in the final time trial against the clock and rolled into Paris with the overall win.
Then Mr. Landis's fortunes turned. Word leaked that a urine test after his miraculous mountain breakaway had revealed an abnormally high testosterone ratio. While another test still needed to be done, Mr. Landis's image had been badly damaged.
Mr. Landis said he had taken testosterone while training for the Tour. But, as he told officials for his Phonak team, he hadn't done so during the race. The next day, Mr. Landis said, team officials advised him to give a press conference to deny taking testosterone during the race. Mr. Landis flew to Spain, where a pair of Spanish lawyers had arranged what he thought was a meeting with a single reporter. Instead, he said, they ushered him into a giant press conference and handed him a statement that had been translated from Spanish. Mr. Landis tripped on the odd wording as he read the statement aloud. He said he realized immediately he had come off badly.
Minutes after the press conference ended, Mr. Landis said, he got a phone call. It was Mr. Armstrong.
Mr. Armstrong's message was simple, Mr. Landis said: If anyone asked if he had taken performance-enhancing drugs, he should respond "absolutely not," and stop talking. Mr. Landis said Mr. Armstrong advised him to get a lawyer and to not say anything else.
On the heels of the press conference, Mr. Landis said, Jonathan Vaughters, a former U.S. Postal rider, invited him to fly to New York and lie low for a while. There, Mr. Vaughters urged Mr. Landis to come clean—about everything he'd done.
Mr. Landis was conflicted. If he told the truth about taking blood transfusions, including the one he said he'd just taken during the Tour, he said he would have looked like a "lunatic" for giving that press conference. He said he was concerned the truth would not only jeopardize the careers of his friends and teammates, but might end his own.
At the same time, he felt wronged by the testing system. "I felt the punishment I received for what had happened was unfair, especially considering the magnitude of the problem and the people who were never punished."
By that fall, Mr. Landis had decided to appeal the drug test, he said, because he hadn't taken testosterone during the Tour. That, he believed, meant the whole testing protocol must have been scientifically unsound.
Pat McQuaid, president of the International Cycling Union, which usually oversees testing at the Tour, said Mr. Landis's subsequent appeals resulted in rulings that validated the testing protocol.
During a May 2007 arbitration hearing before the U.S. arm of the World Anti-Doping Agency, Mr. Landis repeatedly lied to a three-lawyer panel. He denied using testosterone or performance-enhancing substances while on the U.S. Postal team, and denied doping while on the Phonak team.
That September, Mr. Landis said, he was about to take a morning bike ride in Temecula, Calif., when his phone rang. His lawyer, Maurice Suh, told him the panel was about to make its decision. Mr. Landis said he went into the garage and cracked open a beer. "If there was ever a time to drink in the morning," he said, "that was it."
A couple of hours later, Mr. Suh told him he'd lost.
Mr. Landis said he walked upstairs to find his Tour de France trophy. With the iconic purple chalice in hand, he walked onto the balcony overlooking his driveway, hoisted the trophy over his head and threw it as hard as he could. It hit the pavement and shattered into hundreds of pieces.
In 2008, Mr. Landis appealed his case to the Court of Arbitration in Sport. He lost that appeal, too.
In February 2009, Mr. Landis came back to cycling after a two-year suspension. That same year, Mr. Armstrong also decided to return to the sport after a 3½-half-year retirement. Their experiences could not have been more different. Mr. Armstrong's team was invited to compete in the Tour de France, and he finished third.
Mr. Landis had a terrible showing at the 2009 Tour of California. Later, he fell off a ladder while painting his house and injured his leg. Mr. Landis said he began seeing a therapist—and discovered how liberating it was to tell the unvarnished truth about his career in cycling.
For the 2010 season, Mr. Landis joined the OUCH-Bahati Foundation cycling team, a lower-division club, and set his sights on the Tour of California, the biggest race the team could have participated in. But in March, Mr. Landis said, he found out his team would not be invited to take part. For Mr. Landis, it was the last straw. He decided to go public about cycling.
On a sunny, cool morning in late May, Mr. Landis sat on the deck of a small cabin in the San Jacinto Mountains southeast of Los Angeles, drinking coffee and eating an omelette. The cabin, which he bought in 2007, sits among pine trees near the end of a narrow, bumpy road wide enough for one car.
The living room, with its mismatched couches, looked somewhat bare—like a college student's first apartment. A Cannondale bike leaned against a window in the kitchen. On the refrigerator, there were nine stickers—U.S. Anti-Doping Agency notices of passed drug tests, all given since Mr. Landis's return to cycling.
Mr. Landis was about to go for a bike ride. He said he wasn't sure what he was going to do next. He had no races, nothing to compete for. He said he was planning to watch the Tour de France on television.
