Every turn of the pedal was a miracle, proof that the impossible was just another obstacle. That the cancer that almost killed him and left him unable to walk could never stop him. Nothing would keep him from riding this bike.
Cameron Stewart was three years old when he fell down and couldn’t get back up. The leukemia was already advanced when they found it, working hard to steal his life. It was a two-year war through the cancer and the chemo. He’d come out alive but wounded; those tiny legs were useless beneath him. The physio sessions just couldn’t get them to move.
Then one day he watched a man ride over mountains in a faraway place. His dad, Paul, told him about the Tour de France and about the man who’d beaten cancer and went on to become the greatest cyclist in the world. “I want to have Lance Armstrong legs,” Cameron said. It seemed like a perfect idea.
Day after day they went down to their garage in Placerville, Calif., and Paul held Cameron up on his bike, suspended off the ground, as the five-year-old pushed with all his might. He pushed and pushed—and then, finally, he pedalled. He kept going, practising as his father pushed him around the block. A month went by. And then one day his dad stepped back and Cameron pushed the bike forward on his own. “I HAVE LANCE ARMSTRONG LEGS!” Cameron shouted. And a few days later, he walked.
Lance Armstrong didn’t give Cameron Stewart the strength to move his legs—the kid did that on his own. But Armstrong helped him find the courage to do it. He helped millions find hope within themselves. He built a $500-million empire for cancer research on the back of his own survival story, bolstered to Nike-branded levels by an unfathomable stretch of seven straight Tour de France wins. “Maybe it’s because illness is universal— we’ve all been sick, no one is immune—and so my winning the Tour was a symbolic act,” Armstrong wrote in It’s Not About the Bike. “Proof that you can not only survive cancer, but thrive after it. Maybe… I am hope.”
But hope lies, sometimes. In October, the United States Anti-Doping Agency released an exhaustive report—that included testimony from 11 of Armstrong’s former teammates—detailing damning evidence that Armstrong not only used performance-enhancing drugs and doped throughout his career, but also pressured his teammates to do so and aggressively intimidated anyone who challenged him. He was the kingpin in a doping scheme run like a two-wheeled mafia, insisting his underling domestiques cover up his elaborate fraud. After years of vehemently denying allegations that he cheated, Armstrong had nothing left to say. He waived his right to testify against the allegations, and was subsequently stripped of his seven Tour titles and banned from pro cycling for life.
Legend turned to myth. The man who cheated death seemed to have cheated the millions who believed in the message he peddled: that the impossible can happen, that miracles are real. The USADA report forced us to face the dual narrative that has followed Armstrong through his careeer: that of villain and saint. En route to becoming the most celebrated cyclist in history, he used his celebrity to help millions of people. That work has done untold good. But according to the evidence, Armstrong’s legacy was built on deceit and intimidation. “Everybody wants to know what I am on,” he once told us in a Nike ad. “What am I on? I’m on my bike.” Now he’s left us with another, more complicated question: Faced with this dichotomy of hero and cheat, what does Lance Armstrong mean to us now?
It was July 25, 1999, when Armstrong cycled toward Paris, a defiant victor who’d overcome a war. The 27-year-old Texan was about to become only the second American to win the Tour de France—and the greatest comeback story in the history of sport. It had been a gruelling three weeks across the French countryside, through the Alps and to the highest peaks of the Pyrenees. Yes, that was part of the battle. But the hardest part began less than three years earlier, when Armstrong felt the burn of toxic chemotherapy push through his veins, eating him from the inside out. If he wasn’t in pain, he was vomiting or hacking black chunks from deep inside his chest. The chemo consumed him, attacking his marrow and muscle, his teeth, the linings of his throat and stomach. It left him unable to walk, unable to talk. “Felt kind of like a living death,” he wrote. What he thought was an inflamed testicle caused by hours of training on his bike had turned out to be stage three cancer, which had spread to his brain and lungs by the time it was found. Armstrong—a brash but sensationally athletic cyclist who was already a world champion, a two-time Olympian and a millionaire—was rendered to his weakest, most vulnerable state, the only way he could outpace death.
He survived the chemo, brain surgery, the isolation and fear. His doctors beat that cancer into remission. Armstrong got back on the bike. He turned his frailty into strength through hours in the gym and miles on the road, willing his body back into superhuman form. In 1998, he joined the U.S. Postal Service team, which viewed itself as a ragtag bunch of scrappy underdogs without lavish funding. “I was willing to sacrifice the entire season to prepare for the Tour,” Armstrong wrote. “I staked everything on it.” Under his direction, the USPS team skipped races during the season to train for the punishing three-week ride through France—raising suspicion that they were also evading drug testing by limiting their appearances.
And then, along those Paris streets, his comeback story seemed complete. “I’d like to say hi to Kelly Davidson, back in Forth Worth, Texas,” Armstrong told a TV camera as he rode ahead of the peloton. “This is for you.” Kelly was an 11-year-old cancer patient Armstrong had met while in remission. Back home she had stayed up until midnight, well past her bedtime, to watch her friend win the Tour. “I’m just crossing my fingers and hoping,” she told the Associated Press ahead of his win.
There were American and Texan flags waving as Armstrong neared the final stretch on the Champs-Élysées, but not everyone was cheering. Cycling had been marred a year before when the Festina team from France was busted for doping and police raided the rooms of other teams at the Tour. The reality of doping in cycling was exposed. So in 1999—the Tour of Renewal, as hopeful organizers dubbed it—skeptical reporters questioned Armstrong’s storybook return. Newspapers said he was “from another planet.” Armstrong was defiant. “It’s incredible that they print this,” he said. “They don’t print the truth.” He called the previous year’s drug scandal “exaggerated and overblown.”
Armstrong lashed out at French rider Christophe Bassons after Bassons criticized the culture of doping in cycling. “He wants to be a professional, then he should act like one,” Armstrong told the press after he chased Bassons down during the race and berated him. “And I told him so.” He called Le Monde’s report that he tested positive for cortisone “vulture journalism,” and when speaking to the Los Angeles Times, said: “I feel a bit like Bill Clinton having to defend myself all the time. But Clinton obviously made some mistakes; we don’t have anything to hide.”
The truth behind the newspaper allegations came out in USADA’s report. Tyler Hamilton, a member of Armstrong’s inner circle on the USPS team, says every few days during the 1999 Tour, he, Armstrong and teammate Kevin Livingston injected the drug Actovegin from syringes snuck into their camper by the team’s doctor, Luis Garcia del Moral, or trainer, Pepe Marti. They discarded the used syringes in a Coke can, banged it up to look like garbage and hid it in the doctor’s bag, who’d sling it over his shoulder, push open the trailer door and disappear into the crowd of screaming fans, reporters, tour officials and police. The team covered up illegal cortisone shots by backdating a prescription for topical cream they claimed he used to help treat saddle sores. Throughout the race, Armstrong’s teammates have said, they mixed testosterone with olive oil to drop under their tongues.
After winning his first Tour, Armstrong became a global sensation. Nike flew him to New York for a press conference. Mayor Rudy Giuliani declared July 29 Lance Armstrong Day. He was a guest on Late Night with David Letterman and the Today show. On Good Morning America he spoke to Kelly, his 11-year-old friend, who was beamed across TV sets around the country from Cook Children’s Medical Center in Fort Worth. She was bald from chemotherapy, and wore a ring Armstrong had given her on a chain around her neck. He gave her a bike on the air, and she showed him a stuffed animal she bought at the hospital gift shop for the baby Armstrong and Kristin, his wife at the time, were about to have. Kelly was asked what it meant to her that Armstrong had won. “It makes me really, really happy,” she said.
One victory would never be enough. As millions continued to find inspiration in Armstrong, he became more and more militant about doping. “He was haunted by what others might be doing,” Tyler Hamilton wrote in his book, The Secret Race. According to the USADA report, Armstrong was committed to a doping program provided by Dr. Michele Ferrari, a notorious Italian doctor believed to have given performance enhancing drugs to athletes. Team director Johan Bruyneel, team doctors and other personnel were directly involved with the conspiracy, which included evading drug tests and smuggling illegal drugs across Europe, the report says. Several teammates testified that Armstrong kept the doping drug EPO at his home in Nice and would distribute it to them when needed. Armstrong became less like a teammate and more like a CEO, Hamilton says. At the time, USA Today had estimated Armstrong’s income at $7.5 million, including sponsorship deals with Nike, Coca-Cola and Bristol-Myers Squibb. His autobiography became a bestseller. The USPS team no longer had to drive from race to race—now they were zipping around in a private jet.
On a sunny morning in June 2000, a few weeks before the Tour de France, that jet carried Armstrong, Hamilton, Livingston and Bruyneel from Nice to Valencia. They drove to a hotel in the countryside village of Les Gavines, where Ferrari, del Moral and Marti were waiting to extract a pint of blood from each rider. It took about 20 minutes. The bags were then taken away by Ferrari, who kept them refrigerated until the riders were ready to reinject the blood during the Tour.
Armstrong called Kelly from Europe just before the 2000 Tour began. Her life was slipping away. “You fight,” Armstrong recalled telling her in his 2003 book, Every Second Counts. “It hasn’t beaten you and it can’t beat you. I don’t let anything kick me without kicking back.” But it was apparent Kelly couldn’t win. “Is there anything I can do for you?” he asked. “Wear yellow for me,” she said.
The press was once again rife with concerns about doping. “I’m sick of the myth of widespread doping in cycling,” Armstrong told the Boston Globe. “I was world champion in 1993 and proved from the start of my career that I was one of the best. So why the detractors? Why the surprise?”
By July 11, Armstrong had given himself a 4:14 overall lead as the riders moved through the Pyrenees. “I feel strong,” he told reporters. That night, Armstrong, Hamilton and Livingston met in a hotel suite, where, according to Hamilton, the blood that had been extracted in Les Gavines was re-injected. Hamilton and Livingston went into one room and Armstrong was in the adjoining room, visible through an open door. Bags of blood hung from picture frame hooks above each bed, and they lay there for 30 minutes. They shivered as the cold blood entered them and joked about whose moved the fastest.
Armstrong went on to win his second straight Tour by a wide margin of more than six minutes. Fans packed around as Armstrong cycled down the Champs-Élysées toward victory. Among them was his wife, Kristin, with their nine-month-old son, Luke, in her arms. “This is just amazing,” said Tina Stengel, a 17-year-old from Florida who was in the crowd cheering for Armstrong. “That someone can overcome all kinds of odds and show true American spirit.”
After the victory, Armstrong told reporters, “I’ll be back next year. I can promise you that.”
Kelly Davidson died that August. Armstrong sent a letter to be read during her funeral and visited her family when he returned to Texas. “I couldn’t think of the right things to say,” Armstrong wrote. “I marvelled at their strength.” Later, Kristin went with Kelly’s mother, Jamie Davidson, to visit the gravesite; Armstrong was too distraught to go. Her grave was near a tree, in the shade. Kristin placed yellow flowers beside it.
The allegations against Armstrong continued through 2001, with the Sunday Times of London publishing an article by David Walsh uncovering Armstrong’s relationship with Ferrari, who was facing trial in Italy for administering PEDs to athletes. “Doping is a way of life in professional cycling,” Walsh wrote. “In this game, Mr. Clean competes against the majority and against the odds. Can a clean rider beat those on drugs?” Armstrong, who had never faced sanctions for a failed drug test, quickly refuted the allegations. “It’s rip Lance time,” he told the New York Times. He slammed legendary cyclist Greg LeMond—the first American to win the Tour de France, in 1986—when LeMond said he was “disappointed” with Armstrong for associating with Ferrari.
According to the USADA report, earlier that year Armstrong encouraged his teammate and close friend George Hincapie to join USPS’s elaborate blood-doping program under Ferrari’s guidance. He later brought new team member Floyd Landis into the program. In his testimony, Landis says he watched over bags of blood at Armstrong’s home and regularly received EPO from the cycling icon. Landis says he watched Armstrong re-infuse blood before his time trial at the Tour in 2002—the same year the Associated Press named Armstrong its athlete of the year. Hincapie backed up the claim.
That year, the Lance Armstrong Foundation was told that a little boy in Placerville, Calif., had asked the Make-A-Wish foundation for a chance to ride his bike with Armstrong. (His first choice was to ride a whale, but they couldn’t make it happen.) So Armstrong invited Cameron Stewart and his family to Stanford University, where he was speaking. They were supposed have 10 minutes with Armstrong, but he stayed with them for more than an hour, running around with Cameron as the boy cycled around on his red and black bike. They showed each other the scars on their chests, and Cameron took off his racing jersey and signed it for his hero. “I’ve never received an autograph,” Armstrong said. In 1997, Armstrong’s foundation raised around $200,000 to support research for testicular cancer. By the time he met Cameron, it was raising more than $15 million a year, with 80 percent going to research grants and programs that support cancer survivors across the U.S. “I would never try to put myself in the position of being someone else’s miracle,” he told USA Today in May 2002. “I can be the rabbit’s foot for people.”
Armstrong won his fourth straight Tour title that year. Shortly after the victory, he asked USPS team member Christian Vande Velde to meet him at his apartment in Girona. Vande Velde was not on the Tour de France team that season, and was worried that he was going to be cut. He’d been apprehensive about the mandate to cheat—he would use the EPO and testosterone drugs given to him for short periods, but would go off the program without telling Ferrari. When Vande Velde arrived at Armstrong’s place, Ferrari was also there. Armstrong accused Vande Velde of not preparing for races and of not following Ferrari’s program. He told him that if he wanted to stay with USPS, he’d have to take the program seriously. “Lance called the shots on the team,” Vande Velde told USADA. “What Lance said went.”
The doping, EPO and testosterone program continued through the 2003 and 2004 seasons, when Armstrong won his fifth and sixth straight Tour titles. The accomplishment was unprecedented in sport—his six titles was a new record. As Armstrong and his teammates continued to dominate, they became more brazen. In his affidavit, Hincapie told USADA that after a stage of the 2004 Tour, blood transfusions were given to most of the riders on the team on its bus.
During the tour, Armstrong publicly berated Italian cyclist Filippo Simeoni for testifying in a court case against Ferrari. During the 18th stage, Armstrong made a famous “zip your lip” motion after chatting with Simeoni as they rode in the peloton.
That year, Nike teamed up with Armstrong’s foundation to create yellow wristbands engraved with the word “Livestrong,” Armstrong’s mantra. All proceeds went to the foundation, with a plan to raise $5 million. The one-dollar bands quickly became a craze. By the time Armstrong announced that he’d retire after the 2005 Tour, more than $28 million had been raised from Livestrong wristbands.
Armstrong won his seventh Tour de France on July 21, 2005. He rode into Paris still hearing the nagging charges in the media, along with a chorus of praise—headlines screaming that he was an inspiration, brave, peerless, immortal. It was “a bittersweet adieu,” the Chicago Times said. On that misty afternoon in Paris, as he moved toward the finish line one last time in a yellow jersey, he took a sip of champagne and touched glasses with Johan Bruyneel, still the director of his team, who drove close by in a Discovery Channel car, which had taken over as the team’s sponsor. The clouds parted and the sun kissed the Champs-Élysées as Armstrong moved along the final stretch late in the afternoon. He crossed the line with a blank expression, without a single gesture to acknowledge the occasion.
A half-hour later, Armstrong stood on the victory stand and addressed his critics:“The last thing I’ll say to the people who don’t believe in cycling, the cynics, the skeptics: I’m sorry for you,” he said. “I’m sorry you can’t dream big, and I’m sorry you don’t believe in miracles.”
Cameron Stewart believed in miracles. As the allegations continued to mount against his hero, he held on to his belief that Armstrong really was the exception in a sport plagued by doping. He ignored the claims of Armstrong’s former teammates as they slowly began to tell their stories. He believed that Landis was lying, that Hamilton was telling stories, that USADA was on a witch hunt. “I didn’t want to accept it,” he says.
Cameron kept cycling. He began to run triathlons, and eventually joined his high school mountain bike team. He gave every new teacher he had a copy of Armstrong’s book, and signed it himself. He plastered his wall with Armstrong posters, including one of the 1999 Tour de France: “All my best to my buddy Cameron,” Armstrong had signed.
Cameron went to schools and talked about cancer and Lance Armstrong, the hero who gave him his legs. He remembered what Armstrong told him: “Once you’re cured, you have an obligation to do what others did before you.” He put a yellow Livestrong wristband on in 2004 and never thought about taking it off until last month, when everything he thought he knew about his hero was ripped from the fabric of his 15-year-old soul. The evidence was impossible to avoid. He watched as Armstrong stepped down as head of his foundation. All seven victories, a lifetime of inspiration, were stripped away. Pat McQuaid, head of the International Cycling Union, declared that Armstrong has no place in the sport: “He deserves to be forgotten in cycling.” Nike dropped him. Oakley dropped him. Radio Shack dropped him. Around the globe, millions of cynics said, “I told you so.” Millions of believers quietly tried to grapple with the notion of hero and cheater as one.
Cameron’s parents noticed how quiet he’d become. They talked about the reality that Armstrong had doped and lied. But maybe it didn’t matter, they said, because in the end, this was always about more than a race. Cameron grappled with how to deal with friends who might call Armstrong a fraud. He thought about the red and black bike that still hangs in the family garage, the one he rode over mountains of air on a journey to life after cancer. Then, one October morning, Cameron walked down the stairs and sat down beside his dad in the kitchen. He fiddled with his yellow Livestrong bracelet, considering all the truth and lies it carried. The boy with Lance Armstrong legs—who’d pushed and pushed and pedalled and won—thought about the hope he found in his fallen hero. “You know,” he said, looking up at his dad, “I’m going to keep it on.”
This article originally appeared in Sportsnet magazine.
The Needle and the Damage Done: The Epic Crash of Lance Armstrong
