How the mighty has fallen. Once inarguably the greatest biker in the world, Lance Armstrong has been stripped of each of his seven Tour de France titles after declining to fight charges that he violated anti-doping rules. From personal-life woes to the first doping allegations, a brief history of Armstrong’s rocky ride to infamy.
Armstrong's first marriage ended after four years and three children. His ex-wife, Kristin, had stayed home—in the French Riviera—to raise their kids while Armstrong won the first four of his seven Tour titles. But she sat down with Oprah Winfrey in 2006 to say she felt she had “lost herself” in her marriage to Armstrong. Kristin also penned an article in Glamour titled “What I Learned About Marriage” to educate other women on the mistakes she felt she had made with Lance.
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Lance’s highest-profile romance didn’t end happily ever after. Following two years of dating and a five-month engagement, Lance and Sheryl Crow parted ways. Three years later, Armstrong opened up about the split: “She wanted marriage, she wanted children, and not that I didn’t want that, but I just didn’t want that at that time because I had just gotten out of a marriage, I’d just had kids,” he explained to the biographer who penned Lance. Put curtly, they were “up against her biological clock—that pressure is what cracked it.” By the time the book came out, his explanation as to why things went sour sounded even more absurd because he and his current girlfriend, Anna Hansen, had just welcomed a baby. In 2010, Crow admitted that her split from Lance ultimately inspired her to adopt.
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Yes, Lance hooked up with an Olsen twin… when she was 21. Shocked? Neither are we. Given his playboy ways, it’s no surprise that 36-year-old Lance took a shine to the much-younger Olsen. During their brief affair in the fall of 2007, the two were spotted getting cozy at the Gramercy Park Hotel. “Ashley drank red wine, sat on his lap and they were making out all night,” a source told the New York Post. “They left together around 2 a.m.” Perhaps then he brought her back to his bachelor pad in Manhattan, which he bought to allegedly make his ex-girlfriend, Tory Burch, happy. “But she couldn’t deal with him not actually living in the same city, so they broke up,” according to the Post. Good thing he had Ash to keep him company, right?
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While speculation had swirled before, the first major doping accusation hurled at Armstrong came in 2010 by his former teammate, Floyd Landis. Landis’s 2006 Tour de France victory was nullified after his own positive doping test, and he attempted to connect Armstrong with his own questionable ways. In a series of emails, Landis admitted and detailed his systematic use of blood transfusions and other drugs throughout his career, and claimed Armstrong and other Livestrong teammates had used as well. Armstrong shrugged off Landis’s accusations. “Floyd lost his credibility a long time ago,” he said in a press conference. Landis had insisted he never doped in his 2007 book, Positively False, and that Armstrong had never doped either.
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Even though it was well-intentioned, Lance Armstrong’s move to dress his Radio Shack-sponsored team in special jerseys for the final stage of the 2010 Tour (Lance’s last) was plain illegal. In the first few miles of the stage, the team—and the entire race—was stopped when officials told the team it needed to change into its original uniforms. Their jerseys, with the number 28 printed on them, were an ode to “the 28 million people worldwide dealing with cancer,” Armstrong had tweeted.
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There’s nothing like a little political drama to add to an athlete’s life. Armstrong got just that during his final year of professional cycling, while he was attempting one final surge on the racing circuit. He appeared in the Tour Down Under in Australia, a race that was attempting to build its international cachet, in January 2010 and endorsed Premier Mike Rann’s election campaign, causing outrage from Rann’s opponents. Government officials wouldn’t reveal how much Armstrong had been paid to say that “Rann is my man,” spurring others to claim that Armstrong was used as a “backdoor” political advertiser. Another opposition leader said that the premier was not “being frank with … taxpayer [dollars].” As for Lance, he stayed mum on the issue.
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To Lance, it really was a BFD. When the cycling phenom appeared on the cover of Outside magazine in July 2010, the magazine’s editor slapped in gigantic font “38. BFD.”—a reference to his age (38) and his incredible physique (“big f--cking deal”). But Armstrong was none too impressed with the mag, taking to Twitter to blast it: “Just saw the cover of the new Outside mag w/ yours truly on it. Nice photoshop on a plain t-shirt guys. That’s some lame bulls—. #weak.” The magazine had written in tiny letters “Note: Not Armstrong’s real T-shirt.” But to Lance, that was really, really … well, weak.
While much of Lance Armstrong’s career was shrouded in controversy, perhaps no confrontation was as high-octane as his very public feud with longtime teammate Tyler Hamilton, who accused Armstrong of doping in the first three years he won the Tour, in 1999, 2000, and 2001. In the spring of 2011, Hamilton claimed on 60 Minutes that he had watched Armstrong inject performance-enhancing drugs, after a federal grand jury had summoned Hamilton to testify in their investigation of Armstrong. (Armstrong later denied the claims.) In February 2012, the grand jury dropped its case without charging Armstrong.
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It began in June with news that an official investigation would take place to study “overwhelming evidence” that Armstrong had broken anti-doping rules. When Armstrong publicly decided not to fight the charges, it was an automatic forfeit of his entire career. In an official statement, the USADA announced that, in addition to a lifetime ban, Armstrong will be “disqualified from any and all competitive results obtained on and subsequent to Aug. 1, 1998, including forfeiture of any medals, titles, etc.” A devastating end, but one which the cyclist seems to have found peace with. Breathing a sigh of relief to fans on his website in a lengthy statement, he wrote, “Today I turn the page.”
