long time coming?
Payback: Lance Armstrong's former assistant details cyclist's dark and vengefulbehavior
Lance Armstrong's former assistant, Mike Anderson, comes out swinging in Outside Magazine, alleging that his life was destroyed in a matter of years by an angry, manipulative, doping Armstrong. It's the stuff tabloid dreams are made of.
Only, according to Anderson, it's 100 percent true.
Anderson, a graduate-school-dropout-turned-bike-mechanic, worked for Armstrong from 2001-2005, just after the cyclist's battle with testicular cancer and miraculous Tour de France win.
Although Anderson was once referred to as "H2" (husband no. 2) by the Armstrongs, the relationship took a nightmarish turn when Armstrong filed a civil suit alleging Anderson was extorting money from him. Anderson maintains he was just trying to get Armstrong to live up to a business agreement, and the issue was settled out of court.
Now that Anderson believes he's suffered 12 years of defamation, he's speaking out amid the anti-doping allegations that ultimately led to Armstrong's being stripped of his seven Tour de France titles. Armstrong supporters call it a witch hunt; a few former Armstrong insiders call it vindication:
I’m telling my story now because millions of people still look up to Armstrong as a role model. That’s their choice, and I think it’s possible he can emerge from the wreckage and continue his second career as a fundraiser for cancer awareness. But he needs to come clean at this point, and the people who support him need to understand that he isn’t and never has been a victim."
In the article, Anderson spends a great deal of time setting up his story with his own salt-of-the-earth background, as if to prove his good standing. The rest of the first-person piece then delves into never-before-heard details of how Armstrong left ex-wife Kristin; how he took up with Sheryl Crow; the drugs in Armstrong's Spanish medicine cabinet; the quiet visits with an Italian physician; and the charades to avoid the World Anti Doping Agency.
While Anderson writes a few times that he took the job in 2002 because he "saw it as helping a buddy" (um, really?), he later cites the perks of the job as a reason he didn't run when his moral compass went off upon spotting Androstenedione that day in Spain — a day that Anderson marks as the turning point of his relationship with Armstrong.
I'd made a commitment to Armstrong and I couldn't walk away from that — though, looking back, I wish I had."
According to Anderson, Armstrong had promised to invest in and promote a bike shop run by Anderson at the close of his two-year employment agreement. Anderson recounts dramatically the suspenseful scenes as Armstrong refused to honor what Anderson believed to be Armstrong's end of the bargain.
Anderson, who has relocated to New Zealand, tells his story with a sharp tongue. He presents himself as the angel on one shoulder to Armstrong's devil on the other — a little too much, for my taste. And although I'm a fan of the people at his organization, Livestrong, I'm not what you would call a Lance fan. The article is overly dramatic, but I suppose that's inevitable when a hero is being knocked off his pedestal.
Anderson's got a score to settle, and now that Armstrong has given up his fight with the anti-doping agencies, Anderson has an opportunity to strike while the iron's hot and tell his side of the story — which may be all the retribution he needs.