Tour de France

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No Closure for Family of Armstrong’s Former Teammate
By JULIET MACUR


Betsy Andreu, the wife of one of Lance Armstrong’s former teammates, watched his interview with Oprah Winfrey on Thursday, and waited for Armstrong to admit it.

She was not waiting for his doping confession. She was waiting for Armstrong to announce that she and her husband, Frankie, were not liars when they said Armstrong in 1996 had admitted to doping.

But the acknowledgment that Betsy Andreu had long anticipated never came.

“He owed it to me,” Betsy Andreu, on the verge of tears, said Thursday night on CNN’s Anderson Cooper 360. “You owed it to me, Lance, and you dropped the ball. After what you’ve done to me and what you’ve done to my family, and you couldn’t own up to it? Now we’re supposed to believe you? You had one chance at the truth, and this was it.”

The Andreus claim that they overheard two doctors in an Indianapolis hospital room in 1996 ask Armstrong if he had ever used performance-enhancing drugs. They said Armstrong, who was battling cancer then, rattled off: testosterone, EPO, growth hormone, cortisone and steroids.

But for years, Armstrong vehemently criticized them for their claims, saying they made up the story because they were jealous and vindictive, and that Betsy Andreu hated him.

Yet when Armstrong told Winfrey in an interview that aired Thursday that he had doped throughout most of his cycling career, he failed to say that the Andreus’ hospital room story was true.

“I’m not going to take that on,” he said when Winfrey asked about it. “I’m laying down on that one.”

Winfrey did not press him on it.

For years, the Andreus were silent about the alleged hospital room confession. But in 2005, they were forced to testify in a civil lawsuit about it, and Armstrong began his attack.

The Andreus said Armstrong blackballed Frankie Andreu from jobs in the sport, and shortly thereafter Frankie was let go from his job as a team director of a squad based in the United States. Andreu, who was once the captain of Armstrong’s United States Postal Service team and commanded respect in the peloton, then struggled to continue his career in the sport because Armstrong threatened to ostracize anyone who would hire him, the Andreus said.

Armstrong also publicly excoriated Betsy Andreu, who over the years became increasingly vocal with her doping accusations against Armstrong, eventually calling him “the Bernie Madoff of sport” because she considered him to be perpetuating a gigantic fraud.

In turn, Armstrong called Betsy Andreu crazy, and he acknowledged that name-calling during his interview with Winfrey. He fought off a smirk when he explained it.

“I called you all these things,” he said about Betsy, “but I never called you fat.”

Armstrong told Winfrey that he had reached out to apologize to the Andreus and had a 40-minute conversation with them. She asked him if he had made peace with them and, for a moment, he fell silent before speaking.

“No,” he said, “because they’ve been hurt too badly.”

Betsy Andreu wouldn’t elaborate on the conversation she and Frankie had with Armstrong earlier this week. She said it was “just too emotional” to go into the details.

“He was our good friend once, but he tried to destroy this family,” she said in a telephone interview, sounding as if she was crying. “It’s just so hard to deal with this.”

On CNN on Thursday, she appeared to toughen up. She questioned Armstrong’s motivation and honesty during his interview with Winfrey.

“If he can’t say the hospital room happened, how are we to believe everything else he said?” she said, still teary-eyed. “I want to believe that Lance wants to come clean, but this is an indication that I can’t.”

“This is a guy who used to be my friend, who decimated me,” she said. “He could have come clean. He owed it to me. He owes it to the sport that he destroyed.”


http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/19/sports/cycling/in-armstrong-interview-no-closure-for-andreus.html?ref=sports&_r=0&pagewanted=print