The Man Who Brought Down Lance Armstrong

Updated: 2018-04-19

At 5:19 p.m. on Friday, April 30, 2010, Floyd Landis hit send on what would prove the most consequential email of his life. Addressed to the then-CEO of USA Cycling, Steve Johnson, the email bore the subject line “nobody is copied on this one so it’s up to you to demonstrate your true colors….” It went on to detail, year by year, how Landis and other members of the United States Postal Service team had used illegal performance-enhancing drugs and methods to dominate the sport of cycling and claim victories at the sport’s premier event, the Tour de France. The email, later included in Landis’s 2012 affidavit for a United States Anti-Doping Agency (usada) investigation, clearly implicated many of his former teammates—most famously, the seven-time Tour winner Lance Armstrong (who declined to comment for this article).

It would take more than two years of investigation, but in October 2012, that the U.S. Postal Service team and its manager, Johan Bruyneel, had run “the most sophisticated, professionalized and successful doping program that sport has ever seen.” , and the rest followed. In one day, he lost seven sponsors and an estimated . A few days later, the International Cycling Union (UCI), which oversees international competitive cycling, . Attempting damage control, Armstrong in 2013, in an interview that went terribly awry; he simply could not muster the appropriate