33. Travis Tygart Is Coming for Cheaters — Just Ask Lance Armstrong

0:00It's smart to always have a few financial goals and a really smart one you can set, earning cash back on what you buy every day. And with Discover, you can. Get this. Discover automatically matches all the cash back you've earned at the end of your first year. Seriously, all of it. And we trust you to make smart decisions. After all, you listen to this show. See terms at discover.com slash credit card. The snack wrap plus Caesar sauce equals extra crispy chicken Caesar-y greatness. Sounds delicious. Caesar sauce at McDonald's for a limited time.

0:43My guest today, Travis Tigard, is the CEO of USADA, the United States Anti-Doping Agency. And if it weren't for Travis, this infamous exchange... So here we go. Never would have happened. Yes or no, did you ever take banned substances to enhance your cycling performance? Yes. Yes or no, was one of those banned substances EPO? Yes. That, of course, is Lance Armstrong's infamous interview with Oprah Winfrey from 2013. The one where he called his cycling career one big lie, publicly acknowledging that he had doped to win his seven Tour de France titles. Lance didn't come forth voluntarily. For over a decade, he had vehemently denied that he had used the drug erythropoietin, better known as EPO, aggressively suing those who suggested he had doped.

1:31It looked like Lancet finally put the rumors to rest once and for all, when in 2012, USADA, Travis's organization, published a 1 ,000-plus page report, what they called their reasoned decision, that detailed evidence of the, quote, most sophisticated, professionalized, and successful doping program that sport has ever seen, unquote. It included testimony from 11 of Lance's teammates. He was stripped of his cycling titles and received a lifetime ban from all sports that follow the world anti-doping code, including cycling. Welcome to People I Mostly Admire with Steve Levitt. This episode is airing the week the Tour de France starts.

2:11But despite this, Lance Armstrong isn't actually the main reason I wanted to talk with Travis today. I've devoted a good chunk of the last 25 years to trying to catch cheaters. Everything from crooked sumo wrestlers to terrorists. So for me, to get to talk with probably the world's foremost expert on cheating in sports, that's like a dream come true. I'm sure we could talk all day about Lance, but there are a half dozen other topics I want to hit as well, so I'll have to use my time wisely.

2:46Travis Tiger, thank you so much for taking the time to talk with me today. Your job is to catch athletes who are using prohibited performance enhancing drugs. And it seems to me that's a thankless job because, first off, the people you catch, they're sometimes national heroes, beloved champions. And my hunch is that you're not always welcomed when you're finding these people are guilty. While I understand the characterization of we're here to catch athletes, we look at it entirely different than that. I think the majority, the overwhelming majority of athletes who are playing by the rules, they appreciate the fact that we're protecting their right to compete on a level playing field.

3:24Because there's really no bigger injustice in sport than if someone is cheated or robbed of their sacrifice to be the best that they can be under the rules that they agree to. So, yes, that means we have to catch those who are not deterred from cheating. And of course, many times those individuals don't like us or appreciate the fact that they've been caught. One journalist described us as the union for clean athletes, and that may be exactly how we see it and probably the biggest compliment that we ever could be given. We do the right thing for the right reasons, not because of popular opinion or what people think of us, quite honestly.

3:56The second reason that I suspect your job is pretty thankless is the nature of doping and the limits of the testing technology and legal limits on what you can do. does that not mean that most cheaters get away with it if they're smart enough, sophisticated enough, and don't make mistakes? Does that not make it almost impossible to catch them? I don't think so. The idea of being a winner here in the United States, every kid grows up on a playground knowing that winners never cheat and cheaters never win. And so there's this moral community and I think moral ethic that many of our athletes have that they want to be the best they can be.

4:33And yes, they're uber competitive and hyper competitive. They don't get to the elite level without being that and willing to sacrifice sometimes their own health, their education and career opportunities. But they know that they can't look themselves in the mirror if they cheat to win. Wonderful example back in 2003, Kelly White won in the World Championships track and field the 100 meter and 200 meter. And she was doping at the time. And you look at her face and she testified about this later to us. But you look at her face in front of 70 ,000 plus fans in Paris. And she has this look of kind of disgust and shame in herself for knowing what she did.

5:08I really start with the premise that no athlete, no true athlete, particularly in the Olympic movement where you're representing your country, you're doing it for national pride and to be the hero that many kids around the world need you to be. That's not where you want to start. Certainly, we want to continue to be innovative and have research and funds devoted to testing and developing scientific methods to ensure that, hey, the risk of getting caught is entirely too high. And it's not worth taking that risk. Even if you were otherwise inclined to go against your moral ethic, you're going to get caught.

5:41You're going to have, unfortunately, a cloud that will live over you for the rest of your life as being a cheater at the highest levels in sport. And that's an incredible deterrent that further enforces that moral code and makes it an unteenable decision to cheat in the Olympic movement in the United States. A few years after Lance's fall from grace, Stephen Dubner interviewed him for a Freakonomics radio episode called Has Lance Armstrong Finally Come Clean? Here's an excerpt from that conversation. I mean, I raced in a generation and on a team that was amongst 20 other teams that all did the same thing.

6:17Every single one of them did the same thing. I went to the team in 92, and the sport of cycling in the mid-90s, EPO was like wildfire. And we were holding out, holding out, holding out, just assuming that, come on, there has to be a test for this. And we got to this moment where we looked around and we're like, oh my God, we don't have a choice. Well, we do have a choice. Our choice is to go home. We can just quit, you know, retire. But if we want to stay and fight, you know, we're all walking around with knives because we were told we were going to a knife fight. And next thing you know, everybody had guns.

6:54And we said, oh, s***, these boys are carrying guns. And so in the spring of 95, we went to the gun store. Do you remember when you first became pretty certain that Lance Armstrong was doping? To this day, it's seared in my mind. We left an interview with an athlete, actually Tyler Hamilton, up in Denver, Colorado, where my general counsel and myself at the time spent two days with him and his lawyer and heard the evidence that he presented and combining it with the evidence that we already had from other writers as well as the documentary evidence as well as testing results that we had that were abnormal.

7:33I remember walking out that second day saying, there's no doubt in my mind that they perpetuated one of the greatest frauds that the sports world has ever seen. And I think it means we have no choice but to move forward. And when was that, Travis? What year was that? So that was 2011, I think, end of 2011. I think it was in 2001 or 2002 that I became convinced that Lance was cheating. I was a young professor. This was before Freakonomics even. And I was sitting in my office and the phone rang. And on the other end of the line was a guy named Greg Lamond. And it was crazy for me because I grew up in Minnesota and Greg Lamond was such a hero of bike racing.

8:13He was from Minnesota as well. And I'd never met him. And he said, hey, I've heard that you're good with data and good at catching cheaters. And Lance Armstrong is a cheater. Can you help me catch him? And at first I thought that Greg Lamond was a little crazy. and we ended up talking for three hours on the phone. And actually to say we talked is kind of a misnomer because really he talked for three hours straight. I spoke so little that I remember about once every 30 minutes, Greg would say, hey, are you still there? And I'd say, yes. And he would just keep on going for another 30 minutes. The thing was he talked with such knowledge about the science and such specificity about particular incidents that at the end of the three hours, I was just completely convinced that what he was saying was true.

9:00No one could have enough imagination to have made up what he was telling me. I got off the phone and I began collecting data from the Tour de France and never figured out a methodology that could really prove that there was cheating. But it was clear from the data that the improvements that Lance and his team had made were bigger than any improvements that any team in the history of bike racing had ever made. Now, that's not enough, obviously, to do what you did. But here's my point of that. If even I knew that he was cheating in 2001 or 2002, there must have been so many people, so many authorities.

9:36Why do you think it is that the organizations in charge of cycling didn't do anything? They must have known. What were they thinking? That's a great story. And I know Greg Lamont and have both talked, but also listened to a lot of what Greg has say. Greg is infamous for saying that EPO, one of the drugs of choice during that time period for which there was no test, can turn a donkey into a thoroughbred. And I think that's a pretty apt description. But listen, I think in 99, there was a positive test on Lance Armstrong that was due to him trying to gain an advantage for a glucocorticoid that the sport at the time decided not to move forward on and allowed him to fabricate a prescription for that.

10:19But the whole story would have stopped if the sport at that point would have done its job. One, there were some tests on some EPO results that should have triggered an investigation. These were all tests that were done by the International Cycling Union. The self-interest for cycling, rather, was not to cause this story to tumble because it's against the promotion interests of the sport. They covered up these tests because ultimately having an American win, and listen, I've said it before, I firmly believe there was going to be an American cyclist because there were corporate interests behind having an American bring back cycling to the United States for the gear companies, the helmet companies, the bike companies, the sunglass companies, all the companies that profited off the Armstrong story.

11:03And look, it was against the financial interest of the sport to hold him accountable because it was going to wreck the story and ultimately take away the profits that were flowing into the sport. You talked at the beginning about how you don't think athletes naturally want to cheat because the whole spirit of athleticism is wanting to win fairly. But I would say if you're in charge of cycling as a sport, at the same level, how do you live with yourself knowing that you're overseeing a sport that's completely corrupt? Somehow those two things don't go together with me. It doesn't seem like we should believe in the spirit of athletes and also think that the CEO of the International Cycling Union would be willing to look the other way just to make a little more cash.

11:42It is hard for us to believe, those of us who have a moral compass and look at doing the right thing. But when you're a sport promoter, your job is to promote sport. It's to bring in revenues. It's to have higher contracts for your broadcast agreements or your sponsorship agreements. And there's this conflicting interest. to both promote and police. And we've seen it time and time again. We saw it in baseball in the late 90s, in the early 2000s. We've seen it recently in biathlon. We saw it over in Russia. They're really willing to turn a blind eye to some of the cheating that might go on. They're ambivalent about it to a certain extent because it's so profitable and beneficial, and they don't want to have to make tough decisions against the athletes that they've invested hundreds of thousands, if not millions of dollars in, and the athletes who bring in that much profit.

12:29And trust me, it is really easy if you're not committed to doing the right thing in all circumstances to find a way to justify doing the wrong thing. I'll never forget in the middle of the Armstrong case, and it might have been one of the low points, I got an email from someone that sat on the board of a publicly traded company, one of the Fortune 500 companies, just ripping me apart. Yes, he cheated. Yes, it was fraud. But you shouldn't do anything about it because the outcome was justifiable and was worth it. And I'll never forget walking into my bedroom after I received that email late one night and telling my wife, this is the saddest thing I've seen.

13:07Here is a corporate leader, one of the top companies in the globe, quite frankly, who is coming after me, acknowledging that what he did was wrong and against the rules and yet was willing to justify it because the outcome was going to be potentially bad for cycling. I don't take any joy or pride in that. That was not my choice. My choice is to follow the rules that we make an oath to uphold to ensure that clean athletes have an opportunity. And it was the slam dunk case, the most powerful evidence that we've ever had. So, okay, what if I was the head of cycling? Would I turn a blind eye to it?

13:41There'd be a whole lot of reasons and motivation to do it. Tens of millions of dollars coming in on the Tour de France and the legacy and having to wipe away seven tours to France. And can you imagine if the head of the UCI, the International Cycling Union, or even USA Cycling was on my board or making the decision in that case? They'd find a way to stick it in the drawer and be done with it. And that's why it's so critically important for us to have independent organizations of people who don't have a sports promotion role upholding and enforcing and protecting the rights of clean athletes to compete on a level playing field.

14:16So I have to say I met Lance twice and he scared me, both as a person he scared me and his legal team and entourage that viciously harassed people that scared me. Did he scare you? You know, death threats against your family and all that kind of stuff that weren't directly from him, fans and followers of his. That's not fun stuff to have to deal with. But no, look, I take confidence in the truth. Amazing group of people here to provide support. And while it's not fun and you don't necessarily like being the bullseye of all the attacks or the lawsuits, you just do the job that you're sworn to do because there's athletes out there who are counting on you to take the brunt of that.

14:53In a way, the reaction clearly indicates some sort of malfeasance and cover up, and that just furthers the determination. And I think it should of people in my position. We can't let politics or bullying or efforts to destroy us stop us. The truth is what we're always after, and we're not going to let those kind of tactics deter us from getting to the truth. his tactics worked pretty well though because as far as i can tell you thought it was essentially the last line of defense if you guys hadn't gotten him it kind of seemed like he was walking because everybody else seems to have given up is that a fair assessment i think that's exactly right i'll never forget a business week article labor day of 2012 and it concluded with lance armstrong might be the only athlete that's too big to fail.

15:48And that was before our reasoned decision came out, and it was basically complementing their media political strategy in coming after us and attempting to smear us and our process and our motives. Then our reasoned decision and thousands of pages of evidence came out a month later, and the tide and the truth was ultimately revealed, and people then gravitated towards the truth and saw exactly what was going on. And what I'll say is we were sorry at the time Lance didn't come in like 11 of his teammates and sit down with us. We gave him every opportunity to do that and he never did because I think he would have brought in a wave of additional riders, but also evidence that would have allowed that system to be cleaned up even quicker and more efficiently than it ultimately did.

16:35And that was the low point of the investigation when instead of coming in and sitting down with us and being truthful, which could have benefited him as well from a sanctioning standpoint, like it did the other riders. He went and sued us and tried to block our efforts to get to the truth. Do you think it was outright robbery and intimidation that let Lance go along so long, or was it just the natural conflict between the incentives of the promoters? I think the natural incentives for sure. And you got to remember those in the sport, the administrators, the doctors, they're not in testing programs.

17:10So while we may test an athlete and suspend and discipline, until those athletes come forward with the truth, it's hard for us to get evidence against those in the sport, particularly people who live around the world. So it wasn't until we had a number of positive tests and eventually were able to convince those riders to sit down and all of them, going back to that moral ethic, said, we never wanted to do this. Many of them came in at our request voluntarily because they wanted to see this sport change for the good. And our effort was always, yes, the athletes were going to have to receive some consequence because they made their choices.

17:48No one held them down and stuck needles of EPO in their stomachs. However, the nature of the culture was very coercive. On the scale of culpability, the hierarchy, they were much less culpable than the president of the sport that oversaw this corrupt culture, the doctors, the trainers. And so our ability to get them to come in and sit down with us and be truthful was what allowed us to achieve the goal that we wanted, which was to dismantle the corrupt system, not just punish the athletes moving forward. What's amazing to me is that with the number of people involved, suppliers, teammates, coaches, doctors, girlfriends and wives, how they managed to keep it as secret as they did for as long as they did.

18:33That huge web of people, eventually you cracked it. Eventually it fell. But when hundreds of people know, how can you not expect it's going to become public? Yeah, I think two things. One, they have described it as the omerta, right, like the mob term. You don't step out. You don't tell the secrets of the family. In large part, why one of the riders came forward was because he had a positive test. It got suspended. And while he had multiple opportunities to come forward at the time, he didn't. And then when he tried to return to the sport, they, in large part, Lance kept him out. And that frustrated him and made him mad and said, I'm coming clean with what's going on because you guys turned your backs on me during a time when I kept the secrets within the family.

19:18The second thing I would say is while a lot of people knew, the athletes were pretty savvy in not spreading it too far. And they did do a lot, particularly as the testing system got up around the world. 98, 99, 2000, 2001, more people knew what was happening at that time. But there were very few people that actually had eyes on the fraud that was being committed. And then those that did had an interest in not getting it out or being truthful about it because they would have to implicate themselves and be held accountable to it as well. My guess is that if Lance was just a little nicer to people, he could have kept up the facade forever.

19:57Is one of the lessons here just to be nice to people along the way? Listen, someone during the course of our investigation said no one's going to take a fall for Lance, meaning he didn't make many friends throughout this process. But it's hard to say. I think what you hope is that if you do have a charismatic A-type ultra winner, that person uses that personality to set a wall of cleanliness or moral decision-making where the price of going against, whether it's that person or that community, is too high. That then can emphasize and reinforce the idea that these rules are here for a purpose and they're here to protect everyone.

20:36And we're going to go to great lengths to ensure that they're upheld. How many hours of your life do you think you devoted to that Lance Armstrong case? Oh, God, that's a great question. I don't know. I'd say too many. Did the pursuit of justice with Lance become more personal to you than with other cases? No. We have a motto here that we're going to attempt to exonerate the innocent just as hard as we try to convict the guilty. And so in a situation like that, you don't prejudge it. You just continue to follow the evidence and see where the evidence ultimately leads you. Their whole effort was to try to make it personal.

21:14I joke sometimes they put the bullseye on the bureaucrat at the organization. Our board is led by Edwin Moses, great Olympian, equal in stature to an Armstrong or any other high-profile athlete. And they weren't coming after him because the strategy is not to make global icon versus global icon. It's find the sport bureaucrat, the person making the decision, and that happened to be my role. I accept that. I just continue to focus with the team on what the evidence is and our effort to pursue getting to the truth. So it doesn't become personal at all, and it shouldn't. You're listening to People I Mostly Admire with Steve Levitt and his conversation with head of USADA, Travis Teigart.

21:57After this short break, they'll return to talk about advances in testing and also horse racing.

22:10People I Mostly Admire is sponsored by Mint Mobile. There are things in life that you don't want to be transparent, like your swimsuit or your search history. But when it comes to your wireless bill, transparency is everything. That's why Mint Mobile's wireless plans have no gimmicks and no gotchas, just high-speed data and reliable coverage on the T-Mobile 5G network. And right now, all plans are$15 per month, even unlimited. To get your new wireless plan for just$15 a month, go to mintmobile.com slash admire. That's mintmobile.com slash admire. Cut your wireless bill to$15 a month at mintmobile.com slash admire.

22:49That's it. There's no catch. Upfront payment of$45 for three months, $90 for six months, or$180 for 12 months. Plan required,$15 per month equivalent. Taxes and fees extra, initial plan term only. Greater than 50 gigabytes may slow when network is busy. Includes up to 20 gigabytes hotspot. Capable device required. Availability, speed, and coverage varies. See mintmobile.com.

23:17A History of the United States in 100 Objects is a brand new podcast from 99 % Invisible and BBC Studios. Each week, we're looking at a different object from across American history with a unique story to tell about who we've been, what we've built, and what we've allowed ourselves to forget. Some of these objects are well-known, many are not, but all of them carry the story of how we got to this moment. Find a history of the United States in 100 objects on the 99 % Invisible Feed, wherever you get your podcasts. Ready, set, summer, with the Honda Summer Event. Take the summer fun farther with a great deal on a Honda Hybrid or EV.

23:56With impressive efficiency, the all-electric Honda Prologue, CR-V Hybrid, Accord Hybrid, and Civic Hybrid have all you need to get summer ready with the most fuel-efficient full-line automaker in America. Visit your local Honda dealer today. For more details, visit your Chicagoland Northwest Indiana Honda dealer today. See dealer for financing details. Based on EPA estimate of 2024 large full-line automaker fleet-wide fuel economy. EPA Automotive Trends Report 2025. This week's listener question comes from Krista Goss. And Krista writes, Hi, Steve. Thank you so much for this podcast. I look forward to it every week.

24:29I especially loved the episode with Daniel Kahneman. As a mom of a two-and-a-half-year-old, I found the observations about persuasion and decision-making really clarifying. It definitely helped explain why my usual efforts convinced my daughter to eat her dinner. It's delicious. It's good for you. You can have ice cream after. always fail. And why, when I take the opposite approach, it's my food and I'm not sharing and I'm going to eat it all up, works every time. Along those lines, it made me wonder what would happen if we did the same thing for COVID-19 vaccinations. What if we told every American in the U.S.

25:09that they had until July 4th to claim their free vaccination and any unused vaccinations would be shipped overseas. I suspect that it would trigger that base, childish desire to claim what we feel is ours and to prevent others from taking it. What do you think? So Krista, what do I think of your idea? I love it. I absolutely love it. It is so simple and so absurd that I think it would really work. Now, I don't think it would be a very popular policy, but I also think that it would lead to a stampede at the vaccination sites. that we just need to figure out how to convince the Biden administration that it's a great idea.