From Lance to Landis: Inside the American Doping Controversy at the Tour de France

PROLOGUE

Monday, July 19, 1999. It is a rest day on the Tour de France and the race’s three-thousand-strong entourage has set up camp in the Pyrenean town of Saint-Gaudens. After two weeks on the road, it is an opportunity for the Tour’s traveling community to draw breath before the final push north to Paris. For Benoît Hopquin, a journalist with the French daily newspaper Le Monde, it is another day at the office. He attends the press conference of the champion-elect Lance Armstrong and is at the pressroom later in the afternoon when he takes a phone call from a source in Paris. They disagree over something Hopquin wrote a few days before, but things soon cool down and they talk about the Tour. During the first week of the race there had been a story about riders testing positive for corticoids and a rumor that Armstrong had been one. Hopquin tells his source about the press conference and Armstrong’s insistence that he has never used corticoids and didn’t have a medical exemption for any banned product. "Ce n’est pas vrai (It’s not true), says the source, teasingly, because he is in a position to know. What are you saying?" asks Hopquin. The source refuses to elaborate, preferring to leave the journalist with an impression. Hopquin’s impression is that Armstrong has tested positive for corticoids.

Hopquin spoke with his Le Monde colleagues, Yves Bordenave and Philippe Le Coeur, and they began calling contacts who might know the truth. They rang a source at the French Ministry of Youth and Sport, they called the national anti-doping laboratory at Châtenay-Malabry, they left two messages for the head of the medical commission of Union Cycliste Internationale (UCI), Leon Schattenberg, but they couldn’t confirm the story. They tracked down UCI president Hein Verbruggen, who said he had not been advised about a positive test for Armstrong. The following morning, the journalists went back to Hopquin’s original source. He agreed to meet a representative of the newspaper and to show him the medical report forms of the riders who had tested positive for corticoids. A senior editor from Le Monde went to the rendezvous and saw a medical report for Armstrong that showed he had tested positive for corticoids following a drug test on the first weekend of the race. The journalist looked down the form to the part where it said Médicaments Pris (medications taken), and the word néant (none) was written. Le Monde believed it was on to an important story.

From the newspaper’s point of view, Armstrong’s insistence that he did not have a therapeutic exemption was critical. Corticoids are banned but may be legally taken if supported by a doctor’s prescription. At the previous day’s press conference and in an answer to a journalist from L’Equipe eleven days before, Armstrong categorically said he did not have any medical exemptions. Journalists from Le Monde contacted U.S. Postal Service team spokesman Dan Osipow and were told the team would wait for an official declaration from UCI before making any comment.

Twelve days before, the U.S. Postal Service team had been told about the presence of cortisone in Armstrong’s drug test. Selected at random, Postal rider Kevin Livingston was accompanied to the medical caravan by the team’s directeur sportif, Johan Bruyneel. There, the two men heard about the positive test, and then for twelve days, there was nothing, until Le Monde’s journalists started asking questions. On the day after the rest day, the Tour riders left Saint-Gaudens on the race to the Pyrenean ski station at Piau-Engaly. It was a tough leg, won by the Spaniard Fernando Escartin, and it was also a good day for race leader Armstrong. He crossed the line fourth and tightened his grip on the race. That day, Le Monde published its story alleging he had tested positive for the corticoid triamcinolone acetonide. If the story were substantiated, Armstrong’s dream of winning the Tour de France would be over.

That evening Armstrong traveled by helicopter from the top of the mountain to the team hotel. By the time he got around to his evening massage, it was late and two high-ranking U.S. Postal Service team officials were in the room. They spoke with the rider about Le Monde’s story and discussed how they would counter it.

At stake was the greatest comeback story in the history of sport.

Chapter 1

THE KID FROM THE CORNFIELDS

It was one of the tougher moments in Greg Strock’s unfulfilled career in cycling: the moment when he had to accept it was over. The dream of becoming a professional cyclist had ended much too soon. He was just twenty-one. At the same time, the 1993 Tour de France was winding its way south toward the Alps, and he was in Madison, Wisconsin, riding among fellow Americans in a race that slipped under the sport’s radar. Though he now felt a long way from the elite peloton, there had been a time when Strock imagined himself among them. At the age of seventeen, he had been offered a place in the amateur squad of Spain’s Banesto team. He thought he would go there, impress the locals, and earn a place on a top professional team. But that was then, before illness sucked away his energy, drained away his ambition.

He waited almost two years for his body to recover. Ever so slowly, it did. It improved enough, anyway, for him to feel normal and to try to resurrect his career. And though his second coming had its moments, in the end he couldn’t get back to where he’d been. One day he felt strong, rode well, believed it was possible. The next morning his body spoke to him, not so much of aches and pains but of overwhelming tiredness. To be successful, a cyclist needs to recover fast. Now Strock knew he wasn’t going to be a successful racer, and on that July afternoon in Madison, he let it go. I can’t do this anymore, he said to his coach, René Wenzel, on a street not far from the finish line. I’m going to go to medical school, because I can’t do this anymore.

This wasn’t what Wenzel wanted to hear. Part of the reason he had taken the assistant team director’s job with Saturn was so he could work again with Strock. He’d had him as a junior in the U.S. squad three years before and liked him. Though Strock was now telling him it was over, he didn’t accept that. What’s wrong with persevering? This will come right, he told Strock. You can still get back. You can be very good again. What began as a heart-to-heart conversation ended as a full-blown argument. Wenzel yelled as Strock stuck by his decision. In the midst of the coach’s accusations and the rider’s stubbornness, Wenzel saw tears well in Strock’s eyes, and that made him emotional but he didn’t want to cry, not in front of his rider, and so he kept shouting. Eventually, emotions calmed, and with that came the certainty that it was over. Wenzel had to accept that one of his favorite riders was leaving the sport. That evening they shared a beer and tried to end things the right way.

After that they went their separate ways and over the following years they would drift apart. Accepted into medical school at Indiana University, Strock wasn’t left with a lot of free time. Wenzel continued with the Saturn cycling team, got laid off, then got rehired; to better make ends meet, he started his own business, Wenzel Coaching, from his home in McKenzie Bridge, Oregon. Coaching bike riders was something he was good at. But, seven years on from that angst-ridden scene in Wisconsin, Strock reentered his life. Wenzel was in Bermuda with a women’s team due to race the Bermuda Grand Prix when his wife, Kendra, called. Your buddy Strock is going to sue you, she said.

You could have knocked him over with a feather.

On an afternoon in January 2001, in a Starbucks coffee shop in Indianapolis, a young man with a latte sits at a table. Over the following two hours, he will turn back the pages of his life and recall a remarkable story.

He is now Dr. Greg Strock, having just graduated from Indiana University medical school, and will soon begin his residency. He was born in Anderson, a town northeast of Indianapolis, and his story began as simply as a fairy tale. From his cousin Dan Taylor, he got the longing to ride a racing bike. Taylor would go for thirty miles at a time, and when you’re his impressionable twelve-year-old cousin, that seems a long, long way. Perhaps it was the promise of a world beyond his little Midwest town, the allure of cobbled roads in Belgium, or maybe it was just the thrill of speed, the cut and thrust of competition. Whatever it was, the boy dreamed of being a bike racer. To get his first bike, he mowed neighbors’ lawns and saved his earnings until they were enough to trade for a bicycle. When his parents wondered if it was right to spend so much time on a bike, the boy worked harder at his schoolwork and earned the right to his bike time.

As his grades improved, so, too, did his parents’ attitude toward cycling. Soon there existed an unspoken pact: as long as he took care of his academic work, they made sure he had a lift to the next race, money for the next wheel, and a smiling face to greet him when he returned from a training ride. Adolescent life is simpler when it is controlled by one passion, and back then Greg Strock existed to ride his bike. Everything was arranged so that when the time came, as it did most days of the week, the boy could escape on his bike onto long, straight roads hedged by fields of corn.

He sent away for videos of cycling’s biggest races and watched them over and over again, especially the one-day classic race from Paris to Roubaix. True cycling men know this is the hardest of the one-day races, and Strock dreamed of winning it. And all the time, he nurtured his dream. Through the flat cornfield countryside around Anderson, the wind was his constant enemy and, to fight it, he imagined he was chasing breakaways on the cobbled tracks to Roubaix. When the Indiana weather worsened in winter and it was too bad to be outdoors, he rode a stationary bike indoors and took pleasure in the pain. By the time he was fifteen, he was Indiana’s best young cyclist and one of the best in the country. That was confirmed a year or so later when he went to the junior national championships at Allentown in Pennsylvania and beat George Hincapie to win the individual time trial. That performance won him a place on the U.S. team for the 1989 junior world championships at Krylatskoye in Moscow, a serious achievement for a boy who would still be a junior in 1990.

At this time cycling in America was run by the United States Cycling Federation (USCF), an organization that would merge with an umbrella organization, USA Cycling (USAC), in 1995. Strock’s selection to the team for Moscow meant that he was invited to training camps at Colorado Springs, and he impressed with his performance in physiological tests. That’s better than Roy Knickman in his junior year, they marveled, because Knickman had been very good at that age. They made him do an ergometer test, riding against resistance, and he beat the record for sustained power set by Greg LeMond eleven years before. He ate well, he slept well, he didn’t flinch on training, and through it all he didn’t feel like he was making a sacrifice. I was just this kid from the cornfields who found a sport he loved and a sport he was good at.

His experience at the 1989 junior world championships in Moscow sharpened his ambition. He raced in the four-man time-trial team, which didn’t suit him, and though they did not get a medal, the experience gave him a taste for serious competition. He returned from the world championships with the belief that he could do a lot better, and after speaking with USCF coaches, it was agreed that for the following season he would compete in the stage races he preferred. Another part of the plan for 1990 was to train even harder, and as he had graduated from high school that January, his parents didn’t object. Two and a half years away, the Barcelona Olympics was a target; and after that, he wanted a place on a professional team. So determined was he to make it happen that he agreed to an international exchange with a talented young Spanish cyclist, Igor Gonzalez de Galdeano, which meant he would spend ten weeks racing in Spain during the spring of ’90 and Gonzalez de Galdeano would come to the United States for the same amount of time later in the year.

He won three of the six races he rode in Spain, beating many of the best young riders in that country and delivering the performances that got him the offer from Banesto’s amateur squad.

So far, so good.

As Strock was packing his suitcases for Spain, the USCF appointed Chris Carmichael and René Wenzel to coach and manage its best amateur racers. Both were ex-riders, and both were young and ambitious. Wenzel thought he was hired to look after the senior amateur squad and that Carmichael would take the juniors, but when he showed up at the USCF offices in Colorado Springs on February 2, 1990, he realized Carmichael was getting the seniors. Carmichael had started the day before, and though Wenzel suspected the change came from a desire to have an American in charge of the more important senior squad, he didn’t mind. He would prove himself with the juniors.

He was born René Wenzel Olesen in Copenhagen on April 20,1960. The middle name was his father’s first name and he took the name Olesen from his mother, as his parents were not married. Cycling was in his blood. His father had been a professional cyclist, even if Wenzel Jorgensen’s career had been diminished by the onset of the Second World War. Jorgensen retired in 1959, but when young René was ready to ride, his dad was still competing in masters’ races and father and son trained together: six-or twelve-mile rides, enough to get the kid into the sport, more than enough to ease the old man out. People saw them together and sensed the kid’s longing. They called him Wenzel after his father and the boy didn’t fight it. It said René Wenzel Olesen on his passport but he was known simply as René Wenzel. Eventually, he would officially drop Olesen and his passport would catch up with the reality.

Like the young man he would coach ten years later, when Wenzel was in high school, he dreamed of becoming a professional cyclist. School was okay but not what he wanted, and five months into his final year, he quit and headed for Belgium. Deinze is a Flanders town close to the spiritual heartland of European cycling. He arrived in early 1979, a young Danish kid with a little money and a lot of hunger. At first he competed as an individual, but he rode well enough to be taken on by the local club, KVC (Kronica Velo Club) Deinze. It wasn’t the happiest time in his life because he was only nineteen and unused to being away from home; he found all the free time hard. Good results would have helped, but he struggled on the cobbled roads used in so many of the races in Flanders.

Wenzel was not stupid and knew the people who befriended him at his new Belgian club expected him to get results for KVC. If the results didn’t come, they would move on to some other wannabe. He also sensed that no one much cared how good results were achieved. If some racer found a pill that worked or accepted that kind of help from a friend or trainer, that was a private matter.

One KVC club member helped the foreign riders in Deinze. Took them from the airport to their lodgings, brought them to races, showed them where to shop, and tried to be their friend. Before one race at Mariakerke on the coast, this man gave the teenager two tablets. These are good vitamins, he said. Wenzel accepted. He was my guy, he says now, the guy that I was with and I didn’t think it was doping. Wenzel took the tablets and twenty minutes later felt his heart begin to beat faster, so strong it pounded against his chest wall. Though the Mariakerke race was insanely hard, he was able to keep going. So many times he wanted to quit but something pushed him on and he made it to the finish.

He didn’t sleep that night, or the following night. His heart raced on, faster than normal, thump, thump, thump. Sometime later, when he understood more about drugs, he realized he had been given amphetamines. The thought of turning down the help never entered his mind. Pills and tablets were part of the sport, and at the time, he was happy to accept they were just vitamins. After all, it’s easier to say yes when you’re unsure what you’re getting. About the worth of the forbidden fruit, he was of two minds: it had helped, but seventeenth place wasn’t much compensation for two sleepless nights. The dream of being a pro survived that season in Belgium, and early in 1980 he left Copenhagen for Paris—another country, another chance. This time the arrangements were better. He rode for a club in the southwest corner of suburban Paris that provided accommodation, a bike, and a small allowance. He and two other Danish riders shared a decent apartment, and the season in France was more enjoyable than his year in Belgium.

Wenzel’s experience of cycling’s doping culture while in France came when he and his teammates were blood-tested. We were taken to a doctor, he says, a man we knew as Dr. Bernard. His full name was Bernard Sainz. We felt like pros when we went to him because if we were being put under medical supervision, that meant someone was taking us seriously. We also knew that Dr. Bernard worked with Bernard Hinault at this time, and that was part of the sell for us. We felt honored that Hinault’s doctor would agree to work with us.

In 1980, not much was known about Bernard Sainz. He rode in the ’50s and ’60s on the track, and after retiring, he worked as a trainer and homeopath with the French GAN-Mercier team. They called him doctor even though he had no medical training, and it was also thought that he was a veterinary surgeon but, again, that wasn’t true. His relationship with Bernard Hinault was important because in the late 1970s and early ’80s, Hinault was the world’s best bike rider. In 1978, he won the first of five victories in the Tour de France at the impressively young age of twenty-two. As well as working with Hinault, Sainz had also helped the 1976 winner of the Tour, the Belgian Lucien Van Impe. To their minds, Wenzel and his teammates could not have been taken to a doctor with more impressive credentials.

Over the next two decades, official attitudes toward doping and toward those who helped riders dope would change in continental Europe, especially in France. And the police would eventually catch up with Bernard Sainz. In 1986 he was investigated on suspicion of dealing in amphetamines at a Paris track meet, and thirteen years later he was placed under investigation by French authorities on suspicion of breaking anti-doping laws and illegally practicing as a doctor. During this time, he was prohibited from meeting with athletes, attending any cycle races, or having any involvement in the training and preparation of cyclists. He was also ordered not to leave France, and after being stopped in Belgium on a speeding offense (he was visiting the cyclist Frank Vandenbroucke), Sainz was imprisoned upon returning to his native country. In 2005, he was named as a key figure in a major investigation into the doping of racehorses, and though that inquiry is ongoing, Sainz has not been convicted on a doping offense. Philippe Gaumont, a former professional rider who has admitted doping, says that Sainz gave him legal homeopathic medicines to help rid his body of doping products that were supplied by others.

To the French press, he became known as Dr. Mabuse after the dark character in the 1922 Fritz Lang movie of the same name. It was an alias that did not cause Sainz excessive concern: he wrote the story of his life in 2002 and called it The Astonishing Revelations of Doctor Mabuse.

Young and undoubtedly a little naïve, René Wenzel was pleased to have Dr. Bernard examine his blood. The follow-up to the test came a week or so later. We had finished a training ride one afternoon, Wenzel says, and those of us who lived in the area were told to stop by at the directeur sportif’s house. There was a box containing envelopes with each of our names on them. Inside each envelope was a bunch of tablets, one or two ampoules of liquid, and enough syringes to cover the doses outlined in the note describing what we were to do with the different products. There was also a substance that we were to take, one drop each day placed under the tongue.

When a young rider is given syringes and the hermetically sealed glass container holding what seems a precious—perhaps magical—liquid, and when this substance comes from someone who is described as a doctor and serves as the champion’s preparatore (preparer), it is natural that he willingly submits. By agreeing, the young rider enters another world and perhaps for the first time sees a picture of sport that is cynical, brutal, and tawdry. Once he accepts the drugs, his view of sport is changed. The virtues that attracted him as a child are overtaken by the reality of what it takes to win. Passion is replaced by a more businesslike attitude, and though success may follow, there can be no realization of the original dream.

We, the three Danish guys, had no idea, says Wenzel. We hadn’t injected ourselves before and so we ended up injecting each other. The French guys knew exactly what to do. The supply lasted about six weeks. There were tablets we had to take one or two hours before the race, different ones for different races. If I remember correctly the tablets were for the smaller races because there was the possibility of drug controls at the bigger races. In his note telling us how to use the ampoules and tablets, Dr. Bernard didn’t say what the products were and there were no labels identifying them. At the time I didn’t think of it in terms of doping, but later on, yes.

After returning from France to Denmark in the winter of 1980, Wenzel felt listless and weak. He tried to continue racing but the effort drained his strength and made him want to lie down. For much of the following six months, he was forced to stay in bed. His recovery was slow and he remained sick for a year and a half. Mononucleosis, a debilitating condition caused by an excess of leukocytes (white cells) in the blood, was diagnosed and Wenzel was not able to return to action until the spring of 1982. Even then his body couldn’t take a heavy training load and he had to back off at the first hint of fatigue. Eventually he would get back to a high level of racing, but he never returned to where he had been before.

Twenty-six years have passed since Wenzel was an amateur racer in France, and with the passing of time has come clarity. I would be really surprised if what Bernard Sainz gave us was all legal. If it was, he could have just given us a prescription and sent us to the nearest pharmacy. If it was legal, I think the labels would still have been there. I have no doubt that the shit I was given was probably what made me sick.

Wenzel left Denmark for America in the spring of 1983. His plan was to train in California and then race on the U.S. circuit through that summer. Midway through the season it was obvious his body wasn’t ready for the demands of bicycle racing, and for the following two years he raced a little and seesawed between his native country and the United States. By 1986, his health had improved enough to allow a full return to racing and he competed on the U.S. circuit in ’86 and ’87 before immigration officials caught up with him and suggested his U.S. vacation had gone on for a little too long. But it had been good while it lasted, and soon after he returned to Denmark, Wenzel was offered the job of cycling coach to his old club in Copenhagen. He worked as a postman to supplement his income and kept in touch with American friends in the hope that something might turn up in the United States. In late 1989, it did. Jiri Mainus, coaching director for the United States Cycling Federation, called and asked if he would be interested in a coaching role with his organization. It was precisely what Wenzel wanted, and on February 2, 1990, he walked into the office he would share with fellow coach Chris Carmichael at the USCF’s Colorado Springs headquarters in Colorado.

Wenzel’s first important assignment was a trip to Europe with his junior squad, where they would compete in France before carrying on to the prestigious Dusika tour in Austria. The trip to Europe would show him what the riders could do and allow him to get to know them as young men. He had met all but one at a training camp in Colorado Springs before leaving for France. The one he hadn’t met was a guy from the cornfields of Indiana who people said would be one of the stronger riders in his group.

Chapter 2

THE NEEDLE AND THE DAMAGE DONE

How Greg Strock had looked forward to that spring of 1990 in Europe.

It began with the exchange experience in Spain, and that couldn’t have gone better. He settled in with his Spanish family and won three races. So impressed were his hosts that he received the offer to return and ride for Banesto’s amateur team. Before leaving Spain to rendezvous with the U.S. junior squad in France, he picked up a heavy cold and a sore throat. After seeing the doctor of the Spanish family with whom he stayed, Strock was put on a course of penicillin. By the time he reached France, he was still a little off-color and not riding well. As it was his first time working under Wenzel, he worried about creating the wrong impression and decided to talk things through with the coach. Wenzel thought the course of antibiotics might be the cause of the rider’s poor form.

According to Strock, Wenzel discussed his situation with a French trainer/soigneur (carer) whom he had hired for the stay in Brittany. I didn’t know who this Frenchman was, says Strock. Dark hair, average height, in his thirties, fairly fit-looking, but I didn’t get the impression he was a doctor. He didn’t do a physical examination or even talk to me, but after he and René had spoken, René came back and said I was to discontinue the antibiotics even though they had been prescribed by a legitimate physician.

The next step, says Strock, went further. I was told I needed an injection and was given one. As well as that I was given these vials and pills, approximately seven to ten days’ worth that were to be taken each day in the case of the vials, and the pills twice a day. They were described to me as ‘a variety of pills and extract of cortisone.’ Other than a vaccination, this was the first time I had been given an injection. At the time we were starting to find pills pushed into our energy bars. I distinctly remember the first time it happened, biting into a bar and wondering why it tasted so awful. I bit into something strange and could see the cross section of a pill. At first I thought someone at the store must have tampered with it; then I realized our own guys were doing this.

Strock was seventeen at this time, far from home, and concerned about what he was getting into. He asked Wenzel if what he was being given was legal and safe. He was told it was. When he persisted with his questions, he sensed his coach’s impatience and got the feeling that what they were doing now was nothing in comparison to what they would be asked to do when they became professional racers. In later years, Strock would look back on these conversations and conclude he and other U.S. junior squad members were in fact being eased into a doping culture. He recalled one particular day from the time in Brittany when he went to his coach’s room at the motel and was injected by Wenzel in the buttocks with approximately five to ten cc’s of a fluid described by the coach as extract of cortisone.

After a few races in France, Strock began to feel better, and in the most prestigious race of that spring campaign, the six-day Dusika tour in Austria, he rode strongly to finish eighth. The race ended with a 3.7-mile climb, and halfway to the top Strock attacked to gain a ten-second advantage that, had he been able to maintain it, would have given him overall victory. He was caught seven hundred meters from the finish line but it was, nevertheless, a good effort and one that impressed his coach.

For Wenzel’s squad of 1990, the biggest test of the year came at the junior world championships in Cleveland, England. Two days after arriving at their base on July 8, the riders were introduced to a Scottish massage therapist and soigneur, Angus Fraser, who had been contracted by Wenzel to work with the U.S. team for the duration of the championships. Unknown to the racers, Fraser was well versed in providing medical care for bike riders, and within the sport he did not have a good reputation. A year later he would be accused of supplying the Australian track rider Martin Vinnicombe with illegal anabolic steroids. Fraser was also accused of writing a letter to the rider advising him on how to use steroids, how to sell them to other riders, and how to conceal the doping from his coaches by saying the steroids were a mixture of legal vitamins.

Strock recalls his first session with Fraser. René was in the room the first time I got a rub from Angus. He told me to have complete faith in Angus, who he said was a professional and knew what he was doing. Fraser had his own room at the team hotel. As well as massage, his official duties included taking blood tests, supplying medicines and vitamins, and providing injections. He was being paid to do this by the United States Cycling Federation even though he had no medical training. Riders entered his room alone, wearing just a towel, and were asked to lie down on a table. The curtains were drawn and Fraser did his best to make them feel comfortable. Just relax in here. Don’t talk, he told them.

He wore a blue and white apron, recalls Strock. "Sometimes the injection came first, then the rub; other times the injection came afterward. At one point we were getting two or three injections a day. I questioned René quite a bit. ‘What is this?’ ‘Is it legal?’ In his eyes I was a nuisance. ‘Damn it, Greg, if you want to succeed as a pro, you are going to have to learn to trust your trainers and coaches. The pros on the Tour don’t waste this kind of energy.’

In England I was told the injections were vitamins and extract of cortisone. One time we were told it was an ATP [adenosine triphosphate, the energy source used by muscles for short bursts of power] injection. When you break down glucose in the body, you make ATP, and so an injection of ATP was okay. Then for the team time trial, each member of the team was given a caffeine suppository, after which I remember having a horrible stomachache and being curled up in the fetal position. We had a van parked near the start/finish line and it was there we took the suppository. You put it into your anus and it released a stimulant.

The four riders that represented the United States in the team time trial at the championships were Strock, Erich Kaiter, Gerrik Latta, and George Hincapie. Although they were in the silver-medal position for most of the race, the U.S. team’s chances were destroyed by a flat tire in the final quarter—a detail quickly forgotten when serious questions were eventually asked about what precisely Wenzel and Fraser were doing with the U.S. junior team in England. A month after the junior world championships ended in England, Strock went to the Washington Trust race in Spokane, Washington. He spoke with Wenzel about how he was feeling, and Wenzel took him to the motel room of fellow USCF coach Chris Carmichael. Strock talked about this incident without actually naming Carmichael, but in Strock’s description, this other coach had a hard-sided briefcase that he placed on a stand at the end of the bed before opening it. Inside were pills, ampoules, and syringes. Selecting an ampoule and syringe, Carmichael inserted the needle into the ampoule, drew some liquid, and injected Strock in the upper part of the buttocks. Strock says he was told the injection was extract of cortisone and that the other coach gave the impression of being comfortable with the syringe in his hands. Strock also said he had seen this coach at other races and noticed