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The attorney told Steffen his theory was sound. If team officials had kept the Postal Service's $10 million-per-year checks coming in by hiding a doping problem, it might constitute fraud. And whistle-blowers who sue to expose fraud against the government are allowed by law to get part of the proceeds. Given that the Postal Service sponsored the team for several years, such a cut could amount to millions of dollars. (Steffen went to attorneys about a year before I wrote about this legal theory last year.)
But Steffen didn't have a case. For one thing, his account of possibly being asked to dope two riders wasn't evidence of team-official-endorsed doping. For another, Postal Service contracts didn't contain anti-doping clauses until 2001, four years after Steffen had left the team. But Steffen believed there were other insiders who might have such information and would be in a financial position in which lawsuit winnings might come in handy.
Last fall Spanish bike racer Roberto Heras, who had been Armstrong's top lieutenant on U.S. Postal, was suspended after testing positive for erythropoietin, a year after his U.S. Postal predecessor Hamilton tested positive for blood doping. Both of these riders are in their mid-30s, and near the end of their careers, and potentially in need of money.
Steffen e-mailed a half-dozen cyclists he knew who had been on the U.S. Postal Service team advising them that, if they had insider doping information, along with information that team officials knew about it but did nothing, they might be in a position to approach an attorney specializing in False Claims Act cases.
If doping did go on at U.S. Postal with team officials' knowledge -- and the types of medications and procedures now used to illegally boost performance are so sophisticated and dangerous that they usually involve help of one kind or another -- Steffen's e-mails could prove a time bomb waiting for an ex-Postal rider to follow his suggestion. Nobody seems to have taken Steffen up on his call to arms -- yet.
Steffen's next go-round with the anti-doping cause came last September, in an interview he gave a reporter with the French newspaper L'Equipe. The interviewer asked Steffen if there was such a thing as a typical "profile" of a bike racer who boosts performance with dope, and Steffen, who speaks French, said no, that all sorts of athletes cheat with drugs.
"Unpleasant people like Lance Armstrong dope and nice people like Tyler Hamilton also dope. There's a moment when they waver. As if they don't have a choice. The only other solution would be to stop cycling. But they see themselves without a future, without a job," Steffen was quoted as saying.
Armstrong placed a personal call to the TIAA-Cref cycling team director. Soon TIAA-Cref team officials were editing Steffen's resignation letter and sending it to Armstrong's assistants for approval.
"Lance spoke with me about it, yeah. He did. He wasn't terribly happy," says Jonathan Vaughters, director of Team TIAA-Cref.
He says Armstrong "has a history of taking legal action against people saying things he didn't like. You can call that a legal implication. But he didn't say, 'We're going to come after you.'"
Steffen's L'Equipe quotes and subsequent resignation spawned newspaper stories all over the world. Steffen quickly found that his outspoken posture had gained him fans across the globe, some of them in high places.
"In the aftermath of the L'Equipe interview in October I got a bunch of e-mails from all over," says Steffen, "and I got one e-mail from the International Association of Athletics Federations," the world governing body of track and field.
Steffen was invited to apply for a position implementing the IAAF's anti-doping programs worldwide.
Harmon Brown, a UCSF physician who is a member of the IAAF's Medical and Anti-Doping Commission, says he believed Steffen would make a good fit with international track and field's efforts to banish doping.
"He was very much opposed to any form of doping, and he had a pretty strict attitude about the use of any illegal means to enhance performance," Brown says.
The association flew Steffen to Monaco for an interview. He was thrilled.
"I thought, 'Man, this is destiny.' Talk about landing on your feet after the Lance affair," Steffen says. "The problem was the pay was so low."
In Europe physicians don't occupy the same elite economic status that they do here. And administering the IAAF's global anti-doping programs paid a paltry $50,000 per year, less than half Steffen's income as an emergency room physician.
So for now, Steffen is left working nights at St. Mary's with hopes of returning to his sideline ensuring the health and fitness of elite international cyclists.
"Our sponsors have a say in whether that happens. Prentice himself has a say in whether that happens. But Lance doesn't have any interest or say in that decision," Team TIAA-Cref's Vaughters says.
While I had him on the line, Vaughters, himself a former top professional cyclist who raced with the U.S. Postal Service team in 1999, reminded me that cycling gets a lot of flak for banned drug use when the problem is at least as acute in sports such as football and baseball. Those sports don't have anything near the rigorous urine and blood analysis that cyclists must endure all year long.
Vaughters said he believes stricter testing has reduced the use of banned substances by cyclists since 1998, when Tour de France police raids revealed systematic doping programs implemented by European teams. In 2000, Vaughters moved from Postal to a French team sponsored by the bank Credit Agricole, which had insisted team directors take an absolutist anti-doping stance. He's brought that philosophy to TIAA-Cref, which he has staffed with young riders unversed in old cycling ways. And he hired Steffen, who is well known for his opposition to doping.
