Bloomberg Businessweek August 5, 2019pulses. During the Tour, Armstrong has talked up both on
his daily episodes ofThe Move. “Tim Ferris, Chris Sacca, Gary
Vaynerchuk—they all do this,” he says, referring to the self-
help author, the formerShark Tankstar, and the social media
guru, respectively. “Nobody does it specifically dedicated to
this world—endurance, outdoors, health and fitness.”
We’re speaking in the sunroom of a modest bungalow in a
slightly sketchy part of Austin, aka Wedu Sport’s headquarters.
Armstrong is dressed casually—shorts, running shoes, white
T-shirt—for a podcast taping with John Furner, chief executive
officer of Sam’s Club. He recorded the episode in a shed behind
the house that’s been retrofitted with soundproofing, audio
equipment, and cameras for YouTube. It’s not much, consid-
ering Armstrong was once one of the best-paid athletes in the
world, but he sees it as the beginning of something new—a sort
of DIY Nike that will encompass media, events, and apparel.
“It’s f---ing awesome,” he says of the popularity of his podcast.
“It feels like all is not lost.”“I don’t wanna lie: I don’t want to not talk about that,”
Armstrong said, referring to the fraud trial, on a Wedu pod-
cast calledThe Forward, which appeared in iTunes and other
podcastapps in 2016. He acknowledged it could bankrupt him.“That’s a big deal for me and my family. But the goal is to get
that part of life behind me and move forward. That’s the name
of this thing.”
It was the day after Christmas, and Armstrong was in a
reflective mood. At the time the crew consisted of Armstrong
and Higgins. (Headcount at Wedu has since doubled, to four.)
Most of the guests on the show so far had been Armstrong’s
friends. The mix was eclectic: tennis great Chris Evert, histo-
rian Douglas Brinkley, musician Seal. Episodes were posted
every few weeks, mostly recorded in Armstrong’s wine cellar,
on a laptop. The show, he told his listeners, had attracted more
than 1.5 million downloads in its first six months—a big enough
audience to sell to advertisers, though Armstrong said he had
no immediate plans to do so. “I don’t want you all to think that
this is a money grab for me,” he said. “I know how people view
my situation—the last four years of my life.”
Eventually though, he said, he hoped the podcast would
generate revenue for Wedu. There would be events, media,
and merch. And—in case anyone doubted that Armstrong was
reclaimingallof his old empire, which had merged his ath-
letic prowess with his capacity for raising money for cancer
patients—he hinted at a charity component. “Dear cancer com-
munity,” he said, his voice breaking. “I want back in.”
During that 2016 Christmas episode, and in interviews since,
Armstrong has presented his decision to launch a podcast as
a spur-of-the-moment thing. Higgins had suggested the ideayears earlier, but Armstrong resisted until June 2016, when,
on a lark, he posted his first interview, a conversation with
Tim League, a friend and the founder of Alamo Drafthouse
Cinema LLC.
In reality, it was more considered. Armstrong tells me he’d
wanted to find a way back into the business world for years
but felt helpless. “Everybody exited: the backers, the sponsors,
the partners, my foundation,” he says. “We were in this place
for years where it was like, F---, we got nothing.”
Armstrong first began contemplating a comeback around
2015, when he contacted Strava, developer of the fitness app
he was using to track his daily runs, after an overly aggressive
fan used it to harass him. When he asked the company for help,
Armstrong recalls one of the company’s founders mentioned
something else in passing: Armstrong had the biggest fan base
of any Strava user. (Today he has 117,000 followers. Tejay van
Garderen, the top American rider, who dropped from this
year’s Tour after a crash during the seventh stage, has fewer
than 25,000.) “I was running four miles a day,” Armstrong
recalls thinking. “Why would you wanna watch that?”
But the real turning point came the following year, when
a friend at a major sporting goods company covertly passed
him an internal market-research study of bike customers. “Itwas like 3,000 respondents,” Armstrong recalls. “They asked
about all kinds of random sh--. Do you ride a mountain bike or
a road bike? How old are you? Where do you live?”
The survey also asked respondents to name their favor-
ite professional cyclist, offering 10 choices, including Chris
Froome, a four-time Tour de France winner widely regarded
at the time as the world’s dominant road cyclist, and Greg
LeMond, the legendary 1980s Tour winner. Armstrong was
the overwhelming favorite, despite all the controversies. “It
wasn’t even close,” he says. “The people are out there. But
they don’t have a bike race they can attend, they don’t have a
[ jersey] they can buy.”
Armstrong set about rectifying that. He got in touch with
an old collaborator, James Selman, formerly of the Portland,
Ore., office of Wieden + Kennedy and a key designer behind
Nike’s Armstrong ads. Armstrong and Selman had stayed in
touch after the designer left the agency world to take a job
at Apple Inc. Armstrong asked Selman, who’d started his
own design studio, to work up an idea for a brand aimed at
enthusiasts of outdoor endurance sports. Armstrong picks
up a book Selman produced with Wedu’s logo and slogan
on the cover—“Solidarity for the solitary”—and starts flip-
ping through it. On each page there’s an inspiring photo and
aphorism, which Armstrong reads off at a rapid clip. “Forward,
never straight. Never take counsel from fear. It’s called Wedu,
not ‘we don’t.’” Selman’s work, coupled with Armstrong’s“EVERYBODY EXITED: THE BACKERS, THE SPONSORS, THE PARTNERS, MY FOUNDATION.
WE WERE IN THIS PLACE FOR YEARS WHERE IT WAS LIKE, F---, WE GOT NOTHING”
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