The Secret Race: Inside the Hidden World of the Tour de France: Doping, Cover-ups, and Winning at All Costs

by Daniel Coyle

  I launched off the ramp and cut into the first corner at full speed, with Carmichael following in a team car. I kept pushing, going right to the limit and staying there. I can tell I’m at the limit when I can taste a little bit of blood in my mouth, and that’s how I stayed, right on the edge. This moment is why I fell in love with bike racing, and why I still love it—the mysterious surprises that can happen when you give everything you’ve got. You push yourself to the absolute limit—when your muscles are screaming, when your heart is going to explode, when you can feel the lactic acid seeping into your face and hands—and then you nudge yourself a little bit further, and then a little further still, and then, things happen. Sometimes you blow up; other times you hit that limit and can’t get past it. But sometimes you get past it, and you get into a place where the pain increases so much that you disappear completely. I know that sounds kind of zen but that’s what it feels like. Chris used to tell me to stay within myself, but I never understood the sense of that. To me the whole point is to go out of yourself, to push over and over until you arrive somewhere new, somewhere you could barely imagine before.

  I accelerated into the corners like a race car, skidding on the cobbles but somehow staying upright and out of the hay bales. I dug frantically on the hills; tucked and drove on the flats. I could feel the lactic acid building up, moving through my body, filling up my legs, my arms, my hands, under my fingernails—good, fresh pain. There was one last 90-degree turn, from cobbles onto pavement. I made it, straightened and gunned it for the line. As I crossed, I glanced at the clock: 6 minutes, 32 seconds.

  Third place.

  I blinked. Looked again.

  Third place.

  Not 103rd. Not 30th. Third place.

  Carmichael was stunned, shell-shocked. He hugged me, saying, “You are one crazy motherfucker.” Then we stood and watched the rest of the riders, assuming that my time would gradually be eclipsed many times over. But as rider after rider crossed the line, my time stayed up.

  Ekimov—three seconds behind me.

  Hincapie—three seconds behind me.

  LeMond—one second ahead of me.

  Armstrong—eleven seconds behind me.

  When the final rider finished, I was in sixth place.

  The following day, as the peloton rolled out of Wilmington for stage 1, I wondered if some of the pros would talk to me; perhaps they’d say hello, offer a friendly word. Not one of them did—not Alcalá, not Ekimov, not LeMond. I was disappointed, and also relieved. I didn’t mind being anonymous. I reminded myself that I was just an amateur, a work pony, a nobody.

  Then, about ten miles into the race, I felt a friendly tap on my back. I turned, and there was Lance’s face, two feet from mine. He looked straight into my eyes.

  “Hey Tyler, good ride yesterday.”

  I’m far from the first person to point this out, but Lance has a compelling way of talking. First he likes to pause for about half a second right before he says something. He just looks at you, checking you, and also letting you check him.

  “Thanks,” I said.

  He nodded. Something passed between us—respect? Recognition? Whatever it was, it felt pretty cool. For the first time, I got a feeling that I might belong.

  We kept riding. Being a newbie in a pro peloton is a bit like being a student driver on a Los Angeles freeway: move fast, or else. Halfway through the stage, inevitably, I messed up. I moved to the side, and accidentally cut off a big European guy, nearly hitting his front wheel, and he got pissed off. Not just angry, but theatrically angry, waving his arms and screaming at me in a language I didn’t understand. I turned to try to apologize, but that made me swerve even more and now European Guy was screaming louder, riders were starting to stare, and I was dying of embarrassment. European Guy rode up next to me, so he could yell directly in my face.

  Then someone moved between the angry European and me. Lance. He put his hand on European Guy’s shoulder and gave a gentle but firm push, sending a clear message—back off—and as he did, he stared European Guy down, daring him to do something about it. I was so grateful to Lance I could have hugged him.

  As the race went on over the next few days, I slid back with the other work ponies. Lance got stronger. He ducked a potential disaster at the end of the stage 5 time trial when, because of a screwup with traffic control, he was nearly crushed by a dump truck that was driving onto the racecourse. But Lance saw the truck coming, and managed to slip through an opening with an inch to spare on either side. He finished second that day to Ekimov. Afterward the press wanted to talk about the near miss—he’d almost died! But not Lance. Instead, he talked about how he should’ve won the race. That was Lance in a nutshell: cheat death, then get pissed you didn’t win.

  All in all, I was pretty impressed with the Texan. But what really impressed me happened that July. That’s when, from the safe distance of a TV screen, I watched Lance ride the Tour de France—the toughest race on earth, three weeks, 2,500 miles. For the first few days, he did pretty well. Then came stage 9, a 64-kilometer time trial: the race of truth, each rider sent off at one-minute intervals, alone against the clock. I watched in disbelief as Lance got passed by Tour champion Miguel Indurain. Actually “got passed” doesn’t do justice to how much faster the Spaniard was going. It was closer to “got blown into a ditch.” In the space of thirty seconds, Indurain went from being twenty bike lengths behind Lance to being so far ahead that he’d almost ridden out of camera frame. Lance lost more than six minutes that day, a massive amount. A few days later he abandoned—the second year in a row he’d failed to finish.

  I watched, thinking, Holy shit. I knew how strong Lance had been only two months before, and how well he could suffer. I’d seen him do things on a bike I could barely imagine, and yet here came Indurain, making Lance look like a work pony.

  I had always heard the Tour de France was hard, but that’s when I realized that it required an unimaginable level of strength, toughness, and suffering. That was also the moment when I realized that, more than anything, I wanted to ride it.

  I’d hoped my little success at the Tour DuPont might catch the eye of a professional team. It seemed I was wrong. I spent the summer of 1994 continuing to ride as an amateur, listening to Coach Carmichael’s increasingly bland cheerleading. Off the bike, I ran the hauling business, painted houses, and waited for my phone to ring.

  One afternoon in October, while I was painting my neighbor’s house, my phone rang. I sprinted inside, still splattered with paint, and picked up the receiver with my fingertips. The voice on the other end was gravelly, commanding, and impatient—the voice of God, if God had woken up on the wrong side of the bed.

  “So what’s it gonna take to get you on our team?” Thomas Weisel said.

  I tried to play cool. I had never talked to him before, but like everybody I knew Weisel’s story: fifty-something Harvard-trained millionaire investment banker, former national-level speed skater, masters bike racer, and, above all else, a winner. In the coming decade these guys would be a dime a dozen, enduro jock CEOs who traded golf clubs for a racing bike. But Weisel was the original of the species. For him, life was a race, and it was won by the toughest, the strongest, the guy who could do what it takes. Weisel’s motto was Get it fucking done. I can still hear that gravelly voice: Just go get it done. Get it fucking done.

  What Weisel wanted to do was build an American team to win the Tour de France. As more than one person had pointed out, it was the equivalent of starting a French baseball team and attempting to win the World Series. Plus, you couldn’t just start a team and enter the Tour—your team had to be invited by the organizers, an invitation based on getting results in big European races. This was not easy. In fact, it was so difficult that Weisel’s main sponsor, Subaru, had abandoned him the previous fall, leaving Weisel alone, just him against the world. In other words, exactly where he liked to be.

  Here’s a story about Weisel: When he was in his late forties, he decided to get
serious about cycling. So he hired Eddie Borysewicz, the Olympic team’s cycling coach and the godfather of American bike racing.* Twice a week, Weisel flew from San Francisco to San Diego to train with Eddie B from 10 a.m. until 5 p.m. During the winter, Weisel kept a photo of his main rival pinned up on his weight room wall “to remind me why I was working so hard.” Weisel went on to win three age-group masters world championships and five national titles on the road and the track.

  “Was it worth it?” a friend asked afterward.

  “Yeah, but only because I won,” Weisel said.

  Weisel’s personality was similar to Lance’s (later, on Postal, we riders would frequently confuse one’s voice for the other’s). In fact, back in 1990, Weisel had hired Lance for his pro-am cycling team, called Subaru-Montgomery, when Lance was just nineteen. The two hadn’t gotten along; most attributed it to the fact that they were too much alike. Weisel had let Armstrong go; Armstrong had become world champion three years later—a rare example of Weisel letting his emotions get ahead of a business opportunity.

  Weisel told me how he’d signed other good American riders—Darren Baker, Marty Jemison, and Nate Reiss—and hired Eddie B to coach. The team would be called Montgomery-Bell. How much did I want for one year? I hesitated. If I went too high, I might lose this. But I didn’t want to go cheap, either. So I named a figure in the middle. Thirty thousand dollars.

  “You got it,” Weisel growled, and I thanked him profusely and hung up the phone. I called my parents to tell them the news: I was officially a professional bike racer.

  Year one of the Weisel Experiment went pretty well. We spent 1995 racing mostly in the States, with a couple of trips to Europe to enter smaller races. The team was a mix: mostly younger Americans, with a sprinkling of middling European racers. Though Eddie B tended to be disorganized at times (we got lost a lot traveling to and from races; the race schedule kept changing), the craziness made it fun, helped the team become tighter, and besides, most of us didn’t know any different. One afternoon, a soigneur (team assistant) gave me my first injection. It was perfectly legal—iron and vitamin B—but it was also a little unnerving, the sight of a needle going into my ass. He told me it was for my health, because I was depleted from all the racing I’d been doing. After all, bike racing was the hardest sport on earth; it put you out of balance; the vitamins would help restore what was lost. Like with astronauts, he said.

  Besides, we riders had far more important things to worry about. We competed to see who could do the best impression of Eddie B’s Polish accent, where “you” was a Brooklynese “youse” and every verb was plural. Youse must attacks now! Youse must attacks now! Weisel was a constant presence at the bigger races, almost another coach. When we won, he would get teary-eyed, and hug everyone as if we’d just won the Tour de France. I probably made him cry when we traveled to a small race in Holland, a contest called the Teleflex Tour, and I managed to win the overall. Not the biggest race in the world, but it felt good—another sign that I might belong in this sport. Besides, I needed the money: I had my eye on a house in Nederland, Colorado, a small, sleepy town just outside Boulder. The house wasn’t anything fancy, just fifteen hundred square feet, with a small porch where I could see the mountains. But to me it meant a sense of permanence, a place to call my own.

  In early 1996 Weisel hired former Olympic gold medalist Mark Gorski as general manager. Within a few months Gorski delivered the big news: the U.S. Postal Service had agreed to a three-year contract to be the team’s title sponsor, with budget increases built in so the team could grow. Weisel and Gorski got busy stocking the roster with more young riders, capping it with Andy Hampsten, who was the most accomplished American cyclist this side of Greg LeMond. Hampsten had won the Tour of Italy, the Tour of Switzerland, and the Tour of Romandie.

  The plan for 1996–97 was to establish Postal’s European credentials. We’d enter more big races, and hopefully, by 1997, earn an invitation to what Weisel liked to call the Tour de Fucking France. We fed off Weisel’s determination. We felt optimistic and energized, especially with Hampsten leading us. That spring of ’96 we headed to Europe feeling optimistic. We knew it’d be tough, but we’d find a way to get it done.

  We had no idea.

  * Borysewicz was best known for importing Eastern European training methods to the United States—including some that were more than a little questionable. Prior to the 1984 Olympic Games, Borysewicz arranged blood transfusions for the U.S. Olympic cycling team in a Ramada Inn in Carson, California. The team went on to win nine medals, including four golds. While transfusions were not technically against the rules at the time, the United States Olympic Committee condemned the procedure, calling the transfusions “unacceptable, unethical, and illegal as far as the USOC is concerned.”

  The scandal and ensuing publicity seem to have scared Borysewicz straight: Hamilton and teammate Andy Hampsten agree that the team was clean during Eddie B’s 1995–96 tenure as director, and that he frequently warned them against “getting involved with that shit.”

  Chapter 2

  REALITY

  AT FIRST, WE TOLD ourselves it was jet lag. Then the weather. Then our diet. Our horoscopes. Anything to avoid facing the truth about Postal’s performance in the bigger European races in 1996: we were getting crushed.

  It wasn’t that we were losing; it was the way we were losing. You can grade your performance in a race the same way you would grade a test in school. If you cross the finish line in the lead group, then you earned an A: you might not have won, but you never got left behind. If you are in the second group, you get a B—not great, but far from terrible; you only got left behind once. If you’re in the third group, you get a C, and so on. Each race is really a bunch of smaller races, contests that always have one of two results: you either keep up, or you don’t.

  As a team, Postal was scoring D’s and F’s. We did fairly well in America, but our performance in the big European races seemed to follow the same pattern: the race would start, and the speed would crank up, and up, and up. Pretty soon we were hanging on for dear life. Pack-fill, we called ourselves, because our only function was to make the back group of the peloton bigger. We had no chance to win, no chance to attack or affect the race in a meaningful way; we were just grateful to survive. The reason was that the other riders were unbelievably strong. They defied the rules of physics and bike racing. They did things I’d never seen, or even imagined seeing.

  For instance, they could attack, alone, and hold off a charging peloton for hours. They could climb at dazzling speed, even the bigger guys who didn’t look like climbers. They could perform at their absolute best day after day, avoiding the usual peaks and valleys. They were circus strongmen.

  For me, the guy who stood out was Bjarne Riis, a six-foot-tall, 152-pound Dane nicknamed the Eagle. Riis had a big bald head, and intense blue eyes that rarely blinked. He spoke seldom, and usually cryptically. His focus was so intense that it sometimes looked as if he were in a trance. But the strangest thing about Riis, by far, was the arc of his career.

  For most of his career, Riis was a decent racer: solid, but rarely a contender in the big races. Then, in 1993, at twenty-seven, he went from average to incredible. He finished fifth in the 1993 Tour, with a stage win; in 1995, he finished third. By 1996, some observers believed he might even be able to defeat the sport’s reigning king, five-time defending champion Miguel Indurain.

  I remember one of the first times I saw him up close, in the spring of 1997. We were going hard up some brutally steep climb, and Riis was working his way through the group, except he was pushing a gigantic gear. The rest of us were spinning along at the usual rhythm of around 90 rpms, and here comes Bjarne, blank-faced, churning away at 40 rpms, pushing a gear that I couldn’t imagine pushing. Then I realized: he’s training. The rest of us are going full bore, either trying to win or trying to hang on, and he’s training. As Riis went by, I couldn’t resist. I said, “Hey, how’s it going?” to see if he’d react
. He gave me a glare and just kept riding.

  You looked at Riis, you looked at the dozens of Riis look-alikes that made up the peloton, and you couldn’t help but wonder what was going on. I mean, I was green, but I wasn’t an idiot. I knew some bike racers doped. I’d read about it—albeit limitedly, in this pre-Internet age—in the pages of VeloNews. I’d heard about steroids (which mystified me at the time, since bike racers don’t have big muscles); I’d heard about riders popping amphetamines, about syringes tucked in jersey pockets. And lately I’d heard about erythropoietin, EPO, the blood booster that added, some said, 20 percent to endurance by causing the body to produce more oxygen-carrying red blood cells.*

  The rumors didn’t impress me as much as the speed—the relentless, brutal, mechanical speed. I wasn’t alone. Andy Hampsten was achieving the same power outputs as previous years, years when he’d won the big races. Now, producing that same power, he was struggling to stay in the top fifty. Hampsten, who was staunchly anti-doping, and who would soon retire at age thirty-two rather than dope, had a good view of the change.

  ANDY HAMPSTEN: In the mideighties, when I came up, riders were doping but it was still possible to compete with them. It was either amphetamines or anabolics—both were powerful, but they had downsides. Amphetamines made riders stupid—they’d launch these crazy attacks, use up all their energy. Anabolics made people bloated, heavy, gave them injuries in the long run, not to mention these horrid skin rashes. They’d be superstrong in the cool weather, in shorter races, but in a long, hot stage race, the anabolics would drag them down. So bottom line, a clean rider could compete in the big three-week tours.

  EPO changed everything. Amphetamines and anabolics are nothing compared to EPO. All of a sudden whole teams were ragingly fast; all of a sudden I was struggling to make time limits. By 1994, it was ridiculous. I’d be on climbs, working as hard as I’d ever worked, producing exactly the same power, at the same weight, and right alongside me would be these big-assed guys, and they’d be chatting like we were on the flats! It was completely crazy.†