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

by Daniel Coyle

  I remember being struck by Pedro’s wording: it wasn’t “You scored a 43” or “Your level is 43,” it was “You are 43.” Like I was a stock, and 43 was my price. Only later would I find out how accurate this really was.

  But to be honest, I wasn’t paying a lot of attention at the time. I was more concerned with immediate things; the upcoming European season, planning, packing, training, seeing where I fit into the newly outfitted team. Scott Mercier was one of the older guys on the team, a former Olympian, and more savvy than I was at the time. I’ll let him describe his encounter with our new doctor.

  SCOTT MERCIER: I’d never had a doctor ask me for blood before, so I wasn’t sure what to expect. But I knew that the only way to raise hematocrit was to take EPO, or get a transfusion. So [Celaya] takes me to his hotel room and we do the test. When he looks at my number, he starts shaking his head.

  “Oooooh la la!” Pedro says. “You are 39. To be professional in Europe, you need to be 49, maybe 49.5.”

  I understood what that meant; he had to be talking about EPO. But I decided to play dumb, to see what the doctor would say.

  “How will I do that?” I ask, and Pedro smiles.

  “Specialty vitamins,” he says. “Why don’t we talk about it later?”

  When we got to Europe, I had my eyes open. I knew about EPO, I knew it had to be refrigerated. Sure enough, there’s a refrigerator in the team mechanic’s truck. It’s got some drinks, some ice, and, on the lower shelf, a black plastic box, like a tackle box, with a padlock. If you picked it up and shook it, you could hear the vials pinging together. I started calling it “the specialty vitamin lunchbox.”

  Anybody could see the decision that had been made at the top, and where the team was headed. It was clear as day. Even so, you don’t really want to believe it; you ignore it and try to keep within yourself. For a while. Later that spring, in May, I had a four-week break between races. Pedro came to my hotel room one night and handed me a Ziploc filled with about thirty pills along with some clear liquid in glass vials. He told me they were steroids. “They make you strong, like a bull,” he said. “Strong like never before.”

  I thought about it a long time. A tough decision, and in the end I didn’t take the pills and I quit at the end of the year. My heart wasn’t in it. What made the difference for me is that I was already twenty-eight; I’d had a good career; I had some options for going forward in my life. I went into business, have done pretty well. Even so, I’ve wrestled with that decision for fourteen years. I don’t blame people who did it in the least—I get why they did it. I mean, look at Tyler—look at how well he did in that world! It’s been strange watching that from afar, wondering what might have been, if I’d made a different choice.

  In February 1997, a couple of weeks after training camp ended, I headed across the Atlantic. I remember looking out the window of the plane and seeing Spain spread out beneath me, and feeling my stomach lurch. I was nervous. I was about to ride in three races in the south of Spain; then I would meet up with Haven in Barcelona and we’d drive to the new apartment in Girona we were going to share with the other Postal riders. I was nervous about living in Europe, about my still-new relationship with Haven, and about my nonexistent Spanish language skills. But mostly I was nervous about the fact that there were twenty riders on Postal and room for just nine on the Tour team. I wanted to be one of them.

  I landed and dove straight into the fire: the five-day Ruta del Sol, the one-day Luis Puig race, then the five-day Tour of Valencia. It was brutal: windy, hot, unbelievably fast, rolling across the Spanish scrublands and coast, the brown and blue scenery. That was when I saw the white bags for the first time. They showed up at the end of each race, brought out by the soigneurs, who kept them in the fridge in the mechanic’s truck. They were small, the size of a lunch bag a kid might take to school, folded neatly at the top. The soigneurs didn’t make a big deal out of them—that, in a way, was what made it seem big, because they were so matter-of-fact, so routine. They were handed to certain riders as they left the team to go home.

  Some riders got them. Some didn’t.

  The first time I noticed the white bags, it got my attention. After two races, I started looking for them. They were given only to the stronger riders on the team—Hincapie, Ekimov, Baffi, Robin. The guys I thought of as the A team. That’s when I felt a sinking realization: I was on the B team.

  It was around this time that I started hearing the phrase “riding paniagua.” Sometimes it was delivered in a slightly depressed tone, as if the speaker were talking about riding a particularly slow and stubborn donkey. I might’ve finished higher, but I was riding paniagua. Other times, it was mentioned as a point of pride. I finished in the first group of thirty and I was paniagua. I came to discover that it was really pan y agua—“bread and water.” From that, I made the obvious conclusion: riding without chemical assistance in the pro peloton was so rare that it was worth pointing out.

  I tried to ignore the white bags at first, but I quickly came to hate them. I thought about them often. When I felt an A-team rider pass me, I thought of the white bags. When I felt exhausted and ready to drop, I thought of the white bags. When I worked my ass off and still couldn’t come close to competing in the race, I thought of the white bags. In a way they served as my fuel; they made me push myself harder than I’ve ever pushed, because I wanted to prove that I was better, I was stronger than some little bag. I went to the edge, tasted the blood in my mouth, day after day. And for a while, it worked.

  Then I started to break down.

  Here’s an interesting number: one thousand days. It’s roughly the number of days between the day I became professional and the day I doped for the first time. Talking to other riders of this era and reading their stories, it seems to be a pattern: those of us who doped mostly started during our third year. First year, neo-pro, excited to be there, young pup, hopeful. Second year, realization. Third year, clarity—the fork in the road. Yes or no. In or out. Everybody has their thousand days; everybody has their choice.

  In some ways, it’s depressing. But in other ways, I think it’s human. One thousand mornings of waking up with hope; a thousand afternoons of being crushed. A thousand days of paniagua, bumping painfully against the wall at the edge of your limits, trying to find a way past. A thousand days of getting signals that doping is okay, signals from powerful people you trust and admire, signals that say It’ll be fine and Everybody’s doing it. And beneath all that, the fear that if you don’t find some way to ride faster, then your career is over. Willpower might be strong, but it’s not infinite. And once you cross the line, there’s no going back.

  I raced Ruta del Sol paniagua. I was determined to prove my worth—maybe too eager. The sun was hot, the pace was blazing. For five days I went to my limits and hung there, trying to keep up with the strongmen. I felt my body begin to weaken, and I pushed harder. The next race started—the Tour of Valencia. Five more days in the torture chamber. I dug deep, found a second wind. Then a third. Then a fourth.

  Then there were no more winds left. The peloton seemed like it was made up of a hundred Bjarne Riises, a freight train. I felt myself losing strength, drying up like a leaf. I had been in Europe for all of two weeks, and the writing was on the wall. I was starting to feel desperate. I’d always risen to the challenge; I’d always been able to gut it out. No job too small or tough. And now, I wasn’t tough enough.

  At this point I could tell you all about what an honest person I am. I could tell stories about when I was kid, growing up on High Street in Marblehead, how we always played fair, no matter what the game. I could tell you about the honor of my grandfather, who served in the U.S. Navy, or I could tell you about the time I got caught breaking the rules by reselling ski-lift tickets in high school, and had to write forty letters of apology and do volunteer work, and how I learned my lesson and swore to always be a good person, and how I’ve tried my best to keep that vow.

  But that wouldn’t be honest,
because in my opinion this decision isn’t really about honor or character. I know wonderful people who doped; I know questionable people who decided not to. For me, the only fact that mattered was that for a thousand days I had been cheated out of my livelihood, and there was no sign that things were going to get better. So I did what many others had done before me. I joined the brotherhood.

  Actually, they came to me. Just after the Tour of Valencia, Pedro came to visit me in my hotel room. My roommate, Peter Meinert Nielsen, was at dinner, so we could talk in private. Pedro was wearing what he usually wore at races: a vest with lots of pockets, like a fly fisherman might use. He sat down and asked me the question he always asked: How are you, Tyler? He was always so good at asking that question; he made you feel how much he cared. So I told him the truth. I was wiped out. I could barely make it to the shower. I didn’t have anything left.

  Pedro didn’t say anything at first. He just looked at me—or, to be more accurate, looked into me with those soft, sad brown eyes. Then his hand started rooting around in the fly-fishing vest, and pulled out a brown glass bottle. Slowly, casually, he showed it to me, unscrewed the top, gave an expert tap with his fingertips. A single capsule. A tiny red egg.

  “This is not doping,” he said. “This is for your health. To help you recover.”

  I nodded. He was still holding the capsule. I could see it was filled with liquid.

  “If you were racing tomorrow, I would not give you this. But it is totally okay if you take it now and race the day after tomorrow,” he said. “It’s safe. It will help you recover. Your body needs it.”

  I understood exactly what Pedro was saying; if I was selected to be drug-tested, I would test positive for the next day. As we both knew, they only tested at races, and the next race didn’t start for two days. I put out my hand, and he tipped the capsule into my palm. I waited until he was gone, and then I got a glass of water, and looked at myself in the bathroom mirror.

  This is not doping. This is for your health.

  The race, the Luis Puig, started two days later with an insanely fast climb, a long, brutal switchback ascent. I fell back, as I’d expected to. But then something happened. As we neared the top of the climb, I noticed I was moving up; I was passing one rider, then three, then ten. Don’t get me wrong: I wasn’t suddenly superman—I was dying, I was at my absolute limit. But the thing was, the others were dying a little more quickly. When a break formed, I was with the A students.

  Objectively, I knew what had happened: the red egg—which I found out later was testosterone—had gone into my bloodstream and kicked off a cascade of beneficial changes: added fluid to my muscles, repaired tiny injuries, created a feeling of well-being. It wasn’t just me going up that hill, it was an improved me. A more balanced me. As Pedro would say, a healthier me.

  I’m not proud of that decision. I wish with all my heart that I’d been stronger, that I’d dropped that red egg back into the bottle and suffered through another day at the back, paniagua. I wish I’d realized the path I was taking, wish I’d quit the sport, come back to Colorado, finished college, maybe gone to business school, had a different life. But I didn’t. I took the pill, and it worked—I rode faster, felt better. I felt good, and not just physically. The red egg was a badge of honor, a sign that Pedro and the team saw my potential. I felt like this was a small step toward making the A team.

  I didn’t win the race, but I did pretty well. Afterward, I accepted a pat on the back from my director, Johnny Weltz, and then I watched as the white bags were handed out. I watched the A-team riders tuck their white bags into their rollaways, and I felt a sinking sensation.

  Apparently, I still had more work to do.

  After the Tour of Valencia, we headed to Girona, a walled medieval city of 100,000 people in the foothills of the Pyrenees, and my new home for the next seven months. I picked up Haven at the Barcelona airport and we drove north, eager to see the city, which team director Johnny Weltz had described as a rare jewel. We followed Johnny as he drove the road north from Barcelona. The problem was, Johnny drove like a madman through the mist, accelerating to 100 mph. I did my best to keep up, racing in and out of traffic like a Formula One driver. (Haven later looked back on that ride as a metaphor for our entire European experience: an insane, high-speed chase through the foggy darkness.)

  Johnny was right about the city. Our apartment, unfortunately, turned out to be the flaw in the jewel: a dusty set of dormitory-like rooms in a decrepit high-rise. It would be home for four of us—George Hincapie, Scott Mercier, Darren Baker, and me; Marty Jemison and his wife, Jill, lived a short walk away. We drew straws for rooms; Scott, being the tallest, naturally drew the straw for the smallest room (when he lay in bed, his head and feet could almost touch the opposing walls). The place was filthy, so Haven headed up a cleaning project; we spent our first morning scrubbing and dusting, until the place looked less like a scary dump and more like a college dormitory. We dubbed it, in a tribute to the old Jeffersons sitcom, our Dee-Luxe Apartment in the Sky. We called ourselves the Eurodogs.

  If our life had been a sitcom, Scott Mercier would have played the Smart One: he was twenty-nine, tall and college-educated, a classy thoroughbred both on and off the bike.

  Darren Baker would have been the Edgy One; big, strong, tough as nails, he’d come to the sport after being injured as a runner and proven to be a natural (he’d beaten Lance in a big race back in 1992). Darren was a realist to the bone, a guy who took no BS and who reveled in telling hard truths.

  George Hincapie was the Quiet One: a twenty-three-year-old who’d spent the last few years racing at a high level in Europe and who’d been picked as a rising star, specializing in the supertough one-day northern European races known as classics. George didn’t say much, but on his bike he was eloquent, combining a liquid pedal stroke with a gritty, never-say-die Belgian mentality. People often mistook George’s silence for slowness; as time went by, I found the opposite was true. He was wiser and more observant than anyone suspected.

  That left me as the Scrappy One, the undersized pup who had the most to learn about the sport. The theme of our early days was cluelessness. We had no idea where to train, where to get bikes repaired, where to shop for groceries, how to rent a movie or use an ATM. Thank God, George spoke Spanish, and could patiently guide us through the thornier moments. For the first weeks, whenever we encountered a linguistic obstacle, we would call “George!”—so often that it became a running joke. And George always came through: he was kind and patient.

  We quickly became friends, and discovered a truth about our sport: there is no friendship in the world like the friendship of being on a bike-racing team. The reason is one word: give. You give all your strength: during the race, you shelter each other, you empty yourself for the sake of another person, and they do the same for you. You give all your time: you travel together, room together, eat every meal together. You ride for hours together every day, knuckle to knuckle. To this day, I can remember how each of my teammates chewed their food, how they fixed their coffee, how they walked when they were tired, how their eyes looked when they were going to have a shitty day or a great day. Other sports teams like to call themselves “families.” In bike racing, it’s close to true.

  Thrown together in this far-away place, the four of us became inseparable. When we traveled to races, we stuck together, causing the rest of the peloton to regard us with the same kind of polite curiosity you might give to four toddlers wandering around your workplace: Oh look, it’s the new Americans—aren’t they cute? Our sense of apartness was increased by the fact that the peloton is essentially one big clique, with a set of detailed rules, most of which we were in the process of breaking.

  The rule against air-conditioning, for instance. The Europeans believed A/C to be a dangerous invention that caused illness and dried out the lungs; if someone on the bus or in a hotel room turned on the air-conditioning, it was as if they were giving everyone the bubonic plague.

  Or th
e rule against eating chocolate mousse (causes sweating).

  Or the rule against sitting down on a curb (tires out the legs).

  Or the rule against passing the salt from hand to hand (it had to be set on the table, lest it bring bad luck).

  Or the rule against shaving your legs the night before a big race (your body loses energy regrowing the hair).

  George proved to be an ideal roommate for two reasons. First, he was a gadget guy. In an age when portable electronics were still exotic, George was a one-man SkyMall: he owned a portable DVD player, speakers, the latest cell phones, laptops, etc. He was the one who gave me my first cell phone; he taught me how to text.

  George also taught me how to be lazy. We didn’t call it laziness, of course—we called it “conserving energy,” and it was an essential part of being a good bike racer. The rules were simple: stand as little as possible, sleep as much as possible. George was amazing at it, a superman of lounging. Whole days would go by, and he would only be vertical to eat and train. I can still see his long body stretched on the couch, legs up, surrounded by a debris field of his electronic gear. He also saved energy when it came to thinking about food: George ate pizza margherita for lunch and dinner some days; he ate it so often that we began to call him Pizza Margherita. I did my best to copy his energy-conserving habits, but it didn’t come naturally: I had more nervous energy to burn off, and besides, I was worried about making the team.

  The worries, ironically enough, had started with George, and an overheard conversation. The walls of our apartamento were painted cinder block, the floors white Spanish tile. You could not drop a pin without it being heard. If someone whispered, you heard it all over the apartment. And there was some whispering going on, between George and our director, Johnny Weltz.

  It was natural that Johnny would visit George: after all, George was one of the team’s best riders, our biggest hope for a classics victory that could help propel Postal into the Tour. What was not natural, however, was that Johnny would sometimes show up carrying a white bag. You could hear the paper crinkle. Also, when they spoke privately, they would either whisper or switch to Spanish. While George and Johnny were both fluent in Spanish, this didn’t make sense to me—we were all on the same team, why not speak English? Scott, Darren, and I couldn’t help but be curious. We saw George put a small foil packet in the back of the fridge, behind the Cokes. One day soon after, when George was out, we couldn’t resist. We opened the refrigerator and opened up the foil packet. We saw syringes and ampules labeled EPO.