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

by Daniel Coyle

  SCOTT MERCIER: I asked George about it once. He and I were sitting alone in the apartment. All this stuff was happening, and I wanted to know. So I asked him, “Do you have to do the drugs to make it?” He hesitated a long time. George is a quiet guy. He doesn’t want conflict. So he felt a little on the spot. But eventually he said, “You gotta figure it out for yourself.” And I knew what he meant.

  I was figuring it out. In March I roomed with Adriano Baffi at the Tour of Catalunya. This was a big deal for me at the time because Baffi was a veteran, a big name, one of Weisel’s hired guns; he’d won five stages at the Tour of Italy, which made him a legend on our team. So I walked into our hotel room and the first sound I heard was a high-pitched zzzzzzzzzz—the centrifuge. I look in to see Baffi, a handsome, debonair guy, fussing over this small machine exactly like Pedro’s, except smaller and nicer—the Brookstone version. Baffi wasn’t being secretive about it in the least, just matter-of-fact and precise, like he was fixing an espresso. He peered at the hatchmarks on the side of the tube, and he smiled. “Forty-eight!” he said.

  In those situations, I always acted like I knew what they were talking about. I know it sounds weird now—maybe I should’ve been more honest and asked, Hey, Adriano, why are you testing your own hematocrit? Doesn’t the team doctor do that? But I wanted to be cool, to fit in. At other races, I’d overhear the A-team riders talking about their hematocrit, comparing numbers, with a lot of oohs and aahs and teasing. They talked about hematocrit all the time, as much as they talked about the weather or the road conditions. The numbers seemed to carry huge meaning: I’m 43—you don’t have to worry about me winning today. But I hear you’re a 49—look out! I would smile and nod, and quickly I figured out just how important hematocrit was. It was not just another number; it was the number, capable of making the difference between having a chance at winning and not. This was not particularly good news for me, because my own hematocrit usually tested at a depressing 42. The harder I trained and raced, the lower it dropped.

  Still, I didn’t do anything. Pedro gave me an occasional red egg at races, but that was it. I would not have dreamed of asking Baffi or another teammate for EPO. It felt like something that was above my station, that had to be earned. So I did what I was good at: I put my head down, gritted my teeth, and kept riding, touching limit and trying to nudge a little past it. I might’ve been able to ignore what was happening a bit longer if it hadn’t been for Marty Jemison.

  I knew Marty well and considered him a friend. He was a bit older; he had lived in Europe and raced for a Dutch team before joining Weisel’s Montgomery squad in 1995. Marty didn’t talk a lot about his previous European experience, but I got the feeling it had been tough being a solo American. Marty was a nice guy; a little touchy at times, perhaps, but on the whole friendly and outgoing (he’s since founded a successful bike-travel business). The main thing I knew about Marty, though, is that I could usually beat him. We’d raced against each other many times over the years, and I’d ended up on top maybe 80 percent of the time, especially in time trials, which are considered the best measure of pure strength. There was no disputing it; the gap between our abilities was as stable and reliable as our height.

  But in the spring of 1997, the pattern reversed. In training rides, and in early season races, Marty started doing better than me, and it made me nervous. Was he doing something? Did I need to do something too?

  In April, I was picked to ride for the team in the year’s toughest test yet: Liège–Bastogne–Liège, a cruel 257-kilometer painfest through Belgium’s Ardennes region that some consider to be the hardest single-day race on the calendar. I put everything toward preparing for it, figuring it was a golden opportunity to improve my chances of making the Tour team. My goal was to make it into the first or second group—to earn an A or a B, to my way of thinking.

  I scored a big fat paniagua D. Oh, I kept up for a while, but when the race got serious, I got dusted and finished in the middle of the pack, the fourth group, fifteen minutes back. Meanwhile, Marty stayed with the first group most of the day, and finished in the second group—right in the mix. After the race, I felt a new level of frustration as I watched the white bags get handed out. Now I could measure the injustice. Marty used to be a few groups behind me; now he was a few groups ahead. I could count the number of seconds those white bags contained. I could see the gap between who I was and who I could be. Who I was supposed to be.

  This was bullshit.

  This was not fair.

  In that moment, the future became clear. Unless something changed, I was done. I was going to have to find a different career. I began to get more stressed and angry. Not at Marty—after all, he was only doing what a lot of others were doing. He’d been given the opportunity, and he’d taken it. No, I felt angry at myself, at the world. I was being cheated.

  A few days later, I heard a soft knock on my door. Pedro walked in and sat down on the bed; we were knee to knee. His eyes were sympathetic.

  “I know how hard you work, Tyler. Your levels are low, but you push yourself to keep up.”

  I acted tough, but he could tell how much I appreciated hearing that. He leaned in close.

  “You are an amazing rider, Tyler. You can push yourself to the limit, even when you are completely empty; very few people can do this. Most riders, they would abandon. But you keep going.”

  I nodded. I could feel where he was going, and my heart started beating faster.

  “I think you perhaps have a chance to make the Tour de France team. But you have to be healthier. You have to take care of your body. You must make yourself healthier.”

  The next day, I took my first EPO shot. It was so easy. Just a tiny amount, a clear liquid, a few drops, a pinprick on the arm. It was so easy, in fact, that I almost felt foolish—that was it? This was the thing I’d feared? Pedro gave me a few vials of EPO to take home along with some syringes. I wrapped it all up in foil and put it in the back of the fridge and, soon after, showed it to Haven. We talked about it for a few minutes.

  “This is the exact same result as sleeping in an altitude tent,” I said. That wasn’t completely true, of course, first because sleeping in a low-oxygen enclosure, or altitude tent (a legal method of boosting hematocrit) is a big hassle and gives you a headache, and also because it doesn’t improve your blood values nearly as much. But the reasoning sounded good enough for both of us. We knew this was a gray area, but we also knew that the team doctor thought it was a good idea, for my health. We knew we were breaking the rules. But it felt more like we were being smart.

  Besides Haven, I didn’t talk about my decision with anyone. Not Scott, or Darren, or George, or Marty. They might’ve been like family, but telling them would’ve felt weird, like I was breaking a team rule. Now, I can see that the real reason I didn’t want to tell was that I was ashamed. But back then, it felt like I was being savvy. I was becoming, in the word the Europeans liked to use, professional.‡

  A lot of people wonder if taking EPO is risky to health. I’d like to reply to that concern with the following list:

  Elbow

  Shoulder

  Collarbone (twice)

  Back Hip

  Fingers (multiple)

  Ribs Wrist

  Nose

  Those are the bones I’ve broken during my racing career. This is not an unusual list in our profession. It’s funny: in the States, everybody connects bike racing with health. But when you get to the top level, you see the truth: bike racing is not a healthy sport in any sense of the word. (As my former teammate Jonathan Vaughters likes to say, If you want to feel what it’s like to be a bike racer, strip down to your underwear, drive your car 40 mph, and leap out the window into a pile of jagged metal.) So when it comes to the risks of EPO, they tend to feel pretty small.

  What does being on EPO feel like? It feels great, mostly because it doesn’t feel like anything at all. You’re not wiped out. You feel healthy, normal, strong. You have more color in your cheeks;
you’re less grumpy, more fun to be around. These little clear drops work like radio signals—they instruct your kidneys to create more red blood cells (RBCs), and soon millions more are filling up your veins, carrying oxygen to your muscles. Everything else about your body is the same, except now you have better fuel. You can go harder, longer. That holy place at the edge of your limits gets nudged out—and not just a little.

  Riders talked of an EPO honeymoon, and in my experience it was true—as much a psychological phenomenon as anything else. The thrill comes from the way a few drops of EPO allow you to break through walls that used to stop you cold, and suddenly there’s a feeling of new possibility. Fear melts. You wonder: How far could I go? How fast can I ride?

  People think doping is for lazy people who want to avoid hard work. That might be true in some cases, but in mine, as with many riders I knew, it was precisely the opposite. EPO granted the ability to suffer more; to push yourself farther and harder than you’d ever imagined, in both training and racing. It rewarded precisely what I was good at: having a great work ethic, pushing myself to the limit and past it. I felt almost giddy: this was a new landscape. I began to see races differently. They weren’t rolls of the genetic dice, or who happened to be on form that day. They didn’t depend on who you were. They depended on what you did—how hard you worked, how attentive and professional you were in your preparation. Races were like tests, for which you could study. Instantly, my results began to improve; I went from getting C’s and D’s to getting A’s and B’s. As the summer began, I started figuring out the rules of the game:

  1. Take red eggs for recovery once every week or two; make sure not to take them too close to races.

  2. Get EPO at races, from the team doctors. You don’t buy it; try to avoid keeping it in your house, except in special situations (like injury, or a long break between races). You inject it subcutaneously, into the fat layer beneath the skin. That helps it release more slowly, and provides a sustained effect.

  3. Be quiet about it. There was no need to talk, because everybody already knew. It was part of being cool. Besides, if any laws were being broken, it was clear that the team was the one doing the breaking—they were the ones obtaining and distributing the EPO; my only job was to close my mouth, extend my arm, and be a good worker.

  As the summer heated up, I started delivering real results, finishing in the top twenty, the top ten. I felt less tense, more relaxed. When other riders joked about their hematocrit numbers, I laughed along. I smiled knowingly when someone made a joke about EPO. I was the newest member of the white-bag club.

  In June, we got the big news that Tour de France organizers had decided to invite Postal to the race. Then, a few weeks later, I got even bigger news when I was selected for the Tour team: I would be riding alongside Eki, George, Baffi, Robin, and the rest of the A team. I phoned my parents back in Marblehead and told them to fly over to watch part of the race. After all, this might never happen again. I was ecstatic—at least until the race began.

  The 1997 Tour was crazily difficult. Normally, Tour stages are tough, but this year the organizers, perhaps reacting to the increased speed of the peloton, decided to make them really tough—one stage was 242 kilometers through the heart of the Pyrenees; seven continuous, camera-friendly hours of suffering. As a bonus, the weather was hellacious, featuring freezing rain, fog, and hurricane-strength winds. If the organizers were looking for a way to inspire EPO use, they succeeded. Postal went through a lot of white bags, and I’m sure we weren’t alone.

  A lot of people wonder why doping seems more prevalent at the longer, three-week races like the Tour de France. The answer is simple: the longer the race, the more doping helps—especially EPO. The rule of thumb: If you don’t take any therapy in a three-week race, your hematocrit will drop about 2 points a week, or a total of about 6 points. It’s called sports anemia. Every 1 percent drop in hematocrit creates a 1 percent drop in power—how much force you can put into the pedals. Therefore, if you ride a grand tour paniagua, without any source of red blood cells, your power will drop roughly 6 percent by the end of the third week. And in a sport where titles are often decided by power differentials of one-tenth of a percentage point, this qualifies as a deal breaker.

  EPO or no EPO, the Tour’s hardest day came on stage 14. On that day the French Festina team performed a circus strongman act the likes of which nobody had ever seen. At the foot of the 21.3-kilometer Col du Glandon, all nine Festina riders rode to the front, then went full bore, revving to unimaginable speed and carrying that speed over the climb of the Madeleine and into Courchevel. Later, we all realized what was happening: Festina was playing a new card. Something that went beyond EPO. Over the next day or so, the rumor circulated that Festina was using something called perfluorocarbons, synthetic blood that increases oxygen-carrying capacity, and for which there was no test. Using PFCs held huge, potentially life-threatening risks. The following year, a Swiss rider named Mauro Gianetti had ended up in intensive care; doctors suspected he’d used PFCs, though Gianetti denied it. But as Festina had shown, there were also rewards—which meant that these innovations, too powerful to stay secret for long, were quickly matched by other teams. “Arms race” is an accurate way to describe it, but it’s important to realize that it was an arms race between teams, not individuals. Team doctors were trying to stay ahead of other team doctors; the riders’ job was simply to be obedient.§

  I rode the 1997 Tour, and survived. Riis was heavily favored to win, but to the world’s surprise, he was surpassed by a teammate, a wide-eyed, muscled twenty-three-year-old German named Jan Ullrich. Ullrich was a genuine phenomenon, with a fluid pedal stroke and incredible power for such a young rider. Watching him, I agreed with most observers: Ullrich was clearly Indurain’s successor, the guy who was going to dominate the Tour for the next decade.

  As for Postal, we did pretty well for a rookie team; our leader, Jean-Cyril Robin, finished 15th. I was 69th overall, the fourth Postie (Jemison was 96th, half an hour behind me; George was 104th). I wasn’t the greatest rider in the world, but I was far from the worst. The new 50 percent hematocrit rule wasn’t a big headache—in fact, I kind of liked it, since it seemed to reduce the frequency of strongman acts (there was still no test for EPO, remember). Thanks to the white bags and Pedro’s spinner, it was easy to stay in the mid-forties. And if anybody on the team got too high, they could always lower their hematocrit by taking a speed bag—an IV bag of saline—or simply chugging a couple of liters of water and some salt tablets, a process we called “getting watered down.”

  In a Paris hotel after the Tour finished, I stood in front of a mirror and looked at my body. Slender arms. Legs with actual veins. Hollows in my cheeks I’d never seen before. A new hardness in my eyes. I went downstairs and met with the team and Thom Weisel and our sponsors. We raised champagne glasses and toasted the team’s achievement. Weisel was pleased, but even then, with the bubbly in his hand, he was already talking about next year, when we’d really get it done.

  By the spring of 1998 two of the Eurodogs had gone home, left the team. Scott had decided to go into the family business; Darren had decided to get a job in finance. George and I moved from the Dee-Luxe Apartment in the Sky to a modern three-bedroom apartment in the heart of Girona, near the Ramblas. We were sorry to see them go. They were good guys; we missed them. But we were also learning how our world worked. Some guys kept up; some didn’t.‖

  * After he was let go, Steffen protested via a letter sent to Postal team manager Mark Gorski that read, in part, “What could a Spanish doctor, completely unknown to the organization, offer that I can’t or won’t? Doping is the fairly obvious answer.” Postal responded via its lawyers, informing Steffen that he would be sued if he made any public statements that caused financial damage to the Postal team. Steffen consulted a lawyer and decided to drop the matter.

  † Verbruggen, a former sales manager for Mars candy bars, likened the new rule to blood-testing paint-factory workers f
or lead exposure, just to make sure nobody got sick. When others pointed out that Verbruggen was essentially legalizing doping with EPO (as one Italian team director put it, the new rule was the equivalent of allowing everyone to go into a bank and steal as long as they kept it under $1,000), Verbruggen, who was famous for his short temper, called the analysis “bullshit” and told them to “shut up.” The message to the teams and riders was clear: as long as your hematocrit stayed under 50, nobody would care.

  ‡ Hamilton’s 1997 decision to start using EPO may have been based on an inaccurate assumption about his teammate, Marty Jemison.

  “That spring, Tyler and I were in the same boat, hanging on by our fingernails,” Jemison says. “I raced clean through the spring. Then in June, just before the Dauphiné, Pedro [Celaya] came to me and said if I was going to make the Tour team, I needed to be healthy. He taught me, he provided everything. So yeah, I did what the others did, starting in June and then in the Tour. But my Liège result was an honest result. I just had a good day.”

  Jemison, who won the U.S. national championship in 1999, rode just two Tours for Postal, a fact that might be attributed to the way the EPO era changed how teams assessed riders’ potential. “I had a natural hematocrit of 48, so EPO didn’t add that much horsepower to me,” he says. “The longer I was [at Postal], the more I saw that I was no longer being groomed for the A team. Clearly, they were looking for riders who could deliver a whole new level of results.” Jemison left the team after the 2000 season.