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

by Daniel Coyle

  In my mind, this is a classic Lance moment, being cavalier about doping. This was the same urge that made Lance put his EPO in the front of his fridge in Nice and talk about it openly at a restaurant. He wants to minimize doping, show it’s no big deal, show that he’s bigger than any syringe or pill.

  Inside that hospital room, Betsy and Frankie managed to keep their cool, but the second they stepped outside into the hallway, Betsy went ballistic. She told Frankie that if he was doing that shit, the wedding was off. Frankie swore to her he wasn’t, and Betsy gradually calmed down. A few months later, they did get married, but Betsy never looked at Lance or the sport the same way again.

  As you can imagine, this put Frankie in a tough spot, considering the demands of our profession. Kevin, Lance, and I often spoke openly about Ferrari and Edgar in front of the wives and girlfriends, but whenever Betsy was around, that changed. The phrase Frankie always used was Betsy’ll kill me. He’d be particularly nervous before a group dinner. Shut up about that stuff, guys—Betsy’ll kill me.†

  Frankie did what he had to do. Fortunately for him, it wasn’t as much as Kevin, Lance, and I had to do. This was due to the fact that Frankie was a rouleur, a big guy, suited for grinding through flatter and rolling stages, and so required less Edgar and other therapy than we climbers did. If we had to tune our engines to 99 percent of capacity at the Tour, Frankie could gut it out while staying a little closer to au naturale.

  While I admired Betsy’s conscience, I didn’t suffer any such hesitations myself. I was learning fast. With the help of Ferrari’s spinner, I was learning to calibrate how much EPO I should take to fuel my increasingly intense training. Ferrari taught me that injecting EPO under the skin was like turning up the thermostat in a house: it worked slowly, causing your body to create more red blood cells over the next week or so. Add too little, and the house would be too cold—your hematocrit would be too low. Add too much, and the house would get too hot—you’d go over the 50 limit.

  I got to where I could estimate my hematocrit level by the color of my blood. I’d stare at the little drops when Ferrari stuck my finger with a lancet when he gave a lactate test. If it was light and watery, my hematocrit was low. If it was dark, it was higher. I liked seeing that dark, rich color, all those cells crowding in there like a thick soup, ready to go to work; it made me eager to train even harder.

  Training felt like a game. How hard can you work? How smart can you be? How skinny can you get? Can you pit yourself against those numbers, and can you reach them? And then, behind all that, was always the anxiety that drove you, that kept you working: Whatever you do, those other fuckers are doing more.

  The other game, however, had to do not with EPO, but with Lance—namely, how to get along with him. He’s a touchy guy, and as the 2000 Tour grew closer, he got touchier. By June, the ragtag charm of the Bad News Bears seemed a million years old. Now he was tenser, more distant. He related to us less like a teammate than a CEO: hit your numbers, or else. Small things would set him off, and you knew it had happened when you got The Look—the long, unblinking three-second stare.

  It’s funny; the media would go on to treat The Look as if it were Lance’s superpower, something he unveiled at big moments in races, but to us, it was something that happened more often on the team bus or around the breakfast table. If you interrupted Lance while he was talking, you got The Look. If you contradicted what Lance was saying, you got The Look. If you were more than two minutes late for a ride, you got The Look. But the thing that really set off The Look was if you made fun of him. Underneath that tough exterior was an extraordinarily sensitive person. My teammate Christian Vande Velde once made fun of some new Nike shoes Lance was wearing one morning at breakfast. Christian is a great guy—he didn’t mean anything by it, he was just trying to go with the flow, and gave Lance some frat-boy dig about his shoes. Nice fucking shoes, dude! Christian laughed. Lance got pissed, gave Christian The Look. And that was it. I’m sure that incident didn’t end Christian’s prospects on Postal. But it definitely didn’t help.

  But one of the biggest ways to piss off Lance was to complain about doping.

  Jonathan Vaughters was probably the best example of this. With his probing mind, JV wasn’t the kind of guy to accept doping at face value. He didn’t just do whatever Lance and Johan said. He asked the questions nobody asked: Why are we doing this? Why doesn’t the UCI enforce the rules? What’s more, JV was twitchy when it came to the doping; he was always worried about police, or testers. He even talked about feeling guilty—and guilt was an emotion most of us had given up long ago. To Lance, JV’s questions and doubts were proof that JV lacked the right attitude. I remember Lance bitching JV out after the 1999 Dauphiné when JV made the mistake of mentioning that he was happy finishing second in a stage—the position Lance liked to call “first loser.” After the 1999 Tour, it was clear to everybody that JV didn’t gel with Lance and Johan’s system.

  Vaughters left Postal in 2000 for the French team Crédit Agricole, where stricter French anti-doping laws kept the team in line. JV essentially curtailed his career in order to get away from the doping culture. But back then, Lance considered JV the king choad. To Lance’s way of thinking, doping is a fact of life, like oxygen or gravity. You either do it—and do it to the absolute fullest—or you shut up and get out, period. No bitching, no crying, no splitting hairs. This made JV the worst kind of hypocrite in Lance’s eyes because he’d used his Postal results to sign a big two-year contract with Crédit Agricole, and therefore he owed it to his sponsor to get results—that’s what they were paying him for. And suddenly JV was Mister Clean, moaning about doping, proclaiming his righteousness, finishing in the middle of the pack? Choad.‡

  Of course, there were more direct ways to cross Lance. One such incident happened in the spring of 2000 when we were finishing a six-hour training ride, climbing a narrow road toward my house. Lance and I were tired, dehydrated, hungry, ready to come home and take a nap. Then this small car comes tearing up the hill behind us at top speed, nearly hitting us, and the driver yells something as he goes past. I’m mad, so I yell back at him. But Lance doesn’t say anything. He just takes off, full speed, chasing the car. Lance knew the streets, so he took a shortcut and managed to catch the guy at the top, near a red light. By the time I got there Lance had pulled the guy out of his car and was pummeling him, and the guy was cowering and crying. I watched for a minute, not quite believing what I was seeing. Lance’s face was beet red; he was in a full rage, really letting the guy have it. Finally, it was over. Lance pushed the guy to the ground and left him. We got back on our bikes and rode home in silence. In the days afterward Lance told that story to Frankie and Kevin as if it was funny, just another crazy-ass thing that happened in France. I tried to laugh along. But I couldn’t. I kept picturing that guy on the ground, crying and pleading, and Lance pounding away. I’d seen more than I wanted to see.

  This darker side of Lance stressed us out; but as far as the team’s performance went, it served as fuel. He and Johan Bruyneel had Postal running like a Swiss watch. Better hotels. Better treatment from race organizers. Better planning. Better nutrition. Better sponsors. Better technology, including wind-tunnel testing. Our lives had the buzzy, connected feeling of being a part of something big and bold, like we were astronauts training for a NASA mission. Plus, there was the larger, simpler fact that we were riding our bikes together every day through some of the most beautiful terrain on the planet; the feeling of pushing yourself harder than you’ve ever pushed, making yourself into something powerful and new—and getting paid for it. On our rides, we’d sometimes catch each other’s eye and smile, as if to say, can you believe how crazy this is?

  As the 2000 Dauphiné Libéré approached, I was feeling quietly confident. I was lighter and stronger than I’d ever been. At my last fitness test, Ferrari had made a sound I’d never heard before—Oooooh, Tyler! The sound of approval.

  I wanted to be strong, especially for the key day
of the weeklong race, the stage on Mont Ventoux. There are lots of legendary climbs in France, but Ventoux might be the most legendary of all. It’s called the Giant of Provence, and it’s tough enough that it has a body count: Tom Simpson, a British cyclist who died in 1967, overdosing on a combination of exertion, brandy, and amphetamines.

  For the first part of the Ventoux climb, I felt great. I should point out that when a bike racer says he feels great, he does not actually feel great. In fact, you feel like hell—you’re suffering, your heart is jumping out of your chest, your leg muscles are screaming, flashes of pain are moving around your body like so many strings of Christmas lights. What it means is that while you feel like crap, you also know the guys around you feel even crappier, and you can tell through their subtle expressions, the telltale signs, that they’re going to crack before you do. Your pain, in that situation, feels meaningful. It can even feel great.

  So here on Ventoux at the Dauphiné, I was feeling pretty great. Lance was next to me wearing the leader’s yellow jersey, well positioned to clinch the overall. With 10 kilometers to go we were in the front group with an elite handful of contenders. My job was to cover the attacks—which meant to follow them, so no one got away. Once I did that, the plan was for Lance to bridge up and launch an attack of his own, and take the stage. It was straight out of Bike Racing 101: the old one-two.

  The first part went well: I covered the attacks. I waited, expecting to see Lance riding across the gap.

  No Lance.

  I could hear Johan on the radio, urging him on. Time ticked by.

  I started feeling a little nervous. I could see Alex Zülle and Spanish climber Haimar Zubeldia catching up to me; others were following them. But where was Lance?

  Time kept passing. Still more contenders rode up; it was getting crowded. But still no Lance. Then, Johan’s voice.

  Lance cannot make it. Tyler, you ride.

  I checked with Lance.

  Go. Just fucking go.

  I launched an attack as we came along the Tom Simpson memorial, 1.5 kilometers from the lighthouse-like weather station that marks the top. I went deep, maybe deeper than I’d ever gone to that point. The world narrowed to a bright hallway. I felt Zülle and Zubeldia nearby, and then felt them fall away. I felt the spectators, felt my legs turning the pedals, but they didn’t feel like my legs anymore. I gave everything; I made the last right switchback turn to the line, and crossed it.

  Chaos. People grabbing me, screaming into my ear, media crowding around. I’m delirious.

  I had won on Mont Ventoux.

  A Postal soigneur grabbed me, wrapped a towel around my neck, and steered me toward the team bus. The bus was so quiet. I sat down, unclicked my helmet, let myself begin to take this in. It felt surreal.

  I’d been stronger than all of them.

  I was now a favorite to win the race.

  The bus door wheezed open. Lance climbed grimly onto the bus, his head down. He sat ten feet away from me, toweled off, didn’t say a word. I could see he was pissed. The silence became a bit uncomfortable.

  A few seconds later the door opened again—Johan, a concerned expression on his face, headed straight for Lance. He touched Lance on the shoulder, sat next to him, spoke softly, reassuringly. Like a nurse or a psychiatrist.

  “This was no big deal, man,” Johan said. “It was probably the altitude. Perhaps you have been training too hard, no? We will talk to Michele. The Tour doesn’t even start for three weeks. Don’t worry, there is plenty of time.”

  After a few minutes of this, Johan asked, “So, who won?”

  Without looking up, Lance pointed at me.

  Johan blushed, full red. He walked over and gave me an awkward hug, shook my hand, congratulated me. I think he felt embarrassed; he knew what a huge victory this was, and he’d ignored me completely. Now he made up for it.

  But Lance stayed cranky. That night at dinner, when everybody was toasting my victory, he would barely make eye contact. It was like he was having an uncontrollable reaction, like an allergy: my success in the race—which was good for Postal, and therefore good for him—drove him bananas.

  Late in the next day’s stage, Lance and I managed to break away. I was thrilled at first—if we held on, it meant that I would go into the overall lead, and, just as important, we would show that Postal was the strongest team in the world going into the Tour. The thing was, it felt like Lance was trying to drop me. He kept accelerating on the final climbs, going way faster than we needed to go. Then he’d bomb the descents, going so fast we were both on the edge of crashing. I finally had to yell at him to slow down.

  We crossed the line together. I finished that day wearing the leader’s yellow jersey, the polka-dot jersey for best climber, the white jersey for most points. Winning the Dauphiné, a race whose former champions included Eddy Merckx, Greg LeMond, Bernard Hinault, and Miguel Indurain, instantly put me on the map. People started mentioning me as a possible Tour contender. But underneath, I was wondering about the way Lance had tried to break me on those climbs. It was the same pattern from our training rides: Can you match this? This? This?

  The last night of the Dauphiné, Lance and Johan came to my hotel room. I expected them to talk about the race, or maybe plan for the upcoming Tour. Instead, they told me that on Tuesday, two days after the race ended, we were going to fly to Valencia to do a blood transfusion.

  * In his books and on his website, Carmichael asserts that he worked as Armstrong’s coach throughout his seven Tour victories. In a USA Today interview in July 2004, Carmichael described a system in which Armstrong sent his daily training data to Ferrari, who forwarded them to Carmichael, who then adjusted Armstrong’s training accordingly.

  In interviews for Lance Armstrong’s War, however, Ferrari said he had never communicated with Carmichael. “I do not work with Chris Carmichael,” he said. “I work for Lance. Only Lance.”

  Here is what Postal riders say on the subject:

  Jonathan Vaughters: “In two years, I never heard Lance refer to Chris one time.”

  Floyd Landis: “Give me a break. Carmichael’s a nice guy, but he had nothing to do with Lance. Carmichael was a beard.”

  Christian Vande Velde: “Chris had nothing to do with Lance’s daily training. I think his role was more like a friend, someone to talk about the bigger picture.”

  † After seeing Frankie’s performance in the mountains of the 1999 Tour de France, Betsy confronted Frankie and asked him, “How the hell did you ride so well in the mountains?” Frankie refused to answer. Betsy drew her own conclusions: that Postal had a doping program, and that Ferrari and Armstrong were at the center of it.

  In the years that followed, Betsy became a passionate anti-doping advocate, and a thorn in the side of Armstrong and Postal. Her involvement deepened in 2003 when she assisted David Walsh with his book L.A. Confidentiel, and when she was asked to testify under oath in 2005 about the 1996 hospital-room scene as part of Armstrong’s legal battle with SCA Promotions. Over time, Betsy Andreu became a clearinghouse of information for journalists and anti-doping authorities alike.

  “It’s funny,” she says of her role. “Lance likes to portray me as this fat, bitter, obsessed bitch who’s out to get him. But all I’ve cared about from the beginning is to get the truth out.”

  Frankie, on the other hand, takes a different approach. While he gave a limited confession to The New York Times in 2006, in which he spoke of being introduced to performance-enhancing drugs in 1995 while on Motorola with Armstrong, and admitted to using EPO to prepare for the 1999 Tour de France, he mostly chooses to remain silent about doping—a stance that can create a unique tension in the small ranch home they share with their three children. In the summer of 2010, federal investigator Jeff Novitzky interviewed Frankie for two hours by phone. When Frankie hung up the phone, Betsy noticed he looked shaken. She asked him what he’d said. “I don’t want to talk about it,” Frankie said. Betsy phoned Novitzky and asked him. Novitzky laughed. �
�He’s your husband,” he said. “Go ask him.”

  ‡ Vaughters said that he had a candid conversation with Crédit Agricole’s doctors before he signed the contract, in which he told them he’d been doping on Postal, and therefore couldn’t be expected to achieve the same results. “It was all on the table before the contract was signed,” he says.

  Chapter 7

  THE NEXT LEVEL

  AS A BIKE RACER, over time you develop the skill of keeping a poker face. No matter how extreme a sensation you feel—no matter how close you are to cracking—you do everything in your power to mask it. This matters in racing, when hiding your true condition from your opponents is a key to success, since it discourages them from attacking. Feel paralyzing pain? Look relaxed, even bored. Can’t breathe? Close your mouth. About to die? Smile.

  I’ve got a pretty good poker face; Lance has a great one. But there’s one guy who’s better than either of us: Johan Bruyneel. And it was never so well used as that night at the end of the 2000 Dauphiné, when he told me about the plans for the blood transfusion. I’d heard about transfusions before, but it was always theoretical and distant—as in, can you believe that some guys actually bank their blood, then put it back in before a race? It seemed weird, Frankenstein-ish, something for Iron Curtain Olympic androids in the eighties. But Johan, when he explained the plan during the Dauphiné, made it sound normal, even boring. He’s good at making the outrageous sound normal—it might be his greatest skill. It’s something in his expression, in the certainty of his big Belgian voice, in the supremely casual way he shrugs while laying out the details of the plan. Whenever I watch the likable gangsters on The Sopranos, I think of Johan.