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

by Daniel Coyle

  The worst came on stage 16, from Courchevel to Morzine, when Pantani took off alone early in the race, a suicide move we figured would soon end. But it didn’t end. Pantani kept driving the pace; he didn’t slow down; in fact, he kept speeding up. We chased as hard as we could, but we weren’t reeling him in. There was only one thing to do: Lance told Johan to get Ferrari on the phone.

  The conversation was brief—I could picture Ferrari with his graph paper, running the numbers—and the answer came back: the pace was too fast. Pantani would crack. He could not keep this up. And Ferrari was right, as always. On the last climb, a nasty 12-kilometer ascent called the Joux Plane, Pantani finally cracked.

  The problem was that Lance cracked too. Early in the climb, while he was alone, Lance started to slow. He tried to hide it for a while, but soon it was obvious: his face went white, his shoulders started rolling, and soon Ullrich was riding up the road, his superman legs churning as he left Lance in the dust. This was Ullrich’s big chance, and Lance’s nightmare. For the next twenty minutes, they both rode to their limits—Ullrich sprinting, Lance following more stiffly, more frantically, his expression frozen in exhaustion and fear. Lance showed a lot of toughness that day; he lost only one and a half minutes, when he could have easily lost ten.

  After stage 16, Lance looked terrible: pale, squinty, puffy eyes, with dark circles underneath. In interviews, he called Pantani “a little shit-starter,” which was true enough; the problem was that Postal didn’t have any shit-stoppers—nobody strong enough to ride Pantani down.

  Luckily for Lance and us, Pantani had used up all his ammunition, and abandoned the race the next day, citing illness. Lance recovered, and we made it to Paris without any problems to win his second Tour. We did the celebration at the Musée d’Orsay again, but underneath the triumph there was a note of concern. Pantani, single-handed, had nearly derailed Lance’s victory. We were lucky Ullrich hadn’t brought his A game, lucky that Pantani had eventually cracked, lucky that Lance had only lost a couple minutes on the Joux Plane. And Lance and Johan weren’t the kind to rely on luck.

  That’s when the rumors started that Postal was going to sign more high-profile climbers. The obvious candidate was Roberto Heras, the Pantani-size Spaniard who’d finished fifth in the 2000 Tour and who’d go on to win the Tour of Spain that fall. But he seemed a long shot for obvious reasons: his existing contract with Kelme contained a $1 million buyout fee (more than Kevin and I made together) and our entire team budget was $10 million. We didn’t seem to have the space to sign such an expensive rider, so I disregarded the rumors. I thought Postal’s lineup was solid, and would stay together for years to come. In retrospect, I should have seen it coming.

  A few weeks after the Tour, Lance and I were training together near Nice, and he started talking about Kevin. Lance was not happy. He said Kevin had approached Johan asking for more money—a two-year deal, with a significant bump in salary. Lance shook his head.

  “I don’t know who the fuck Kevin thinks he is,” he said.

  I remember being a little confused, thinking to myself that this was Kevin Frigging Livingston, the guy who had just helped Lance win two Tours in a row, who had sacrificed his place in the overall standings to support Lance, who had visited Lance in the hospital when he had cancer, who had been his closest friend. But to Lance, that wasn’t the question. Kevin was good, but Kevin’s performance was replaceable. Therefore, Kevin was replaceable.

  “Kevin thinks he’s gonna get paid,” Lance said. “Well, he’s not gonna get shit.”

  A few weeks later, I was riding with Lance, and he started talking about Frankie Andreu. Apparently Frankie had also asked for a raise, and Lance was not happy about that either.

  “Frankie thinks he’s gonna get paid. Well, he’s not gonna get shit.”*

  It wasn’t personal, it was mathematical. If Lance could gain a few seconds by making a helmet lighter, he made it happen. If Lance could save time by using a private jet, he made it happen. If Lance could free up salary money by cutting a couple of old friends from the team, he made it happen.

  Neither Livingston nor Andreu was offered a contract for 2001. Kevin wound up on Telekom, riding for Jan Ullrich (in the press, Lance was unmerciful, comparing it to American general Norman Schwarzkopf going to work for Communist China), and Frankie simply retired. I think he was heartbroken; he’d ridden with Lance almost his entire career, and he didn’t want to start over with another team. Their salary money was spent on signing the Spanish duo of Heras and his Kelme teammate Chechu Rubiera, and the Colombian Victor Hugo Peña of Vitalicio Seguros, a trio who quickly became known as the Spanish Armada. Just like that, the Bad News Bears were gone.

  The trolls showed up that fall as well. A French TV station had followed del Moral and Postal chiropractor Jeff Spencer during the 2000 Tour and filmed them disposing of syringes, bloodied compresses, and a drug called Actovegin. The French were making a big deal out of it, launching an official police investigation into the matter.

  We had, in fact, used Actovegin, not only in 2000 but also in 1999. It was an injection del Moral gave some of the team just before a handful of big Tour stages, in order to increase oxygen transport, and which was undetectable in doping tests. But Lance and Postal handled this scandal with growing skill. First, they came up with some plausible medical reason for the team to have been carrying the substance (they said head mechanic Julien DeVriese was diabetic, and that it was also used for healing skin abrasions from road rash). Then they framed the story as if they were the victims of some unfair tabloid journalism setup. In addition, Lance scored style points by referring to the drug in the media as “Activo-something,” as if he hadn’t the foggiest idea how to pronounce it. The investigation came to nothing, and was eventually dropped. But it had one major effect: it got Lance out of France for good. In October he phoned me, saying that he had had enough of the fucking French. He was selling his place in Nice, getting out, now. I should, too. Where should we move?

  I wasn’t happy about leaving France; Haven and I loved living in Villefranche—the community, the training, the friendships. But Lance was the boss. Kevin and Frankie weren’t on the team anymore. Life was moving on.

  I told Lance about Girona, that ancient walled Spanish city I’d lived in before coming to France. I told him about its cool restaurants, its decent training nearby, the half-dozen other American riders who lived there, including several of our teammates. As an additional plus, we all knew the Spaniards were far less strict about doping; no gendarmes raiding hotel rooms, no dumpster-diving reporters. The decision took five minutes. We were headed to Girona.

  * Betsy Andreu says that Armstrong told Frankie that it was Thom Weisel’s decision. “Lance said, ‘It’s not me; I want you on the team; it’s Thom who’s cutting the budget.’ Even though it didn’t make any sense—I mean, how could they be cutting the budget when they’ve just won two Tours?—Frankie believed Lance, and that was a mistake.”

  Chapter 8

  LIFE IN THE NEIGHBORHOOD

  DURING MY CAREER, JOURNALISTS often used the term “arms race” to describe the relationship between the drug testers and the athletes, but that wasn’t quite right, because it implied that the testers had a chance of winning. For us, it wasn’t like a race at all. It was more like a big game of hide-and-seek played in a forest that has lots of good places to hide, and lots of rules that favor the hiders. So here’s how we beat the testers:

  • Tip 1: Wear a watch.

  • Tip 2: Keep your cell phone handy.

  • Tip 3: Know your glowtime: how long you’ll test positive after you take the substance.

  What you’ll notice is that none of these things are particularly difficult to do. That’s because the tests were very easy to beat. In fact, they weren’t drug tests. They were more like discipline tests, IQ tests. If you were careful and paid attention, you could dope and be 99 percent certain that you would not get caught.

  Early in my career (from 1997
to 2000) the testers were easy to deal with because they mostly didn’t exist. You got tested at races only, and then only if you won a stage or were unlucky enough to have your name be among the one or two names drawn for the occasional random test. So all you had to do was to follow the team doctor’s instructions and make sure you stopped using a certain number of days before the race. Remember, until 2000 there was no test for EPO, only the 50 percent hematocrit limit to worry about, and that was simple to manage with spinners and experience. Glowtime for the red eggs was three days, so that’s basically all I had to worry about.

  Around 2000, very slowly, out-of-competition testers started showing up. I volunteered for the inaugural testing program of the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency (USADA) because I wanted to ride in the Olympics, and I thought declining to volunteer might arouse suspicion. Testing was quarterly, to establish baseline values, with only a tiny handful of out-of-competition tests. Still, we had to make adjustments. One time, before the 2000 season, I asked Lance to overnight me some EPO from Austin to Marblehead so my blood values for the quarterly test would be more consistent. (I figured that having your hematocrit leap from 39 to 49 might draw attention.)

  USADA called them “surprise” drug tests, but they usually weren’t all that surprising. In Girona, we had a built-in advantage because the testing organization would send one person to test all the Girona cyclists. Whoever got tested first immediately phoned his friends to tell them (see Tip 2); word got around fast. So if you happened to be glowing, you could take evasive measures.

  Ducking the out-of-competition tests was fairly easy. The testing agencies use what is known as a whereabouts program: you were supposed to inform them of your location at all times, and if you failed to do so, you could be penalized—given a strike. Three strikes in an eighteen-month period was supposed to lead to a sanction, in theory—but that rule had never been tested in court. One trick was to be vague in the whereabouts forms (I used to write “roadways, eastern MA, southern NH, 100 mile radius from Marblehead, MA”). Another trick was to change your plans at the last minute, so they were never quite sure where you were. The last trick was that when the tester showed up and you thought you might be glowing, you didn’t answer the door.

  The nightmare scenario was if the tester snuck up on you at the wrong time. Stories were around: One rider got busted when a tester hid in a parking garage and surprised him. I heard that one Tour contender had installed a set of mirrors near the doorway of his house so he could secretly observe who was coming. It sounds like paranoia, but from our point of view, it was merely being practical. I considered adding a back door to my Girona apartment so I could come and go more inconspicuously, and tried to minimize my time outside my front door, where a tester might waylay me unexpectedly. Whenever I returned from a training ride, I always came from the uphill side, zooming down the street, sunglasses on. I kept my house key in my right hand, the quicker to use it. I treated our Girona apartment like the Bat Cave—once I was inside, with the door locked behind me, I was safe.

  Riders who lived with girlfriends or wives had a big advantage: a live-in scout who could deflect the testers, or cover for them. Haven and I developed a shorthand. If the doorbell rang unexpectedly, she’d lock eyes with me and ask, “You’re good?” My answer was almost always yes, I’m good.

  In late 2000, shortly after Haven and I bought a house in Marblehead, the doorbell rang. Haven did the check-in, and this time I shook my head. I wasn’t good. In fact, I was glowing—I’d recently taken some testosterone (my personal doctor said mine was low, and it was prescribed, but still, I might have tested positive).

  “Mister Hamilton? I’m here from USADA to administer a doping test.”

  Haven and I looked at each other for a long second. Then, moving as one, we hit the deck—we lay flat on our bellies on the tile floor of our new kitchen.

  “Hello? Anybody there?”

  We crawled across the floor and into the safety of the living room, and listened to the knocking. We put them off for the day. I fudged my whereabouts form, drank a ton of water, peed a lot. Then, when I was sure I wasn’t glowing, I took the test.

  Another way to hide was through the use of TUEs—therapeutic use exemptions, which were mostly used for cortisone. The UCI permits riders to use certain substances with a doctor’s prescription. So the team doctors would invent some phantom problem—a bad knee, a saddle sore—and write a note allowing you to use cortisone or some similar substance. The only trick to it was remembering what made-up ailment the doctor had given you—was it your right knee that was supposed to be injured, or your left knee? Before races, I’d sometimes check the paperwork to make sure I knew which knee to complain about if the testers happened to ask.

  The best way to hide, though, was simply by reducing glowtime to a minimum. Because the best, most liberating rule of drug testing is this: the testers can only visit you between 7 a.m. and 10 p.m.* This means that you can take anything you like, as long as it leaves your system in nine hours or less. This makes 10:01 p.m. a particularly busy time in the world of bike racers. If you’re in Spain, you’re twice lucky, because given the nocturnal Spanish customs (dinner often starts at 10:30 p.m.), the testers almost never turn up at 7 a.m.; it’s more like noon, or later. (One tester, a considerate older gentleman who lived an hour away in Barcelona, used to telephone the night before to make sure we were in town, so he didn’t waste a trip.) But the best way to reduce glowtime was to have a smart doctor who could find new ways of administering drugs so they left your body more quickly, but still had the desired effect. And when it came to doctors, we had the smartest: Ferrari.

  The test for EPO is a good example of how big an advantage Ferrari was to us. It took the drug-testing authorities several years and millions of dollars to develop a test to detect EPO in urine and blood. It took Ferrari about five minutes to figure out how to evade it. His solution was dazzlingly simple: instead of injecting EPO subcutaneously (which caused it to be released over a long period of time), we should inject smaller doses directly into the vein, straight into the bloodstream, where it would still boost our red blood cell counts, but leave our body quickly enough to evade detection. Our regimen changed. Instead of injecting 2,000 units of Edgar every third or fourth night, we injected 400 or 500 units every night. Glowtime minimized; problem solved. We called it microdosing.†

  The trick with getting Edgar in your vein, of course, is that you have to get it in the vein. Miss the vein—inject it in the surrounding tissue—and Edgar stays in your body far longer; you might test positive. Thus, microdosing requires a steady hand and a good sense of feel, and a lot of practice; you have to sense the tip of the needle piercing the wall of the vein, and draw back the plunger to get a little bit of blood so you know you’re in. In this, as in other things, Lance was blessed: he had veins like water mains. Mine were small, which was a recurring headache. If you miss the vein you can see the EPO forming a small bubble beneath the skin. I’ve seen that start to happen a few times; fortunately for me, I stopped it in time, and was lucky not to be tested the following day. A few millimeters one way or the other can end a career. Sometimes, when riders unexpectedly test positive, I wonder if that’s the reason.

  Of course, EPO wasn’t the only thing that could be microdosed: testosterone worked that way, too. Around 2001 we got away from the red eggs and started using testosterone patches, which were more convenient. They were like big Band-Aids with a clear gel in the center; you could leave one on for a couple of hours, get a boost of testosterone, and by morning be clean as a newborn baby.

  Still, we had to be careful. One of my closer calls happened while I was living in Girona. We had some houseguests visiting, an old high school friend and his wife, and perhaps because I was distracted, I left my testosterone patch on for too long—for six hours instead of two hours. When I realized it—when I felt the crinkle of the patch on my stomach—I had a sinking feeling. Now I was glowing, and would be for about a day.

&
nbsp; I went for a ride early the following morning, and as luck would have it, the testers showed up while I was out. Haven called me, and so instead of going home, I rode to a hotel and spent the night—which made for some awkwardness around our houseguests, but ended up being the right thing to do. Taking a strike wasn’t a big deal. Getting caught, testing positive, would have been a catastrophe: I’d lose my job, my sponsors, my team, and my good reputation. I’d jeopardize Postal, and the jobs of my friends. Due to the French investigation, our 2001 Postal contracts contained a clause that allowed Postal to terminate the contract of any rider who violated anti-doping rules. Like Lance and everybody else, I lived my life one slip-up, one glowing molecule, away from ruin and shame.‡

  Compared to the cluelessness of the testers, Lance’s senses were dialed in tight, particularly when it came to doping. He watched everyone; he looked for strange leaps in performance; he paid attention to who was working with which doctor. He wanted to sort out who was doping more, being aggressive, ambitious, innovative—in short, who needed to be watched.

  Leading up to the 2001 Tour, Lance’s radar was working overtime. He knew that Ullrich was training in South Africa—and was it a coincidence that a blood substitute called Hemopure had just been approved over there? He knew that a lot of the up-and-coming Spanish riders were working with a Madrid doctor named Eufemiano Fuentes. He knew that Pantani was falling off the deep end, getting into cocaine and other recreational drugs. Above all, he knew that the new EPO test was going to be introduced in the spring, and that there were new, undetectable forms of EPO being developed. The game was constantly changing.

  To stay ahead, Lance would use races for gathering information, digging for gossip, getting some inside knowledge. Lance would pull alongside someone—often the Italians or the Spanish, who were known for being chatty—and simply ask them, in that straightforward, irresistible Lance way, What was going on, what was new? Who was flying? How did Ullrich look? How was Pantani climbing? What doctor were they working with? Riders were eager to get on Lance’s good side; they knew he had the power to help or hurt them.