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

by Daniel Coyle

  Though anybody with eyes could see that I was in no position to perform, that didn’t matter much to Lance and Johan. At one point early in the race, I was supposed to cover the breaks—that is, to stay at the front of the race and join early breakaways, to make sure Lance had a teammate up ahead. Getting to the front is no picnic in the Tour, because everybody’s riding like hell and you have to fight your way past the other 188 riders who want to be there. It was early in the stage and we’re going like crazy, and Johan is yelling over the radio for me to get to the front, get to the front, and I’m going all out but in my exhausted state, I couldn’t make progress. Then I felt a hand grab my jersey by the neck and pull me back, hard. Lance’s voice, yelling in my ear at the top of his lungs.

  What the FUCK are you doing, Tyler?

  As the other riders watched, Lance shoved me forward.

  Cover the fucking break!

  After that stage, Johan asked me to apologize to the entire team for my poor performance. Which I did. I swallowed whatever pride I had left, and I said I was sorry for letting the team down, as Lance looked on approvingly.

  That night, I told Haven that I was not re-signing with Postal, no matter what. If they offered me $10 million, I would say no thanks. I told my agent to start looking for offers. The question was, Where to go? There were more than a few team directors who were interested, who saw my potential as a team leader, perhaps even as a Tour winner.

  But the more I thought about it, there was only one answer. Only one guy who had been at the top. Who could build a team stronger than Postal. Who knew how to help me become the kind of leader who could take on Lance and win. The Eagle. The original strongman himself.

  Bjarne Riis.

  * According to the code of the World Anti-Doping Agency, athletes were required to make themselves available for testing twenty-four hours a day. In practice, however, testers seem to have obeyed the 7 a.m.–10 p.m. window. In fact, French law decrees that any testing organization, national or international, must schedule tests between 6 a.m. and 9 p.m.; Spain passed a similar law in 2009. The reasoning was (1) to protect athletes’ privacy; (2) the mistaken belief that any drug that was in an athlete’s body at bedtime would still be detectable in the morning.

  Bernhard Kohl, an Austrian cyclist who finished third in the 2008 Tour de France before being suspended for a blood booster and stripped of the result, told The New York Times, “I was tested 200 times during my career, and 100 times I had drugs in my body. I was caught, but 99 other times, I wasn’t. Riders think they can get away with doping because most of the time they do.”

  † This proved to be a good example of the information gap between testers and athletes. Dr. Michael Ashenden, the hematologist who helped develop the EPO and transfusion tests, was not aware of the in-the-vein microdosing strategy until Floyd Landis explained it to him in 2010.

  ‡ There also may have been simpler ways to avoid the testers. According to former Kelme rider Jesús Manzano, Postal doctor Luis del Moral received advance warnings about tester visits from Walter Viru, the former Kelme doctor who ran the UCI-accredited Spanish hematology laboratory that handled testing. “The world of cycling in Spain is completely corrupt,” Manzano told L’Équipe, the French daily, in 2007. Viru was arrested by Spanish police in November 2009 and charged with running a doping network.

  § Armstrong had a new reason to be serious. In the spring of 2001, Tailwind Sports (the management company co-owned by Armstrong that ran Postal) approached SCA Promotions, a company that insures sports and event promotions—for example, million-dollar half-court basketball shots. The idea was to have SCA insure bonuses that Tailwind would pay Armstrong if he won the Tour from 2001 through 2004. Because the odds of Armstrong winning a record six consecutive Tours were considered remote, the arrangement resembled a bet. Tailwind paid SCA $420,000; in exchange, SCA and its partners agreed to fund Armstrong’s escalating schedule of bonuses covering the 2001–2004 Tours. The contract called for Armstrong to be paid $3 million if he won two consecutive additional Tours, $6 million if he won three, and $10 million if he won all four, for a total potential payoff of $19 million.

  ‖ According to a 60 Minutes investigation aired in May 2011, the Lausanne lab termed Armstrong’s original sample “suspicious” and “consistent with EPO use.” At that point, according to sources within the FBI, a UCI official intervened, requesting that the matter “go no further,” and arranged for Armstrong and Bruyneel to have a private meeting with Dr. Martial Saugy, the lab director. Armstrong later made two donations totaling $125,000 to the UCI’s anti-doping fund, with the understanding that the money would go to Saugy’s Lausanne laboratory for the purchase of a new blood-testing machine.

  After 60 Minutes aired its report, the UCI issued a statement “categorically rejecting” the story and asserting that it had never altered or hidden a positive test. “There has never, ever been a cover-up,” said former UCI president Hein Verbruggen. “Not in the Tour de Suisse. Not in the Tour de France.”

  a One exception was three-time Tour de France champion Greg LeMond, who said, “When Lance won the prologue to the 1999 Tour I was close to tears, but when I heard he was working with Michele Ferrari I was devastated. In the light of Lance’s relationship with Ferrari, I just don’t want to comment on this year’s Tour. This is not sour grapes. I’m disappointed in Lance, that’s all it is.”

  LeMond received a call from Lance shortly after; LeMond says that Armstrong was threatening and aggressive, pointing out that LeMond could lose business with Trek, a Postal sponsor with whom LeMond had a line of bikes. A few weeks later, LeMond issued an awkwardly worded retraction. “They put a gun to my head,” LeMond later told British journalist Jeremy Whittle. “I was under incredible duress from the Armstrong camp, and my whole business was at stake.”

  Chapter 9

  NEW START

  I FELT LIKE I WAS on a movie set, a postcard come to life. I was sitting in a lawn chair looking out over the hills of Tuscany. Olive trees, golden light, full-on Michelangelo stuff. It was August 31, 2001, a month after the Tour ended. A few feet away from me sat the tall, bald, still muscular form of my new director, Bjarne Riis of Team CSC–Tiscali. We’d spent the last day together talking about the team, about my 2002 race schedule, about equipment, about training. Now he leaned in.

  “What methods did you use at Postal?”

  The question caught me by surprise, so I stalled. I’d expected Bjarne to inquire at some point, but I hadn’t imagined that he’d be quite so forward about it. I’d thought Bjarne would be the cool, robotic Dane, play it low-key. But, as I was discovering, I was wrong.

  Bjarne’s secret was that beneath his Danish cool he had a wild and creative Italian brain. It wasn’t just the fact that he owned this beautiful villa near Florence or liked to listen to opera. It was more about how Bjarne approached the question of constructing a Tour-winning team. He was open to new ideas, he wanted to hear what I thought about nutrition, training, uniforms, everything. I liked him enough that I’d taken a pay cut to ride for him, in part because, unlike Johan and Lance, Bjarne didn’t act as if he had all the answers. If riding for Postal had felt like being in the army—shut your mouth and do your job—then riding for Bjarne looked like it might be like working for Apple—think different.

  Our training camp was a good example. Instead of the usual routine (warm-weather spot, day after day of training rides), Bjarne did the opposite. He brought us all to a freezing forest in Sweden, and had a former special forces soldier lead us through a survival course. It was one of those experiences that sound sort of cheesy and corporate, but it really brought us together as a team. There’s nothing like starting a fire in the snow to help you get to know one another.

  Riis’s Renaissance mentality included all elements of the race. Like the rest of the peloton, Bjarne was vastly impressed with Lance’s and Postal’s strength, and now, as he leaned ever closer to me, he was hungry for the details. Names, numbers, technique
s—what methods did we use? At that moment, I got the impression that Bjarne was ready to hear anything. If I had told him that Postal’s method was to drink bleach with ostrich eggs, he would have listened. And considered it.

  But here’s the weird part: When Bjarne asked me what methods we used at Postal, I lied. I played dumb. I told him that as far as I knew, we didn’t have any special methods; that we just used EPO. Testosterone. Cortisone. Actovegin. Some guys liked HGH; other than that, nothing special.

  Bjarne leaned back in his chair. Took a sip of wine.

  “Have you ever tried a transfusion, Tyler?”

  I shook my head. Bjarne’s blue eyes lit up.

  “Oh, you need to do it. You will like it.”

  —Okay, I said. Sounds good.

  I’m not sure why I lied to Bjarne. Perhaps it was because we’d just met. And though I’d left Postal under less than friendly terms, I didn’t want to betray them. I look back on this, and the fact that at the time it felt like some kind of moral stand, and I laugh. Honor among thieves, I suppose.

  Ironically, it was fortunate I didn’t tell the truth, because the intensity of Bjarne’s recommendation led me to reconsider my opinion of transfusions. In my single experience, back in the 2000 Tour, I hadn’t ridden as well as I’d expected. But in Bjarne’s opinion, I had missed something big.

  To demonstrate, Bjarne told me how, in his 1996 Tour de France victory, he’d done three transfusions: one just before the Tour started, and one on each of the two rest days. He explained the reasons they worked so well; how, unlike the slow rise in hematocrit created by EPO, transfusions provided an instant boost of around 3 points, which correlated to a 3 percent increase in power. They were like a fountain of youth. Best of all, in this new age of the EPO test, they were undetectable, 100 percent safe—if you did them properly.

  He told me all this, then he went silent. He was waiting for me to give a sign. Yes or no?

  So here I was, looking out over the hills of Tuscany, at another crossroads. This would have been an ideal chance to say, Thanks but no thanks. I could have begged off, told Bjarne that I wasn’t interested in doing any transfusions, and walked away. I could’ve said no to being team leader; I could’ve said no to the program.

  So why didn’t I do that?

  I don’t have an answer other than the obvious: I was already inside; I knew how the game was played, and so did everybody around me. After the way I had left Postal, I felt I had something to prove.

  I said yes.

  Bjarne and I immediately started to figure out my race schedule: instead of targeting the Tour de France, I would aim for May’s Tour of Italy, a three-week race. Our reasoning was a mix of strategy and practicality: while still prestigious, the Tour of Italy offered a more wide-open field than the Tour de France. Also, our co-sponsor Tiscali was an Italian telecommunications company.

  Then Bjarne gave me the phone number of the man who would define my life for the next few years: Dr. Eufemiano Fuentes. Bjarne told me that Fuentes was a well-respected Spanish doctor, very experienced, had worked with top riders for years. His personality was a little different, Bjarne said, but nothing to worry about. Fuentes was very safe. I should not worry. (Here’s another pattern I later noticed: whenever anybody emphasized how safe something was, it often turned out to be the opposite.)

  I went to see Fuentes at his office in Madrid the following spring. He looked more like a movie star than a doctor. A tall man in his midforties, dark eyes, swept-back hair, aviator glasses, linen suits, Italian loafers. Fuentes talked fast. Moved fast. He had a warm bedside manner: friendly, even ebullient. He loved playing the game. He had a half-dozen secret phones; he seemed to have assistants and connections all across Europe. I heard Fuentes would sometimes attend medical conferences while wearing disguises, and help himself to pharmaceutical samples he wanted to try out on athletes. In police recordings, Fuentes called himself El Importante: the Important One. I called him Ufe (OO-fay).

  Ufe was from a wealthy family of tobacco farmers, and had an office in a fashionable section of Madrid and a couple of apartments. He was an athlete himself, a hurdler, who did his medical training in gynecology. He moved into sports medicine in the 1980s, when Spain was struggling to catch up with the rest of the world after the Franco years. He studied for a time in East Germany and Poland, then came home to help Spain succeed at the 1992 Barcelona Olympics. By the time I met him, he was in the prime of his career, having already worked with all the big Spanish teams, ONCE, Amaya Seguros, and Kelme. Unlike Ferrari, who had to worry constantly about the Italian police, Ufe had the advantage of living in a system that tolerated doping; racers used to say you could tape EPO syringes to your forehead and you wouldn’t get busted in Spain.

  There’s a story told about Ufe from the 1991 Tour of Spain. He was traveling in a plane to the Canary Islands, the site of the final stages. Some journalists were with him, and they noticed a small cooler on his lap. They inquired, What’s in the cooler? “The key to victory,” Ufe said. That year, one of his riders, Melcior Mauri, won the race. In five previous grand tours, Mauri had placed no higher than 78th.

  Jörg Jaksche, a great rider (a winner of Paris–Nice, 16th in the Tour), met Ufe around the time I started working with him. Jörg’s story about meeting Fuentes is probably pretty typical. You didn’t meet Fuentes so much as experience him.

  JÖRG JAKSCHE: Fuentes asked me to fly down to the Canary Islands. He met me at the airport in the kind of beat-up Land Cruiser that only very rich people drive. He liked having an aura, standing a little ways off in the fog. But when he spoke, he was very clear, very convincing. In the first few minutes he’d explained his expertise; told me he’d trained in East Germany; told me he worked with the top soccer teams; etc. He was like a great salesman. Then, as we’re driving, he starts going through the menu of what is possible—testosterone, EPO, transfusions, insulin, HGH, etc. I told him I was interested in doing the minimum, no risk. Then Fuentes reaches into a cardboard box on the seat between us and pulls out some tablets. They were in foil packets, and he pops one out with his thumb and holds it up to me. It looked like a piece of candy. “These are Russian anabolics,” he says. “Undetectable. Want one?” I said no thanks. “Fine!” he says, and he throws it up and catches it in his mouth, and swallows it, just like that. I was amazed!

  Fuentes is a little crazy, but he is definitely a genius. He knew what to do, and he knew how to avoid getting caught. And he told me several times during our relationship that what we were doing was perfectly legal—and he turned out to be right about that, at least in Spain. Besides, once you’re dealing with him, you just have to trust. You’re inside his system, and there’s no one to check with, to be sure. Fuentes is the father, he is the authority in this world, and so you’re in a position where you have to believe. You really don’t have much of a choice.

  From my first visit to Ufe, I made it clear: I wasn’t interested in the bells and whistles. I just wanted him to provide me with testosterone and Edgar, and to handle the transfusions. Ufe agreed—he was always very agreeable. It would be safe, easy, no problem at all. Ufe charged a fee for each transfusion, a fee for medicación (EPO and testosterone), plus a schedule of primas—bonuses that I would pay him if I won a stage of a grand tour or a big race. The primas weren’t small: 50,000 euros to win the Tour de France, 30,000 if I made the podium; 30,000 if I won the Tour of Italy, 20,000 for podium; and 30,000 for winning a World Cup race.

  Ufe introduced me to his assistant, José Luis Merino Batres, a polite snowy-haired, seventyish gentleman who was chief of hematology at La Princesa, a Madrid hospital. After I had given my first bag of blood, Batres asked me what code name I’d like to use. He suggested I choose the name of my dog. I didn’t want to do that—by now, Tugboat was well known in the cycling world—so I chose 4142, the last four digits of the phone number of Jeff Buell, my best friend growing up back in Marblehead. Figuring I needed a code name for Ufe as well, I decided to call him Sam
. I decided to call Batres Nick. Sam and Nick: my new assistants.

  The planning started right away. The goal was to have two blood bags ready for the Tour of Italy, and perhaps for the Tour de France as well. (And since the term “blood bags” is a bit gross, we’ll call them BBs from now on.)

  BB logistics are complicated by the fact that blood cells are alive; they can survive outside your body for about twenty-eight days. My first transfusion in 2000 had been the simplest kind: take one BB out, put it in the fridge for four weeks, then put it back in during a race. To get multiple bags ready, however, was a lot more complicated. You couldn’t take two or three BBs out four weeks before the race, because the blood loss would cripple your training. The method that had evolved solved this problem through simple rotation: taking out fresh BBs while re-infusing the stored BBs back into your body. This method ensured a fresh supply of BBs in the fridge while also keeping your body topped up and capable of hard training. We swapped them out every twenty-five days or so.

  For example, if you wanted three BBs for the Tour de France, you would begin ten weeks before the race, and your plan might look like this:

  10 WKS BEFORE

  1 BB OUT

  6 WKS BEFORE