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

by Daniel Coyle

  † Hamilton was not the only rider to worry about this, of course. Floyd Landis said that Armstrong kept blood bags inside a small medical refrigerator in the closet of his Girona home, and that, in 2003, Armstrong asked Landis to stay in the apartment while he was away, to make sure that the power didn’t go out and that the fridge remained at a constant temperature.

  Chapter 10

  LIFE AT THE TOP

  ONE OF THE THINGS I learned in 2002 was that living in the same building as Lance had its complications. The walls were thick as a prison’s, but we could still hear each other moving around—dishes, doors, voices. The inner courtyard, where Lance had his bike garage, was like an amplifier. Lance liked to talk loud; when he was in there we could hear every word. When we bumped into each other, we were friendly enough—hey, what’s up, dude, how’s it going? Sometimes he would make little comments to show that he knew what I was doing behind closed doors—hey, how was Madrid?—but I ignored him, kept walking.

  As soon as I started at CSC, my life in Girona changed. I didn’t try to train with my old Postal friends (which under normal, non-Lance circumstances, would have been acceptable); instead I trained alone or sometimes with Levi Leipheimer, a quiet, intense Montanan who rode for the Dutch team Rabobank. I didn’t hang out at the coffee shop across the street from where we lived. I didn’t linger in the courtyard. Instead of the gossipy scene of the group rides, I was able to focus on my own numbers, my own goals. My system for dealing with Lance was similar to the strategy you’d use if you lived near a pit bull: Move slowly and calmly. Don’t make any sudden moves. Even so, my links to Postal were never far away.

  One day that spring I answered a knock at my door and was surprised to see Michele Ferrari. This time he had a different way to pinch me. He’d been downstairs, visiting Lance, and had popped up to let me know that I owed him $15,000 from the previous year. I wasn’t so sure about his figures—since mid-2001, when I’d been booted from the inner circle, Ferrari hadn’t given me any coaching. But I didn’t want to make waves. I talked him down to $10,000, wrote him a check, and got him out of my life forever.

  When it came to keeping peace in the building, I had one advantage: Haven. Lance had always admired Haven. He respected her business savvy and wanted her opinion on things. In his eyes, she seemed to stand out from the other wives and girlfriends and, as a result, he treated her with respect. This allowed Haven to serve as our building’s peacekeeper, keeping conversations moving, preventing any small problems from boiling up into bigger ones. Haven was good at her role because she understood Lance. She was the one who came up with one of the better lines about him that I’ve ever heard. Lance is Donald Trump. He might own all of Manhattan, but if there’s one tiny corner grocery store out there without his name on it, it drives him crazy.

  In this analogy, Haven and I were the corner grocery store. Though I still was making less money than I had at Postal, my new success had brought some changes: sponsors, attention, media, and our own charitable foundation. A few years back I’d watched a friend’s mother-in-law suffer from multiple sclerosis, and I’d become interested in the cause, getting involved with several MS fundraisers. Now we decided to formalize and expand our effort, and began building what would become the Tyler Hamilton Foundation. It felt good to give back.

  If we were a start-up company, Haven was our CEO. She returned the emails, vetted the contracts, even ghost-wrote my columns for VeloNews. She made the travel arrangements for trips to Lucca to see Cecco and the shuttles to Madrid; she made the bank withdrawals to get the cash for me to pay Ufe. It was busy and stressful, but on the other hand, we only had a few years to do it before I would retire and we’d get on with our lives.

  For the time being, though, Haven and I decided to hold off on having kids. We talked about it a lot; I was in favor, but then, I wouldn’t be the one who’d bear most of the burden. Haven wanted to wait until I was retired. She knew how tough it would be, essentially raising a child by herself. So when the old Spanish women in the neighborhood would ask Haven when she was going to have a baby, we smiled politely and said, “Someday.” Tugboat became the one piece of normalcy in our world. Tugs was always glad to see us, always ready for some fun, always willing to chase that tennis ball around the cobblestone streets. We took him on training trips, bought him sandwiches, doted on him like he was our baby. In a sense, that’s what he was.

  The spring of 2002 also brought the arrival of Floyd Landis. Floyd had just signed for Postal, but he didn’t seem to fit in with the rest of the guys. While the other Postal riders were in the Hincapie mode, quiet and obedient and neutral, Landis was different. He was from Pennsylvania, an ex-Mennonite with a deeply irreverent sense of humor, a fantastic work ethic, and an unbreakable habit of questioning everything. He didn’t see the sense of spending much money on a place to live, so he lived in a small college-style apartment in Girona’s new section; he liked to commute to town on his skateboard. He saw everything logically, in terms of black and white, right and wrong. His parents had told him that if he raced bikes, he’d go to hell, and he’d decided to do it anyway. I guess once you risk hell, there’s not much left to scare you.

  Everybody could see that Floyd was a big star in the making. I think Lance saw a bit of himself in Floyd—the fearlessness, the toughness, the willingness to question convention—because Lance and Floyd started riding together a lot. In a way, Floyd was my replacement. I’d see them out on rides; I’d hear of them doing training camps together. But Floyd wasn’t the yes-man I’d been. Because Floyd chafed. Floyd spoke up.

  For example, Floyd pointed out something that had bugged me for a long time: Lance got great bikes, while the rest of the team had to make do with retreads. It was true: each year, our race bikes were kept by head mechanic Julien DeVriese up in Belgium; he let us use them for the Tour and big races only, then after the season he took them and they disappeared. We never got new helmets, though we knew Giro was sending dozens to the team. We speculated that someone was selling the equipment on the side, a fairly common practice in cycling. It was annoying. While Lance was given a pile of the finest equipment on the planet, we’d be training with dated, beat-up bikes and dented helmets. I told Floyd how one of my Postal teammates, Dylan Casey, had used an inventive strategy: he ran over his old Postal bike with his car, forcing the team to get him a new one. Floyd loved that story, because it was something he would have done.

  Floyd and I started hanging out occasionally. He and I would see each other and join up for a ride by ourselves. Floyd would good-naturedly bitch about the latest stuff Postal was up to. We never talked about doping. Instead we talked about how Lance was jetting off to Tenerife or Switzerland, or how pissed Lance got when Floyd decided to see how many cappuccinos he could drink in one sitting (fourteen, it turned out), or how the entire team was forced to ride with the Champion’s Club, a corporate group formed by Thom Weisel and his millionaire friends who liked to ride with Postal during training camp every year. We called them Rich-Man Rides. This kind of corporate showbiz offended Floyd’s Mennonite sense of honesty, in part because he thought it was unfair to the team to force them to add value to Lance’s corporate relationships without getting paid, and in part because riding with a bunch of amateur millionaire wannabes was patently ridiculous. “Hey, if I were an NBA fan, I’d love to watch the Lakers train,” he would say. “But I wouldn’t bring a fucking ball.”

  I liked Floyd. He always made me laugh. Plus, I liked how my new life without Postal was shaping up. I wasn’t a cog in Lance’s system anymore; I was figuring things out on my own terms. In a weird way, all this made me feel closer to Lance, in the sense that I could relate to his situation. Before, he was the general and I was the soldier. Now we were in the same position, having to plan, motivate a team, navigate relationships with sponsors and owners. I could feel the pleasure and pressure that came from carrying people’s hopes.

  I also felt the fear. Especially that summer, when I had my firs
t-ever encounter with the trolls—the journalists who pull you into the muck of doping scandals. Up until this point, my image was always that of a clean rider, never linked to any whisper of doping. This ended when Prentice Steffen, our doctor from the early Postal days, told a Dutch journalist his story about the Tour of Switzerland back in 1996, where Steffen claimed that Marty Jemison and I had approached him asking about doping products.

  The article appeared in a Dutch newspaper, and it caused our carefully constructed world to tremble. In the space of a single quote from a guy I hadn’t seen in years, I was now tarnished. Never mind that I didn’t remember the incident the same way, never mind that Marty didn’t either—sponsors were worried, the team was worried. All the careful measures we’d taken for secrecy—the sneaking around, the code words, the scraping of labels and the foil packets tucked into refrigerators—suddenly seemed worthless. One tiny story, and our life turned into a house of cards ready to fall. It felt terrifying.

  So I did the only thing I thought I could do: I attacked the messenger. I spoke with reporters and said I was a victim of a groundless, vicious smear. I speculated about Steffen’s motives. I pointed out that he’d had his own struggles with recreational drugs (which happened to be true; he’d had some problems and overcome them). I said it was a case of sour grapes.

  I was learning: when the accusations come, hit back twice as hard.

  In July 2002, I rode the Tour de France, and watched Lance cruise to his fourth and easiest victory. He was helped by the fact that Ullrich was home with a knee injury and a suspension (he’d gotten popped for the recreational drug ecstasy). Pantani and the Italians were tangled up in a series of doping scandals, and the French were still struggling due in part to their nation’s strict testing. Even so, Postal’s domination was impressive. I saw George Hincapie—big, tall, non-climber George—lead the peloton up the steep climb on the Aubisque. Floyd, the new guy, was ungodly strong. To my eye it looked like the entire team was doing multiple BBs.

  When it came to my own BBs, the system was at once simple and complicated. It was simple because few people were involved—just me and Ufe, basically. It was complicated because we had to be sneaky. Before the Tour, Ufe would figure out the times and places for our meet-ups. We usually did the BBs on the Tour’s two rest days, always in hotels. Ufe was good at picking middle-of-the-road hotels: never too nice, and never too shabby. He would tell me the names of the hotels before the Tour when I saw him in Madrid, and I would keep the names on a scrap of paper in my wallet, along with the number of Ufe’s latest secret phone (he was always changing numbers). The morning we were to meet, Ufe would send me a text on my secret phone, the prepaid kind I bought that was only used with him. The messages would be one sentence like “The drive is 167 kilometers long,” or “The address of the restaurant is 167 Champs-Élysées.” The words were complete nonsense; all that mattered was the number. It meant he’d be waiting in room 167 of our prearranged hotel, with my BB on ice in a picnic cooler.

  I never took a team car; usually Haven would drive me in our car. I wore my usual undercover outfit: street clothes, sunglasses, baseball cap pulled low. We would park in the back of the hotel and go in the service entrance, avoiding lobbies at all costs. (That was one of the drawbacks of being semi-famous in Europe: if a journalist spotted me, it could be a disaster.) Normally, I hated walking fast, but I sure did it now: full steam, head down, up the stairs, through the halls, tap lightly on the door, heart beating a mile a minute. When Ufe opened the door, I felt like hugging him.

  I’m sure I wasn’t the only one making these secret BB missions, but you never would have known it from reading the papers. As was becoming the pattern, the Tour was almost entirely free of any doping scandal: zero riders tested positive. The only incident was when Edita Rumsiene, the wife of the third-place finisher, Raimondas Rumsas, was found to be carrying a cache of EPO, corticoids, testosterone, anabolics, and HGH in the trunk of her car. She gamely claimed they were for her mother (who must’ve been quite a racer). Rumsas kept his podium spot, proving (1) that the UCI was still not serious about punishing anybody and (2) that it was possible to microdose a boatload of drugs during the Tour and not get caught.

  My Tour de France went pretty well. Since I had been team leader for the Tour of Italy, my job was to support team leaders Frenchman Laurent Jalabert and Spaniard Carlos Sastre. I used two BBs and rode the race with the A students, finishing a more than respectable 15th. Mostly, I watched and learned.

  Watching Lance in the Tour, I couldn’t help but wonder about what methods he was now using. I already knew a fair amount—I figured it was a combination of transfusions and microdosing with EPO. But to me that didn’t explain everything. It didn’t explain the big improvement Lance made each July. It happened every year. One month before the Tour, Lance would be at a fairly normal level for him. Then, in the space of two or three weeks, he would be in a different league, adding another 3 or 4 percent. In the 2002 Tour, it got to the point that his superiority was almost embarrassing.

  He showed it on stage 15, a summit finish at Les Deux Alpes. Right at the end of the stage Joseba Beloki, the great Spanish climber, decided to go for the stage win. Beloki attacks, and gets away. With less than one kilometer to go, Beloki is in the lead, and you can see the price he’s paying for his effort. He’s dying, his eyes rolling back, shoulders rolling, in pure anguish—like anybody else would be.

  Then, zooming up from behind Beloki like a motorcycle cop comes Lance. Mouth closed. Eyes level behind sunglasses, looking around, checking for others, looking for all the world like he’s going to pull Beloki over and give him a ticket. This was 1999 Sestrière all over again—Lance was on a different planet. The whole Tour was like that: Lance won four stages, was never put into difficulty, finished 7:17 ahead of Beloki in the overall. Nobody else was even close.

  To me the question was how. Lance had always been secretive about his methods; even back when Kevin and I were in the inner circle, there was always the sense that there was one more circle we weren’t seeing.

  I knew Lance had a habit of jetting off to Switzerland to train with Ferrari for a couple of weeks just before the Tour. I also had a hunch that whatever methods he and Ferrari had evolved, BBs were firmly at the center. The Tour of Italy had shown me that. I also knew how Lance’s mind worked: to do everything possible, because, as always, those other bastards were doing more. If two BBs were good, why not try four? If artificial hemoglobin was available, why not? In the peloton, we used to say that Lance was two years ahead of everyone else.

  Whatever Lance was doing, it’s certain that during 2002 and 2003, the peloton was catching up. Good information is hard to keep underground. Innovations can’t help but spread, especially in bike racing. It’s funny—you often hear about cycling’s omertà, which is real enough. But when you’re inside, it’s positively chatty. Riders are constantly talking, whispering, comparing notes. The rewards were too big, the punishments too mild, so the hunt for the next magical product was too tempting. The peloton was Facebook on wheels—and during this period, information was flying. Talk about artificial hemoglobin was all around, and a new type of Edgar called CERA that was coming out of Spain, and something called Aranesp. BBs were becoming more common. A crazy story went around of a low-level Spanish rider who was unable to afford transfusions, and so used dog’s blood instead (he won the race, the story went, but got sick afterward and was never the same). Later, I met a rider in Italy who was on a low-level team—the equivalent of Double-A minor leagues in baseball—who was doing blood transfusions. That’s how quickly it spread; in a few years, a technique that was once cutting edge was trickling down to the sport’s lower levels.

  The bigger gossip on everybody’s mind was that Jan Ullrich was coming back. After his year lost to the ecstasy bust, Ullrich was attempting to leave his undisciplined ways behind and build a Jan 2.0. He was spending time in Lucca, working with my trainer, Cecco. Like others, I presumed this meant
Ullrich was also working with Ufe—which Ufe soon confirmed (for a secret doctor, Ufe was kind of terrible at keeping secrets). I figured this meant Ullrich was going to come back stronger than ever. In addition, a new generation of Spanish and Italian riders were on the rise, young guns like Iban Mayo and Ivan Basso and Alejandro Valverde. The sharp end of the race was going to get a lot more crowded.

  When I was thirteen or so, I joined a club called Crazykids of America, made up of kids my age who skied at Wildcat Mountain in New Hampshire. There were no adults, no official meetings, no dues. The purpose of the club was basically to dare each other to do risky, borderline-stupid stuff: climb a cliff, crawl through a long drainage pipe, sled down an icy run on a cafeteria tray at night. The whole point of Crazykids was to get to the edge, see how far you’d go.

  Nobody in Crazykids would go further than me. I wasn’t the biggest, or the strongest, or the fastest, but I could always push things to their limit. I’ve always had a love for the edge, a need for adrenaline. Maybe it’s the depression, maybe it’s my need for stimulation. But when I’m given the chance to go to the brink, I go.

  In some ways 2003 was the Crazykid year of my bike racing, the year where I went to the edge. It was, by far, the most successful year of my career. I got everything I ever wanted—every victory, every accolade, every big moment—and it nearly ended up destroying me.

  You could see my new attitude in the season’s first major event, Paris–Nice in March. In the past, I’d always shown up for Paris–Nice, that weeklong competition known as “the Race to the Sun,” with a question in my mind: Was I good or not? Now, with the help of Cecco and Ufe and Riis, I knew. And I delivered. In the prologue, I finished second. In stage 6, I did a strongman move of my own: a 101-kilometer solo breakaway. I was second in the Tour of the Basque Country, and sixth in Critérium International. In each race, I was with the A students.