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

by Daniel Coyle

  The next day, early in the race, Floyd Landis and I were riding next to each other. I still liked Floyd, and I think he felt the same about me. We shot the breeze for a minute. Then Floyd looked around.

  “You need to know something.”

  I pulled in closer. Floyd’s Mennonite conscience was bothering him.

  “Lance called the UCI on you,” he said. “He called Hein, after Ventoux. Said you guys and Mayo were on some new shit, told Hein to get you. He knew they’d called you in. He’s been talking shit nonstop. And I think it’s right that you know.”

  For a second, I was confused—how did Floyd know the UCI had called me in? I’d told no one about the meeting; only Haven and a couple people in Phonak management knew. But Floyd knew. Because, I realized, Lance had told him.

  I don’t get mad very often. But when I do it’s for real: time slows down and I can feel myself rising out of myself, almost like I’m looking down on this other person through a red mist.

  Now it all made sense: the trip to Aigle, the weird meeting with Dr. Zorzoli. It had all been because of Lance. Lance had called the UCI on June 10, the day I’d beaten him on Ventoux, the same date they told me to come in, the same date of the warning letter they’d sent to Girona. Lance called Hein, and Hein called me.†

  The bike race seemed to disappear. I felt years of pent-up anger cracking loose inside me. I felt heat, rising up.

  Lance called the UCI on you.

  Told Hein to get you.

  He’s been talking shit nonstop.

  I rode up next to Lance. Together again, a few inches apart. He could see I was pissed, so he opened his mouth to say something. He didn’t get far.

  —Shut the fuck up, Lance, you piece of shit, shut the fuck up. I know you. I know what you did. I know you’ve been ratting me out, talking shit about our team. Worry about yourself, because we’re going to fucking kill you.

  Lance’s eyes got wide.

  “It’s not true. I never fucking said a word. Who told you that? I didn’t say anything like that. Who said it? Who the fuck said I did?”

  —Never mind who said it. You know it’s true.

  A circle slowly widened around us. He was almost frantic; he insisted he was innocent, and wanted to know who’d told me.

  “I didn’t say fucking anything. Who said I did? Who? Fucking tell me who.”

  I didn’t say a word.

  “Who? Tell me who. Who?”

  —Fuck you, Lance.

  I felt like I’d been waiting to say those three words for the past six years. I rode off and joined my teammates. At the front.

  I think it’s my destiny to have good things and bad things happen close to each other. Because later in that stage, I crashed. Actually, pretty much everybody crashed. The Tour organizers laid out a course custom-made for disaster. With one kilometer left, the road narrowed and turned, then narrowed again. We were all going like hell, hitting that bottleneck at 65 kilometers an hour. Then kaboom—as if a land mine had gone off, people flying everywhere, bikes crumpling, scraping, people thudding, flying. Including me. I went straight into the jagged pile, flipped, and smashed down on my back. Hard.

  I lay there a second, unable to breathe, convinced I’d broken my back. I felt my limbs tingle; moved gingerly, took inventory. My helmet was cracked; my bike was rideable. I climbed on, numb.

  With my teammates’ help, I managed to cross the line. I spotted Ullrich and Lance; they’d been caught up in it, but looked unscathed. I felt my back, and I could feel damage. Deep damage. I was missing meat on my lower spine.

  That night everything began to tighten up. Like a ratchet, tighter and tighter, until I had trouble breathing. I felt little lightning bolts of pain shooting in strange places. I called Haven. This wasn’t a normal crash. This was serious. Kristopher, the team physiotherapist, examined me. He started talking about nerve damage, possible organ damage. I cut him off.

  “Be honest with me,” I said. “Is my back fucked?”

  “Your back is fucked,” Kristopher said.

  I managed to ride the next couple of days, which thank God weren’t big mountain stages, to make it to the rest day in Limoges. Then things got worse. Haven phoned and told me Tugboat was dying, and we decided it would be best to put him to sleep. With a heavy heart, Haven loaded Tugs into the Audi wagon and drove north to Limoges so I could say my goodbyes.

  I decided to go ahead with the BB, just in case. Ufe had scheduled the transfusion for 1 p.m. at the Hotel Campanile on the north side of Limoges—a good hotel, nondescript, sort of a Holiday Inn. As it happened, Ufe wasn’t there, so the Phonak team doctors handled the transfusion; it went smoothly. I went back to my hotel room to wait for Haven and Tugs to show up. But a few minutes after I got there, I started feeling bad. I got a headache, and felt my forehead: I was burning up.

  I had to piss, badly. I looked down, expecting to see the usual slight discoloration from the BB. But when I looked down, I was pissing blood. Dark, dark red, almost black. It kept coming and coming, filling the toilet like a horror movie.

  I felt myself panicking. I told myself it was going to be okay. Maybe just 15 percent of the bag was bad. I’d still have the other 85 percent. I was still okay, right? I drank some water, lay on the bed, tried to rest.

  My fever kept rising. My headache got worse. Then I got up to piss again. I didn’t want to look down. Then I did.

  Pure red.

  Then I knew I was in trouble. The bag was bad. Something had happened, either in Siberia or on the way to Limoges: the bag had been warmed up or been damaged; I’d transfused a bag full of dead blood cells. My body felt toxic. I started shivering, felt nauseous. I remembered seeing Manzano get airlifted out last year when he got sick; he went to a hospital, nearly died. My headache got worse, until it felt like my skull was being cracked and peeled off my brain, piece by piece. I got my phone and set it next to me on the bed, in case I had to call for an ambulance.

  Haven came; she could see something was seriously wrong. I told her what had happened, but not all of it—I didn’t want to scare her. I lied; I told her I’d pissed some blood, but was feeling better. She got me aspirin, did her best to make me comfortable. I told her not to tell anybody. Not the doctors, not my teammates, not my director. At the time, it felt like a strategic bit of denial—if I don’t tell them, then it didn’t happen. But now I can see that I mostly felt ashamed. My back was fucked. My blood was fucked. My entire Tour—everyone’s hard work, our big chance—was turning to shit.

  I spent the night lying next to Tugs, shivering with fever, telling him goodbye.

  You keep going. That’s the horrible, beautiful thing about bike racing. You keep going. The next morning I rode, gritting it through a flat stage. Then came the first test of the Tour, stage 10, a slog through the Appalachian-like Massif Central. I was burning matches all day to be with the front group. When we hit the climb of the day, the Col du Pas de Peyrol, things got serious and I got dropped. The main problem was my back: when I went hard, I couldn’t make myself hurt. Sickness I could deal with. Pain I could deal with, but not being able to go hard enough to have pain—that was truly tough.

  I lost seven seconds that stage. A tiny amount, but it showed the truth: I couldn’t keep up. Afterward, Lance and I found ourselves next to each other. Our blowup a few days earlier had cleared the air. Now there was eye contact, talking.

  “Fuck, that was hard,” Lance said casually.

  —Yeah, I felt like shit, I said, honestly. I was suffering at the end.

  Lance turned to me and I got a good look at his face. He looked healthy: pink, bright clear eyes, no trace of suffering; he had a glint in his eye. That’s when I knew: his comment was a way of testing me. He wasn’t suffering. But he got me to admit I was. It was like he was giving me a needle, a little fuck you.

  I wasn’t the only one struggling. Though he hadn’t crashed, Ullrich was having a hard time: gasping on the big climbs, struggling to keep up. He wasn’t himself
the entire Tour; he had good form, but he was struggling to keep up and went on to finish fourth, the first time he’d finished lower than second. Later, I heard rumors that Ullrich had also had a bad bag of blood. I have no idea if it’s true or not, but given his performance it makes sense.

  Mayo wasn’t doing any better. The crash hadn’t injured him, but it looked like he’d lost horsepower. He got so frustrated that at one point he got off his bike and wanted to quit. We all were falling away. Lance was the only one left standing.

  My Tour ended on stage 13 to Plateau de Beille. As it happened, it was the same day for which our foundation had combined with Outdoor Life Network and Regal Entertainment Group to hold a fundraiser in which the Tour would be broadcast live at nineteen movie theaters across the U.S. I had hoped it would be a good day for me, but instead viewers saw me sliding back, my face weirdly calm. I’m sure they were looking for some fight, but I didn’t have any. I couldn’t move my legs; I couldn’t feel pain; my back felt like it was in a vise.

  I kept going.

  My director, Álvaro, saw what was happening. That morning, he’d instructed me to go as far as I could, then we would see. I knew he was talking in code: he wanted me to abandon.

  I kept going.

  My teammate Nic Jalabert slid in beside me. I’d brought Nic from CSC because I liked his easy manner and his hardworking nature. He was the younger brother of Laurent Jalabert, the French world champion, and, perhaps as a result, cast a skeptical eye toward the craziness at the top of the sport. Once, in a 2003 race in Holland, we’d been in a crash and I’d gashed my hand badly on a chain ring. I leapt to my feet and started chasing, trying to catch up. I was riding like hell, pushing the old wall, and blood was dripping down into my wheels, spattering everywhere, when I felt Nic’s hand on my shoulder.

  Tyler, it’s just a bike race.

  At first I didn’t understand. Then I looked at myself and I saw that Nic was right. It’s just a bike race. Finish 6th, finish 60th, finish 106th, did it really matter? Do your best and let it go. That day, we’d slowed down and ridden together to the finish.

  Now, as I struggled to keep up with the peloton on Plateau de Beille, I felt Nic’s hand on my shoulder. He didn’t say anything but I could feel what he meant: Tyler, it’s just a bike race.

  I relaxed. I let my legs stop moving. I coasted to the side of the road, along a small stone wall, and, for the first and only time in my career, got off my bike while I could still ride.

  No job too small or tough.

  As it turned out, no job was too tough. This job, though, suddenly seemed too small.

  That night, I was supposed to get my second BB from Ufe. To save him the trip, I phoned him. I spoke carefully, in case anyone was listening, and told him that I’d just dropped out, and we didn’t need to meet for “dinner.” But before I could complete the sentence, he jumped in, his voice agitated, talking a mile a minute.

  “It’s all gone crazy. Everything’s lost, gone. So sorry, man.”

  —What?

  “He got stopped. Police. Had to throw everything away. I’m so sorry, man. So sorry. I can’t believe it, it’s so crazy …”

  I hung up quickly, unnerved that Ufe had spoken so openly. Later he explained: the courier had been stopped in a police roadblock, and had panicked, thrown the blood bags into a ditch by the side of the road. I didn’t care at the time. I was bummed to lose one, but we had more where that came from. I didn’t suspect any foul play—though later, when a friend told me that the same thing had happened to Ullrich, part of me wondered.

  I went home to recover. I watched a few minutes of the Tour on television. I could see Postal up front, dominant. All of them together, George, Chechu, Floyd, leading the way up the big climbs, the old blue train. It was a demonstration just like the old days before Festina: one team using its advantages to take the race by the throat. Lance won a bunch of stages in that last week, including several that he didn’t have to win, in order to send his message: he was still boss. And when an Italian rider named Filippo Simeoni challenged Lance (Simeoni had testified against Ferrari in court, and spoke openly about doping), Lance made sure Simeoni paid the price. When Simeoni broke away to try to win a stage, Lance, who was in the yellow jersey, single-handedly chased him down and brought him back to the pack, making a “zip the lips” gesture.

  In short, everything was back to normal.‡

  * Jonathan Vaughters, who attended the race, says, “After the climb, Floyd [Landis] was completely white; he looked like death warmed over. I asked him what was up, and he told me he had donated a bag of blood just before the race.” According to Landis, Postal’s Tour de France team had undergone a transfusion a few days before the Dauphiné.

  † This was not the only time Armstrong informed anti-doping authorities about his rivals. In 2003, a few days before the Tour, he’d sent an email to the UCI, the World Anti-Doping Agency, and Tour de France organizers expressing concern over the use of artificial hemoglobin by Spanish riders.

  ‡ According to Landis, Postal performed two transfusions to the entire team during the 2004 Tour de France. The first was after the first rest day in a hotel in Limoges. Riders were taken in small groups to a room and told not to speak. For safety, team staffers were stationed at each end of the hallway. To guard against the possibility of hidden cameras, the air conditioner, light switches, smoke detector, and even the toilet were covered with dark plastic and taped off.

  According to Landis, the second transfusion occurred between stages 15 and 16, when Postal instructed their bus driver to fake a breakdown on the road to the hotel. While the driver pretended to fuss with the engine, the team lay on the bus’s couches and received their transfusions. Tinted glass and curtains prevented any passersby from looking in. Blood bags were taped to the cabinets with athletic tape. Armstrong received his transfusion while lying on the bus floor.

  Landis said Postal transported the blood bags inside a dog kennel in a camper driven by a team assistant. “They laid out the bags on the floor of the kennel and covered them with a piece of foam and a blanket; the dog went on top of that,” Landis said. “It was simple. Once the blood bags are out of the refrigerator, it takes 7 or 8 hours for them to warm up. That way they didn’t have to mess with coolers or refrigeration or anything that would alert police. They could just drive to the team hotel, put the bags in a cardboard box or a suitcase, and carry them in with the rest of the team’s gear; nobody would notice.” Landis said the dog’s name was Poulidor.

  Chapter 13

  POPPED

  HERE’S A MOTTO FOR my generation of cyclists: Sooner or later, everybody gets popped.

  It works, because it’s true:

  Roberto Heras: 2005

  Jan Ullrich: 2006

  Ivan Basso: 2006

  Joseba Beloki: 2006

  Floyd Landis: 2006

  Alexandre Vinokourov: 2007

  Iban Mayo: 2007

  Alberto Contador: 2010

  And so on. It’s not that the testers suddenly became Einsteins, though they did get better. I think it has more to do with the odds over the long run. The longer you play hide-and-seek, the more likely it is that you’ll slip up, or they’ll get lucky. It’s inevitable, really, and maybe it was inevitable from the start. Maybe I should have seen it coming. But that’s the funny thing about fate: in the end, it always comes as a surprise.

  When I returned to Girona from my crash-abbreviated 2004 Tour, I set my sights on the Athens Olympics time-trial race in August. The Games were going to be my chance to rescue my year. I spent a couple of weeks in Girona resting up, letting my back heal, getting my head on straight. Maybe it’s the old ski racer in me, but the Olympics have always meant a lot to me (just hearing that theme song still gives me goosebumps).

  I dove into the usual drill. I trained super-hard, spending day after day on the time-trial bike. I hit the Edgar, dialed up my values, energized by the knowledge that, though it would be a world-class field, I�
�d have the advantage of competing against riders who were exhausted from the Tour.

  Race day at the Olympics was a furnace: windy, with temperatures approaching 100 degrees. As always in a time trial, riders headed off one by one; I would be among the last to go, along with Ullrich, Ekimov, Bobby Julich, and Australian Michael Rogers. The course would take us through two 24-kilometer laps along the seafront near a town called Vouliagmeni. There were little houses, narrow streets, and sailing boats; if I squinted a little, I could almost pretend I was back home in Marblehead.

  I started well, rolling down the ramp and firing on all cylinders. As usual, stuff went wrong: the heat melted the tape holding my radio earpiece, and so I tore the thing out of my ear. For a second the wires dangled near my spokes, and I thought, Uh-oh, here we go again. But the crash gods were on my side for once; the wires fell harmlessly to the pavement. I settled in and trained my sights on the three in front of me: Ekimov, Julich, and Rogers (Ullrich, starting behind me, was having an off day; he’d finish seventh). I liked riding without the earpiece and not knowing the split times; I focused on the sound of the wind and the hiss of my tire on the hot pavement. I felt I was going well—hell, I knew I was going well. But I didn’t know if it would be enough.

  When I crossed the line I was dimly aware of the big crowd going crazy. Then I saw Haven. I saw her beaming smile, which was getting bigger by the second.

  Gold.

  Our world exploded in happy pandemonium. Our phones were blowing up with congratulations and offers; back home in Marblehead I heard people were going bonkers. I could picture my parents: my dad hugging everybody in sight; my mom quieter and more dignified but her eyes shining with pride.