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

by Daniel Coyle

  Olympic gold medalist Tyler Hamilton.

  That night I didn’t want to take the medal off; it felt so good, looked so beautiful. I set the medal on our bedside table, woke up in the middle of the night, and picked it up to make sure it wasn’t a dream.

  My agent started receiving calls: sponsors, talk shows, speaking engagements. In Athens, corporations wanted to pay me just to hang out for a couple of hours in an Olympic hospitality tent. It felt crazy, getting paid to stand around and rub elbows for an hour or two. But I took the check. If I felt guilty about it, I pushed that feeling down by telling myself all the usual things. It was a level playing field. I worked the hardest, and whoever works the hardest wins. After all I’d been through, I deserved this.

  I kept touching the medal, running my fingertips over it, feeling the weight in my hand; I couldn’t keep my hands off it. I think what I loved most about it was the feeling of permanence. Winning a gold medal was something nobody could ever take away from you.

  I was getting my massage when I heard the door-hinge squeak. I opened my eyes to see the solemn face of my team director, Álvaro Pino. I gave him a smile, but he didn’t seem to notice.

  “Tyler, come see me when you’re done here,” he said.

  It was twenty-nine days after the Olympics, and I was with my Phonak team in a town somewhere in Spain’s Almería province. Haven had gone back to the States for a friend’s wedding; my team asked me to ride the Tour of Spain. My form was good, and now I had a chance to cap my comeback with my first grand tour victory. The race had gone okay: I’d won a stage but lost some time in the mountains. I figured Álvaro wanted to talk race strategy.

  When the massage was done, I got up, dressed, and hustled to Álvaro’s room. He bade me sit down, and looked at me with big, concerned eyes.

  “The UCI called. They tell me you have a positive A test for transfusion of another person’s blood.”

  I almost laughed. Because it was crazy—as Álvaro knew. He’d been the one to arrange our team transfusion before the Dauphiné. Why would anybody use anybody’s blood but their own? The test was wrong. No way.

  “I know, Tyler, but—”

  —That can’t be right. Are they sure it’s me?

  “They’re sure.”

  —Are they sure the test is positive?

  “That is what they tell me. The A sample. They will test the B sample next.”

  —There’s no fucking way.

  Álvaro tried to soothe me but I was exploding with questions—where’s their proof? What’s this fucking test? Who do I call? Where is this lab? We told the press I had stomach troubles and I dropped out of the race. We found team owner Andy Rihs, who was at the race. He looked in my eyes and asked if I’d done it. I didn’t blink. I looked in his eyes and told him I was innocent.

  I went to my hotel room, took a deep breath, and dialed Haven. I tried to make it sound like a glitch, a harmless fluke that would soon be fixed, but I could hear the tremble in her voice, and I’m sure she could hear it in mine. Haven was no fool. She knew precisely how serious this was, and she knew we were now in a race: we had to get this taken care of before the media found out. Once it hit the Internet, the story would be everywhere, and I’d be stained. I told Haven everything was going to be okay, and I tried to sound convincing. I hung up the phone and sat in silence.

  This was the moment, the fork in the road. Everyone who gets popped experiences it: that eerie calm before the storm, those few hours when they can decide to tell the truth or not. I’d like to tell you that I thought about confessing, but the truth is I never considered it, not for one second. Confession felt impossible, unthinkable, an act of insanity. Not just because I’d spent years playing the game, telling myself that I wasn’t a cheater, that everybody did it. Not just because it would mean the shame of being exposed, or the loss of my team and contract and good name, or having to tell my parents. Not just because confession would implicate my friends, possibly end the careers of my teammates and staffers—after all, it wasn’t like I’d done all this solo. But mostly because the charge didn’t make any sense to me. The UCI was claiming I had someone else’s blood in my body—and I was 100 percent sure that I didn’t. Should I ruin my life and others’ lives by pleading guilty to something I hadn’t done? To me, the answer was clear: No.*

  Andy, Álvaro, and I huddled, and tried to figure out a strategy. We all knew the protocol: the testers take two samples, an A sample and a B sample. My A sample had tested positive; the B sample hadn’t yet been tested. If the tests matched—and they almost always did—then I was officially, publicly positive, automatically suspended, and would have to fight the test with USADA, the anti-doping organization that has jurisdiction over every American professional cyclist. Our thoughts immediately went toward disproving the test for blood transfusion, which, we were discovering, was a brand-new test. In fact, I was the first person to test positive. Rihs was supportive, said he’d help me get the best lawyers, the best doctors, even spend his own money to fund an independent scientific investigation of the test.

  Then it got worse. Two days after the Tour of Spain positive, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) informed me that my A test from the Olympics had also tested positive. My heart sank. This wasn’t some random glitch of the test; it was a pattern. Now they had two results, two glowing test tubes, two uphill battles for me to fight.

  Life became a nightmare. I flew to Lausanne, Switzerland, to watch the lab conduct the test of the B sample. When the media swarm started humming with news of my positive test, I held a press conference in Switzerland alongside Rihs, and we said all the right things—we’d do whatever it took to clear my name. I tried not to lie too much. I know that sounds crazy—I mean, there I was, having doped consistently for eight years, professing my innocence—but I instinctively tried to keep things as close to the truth as I could. I felt like I was an actor trapped in a terrible play, with no choice but to move ahead.

  “I’ve always been an honest person since I grew up,” I said. “My family taught me to be an honest person since I was a kid. I’ve always believed in fair play.… I’ve been accused of taking blood from another person, which if anybody knows me, knows that that is completely impossible.… I can guarantee you the gold medal will be staying in my living room until I don’t have a cent left.”

  Underneath my brave front, though, I felt powerless. I knew all too well how these things could be handled, if you had the connections. Back in 1999, when Lance tested positive for cortisone, it was handled quietly with Tour officials, and solved with a prescription. Back in 2001, when Lance had the suspicious EPO test at the Tour of Switzerland, the same thing had happened: he’d had meetings with people at the lab and it all went away. Lance worked the system—hell, Lance was the system. But who could I call? Who would help me?

  No one.

  After the press conference, I checked my messages and texts. I was hoping to hear some messages from my Postal or Phonak friends, the guys who understood what I was going through. I wanted to hear some “hang in theres” or “thinking about yous.” But I didn’t. My phone was filled with messages and texts from journalists. That was it. Haven would be in the States for another week. I was alone.

  Not knowing what else to do, I traveled back to Girona. I felt like a fugitive. I wore my sunglasses and pulled my ball cap low, imagining the accusing stares: There he goes. Cheater. Doper. I walked down the narrow street and unlocked the gate to our shared courtyard. I was never more grateful that Lance wasn’t around. I walked upstairs to our apartment and locked the door behind me. I sat down on one of the stools next to the kitchen counter, and I stared at the floor.

  I don’t know how long I sat there. A day? Two days? I didn’t eat. I didn’t sleep. I didn’t cry. I felt dead inside, a zombie. I stared at the floor for hours, trying to accept that this was happening. Trying to get ready for what lay ahead. I stared at the floor and tried to harden my mind.

  I’m not gonna let this
beat me. I’m not going to become an angry or bitter guy. Nothing is going to change. Nothing is going to change.

  I’m going to get through this. It might take a while, but I’ll get through.

  I’m still Tyler. I’m still Tyler. I’m still Tyler.

  Getting popped makes you go a little crazy. You’ve spent your career inside this elite brotherhood, this family, playing the game alongside everybody else when suddenly—whoosh, you’re flushed into a world of shit, labeled “doper” in headlines, deprived of your income, and—here’s the worst part—everybody in the brotherhood pretends that you never existed. You realize you’ve been sacrificed to keep the circus going; you’re the reason they can pretend they’re clean. You’re alone, and the only way back is to spend years and hundreds of thousands of dollars on lawyers so that you can, if you’re lucky, grovel your way back to rejoining that same messed-up world that chucked you out in the first place.

  When Marco Pantani got popped in 1999 and 2001, he got depressed, and ended up overdosing on cocaine in 2004. Jörg Jaksche suffered from depression after his bust; so did Floyd Landis. Jan Ullrich was treated in a clinic for “burnout syndrome.” Iban Mayo maybe had the best reaction: when he was busted he quit bike racing, and I heard he became a long-distance truck driver. In the days after my positive test, I fantasized about doing something like that, maybe getting a job as a carpenter.

  But I couldn’t quit, not now. Neither could Haven. So we set out to clear our name. It was our old reflex of getting ready for a big race—except now we had to deal with mountains of legal and scientific paper, trying to destroy this test before it destroyed me.

  We poured all our energy into the project. We hired the best sports-doping lawyer we could find, Howard Jacobs, and set up an office in our Colorado house. We dug into the history and reliability of the test, especially when it came to false positives. We found that false positives can be caused by a number of conditions, including chimerism, a rare fetal condition that can result in a person having two distinct blood types, also called “vanishing twin.” While we never claimed that I was a chimerical twin, the press had a field day making jokes about my “vanishing-twin defense” as if that were the centerpiece of our strategy. The press didn’t understand that our job was to throw the kitchen sink at the test, to cast its credibility into doubt. (Law, I was discovering, works like bike racing: try everything, just in case it works.)

  Early on, we received some good news: I’d be keeping the Olympic gold medal. For an unexplained reason, the Athens lab had frozen the B sample, rendering it untestable and therefore failing to confirm the positive A test. This was good news, not just for the gold, but because it showed that the lab was sloppy.

  We also learned a disconcerting story about a Swiss man named Christian Vinzens. According to reports in Swiss newspapers, Vinzens had attempted to extort Phonak officials before the positive results went public by claiming to know which Phonak riders, including me, were going to test positive; he was demanding payment from team officials in exchange for making the problem go away. While we were never able to prove any causal link between Vinzens and the test, it added to our sense that there was more to this story for us to uncover.

  Meanwhile, our friends and families supported us 100 percent. People were incredibly kind: they wrote letters, sent emails, even donated money. A high school friend started believetyler.org; red wristbands were sold that said BELIEVE.†

  I was living with so many levels of delusion. On the surface, I was grateful for the support. Beneath that, I was uncomfortable with it, especially the “Believe Tyler” tagline that made me appear like such a saint. Beneath that, I knew in my heart that I was guilty as sin—maybe not guilty of this specific charge, but guilty of living a lie. Yet I wasn’t in a position to try to enlighten my team of supporters. (“Uh, listen, guys, thanks for everything but the truth is, I’m not entirely innocent …”) Besides, I didn’t exactly have to take acting lessons in order to feel persecuted. I felt like I was being victimized—by the sport, by the UCI, by the testers, by some of the peloton, by certain members of the press, and most of all by a world that was swift to lump me into the category of “cheater,” “doper,” and “liar” without looking at the details. So when my friends saw me as an innocent who was being unfairly railroaded, it fit well enough. When the people in my foundation wanted to organize events, I said yes. When my parents, with tears in their eyes, told me that they believed in me and were going to do everything in their power to help, I thanked them with all my heart, and I meant it.

  Meanwhile, Haven and I were living in a catacomb of legal boxes. We barely slept, working seven days a week, twelve hours a day, racing through an endless jungle of problems and legal strategies. We hired experts from MIT, Harvard Medical School, Puget Sound Blood Center, Georgetown University Hospital, and the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center. We found out the details behind the test’s development, including a tall stack of emails questioning why it produced false positives. I traveled to Athens, and got more seemingly useful material—emails from lab techs questioning the test’s accuracy. We petitioned the UCI to release the paperwork on blood tests I’d taken in July, during the Tour, and when they failed to release them, Howard Jacobs and I traveled to the lab in Lausanne and dug in like a couple of gumshoes, unearthing the paperwork we needed.

  I got better at making my case with the public. I learned that if you’re vague enough, you don’t have to lie. I said things like “I’ve always been a hard worker,” and “I’ve been at the top consistently for ten years,” and “I’ve tested clean dozens of times,” and so on. I learned that if you repeat something often enough, you begin to believe it. I even took a lie-detector test to help prove my innocence, and passed. (Though, just before taking it, we Googled a few tips for beating the test. Clenching your buttocks, I remember, was one.)

  To pay our legal bills, which would eventually add up to about $1 million, we sold our house in Marblehead and our little house in Nederland, the one I’d bought back when I was a neo-pro. Selling that little house hurt, but we did it because we were convinced we were going to win and be vindicated. Meanwhile, I kept training, fueled by a new anger, taking crazy-long rides in the mountains around Boulder. I was going to show those sons of bitches. I was going to come back all the way. As our arbitration date approached, I felt myself getting more and more excited, picturing myself back in the Tour. This test was bullshit—I knew it and they knew it. I knew we were going to win. We had to win.

  Then we lost.

  We lost not once, but twice. First at a USADA hearing in April 2005, and then, on appeal, in the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) in February 2006. Their side argued the test was solid; that the emails and other materials we’d uncovered were “evidence of normal scientific debate.” We were devastated. I had no choice but to express my disappointment, serve out the rest of my two-year suspension, and rejoin the peloton in the fall of 2006.‡

  Losing has a way of clearing your vision. We saw how naïve we’d been, how we’d thrown everything into a hopeless cause. I saw how the system really worked. This wasn’t like a jury trial—we weren’t innocent until proven guilty. The threshold phrase that USADA used was “comfortable satisfaction.” They looked at the evidence, and they decided. Despite all our work, it felt like we’d never really had a shot.

  Looking back, I can see that this was the moment when things with Haven started to fall apart. Over the past couple of years, our relationship had become more of a business partnership; it often felt as if we were a couple of overworked lawyers who happened to sleep in the same bed. Until the verdicts, we had told ourselves it was all going to be worth it, that we were going to be proven innocent, we were going to wipe this stain away and then come back even stronger.

  Now, in the quiet weeks after the decision, we realized how incredibly tired we were—tired of battling the system, tired of losing, tired of playing these roles of the never-say-die cyclist and plucky, supportive wi
fe. We’d worked so hard, we’d given our absolute all, and it had all been for nothing. We tried to pick ourselves up, to tell ourselves that this was just another bump in the road, that we could tough this out just like we’d toughed everything else out. But in reality, we were finding out that toughness, and our relationship, had their limits.

  By the time my final CAS appeal was denied, Lance was retired. He’d won his record seventh Tour in 2005, and had addressed his doubters from the podium. He’d said, “I feel sorry for you. I’m sorry you can’t dream big and I’m sorry you don’t believe in miracles.” With that, he’d ridden off into the sunset.§

  Then, with timing that can only be described as poetic, the sport had its next great scandal. This one, though, involved someone I knew rather well. Ufe.

  In late May 2006 Spanish police raided Ufe’s Madrid office—that office I knew so well—along with a couple of nearby apartments. They emerged with a trove of evidence that astonished the world. Two hundred and twenty BBs. Twenty bags of plasma. Two refrigerators. One freezer (which I presumed was good old Siberia). Large plastic totes filled with no fewer than 105 different medications, including Prozac, Actovegin, insulin, and EPO; billing information; invoices; rate sheets; calendars; lists of hotels for the Tour of Italy and Tour de France; and the bonuses he was due when a client won a stage or a race.

  Now, I had known Ufe was a busy guy. I’d always known he worked with other riders—he’d told me about Ullrich and Basso himself. But the truth was now clear: Ufe hadn’t been a boutique service for elite riders; he had been a one-man Wal-Mart, servicing what seemed to be half the peloton. Officially, the police linked forty-one riders to him; unofficially they said there might be more, including tennis players and soccer teams. Prosecutors calculated that in the first quarter of 2006, Ufe made 470,000 euros ($564,000).