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

by Daniel Coyle

  Copyright © 2012 by Tyler Hamilton and Daniel Coyle

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Bantam Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  BANTAM BOOKS and the rooster colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  eISBN: 978-0-345-53043-1

  www.bantamdell.com

  Jacket design: Tom McKeveny

  Jacket photograph: © Patrick Kovarik/AFP/Newscom

  v3.1_r1

  If you shut up the truth and bury it under the ground, it will but grow and gather to itself such explosive power that the day it bursts through it will blow up everything in its way.

  —Émile Zola

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Epigraph

  THE STORY BEHIND THIS BOOK

  Daniel Coyle

  CHAPTER 1 GETTING IN THE GAME

  CHAPTER 2 REALITY

  CHAPTER 3 EURODOGS

  CHAPTER 4 ROOMMATES

  CHAPTER 5 BAD NEWS BEARS

  CHAPTER 6 2000: BUILDING THE MACHINE

  CHAPTER 7 THE NEXT LEVEL

  CHAPTER 8 LIFE IN THE NEIGHBORHOOD

  CHAPTER 9 NEW START

  CHAPTER 10 LIFE AT THE TOP

  CHAPTER 11 THE ATTACK

  CHAPTER 12 ALL OR NOTHING

  CHAPTER 13 POPPED

  CHAPTER 14 NOVITZKY’S BULLDOZER

  CHAPTER 15 HIDE-AND-SEEK

  CHAPTER 16 THE END-AROUND

  AFTERWORD

  DEDICATION

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  FURTHER READING

  ABOUT THE AUTHORS

  THE STORY BEHIND THIS BOOK

  Daniel Coyle

  IN 2004, I MOVED TO SPAIN with my family to write a book about Lance Armstrong’s attempt to win his sixth Tour de France. It was a fascinating project for many reasons, the biggest being the mystery glowing at its center: Who was Lance Armstrong, really? Was he a true and worthy champion, as many believed? Was he a doper and a cheat, as others insisted? Or did he live in the shadowy space in between?

  We rented an apartment in Armstrong’s training base of Girona, a ten-minute walk from the fortresslike home Armstrong shared with his then-girlfriend, Sheryl Crow. I lived fifteen months on Planet Lance, spending time with Armstrong’s friends, teammates, doctors, coaches, lawyers, agents, mechanics, masseuses, rivals, detractors, and, of course, Armstrong himself.

  I liked Armstrong’s abundant energy, his sharp sense of humor, and his leadership abilities. I didn’t like his volatility, secrecy, or the sometimes bullying way he would treat teammates and friends—but then again, this wasn’t tiddly winks: it was the most physically and mentally demanding sport on the planet. I reported all sides of the story as thoroughly as I could, and then wrote Lance Armstrong’s War, which several of Armstrong’s teammates judged to be objective and fair. (Armstrong went on record as saying he was “okay” with the book.)

  In the months and years after the book was published, people often asked me if I thought Armstrong doped. I was 50–50 on the question, with the likelihood rising steadily as time passed. On one hand, you had the circumstantial evidence: Studies showed dope boosted performance 10–15 percent in a sport where races were often decided by a fraction of a percentage point. You had the fact that almost every other rider who stood on the Tour de France podium with Armstrong was eventually linked to doping, along with five of Armstrong’s U.S. Postal Service teammates. You had Armstrong’s longtime close association with Dr. Michele (pronounced mi-KEL-ay) Ferrari, aka “Dr. Evil,” the mysterious Italian acknowledged as one of the sport’s most infamous doctors.

  On the other hand, you had the fact that Armstrong had passed scores of drug tests with flying colors. You had the fact that he defended himself vigorously, and had prevailed in several high-profile lawsuits. Plus, in the back of my mind there was always the fallback reasoning: if it turned out that Armstrong was doping, then it was a level playing field, wasn’t it?

  Whatever the truth, I was 100 percent sure that I was never going to write about doping and/or Armstrong again. To put it simply, doping was a bummer. Sure, it was fascinating in a cloak-and-dagger sort of way, but the deeper you went, the nastier and murkier it got: stories of dangerously unqualified doctors, Machiavellian team directors, and desperately ambitious riders who suffered profound physical and psychological damage. It was dark stuff, made darker during my time in Girona by the deaths of two of the Armstrong era’s brightest stars: Marco Pantani (depression, cocaine overdose, age thirty-four) and José María Jiménez (depression, heart attack, age thirty-two), and the suicide attempt of another star, thirty-year-old Frank Vandenbroucke.

  Surrounding it all, like a vault of hardened steel, was the omertà: the rule of silence that governs professional racers when it comes to doping. The omertà’s strength was well established: in the sport’s long history, no top-level rider had ever revealed all. Support riders and team personnel who spoke about doping were cast out of the brotherhood and treated as traitors. With so little reliable information, reporting on doping was an exercise in frustration, especially when it came to Armstrong, whose iconic status as a cancer-fighting citizen saint both drew scrutiny and sheltered him from it. When War was finished, I moved on to other projects, content to see Planet Lance receding in my rearview mirror.

  Then, in May 2010, everything changed.

  The U.S. government opened a grand jury investigation into Armstrong and his U.S. Postal team. The lines of inquiry included fraud, conspiracy, racketeering, bribery of foreign officials, and witness intimidation. The investigation was led by federal prosecutor Doug Miller and investigator Jeff Novitzky, who’d played major roles in the Barry Bonds/BALCO case. That summer, they began to shine a bright spotlight into the darkest corners of Planet Lance. They subpoenaed witnesses—Armstrong teammates, staffers, and friends—to testify before a Los Angeles grand jury.

  I began to receive calls. Sources told me that the investigation was big and getting bigger: that Novitzky had uncovered eyewitness evidence that Armstrong had transported, used, and distributed controlled substances, and evidence that he may have had access to experimental blood replacement drugs. As Dr. Michael Ashenden, an Australian anti-doping specialist who had worked on several major doping investigations, told me, “If Lance manages to get out of this one, he’ll be bloody Houdini.”

  As the investigation progressed, I began to feel the tug of unfinished business, the sense that this might be an opportunity to discover the real story of the Armstrong era. The problem was, I couldn’t report this story on my own. I needed a guide, someone who had lived in this world and was willing to break the omertà. There was really only one name to consider: Tyler Hamilton.

  Tyler Hamilton was no saint. He had been one of the world’s top-ranked, best-known racers, winner of the Olympic gold medal, until he was busted for doping in 2004 and exiled from the sport. His connection to Armstrong went back more than a decade, first as Armstrong’s top lieutenant on U.S. Postal from 1998 to 2001, then as a rival when Hamilton left Postal to lead CSC and Phonak. The two also happened to be neighbors, living in the same Girona building, Armstrong on the second floor, Hamilton and his wife, Haven, on the third.

  Before his fall, Hamilton had been regarded as the sort of Everyman hero sportswriters used to invent in the 1950s: soft-spoken, handso
me, polite, and tough beyond conventional measure. He hailed from Marblehead, Massachusetts, where he had been a top downhill skier until college, when a back injury caused him to discover his true calling. Hamilton was the opposite of a flashy superstar: a blue-collar racer who slowly, patiently ascended the pyramid of the cycling world. Along the way, he became known for his unparalleled work ethic, his low-key, friendly personality, and, most of all, his remarkable ability to endure pain.

  In 2002 Hamilton crashed early in the three-week Tour of Italy, fracturing his shoulder. He kept riding, enduring such pain that he ground eleven teeth down to the roots, requiring surgery after the Tour. He finished second. “In 48 years of practicing I have never seen a man who could handle as much pain as he can,” said Hamilton’s physical therapist, Ole Kare Foli.

  In 2003 Hamilton performed an encore, crashing in stage 1 of the Tour de France and fracturing his collarbone. He kept going, winning a stage and finishing a remarkable fourth in a performance that veteran Tour doctor Gérard Porte described as “the finest example of courage I’ve come across.”

  Hamilton was also one of the better-liked riders in the peloton: humble, quick to praise others, and considerate. Hamilton’s teammates enjoyed performing a skit in which one teammate would pretend to be Hamilton lying crumpled on the road after a crash. The other teammate, pretending to be the team doctor, would race up to Hamilton, distraught. “Oh my God, Tyler,” he would shout, “your leg’s been cut off! Are you okay?” The teammate playing Hamilton would smile reassuringly. “Oh, don’t worry, I’m fine,” he would say. “How are you feeling today?”

  I’d spent time with Hamilton in Girona in 2004, and it had been a memorable experience. Most of the time, Hamilton was exactly as advertised: humble, nice, polite, every inch the Boy Scout. He opened the door for me, thanked me three times for buying the coffee; was charmingly ineffectual when it came to controlling his exuberant golden retriever, Tugboat. When we talked about life in Girona, or his childhood in Marblehead, or his beloved Red Sox, he was funny, perceptive, and engaged.

  When he talked about bike racing or the upcoming Tour de France, however, Hamilton’s personality changed. His playful sense of humor evaporated; his eyes locked onto his coffee cup, and he began to speak in the broadest, blandest, most boring sports clichés you’ve ever heard. He told me he was preparing for the Tour by “taking it one day, one race at a time, and doing his homework”; how Armstrong was “a great guy, a tough competitor, and a close friend”; how the Tour de France was “a real honor just to be a part of,” etc., etc. It was as if he had a rare disorder that caused outbreaks of uncontrollable dullness whenever bike racing was mentioned.

  In our last conversation (which happened a few weeks before he was busted for blood doping), Hamilton had surprised me by asking if I might be interested in writing a book with him about his life in cycling. I’d said that I was flattered to be asked, and that we should talk about it more someday. To be honest, I was putting him off. As I told my wife that evening, I liked Hamilton, and his feats on the bike were amazing and inspiring, but when it came to being the subject of a book, he was fatally flawed: he was simply too boring.

  A few weeks later, I found out that I had been mistaken. As news reports over the following months and years would reveal, the Boy Scout had been leading a second life straight out of a spy novel: code names, secret phones, tens of thousands of dollars in cash payments to a notorious Spanish doctor, and a medical freezer named “Siberia” for storing blood to be used at the Tour de France. Later, a Spanish police investigation revealed that Hamilton was far from alone: several dozen other top racers were on similarly elaborate secret programs. Against all evidence, Hamilton maintained he was innocent. His claims were rejected by anti-doping authorities; Hamilton was suspended for two years, and promptly dropped off the radar screen.

  Now, as the Armstrong investigation accelerated, I did some research. The articles said Hamilton was nearing forty, divorced, and living in Boulder, Colorado, where he ran a small training and fitness business. He’d attempted a brief comeback after his suspension, which had ended when he tested positive for a non-performance-enhancing drug he’d taken to deal with his clinical depression, which he’d suffered from since he was a child. He wasn’t giving interviews. A former teammate referred to Hamilton as “the Enigma.”

  I still had his email address. I wrote:

  Hi Tyler,

  I hope this finds you well.

  A long time ago you asked me about writing a book together.

  If that’s something that still appeals to you, I’d love to talk about it.

  Best,

  Dan

  A few weeks later, I flew to Denver to meet Hamilton. When I walked out of the terminal I saw him behind the wheel of a silver SUV. Hamilton’s boyishness had weathered into something harder; his hair was longer and showed flecks of gray; the corners of his eyes held small, deep wrinkles. As we drove off, he cracked open a tin of chewing tobacco.

  “I’ve been trying to quit. It’s a filthy habit, I know. But with all the stress, it helps. Or at least it feels like it does.”

  We tried one restaurant, but Hamilton decided it was too crowded, and chose an emptier one down the block. Hamilton picked out a booth at the back, two candles burning on the table. He looked around. Then the man who could tolerate any pain—the one who’d ground his teeth down to the roots rather than quit—suddenly looked as if he was going to start crying. Not from grief, but from relief.

  “Sorry,” he said after a few seconds. “It just feels so good to be able to talk about this, finally.”

  I started with the big question: Why had Hamilton lied before, about his own doping? Hamilton closed his eyes. He opened them again; I could see the sadness.

  “Look, I lied. I thought it would cause the least damage. Put yourself in my shoes. If I had told the truth, everything’s over. The team sponsor would pull out, and fifty people, fifty of my friends, would lose their jobs. People I care about. If I told the truth, I’d be out of the sport, forever. My name would be ruined. And you can’t go partway—you can’t just say, Oh, it was only me, just this one time. The truth is too big, it involves too many people. You’ve either got to tell 100 percent or nothing. There’s no in-between. So yeah, I chose to lie. I’m not the first to do that, and I won’t be the last. Sometimes if you lie enough you start to believe it.”

  Hamilton told me how, a few weeks before, he’d been subpoenaed by the investigation, placed under oath, and put on the stand in a Los Angeles courtroom.

  “Before I went in I thought about it, a long time. I knew I couldn’t lie to them, no way. So I decided that if I was going to tell the truth, I was going to go all the way. One hundred percent, full disclosure. I made up my mind that no question was going to stop me. That’s what I did. I testified for seven hours. I answered everything they asked to the best of my ability. They kept asking me about Lance—they wanted me to point the finger at him. But I always pointed it at myself first. I made them understand how the whole system worked, got developed over the years, and how you couldn’t single one person out. It was everybody. Everybody.”

  Hamilton rolled up his right and left sleeves. He put his palms up and extended his arms. He pointed to the crook of his elbows, to matching spidery scars that ran along his veins. “We all have scars like this,” he said. “It’s like a tattoo from a fraternity. When I got tan they’d show up and I’d have to lie about it; I’d tell people I cut my arm in a crash.”

  I asked how he avoided testing positive for all those years, and Hamilton gave a dry laugh.

  “The tests are easy to beat,” he said. “We’re way, way ahead of the tests. They’ve got their doctors, and we’ve got ours, and ours are better. Better paid, for sure. Besides, the UCI [Union Cycliste Internationale, the sport’s governing body] doesn’t want to catch certain guys anyway. Why would they? It’d cost them money.”

  I asked why he wanted to tell his story now.

&
nbsp; “I’ve been quiet for so many years,” he said. “I buried it inside for so long. I’ve never really told it from beginning to end before, and so I’d never really seen it, or felt it. So once I started telling the truth, it was like this huge dam bursting inside me. And it feels so, so good to tell, I can’t tell you how fantastic it feels. It felt like this giant weight is off my back, finally, and when I feel that, I know it’s the right thing to do, for me and for the future of my sport.”

  The next morning, Hamilton and I met in my hotel room. I set out three ground rules.

  1. No subject would be off limits.

  2. Hamilton would give me access to his journals, photos, and sources.

  3. All facts would have to be independently confirmed whenever possible.

  He agreed without hesitation.

  That day, I interviewed Hamilton for eight hours—the first of more than sixty interviews. That December, we spent a week in Europe visiting key locations in Spain, France, and Monaco. To verify and corroborate Hamilton’s account, I interviewed numerous independent sources—teammates, mechanics, doctors, spouses, team assistants, and friends—along with eight former U.S. Postal Service riders. Their accounts are also included in this book; some of them are coming forward for the first time.

  Over the course of our relationship, I found Hamilton didn’t tell his story so much as the story told him, emerging from him in extended bursts. He possesses an uncommonly precise memory, and proved accurate in his recollections, attributable, perhaps, to the emotional intensity of the original experiences. Hamilton’s pain tolerance came in handy as well. He didn’t spare himself in his process, encouraging me to talk with those who might hold him in an unfavorable light. In a way, he became as obsessed with revealing the truth as he was once obsessed with winning the Tour de France.

  The interview process lasted nearly two years. At times I felt like a priest hearing a confession; at other times, like a shrink. As the time went by, I saw how telling gradually changed Hamilton. Our relationship turned out to be a journey for both of us. For Hamilton, it was a journey away from secrets and toward a normal life; for me, a trip toward the center of this never-before-seen world.