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

by Daniel Coyle

  The interesting part was, I think Lance knew I was lying. His BS detector is top-notch. But in this case, he needed me to lie.

  Seeing him like that, I could feel what he was up against. He had to win the physical battle—he had to get in race shape again. Then the strategic battle—he had to get a good team, one that would support him. Then, even if he did all that, he still had those strongmen like Riis and Casagrande out there, doing God knows what to beat him. I could see why he focused on the Tour. It was the biggest race in the world by far, the one goal that would be worth this immense effort.

  The Tour of Luxembourg started well; Lance’s form was coming around. Going into the last day he was tied for the lead. The weather was epically shitty, raining like hell and blowing sideways. Lance was stoked; he always preferred bad weather—not because he loved it, but because he knew it demoralized others.

  I sometimes forget how much fun Lance was to race with. He didn’t go in with vague ideas, just hoping to do well. He was switched on, lit up from the inside; every move was life or death. When it didn’t work, it was disaster—nothing could be worse. But when it worked, it was magic.

  On the bus before the stage, Lance outlined the plan: we’d cover every single break, then attack on the steepest climb. It worked. Early in the stage, Lance, Marty Jemison, Frankie Andreu, and I made it into a small breakaway, and we started gaining time on the field. Lance was screaming and yelling, going crazy. We’d left his competitors behind, but he still wanted more.

  “Go go go go, fucking go! You guys are gonna earn some money today. You are gonna motherfucking get paid if we win this race.”

  Frankie, clever as always, made a late solo break and won the stage; we crossed the line a minute later, and Lance took the overall victory. As we crossed the finish line the loudspeakers were cranking Springsteen’s “Born in the USA.” Lance was lit up like a Christmas tree. He yelled, he whooped, he whacked us on the back. He phoned his agent, Bill Stapleton. He phoned Weisel. He phoned a VeloNews writer. He phoned his mom.

  We won the race, we won the race, we won the race!

  I liked the sound of that.

  We.

  To Lance’s everlasting good fortune, he decided he wasn’t ready to race the 1998 Tour de France and targeted the three-week Tour of Spain instead. He thus avoided having his comeback associated with the royal shitshow known as the Festina Affair. While he might have missed it, I didn’t. I was riding my second Tour de France; it turned out to be one of the most memorable, and not in a good way.

  It began when a Festina team car, driven by a Belgian soigneur named Willy Voet, got stopped and searched by French police at a border crossing. In the trunk was a stash of performance-enhancing drugs large enough to supply several pharmacies. Customs officers found 234 doses of EPO, 82 vials of human growth hormone, 160 capsules of testosterone, etc. (probably not a whole lot different from what Postal or many of the other teams were taking to the race). I remember being impressed that they were carrying hepatitis vaccine—pretty thoughtful, given how many shots those riders were getting.

  The result: instant chaos. Gendarmes swarmed the Tour, searching team cars and buses. Festina team officials denied everything for a few days, then were kicked out of the race when the evidence became too great. Police raided Festina’s offices and found a similar trove, including PFCs; it turned out the team maintained a slush fund for their dope to which riders were required to contribute the equivalent of a few thousand dollars each. The biggest surprise for me was when French riders got perp-walked—unlike in the U.S., doping is a crime in France. Riders staged dramatic but ultimately pointless protests, refusing to ride unless they were treated with respect. Meanwhile, teams were frantically flushing thousands of dollars’ worth of pharmaceuticals down the toilets of buses, RVs, and hotels. I remember Ekimov joking that he was thinking about diving into the Postal team RV’s toilet and pulling it out.†

  The police didn’t mess around. Alex Zülle, a Swiss contender who rode for Festina, was strip-searched, held in a cell for twenty-four hours, given nothing but one glass of water. He confessed: “Everybody knew that the whole peloton was taking drugs and I had a choice. Either I buckle and go with the trend or I pack it in and go back to my old job as a painter. I regret lying but I couldn’t do otherwise.”

  I remember it was the one and only time I ever saw Pedro nervous. People were going to jail; in fact, Pedro’s replacement at ONCE, a doctor named Terrados, was detained by the cops. I remember feeling strangely relieved at the whole thing. I knew I didn’t have any EPO on me (well, in my veins perhaps, but there was no test yet). It felt weirdly good knowing that it’d be a level playing field, that we’d all be riding the rest of the Tour paniagua. I remember Frankie applying a little Ajax-style truth, saying that all this police craziness might be a good thing, that the sport was getting out of hand. We were only the foot soldiers in this messed-up arms race.

  And beneath all the chaos, we heard rumors that a few riders did something that was either very brave or very stupid: they went to Plan B. They carried their own Edgar. They got it from other sources: quick dropoffs in hotel parking lots from girlfriends, mechanics, cousins, a bartender friend of the coach. That’s how it works. The authorities shut one door, riders open two windows.

  In the wake of the busts, then, the 1998 Tour became a different sort of contest, less about who was the strongest, and more about who was the ballsiest, who had the best Plan B. And it turned out there were some good ones. The Polti team later confessed to keeping a thermos of EPO hidden inside a vacuum cleaner. The GAN team joked about stashing it by the side of the road. The race was won by Marco Pantani, the Italian climber, and dominated by the French team Cofidis, whose riders took three of the top seven spots, with none other than Bobby Julich finishing third. Cofidis’s performance sparked rumors that the team had kept using EPO after the rest of the peloton had stopped; nothing was ever proven. The rest of us rode paniagua, dragged ass, survived.‡

  Amid all the controversy, I did manage to have a big moment, one that, when I look back, changed me. On July 18, the day after Festina was expelled, we rode the first true test of the Tour: a 58-kilometer individual time trial in Corrèze, a grueling course with a profile like shark’s teeth. It was the kind of course built to favor big strong riders, not smallish guys like me. My team thought so little of my chances that they did not even send a team car to follow me in case I had a mechanical problem. This royally pissed me off, but I didn’t say anything; I figured I’d let my legs do the talking.

  And my legs didn’t just talk—they sang. I pushed past my normal limits, felt myself pressing against that old wall, and—all of a sudden, I found another gear. I passed rider after rider; moving past them at speed. I pushed for the line, seeing stars from oxygen deprivation. When the stars cleared, I had beaten every single Tour de France rider except for one, the German wunderkind, Jan Ullrich. Observers were shocked. I was nearly as surprised as they were. Second place on the Tour’s toughest day. Me.

  That night, Pedro came to see me. He was twinkling; his eyes were shining with delight. More than anyone, he understood the deeper meaning of my result. There’s a term they use in the sport, “revelation”—the ride where someone shows they have a champion’s capacity. And Pedro informed me that I had just performed my revelation, and, more impressive, I’d done it with a hematocrit of only 44.

  Forty-four! He said it several times. That number moved him, because in it he could see how fast I might have gone, might yet go if I became more professional. Then he put a fatherly hand on my shoulder, and he told me something that changed my life.

  You can win the Tour de France someday.

  I laughed out loud, told him to be quiet. But Pedro insisted. I could win the Tour. Not this year, not next year. But some year. He made the case with doctorly assurance.

  You can time-trial, you can climb, and you can push yourself where no one else can. Listen and remember, Tyler. I know. I have seen ma
ny, many riders, and you have something special, Tyler. You are a special rider.

  I returned to the States when the season ended that fall. A few months later, Haven and I got married. Occasionally, over that off-season, the topic of doping would come up. People had heard of the Festina Affair, and they wanted to know what really happened. I usually responded by saying it was overblown, that there were a few bad apples and now they’d been found out. I told people I was grateful for the scandal, because it helped the rest of us who wanted to compete cleanly.

  One afternoon, my father came to me with that question. He sat me down; he brought up Festina. My dad’s a smart guy; he knew that Festina wasn’t something that could be brushed away. He was clear: he didn’t want me getting mixed up in a bad scene, in something I might regret later.

  I didn’t hesitate.

  “Dad, if I ever have to take that stuff to compete, I’ll retire.”

  I’d thought it would be hard to lie to my dad; it turned out it was easy. I looked him right in the eye; the words popped out so effortlessly that I’m ashamed to think of it now. The truth was far too complicated to tell. That fall, when other friends asked about Festina, I said the same thing with even more conviction—If I ever have to take that stuff to compete, I’ll retire. Each time, the words felt good to say. Each time, lying got easier. They wanted to believe I was clean, and in a way, so did I.

  When I spoke those words to my father, it sealed my life in bike racing behind a steel door. That was the moment I started learning what we all had to learn: how to live on two planets at once. Only Haven and I would know the real truth. And I knew, even as I assured my father everything was fine, that I was about to go in a lot deeper.

  At the Postal banquet in Paris after the Tour, word had begun to go around the team. Given all the shit with Festina, teams weren’t going to be able to keep supplying EPO and other products. Postal would pay for the legal recovery stuff, but beyond that, we were on our own. I understood the message loud and clear. A new era was about to begin.

  * A year later, when Armstrong was late in paying the team the traditional bonuses after winning the 1999 Tour de France, Andreu went to Armstrong and reminded him to pay everyone their $25,000.

  † In From Lance to Landis, by David Walsh (New York: Ballantine Books, 2007), Postal soigneur Emma O’Reilly says that she heard Postal staffers estimate that $25,000 in medical products was flushed down the toilet of the RV.

  ‡ Cofidis’s 1998 performance was statistically unusual. Over the rest of their careers, the top four Cofidis finishers (Julich, Christophe Rinero, Roland Meier, and Kevin Livingston) rode the Tour a collective fifteen times, averaging 45th place.

  “It drove Lance crazy that Bobby [Julich] got third in the [1998] Tour,” recalled Betsy Andreu, Frankie’s wife. “Lance never considered Bobby to be that great of a rider, and so we used to tease Lance about it. Looking back, I think it motivated Lance a lot—if Bobby could get third, Lance probably figured he could win.”

  Chapter 5

  BAD NEWS BEARS

  IT MAY NOT LOOK like it, but bike racing is the quintessential team sport. The leader stands on the shoulders of his teammates—called domestiques, servants—who use their strength to shelter him from the headwind, set the pace, chase down attacks, and deliver water and food. Then, just out of sight, there’s a second level of domestiques: the team director, the soigneurs, the mechanics, the drivers, the interconnected grid of people who are essentially doing the same thing. Every race is an exercise in cooperation—which means that when it goes well, it creates a kind of high like I’ve never felt anywhere else; a feeling of connectedness and brotherhood. All for one, one for all.

  The 1999 Postal team was one of my favorite teams of all the ones I’ve ever been on. Not because of the remarkable things we accomplished together, but because of the extreme amount of fun we had while we were doing it. Now, looking back, I have mixed feelings about the methods we used to win the Tour. But I can’t pretend that being on this particular team was anything but a complete blast because (1) Postal didn’t do anything that other smart teams couldn’t have done, and (2) we had absolutely nothing to lose.

  We had Frankie Andreu. The field general, the road captain, with his gravelly Ajax voice you could hear from a hundred yards away. We had my Girona roommate, George Hincapie, the Quiet Man, who was maturing into one of the strongest riders in the world.

  We had Kevin Livingston, newly signed from Cofidis, who was the engine, both socially and on the bike. Kevin was a brilliant climber, and an equally brilliant comedian. I’ve seldom laughed harder than when Kevin and I went out for beers—he could do dead-on impressions of everyone on the team (including Lance, though he wisely kept that one under wraps). During races, though, Kevin had a serious ability to “bury himself,” that is, to push himself to his breaking point and past it, in the service of a teammate, especially when that teammate was Lance. Kevin’s relationship with Lance went way back: when Lance was recovering from chemo treatments, Kevin had been the one to take him for his first rides.

  We had Jonathan Vaughters, the Nerd. If Bill Gates had decided to become a cyclist, he might’ve been like Jonathan. Genius-level smart and naturally talented, Jonathan was known on the team for four things: (1) his ability to climb; (2) his incredibly messy hotel rooms, which looked like a laundromat had exploded in them; (3) his even-more-incredible gas, caused by the protein shakes he was constantly drinking; and (4) his tendency to ask uncomfortable questions, especially when it came to doping. While the rest of us simply did what the team doctors told us to do, Jonathan read books on sports science and designed his own training programs. He was always probing: Where did this stuff come from? What does it do? He was visibly more nervous about doping than the rest of us, but he was certainly no teetotaler: in fact, he set the record for climbing Mont Ventoux, one of the sport’s toughest, most legendary peaks.

  We had Christian Vande Velde, an easygoing, immensely talented Chicago kid whose claim to fame, besides being strong as hell, was that his father, John Vande Velde, played one of the evil Italian cyclists in the classic movie Breaking Away (some of the guys could recite the lines by heart). Christian was twenty-three, in his second year in Europe, and was taking everything in with wide-open eyes; he reminded me a little bit of me.

  We had Peter Meinert Nielsen from Denmark and Frenchman Pascal Deramé, two big motors for the flats, and two good-natured guys. We had a crackerjack team of soigneurs, including Emma O’Reilly from Ireland and Freddy Viane from Belgium, who were whip-smart and funny to boot.

  Then we had another type of teammate: the invisible kind. The person nobody talks about, but who is perhaps more important in the long run. That’s where Motoman and Dr. Michele Ferrari come in. I met them around the same time, in the spring of 1999, during the run-up to the Tour.

  I met Motoman at Lance and Kristin’s villa in Nice, France, on May 15, just after I flew in from Boston. His first name was Philippe—I never learned his last name. He was trimming the rosebushes. I remember he wielded the garden shears carefully, as if he were performing some crucial task. Philippe was a slender, muscular guy with close-cropped brown hair, a broad forehead, and a gold earring. He had that French coolness that said, Whatever you might say or do, I won’t be surprised in the least.

  Lance gave me a quick rundown on Philippe’s résumé: former amateur rider for a French team. Buddy of Sean Yates, a British rider and friend of Lance. Worked as a mechanic at a nearby bike shop. Philippe knew the local roads like the back of his hand; could show us all the best climbs. Lance had hired Philippe to take care of their place while they were gone, run errands, do odd jobs. Philippe was clearly proud of his status, but at the time it seemed Lance was the proud one, proud that he knew this cool French dude. Coolest of all, Philippe had a kick-ass motorcycle. I saw it when Philippe left: it was one of those crotch rockets, glossy and dangerous looking.

  Kristin came outside and greeted us; she was four months pregn
ant. They’d recently purchased the villa, which looked like it had cost a pretty penny. It wasn’t surprising to see Lance living large; he’d made big money before his cancer, and he knew how to spend it. Around us, workmen were finishing up the renovation, missing deadline after deadline in the traditional style.

  Fuckin’ French, Lance said.

  To my eye, though, the place looked like something out of a movie. Rose garden, swimming pool, marble balconies from which you could look out on the red-tiled roofs of Nice and beyond to the blue Mediterranean. Seeing them, I felt a twinge of wistfulness; Lance and Kristin were building a life, like the one Haven and I sometimes dreamed about. We had agreed that we didn’t want to have kids, not yet, until things were more settled, and our tastes ran closer to cottages than villas. But someday, definitely.

  Right now, though, my concern was the immediate future. I’d been in Boston the previous two weeks, with zero access to our friend Edgar (at this point in my career, I wasn’t about to risk taking it through customs, and had no sources of stateside EPO). As a result, my hematocrit was down, and I needed a boost, especially if we were about to train hard. When Kristin walked off, I turned to Lance.

  —Hey dude, you got any Poe I can borrow?

  Lance pointed casually to the fridge. I opened it and there, on the door, next to a carton of milk, was a carton of EPO, each stoppered vial standing upright, little soldiers in their cardboard cells. I was surprised that Lance would be so cavalier. On the occasions I had kept EPO in my Girona fridge, I had taken it out of its cardboard packaging, wrapped it in foil, and put it in the back, out of sight. But Lance seemed relaxed about it. I figured he knew what he was doing. I took a vial, and thanked him.

  I needed to be on top of my game, because the next few weeks looked busy. Postal had undergone a Lance-driven makeover, adopting a Tour-first mentality. Team director Johnny Weltz had been replaced by Lance’s handpicked choice: a sharp-eyed, just-retired Belgian rider named Johan Bruyneel. Johan had an ideal pedigree: he’d ridden for the Spanish geniuses at ONCE and knew their system. Johan had the same savvy, information-driven mind as Lance did; from the start, the two were finishing each other’s sentences. The overhaul meant new staff; Pedro’s replacement was ONCE’s former doctor, a humorless, overcaffeinated man from Valencia named Luis Garcia del Moral, whom the riders quickly nicknamed the Little Devil, or El Gato Negro (the black cat). Del Moral’s harshness was balanced a little by the friendly, easygoing personality of his assistant, Pepe Martí.