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

by Daniel Coyle

  There were other changes, too. Under the new, post-Festina system, we no longer got EPO from team staffers at races; instead we had to pick it up ourselves. I got it at del Moral’s clinic in Valencia; some of my teammates drove to pharmacies in Switzerland, where it was sold over the counter. In theory, the new system was “for safety”—to avoid a repeat of the Festina Affair. But to me it was the opposite, because now the risk of transport and border crossing was ours, to say nothing of the expense. I didn’t like it, because it was yet another thing to deal with, another chore. But I did it. On May 25, I drove to Valencia and picked up 20,000 units—a couple months’ worth—for around $2,000.

  More urgently, we had six weeks left before the start of the Tour de France, and we were facing a bunch of questions, the biggest of which was whether Lance would be strong enough to contend. Would the team be strong enough to support him? And, in the back of our minds, one more question: Would we risk bringing Edgar along during the race? Carrying EPO in the team vehicles was out of the question. Yet, as we knew from the previous year, any rider or team who had access to EPO during the race would have a tremendous advantage.

  That’s where Philippe came in.

  We were standing in Lance’s kitchen when he lined out the plan: he would pay Philippe to follow the Tour on his motorcycle, carrying a thermos full of EPO and a prepaid cell phone. When we needed Edgar, Philippe would zip through the Tour’s traffic and make a dropoff. Simple. Quick—in and out. No risk. To be discreet, Philippe wouldn’t be supplying all nine of us; it would just be the climbers, the ones who needed it most and would provide the biggest bang for the buck: Lance, Kevin Livingston, and me.* Los Amigos del Edgar. From that moment on, Philippe wasn’t Philippe the handyman anymore. Lance, Kevin, and I called him Motoman.

  Lance practically glowed when he told me about the plan—he loved this kind of MacGyver secret-agent stuff. Aside from Johan Bruyneel, we three would be the only ones who knew. The French could search us all day long and they’d find zero. And besides, we felt sure that most of the other teams would be doing their own version of Motoman. Why wouldn’t they? Lance had come back from cancer; he wasn’t about to sit back and hope things worked out; he was going to make it happen. He was incapable of being passive, because he was haunted by what others might be doing. This was the same force that drove him to test equipment in the wind tunnel, to be finicky about diet, to be ruthless about training. It’s funny; the world always saw it as a drive that came from within Lance, but from my point of view, it came from the outside, his fear that someone else was going to outthink and outwork and outstrategize him. I came to think of it as Lance’s Golden Rule: Whatever you do, those other fuckers are doing more.

  That rule was why Lance worked with the other invisible Postal teammate, Dr. Michele Ferrari. Ferrari was a forty-five-year-old Italian doctor with a reputation for being so brilliant, so innovative, that he’d single-handedly reshaped the sport. He’d worked for the biggest riders and teams, he charged the biggest fees, and he was so mysterious that in the peloton he was known as “the Myth.”

  I met Ferrari for the first time in April 1999, at a rest stop by the side of the highway that runs between Monaco and Genoa, Italy. Ferrari showed up, a skinny, bespectacled, birdy-looking guy, driving a humble camper. At first it seemed kind of a letdown. Given Ferrari’s reputation (not to mention his name), I’d expected to see him arrive in a sleek Italian sports car. Only with time did I realize how brilliant this was; the perfect camouflage.

  Ferrari was unlike any other doctor I’d ever met, before or since. While Pedro was all about the human connection, Ferrari approached you like you were an algebra problem that needed solving. He traveled with his own scale and skin-fold calipers for measuring body fat. He had a hematocrit spinner, syringes, and a calculator. He looked at me with those dark eyes through oversize 1980s glasses, and I could almost hear the numbers whirring in his head. Unlike Pedro, Ferrari couldn’t have cared less about how you were feeling, or what was happening in your life. He was interested only in body weight, fat percentage, wattage (the measure for power—basically how much force you put into the pedals), hematocrit. I was hoping to impress him with my fitness; after all, in six days we’d be racing 257-kilometer Liège–Bastogne–Liège, one of the spring’s toughest tests. But when Ferrari analyzed me, he shook his head in disappointment.

  Ahhh, Tyler, you are too fat.

  Ahhh, Tyler, your hematocrit is only 40.

  Ahhh, Tyler, you don’t have enough power.

  Whatever, I thought. Then he said something else.

  Tyler, you will not finish Liège.

  The hell I won’t, I thought. Ferrari’s certainty angered me. I wasn’t just some equation. How could he know what I was capable of? As it turned out, Ferrari was wrong. I did finish Liège—in fact, I finished 23rd, my best finish to date, and I thought about Ferrari the entire race.

  But Lance loved Ferrari. Ferrari appealed to his love of precision and numbers and certainty. I got the feeling that Lance’s relationship with Ferrari was like mine with Pedro: complete trust. It was clear that Ferrari had told Lance if he hit certain numbers, he had a chance to win the Tour de France. This idea ignited Lance. It gave him the kind of specific target he thrived on. In the months before the Tour, we trained harder than I’d ever trained. Lance focused on Ferrari’s promise: hit the numbers and good things will happen.†

  Ferrari’s importance in Lance’s life was pretty obvious, mostly because Lance talked about him all the time, especially while we trained. Ten people could give him the exact same piece of advice, but if it came from Michele, it was gospel. My understanding was that Lance valued Ferrari so much that he had worked out an exclusive agreement that Ferrari would not train any other Tour contenders. Kevin and I used to say that Lance said the word “Michele” more often than he said the word “Kik.”

  Even so, Lance tried to keep his relationship with Ferrari quiet from the rest of the team—not always with success.

  JONATHAN VAUGHTERS: I remember one time during [the Spanish race] Setmana Catalana in March 1999. Marco Pantani totally dominated the first climbing stage; he was flying, looking really good, and Lance was in the middle of the pack. At the finish, we get into the team car and right away Lance is on his cell phone having this really intense conversation with someone about what he needs to do to go faster than Pantani three months from now at the Tour. But it’s not a normal conversation, because Lance is talking in code. I don’t remember the precise wording, but it was something like “Should I take one apple this week or two apples next week?” Then Lance hangs up the phone and I ask, “Who was that?” And Lance says, “None of your business.” Later, I put two and two together; it had to be Ferrari.

  Looking back now, it’s kind of amazing to realize how many different random factors lined up in our favor in the 1999 Tour de France. It’s even more amazing when you think about how important the 1999 Tour turned out to be in the whole scheme of things; how it got the wheels turning for the whole crazy ride that came afterward. What’s still more amazing—what I still sometimes lie in bed thinking about, almost fifteen years later—is how close it all came to not happening at all.

  On July 3, we headed to the Tour de France prologue, and it wasn’t hard to tell which team was the underdog. Around us, teams like ONCE, Banesto, and Telekom had rock-star buses with couches, halogen lighting, stereo systems, TVs, showers, and espresso machines.

  We, on the other hand, were the Bad News Bears. We had two of the crummiest family campers on the Continent. One was rented; the other belonged to Julien DeVriese, Postal’s crotchety Belgian head mechanic. We called it Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, because everything shook when you drove: the cabinet doors tended to fly open on the gentlest curve; every hinge squeaked frantically; it was so loud that, when under way, you could barely talk over the din. Julien had one rule: No shitting in the camper. He was very clear on this rule. We could tell because every time we saw him, he would point hi
s big finger at us and say, “No shitting in the campa!” in a husky voice. We informed Julien that shitting in the camper was likely to improve it.

  I couldn’t complain, though, because I was lucky enough to be assigned to the better camper. It was better because we had only three riders in ours—Lance, Kevin, and myself, plus a driver. The worse camper held the other six Postal team members, who were crammed in like college kids in a phone booth. The logic behind our seating chart was Motoman: Lance, Kevin, and I would be the only team members to get EPO during the race, so it made sense that the Amigos del Edgar should have our own space. Cleaner that way, as Lance put it. We kept it secret, but the other guys knew something was up.

  Despite the campers, we had a growing good feeling about the race. During the run-up to the Tour, it seemed every week brought another piece of news about Tour de France contenders.

  • Back in January, the French cycling federation had started testing the blood profiles of their riders; it was called longitudinal testing, and it basically meant that it would be harder for the French to take EPO and get away with it.

  • In May, Belgian star Frank Vandenbroucke was suspended for buying drugs.

  • In June, on the brink of winning his second Tour of Italy, 1998 Tour de France winner Marco Pantani, the best climber in the world and one of the guys Lance feared most, was suspended for exceeding the 50 percent hematocrit rule.

  • In mid-June, the German magazine Der Spiegel published an investigative report detailing organized doping on Telekom, the largest German team, home to both Bjarne Riis and Jan Ullrich. The article was filled with details, including training plans (they called EPO “Vitamin E,” and paid a lot less than we did—about $50 for 1,000 units, while we paid closer to $100). The article spoke of Telekom’s use of a private clinic; it quoted team trainers who vouched that Riis had raced the 1995 Tour—one he didn’t win—with a hematocrit of 56.3. We read about the report and the ensuing controversy, and felt a mix of emotions: on one hand, fear that such details could emerge; on the other, relief that we didn’t have the pressure and attention of being a big European team.

  • In late June, both Riis and Ullrich suffered injuries at the Tour of Switzerland—a broken elbow for Riis, and a knee injury for Ullrich—that would keep them out of the Tour.

  All that added up to make the 1999 Tour one of the most wide-open fields in modern history, the first in fifty years without a former winner in the lineup. Lance was on a long list of hopefuls behind Alex Zülle (the now-former Festina rider who was allowed to return after a brief ban and fine), French favorite Richard Virenque (ditto), Spanish climber Fernando Escartín, Italians Ivan Gotti and Wladimir Belli, and Bobby Julich. Tour organizers did their best to dress up the situation, calling the 1999 race the “Tour of Renewal.”

  Like most people, I figured Lance’s chance of winning was small, mostly because he had yet to prove that he could climb with the best. Also, I worried about the Motoman plan. Every time I saw a gendarme, I thought of Philippe, somewhere out there with the EPO and the phone. What if he got stopped? What if he decided to sell us out, to talk to police, the press? The Motoman plan suddenly felt like a huge, crazy gamble. But if Lance was worried, he didn’t show it. He’s never happier than when he’s making a bet, moving one step ahead, playing chess. When I seemed worried, he would reassure me. This is all going to work. It’s foolproof. We’re going to fucking throttle everybody. Apparently Johan Bruyneel was confident as well.

  JONATHAN VAUGHTERS: A few days before the Tour, I went up to Johan and asked him if the team was going to be carrying anything illegal into France. I’d seen what happened with Festina, and frankly I was scared shitless about getting arrested. So I ask Johan, “Our team isn’t going to be bringing anything into France, right?” Johan smiles at me, this big knowing smile. He says, “You don’t need to worry about anything.”

  The funny thing was, the Tour nearly ended before it began. A day or so before the race Johan informed us that, according to the Tour’s medical tests, several of our hematocrits were dangerously close to surpassing the 50 percent limit: I don’t remember all the exact numbers, but they were all in the high forties. George was 50.9 (back then you only got dinged if you went past 50; the threshold was later reduced to 50.0). None of us were over, but we were awfully close, and it didn’t look good in the eyes of the UCI. I remember Jonathan Vaughters being particularly worried. We set about correcting the situation in the usual way: taking salt tablets and chugging as much water as we could hold. Jonathan said he peed every two hours that night.

  Then, another near miss. The day of the prologue, we were previewing the 6.8-kilometer course for the final time. Lance was checking to see if he could climb the last hill in a big gear. He was on the flats going full blast, looking down at his chainring, when a Telekom team car pulled out right in front of him. Lance was on a path to smash directly into it at full speed. But George spotted the car and yelled, Lance looked up just in time to turn slightly. He got clipped by the mirror and knocked down, but was okay. I sometimes wonder what would’ve happened if George hadn’t noticed, hadn’t yelled.

  Lance blazed the prologue, winning by seven seconds over Zülle. I think he was as shocked as the rest of the world was. He crossed the line, and didn’t quite know what to do. The first person he hugged was the Little Devil, Dr. del Moral. In post-race interviews, Lance was charmingly stumbly and tongue-tied. He kept talking about how great this was for the team, for the staff, for everybody. It didn’t feel real. It felt temporary—a fluke that would no doubt be corrected.

  Two days later, the opposite happened. Stage 2 took us through Brittany and across the Passage du Gois, a narrow causeway that connects the island of Noirmoutier to the mainland, and which is only uncovered at low tide. Tour organizers love spectacular visuals, and so, about 80 kilometers into the ride, we found ourselves racing like hell across the causeway, which was wet and slick. Lance and George had smartly battled their way to the front; the rest of us fought to follow them in case of a crash. Sure enough, early in the crossing, someone in the middle of the pack wiped out; the ensuing demolition-derby pileup sent dozens of riders flying, blocked the road, and took Jonathan Vaughters out of the race. Most of the other contenders—including Zülle, Belli, and Gotti—were stuck behind the crash. They remounted in a panic and tried to catch up, but it was futile.

  Just like that, Lance had a colossal six minutes on his main rivals. People spoke of it as luck, but that’s not how we saw it within the race, and certainly not how Lance saw it. Everybody knew the causeway was going to be slick. Everybody knew that crashes were likely. Everybody had a chance to get to the front. It was the same with everything: the unfairness was part of what made the Tour fair, because everybody had to deal with it. You made it or you didn’t. Period.

  But the Tour was far from over. Everybody knew the key stages were 8 and 9: a 56-kilometer time trial in Metz, followed by a rest day, then the queen stage—a wicked triple-header of climbs of the Télégraphe, Galibier, and a mountaintop finish in the Italian ski village of Sestrière. As we rolled toward the showdown, the media used the week to whip up the plotlines, most of which revolved around a couple of questions: Was the peloton truly clean? Would Lance, who’d never been great on the long European climbs (his only Tour finish in four attempts was 36th), be able to climb with the rest of the contenders?

  A couple days before, we got prepared. We used the secret phone to call Philippe, who zipped through the crowds and made his delivery. Since we wanted to keep the EPO out of our hotel, we usually did the shots in the camper. It worked like this: we’d finish a stage, and go straight into the camper for cleanup, get a drink, and change clothes. The syringes would be waiting for us, sometimes tucked inside our sneakers, in our race bags.

  The sight of the syringe always made my heart jump. You’d want to inject it right away—get it in you and then get rid of the evidence. Sometimes del Moral would give the shot, sometimes we’d do it ourselves,
whatever was fastest. And we were fast—it took thirty seconds at most. You didn’t have to be precise: arm, belly, anywhere would do. We got into a habit of putting our used syringes in an empty Coke can. The syringes fit neatly through the opening—plonk, plonk, plonk—you could hear the needles rattle. And we treated that Coke can with respect. It was the Radioactive Coke Can, the one that could end our Tour, ruin the team and our careers, maybe land us in a French jail. Once the syringes were inside, we’d crush it, dent it, make it look like trash. Then del Moral would tuck the Coke can at the bottom of his backpack, put on aviator sunglasses, open that flimsy camper door, and walk into the crowds of fans, journalists, Tour officials, even police, who were packed around the bus. They were all watching for Lance. Nobody saw the anonymous guy with the backpack, who walked quietly through them, invisible.

  In the stage 8 time trial Lance did well, winning over Zülle by nearly a minute (I didn’t do too badly, finishing fifth). But it was stage 9 that everybody was waiting for—the climb to Sestrière. The first big climb of the Tour is a coming-out party, the moment the race really begins. Everybody’s watching because this is when the Tour contenders finally show their cards.

  The morning was cold and rainy. The early part of the race brought lots of attacks; everybody was trying to prove himself. Frankie did a magnificent job as road captain, watching the potential breakaways like a hawk, making sure we didn’t let any contenders get away. We protected Lance as long as we could, then fell back, leaving him with an elite group of contenders. A few long-shot guys broke away; then Escartín and Gotti, who were thought of as the best climbers, took off after them. The script of the race looked clear: Lance had done well, but now it was time for the real climbers to take over. Escartín or Gotti would most likely win.