by Daniel Coyle
As Johan explained it, Lance, Kevin, and I would fly to Valencia. We would donate a bag of blood, which would be stored, and we’d fly home the next day. Then, at a key point during the Tour, we’d put the bag back in, and we’d get a boost. It would be like taking EPO, except better: there were rumors of an EPO test being developed for the 2000 Olympics, and word was, they might be using the test during the Tour. I listened to Johan, nodded, gave him my poker face. When I told Haven about it, she gave me the poker face right back (wives get good at it, too). But part of me was thinking, What the hell?
Maybe that’s why I was late the Tuesday morning we left for Valencia. There was no reason to be late—everybody knew Lance despised lateness above all things—but on that crucial morning we were running late by a full ten minutes. I raced our little Fiat through the narrow streets of Villefranche; Haven was hanging on to the oh-shit bars, asking me to slow down. I kept speeding up. It was eight miles to the airport in Nice. During the trip, my cell phone rang three times. Lance.
Dude, where are you?
What’s going on? We’re about to take off.
How fast can that fucking car of yours go? Come on!
We screeched into the airport parking lot; I walked through the security area and onto the runway. I’d never been on a private jet before, so I took in the scene: the leather seats, the television, the little fridge, the steward asking me if I would like anything to drink. Lance acted casual, as if private jets were routine—which for him, they were. He’d been riding them fairly constantly since the previous July, courtesy of Nike, Oakley, Bristol-Myers Squibb, and the other corporations who were competing for the privilege of ferrying him around. The numbers were unbelievable. USA Today estimated Lance’s income at $7.5 million, he was getting paid $100,000 per speech, and his new memoir, It’s Not About the Bike, was an instant bestseller. You could feel the flow of money, the new possibilities it opened. Now we didn’t have to drive to Valencia. We didn’t have to worry about customs or airport security. The jet, like everything else, was now part of our tool box.
The engines revved, the wheels went up, and we were airborne. Below, we could see the Côte d’Azur, the mansions, the yachts; it felt surreal, like a fantasy world. In the plane, my lateness was forgiven. Lance was confident, happy, excited, and it was contagious. The confident feeling increased when we landed in Valencia and were met on the runway by the Postal team: Johan, Pepe Martí, and del Moral. They showed up with sandwiches, bocadillos—it was important to have a little something in our stomachs beforehand.
From the airport, we drove south for half an hour through a marshland as Johan and del Moral talked about the transfusion. It would be so simple, they said. So easy. Extremely safe, nothing at all to worry about. I noticed Johan talked more to Kevin and me than to Lance, and that Lance didn’t seem to pay attention; I got the feeling this wasn’t Lance’s first transfusion.
We pulled up near the village of Les Gavines at a beached whale of a hotel called the Sidi Saler, luxurious and quiet, free of the tourists who’d be arriving later in summer. We’d already been checked in; we took the elevator up to the fifth floor, moving through the deserted hallways. Kevin and I were directed into one room facing the parking lot; Lance got his own room next door.
I had expected to see a sophisticated medical setup, but this looked more like a junior-high science experiment: a blue soft-sided cooler, a few clear plastic IV bags, cotton balls, some clear tubing, and a sleek digital scale. Del Moral took over.
Lie on the bed, roll up your sleeve, give me your arm. Relax.
He tied a blue elastic band below my biceps, set an empty transfusion bag on a white towel on the floor next to the bed, and wiped the inside of my elbow with an alcohol swab. Then the needle. I’d seen a lot of needles, but this one was huge—about the size and shape of a coffee stirrer. It was attached to a syringe that was in turn attached to clear tubing that led to the waiting bag, with a small white thumbwheel to control flow. I looked away; felt the needle go in. When I looked again, my blood was pumping steadily into the bag on the floor.
You often hear “blood transfusion” tossed around in the same breath as “EPO” or “testosterone,” as if it’s all equivalent. Well, it’s not. With the other stuff, you swallow a pill or put on a patch or get a tiny injection. But here you’re watching a big clear plastic bag slowly fill up with your warm dark red blood. You never forget it.
I looked over to see Kevin hooked up in the same way. We could see our reflections on the closet-door mirror. We tried to cut the tension by comparing the speed with which our respective bags were filling: Why are you going so slow? I’m dropping you, dude. Johan shuttled between the rooms, checking on us, making small talk.
Every so often Pepe or del Moral would kneel down and take the bag in their hands, tilting it gently back and forth, mixing it with anticoagulant. They were gentle because, as they explained, the red blood cells were alive. If the blood was mishandled—shaken or heated, or left in a refrigerator beyond four weeks or so—the cells would die.
Filling the bags took about fifteen or twenty minutes. The bags plumped up until the scale showed we were done: one pint, 500 milliliters. Then, unhook: needle out. Cotton ball, pressure. Bags taped closed, labeled, and tucked into the blue cooler. Del Moral and Pepe headed out; they didn’t say where, but we guessed it was to the clinic in Valencia and the refrigerator there, where the bags would be stored until we needed them three weeks later at the Tour.
I sat up, feeling woozy. Johan reassured us, soothed us: This feeling is normal. Take some B vitamins and an iron supplement. Eat a steak. Rest. Above all, do not take any EPO, because that will block your body’s response of making more red blood cells. Your strength will come back soon.
Then we went on a ride south along the coast. We wore long sleeves to cover the Band-Aids on our arms, despite the afternoon heat. We weren’t riding fast, but instantly we were breathing heavily, feeling light-headed. We reached a hill—a tiny pimple of a climb on the northern side of a town called Cullera. As we climbed, I felt worse and worse. We all started to gasp. We slowed to a pathetic crawl.
Just a few days ago, I’d been in the greatest shape of my life, beating some of the best athletes in the world on Mont Ventoux. Now I could barely make it up this tiny hill. We joked about it, because that was all we could do. But it was unnerving. It shook me deeply: my strength wasn’t really in my muscles; it was inside my blood, in those bags.
The disconcerting feeling increased a couple days later, when Kevin and I rode the Route du Sud, a tough four-day race in southern France. When I arrived, my teammates were happy and impressed with my Dauphiné victory. Writers and the media were buzzing with expectation; other riders looked at me with new respect. After all, I had won on Ventoux; I was the next big thing, wasn’t I?
In my depleted state, I was an utter embarrassment, a non-factor; Kevin wasn’t any better. Instead of contending, I struggled to keep up with the pack. After the third stage, I was forced to do the one thing I hated most: abandon. I pulled off my race number, packed up my bags, and left the team hotel in shame.
When I returned to Nice, I expected Lance and Johan to apologize. After all, they were the ones who controlled the roster for the Route du Sud. In fact, Lance had originally been scheduled to be in the race, but he’d withdrawn at the last minute, citing his desire to rest before the Tour.
Lance or Johan could have made a phone call and taken Kevin and me off the Route du Sud team as well, spared us the humiliation and ensured our condition for the Tour. But they didn’t. Neither Lance nor Johan ever said anything to me; they pretended our trip to Valencia hadn’t happened. It was bullshit. That was a big learning experience for me—a teachable moment, as they say. I knew that protesting would do no good. I simply shut my mouth and did what I’d always done: keep going, no matter what. No job too small or tough.
Going into the 2000 Tour, Lance worried about two main problems. The first was that his physical
margin over the rest of the field wasn’t that big. As Lance pointed out, if you took out last year’s early crash at the Passage du Gois, he had only beaten Zülle by 1:34 in the overall; and if Sestrière had been three kilometers longer, Zülle and the others would’ve caught him. The second factor was that the two big contenders who’d sat out the 1999 Tour would be back: Jan Ullrich and Marco Pantani.
Ullrich was like a superman—or, to be more accurate, a superboy. He’d come up training in East Germany, where the coaches lived by the maxim Throw a dozen eggs against the wall, and keep the ones that don’t break. Ullrich was the unbreakable egg, a Cold War kid who, like Lance, had grown up without a father and, with the help of the East German state, had turned his energy into the single most impressive physique in cycling history. Ullrich’s body was unlike any other rider’s I’d ever seen. I’d sometimes try to ride next to him just so I could watch: you could actually see the muscle fibers moving. He was the only rider I’ve ever seen whose veins were visible under the Lycra. His mind wasn’t bad, either: Ullrich had a remarkable ability to push himself, to go deep. In the 1997 Tour, when he was only twenty-three, I’d watched Ullrich win the hardest stage I’ve ever ridden, 242 kilometers over eight hours through the Pyrenees; he even destroyed the mighty Riis. Despite that imposing physique, Ullrich was a gentle soul, a nice guy who had a friendly word for everyone. His weakness was discipline—he struggled with his weight—but he had the ability to rise to the occasion and deliver a monster ride when you least expected it.
If Ullrich was a superboy, Pantani was more of a mystic: a small, shy, dark-eyed Italian who, when on form, was the best climber in the world. Pantani was a mix of artist and assassin: vain enough to get cosmetic surgery to pin back his prominent ears, tough enough to be able to win races in the worst conditions. He’d defeated Ullrich in the 1998 Tour, outriding “Der Kaiser” through a freezing storm to Les Deux Alpes. Since getting popped for high hematocrit the previous year, Pantani had struggled. He’d wrecked two sports cars and written open letters to his public that spoke of “a difficult period with too many inner problems.” Still, Pantani would be out to reclaim his title, and with his climbing ability, he was dangerous. If Lance cracked in the mountains, Pantani could make him pay.
Lance talked about them constantly. Ullrich and Pantani; Pantani and Ullrich. He tracked their training, trawling the Internet for articles from obscure newspapers in Frankfurt and Milan. For a while Lance had so much information I thought he had someone working for him—I pictured a young intern in a cubicle somewhere, compiling reports. But after a while I realized it was all Lance. He needed to gather the information so he could convert it into motivational fuel. If Ullrich was in good shape, that motivated Lance to train harder. If Ullrich was overweight (as was the case that spring), then that also motivated Lance to train harder, to show Der Kaiser who was boss.
The 2000 Tour was really more like a series of boxing matches. Lance vs. Ullrich was over pretty quickly. First Lance beat Ullrich decisively in the prologue. Then he spent a few flat stages getting under Ullrich’s skin. There are a thousand ways to intimidate someone in a bike race, and Lance knew every one of them. To chat when things are tough. To take a bite of food or a long drink when you’re going fast, to show that you can. To accelerate quickly; to ride forward along the outside of the peloton, against the wind, with ease. He showed Ullrich over and over who was stronger. And Ullrich had no answer for any of it. By the first climb to the Spanish ski town of Hautacam, Lance had Ullrich in his pocket.
Lance vs. Pantani, though, was another matter entirely. Pantani was impetuous, romantic, the kind of person who in a slightly different life would have been a bullfighter or an opera star. He wouldn’t rest until he’d made an impact on the race. Lance wanted things to be logical, and Pantani wasn’t logical, and Lance hated it. Even though Pantani was behind by a handful of minutes, we all knew that he would attack Lance on stage 12 on Mont Ventoux, where Lance had suffered during the Dauphiné. This suited Pantani’s love of drama; it also suited us, because it was where Lance and Johan had planned to make our chess move.
After stage 11 finished, we traveled to a postcard of a town near Ventoux called Saint-Paul-Trois-Châteaux, where we’d spend the rest day before stage 12. We stayed at Hôtel l’Esplan, which was great not just because the owner gave the entire hotel to our team, or because they had a nice dining room, but also because some of the rooms were arranged as suites. They gave Kevin, Lance, and me one such pair of rooms that shared an arched entry; Kevin and I roomed together, as usual, and Lance was across the small foyer.
That night, before dinner, we did the transfusion in our rooms. The bags of our blood were taped to the walls above our beds with thick swatches of white athletic tape. The bags were shiny, swollen like berries. Johan went to the doorway, standing guard against any passersby. Kevin and I lay down like mirror images; through the open door, I could see Lance’s sock feet, his arm, the tubing.
Del Moral and Pepe were fast and efficient: the blue rubber band to make the vein protrude, the needle pointing toward the heart, the wheel control to make the blood flow. They opened the valve and I watched my blood run down the tube, through the needle, and into my arm, and felt a chill. Goosebumps. Del Moral noticed, and explained that the blood had recently come out of the cooler; they kept it on ice to lower the risk of infection.
The transfusion took about fifteen minutes. We distracted ourselves by kidding around, talking trash, our voices echoing through the open door—We’re gonna throttle those guys on Ventoux. Maybe we talked that way to reassure ourselves that this strange process was okay (because after all, they were all doing the same thing, right?), maybe to cover up any lingering feelings of guilt.
From the archway, Johan looked on approvingly. I watched my blood bag slowly empty, the last drops flow down the tube; del Moral cut it off just as the last red blood cells went in. I never asked what happened with the empty bags; I assumed del Moral and Pepe carried them to some anonymous dumpster miles away; more likely they cut them into tiny pieces and flushed them down the hotel toilet. We headed down to dinner. Everybody else was in shorts and short sleeves. The three of us, still chilled, kept our sweatsuits on.
At dinner, I noticed a strange sensation: I felt good. Normally at this point in the Tour, you feel a bit like a zombie—tired, shuffling, staring. Now, however, I felt springy, healthy. Euphoric, even, as if I’d had a couple cups of really good coffee. I caught sight of myself in a mirror: I had some color in my cheeks. Lance and Kevin seemed energized too. We relaxed through the rest day, went on a ride, got ready.
Writers like to get poetic about Ventoux. They say it’s a moonscape of white rock, a windswept wasteland, an “alabaster death-head,” blah blah. When you race it, however, you’re reading a different kind of story: the faces and body language of the riders around you. You’re looking for a tight grip on the handlebars. A hesitation or stiffness in the pedal stroke. Bobbing shoulders. A glance downward at the legs, puffy eyes, a gaping mouth, anything that suggests an impending crack. As we started toward Ventoux, I expected to see a lot of guys falling away around me.
The plan was to have Kevin and me go as hard as we could from the bottom of the climb, to burn off most of the contenders and let Lance save his strength as long as possible. When the race reached the pine forest at the foot of Ventoux, we revved—first me, then Kevin. Sure enough, the race blew apart and was soon down to a dozen or so riders; Johan was yelling into the radio that this was good, good, good. But strangely enough, I didn’t feel all that great. My legs were thick, waterlogged. I pushed hard, bumped against that old, familiar wall sooner than I’d expected. I pushed harder, but couldn’t seem to get past it. I began to slow. I felt weird, a little out of sorts—maybe my transfusion hadn’t worked like it was supposed to, maybe my body hadn’t reacted properly.
It would take me a couple of years to figure this out, but I hadn’t yet learned how my body reacted to a transfusion. When you h
ave more RBCs, your body doesn’t obey the same rules: you can go harder than you think you can. Your body might be screaming in the same old way, but you can push through if you ignore all those signals and just ride. Later, I’d learn how to do that.
As I was slowing down, Pantani was coming back. Say what you will about his sometimes overdramatic personality, underneath he was one tough son of a bitch. Pantani somehow hauled himself back to the lead group and then, inconceivably, he was attacking, riding off the front. Lance let Pantani run a few hundred yards ahead, then counterattacked. Even now, when I watch it on video, I can’t quite believe the speed Lance was traveling; the way he gobbles up the distance, sprinting up Ventoux like he’s sprinting for a city-limits sign on a training ride. He caught up to Pantani and they rode together through the white rock, with Lance all the while showing Pantani how much stronger he was. Pantani could only follow, hanging on with his fingernails. It was spectacular. “They rode like the damned” was how fellow contender José Jiménez put it. By the time they reached the top, Lance had proved he was the strongest, so definitively that he eased off and let Pantani take the stage victory.
That moment should have ended the battle: Lance by TKO. But that didn’t happen. Pantani got pissed off that Armstrong had gifted him Ventoux (the Italian didn’t want any charity), and decided to make our lives hell. For the next few days he attacked, over and over. Crazy, hopeless, romantic attacks, fueled by his own pride and who knows what else. This created a cascade of problems, because Kevin and I couldn’t keep up with Pantani, and a small group of Spanish riders—most notably a couple of tiny, tireless climbers named Roberto Heras and Joseba Beloki—could. This left Lance spending too much of the race isolated, alone, without teammates for support for much of the stages.