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

by Daniel Coyle

2 BBs OUT, THEN 1 BB IN

  2 WKS BEFORE

  3 BBs OUT, THEN 2 IN

  RACE

  3 BBs IN (1 PER WEEK)

  Ufe taught me that each individual transfusion had to be done in careful order: (1) take out the new BBs; (2) reinfuse the stored BBs. This was to avoid filling the new BBs with old red blood cells that had already aged in the refrigerator. Freshness was everything. In fact, that’s what we called it—refreshing the BBs. Ufe also taught me about the danger of echo-positives: that’s when you test positive because you reinfuse a BB containing a banned substance. So you had to be careful that you weren’t glowing when you banked any BBs, because giving a BB is the risk equivalent of taking a drug test. He offered me what he called polvo—a gray powder that you could put under your fingernail if you were asked to test while you were glowing. Put the fingernail in the stream of urine, and the test would be negative, guaranteed. I didn’t take any. I think I wanted to believe that I’d never allow myself to get into a situation where I needed to use it.

  Ufe and I quickly developed a routine. I would fly to Madrid from Barcelona, take a cab to his office, and do the withdrawals and reinfusions, then fly back the same day. I wore sunglasses and a baseball cap, in order to avoid being recognized. I paid cash. Ufe would provide me with the Edgar and the testosterone patches as needed. I turned down most of the other drugs he offered me (and there were plenty), but I did accept a nasal spray called Minirin, which is usually given to kids to help with bedwetting (it causes you to retain water and thus reduces your hematocrit). I once tried insulin, which he told me would help my muscles recover, but quit after it made me feel feverish and strange.

  Communicating in code with Ufe sometimes led to confusion. When we texted back and forth to plan transfusion visits, we’d use terms like “have dinner,” “give you a present,” or “meet for coffee.” I liked to keep it fairly generic. One time, however, I made the mistake of texting that I wanted to come to Madrid to “give you that bike.” I didn’t actually have a bike to give him, of course—I thought it would be obvious to Ufe that I was talking about a BB. But when I arrived in his office, Ufe excitedly told me how much he was looking forward to getting his new bike. I didn’t have the heart to tell him that I’d just been talking in code. The next trip, I brought him one of my extra training bikes, a Cervélo Soloist. (I’m glad I never texted that I was going to “give him a car.”)

  As time went by, I noticed that Ufe was often late, forcing me to spend an hour or more in the café before I got his text message. He gave me his full attention when we were together, but he always seemed jittery and in a rush. As time went on, he turned me over more and more to Nick. I enjoyed dealing with Nick, though his forgetfulness occasionally gave me pause. He kept having to ask me my BB code name. I was 4142, right?

  Cuatro-uno, cuatro-dos. Sí.

  The constant traveling from Girona to Madrid was stressful. Though Ufe gave me a prescription for carrying Edgar (Haven, menstrual troubles), and though I had a small cooler bag that fit nicely in the bottom of my carry-on, I hated doing it. Security had tightened since 9/11; I was more recognizable now, and each time I stood in a security line I went into a full-body sweat. Doing the BB shuttle, standing in line at airports, getting stuck in traffic, wasting valuable training time, I sometimes found myself missing the well-oiled Postal machine.

  Then there was the more practical matter of explaining the trips to my friends. Girona is not a big town, and bike racers get to know each other’s schedules well; it’s not normal to take day trips to Madrid every three weeks; it’s the kind of thing people start to talk about, that would show up on Lance’s radar. When pressed, I said I was visiting a Madrid allergist (I did have issues with allergies). More often, I didn’t say anything; I just vanished. More lies. More stress.

  Making things more complicated, Lance and I were now neighbors. The spring before my split with Postal, back when things were still friendly between us, Lance and I had bought homes in the same Girona building, a rehabbed palace in the city’s old section that had been converted into luxury apartments. Lance had purchased the second floor; Haven and I had bought a smaller apartment on the third floor.

  Lance and Kristin’s place was fantastic. Opulent, sprawling, beautifully decorated, fifteen-foot ceilings, decor straight out of Architectural Digest. It had a renovated chapel for Kristin (who is a devout Catholic), and a large storage area in the main courtyard where Lance could keep dozens of bikes, saddles, wheels, and equipment; and where his posse could gather—not just riders, but the increasing flow of people from Trek and Nike, lawyers and bigwigs and mechanics and soigneurs. If Lance had been famous before, his third Tour win had put him on a new level: global icon. He wasn’t like a celebrity so much as a superhero. He was coming and going on the private jet all the time; trips to Tenerife, Switzerland, and Ferrara and who knows where else. Postal had hired some new riders, including a superstrong ex-Mennonite kid named Floyd Landis. Lance and his machine were reloading, and had more power than ever.

  All of which made me tilt in the other direction. Haven and I didn’t have an assistant or a fleet of soigneurs and massage therapists to help. After each day’s training, I carried my bike upstairs and leaned it against the wall. When my bike broke, I did the repairs myself, or took it to the local shop. I liked it that way: simple, focused, no entourage to distract me. Our days were busy and crazy, but also satisfying. I had that old feeling from when I was a kid on Wildcat Mountain trying to walk uphill faster than the chairlift. Haven and I were John Henry against the steam shovel: our muscles against Lance’s gleaming modern machinery. He had a lot on his side, no question. But he wasn’t the only one with secret weapons.

  My secret weapon wasn’t a private jet or even Ufe. It was a short, wiry Italian man named Luigi Cecchini. I called him Cecco. Cecco was a trainer who lived in Lucca, near Bjarne. Bjarne had introduced me to him shortly after I’d signed, saying he could help me reach the next level. Cecco’s client list was top shelf: Ullrich, Pantani, Bugno, Bartoli, Petacchi, Cipollini, Cancellara, Casagrande. In fact, Cecco had helped revive Bjarne Riis’s career back in the early 1990s; he was the reason Riis had bought a house near Lucca.

  Cecco had short gray hair and big, perceptive eyes; he looked a little bit like Pablo Picasso. He also had a revolutionary and refreshing attitude about doping, which is to say, he encouraged me to dope as little as possible. He never gave me any Edgar; never handed me so much as an aspirin, because Cecco believed that most riders dope far, far too much. Insulin, testosterone patches, anabolics—bah! To win the Tour, you needed only three qualities.

  1. You have to be very, very fit.

  2. You have to be very, very skinny.

  3. You have to keep your hematocrit up.

  Rule number 3 was regrettable in Cecco’s eyes, but ultimately unavoidable, a simple fact of life. Cecco made it clear: he never got involved in the dark side. He constantly told me that I did not have to engage in the risky, medically questionable, stress-inducing arms race of chasing after Substance X or Substance Z, or some Russian anabolic jelly beans. He constantly warned me about Fuentes, telling me I didn’t need all the stuff he provided. I could simplify my life and focus on what mattered: my training.

  If working with Ufe was stressful, working with Cecco was a treat. Whenever I visited, he insisted I stay at his home, a villa crammed with bustling life: family meals around a big kitchen table with his wife, Anna, and grown sons Stefano and Anzano, who lived nearby. Cecco’s life was that of a European nobleman. His wife ran a fashionable clothing store in Lucca; Cecco flew a small private plane; Stefano drove sports cars. His money gave him an intellectual freedom that the others lacked; though we worked closely together for years, Cecco never charged me a dime.*

  Every visit began with a light breakfast, then we’d go for a ride together and talk (for his age, he was an exceptionally strong rider). Then we’d go into the stone house where he kept his office, and Cecco would weigh me and
measure my body fat and we’d begin the real work, a prescribed assortment of intervals and tests, either on the road or on a stationary trainer, depending on the weather.

  Cecco swiftly diagnosed my main shortcoming: I lacked top-end speed. Under Postal, my engine had been trained over the years to be a diesel, capable of producing long, steady power. What won big races, however, was not diesels but turbos, riders capable of producing five minutes of high-end power on the steepest climbs, creating a gap, then riding steadily to the line. That’s where I was lacking.

  Cecco analyzed my wattages and cadences, and prescribed a program of intensive intervals: revving my engine, over and over, into the red zone for short periods of time. I did a lot of what he called 40–20s, which meant 40 seconds full gas, followed by 20 seconds of rest repeated over and over. These may have been the toughest and most productive workouts I’ve ever done. He recommended that I use an altitude simulator. Soon, I was seeing the results: my top-end wattage was increasing quickly.

  We were a good fit. I appreciated Cecco’s knowledge, his wisdom, his dry sense of humor. He appreciated my sincerity, and how I did all his workouts to a T, no matter what. I knew other riders who would do 90 percent of a workout, 95 percent. I always did exactly what he asked, if not more. Every day I would download my training file to him with a precise record of my wattage, my cadence, every pedal stroke. Every day he would read and analyze it, and plan out the next day’s work. We sent the files back and forth and I saw my numbers rise. And rise.

  As May’s Tour of Italy approached, Bjarne and I started to refine the plan. Ufe and I decided to use two BBs, one before the race, and one during. Reinfusing the first BB would not be a problem—I’d get it in the safety of Ufe’s Madrid office, just before flying to the start of stage 1.

  The second BB presented a problem. The Italian anti-doping laws were strict; the police had a disturbing tendency to raid hotel rooms and team buses. Ufe made it clear that he had zero interest in risking a trip to Italy. The solution was found by Bjarne, who noticed that stage 5 of the race finished in the town of Limone Piemonte, an hour and a half’s drive from the small, independent, and convenient nation of Monaco.

  The plan took shape: Haven and I would rent an apartment in Monaco in April. In mid-April, four weeks before the Tour of Italy, Ufe would meet us at the Monaco apartment, take out a BB, and store it in the refrigerator. Then, on May 17, after the Tour of Italy’s stage 5, Haven could pick me up at the stage finish and drive me to Monaco. Ufe would again meet us at the apartment, and we could do the reinfusion in safety. The plan wasn’t perfect—strategically speaking, it would have been better to reinfuse the BB later in the race, during the second or third week, when it could have the biggest impact on performance. But it was as good as we were going to get.

  So in mid-April 2002, as Lance was zipping overhead on his private jet, Haven, Tugboat, and I drove our blue Hyundai wagon from Girona to Monaco. We rented a one-bedroom apartment in a big, anonymous, blue-awninged building called La Grande Bretagne; it was a five-minute walk from the Monte Carlo Casino. A few days later, Ufe drove up from Spain with the transfusion gear. The BB withdrawal went smoothly; I lay on the couch and watched the bag fill. We stored the BB inside a soy-milk container. We unfolded the cardboard from the bottom, slid the bag inside, reglued the cardboard, and tucked it in the back of the fridge. It fit perfectly. If you squeezed the sides of the container, it felt like milk.

  We settled in to stay at the apartment for the next four weeks. I had to leave often to train and race, which left Haven and Tugs in Monaco. It was a prime example of what a team player Haven was, because while we’d done all the preparation, there was one element beyond our control: electricity. We were worried about power outages, which would cause the blood to warm up and go bad. So we decided not to take any chances, and Haven and Tugs settled in to babysit our BB.†

  The day of the Tour of Italy prologue I was beyond excited. This was the first time I’d been an unquestioned team leader since college; my chance to prove I belonged. Maybe that’s why, in the prologue, I rode too aggressively. Five hundred meters into the race I came into a right-hand turn way too fast and smashed into the barricades. I broke my helmet and lost some skin on my elbows and knees, got up, and kept going.

  The race was wild. If the Tour de France is the Indy 500 of bike racing, then the Tour of Italy is NASCAR: passionate fans, crashes, lots of drama. Part of it was the fact that the roads of Italy are narrower and steeper than the French roads; part of it was that Italian racers like to take chances, both on the road and off. This particular Tour of Italy was no exception. Two team leaders, Stefano Garzelli and Gilberto Simoni, were sent home when they tested positive.

  Now that I was a team leader and taking bigger risks, it was nerve-racking to see other top riders get popped. One day they’re in the race, riding a few inches from you, chatting. The next they’re gone, plucked out as if by a giant hand. At first, you feel scared and vulnerable—did the testers suddenly get smart? Am I next? Then, the peloton grapevine starts humming with gossip, and pretty soon a reason is established. In the case of Garzelli and Simoni, word was that they’d had echo-positives. Their BBs were contaminated with something they’d taken weeks earlier. Hearing that felt reassuring—bummer for them, but bottom line, they should have known better.

  So I thanked my lucky stars, and not for the first time. You won’t be surprised to learn that bike racers tend to be a superstitious bunch, me included. Since there’s so much we can’t control, we do our best to make our own luck. Some riders cross themselves constantly, some whisper prayers on climbs, some tape holy medals to their handlebars. I tend to knock on wood a lot; or if there’s no wood around, I use my head. Then there’s the superstition about spilling salt. One night midway through the Tour of Italy, my CSC teammate Michael Sandstød decided to risk breaking the rule. He purposely knocked over the salt shaker, then poured out the salt in his hand and tossed it all around, laughing, saying, “It’s just salt!” We laughed too, but more nervously. The next day, Michael crashed on a steep downhill, breaking eight ribs, fracturing his shoulder, and puncturing a lung; he nearly died. After that, I started carrying a lucky vial of salt in my jersey pocket, just in case.

  Even so, I had my own spell of bad luck: I crashed on stage 5 due to a mechanical glitch and cracked my shoulder. We didn’t know it was broken at the time, just that it hurt like hell. I limped off my bike and found Haven and our Hyundai. We might have gone to the hospital, but we had more important things to do—drive to Monaco so I could meet Ufe and reinfuse my BB.

  Ufe was waiting in a nearby café; we texted him and he hustled upstairs. We might have been nervous, but he was stoked. He was talking a mile a minute. He kept saying how great it was that I was near the lead, how now I would be ready to win the race. Everything was fabuloso.

  Ufe pulled the soy-milk container from the fridge, unpacked it, and taped the bag to the wall. He hooked me up, and I felt the now-familiar chill as my blood flowed into my arm. Haven stayed in the room and tried to make idle chatter, avoiding the sight of the BB. Ufe explained how I should ride with a transfusion.

  “When you’re suffering, you must remember: you can still go harder,” he said. “You have more in your tank than you think. Push through.”

  I listened closely, and in the following days, I found out that Ufe was 100 percent right. That knowledge changed my career. I hadn’t realized it on Ventoux in 2000. The key to riding with a BB is that you have to push past all the warning signs, past all the usual walls. You get to that place beyond your edge, the place where you’ve fallen a thousand times, and all of a sudden you can hang there. You’re not just surviving; you’re competing, making moves, dictating the race.

  Now that I was tuning in to my numbers, I could feel the difference. With the transfusion on board, I had 3 to 4 percent more power, which meant 12 or 16 more watts; I could sustain a threshold heart rate of 180 beats per minute instead of 175. Five more heartb
eats per minute, and it made all the difference.

  The thrill of being in contention helped balance out the pain in my shoulder, which was hurting like a bastard. Deep, intense pain, like someone had stuck a screwdriver in my shoulder socket and was trying to pry it off. The adrenaline of the race helped for a while, but eventually that wore off and I was left with the hurt. So I started grinding my teeth. It wasn’t intentional, just a reflex at first. But I found when I ground them really hard—when I could feel the satisfying scrape of tooth on tooth—it helped. I know it sounds strange, but grinding my teeth gave me a distraction, a sense of control. As my dental bill eventually showed, I probably overdid the grinding (I’d need eleven teeth recapped). But it worked.

  As it turned out, I almost won the Tour of Italy. But on the last mountain stage, with three kilometers to go in the final climb, I ran out of energy—bonked, hit the wall. I ended up finishing second to the Italian known as “the Falcon,” Paolo Savoldelli. I made a classic mistake: I felt so good and so strong that I forgot to eat enough. Cecco later informed me that I was probably one 100-calorie energy gel away from winning the race. It was a good lesson, proof of the nature of our sport. You plan for months, you risk jail and scandal, you work harder than you’ve ever worked in your life, and in the end you lose because you didn’t eat a gel.

  Even so, second place in a grand tour felt like a massive vindication, proof that I was the team leader Bjarne had hired me to be. I was instantly catapulted into the ranks of bona fide Tour de France contenders.

  When I returned to Girona, I saw myself on the cover of ProCycling magazine—“Tyler Stakes His Claim” was the headline, and underneath it was a quote from me: “Racing against Lance isn’t a problem.”

  Right.

  * As a student, Cecchini had trained with Ferrari under the father of exercise science, Francesco Conconi. Cecchini and Ferrari then worked together on an Italian team, before each went his own way. Like Ferrari, Cecchini was investigated several times by Italian police, who bugged his phones, raided his house, and, at one point, charged him (the charges were later dropped)—all of which might have contributed to Cecchini’s desire to remain an unpaid adviser.