by Daniel Coyle
The spring’s biggest, and perhaps toughest, race was Liège–Bastogne–Liège; 257 kilometers across Belgium that’s known as the Queen of the Classics. It was one of my favorites; I’d done it every year since 1997. This, however, would be the first time I’d be doing it with the help of a BB. Bjarne and I marked the course into designated sections, and picked teammates to target specific climbs. Instead of racing the entire race, they would be free to give all their efforts to get me to a certain point, then pull off.
I wasn’t the only one gunning for a win. Lance had not won a classic since 1996, and had gotten a lot of criticism in the cycling media for focusing solely on the Tour de France. It was a perfect Belgian day—rainy, wet, miserable. Lance looked superstrong the entire race, though the rest of Postal was not. With about 30 kilometers to go, he led a break late in the race, and was well positioned to win—if he’d been able to stay away, or had some teammates there to support him. But as strong as he was, the rest of us were stronger. We reeled him in, with my CSC teammates, especially Nicki Sorensen, doing the yeoman’s work. With about 3 kilometers to go, it was down to eight contenders, including Lance and me. It was the same old situation, like we were back on the roads of Nice: Lance and I looking at each other, our wheels one centimeter apart, seeing who was stronger.
For a long moment everyone hesitated. That’s when I attacked. I rode like hell, pouring everything I had into the pedals, and they watched me go, thinking that I’d gone too early. We all knew that the LBL finish is a horrendous, slippery, slowly rising road, one of those final stretches that seem to last forever. They figured there was no way I could stay ahead.
But I did. I felt a level of adrenaline that I’d never felt, a kind of panic, as if I were being chased by a pack of wolves. I felt the lactic acid seep up into the tips of my fingers, my lips, my eyelids. The rain blinded me; I kept pushing. As I neared the line, I looked back and saw the most beautiful sight I’ve ever seen: an empty road.
I crossed the line and became the first American to win Liège–Bastogne–Liège; the media were already humming with stories about my Tour de France chances; if the Tour of Italy had put me in the headlines, LBL put me in the stratosphere. One week later, I won the six-day Tour of Romandie, and became the UCI’s leading point-scorer for the year, the world’s number one ranked bike racer. And part of me—way down deep—thought, Uh-oh.
Did you ever look at the face of a rider who won a big race during the years when I competed? If you looked closely, beneath the smile, you might have seen something darker—worry. The rider was worried because he knew that winning creates other problems, like a 100 percent certainty of being tested. No matter how sure you were that you had obeyed the rules of glowtime, there was always that niggling doubt that you had measured wrong, or missed the vein, or that the testers had come up with some new test nobody had heard about. Standing on the podium brought a terrifying clarity. You realized that your career depended entirely on information you got from some random doctor in Spain, a doctor with zero legitimate credentials, who might or might not know what the hell he was talking about. So while you smiled on the surface, underneath you squirmed.
I had other reasons to be concerned. I knew Lance was going to be pissed. I tried to be nice about it in the press (“Part of this victory is Lance’s,” I said), but it was no use. He stalked out without saying a word to me or anybody else. I heard later that he threw his helmet across his team’s bus. It was pretty quiet around the apartment when I got back.
After my win in Liège–Bastogne–Liège, a river of new opportunities was flowing into our little apartamento: sponsorships, endorsements, media, and the like. That spring Haven and I were contacted by a production company that wanted to make an IMAX documentary about my upcoming Tour de France. The producers had originally approached Lance, of course, but he’d turned them down since he already had a film in the works starring Mark Wahlberg and/or Jake Gyllenhaal, depending on whom you asked. So, as happened often, I was the next-best choice. That’s how the market worked, I guess: if you can’t get Batman, you hire Robin.
The film was titled Brain Power; the idea was to use my experience in the 2003 Tour de France to give insights into the way the human mind works when the body is pushed to its limits. The producers had a $6.8 million budget and plans to use whiz-bang computer graphics to take viewers inside my brain as I rode the Tour.
My actual brain was quite busy with a set of decisions I couldn’t exactly tell the filmmakers about. All that spring I was shuttling like mad to Madrid to visit Ufe, to Lucca to visit Cecco, doing my homework for the 2003 Tour de France. We decided to prepare three BBs, one for before the Tour and two for during, in accordance with the Riis 1996 program. I took a break from racing, and worked full-time on my training. I listened to Cecco, who emphasized over and over that all the therapy in the world would not do me any good unless I was first (1) very, very fit, and (2) very, very skinny.
Getting skinny is the part of Tour preparation that is easiest to overlook. It sounds easy: lose weight. Don’t eat. But in fact, it’s like a war, especially when you’re training like a demon and every cell of your body is screaming for nutrients. I spent more time thinking about how to lose weight than I ever spent thinking about doping: the question haunted every meal, every bite I took.
Bjarne recommended his special technique: come home from a training ride, chug a big bottle of fizzy water, and take two or three sleeping pills. By the time you woke up, it would be dinner, or, if you were lucky, breakfast. I tried everything. I drank gallons of Diet Coke. I tried eating lots of raw food—diets of apples and celery. I sucked on butterscotch candies to calm my growling stomach. Every morsel I ate had to be burned off. (Bjarne even reminded me that I needed to account for the extra weight added by a BB in a race.)
I started to get obsessed. When I was eating with friends, I would sometimes take a huge mouthful of food and then fake-sneeze, so I could spit my food into a napkin, excuse myself to go to the bathroom, and flush it. Or, if Tugboat was around, sneak bites to him so my plate would look emptier. It was embarrassing; I felt like a sneaky third-grader or an anorexic teen. By the middle of my career, it’s fair to say that I was on the verge of having a food disorder (which isn’t uncommon among top racers). But the truth is, losing weight works. If I were given a choice between being three pounds lighter or having three more hematocrit points, I would take the lighter weight every time.
When I was in weight-loss mode, I wasn’t much fun to be with. Haven, for one, was sick of it. There we were, a young married couple in our lovely apartment in one of the most beautiful parts of the world, and we hardly did anything as a couple that wasn’t related to my training. Vacation? Sorry. Fancy restaurant dinner? Wish I could. Weekend in Paris? Maybe after the season. And no matter how you dress it up, there’s not much romance in seltzer water and celery.
Even the simplest pleasures became complicated. Girona was a city built for walking, and Haven loved doing the daily rounds to the bakery, the market, the coffee shop. She would ask me to come, but I was always too slow. I know it sounds crazy—I was probably one of the fittest guys on the planet—but I walked like an old man: slowly, with little steps. Naturally, Haven found this irritating, and we’d sometimes get into fights about it. She’d say, Why can’t you walk faster? I’d say, Why can’t you walk slower?
Bjarne and I weren’t getting along either. He wanted CSC to have two leaders at the Tour de France—Carlos Sastre and me. I, on the other hand, felt that we should put all the team’s resources behind one rider—me. We debated it over and over; I pointed to Postal as the model of how to win the Tour; Bjarne insisted we were better off as a team if we had several cards to play. This argument, which played out over the Tour, showed no signs of resolution. I was in the last year of my contract. In the back of my mind, seeds of doubt began to grow about my future with Bjarne and CSC.
While life off the bike had its turbulence, life on the bike was going well. As the
Tour approached, my wattage kept going up, and my weight kept going down. In mid-June, I started to get the signs. The first was when my arms got so skinny that my jersey sleeves started to flap in the breeze; I’d feel them vibrating against my triceps. The next sign was when it began to hurt when I sat on our wooden dining-table chairs. I had zero fat on my ass; my bones dug into the wood and they ached; I had to sit on a towel to be comfortable. Another sign: my skin got thin and transparent-looking; Haven said she could start to see the outline of my internal organs. The final sign was when friends would start to tell me how shitty I looked—that I was just skin and bones. To my ears it sounded like a compliment. I knew I was getting close.
Chapter 11
THE ATTACK
THE 2003 TOUR DE FRANCE really began three weeks earlier at the Dauphiné Libéré. Though Lance won the race, he was tested by Iban Mayo and other climbers who did something new: they out-Lanced Lance. Instead of Lance putting pressure on opponents through accelerations, Mayo turned the tables, applying short bursts of speed, over and over. Not enough to make Lance lose the race, but enough so Lance was hurting, and we were paying attention.
Rather than do a BB in Madrid four days before the race, Bjarne, Ufe, and I had come up with a better, if riskier, plan: to infuse the first BB in Paris the day before the Tour started. The thinking was, the closer to the race I took the BB, the longer its effects would last in the race. To prepare, I kept my hematocrit at 45 prior to the race. I took my physical with the rest of the team, then took a cab to the hotel Ufe had selected: a small, rundown place fifteen minutes from race headquarters. Everything went smoothly; soon my hematocrit was at 48 and I was ready. Things went even better the next day, when I beat Lance in a Tour prologue for the first time ever. Everything was lining up: I was pushing good numbers on the bike, the weight was good, Ufe was ready with two more BBs, the team was strong. The next day, as we accelerated toward the finish of stage 1, I began to feel a sense of possibility. Maybe, finally, this would be the year.
Then, a crash.
You usually hear a crash before you see it. It’s a metallic, rasping, crunching sound, like a crushed Coke can scraping on concrete magnified a thousand times. Then you hear the squeal of brakes, and this soft thumping sound—the thudding of bodies against asphalt. People yelling and screaming in different languages—“WATCH OUT!” “SHIT!”—but it’s too late. It’s one of the most awful sounds in the world.
Tour crashes are like any other, except they’re bigger and more destructive. This one was particularly spectacular: at the end of the stage, a tight turn, everybody going like hell, fighting for position. One bad move—in this case a French rider cutting off a Spanish rider—triggers the whole chain reaction. From a distance, it looks like a bomb goes off in the peloton. I was smack in the middle of it, unable to stop, to turn, to do anything but tense up and get ready to take it. I hit the pile, stopped dead, and was whipped to the ground. As I hit the pavement, my world exploded in stars; I heard a crack. My shoulder.
Fuck.
I crossed the finish line with my left arm hanging limp, dead. X-rays confirmed a double fracture of the collarbone, a neat V-shaped crack. More out of reflex than anything, I asked if continuing the race was a possibility, and the doctor didn’t hesitate. Ce n’est pas possible, he said. Impossible.
Headlines flashed around the world: Hamilton Out. Riders break collarbones often, and the protocol was clear: one or two weeks off the bike, no question. It was devastating. All that work, all that preparation, all that risk. The IMAX film, the sponsors, the team—all of it gone, over. Bjarne and I both had tears in our eyes.
I asked a second doctor: What did he think?
Impossible.
I asked a third doctor—and got a glint of hope. He said that while the bone was clearly fractured, it was stable. There was a chance. I decided to try.
The next morning, with some deep breaths and some painful contortions, I was able to put my jersey on. CSC’s trainer put a couple of swaths of athletic tape across my collarbone to help stabilize it. The mechanic reduced pressure in my tires and added three layers of gel tape to my handlebars to provide some cushion. The team, assuming I would ride a few minutes and then drop out, brought my suitcase to the first feed zone, so I could go straight to the airport.
I climbed on my bike.
Pain comes in different flavors. This was a new taste—harsher, blinding; if it had had color, it would have been electric green. Rolling over a pebble caused a bolt of agony that ran from my fingertips to the top of my skull; I couldn’t decide whether to yell or throw up. But here’s the thing: if you can take the first ten minutes, then you can take more. Time stops mattering. In a strange way the chaos and rush of the race was soothing. I pushed harder, using the pain in my muscles to distract me from the pain in my collarbone.
Thank God the stage was flat and relatively easy, in Tour terms. I rode at the back all day, and I managed to finish that day in the bunch. My face was chalky, I could barely talk. I could tell by the looks around me that the other riders didn’t expect to see me the next day.
The next morning, I showed up again. Again, felt those electric-green lightning bolts. Again, felt like I was going to throw up, pass out, die. Again, made it through.
In this way, I made it through the first week. It didn’t hurt any less, but I felt my body and mind adapting to the task. People started paying attention; it became a small sensation. The IMAX producers were over the moon—talk about brain power, they kept saying. I had to remind people to please stop patting me on the back; it hurt too much.
The real test was going to be stage 8, a brutal triple ascent of the Télégraphe and the Galibier, and finishing on the most famous climb of all, twenty-one legendary hairpin turns of Alpe d’Huez. We all knew that Alpe d’Huez would be where Lance and Postal would make their move: they’d use the team to burn everybody off with a hot pace, and pave the way for Lance’s usual first-climb-of-the-Tour attack.
Three days before stage 8, I made a chess move. Ufe and I had originally scheduled my second BB for the Tour’s first rest day, two days after Alpe d’Huez. But with my broken collarbone, I was feeling weak. I’d burned a lot of energy the first week. I needed my BB now. I texted Ufe on my secret phone.
We need to have dinner on the 11th, in Lyon.
He texted back immediately—weren’t we supposed to meet later? He wasn’t sure if he could make that work. I didn’t back down. It felt like an unfamiliar role for me—the tough-guy boss. I was basically telling Ufe to shut up and do what I wanted.
This is important. It has to be the 11th.
The night of the 11th, I was in my hotel room in Lyon. It was after 10 p.m. when I heard a knock on my door. Ufe came in carrying a soft-sided cooler. He was disheveled and a little ticked off—he’d had to drive quite a ways to make this work. But he was also excited. Talking a mile a minute, as usual.
“What the fuck, Tyler, you are crazy! Riding with a broken collarbone? You are having a good Tour!”
Even in his agitated state, Ufe was efficient. In a few minutes he had the bag out and I was hooked up. Rubber band, needle, valve, zip-zip. Fifteen minutes later, he headed back into the night and I was ready for Alpe d’Huez.
Not everybody was so lucky. On stage 7, a Kelme rider named Jesús Manzano had collapsed by the side of the road and nearly died. Over the following days the truth came out through the peloton grapevine. Rumor was, something had gone wrong with his BB—perhaps it had been carelessly handled, or allowed to heat up, or gotten infected. A bad BB could kill you, because it was like getting injected with poison. I felt grateful to have professionals working with me.*
Of course, there were still the testers to contend with. We called them vampires. During the Tour they tended to arrive first thing in the morning to demand blood and urine. After getting my early BB, I was concerned about getting tested—and sure enough, the next morning, our team was chosen to be tested. Fortunately for me, the protocols
worked in my favor: as is customary, the riders were given a brief window of time after being notified to produce themselves to be tested. It’s not a lot of time, but it’s enough to get an intravenous bag of saline we called a speed bag which lowered the hematocrit by about three points. This is where the soigneurs and team doctors really earn their money: they’re constantly on standby, in case they’re needed. CSC’s crew was as good as Postal’s. One speed bag later, I was back in the safe zone. It’s a team sport.
On Sunday, July 13, 2003, the innovation curve caught up to Lance and Postal on Alpe d’Huez. The weather was blazing hot; the tar on the roads was starting to melt in the heat. On the day’s second climb, the Galibier, Postal sent five riders to the front and put the hammer down. In past years, the peloton would have shredded, leaving Lance with only a few rivals. But this year it didn’t happen; about thirty of us made it over the top with them. And we were looking good.
There was Ullrich, sharper and leaner than I’d ever seen him. You could almost sense Cecco’s influence in his relaxed body language, in the ease with which he answered accelerations.
Mayo and Beloki, who rode for different teams (Mayo for Euskaltel-Euskadi, Beloki for ONCE), were opposites: Beloki had sad eyes and a mournful manner; Mayo was charismatic and handsome. But both loved attacking, and both were fearless: they didn’t ride for placings, they rode to win.
Then you had Alexandre Vinokourov, the Krazy Kazakh. Though he had the body of a fire hydrant, Vino was a monster competitor: a tireless attacker, equally good on time trials and climbs, with one of the best poker faces in the peloton. You never could tell when he was going to launch some suicidal attack. Plus, I figured he was going to be well prepared. One time, while waiting outside Ufe’s Madrid office, I’d spotted Vino in a nearby café.