The Secret Race: Inside the Hidden World of the Tour De France: Doping, Cover-Ups, and Winning at All Costs: Inside the Hidden World of the Tour De France: Doping, Cover-Ups, and Winning at All Costs (11 page)

Then, after a few quiet weeks, we got the surprising news: it turned out Lance wasn’t done. He was coming back across the Atlantic to give it one more try, at the Tour of Luxembourg in June. It wouldn’t be an easy race. A boatload of top riders would be there: Erik Dekker, Stuart O’Grady, Erik Zabel, and Francesco Casagrande—guys gunning for the Tour de France. Nobody said it out loud, but the stakes were clear: this might be Lance’s last shot. If he didn’t do well in Luxembourg, his comeback might be over.

Lance and I roomed together in Luxembourg. We were in a cheap hotel, a cramped room with two twin beds. It was like we were two kids at sleep-away camp. Lance was on his bed, lying on his side, elbow crooked beneath his head. He started asking questions.

“So do you think I can beat Casagrande?” he asked.

—Sure.

“
Really
?” His voice went up.

—He can climb, but you’ll kill him in the time trial.

“I’ll kill him in the time trial,” he repeated, as if memorizing the words. “I’ll fucking kill him in the time trial.”

—No doubt. Not even a contest.

A few seconds passed. Then Lance spoke again.

“So do you think I can beat Dekker?”

You can crush Dekker, I said, and I laughed to show how much I meant it. Then, just as with Casagrande, we went one by one through the reasons why he would absolutely crush Erik Dekker.

In this way, we went through most of the top contenders, until it seemed we’d completely switched roles: I was the old vet; he was the kid racer, fragile and unsure. Then there was one more question. Lance looked me in the eye—just like that first time we spoke. But this time, for once, he wasn’t interested in delivering a message. He was genuinely curious.

“Do you think I can win the Tour someday?”

I hesitated, because in truth, I didn’t see that happening. Lance was good, but we both knew the Tour was another level entirely. I remembered how Indurain had crushed him in 1994, how he’d never contended for the overall in a three-week race, how he’d finished only one of the four Tours he’d attempted thus far.

—Sure. You’re strong already. Wait until you get stronger.

“Really?”

He was suspicious. He said what he often said: he was worried about his climbing.

—Look, you can climb with all those guys. Maybe not attack, but you can hang. You can time-trial with them. If you can hang on the climbs and time-trial, you can win. So I say, Yeah, you can win the Tour.

“You’re not fucking with me. You think I can win the Tour.”

—Definitely.

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 many, 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.