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 (12 page)

When I spoke those words to my father, it sealed my life in bike racing behind a steel door. That was the moment I started learning
what we all had to learn: how to live on two planets at once. Only Haven and I would know the real truth. And I knew, even as I assured my father everything was fine, that I was about to go in a lot deeper.

At the Postal banquet in Paris after the Tour, word had begun to go around the team. Given all the shit with Festina, teams weren’t going to be able to keep supplying EPO and other products. Postal would pay for the legal recovery stuff, but beyond that, we were on our own. I understood the message loud and clear. A new era was about to begin.

*
A year later, when Armstrong was late in paying the team the traditional bonuses after winning the 1999 Tour de France, Andreu went to Armstrong and reminded him to pay everyone their $25,000.

†
In
From Lance to Landis
, by David Walsh (New York: Ballantine Books, 2007), Postal soigneur Emma O’Reilly says that she heard Postal staffers estimate that $25,000 in medical products was flushed down the toilet of the RV.

‡
Cofidis’s 1998 performance was statistically unusual. Over the rest of their careers, the top four Cofidis finishers (Julich, Christophe Rinero, Roland Meier, and Kevin Livingston) rode the Tour a collective fifteen times, averaging 45th place.

“It drove Lance crazy that Bobby [Julich] got third in the [1998] Tour,” recalled Betsy Andreu, Frankie’s wife. “Lance never considered Bobby to be that great of a rider, and so we used to tease Lance about it. Looking back, I think it motivated Lance a lot—if Bobby could get third, Lance probably figured he could win.”

Chapter 5
 
BAD NEWS BEARS

IT MAY NOT LOOK like it, but bike racing is the quintessential team sport. The leader stands on the shoulders of his teammates—called domestiques, servants—who use their strength to shelter him from the headwind, set the pace, chase down attacks, and deliver water and food. Then, just out of sight, there’s a second level of domestiques: the team director, the soigneurs, the mechanics, the drivers, the interconnected grid of people who are essentially doing the same thing. Every race is an exercise in cooperation—which means that when it goes well, it creates a kind of high like I’ve never felt anywhere else; a feeling of connectedness and brotherhood. All for one, one for all.

The 1999 Postal team was one of my favorite teams of all the ones I’ve ever been on. Not because of the remarkable things we accomplished together, but because of the extreme amount of fun we had while we were doing it. Now, looking back, I have mixed feelings about the methods we used to win the Tour. But I can’t
pretend that being on this particular team was anything but a complete blast because (1) Postal didn’t do anything that other smart teams couldn’t have done, and (2) we had absolutely nothing to lose.

We had Frankie Andreu. The field general, the road captain, with his gravelly Ajax voice you could hear from a hundred yards away. We had my Girona roommate, George Hincapie, the Quiet Man, who was maturing into one of the strongest riders in the world.

We had Kevin Livingston, newly signed from Cofidis, who was the engine, both socially and on the bike. Kevin was a brilliant climber, and an equally brilliant comedian. I’ve seldom laughed harder than when Kevin and I went out for beers—he could do dead-on impressions of everyone on the team (including Lance, though he wisely kept that one under wraps). During races, though, Kevin had a serious ability to “bury himself,” that is, to push himself to his breaking point and past it, in the service of a teammate, especially when that teammate was Lance. Kevin’s relationship with Lance went way back: when Lance was recovering from chemo treatments, Kevin had been the one to take him for his first rides.

We had Jonathan Vaughters, the Nerd. If Bill Gates had decided to become a cyclist, he might’ve been like Jonathan. Genius-level smart and naturally talented, Jonathan was known on the team for four things: (1) his ability to climb; (2) his incredibly messy hotel rooms, which looked like a laundromat had exploded in them; (3) his even-more-incredible gas, caused by the protein shakes he was constantly drinking; and (4) his tendency to ask uncomfortable questions, especially when it came to doping. While the rest of us simply did what the team doctors told us to do, Jonathan read books on sports science and designed his own training programs. He was always probing: Where did this stuff come from? What does it do? He was visibly more nervous about doping than the rest of us, but he was certainly no teetotaler: in fact, he set the record for climbing Mont Ventoux, one of the sport’s toughest, most legendary peaks.

We had Christian Vande Velde, an easygoing, immensely talented Chicago kid whose claim to fame, besides being strong as hell, was that his father, John Vande Velde, played one of the evil Italian cyclists in the classic movie
Breaking Away
(some of the guys could recite the lines by heart). Christian was twenty-three, in his second year in Europe, and was taking everything in with wide-open eyes; he reminded me a little bit of me.

We had Peter Meinert Nielsen from Denmark and Frenchman Pascal Deramé, two big motors for the flats, and two good-natured guys. We had a crackerjack team of soigneurs, including Emma O’Reilly from Ireland and Freddy Viane from Belgium, who were whip-smart and funny to boot.

Then we had another type of teammate: the invisible kind. The person nobody talks about, but who is perhaps more important in the long run. That’s where Motoman and Dr. Michele Ferrari come in. I met them around the same time, in the spring of 1999, during the run-up to the Tour.

I met Motoman at Lance and Kristin’s villa in Nice, France, on May 15, just after I flew in from Boston. His first name was Philippe—I never learned his last name. He was trimming the rosebushes. I remember he wielded the garden shears carefully, as if he were performing some crucial task. Philippe was a slender, muscular guy with close-cropped brown hair, a broad forehead, and a gold earring. He had that French coolness that said,
Whatever you might say or do, I won’t be surprised in the least
.

Lance gave me a quick rundown on Philippe’s résumé: former amateur rider for a French team. Buddy of Sean Yates, a British rider and friend of Lance. Worked as a mechanic at a nearby bike shop. Philippe knew the local roads like the back of his hand; could show us all the best climbs. Lance had hired Philippe to take
care of their place while they were gone, run errands, do odd jobs. Philippe was clearly proud of his status, but at the time it seemed Lance was the proud one, proud that he knew this cool French dude. Coolest of all, Philippe had a kick-ass motorcycle. I saw it when Philippe left: it was one of those crotch rockets, glossy and dangerous looking.

Kristin came outside and greeted us; she was four months pregnant. They’d recently purchased the villa, which looked like it had cost a pretty penny. It wasn’t surprising to see Lance living large; he’d made big money before his cancer, and he knew how to spend it. Around us, workmen were finishing up the renovation, missing deadline after deadline in the traditional style.

Fuckin’ French
, Lance said.

To my eye, though, the place looked like something out of a movie. Rose garden, swimming pool, marble balconies from which you could look out on the red-tiled roofs of Nice and beyond to the blue Mediterranean. Seeing them, I felt a twinge of wistfulness; Lance and Kristin were building a life, like the one Haven and I sometimes dreamed about. We had agreed that we didn’t want to have kids, not yet, until things were more settled, and our tastes ran closer to cottages than villas. But someday, definitely.

Right now, though, my concern was the immediate future. I’d been in Boston the previous two weeks, with zero access to our friend Edgar (at this point in my career, I wasn’t about to risk taking it through customs, and had no sources of stateside EPO). As a result, my hematocrit was down, and I needed a boost, especially if we were about to train hard. When Kristin walked off, I turned to Lance.

—Hey dude, you got any Poe I can borrow?

Lance pointed casually to the fridge. I opened it and there, on the door, next to a carton of milk, was a carton of EPO, each stoppered vial standing upright, little soldiers in their cardboard cells. I was
surprised that Lance would be so cavalier. On the occasions I had kept EPO in my Girona fridge, I had taken it out of its cardboard packaging, wrapped it in foil, and put it in the back, out of sight. But Lance seemed relaxed about it. I figured he knew what he was doing. I took a vial, and thanked him.

I needed to be on top of my game, because the next few weeks looked busy. Postal had undergone a Lance-driven makeover, adopting a Tour-first mentality. Team director Johnny Weltz had been replaced by Lance’s handpicked choice: a sharp-eyed, just-retired Belgian rider named Johan Bruyneel. Johan had an ideal pedigree: he’d ridden for the Spanish geniuses at ONCE and knew their system. Johan had the same savvy, information-driven mind as Lance did; from the start, the two were finishing each other’s sentences. The overhaul meant new staff; Pedro’s replacement was ONCE’s former doctor, a humorless, overcaffeinated man from Valencia named Luis Garcia del Moral, whom the riders quickly nicknamed the Little Devil, or El Gato Negro (the black cat). Del Moral’s harshness was balanced a little by the friendly, easygoing personality of his assistant, Pepe Martí.

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
.