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 (15 page)

*
Livingston has never commented publicly on doping matters. He did not respond to interview requests.

†
The reverse was also apparently true: if his numbers were off, Armstrong got nervous—a point that was underlined in January of 1999 at Postal team training camp in Solvang, California. The whole team rode a 10-kilometer time trial, and then had their blood tested afterward; the blood values and the time were combined into an overall fitness score. When the scoring was done, Lance was second—Christian Vande Velde was first. But rather than tell Lance, Bruyneel tweaked the result slightly so that Lance finished first. As George Hincapie told
New York Times
reporter Juliet Macur: “We didn’t want to tell Lance because it would have upset him, but no one ever told Christian, either. We kind of didn’t want to upset the hierarchy.”

‡
As Postal soigneur Emma O’Reilly recounted in
From Lance to Landis
: “At one stage, two of the team officials were in the room with Lance. They were all talking. ‘What are we going to do, what are we going to do? Let’s keep this quiet, let’s stick together. Let’s not panic. Let’s all leave here with the same story.’ ” O’Reilly says that after the meeting Armstrong told her, “Now, Emma, you know enough to bring me down.”

§
As far as the UCI goes, this kind of cooperation wasn’t new. In his 1999 book,
Massacre à la chaîne
, published in English as
Breaking the Chain
(London: Random House, 2002), Festina soigneur Willy Voet says the UCI similarly accepted a backdated therapeutic use exemption for lidocaine to help French cyclist Laurent Brochard avoid a positive test at the 1997 world championships.

‖
In 2005, as part of a retrospective study by the Châtenay-Malabry French national doping-detection lab to improve their methods, urine tests from the 1999 Tour de France were tested for EPO. Using the six-digit rider identification number,
L’Équipe
reporter Damien Ressiot established that fifteen samples belonged to Armstrong. Of the fifteen samples, six tested positive for EPO, including those taken after the prologue, and stages 1, 9, 10, 12, and 14; in addition several others showed the presence of artificial EPO in levels too low to trigger a positive test. All samples taken after stage 14 tested negative.

Armstrong argued that the samples may have been tampered with. But according to Dr. Michael Ashenden, one of the world’s foremost doping experts, the odds of someone successfully tampering with the samples to achieve this precise spiking and tailing effect would be beyond astronomical; in fact, he’s not aware of any lab equipment that is calibrated to such a degree. As Ashenden summed up, “There is no doubt in my mind that [Lance Armstrong] took EPO during the ’99 Tour.”

Perhaps more interestingly, it looks as though Armstrong was in the minority in 1999. Of the eighty-one urine samples taken during the 1999 Tour that were not Armstrong’s, only seven tested positive for EPO, or 8.6 percent.

a
When Hamilton first told me about Philippe/Motoman in August 2010, he only recalled a first name. After a few months, I located a person Hamilton identified, through a photograph, as Motoman. His full name is Philippe Maire. He lives in Cagnes-sur-Mer, a few miles from Nice, where he owns a high-end bike shop called Stars’n’Bikes. The shop sells Trek, Oakley, and Nike Livestrong gear. In June 2012 Maire’s Facebook page featured a 1999-era photograph of Maire and Armstrong standing arm in arm in a bike shop, smiling. The caption to the photograph was “Good job.”

I phoned Maire, and he confirmed that he had worked for Armstrong as a bike mechanic and gardener while Armstrong lived in Nice. I then asked Maire if he’d followed the 1999 Tour on his motorcycle.

—PM (voice rising):
No, I know I follow nothing. If you want to speak to me, you come to the shop, I can see you, I can know you, but now, I don’t understand. The guys, they can call me, explain to me, because I don’t understand
.

—Could Tyler Hamilton call you?

—PM (quickly):
No, no, no, no. If you want, you [tell] Kevin Livingston to call me, to explain to me what you want. I don’t understand, sorry
.

—Is it true or not that you followed the 1999 Tour de France on your motorcycle?

—PM:
Ahhhhhh, no, no
.

—It’s not true? That is a lie?

—PM:
It’s … not true
.

—So they are not telling me the truth when they tell me you followed the 1999 Tour on your motorcycle.

—PM (hurriedly):
Sorry, sorry. I’m a cyclist. I sell bicycles, but I don’t understand what you want. I say, goodbye
. [Abruptly hangs up.]

A few weeks later, I called Maire again. When I brought up the 1999 Tour and informed him of Hamilton’s account, Maire pointed out several times that he was in France, not in the USA.

It’s a fucking joke. I am nobody. Just a small guy in France; I’m just a good mechanic, that’s all
.

Maire said he did attend the Postal team party at the Musée d’Orsay in Paris. When I pointed out that some might find it unusual for Armstrong’s gardener/mechanic to travel six hundred miles to attend Postal’s victory party, Maire said he had gone to Paris because he’d wanted to see the final stage. When I asked Maire if he’d received a Rolex from Hamilton and Livingston, he began to laugh.

“No no no no no!” he said. “Nobody buys me Rolex. Nobody, ha ha. But if you know someone who will buy for me a Rolex, yes. I like Cartier, ha ha, Chanel, Gautier, for sure.”

Chapter 6
 
2000: BUILDING THE MACHINE

YOU AND HAVEN should move to Nice.

Lance said it lightly, but it felt big. In the fall of 1999 I was still based in Girona, but it was clear that the team’s center of gravity had shifted to Nice, that beautiful city in the heart of the French Riviera. Lance and Kristin lived there; so did Kevin Livingston and his now-wife, Becky, as well as Frankie Andreu and his wife, Betsy; Michele Ferrari was a half day’s drive away. Haven had recently left her job at Hill Holliday so we could live together full-time in Europe. Living in Nice sounded better than perfect: all of us together, training, working, living, preparing for the next Tour. So, in March 2000, Haven and I moved into a small yellow house at the end of a rose-covered lane in Villefranche, about a mile from Lance and Kristin. We also, for the first time, had money: a new $450,000 contract (a healthy $300,000 increase from the previous year) plus a $100,000 bonus if I helped Lance win the Tour again.

It felt like moving to another planet: the billionaires’ yachts bobbing in the harbor and the older French couples with enormous
sunglasses and tiny dogs. From our new place we could see Nell-côte, the mansion where the Stones recorded
Exile on Main Street
; Monaco was just around the corner. It was the kind of place where you walked past a glamorous woman on the street, and one second later realized,
Whoa, that was Tina Turner
.

Kevin, Lance, and I. We rode together most days, with Frankie joining up some of the time. We’d usually meet on the road by the sea, then head up and out into the mountainous country north of Nice. Training like that is sort of like sitting with your friends and watching a movie—in this case, the movie was the countryside of France, scrolling past us. As with movies, you spend most of your time talking nonsense, making observations, trying to crack each other up.

We all had our roles. Frankie was the anchor: clear-eyed, unflappable. Kevin was the fizz; he was always bubbling with good humor, stupid jokes, his ever-growing repertoire of impressions (he did a spot-on Michele Ferrari:
Ahhhh, Tyler, you are too fat!
). I was the sidekick, the quiet, dry-humored one; the one who saw everything and didn’t say much.

Lance was the big boss, lit up by this new life, by success. If he was intense before, now his intensity seemed to have doubled. Everything interested him; one day it would be tech stocks that were the
best fucking buy on the market
; the next it would be some bakery in Normandy that had the
best fucking bread you’ve ever tasted
; the next it would be about some band that was the
best fucking band you’ve ever heard
. The thing is, he usually was right.

Lance’s eye was also on the competition. He spent a lot of time talking about Ullrich, Pantani, Zülle, and the rest. Lance knew a lot—who was working with which doctor, who was targeting which race, who was five kilos overweight, who was getting divorced. Lance was like a one-man newspaper: you could go for a two-hour ride and get the scoop on the entire peloton.

Sometimes he was too talkative. I remember sitting at a restaurant
on the Nice waterfront with him and Kevin, and Lance was talking about some new type of EPO he’d heard some Spanish riders were using. He was talking really loudly and openly, and not using any code words, and I got nervous, hoping there weren’t any English-speakers in the next booth. I was so worried, in fact, I said something like “Hey, I think the walls might have ears.” But he didn’t seem to care. He kept right on talking. It was like his keeping EPO in his fridge. The rest of us were borderline paranoid about getting caught, while Lance acted like he was invulnerable. Or maybe acting invulnerable made him feel more secure.

While I learned a lot from Lance, my real education happened every few weeks, when Ferrari came to town. Ferrari was our trainer, our doctor, our god. Ferrari had a knack for designing sessions that were like torture devices: enough to almost kill us, but not quite. In later years we often heard Lance tell the public that Chris Carmichael was his official coach—and Carmichael built quite a business on that relationship. I know they were friends. But the truth is, during the years I trained with Lance, I don’t recall Lance ever mentioning Chris’s name or citing a piece of advice Chris had given him. By contrast, Lance mentioned Ferrari constantly, almost annoyingly so.
Michele says we should do this. Michele says we should do that
.
^*

I had a lot to learn. Until then, I’d trained like most old-school bike racers trained—which is to say, by feel. Oh, I did intervals and counted hours, but I wasn’t very scientific about it. You can see the proof in my daily journals, where most days are marked by a single number: how many hours I rode—the more, the better. That ended the second I set foot in Nice. Lance and Ferrari showed me there were more variables than I’d ever imagined, and they all mattered: wattages, cadence, intervals, zones, joules, lactic acid, and, of course, hematocrit. Each ride was a math problem: a precisely mapped set of numbers for us to hit—which makes it sound easy, but in reality it was incredibly difficult. It’s one thing to go ride for six hours. It’s another to ride for six hours following a program of wattages and cadences, especially when those wattages and cadences are set to push you to the ragged edge of your abilities. Supported by steady doses of Edgar and the red eggs, we trained like I’d never imagined was possible: day after day of returning home and falling unconscious into bed, utterly exhausted.

Every month or so, Ferrari would travel from his home in Ferrara and test us. His visits were like scientific experiments, only he was measuring the ways in which we were disappointing him. He always stayed at Lance and Kristin’s, and so I’d wake up in the morning and ride over to see him. He’d be there with his scale, calipers, and blood spinner. Pinch pinch. Spin spin. He’d start to shake his head.

Aaaaaah, Tyler, you are too fat
.

Aaaaaah, Tyler, your hematocrit is too low
.

Ferrari liked to test us at the Col de la Madone, a steep twelve-kilometer climb just outside of Nice. Sometimes we would do a one-kilometer test, where we’d ride uphill repeatedly at gradually increasing wattages, and Ferrari would measure the lactate in our
blood, charting the results on graph paper so we could figure out our thresholds (basically, how much power we could sustainably produce without burning out). Then, we’d ride the Madone full gas, revving our engines to the maximum. Riding well for Ferrari on the Madone felt almost as important as winning a race.

I tapped Ferrari for information; I used to write down questions on napkins so I’d remember to ask him. He taught me why hemoglobin was a better measure of potential than hematocrit, since hemoglobin comes closer to measuring oxygen-carrying capacity. He explained how a faster cadence put less stress on the muscles, transferring the load from the physical (the muscle fibers) to a better place: the cardiovascular engine and the blood. He explained that the best measure of ability was in watts per kilogram—the amount of power you produce, divided by your weight. He said that 6.7 watts per kilogram was the magic number, because that was what it took to win the Tour.

Michele was obsessed about weight—and I mean totally obsessed. He talked about weight more than he talked about wattage, more than he talked about hematocrit, which could be easily boosted with a little Edgar. The reason: losing weight was the hardest but most efficient way to increase the crucial watts per kilogram number, and thus to do well in the Tour. He spent far more time bugging us about diet than he ever did about our hematocrit. I remember laughing with Lance and Kevin about it: most people thought Ferrari was some crazed chemist, when to us he was more like a one-man Weight Watchers program.