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 (17 page)

When a vial was empty I’d wrap it in several layers of paper towel
or toilet paper and pound it with a hammer or the heel of a dress shoe until the glass was crunched into tiny pieces. I’d take the broken-glass-and-paper-towel package to the sink and hold it under running water, removing all traces of EPO. Then I’d flush it all down the toilet or throw the wet mess in the garbage and cover it with the stinkiest stuff I could find: old banana peels, coffee grounds. I sometimes cut my hands on the glass, but overall it was a good system; I could sleep without being afraid of the French police raiding our house.

We
could sleep, I mean. I didn’t keep anything secret from Haven. She knew about the trips, the cost, my smash-and-rinse system, the whole thing. It would’ve felt wrong not to tell her, and besides, it was safer to keep both of us on the same page, on the off chance the police or a drug tester showed up. It wasn’t like we chatted about EPO over toast and coffee. We both hated talking about it, hated dealing with it. But it was always there, floating in the air between us, that nagging, unpleasant chore we didn’t like, but that had to be done. No job too small or tough.

I can’t speak for everyone on the team, but it was my impression that most of the riders had the same full-disclosure policy when it came to their wives and girlfriends. There was only one notable exception: Frankie Andreu. Frankie was in a tougher spot because he was married to Betsy, and Betsy’s attitude toward doping was the same as the pope’s attitude toward the devil.

Betsy Andreu was an attractive, dark-haired Michigander with a big laugh and an open, no-bullshit manner that mirrored her husband’s. She’d been in Lance’s circle for years (Lance and Frankie had ridden for Motorola together from 1992 to 1996). Betsy’s relationship with Lance had two chapters. In the first chapter, before cancer, Betsy and Lance had gotten along well. They were both strong personalities who liked to argue about politics and religion (Lance was an atheist; Betsy was a practicing, pro-life Catholic). Lance trusted her to the point that he had Betsy vet his new girlfriends.
(Betsy, who wasn’t always so positive about the women Lance chose, had given an early thumbs-up to Kristin.) Lance trusted Betsy because with her, as with him, there were no gray areas. Betsy saw the world clearly—true and false, good and evil. They’d both hate to hear this, but they’re more than a little bit alike.

Lance and Betsy’s relationship had changed, however, one day in the fall of 1996, when a recently engaged Betsy and Frankie, along with a small group of friends, visited Lance’s hospital room in Indianapolis as he was recovering from cancer. According to Betsy and Frankie, who later testified about the incident under oath, two doctors entered the room and began asking Lance a series of medical questions. Betsy said, “I think we should give Lance his privacy,” and stood to leave. Lance urged them to stay. They did. Then Lance answered the questions. When the doctor asked if he’d ever used performance-enhancing drugs, Lance answered, in a matter-of-fact tone, yes. He’d used EPO, cortisone, testosterone, human growth hormone, and steroids. (Armstrong has testified under oath that this incident never happened.)

In my mind, this is a classic Lance moment, being cavalier about doping. This was the same urge that made Lance put his EPO in the front of his fridge in Nice and talk about it openly at a restaurant. He wants to minimize doping, show it’s no big deal, show that he’s bigger than any syringe or pill.

Inside that hospital room, Betsy and Frankie managed to keep their cool, but the second they stepped outside into the hallway, Betsy went ballistic. She told Frankie that if he was doing that shit, the wedding was off. Frankie swore to her he wasn’t, and Betsy gradually calmed down. A few months later, they did get married, but Betsy never looked at Lance or the sport the same way again.

As you can imagine, this put Frankie in a tough spot, considering the demands of our profession. Kevin, Lance, and I often spoke openly about Ferrari and Edgar in front of the wives and girlfriends, but whenever Betsy was around, that changed. The phrase Frankie
always used was
Betsy’ll kill me
. He’d be particularly nervous before a group dinner.
Shut up about that stuff, guys—Betsy’ll kill me
.
^†

Frankie did what he had to do. Fortunately for him, it wasn’t as much as Kevin, Lance, and I had to do. This was due to the fact that Frankie was a
rouleur
, a big guy, suited for grinding through flatter and rolling stages, and so required less Edgar and other therapy than we climbers did. If we had to tune our engines to 99 percent of capacity at the Tour, Frankie could gut it out while staying a little closer to
au naturale
.

While I admired Betsy’s conscience, I didn’t suffer any such hesitations myself. I was learning fast. With the help of Ferrari’s spinner, I was learning to calibrate how much EPO I should take to fuel my increasingly intense training. Ferrari taught me that injecting EPO under the skin was like turning up the thermostat in a house: it worked slowly, causing your body to create more red blood cells
over the next week or so. Add too little, and the house would be too cold—your hematocrit would be too low. Add too much, and the house would get too hot—you’d go over the 50 limit.

I got to where I could estimate my hematocrit level by the color of my blood. I’d stare at the little drops when Ferrari stuck my finger with a lancet when he gave a lactate test. If it was light and watery, my hematocrit was low. If it was dark, it was higher. I liked seeing that dark, rich color, all those cells crowding in there like a thick soup, ready to go to work; it made me eager to train even harder.

Training felt like a game. How hard can you work? How smart can you be? How skinny can you get? Can you pit yourself against those numbers, and can you reach them? And then, behind all that, was always the anxiety that drove you, that kept you working:
Whatever you do, those other fuckers are doing more
.

The other game, however, had to do not with EPO, but with Lance—namely, how to get along with him. He’s a touchy guy, and as the 2000 Tour grew closer, he got touchier. By June, the ragtag charm of the Bad News Bears seemed a million years old. Now he was tenser, more distant. He related to us less like a teammate than a CEO: hit your numbers, or else. Small things would set him off, and you knew it had happened when you got The Look—the long, unblinking three-second stare.

It’s funny; the media would go on to treat The Look as if it were Lance’s superpower, something he unveiled at big moments in races, but to us, it was something that happened more often on the team bus or around the breakfast table. If you interrupted Lance while he was talking, you got The Look. If you contradicted what Lance was saying, you got The Look. If you were more than two minutes late for a ride, you got The Look. But the thing that really set off The Look was if you made fun of him. Underneath that tough exterior was an extraordinarily sensitive person. My teammate Christian Vande Velde once made fun of some new Nike shoes Lance was wearing one morning at breakfast. Christian is a great guy—he
didn’t mean anything by it, he was just trying to go with the flow, and gave Lance some frat-boy dig about his shoes.
Nice fucking shoes, dude!
Christian laughed. Lance got pissed, gave Christian The Look. And that was it. I’m sure that incident didn’t end Christian’s prospects on Postal. But it definitely didn’t help.

But one of the biggest ways to piss off Lance was to complain about doping.

Jonathan Vaughters was probably the best example of this. With his probing mind, JV wasn’t the kind of guy to accept doping at face value. He didn’t just do whatever Lance and Johan said. He asked the questions nobody asked: Why are we doing this? Why doesn’t the UCI enforce the rules? What’s more, JV was twitchy when it came to the doping; he was always worried about police, or testers. He even talked about feeling guilty—and guilt was an emotion most of us had given up long ago. To Lance, JV’s questions and doubts were proof that JV lacked the right attitude. I remember Lance bitching JV out after the 1999 Dauphiné when JV made the mistake of mentioning that he was happy finishing second in a stage—the position Lance liked to call “first loser.” After the 1999 Tour, it was clear to everybody that JV didn’t gel with Lance and Johan’s system.

Vaughters left Postal in 2000 for the French team Crédit Agricole, where stricter French anti-doping laws kept the team in line. JV essentially curtailed his career in order to get away from the doping culture. But back then, Lance considered JV the king choad. To Lance’s way of thinking, doping is a fact of life, like oxygen or gravity. You either do it—and do it to the absolute fullest—or you shut up and get out, period. No bitching, no crying, no splitting hairs. This made JV the worst kind of hypocrite in Lance’s eyes because he’d used his Postal results to sign a big two-year contract with Crédit Agricole, and therefore he owed it to his sponsor to get results—that’s what they were paying him for. And suddenly JV
was Mister Clean, moaning about doping, proclaiming his righteousness, finishing in the middle of the pack? Choad.
^‡

Of course, there were more direct ways to cross Lance. One such incident happened in the spring of 2000 when we were finishing a six-hour training ride, climbing a narrow road toward my house. Lance and I were tired, dehydrated, hungry, ready to come home and take a nap. Then this small car comes tearing up the hill behind us at top speed, nearly hitting us, and the driver yells something as he goes past. I’m mad, so I yell back at him. But Lance doesn’t say anything. He just takes off, full speed, chasing the car. Lance knew the streets, so he took a shortcut and managed to catch the guy at the top, near a red light. By the time I got there Lance had pulled the guy out of his car and was pummeling him, and the guy was cowering and crying. I watched for a minute, not quite believing what I was seeing. Lance’s face was beet red; he was in a full rage, really letting the guy have it. Finally, it was over. Lance pushed the guy to the ground and left him. We got back on our bikes and rode home in silence. In the days afterward Lance told that story to Frankie and Kevin as if it was funny, just another crazy-ass thing that happened in France. I tried to laugh along. But I couldn’t. I kept picturing that guy on the ground, crying and pleading, and Lance pounding away. I’d seen more than I wanted to see.

This darker side of Lance stressed us out; but as far as the team’s performance went, it served as fuel. He and Johan Bruyneel had Postal running like a Swiss watch. Better hotels. Better treatment from race organizers. Better planning. Better nutrition. Better sponsors. Better technology, including wind-tunnel testing. Our lives had the buzzy, connected feeling of being a part of something
big and bold, like we were astronauts training for a NASA mission. Plus, there was the larger, simpler fact that we were riding our bikes together every day through some of the most beautiful terrain on the planet; the feeling of pushing yourself harder than you’ve ever pushed, making yourself into something powerful and new—and getting paid for it. On our rides, we’d sometimes catch each other’s eye and smile, as if to say, can you believe how crazy this is?

As the 2000 Dauphiné Libéré approached, I was feeling quietly confident. I was lighter and stronger than I’d ever been. At my last fitness test, Ferrari had made a sound I’d never heard before—
Oooooh, Tyler!
The sound of approval.

I wanted to be strong, especially for the key day of the weeklong race, the stage on Mont Ventoux. There are lots of legendary climbs in France, but Ventoux might be the most legendary of all. It’s called the Giant of Provence, and it’s tough enough that it has a body count: Tom Simpson, a British cyclist who died in 1967, overdosing on a combination of exertion, brandy, and amphetamines.

For the first part of the Ventoux climb, I felt great. I should point out that when a bike racer says he feels great, he does not actually feel great. In fact, you feel like hell—you’re suffering, your heart is jumping out of your chest, your leg muscles are screaming, flashes of pain are moving around your body like so many strings of Christmas lights. What it means is that while you feel like crap, you also know the guys around you feel even crappier, and you can tell through their subtle expressions, the telltale signs, that they’re going to crack before you do. Your pain, in that situation, feels meaningful. It can even feel great.

So here on Ventoux at the Dauphiné, I was feeling pretty great. Lance was next to me wearing the leader’s yellow jersey, well positioned
to clinch the overall. With 10 kilometers to go we were in the front group with an elite handful of contenders. My job was to cover the attacks—which meant to follow them, so no one got away. Once I did that, the plan was for Lance to bridge up and launch an attack of his own, and take the stage. It was straight out of Bike Racing 101: the old one-two.

The first part went well: I covered the attacks. I waited, expecting to see Lance riding across the gap.