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 (24 page)

Fuentes is a little crazy, but he is definitely a genius. He knew what to do, and he knew how to avoid getting caught. And he told me several times during our relationship that what we were doing was perfectly legal—and he turned out to be right about that, at least in Spain. Besides, once you’re dealing with him, you just have to trust. You’re inside his system, and there’s no one to check with, to be sure. Fuentes is the father, he is the authority in this world, and so you’re in a position where you have to believe. You really don’t have much of a choice.

From my first visit to Ufe, I made it clear: I wasn’t interested in the bells and whistles. I just wanted him to provide me with testosterone and Edgar, and to handle the transfusions. Ufe agreed—he was always very agreeable. It would be safe, easy, no problem at all. Ufe charged a fee for each transfusion, a fee for
medicación
(EPO and testosterone), plus a schedule of
primas
—bonuses that I would pay him if I won a stage of a grand tour or a big race. The
primas
weren’t small: 50,000 euros to win the Tour de France, 30,000 if I made the podium; 30,000 if I won the Tour of Italy, 20,000 for podium; and 30,000 for winning a World Cup race.

Ufe introduced me to his assistant, José Luis Merino Batres, a polite snowy-haired, seventyish gentleman who was chief of hematology at La Princesa, a Madrid hospital. After I had given my first bag of blood, Batres asked me what code name I’d like to use. He suggested I choose the name of my dog. I didn’t want to do that—by now, Tugboat was well known in the cycling world—so I chose 4142, the last four digits of the phone number of Jeff Buell, my best friend growing up back in Marblehead. Figuring I needed a code name for Ufe as well, I decided to call him Sam. I decided to call Batres Nick. Sam and Nick: my new assistants.

The planning started right away. The goal was to have two blood bags ready for the Tour of Italy, and perhaps for the Tour de France
as well. (And since the term “blood bags” is a bit gross, we’ll call them BBs from now on.)

BB logistics are complicated by the fact that blood cells are alive; they can survive outside your body for about twenty-eight days. My first transfusion in 2000 had been the simplest kind: take one BB out, put it in the fridge for four weeks, then put it back in during a race. To get multiple bags ready, however, was a lot more complicated. You couldn’t take two or three BBs out four weeks before the race, because the blood loss would cripple your training. The method that had evolved solved this problem through simple rotation: taking out fresh BBs while re-infusing the stored BBs back into your body. This method ensured a fresh supply of BBs in the fridge while also keeping your body topped up and capable of hard training. We swapped them out every twenty-five days or so.

For example, if you wanted three BBs for the Tour de France, you would begin ten weeks before the race, and your plan might look like this:

10 WKS BEFORE

1 BB OUT

6 WKS BEFORE

2 BBs OUT, THEN 1 BB IN

2 WKS BEFORE

3 BBs OUT, THEN 2 IN

RACE

3 BBs IN (1 PER WEEK)

Ufe taught me that each individual transfusion had to be done in careful order: (1) take out the new BBs; (2) reinfuse the stored BBs. This was to avoid filling the new BBs with old red blood cells that had already aged in the refrigerator. Freshness was everything. In fact, that’s what we called it—refreshing the BBs. Ufe also taught me about the danger of echo-positives: that’s when you test positive because you reinfuse a BB containing a banned substance. So you had to be careful that you weren’t glowing when you banked any BBs, because giving a BB is the risk equivalent of taking a drug test. He offered me what he called
polvo
—a gray powder that you could
put under your fingernail if you were asked to test while you were glowing. Put the fingernail in the stream of urine, and the test would be negative, guaranteed. I didn’t take any. I think I wanted to believe that I’d never allow myself to get into a situation where I needed to use it.

Ufe and I quickly developed a routine. I would fly to Madrid from Barcelona, take a cab to his office, and do the withdrawals and reinfusions, then fly back the same day. I wore sunglasses and a baseball cap, in order to avoid being recognized. I paid cash. Ufe would provide me with the Edgar and the testosterone patches as needed. I turned down most of the other drugs he offered me (and there were plenty), but I did accept a nasal spray called Minirin, which is usually given to kids to help with bedwetting (it causes you to retain water and thus reduces your hematocrit). I once tried insulin, which he told me would help my muscles recover, but quit after it made me feel feverish and strange.

Communicating in code with Ufe sometimes led to confusion. When we texted back and forth to plan transfusion visits, we’d use terms like “have dinner,” “give you a present,” or “meet for coffee.” I liked to keep it fairly generic. One time, however, I made the mistake of texting that I wanted to come to Madrid to “give you that bike.” I didn’t actually have a bike to give him, of course—I thought it would be obvious to Ufe that I was talking about a BB. But when I arrived in his office, Ufe excitedly told me how much he was looking forward to getting his new bike. I didn’t have the heart to tell him that I’d just been talking in code. The next trip, I brought him one of my extra training bikes, a Cervélo Soloist. (I’m glad I never texted that I was going to “give him a car.”)

As time went by, I noticed that Ufe was often late, forcing me to spend an hour or more in the café before I got his text message. He gave me his full attention when we were together, but he always seemed jittery and in a rush. As time went on, he turned me over more and more to Nick. I enjoyed dealing with Nick, though his
forgetfulness occasionally gave me pause. He kept having to ask me my BB code name. I was 4142, right?

Cuatro-uno, cuatro-dos. Sí
.

The constant traveling from Girona to Madrid was stressful. Though Ufe gave me a prescription for carrying Edgar (Haven, menstrual troubles), and though I had a small cooler bag that fit nicely in the bottom of my carry-on, I hated doing it. Security had tightened since 9/11; I was more recognizable now, and each time I stood in a security line I went into a full-body sweat. Doing the BB shuttle, standing in line at airports, getting stuck in traffic, wasting valuable training time, I sometimes found myself missing the well-oiled Postal machine.

Then there was the more practical matter of explaining the trips to my friends. Girona is not a big town, and bike racers get to know each other’s schedules well; it’s not normal to take day trips to Madrid every three weeks; it’s the kind of thing people start to talk about, that would show up on Lance’s radar. When pressed, I said I was visiting a Madrid allergist (I did have issues with allergies). More often, I didn’t say anything; I just vanished. More lies. More stress.

Making things more complicated, Lance and I were now neighbors. The spring before my split with Postal, back when things were still friendly between us, Lance and I had bought homes in the same Girona building, a rehabbed palace in the city’s old section that had been converted into luxury apartments. Lance had purchased the second floor; Haven and I had bought a smaller apartment on the third floor.

Lance and Kristin’s place was fantastic. Opulent, sprawling, beautifully decorated, fifteen-foot ceilings, decor straight out of
Architectural Digest
. It had a renovated chapel for Kristin (who is a devout Catholic), and a large storage area in the main courtyard where Lance could keep dozens of bikes, saddles, wheels, and equipment; and where his posse could gather—not just riders, but the increasing
flow of people from Trek and Nike, lawyers and bigwigs and mechanics and soigneurs. If Lance had been famous before, his third Tour win had put him on a new level: global icon. He wasn’t like a celebrity so much as a superhero. He was coming and going on the private jet all the time; trips to Tenerife, Switzerland, and Ferrara and who knows where else. Postal had hired some new riders, including a superstrong ex-Mennonite kid named Floyd Landis. Lance and his machine were reloading, and had more power than ever.

All of which made me tilt in the other direction. Haven and I didn’t have an assistant or a fleet of soigneurs and massage therapists to help. After each day’s training, I carried my bike upstairs and leaned it against the wall. When my bike broke, I did the repairs myself, or took it to the local shop. I liked it that way: simple, focused, no entourage to distract me. Our days were busy and crazy, but also satisfying. I had that old feeling from when I was a kid on Wildcat Mountain trying to walk uphill faster than the chairlift. Haven and I were John Henry against the steam shovel: our muscles against Lance’s gleaming modern machinery. He had a lot on his side, no question. But he wasn’t the only one with secret weapons.

My secret weapon wasn’t a private jet or even Ufe. It was a short, wiry Italian man named Luigi Cecchini. I called him Cecco. Cecco was a trainer who lived in Lucca, near Bjarne. Bjarne had introduced me to him shortly after I’d signed, saying he could help me reach the next level. Cecco’s client list was top shelf: Ullrich, Pantani, Bugno, Bartoli, Petacchi, Cipollini, Cancellara, Casagrande. In fact, Cecco had helped revive Bjarne Riis’s career back in the early 1990s; he was the reason Riis had bought a house near Lucca.

Cecco had short gray hair and big, perceptive eyes; he looked a little bit like Pablo Picasso. He also had a revolutionary and refreshing attitude about doping, which is to say, he encouraged me to dope as little as possible. He never gave me any Edgar; never handed me so much as an aspirin, because Cecco believed that most riders
dope far, far too much. Insulin, testosterone patches, anabolics—bah! To win the Tour, you needed only three qualities.

    1. You have to be very, very fit.

    2. You have to be very, very skinny.

    3. You have to keep your hematocrit up.

Rule number 3 was regrettable in Cecco’s eyes, but ultimately unavoidable, a simple fact of life. Cecco made it clear: he never got involved in the dark side. He constantly told me that I did not have to engage in the risky, medically questionable, stress-inducing arms race of chasing after Substance X or Substance Z, or some Russian anabolic jelly beans. He constantly warned me about Fuentes, telling me I didn’t need all the stuff he provided. I could simplify my life and focus on what mattered: my training.

If working with Ufe was stressful, working with Cecco was a treat. Whenever I visited, he insisted I stay at his home, a villa crammed with bustling life: family meals around a big kitchen table with his wife, Anna, and grown sons Stefano and Anzano, who lived nearby. Cecco’s life was that of a European nobleman. His wife ran a fashionable clothing store in Lucca; Cecco flew a small private plane; Stefano drove sports cars. His money gave him an intellectual freedom that the others lacked; though we worked closely together for years, Cecco never charged me a dime.
^*

Every visit began with a light breakfast, then we’d go for a ride together and talk (for his age, he was an exceptionally strong rider). Then we’d go into the stone house where he kept his office, and Cecco would weigh me and measure my body fat and we’d begin
the real work, a prescribed assortment of intervals and tests, either on the road or on a stationary trainer, depending on the weather.

Cecco swiftly diagnosed my main shortcoming: I lacked top-end speed. Under Postal, my engine had been trained over the years to be a diesel, capable of producing long, steady power. What won big races, however, was not diesels but turbos, riders capable of producing five minutes of high-end power on the steepest climbs, creating a gap, then riding steadily to the line. That’s where I was lacking.

Cecco analyzed my wattages and cadences, and prescribed a program of intensive intervals: revving my engine, over and over, into the red zone for short periods of time. I did a lot of what he called 40–20s, which meant 40 seconds full gas, followed by 20 seconds of rest repeated over and over. These may have been the toughest and most productive workouts I’ve ever done. He recommended that I use an altitude simulator. Soon, I was seeing the results: my top-end wattage was increasing quickly.

We were a good fit. I appreciated Cecco’s knowledge, his wisdom, his dry sense of humor. He appreciated my sincerity, and how I did all his workouts to a T, no matter what. I knew other riders who would do 90 percent of a workout, 95 percent. I always did exactly what he asked, if not more. Every day I would download my training file to him with a precise record of my wattage, my cadence, every pedal stroke. Every day he would read and analyze it, and plan out the next day’s work. We sent the files back and forth and I saw my numbers rise. And rise.