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 (25 page)

As May’s Tour of Italy approached, Bjarne and I started to refine the plan. Ufe and I decided to use two BBs, one before the race, and one during. Reinfusing the first BB would not be a problem—I’d get it in the safety of Ufe’s Madrid office, just before flying to the start of stage 1.

The second BB presented a problem. The Italian anti-doping
laws were strict; the police had a disturbing tendency to raid hotel rooms and team buses. Ufe made it clear that he had zero interest in risking a trip to Italy. The solution was found by Bjarne, who noticed that stage 5 of the race finished in the town of Limone Piemonte, an hour and a half’s drive from the small, independent, and convenient nation of Monaco.

The plan took shape: Haven and I would rent an apartment in Monaco in April. In mid-April, four weeks before the Tour of Italy, Ufe would meet us at the Monaco apartment, take out a BB, and store it in the refrigerator. Then, on May 17, after the Tour of Italy’s stage 5, Haven could pick me up at the stage finish and drive me to Monaco. Ufe would again meet us at the apartment, and we could do the reinfusion in safety. The plan wasn’t perfect—strategically speaking, it would have been better to reinfuse the BB later in the race, during the second or third week, when it could have the biggest impact on performance. But it was as good as we were going to get.

So in mid-April 2002, as Lance was zipping overhead on his private jet, Haven, Tugboat, and I drove our blue Hyundai wagon from Girona to Monaco. We rented a one-bedroom apartment in a big, anonymous, blue-awninged building called La Grande Bretagne; it was a five-minute walk from the Monte Carlo Casino. A few days later, Ufe drove up from Spain with the transfusion gear. The BB withdrawal went smoothly; I lay on the couch and watched the bag fill. We stored the BB inside a soy-milk container. We unfolded the cardboard from the bottom, slid the bag inside, reglued the cardboard, and tucked it in the back of the fridge. It fit perfectly. If you squeezed the sides of the container, it felt like milk.

We settled in to stay at the apartment for the next four weeks. I had to leave often to train and race, which left Haven and Tugs in Monaco. It was a prime example of what a team player Haven was, because while we’d done all the preparation, there was one element beyond our control: electricity. We were worried about power outages,
which would cause the blood to warm up and go bad. So we decided not to take any chances, and Haven and Tugs settled in to babysit our BB.
^†

The day of the Tour of Italy prologue I was beyond excited. This was the first time I’d been an unquestioned team leader since college; my chance to prove I belonged. Maybe that’s why, in the prologue, I rode too aggressively. Five hundred meters into the race I came into a right-hand turn way too fast and smashed into the barricades. I broke my helmet and lost some skin on my elbows and knees, got up, and kept going.

The race was wild. If the Tour de France is the Indy 500 of bike racing, then the Tour of Italy is NASCAR: passionate fans, crashes, lots of drama. Part of it was the fact that the roads of Italy are narrower and steeper than the French roads; part of it was that Italian racers like to take chances, both on the road and off. This particular Tour of Italy was no exception. Two team leaders, Stefano Garzelli and Gilberto Simoni, were sent home when they tested positive.

Now that I was a team leader and taking bigger risks, it was nerve-racking to see other top riders get popped. One day they’re in the race, riding a few inches from you, chatting. The next they’re gone, plucked out as if by a giant hand. At first, you feel scared and vulnerable—did the testers suddenly get smart? Am I next? Then, the peloton grapevine starts humming with gossip, and pretty soon a reason is established. In the case of Garzelli and Simoni, word was that they’d had echo-positives. Their BBs were contaminated with something they’d taken weeks earlier. Hearing that felt reassuring—bummer for them, but bottom line, they should have known better.

So I thanked my lucky stars, and not for the first time. You won’t be surprised to learn that bike racers tend to be a superstitious bunch, me included. Since there’s so much we can’t control, we do our best to make our own luck. Some riders cross themselves constantly, some whisper prayers on climbs, some tape holy medals to their handlebars. I tend to knock on wood a lot; or if there’s no wood around, I use my head. Then there’s the superstition about spilling salt. One night midway through the Tour of Italy, my CSC teammate Michael Sandstød decided to risk breaking the rule. He purposely knocked over the salt shaker, then poured out the salt in his hand and tossed it all around, laughing, saying, “It’s just salt!” We laughed too, but more nervously. The next day, Michael crashed on a steep downhill, breaking eight ribs, fracturing his shoulder, and puncturing a lung; he nearly died. After that, I started carrying a lucky vial of salt in my jersey pocket, just in case.

Even so, I had my own spell of bad luck: I crashed on stage 5 due to a mechanical glitch and cracked my shoulder. We didn’t know it was broken at the time, just that it hurt like hell. I limped off my bike and found Haven and our Hyundai. We might have gone to the hospital, but we had more important things to do—drive to Monaco so I could meet Ufe and reinfuse my BB.

Ufe was waiting in a nearby café; we texted him and he hustled upstairs. We might have been nervous, but he was stoked. He was talking a mile a minute. He kept saying how great it was that I was near the lead, how now I would be ready to win the race. Everything was
fabuloso
.

Ufe pulled the soy-milk container from the fridge, unpacked it, and taped the bag to the wall. He hooked me up, and I felt the now-familiar chill as my blood flowed into my arm. Haven stayed in the room and tried to make idle chatter, avoiding the sight of the BB. Ufe explained how I should ride with a transfusion.

“When you’re suffering, you must remember: you can still go
harder,” he said. “You have more in your tank than you think. Push through.”

I listened closely, and in the following days, I found out that Ufe was 100 percent right. That knowledge changed my career. I hadn’t realized it on Ventoux in 2000. The key to riding with a BB is that you have to push past all the warning signs, past all the usual walls. You get to that place beyond your edge, the place where you’ve fallen a thousand times, and all of a sudden you can hang there. You’re not just surviving; you’re competing, making moves, dictating the race.

Now that I was tuning in to my numbers, I could feel the difference. With the transfusion on board, I had 3 to 4 percent more power, which meant 12 or 16 more watts; I could sustain a threshold heart rate of 180 beats per minute instead of 175. Five more heartbeats per minute, and it made all the difference.

The thrill of being in contention helped balance out the pain in my shoulder, which was hurting like a bastard. Deep, intense pain, like someone had stuck a screwdriver in my shoulder socket and was trying to pry it off. The adrenaline of the race helped for a while, but eventually that wore off and I was left with the hurt. So I started grinding my teeth. It wasn’t intentional, just a reflex at first. But I found when I ground them really hard—when I could feel the satisfying scrape of tooth on tooth—it helped. I know it sounds strange, but grinding my teeth gave me a distraction, a sense of control. As my dental bill eventually showed, I probably overdid the grinding (I’d need eleven teeth recapped). But it worked.

As it turned out, I almost won the Tour of Italy. But on the last mountain stage, with three kilometers to go in the final climb, I ran out of energy—bonked, hit the wall. I ended up finishing second to the Italian known as “the Falcon,” Paolo Savoldelli. I made a classic mistake: I felt so good and so strong that I forgot to eat enough. Cecco later informed me that I was probably one 100-calorie energy
gel away from winning the race. It was a good lesson, proof of the nature of our sport. You plan for months, you risk jail and scandal, you work harder than you’ve ever worked in your life, and in the end you lose because you didn’t eat a gel.

Even so, second place in a grand tour felt like a massive vindication, proof that I was the team leader Bjarne had hired me to be. I was instantly catapulted into the ranks of bona fide Tour de France contenders.

When I returned to Girona, I saw myself on the cover of
ProCycling
magazine—“Tyler Stakes His Claim” was the headline, and underneath it was a quote from me: “Racing against Lance isn’t a problem.”

Right.

*
As a student, Cecchini had trained with Ferrari under the father of exercise science, Francesco Conconi. Cecchini and Ferrari then worked together on an Italian team, before each went his own way. Like Ferrari, Cecchini was investigated several times by Italian police, who bugged his phones, raided his house, and, at one point, charged him (the charges were later dropped)—all of which might have contributed to Cecchini’s desire to remain an unpaid adviser.

†
Hamilton was not the only rider to worry about this, of course. Floyd Landis said that Armstrong kept blood bags inside a small medical refrigerator in the closet of his Girona home, and that, in 2003, Armstrong asked Landis to stay in the apartment while he was away, to make sure that the power didn’t go out and that the fridge remained at a constant temperature.

Chapter 10
 
LIFE AT THE TOP

ONE OF THE THINGS I learned in 2002 was that living in the same building as Lance had its complications. The walls were thick as a prison’s, but we could still hear each other moving around—dishes, doors, voices. The inner courtyard, where Lance had his bike garage, was like an amplifier. Lance liked to talk loud; when he was in there we could hear every word. When we bumped into each other, we were friendly enough—
hey, what’s up, dude, how’s it going?
Sometimes he would make little comments to show that he knew what I was doing behind closed doors—
hey, how was Madrid?
—but I ignored him, kept walking.

As soon as I started at CSC, my life in Girona changed. I didn’t try to train with my old Postal friends (which under normal, non-Lance circumstances, would have been acceptable); instead I trained alone or sometimes with Levi Leipheimer, a quiet, intense Montanan who rode for the Dutch team Rabobank. I didn’t hang out at the coffee shop across the street from where we lived. I didn’t linger in the courtyard. Instead of the gossipy scene of the group rides, I
was able to focus on my own numbers, my own goals. My system for dealing with Lance was similar to the strategy you’d use if you lived near a pit bull: Move slowly and calmly. Don’t make any sudden moves. Even so, my links to Postal were never far away.

One day that spring I answered a knock at my door and was surprised to see Michele Ferrari. This time he had a different way to pinch me. He’d been downstairs, visiting Lance, and had popped up to let me know that I owed him $15,000 from the previous year. I wasn’t so sure about his figures—since mid-2001, when I’d been booted from the inner circle, Ferrari hadn’t given me any coaching. But I didn’t want to make waves. I talked him down to $10,000, wrote him a check, and got him out of my life forever.

When it came to keeping peace in the building, I had one advantage: Haven. Lance had always admired Haven. He respected her business savvy and wanted her opinion on things. In his eyes, she seemed to stand out from the other wives and girlfriends and, as a result, he treated her with respect. This allowed Haven to serve as our building’s peacekeeper, keeping conversations moving, preventing any small problems from boiling up into bigger ones. Haven was good at her role because she understood Lance. She was the one who came up with one of the better lines about him that I’ve ever heard.
Lance is Donald Trump. He might own all of Manhattan, but if there’s one tiny corner grocery store out there without his name on it, it drives him crazy
.

In this analogy, Haven and I were the corner grocery store. Though I still was making less money than I had at Postal, my new success had brought some changes: sponsors, attention, media, and our own charitable foundation. A few years back I’d watched a friend’s mother-in-law suffer from multiple sclerosis, and I’d become interested in the cause, getting involved with several MS fundraisers. Now we decided to formalize and expand our effort, and began building what would become the Tyler Hamilton Foundation. It felt good to give back.

If we were a start-up company, Haven was our CEO. She returned the emails, vetted the contracts, even ghost-wrote my columns for
VeloNews
. She made the travel arrangements for trips to Lucca to see Cecco and the shuttles to Madrid; she made the bank withdrawals to get the cash for me to pay Ufe. It was busy and stressful, but on the other hand, we only had a few years to do it before I would retire and we’d get on with our lives.

For the time being, though, Haven and I decided to hold off on having kids. We talked about it a lot; I was in favor, but then, I wouldn’t be the one who’d bear most of the burden. Haven wanted to wait until I was retired. She knew how tough it would be, essentially raising a child by herself. So when the old Spanish women in the neighborhood would ask Haven when she was going to have a baby, we smiled politely and said, “Someday.” Tugboat became the one piece of normalcy in our world. Tugs was always glad to see us, always ready for some fun, always willing to chase that tennis ball around the cobblestone streets. We took him on training trips, bought him sandwiches, doted on him like he was our baby. In a sense, that’s what he was.