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 (27 page)

When I was thirteen or so, I joined a club called Crazykids of America, made up of kids my age who skied at Wildcat Mountain in New Hampshire. There were no adults, no official meetings, no dues. The purpose of the club was basically to dare each other to do risky, borderline-stupid stuff: climb a cliff, crawl through a long drainage pipe, sled down an icy run on a cafeteria tray at night. The whole point of Crazykids was to get to the edge, see how far you’d go.

Nobody in Crazykids would go further than me. I wasn’t the biggest, or the strongest, or the fastest, but I could always push things to their limit. I’ve always had a love for the edge, a need for adrenaline. Maybe it’s the depression, maybe it’s my need for stimulation. But when I’m given the chance to go to the brink, I go.

In some ways 2003 was the Crazykid year of my bike racing, the year where I went to the edge. It was, by far, the most successful year of my career. I got everything I ever wanted—every victory, every accolade, every big moment—and it nearly ended up destroying me.

You could see my new attitude in the season’s first major event, Paris–Nice in March. In the past, I’d always shown up for Paris–Nice, that weeklong competition known as “the Race to the Sun,” with a question in my mind: Was I good or not? Now, with the help of Cecco and Ufe and Riis, I knew. And I delivered. In the prologue, I finished second. In stage 6, I did a strongman move of my own: a 101-kilometer solo breakaway. I was second in the Tour of the Basque Country, and sixth in Critérium International. In each race, I was with the A students.

The spring’s biggest, and perhaps toughest, race was Liège–Bastogne–Liège; 257 kilometers across Belgium that’s known as the Queen of the Classics. It was one of my favorites; I’d done it every year since 1997. This, however, would be the first time I’d be doing it with the help of a BB. Bjarne and I marked the course into designated
sections, and picked teammates to target specific climbs. Instead of racing the entire race, they would be free to give all their efforts to get me to a certain point, then pull off.

I wasn’t the only one gunning for a win. Lance had not won a classic since 1996, and had gotten a lot of criticism in the cycling media for focusing solely on the Tour de France. It was a perfect Belgian day—rainy, wet, miserable. Lance looked superstrong the entire race, though the rest of Postal was not. With about 30 kilometers to go, he led a break late in the race, and was well positioned to win—if he’d been able to stay away, or had some teammates there to support him. But as strong as he was, the rest of us were stronger. We reeled him in, with my CSC teammates, especially Nicki Sorensen, doing the yeoman’s work. With about 3 kilometers to go, it was down to eight contenders, including Lance and me. It was the same old situation, like we were back on the roads of Nice: Lance and I looking at each other, our wheels one centimeter apart, seeing who was stronger.

For a long moment everyone hesitated. That’s when I attacked. I rode like hell, pouring everything I had into the pedals, and they watched me go, thinking that I’d gone too early. We all knew that the LBL finish is a horrendous, slippery, slowly rising road, one of those final stretches that seem to last forever. They figured there was no way I could stay ahead.

But I did. I felt a level of adrenaline that I’d never felt, a kind of panic, as if I were being chased by a pack of wolves. I felt the lactic acid seep up into the tips of my fingers, my lips, my eyelids. The rain blinded me; I kept pushing. As I neared the line, I looked back and saw the most beautiful sight I’ve ever seen: an empty road.

I crossed the line and became the first American to win Liège–Bastogne–Liège; the media were already humming with stories about my Tour de France chances; if the Tour of Italy had put me in the headlines, LBL put me in the stratosphere. One week later, I
won the six-day Tour of Romandie, and became the UCI’s leading point-scorer for the year, the world’s number one ranked bike racer. And part of me—way down deep—thought,
Uh-oh
.

Did you ever look at the face of a rider who won a big race during the years when I competed? If you looked closely, beneath the smile, you might have seen something darker—worry. The rider was worried because he knew that winning creates other problems, like a 100 percent certainty of being tested. No matter how sure you were that you had obeyed the rules of glowtime, there was always that niggling doubt that you had measured wrong, or missed the vein, or that the testers had come up with some new test nobody had heard about. Standing on the podium brought a terrifying clarity. You realized that your career depended entirely on information you got from some random doctor in Spain, a doctor with zero legitimate credentials, who might or might not know what the hell he was talking about. So while you smiled on the surface, underneath you squirmed.

I had other reasons to be concerned. I knew Lance was going to be pissed. I tried to be nice about it in the press (“Part of this victory is Lance’s,” I said), but it was no use. He stalked out without saying a word to me or anybody else. I heard later that he threw his helmet across his team’s bus. It was pretty quiet around the apartment when I got back.

After my win in Liège–Bastogne–Liège, a river of new opportunities was flowing into our little
apartamento
: sponsorships, endorsements, media, and the like. That spring Haven and I were contacted by a production company that wanted to make an IMAX documentary about my upcoming Tour de France. The producers had originally approached Lance, of course, but he’d turned them down since he already had a film in the works starring Mark Wahlberg and/or Jake Gyllenhaal, depending on whom you asked. So, as happened
often, I was the next-best choice. That’s how the market worked, I guess: if you can’t get Batman, you hire Robin.

The film was titled
Brain Power
; the idea was to use my experience in the 2003 Tour de France to give insights into the way the human mind works when the body is pushed to its limits. The producers had a $6.8 million budget and plans to use whiz-bang computer graphics to take viewers inside my brain as I rode the Tour.

My actual brain was quite busy with a set of decisions I couldn’t exactly tell the filmmakers about. All that spring I was shuttling like mad to Madrid to visit Ufe, to Lucca to visit Cecco, doing my homework for the 2003 Tour de France. We decided to prepare three BBs, one for before the Tour and two for during, in accordance with the Riis 1996 program. I took a break from racing, and worked full-time on my training. I listened to Cecco, who emphasized over and over that all the therapy in the world would not do me any good unless I was first (1) very, very fit, and (2) very, very skinny.

Getting skinny is the part of Tour preparation that is easiest to overlook. It sounds easy: lose weight. Don’t eat. But in fact, it’s like a war, especially when you’re training like a demon and every cell of your body is screaming for nutrients. I spent more time thinking about how to lose weight than I ever spent thinking about doping: the question haunted every meal, every bite I took.

Bjarne recommended his special technique: come home from a training ride, chug a big bottle of fizzy water, and take two or three sleeping pills. By the time you woke up, it would be dinner, or, if you were lucky, breakfast. I tried everything. I drank gallons of Diet Coke. I tried eating lots of raw food—diets of apples and celery. I sucked on butterscotch candies to calm my growling stomach. Every morsel I ate had to be burned off. (Bjarne even reminded me that I needed to account for the extra weight added by a BB in a race.)

I started to get obsessed. When I was eating with friends, I would sometimes take a huge mouthful of food and then fake-sneeze, so I
could spit my food into a napkin, excuse myself to go to the bathroom, and flush it. Or, if Tugboat was around, sneak bites to him so my plate would look emptier. It was embarrassing; I felt like a sneaky third-grader or an anorexic teen. By the middle of my career, it’s fair to say that I was on the verge of having a food disorder (which isn’t uncommon among top racers). But the truth is, losing weight works. If I were given a choice between being three pounds lighter or having three more hematocrit points, I would take the lighter weight every time.

When I was in weight-loss mode, I wasn’t much fun to be with. Haven, for one, was sick of it. There we were, a young married couple in our lovely apartment in one of the most beautiful parts of the world, and we hardly did anything as a couple that wasn’t related to my training. Vacation? Sorry. Fancy restaurant dinner? Wish I could. Weekend in Paris? Maybe after the season. And no matter how you dress it up, there’s not much romance in seltzer water and celery.

Even the simplest pleasures became complicated. Girona was a city built for walking, and Haven loved doing the daily rounds to the bakery, the market, the coffee shop. She would ask me to come, but I was always too slow. I know it sounds crazy—I was probably one of the fittest guys on the planet—but I walked like an old man: slowly, with little steps. Naturally, Haven found this irritating, and we’d sometimes get into fights about it. She’d say, Why can’t you walk faster? I’d say, Why can’t you walk slower?

Bjarne and I weren’t getting along either. He wanted CSC to have two leaders at the Tour de France—Carlos Sastre and me. I, on the other hand, felt that we should put all the team’s resources behind one rider—me. We debated it over and over; I pointed to Postal as the model of how to win the Tour; Bjarne insisted we were better off as a team if we had several cards to play. This argument, which played out over the Tour, showed no signs of resolution. I was in the last year of my contract. In the back of my mind,
seeds of doubt began to grow about my future with Bjarne and CSC.

While life off the bike had its turbulence, life on the bike was going well. As the Tour approached, my wattage kept going up, and my weight kept going down. In mid-June, I started to get the signs. The first was when my arms got so skinny that my jersey sleeves started to flap in the breeze; I’d feel them vibrating against my triceps. The next sign was when it began to hurt when I sat on our wooden dining-table chairs. I had zero fat on my ass; my bones dug into the wood and they ached; I had to sit on a towel to be comfortable. Another sign: my skin got thin and transparent-looking; Haven said she could start to see the outline of my internal organs. The final sign was when friends would start to tell me how shitty I looked—that I was just skin and bones. To my ears it sounded like a compliment. I knew I was getting close.

Chapter 11
 
THE ATTACK

THE 2003 TOUR DE FRANCE really began three weeks earlier at the Dauphiné Libéré. Though Lance won the race, he was tested by Iban Mayo and other climbers who did something new: they out-Lanced Lance. Instead of Lance putting pressure on opponents through accelerations, Mayo turned the tables, applying short bursts of speed, over and over. Not enough to make Lance lose the race, but enough so Lance was hurting, and we were paying attention.

Rather than do a BB in Madrid four days before the race, Bjarne, Ufe, and I had come up with a better, if riskier, plan: to infuse the first BB in Paris the day before the Tour started. The thinking was, the closer to the race I took the BB, the longer its effects would last in the race. To prepare, I kept my hematocrit at 45 prior to the race. I took my physical with the rest of the team, then took a cab to the hotel Ufe had selected: a small, rundown place fifteen minutes from race headquarters. Everything went smoothly; soon my hematocrit was at 48 and I was ready. Things went even better the next day,
when I beat Lance in a Tour prologue for the first time ever. Everything was lining up: I was pushing good numbers on the bike, the weight was good, Ufe was ready with two more BBs, the team was strong. The next day, as we accelerated toward the finish of stage 1, I began to feel a sense of possibility. Maybe, finally, this would be the year.

Then, a crash.

You usually hear a crash before you see it. It’s a metallic, rasping, crunching sound, like a crushed Coke can scraping on concrete magnified a thousand times. Then you hear the squeal of brakes, and this soft thumping sound—the thudding of bodies against asphalt. People yelling and screaming in different languages—“WATCH OUT!” “SHIT!”—but it’s too late. It’s one of the most awful sounds in the world.