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 (28 page)

Tour crashes are like any other, except they’re bigger and more destructive. This one was particularly spectacular: at the end of the stage, a tight turn, everybody going like hell, fighting for position. One bad move—in this case a French rider cutting off a Spanish rider—triggers the whole chain reaction. From a distance, it looks like a bomb goes off in the peloton. I was smack in the middle of it, unable to stop, to turn, to do anything but tense up and get ready to take it. I hit the pile, stopped dead, and was whipped to the ground. As I hit the pavement, my world exploded in stars; I heard a crack. My shoulder.

Fuck.

I crossed the finish line with my left arm hanging limp, dead. X-rays confirmed a double fracture of the collarbone, a neat V-shaped crack. More out of reflex than anything, I asked if continuing the race was a possibility, and the doctor didn’t hesitate.
Ce n’est pas possible
, he said. Impossible.

Headlines flashed around the world:
Hamilton Out
. Riders break collarbones often, and the protocol was clear: one or two weeks off the bike, no question. It was devastating. All that work, all that
preparation, all that risk. The IMAX film, the sponsors, the team—all of it gone, over. Bjarne and I both had tears in our eyes.

I asked a second doctor: What did he think?

Impossible.

I asked a third doctor—and got a glint of hope. He said that while the bone was clearly fractured, it was stable. There was a chance. I decided to try.

The next morning, with some deep breaths and some painful contortions, I was able to put my jersey on. CSC’s trainer put a couple of swaths of athletic tape across my collarbone to help stabilize it. The mechanic reduced pressure in my tires and added three layers of gel tape to my handlebars to provide some cushion. The team, assuming I would ride a few minutes and then drop out, brought my suitcase to the first feed zone, so I could go straight to the airport.

I climbed on my bike.

Pain comes in different flavors. This was a new taste—harsher, blinding; if it had had color, it would have been electric green. Rolling over a pebble caused a bolt of agony that ran from my fingertips to the top of my skull; I couldn’t decide whether to yell or throw up. But here’s the thing: if you can take the first ten minutes, then you can take more. Time stops mattering. In a strange way the chaos and rush of the race was soothing. I pushed harder, using the pain in my muscles to distract me from the pain in my collarbone.

Thank God the stage was flat and relatively easy, in Tour terms. I rode at the back all day, and I managed to finish that day in the bunch. My face was chalky, I could barely talk. I could tell by the looks around me that the other riders didn’t expect to see me the next day.

The next morning, I showed up again. Again, felt those electric-green lightning bolts. Again, felt like I was going to throw up, pass out, die. Again, made it through.

In this way, I made it through the first week. It didn’t hurt any less, but I felt my body and mind adapting to the task. People started
paying attention; it became a small sensation. The IMAX producers were over the moon—
talk about brain power
, they kept saying. I had to remind people to please stop patting me on the back; it hurt too much.

The real test was going to be stage 8, a brutal triple ascent of the Télégraphe and the Galibier, and finishing on the most famous climb of all, twenty-one legendary hairpin turns of Alpe d’Huez. We all knew that Alpe d’Huez would be where Lance and Postal would make their move: they’d use the team to burn everybody off with a hot pace, and pave the way for Lance’s usual first-climb-of-the-Tour attack.

Three days before stage 8, I made a chess move. Ufe and I had originally scheduled my second BB for the Tour’s first rest day, two days after Alpe d’Huez. But with my broken collarbone, I was feeling weak. I’d burned a lot of energy the first week. I needed my BB now. I texted Ufe on my secret phone.

We need to have dinner on the 11th, in Lyon.

He texted back immediately—weren’t we supposed to meet later? He wasn’t sure if he could make that work. I didn’t back down. It felt like an unfamiliar role for me—the tough-guy boss. I was basically telling Ufe to shut up and do what I wanted.

This is important. It has to be the 11th.

The night of the 11th, I was in my hotel room in Lyon. It was after 10 p.m. when I heard a knock on my door. Ufe came in carrying a soft-sided cooler. He was disheveled and a little ticked off—he’d had to drive quite a ways to make this work. But he was also excited. Talking a mile a minute, as usual.

“What the fuck, Tyler, you are crazy! Riding with a broken collarbone? You are having a good Tour!”

Even in his agitated state, Ufe was efficient. In a few minutes he had the bag out and I was hooked up. Rubber band, needle, valve, zip-zip. Fifteen minutes later, he headed back into the night and I was ready for Alpe d’Huez.

Not everybody was so lucky. On stage 7, a Kelme rider named Jesús Manzano had collapsed by the side of the road and nearly died. Over the following days the truth came out through the peloton grapevine. Rumor was, something had gone wrong with his BB—perhaps it had been carelessly handled, or allowed to heat up, or gotten infected. A bad BB could kill you, because it was like getting injected with poison. I felt grateful to have professionals working with me.
^*

Of course, there were still the testers to contend with. We called them vampires. During the Tour they tended to arrive first thing in the morning to demand blood and urine. After getting my early BB, I was concerned about getting tested—and sure enough, the next morning, our team was chosen to be tested. Fortunately for me, the protocols worked in my favor: as is customary, the riders were given a brief window of time after being notified to produce themselves to be tested. It’s not a lot of time, but it’s enough to get an intravenous bag of saline we called a speed bag which lowered the hematocrit by about three points. This is where the soigneurs and team doctors really earn their money: they’re constantly on standby, in case they’re needed. CSC’s crew was as good as Postal’s. One speed bag later, I was back in the safe zone. It’s a team sport.

On Sunday, July 13, 2003, the innovation curve caught up to Lance and Postal on Alpe d’Huez. The weather was blazing hot; the tar on the roads was starting to melt in the heat. On the day’s second climb, the Galibier, Postal sent five riders to the front and put the hammer down. In past years, the peloton would have shredded, leaving Lance with only a few rivals. But this year it didn’t happen; about thirty of us made it over the top with them. And we were looking good.

There was Ullrich, sharper and leaner than I’d ever seen him. You could almost sense Cecco’s influence in his relaxed body language, in the ease with which he answered accelerations.

Mayo and Beloki, who rode for different teams (Mayo for Euskaltel-Euskadi, Beloki for ONCE), were opposites: Beloki had sad eyes and a mournful manner; Mayo was charismatic and handsome. But both loved attacking, and both were fearless: they didn’t ride for placings, they rode to win.

Then you had Alexandre Vinokourov, the Krazy Kazakh. Though he had the body of a fire hydrant, Vino was a monster competitor: a tireless attacker, equally good on time trials and climbs, with one of the best poker faces in the peloton. You never could tell when he was going to launch some suicidal attack. Plus, I figured he was going to be well prepared. One time, while waiting outside Ufe’s Madrid office, I’d spotted Vino in a nearby café.

At the foot of Alpe d’Huez, five Posties went to the front. Heras and Chechu started sprinting—full gas, as vicious a sprint as they could manage. It was the kind of punch that had won four previous Tours, superhigh wattage for a couple of minutes. For a second, I got dropped. Then I got back on.

That’s the moment. If someone wants to see where doping affects a race, I’d point them to those ten seconds at the foot of Alpe d’Huez in 2003. When Lance and company accelerated, I was instantly twenty, thirty feet back. Without the BB, I would have fallen further back and never returned; my day would have been over. But
with the BB, I had those extra five heartbeats, those twenty more watts. With the BB, I could claw my way back. On the video, you can see me rising out of the bottom of the picture; I catch on to the lead group. And when Lance looks back, I’m right there.

Lance keeps attacking, spinning the pedals, hitting his numbers. But he can’t drop us: it’s Mayo and his teammate Haimar Zubeldia, Beloki and Vino. And no Posties—because Lance is alone now; he’s burned up his helpers.

A few minutes into the Alpe, Lance gets out of the saddle, standing like he does when he’s going his hardest. I can’t stand—my collarbone hurts too much—so I grit my teeth, keep sitting, and go as deep as I can. It was like those old training days: just him and me in the mountains above Nice. He’s giving his all, and I’m answering.

How’s that?

—I’m still here.

How’s that?

—Still here.

A little math: the leader on a climb typically spends 15 to 20 more watts than the guy in his slipstream. That’s why you want to follow as much as you can, conserving your energy for the key moments, the attacks and replies. The phrase we use is “burning matches,” meaning that each rider has a certain number of big efforts he can make. Now, on Alpe d’Huez, Lance was burning one match after another.

We sense it, and start attacking him. First Beloki, then Mayo, then I give it a dig, leaving Lance behind. And it works. For a few seconds, I’m in the clear. On the television broadcast, commentators Phil Liggett and Paul Sherwen are going crazy.

“We’ve never seen a climb like this before,” Liggett shouts. “They believe [Lance is] vulnerable! They actually believe Armstrong can be beaten!”

Lance has the bad face going: deep lines on the forehead, lower lip pushed out, head tipped forward. He drags himself up to me.
Then Mayo escapes, charging up the road, his unzipped orange jersey flapping like a superhero’s cape. Vinokourov follows; Lance lets them both go. I try to escape again, but Lance follows. Now we’ve reversed roles; he’s the one telling me,
I’m still here, dude
.

By the last switchbacks, we’re both out of matches; we ride the last few kilometers of the climb close to each other. Mayo scores the victory; Vino is second; Lance and I finish with five others, with Ullrich only 1:24 behind. Afterward, all the talk in the media is of Lance’s weakness. But we riders know that they’ve got it wrong. The truth is that the playing field, for the first time in my Tour de France career, is level.

In the following days, due to favoring my collarbone, I compressed a nerve in my lower back. This ignited a pain that was even worse than the collarbone and caused my back to spasm and seize up. The evening of stage 10, the pain became unbearable. Walking was becoming difficult. My breathing was restricted. We tried all the usual methods: massage, ice, heat, Tylenol—nothing worked. It felt like an iron fist wrapped around my spine, squeezing.

CSC’s therapist, a lanky, new-agey guy named Ole Kare Foli, decided to try an extreme chiropractic adjustment—basically, to try to straighten me out the same way you’d straighten a bent piece of copper pipe. I told him to do it, quick. So he did. I was screaming and Ole and Haven were crying and Tugboat was barking. But when it was over, I felt better. I lost some time the next couple stages, but stayed within striking distance of the podium.

Going into stage 15, the race was tighter than ever: five riders within 4:37 of each other. Postal, seemingly with only one card to play, tried again to beat us with brute force; again they failed. By the last climb of the day, to Luz Ardiden, we were all together. Mayo was first to attack; Lance responded, and we followed. Lance caught Mayo, then set off on the attack himself.

When Lance is leading, he sometimes likes to make it hard on the pursuers by riding as close as possible to the spectators on the edge
of the road; that way, his rival can use less of his slipstream than if he were in the center. Giving a half draft, it’s called; and while it’s useful, it’s also risky. Because when you ride close to spectators, things can happen.

In this case, it was a boy of about ten. He was playing with a yellow plastic musette—a souvenir feed bag—and as Armstrong passed, his right handlebar caught the handle of the musette; the boy instinctively hung on, neatly flipping Armstrong to the pavement and causing Mayo to crash as well; Ullrich swerved to avoid joining them.

We rode on. In such cases, it’s traditional to call a halt to all attacking, to wait for the yellow jersey to rejoin the group—part of the ancient code of bike-racing chivalry. So we kept pedaling at a steady speed, waiting for Lance to rejoin the group.

Ullrich kept pedaling too. I saw him a couple hundred meters up the road, and it didn’t seem to me like he was waiting. Ullrich wasn’t attacking, exactly, but he sure wasn’t slowing down either. I decided to burn a match, to catch him and tell him to take it down a notch. It took me about a minute, and when I pulled alongside, I gestured for him and the rest to wait. Ullrich waited, and Lance rejoined us. Then Lance rode off and won the stage in impressive fashion, putting 40 seconds into Ullrich and 1:10 into me, and giving himself a small margin going into the Tour’s final days.