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 (3 page)

“The thing was, Lance was always different from the rest of us,” Hamilton said. “We all wanted to win. But Lance
needed
to win. He had to make 100 percent sure that he won, every time, and that made him do some things that went way over the line, in my opinion. I understand that he’s done a lot of good for a lot of people, but
it still isn’t right. Should he be prosecuted, go to prison for what he did? I don’t think so. But should he have won seven Tours in a row? Absolutely not. So yes, I think people have the right to know the truth. People need to know how it all really happened, and then they can make up their own minds.”
^*

*
In the pages that follow, I’ll be providing context and commentary to Hamilton’s account through footnotes.

Chapter 1
 
GETTING IN THE GAME

I’M GOOD AT PAIN.

I know that sounds strange, but it’s true. In every other area of life, I’m an average person. I’m not a brainiac. I don’t have superhuman reflexes. I’m five-eight, 160 pounds soaking wet. If you met me on the street, I wouldn’t stand out in the least. But in situations where things are pushed to the mental and physical edge, I’ve got a gift. I can keep going
no matter what
. The tougher things get, the better I do. I’m not masochistic about it, because I’ve got a method. Here’s the secret: You can’t block out the pain. You have to embrace it.

I think part of it comes from my family. Hamiltons are tough; we always have been. My ancestors were rebellious Scots from a warring clan; my grandfathers were adventurous types: skiers and outdoorsmen. Grandpa Carl was one of the first people to ski down Mount Washington; Grandpa Arthur crewed on a tramp freighter to South America. My mom and dad met backcountry skiing in Tuckerman’s Ravine, the steepest, most dangerous run in the
Northeast—their version of a quiet, romantic date, I suppose. My dad owned an office-supply shop near Marblehead, a seaside town of twenty thousand north of Boston. His business had its ups and downs—as Grandpa Arthur used to say, we went from eating steak to eating hamburger. But my dad always found a way to battle back. When I was little, he used to tell me that it’s not the size of the dog in the fight; it’s the size of the fight in the dog. I know it’s a cliché, but it’s one that I believed with all my heart; still do.

We lived in an old yellow saltbox house at 37 High Street in the middle-class part of town. I was the youngest of three, behind my brother, Geoff, and my sister, Jennifer. Twenty-plus kids lived within two blocks, all about the same age. It was the age before parenting was invented, so we roamed free, returning inside only for meals and sleep. It wasn’t a childhood so much as a never-ending series of competitions: street hockey, sailing, and swimming in summer; sledding, skating, and skiing in winter. We got into a decent amount of mischief: sneaking on board the rich people’s yachts and using them as clubhouses, slaloming Big Wheels down the steeps of Dunn’s Lane, inventing a new sport called Walter Payton Hedge Jumping—basically, you pick the nicest house with the tallest hedge, and you dive over it like Walter Payton used to jump over the defensive line. When the owners come out, run like heck.

My parents didn’t place many demands on us, except that we always tell the truth, no matter what. My dad once told me that if we ever had a family crest, it would contain only one word: HONESTY. It’s how Dad ran his business, and how we ran our family. Even when we got in trouble—especially when we got in trouble—if we faced up to the truth, my parents wouldn’t be mad.

That’s one of the reasons why, for one special day every summer, our family had a tradition of hosting the Mountain Goat Invitational Crazy Croquet Tournament in our backyard. The Mountain Goat Invitational has only one rule—cheating is strongly encouraged. In fact, you can do anything short of picking up your opponent’s
ball and chucking it into the Atlantic (which, come to think of it, might have been done a few times). It was big fun—the winner was always disqualified for cheating, and our friends got to enjoy the joke: the sight of those famously honest Hamiltons cheating their heads off.

As a kid I was scrappy, always racing to keep up with the bigger guys. By the time I was ten, my list of injuries was pretty long: stitches, broken bones, burst appendix, sprains, and the like (the emergency-room nurses jokingly suggested my parents buy a punch card—ten visits, the eleventh is free). It was caused by usual stuff: falling off fences, jumping from bunk beds, getting knocked by a Chevy while riding bikes to school. But whenever I was banged up, Mom would be there to dab my scrapes with a warm washcloth, give me a bandage and a kiss, and boot me out the door.

Dad and I were close, but Mom and I had a special bond. She was a great athlete in her own right, and when I was small I used to want to imitate her. Early each morning she would do an exercise routine in our living room—fifteen minutes of Jack LaLanne–type calisthenics. I’d wake up early and sneak downstairs so I could join her. We made quite a pair: a four-year-old and his mom doing push-ups and jumping jacks.
A-
one
-two-three-four
, two-
two-three-four.…

That wasn’t the only thing that made Mom and me close. For as long as I can remember, I’ve had this problem. The closest I can come to describing it is to say that it’s a darkness that lives on the edge of my mind, a painful heaviness that comes and goes unexpectedly. When it comes on, it’s like a black wave, pressing all the energy out of me, pushing on me until it feels like I’m a thousand feet down at the bottom of a cold dark ocean. As a kid, I thought this was normal; I thought everybody had times when they barely had the energy to talk, when they stayed quiet for days. When I got older, I discovered the darkness had a name: clinical depression. It’s genetic, and our family curse: my maternal grandmother committed suicide; my mom suffers from it as well. Today, I control it with
the help of medication; back then, I had Mom. When the dark wave overtook me, she would be there, letting me know she knew how I felt. It wasn’t anything big; maybe she’d make me a bowl of chicken-noodle soup, or take me for a walk, or just let me climb up on her lap. But it helped a lot. Those moments bonded us, and fueled within me an endless desire to make her proud, to show her what I could do. To this day, when I reflect on the deepest reasons I wanted to be an athlete, I think a lot of it came from a powerful desire to make her proud.
Look, Ma
!

When I was eleven or so, I made an important discovery. It happened while I was skiing at Wildcat Mountain, New Hampshire, where we went every winter weekend. Wildcat is a famously brutal place to ski: steep, icy, with some of the worst weather on the continent. It’s located in the White Mountains, directly across the valley from Mount Washington, where the highest winds in North America are regularly recorded. This day was typical: horrendous winds, stinging sleet, freezing rain. I was skiing with the rest of the Wildcat ski team, riding up the chairlift and skiing down a bamboo-pole racecourse, over and over. Until for some reason I got a strange idea, almost a compulsion.

Don’t take the chairlift. Walk up instead
.

So I got out of the chairlift line and started walking. It wasn’t easy. I had to carry my skis on my shoulder, and chip steps in the ice with the toe of my heavy ski boots. My teammates, riding up in the lift, looked down at me as if I’d gone insane, and in a way they were right: a scrawny eleven-year-old was racing against the chairlift. Some of my teammates joined me. We were John Henry against the steam engine; our legs against the horsepower of that big spinning motor. And so we raced: up, up, up, one step at a time. I remember feeling the pain burning in my legs, feeling my heart in my throat, and also feeling something more profound: I realized that I could keep going. I didn’t have to stop. I could hear the pain, but I didn’t have to listen to it.

That day awakened something in me. I discovered when I went all out, when I put 100 percent of my energy into some intense, impossible task—when my heart was jackhammering, when lactic acid was sizzling through my muscles—that’s when I felt good, normal, balanced. I’m sure a scientist would explain it by saying the endorphins and adrenaline temporarily altered my brain chemistry, and maybe they’d be right. All I knew, though, was the more I pushed myself, the better I felt. Exertion was my escape. I think that’s why I was always able to keep up with guys who were bigger and stronger, and who scored better on physiological tests. Because tests can’t measure willingness to suffer.

Let me sum up my early sporting career. First I was a skier—regionally, nationally ranked, Olympic hopeful. I raced bikes in the off-season to keep in shape, and I won some age-group races in high school—I was a solid bike racer, but certainly not national-level. Then, during my sophomore year at the University of Colorado, I broke my back while dry-land training with the ski team, ending my ski career. While I was recovering, I funneled all my energy into the bike, and made Big Discovery Number Two: I
loved
bike racing. Bike racing combined the thrill of skiing with the savvy of chess. Best of all (for me), it rewarded the ability to suffer. The more you could suffer, the better you did. One year later, I was 1993 national collegiate cycling champion. By the following summer, I was one of the better amateur riders in the country, a member of the U.S. National Team, and an Olympic hopeful. It was crazy, unlikely, and it felt like I’d found my destiny.

By the spring of 1994, life was beautifully simple. I was twenty-three years old, living in a small apartment in Boulder, subsisting on ramen noodles and Boboli ready-made pizza crusts covered with peanut butter. The national team paid only a small stipend, so to make ends meet I started a business called Flatiron Hauling, the assets of which consisted of myself and a 1973 Ford flatbed truck. I placed an ad in the
Boulder Daily Camera
with the slogan that
might’ve been my athletic motto: “No Job Too Small or Tough.” I hauled stumps, scrap metal, and, once, what looked to be a metric ton of dog shit out of someone’s backyard. Even so, I felt fortunate to be where I was: standing at the bottom of bike racing’s huge staircase, looking up, wondering how high I might climb.

That’s when I met Lance. It was May 1994, a rainy afternoon in Wilmington, Delaware, and I was entered in a bike race called the Tour DuPont: 12 days, 1,000 miles, 112 riders, including five of the top nine teams in the world. Lance and I were roughly the same age, but we wanted different things. Lance was out to win. I wanted to see if I could keep up, if I belonged with the big kids.

He was a big deal already. He’d won the world championship one-day race the previous fall in Oslo, Norway. I’d kept the
VeloNews
with his picture and I knew his story by heart: the fatherless Texan born to a teenage mom, the triathlon prodigy who’d switched to bike racing. The articles all used the words “brazen” and “brash” to describe his personality. I’d seen how Armstrong celebrated at the finish line in Oslo with a touchdown dance: blowing kisses, punching the air, showboating for the crowd. Some people—okay, pretty much all people—thought Lance was cocky. But I liked his energy, his in-your-face style. When people asked Armstrong if he was the second Greg LeMond, he would say, “Nope, I’m the first Lance Armstrong.”

There were lots of Lance stories being traded around. One involved the time when world champion Moreno Argentin accidentally called Armstrong by the wrong name, mistaking him for Lance’s teammate Andy Bishop. Armstrong blew a gasket. “Fuck you, Chiappucci!” he yelled, calling Argentin by the name of his teammate. Another took place in the previous year’s Tour DuPont. A Spanish rider tried to nudge American Scott Mercier off the road, and Armstrong had come to his countryman’s defense, racing up to the Spanish guy and telling him to back off—and the Spanish guy actually did. All the stories were really the same story: Lance being
Lance, the headstrong American cowboy storming the castle walls of European cycling. I loved hearing these stories, because I was dreaming of storming those castle walls, too.

The day before the race started, I walked around staring at faces I’d only seen in cycling magazines. The Russian Olympic gold medalist Viatcheslav Ekimov, with his rock-star mullet and his Soviet scowl. Mexican climber Raúl Alcalá, the silent assassin who’d won the previous year’s race. George Hincapie, a lanky, sleepy-eyed New Yorker who’d been tipped as the next big American racer. There was even three-time Tour de France champion Greg LeMond, in his final year before retirement but still looking bright-eyed and youthful.

You can tell a rider’s fitness by the shape of his ass and the veins in his legs, and these asses were bionic, smaller and more powerful than any I’d ever seen. Their leg veins looked like highway maps. Their arms were toothpicks. On their bikes, they could slither through the tightest pack of riders at full speed, one hand on the handlebars. Looking at them was inspiring; they were like racehorses.

Looking at myself—that was a different feeling. If they were thoroughbreds, I was a work pony. My ass was big; my legs showed zero veins. I had narrow shoulders, ski-racer thighs, and thick arms that fit into my jersey sleeves like sausages into casing. Plus, I pedaled with a potato-masher stroke, and because I was on the small side, I had a tendency to tilt my head slightly back to see over other riders, which people said gave me a slightly surprised look, as if I wasn’t quite sure where I was. The plain truth was, I had no real business being in the Tour DuPont. I didn’t have the power, experience, or the bike-handling skills to compete with the European pros, much less beat them over twelve days.