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 (4 page)

But I did have one shot: the prologue time trial—each rider racing alone, against the clock. It was a short stage, only 2.98 miles long, a hilly course with several wicked sections of cobbles, and
turns tight enough to require the hay-bale crash padding you usually see in a ski race. While short, the prologue was viewed as an important yardstick of ability, since each rider would be revving his engine to the max. The day before the race, I rode the course a half-dozen times. I examined each curve, memorizing the entry and exit angles, closing my eyes, visualizing myself in the race.

The morning of the prologue, it started raining. I stood near the start ramp, chatting with my U.S. national team coach, a smiley thirty-two-year-old named Chris Carmichael. Carmichael was a nice guy, but he was more of a cheerleader than a coach. He liked to repeat certain pet phrases over and over, like they were lyrics to a pop song. Before the prologue, Chris serenaded me with his entire greatest-hits album:
Ride hard, stay within yourself, don’t forget to breathe
. I wasn’t really listening to him, though. I was thinking about the rain, and how it was going to make the cobbles as slick as ice, and how most of my competitors would be afraid to go hard through the corners. I was thinking, I might be a rookie, but I have two advantages: I know how to ski race, and I’ve got nothing to lose.

I launched off the ramp and cut into the first corner at full speed, with Carmichael following in a team car. I kept pushing, going right to the limit and staying there. I can tell I’m at the limit when I can taste a little bit of blood in my mouth, and that’s how I stayed, right on the edge. This moment is why I fell in love with bike racing, and why I still love it—the mysterious surprises that can happen when you give everything you’ve got. You push yourself to the absolute limit—when your muscles are screaming, when your heart is going to explode, when you can feel the lactic acid seeping into your face and hands—and then you nudge yourself a little bit further, and then a little further still, and then, things happen. Sometimes you blow up; other times you hit that limit and can’t get past it. But sometimes you get past it, and you get into a place where the pain increases so much that you disappear completely. I know that sounds kind of zen but that’s what it feels like. Chris used to tell me
to stay within myself, but I never understood the sense of that. To me the whole point is to go
out
of yourself, to push over and over until you arrive somewhere new, somewhere you could barely imagine before.

I accelerated into the corners like a race car, skidding on the cobbles but somehow staying upright and out of the hay bales. I dug frantically on the hills; tucked and drove on the flats. I could feel the lactic acid building up, moving through my body, filling up my legs, my arms, my hands, under my fingernails—good, fresh pain. There was one last 90-degree turn, from cobbles onto pavement. I made it, straightened and gunned it for the line. As I crossed, I glanced at the clock: 6 minutes, 32 seconds.

Third place.

I blinked. Looked again.

Third place.

Not 103rd. Not 30th. Third place.

Carmichael was stunned, shell-shocked. He hugged me, saying, “You are one crazy motherfucker.” Then we stood and watched the rest of the riders, assuming that my time would gradually be eclipsed many times over. But as rider after rider crossed the line, my time stayed up.

Ekimov—three seconds behind me.

Hincapie—three seconds behind me.

LeMond—one second ahead of me.

Armstrong—eleven seconds behind me.

When the final rider finished, I was in sixth place.

The following day, as the peloton rolled out of Wilmington for stage 1, I wondered if some of the pros would talk to me; perhaps they’d say hello, offer a friendly word. Not one of them did—not Alcalá, not Ekimov, not LeMond. I was disappointed, and also relieved. I didn’t mind being anonymous. I reminded myself that I was just an amateur, a work pony, a nobody.

Then, about ten miles into the race, I felt a friendly tap on my
back. I turned, and there was Lance’s face, two feet from mine. He looked straight into my eyes.

“Hey Tyler, good ride yesterday.”

I’m far from the first person to point this out, but Lance has a compelling way of talking. First he likes to pause for about half a second right before he says something. He just looks at you, checking you, and also letting you check him.

“Thanks,” I said.

He nodded. Something passed between us—respect? Recognition? Whatever it was, it felt pretty cool. For the first time, I got a feeling that I might belong.

We kept riding. Being a newbie in a pro peloton is a bit like being a student driver on a Los Angeles freeway: move fast, or else. Halfway through the stage, inevitably, I messed up. I moved to the side, and accidentally cut off a big European guy, nearly hitting his front wheel, and he got pissed off. Not just angry, but theatrically angry, waving his arms and screaming at me in a language I didn’t understand. I turned to try to apologize, but that made me swerve even more and now European Guy was screaming louder, riders were starting to stare, and I was dying of embarrassment. European Guy rode up next to me, so he could yell directly in my face.

Then someone moved between the angry European and me. Lance. He put his hand on European Guy’s shoulder and gave a gentle but firm push, sending a clear message—
back off
—and as he did, he stared European Guy down, daring him to do something about it. I was so grateful to Lance I could have hugged him.

As the race went on over the next few days, I slid back with the other work ponies. Lance got stronger. He ducked a potential disaster at the end of the stage 5 time trial when, because of a screwup with traffic control, he was nearly crushed by a dump truck that was driving onto the racecourse. But Lance saw the truck coming, and managed to slip through an opening with an inch to spare on either side. He finished second that day to Ekimov. Afterward the press
wanted to talk about the near miss—he’d almost died! But not Lance. Instead, he talked about how he should’ve won the race. That was Lance in a nutshell: cheat death, then get pissed you didn’t win.

All in all, I was pretty impressed with the Texan. But what really impressed me happened that July. That’s when, from the safe distance of a TV screen, I watched Lance ride the Tour de France—the toughest race on earth, three weeks, 2,500 miles. For the first few days, he did pretty well. Then came stage 9, a 64-kilometer time trial: the race of truth, each rider sent off at one-minute intervals, alone against the clock. I watched in disbelief as Lance got passed by Tour champion Miguel Indurain. Actually “got passed” doesn’t do justice to how much faster the Spaniard was going. It was closer to “got blown into a ditch.” In the space of thirty seconds, Indurain went from being twenty bike lengths behind Lance to being so far ahead that he’d almost ridden out of camera frame. Lance lost more than six minutes that day, a massive amount. A few days later he abandoned—the second year in a row he’d failed to finish.

I watched, thinking,
Holy shit
. I knew how strong Lance had been only two months before, and how well he could suffer. I’d seen him do things on a bike I could barely imagine, and yet here came Indurain, making Lance look like a work pony.

I had always heard the Tour de France was hard, but that’s when I realized that it required an unimaginable level of strength, toughness, and suffering. That was also the moment when I realized that, more than anything, I wanted to ride it.

I’d hoped my little success at the Tour DuPont might catch the eye of a professional team. It seemed I was wrong. I spent the summer of 1994 continuing to ride as an amateur, listening to Coach Carmichael’s increasingly bland cheerleading. Off the bike, I ran the hauling business, painted houses, and waited for my phone to ring.

One afternoon in October, while I was painting my neighbor’s house, my phone rang. I sprinted inside, still splattered with paint, and picked up the receiver with my fingertips. The voice on the other end was gravelly, commanding, and impatient—the voice of God, if God had woken up on the wrong side of the bed.

“So what’s it gonna take to get you on our team?” Thomas Weisel said.

I tried to play cool. I had never talked to him before, but like everybody I knew Weisel’s story: fifty-something Harvard-trained millionaire investment banker, former national-level speed skater, masters bike racer, and, above all else, a winner. In the coming decade these guys would be a dime a dozen, enduro jock CEOs who traded golf clubs for a racing bike. But Weisel was the original of the species. For him, life was a race, and it was won by the toughest, the strongest, the guy who could do what it takes. Weisel’s motto was
Get it fucking done
. I can still hear that gravelly voice:
Just go get it done. Get it fucking done
.

What Weisel wanted to do was build an American team to win the Tour de France. As more than one person had pointed out, it was the equivalent of starting a French baseball team and attempting to win the World Series. Plus, you couldn’t just start a team and enter the Tour—your team had to be invited by the organizers, an invitation based on getting results in big European races. This was not easy. In fact, it was so difficult that Weisel’s main sponsor, Subaru, had abandoned him the previous fall, leaving Weisel alone, just him against the world. In other words, exactly where he liked to be.

Here’s a story about Weisel: When he was in his late forties, he decided to get serious about cycling. So he hired Eddie Borysewicz, the Olympic team’s cycling coach and the godfather of American bike racing.
^*
Twice a week, Weisel flew from San Francisco to San
Diego to train with Eddie B from 10 a.m. until 5 p.m. During the winter, Weisel kept a photo of his main rival pinned up on his weight room wall “to remind me why I was working so hard.” Weisel went on to win three age-group masters world championships and five national titles on the road and the track.

“Was it worth it?” a friend asked afterward.

“Yeah, but only because I won,” Weisel said.

Weisel’s personality was similar to Lance’s (later, on Postal, we riders would frequently confuse one’s voice for the other’s). In fact, back in 1990, Weisel had hired Lance for his pro-am cycling team, called Subaru-Montgomery, when Lance was just nineteen. The two hadn’t gotten along; most attributed it to the fact that they were too much alike. Weisel had let Armstrong go; Armstrong had become world champion three years later—a rare example of Weisel letting his emotions get ahead of a business opportunity.

Weisel told me how he’d signed other good American riders—Darren Baker, Marty Jemison, and Nate Reiss—and hired Eddie B to coach. The team would be called Montgomery-Bell. How much did I want for one year? I hesitated. If I went too high, I might lose this. But I didn’t want to go cheap, either. So I named a figure in the middle. Thirty thousand dollars.

“You got it,” Weisel growled, and I thanked him profusely and hung up the phone. I called my parents to tell them the news: I was officially a professional bike racer.

Year one of the Weisel Experiment went pretty well. We spent
1995 racing mostly in the States, with a couple of trips to Europe to enter smaller races. The team was a mix: mostly younger Americans, with a sprinkling of middling European racers. Though Eddie B tended to be disorganized at times (we got lost a lot traveling to and from races; the race schedule kept changing), the craziness made it fun, helped the team become tighter, and besides, most of us didn’t know any different. One afternoon, a soigneur (team assistant) gave me my first injection. It was perfectly legal—iron and vitamin B—but it was also a little unnerving, the sight of a needle going into my ass. He told me it was for my health, because I was depleted from all the racing I’d been doing. After all, bike racing was the hardest sport on earth; it put you out of balance; the vitamins would help restore what was lost. Like with astronauts, he said.

Besides, we riders had far more important things to worry about. We competed to see who could do the best impression of Eddie B’s Polish accent, where “you” was a Brooklynese “youse” and every verb was plural.
Youse must attacks now! Youse must attacks now!
Weisel was a constant presence at the bigger races, almost another coach. When we won, he would get teary-eyed, and hug everyone as if we’d just won the Tour de France. I probably made him cry when we traveled to a small race in Holland, a contest called the Teleflex Tour, and I managed to win the overall. Not the biggest race in the world, but it felt good—another sign that I might belong in this sport. Besides, I needed the money: I had my eye on a house in Nederland, Colorado, a small, sleepy town just outside Boulder. The house wasn’t anything fancy, just fifteen hundred square feet, with a small porch where I could see the mountains. But to me it meant a sense of permanence, a place to call my own.

In early 1996 Weisel hired former Olympic gold medalist Mark Gorski as general manager. Within a few months Gorski delivered the big news: the U.S. Postal Service had agreed to a three-year contract to be the team’s title sponsor, with budget increases built in
so the team could grow. Weisel and Gorski got busy stocking the roster with more young riders, capping it with Andy Hampsten, who was the most accomplished American cyclist this side of Greg LeMond. Hampsten had won the Tour of Italy, the Tour of Switzerland, and the Tour of Romandie.