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 (8 page)

After the Tour of Valencia, we headed to Girona, a walled medieval city of 100,000 people in the foothills of the Pyrenees, and my new home for the next seven months. I picked up Haven at the Barcelona airport and we drove north, eager to see the city, which team director Johnny Weltz had described as a rare jewel. We followed Johnny as he drove the road north from Barcelona. The problem was, Johnny drove like a madman through the mist, accelerating to 100 mph. I did my best to keep up, racing in and out of traffic like a Formula One driver. (Haven later looked back on that ride as a metaphor for our entire European experience: an insane, high-speed chase through the foggy darkness.)

Johnny was right about the city. Our apartment, unfortunately, turned out to be the flaw in the jewel: a dusty set of dormitory-like rooms in a decrepit high-rise. It would be home for four of us—George Hincapie, Scott Mercier, Darren Baker, and me; Marty Jemison and his wife, Jill, lived a short walk away. We drew straws for rooms; Scott, being the tallest, naturally drew the straw for the
smallest room (when he lay in bed, his head and feet could almost touch the opposing walls). The place was filthy, so Haven headed up a cleaning project; we spent our first morning scrubbing and dusting, until the place looked less like a scary dump and more like a college dormitory. We dubbed it, in a tribute to the old
Jeffersons
sitcom, our Dee-Luxe Apartment in the Sky. We called ourselves the Eurodogs.

If our life had been a sitcom, Scott Mercier would have played the Smart One: he was twenty-nine, tall and college-educated, a classy thoroughbred both on and off the bike.

Darren Baker would have been the Edgy One; big, strong, tough as nails, he’d come to the sport after being injured as a runner and proven to be a natural (he’d beaten Lance in a big race back in 1992). Darren was a realist to the bone, a guy who took no BS and who reveled in telling hard truths.

George Hincapie was the Quiet One: a twenty-three-year-old who’d spent the last few years racing at a high level in Europe and who’d been picked as a rising star, specializing in the supertough one-day northern European races known as classics. George didn’t say much, but on his bike he was eloquent, combining a liquid pedal stroke with a gritty, never-say-die Belgian mentality. People often mistook George’s silence for slowness; as time went by, I found the opposite was true. He was wiser and more observant than anyone suspected.

That left me as the Scrappy One, the undersized pup who had the most to learn about the sport. The theme of our early days was cluelessness. We had no idea where to train, where to get bikes repaired, where to shop for groceries, how to rent a movie or use an ATM. Thank God, George spoke Spanish, and could patiently guide us through the thornier moments. For the first weeks, whenever we encountered a linguistic obstacle, we would call “George!”—so often that it became a running joke. And George always came through: he was kind and patient.

We quickly became friends, and discovered a truth about our sport: there is no friendship in the world like the friendship of being on a bike-racing team. The reason is one word:
give
. You give all your strength: during the race, you shelter each other, you empty yourself for the sake of another person, and they do the same for you. You give all your time: you travel together, room together, eat every meal together. You ride for hours together every day, knuckle to knuckle. To this day, I can remember how each of my teammates chewed their food, how they fixed their coffee, how they walked when they were tired, how their eyes looked when they were going to have a shitty day or a great day. Other sports teams like to call themselves “families.” In bike racing, it’s close to true.

Thrown together in this far-away place, the four of us became inseparable. When we traveled to races, we stuck together, causing the rest of the peloton to regard us with the same kind of polite curiosity you might give to four toddlers wandering around your workplace:
Oh look, it’s the new Americans—aren’t they cute?
Our sense of apartness was increased by the fact that the peloton is essentially one big clique, with a set of detailed rules, most of which we were in the process of breaking.

The rule against air-conditioning, for instance. The Europeans believed A/C to be a dangerous invention that caused illness and dried out the lungs; if someone on the bus or in a hotel room turned on the air-conditioning, it was as if they were giving everyone the bubonic plague.

Or the rule against eating chocolate mousse (causes sweating).

Or the rule against sitting down on a curb (tires out the legs).

Or the rule against passing the salt from hand to hand (it had to be set on the table, lest it bring bad luck).

Or the rule against shaving your legs the night before a big race (your body loses energy regrowing the hair).

George proved to be an ideal roommate for two reasons. First, he was a gadget guy. In an age when portable electronics were still
exotic, George was a one-man SkyMall: he owned a portable DVD player, speakers, the latest cell phones, laptops, etc. He was the one who gave me my first cell phone; he taught me how to text.

George also taught me how to be lazy. We didn’t call it laziness, of course—we called it “conserving energy,” and it was an essential part of being a good bike racer. The rules were simple: stand as little as possible, sleep as much as possible. George was amazing at it, a superman of lounging. Whole days would go by, and he would only be vertical to eat and train. I can still see his long body stretched on the couch, legs up, surrounded by a debris field of his electronic gear. He also saved energy when it came to thinking about food: George ate pizza margherita for lunch and dinner some days; he ate it so often that we began to call him Pizza Margherita. I did my best to copy his energy-conserving habits, but it didn’t come naturally: I had more nervous energy to burn off, and besides, I was worried about making the team.

The worries, ironically enough, had started with George, and an overheard conversation. The walls of our
apartamento
were painted cinder block, the floors white Spanish tile. You could not drop a pin without it being heard. If someone whispered, you heard it all over the apartment. And there was some whispering going on, between George and our director, Johnny Weltz.

It was natural that Johnny would visit George: after all, George was one of the team’s best riders, our biggest hope for a classics victory that could help propel Postal into the Tour. What was not natural, however, was that Johnny would sometimes show up carrying a white bag. You could hear the paper crinkle. Also, when they spoke privately, they would either whisper or switch to Spanish. While George and Johnny were both fluent in Spanish, this didn’t make sense to me—we were all on the same team, why not speak English? Scott, Darren, and I couldn’t help but be curious. We saw George put a small foil packet in the back of the fridge, behind the Cokes. One day soon after, when George was out, we couldn’t
resist. We opened the refrigerator and opened up the foil packet. We saw syringes and ampules labeled EPO.

SCOTT MERCIER:
I asked George about it once. He and I were sitting alone in the apartment. All this stuff was happening, and I wanted to know. So I asked him, “Do you have to do the drugs to make it?” He hesitated a long time. George is a quiet guy. He doesn’t want conflict. So he felt a little on the spot. But eventually he said, “You gotta figure it out for yourself.” And I knew what he meant.

I was figuring it out. In March I roomed with Adriano Baffi at the Tour of Catalunya. This was a big deal for me at the time because Baffi was a veteran, a big name, one of Weisel’s hired guns; he’d won five stages at the Tour of Italy, which made him a legend on our team. So I walked into our hotel room and the first sound I heard was a high-pitched
zzzzzzzzzz
—the centrifuge. I look in to see Baffi, a handsome, debonair guy, fussing over this small machine exactly like Pedro’s, except smaller and nicer—the Brookstone version. Baffi wasn’t being secretive about it in the least, just matter-of-fact and precise, like he was fixing an espresso. He peered at the hatchmarks on the side of the tube, and he smiled. “Forty-eight!” he said.

In those situations, I always acted like I knew what they were talking about. I know it sounds weird now—maybe I should’ve been more honest and asked,
Hey, Adriano, why are you testing your own hematocrit? Doesn’t the team doctor do that?
But I wanted to be cool, to fit in. At other races, I’d overhear the A-team riders talking about their hematocrit, comparing numbers, with a lot of oohs and aahs and teasing. They talked about hematocrit all the time, as much as they talked about the weather or the road conditions. The numbers seemed to carry huge meaning:
I’m 43—you don’t have to worry about me winning today. But I hear you’re a 49—look out!
I would smile and
nod, and quickly I figured out just how important hematocrit was. It was not just another number; it was
the
number, capable of making the difference between having a chance at winning and not. This was not particularly good news for me, because my own hematocrit usually tested at a depressing 42. The harder I trained and raced, the lower it dropped.

Still, I didn’t do anything. Pedro gave me an occasional red egg at races, but that was it. I would not have dreamed of asking Baffi or another teammate for EPO. It felt like something that was above my station, that had to be earned. So I did what I was good at: I put my head down, gritted my teeth, and kept riding, touching limit and trying to nudge a little past it. I might’ve been able to ignore what was happening a bit longer if it hadn’t been for Marty Jemison.

I knew Marty well and considered him a friend. He was a bit older; he had lived in Europe and raced for a Dutch team before joining Weisel’s Montgomery squad in 1995. Marty didn’t talk a lot about his previous European experience, but I got the feeling it had been tough being a solo American. Marty was a nice guy; a little touchy at times, perhaps, but on the whole friendly and outgoing (he’s since founded a successful bike-travel business). The main thing I knew about Marty, though, is that I could usually beat him. We’d raced against each other many times over the years, and I’d ended up on top maybe 80 percent of the time, especially in time trials, which are considered the best measure of pure strength. There was no disputing it; the gap between our abilities was as stable and reliable as our height.

But in the spring of 1997, the pattern reversed. In training rides, and in early season races, Marty started doing better than me, and it made me nervous. Was he doing something? Did I need to do something too?

In April, I was picked to ride for the team in the year’s toughest test yet: Liège–Bastogne–Liège, a cruel 257-kilometer painfest through Belgium’s Ardennes region that some consider to be the
hardest single-day race on the calendar. I put everything toward preparing for it, figuring it was a golden opportunity to improve my chances of making the Tour team. My goal was to make it into the first or second group—to earn an A or a B, to my way of thinking.

I scored a big fat paniagua D. Oh, I kept up for a while, but when the race got serious, I got dusted and finished in the middle of the pack, the fourth group, fifteen minutes back. Meanwhile, Marty stayed with the first group most of the day, and finished in the second group—right in the mix. After the race, I felt a new level of frustration as I watched the white bags get handed out. Now I could measure the injustice. Marty used to be a few groups behind me; now he was a few groups ahead. I could count the number of seconds those white bags contained. I could see the gap between who I was and who I could be. Who I was supposed to be.

This was bullshit.

This was not fair.

In that moment, the future became clear. Unless something changed, I was done. I was going to have to find a different career. I began to get more stressed and angry. Not at Marty—after all, he was only doing what a lot of others were doing. He’d been given the opportunity, and he’d taken it. No, I felt angry at myself, at the world. I was being cheated.

A few days later, I heard a soft knock on my door. Pedro walked in and sat down on the bed; we were knee to knee. His eyes were sympathetic.

“I know how hard you work, Tyler. Your levels are low, but you push yourself to keep up.”

I acted tough, but he could tell how much I appreciated hearing that. He leaned in close.

“You are an amazing rider, Tyler. You can push yourself to the limit, even when you are completely empty; very few people can do this. Most riders, they would abandon. But you keep going.”

I nodded. I could feel where he was going, and my heart started beating faster.

“I think you perhaps have a chance to make the Tour de France team. But you have to be healthier. You have to take care of your body. You must make yourself healthier.”

The next day, I took my first EPO shot. It was so easy. Just a tiny amount, a clear liquid, a few drops, a pinprick on the arm. It was so easy, in fact, that I almost felt foolish—that was it? This was the thing I’d feared? Pedro gave me a few vials of EPO to take home along with some syringes. I wrapped it all up in foil and put it in the back of the fridge and, soon after, showed it to Haven. We talked about it for a few minutes.

“This is the exact same result as sleeping in an altitude tent,” I said. That wasn’t completely true, of course, first because sleeping in a low-oxygen enclosure, or altitude tent (a legal method of boosting hematocrit) is a big hassle and gives you a headache, and also because it doesn’t improve your blood values nearly as much. But the reasoning sounded good enough for both of us. We knew this was a gray area, but we also knew that the team doctor thought it was a good idea, for my health. We knew we were breaking the rules. But it felt more like we were being smart.

Besides Haven, I didn’t talk about my decision with anyone. Not Scott, or Darren, or George, or Marty. They might’ve been like family, but telling them would’ve felt weird, like I was breaking a team rule. Now, I can see that the real reason I didn’t want to tell was that I was ashamed. But back then, it felt like I was being savvy. I was becoming, in the word the Europeans liked to use, professional.
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