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 (9 page)

A lot of people wonder if taking EPO is risky to health. I’d like to reply to that concern with the following list:

Elbow

Shoulder

Collarbone (twice)

Back Hip

Fingers (multiple)

Ribs Wrist

Nose

Those are the bones I’ve broken during my racing career. This is not an unusual list in our profession. It’s funny: in the States, everybody connects bike racing with health. But when you get to the top level, you see the truth: bike racing is not a healthy sport in any sense of the word. (As my former teammate Jonathan Vaughters likes to say, If you want to feel what it’s like to be a bike racer, strip down to your underwear, drive your car 40 mph, and leap out the window into a pile of jagged metal.) So when it comes to the risks of EPO, they tend to feel pretty small.

What does being on EPO feel like? It feels great, mostly because it doesn’t feel like anything at all. You’re not wiped out. You feel healthy, normal, strong. You have more color in your cheeks; you’re
less grumpy, more fun to be around. These little clear drops work like radio signals—they instruct your kidneys to create more red blood cells (RBCs), and soon millions more are filling up your veins, carrying oxygen to your muscles. Everything else about your body is the same, except now you have better fuel. You can go harder, longer. That holy place at the edge of your limits gets nudged out—and not just a little.

Riders talked of an EPO honeymoon, and in my experience it was true—as much a psychological phenomenon as anything else. The thrill comes from the way a few drops of EPO allow you to break through walls that used to stop you cold, and suddenly there’s a feeling of new possibility. Fear melts. You wonder: How far could I go? How fast can I ride?

People think doping is for lazy people who want to avoid hard work. That might be true in some cases, but in mine, as with many riders I knew, it was precisely the opposite. EPO granted the ability to suffer
more
; to push yourself farther and harder than you’d ever imagined, in both training and racing. It rewarded precisely what I was good at: having a great work ethic, pushing myself to the limit and past it. I felt almost giddy: this was a new landscape. I began to see races differently. They weren’t rolls of the genetic dice, or who happened to be on form that day. They didn’t depend on who you were. They depended on
what you did
—how hard you worked, how attentive and professional you were in your preparation. Races were like tests, for which you could study. Instantly, my results began to improve; I went from getting C’s and D’s to getting A’s and B’s. As the summer began, I started figuring out the rules of the game:

    1. Take red eggs for recovery once every week or two; make sure not to take them too close to races.

    2. Get EPO at races, from the team doctors. You don’t buy it; try to avoid keeping it in your house, except in special situations (like injury, or a long break between
races). You inject it subcutaneously, into the fat layer beneath the skin. That helps it release more slowly, and provides a sustained effect.

    3. Be quiet about it. There was no need to talk, because everybody already knew. It was part of being cool. Besides, if any laws were being broken, it was clear that the team was the one doing the breaking—they were the ones obtaining and distributing the EPO; my only job was to close my mouth, extend my arm, and be a good worker.

As the summer heated up, I started delivering real results, finishing in the top twenty, the top ten. I felt less tense, more relaxed. When other riders joked about their hematocrit numbers, I laughed along. I smiled knowingly when someone made a joke about EPO. I was the newest member of the white-bag club.

In June, we got the big news that Tour de France organizers had decided to invite Postal to the race. Then, a few weeks later, I got even bigger news when I was selected for the Tour team: I would be riding alongside Eki, George, Baffi, Robin, and the rest of the A team. I phoned my parents back in Marblehead and told them to fly over to watch part of the race. After all, this might never happen again. I was ecstatic—at least until the race began.

The 1997 Tour was crazily difficult. Normally, Tour stages are tough, but this year the organizers, perhaps reacting to the increased speed of the peloton, decided to make them
really
tough—one stage was 242 kilometers through the heart of the Pyrenees; seven continuous, camera-friendly hours of suffering. As a bonus, the weather was hellacious, featuring freezing rain, fog, and hurricane-strength winds. If the organizers were looking for a way to inspire EPO use, they succeeded. Postal went through a lot of white bags, and I’m sure we weren’t alone.

A lot of people wonder why doping seems more prevalent at the
longer, three-week races like the Tour de France. The answer is simple: the longer the race, the more doping helps—especially EPO. The rule of thumb: If you don’t take any therapy in a three-week race, your hematocrit will drop about 2 points a week, or a total of about 6 points. It’s called sports anemia. Every 1 percent drop in hematocrit creates a 1 percent drop in power—how much force you can put into the pedals. Therefore, if you ride a grand tour paniagua, without any source of red blood cells, your power will drop roughly 6 percent by the end of the third week. And in a sport where titles are often decided by power differentials of one-tenth of a percentage point, this qualifies as a deal breaker.

EPO or no EPO, the Tour’s hardest day came on stage 14. On that day the French Festina team performed a circus strongman act the likes of which nobody had ever seen. At the foot of the 21.3-kilometer Col du Glandon, all nine Festina riders rode to the front, then went full bore, revving to unimaginable speed and carrying that speed over the climb of the Madeleine and into Courchevel. Later, we all realized what was happening: Festina was playing a new card. Something that went beyond EPO. Over the next day or so, the rumor circulated that Festina was using something called perfluorocarbons, synthetic blood that increases oxygen-carrying capacity, and for which there was no test. Using PFCs held huge, potentially life-threatening risks. The following year, a Swiss rider named Mauro Gianetti had ended up in intensive care; doctors suspected he’d used PFCs, though Gianetti denied it. But as Festina had shown, there were also rewards—which meant that these innovations, too powerful to stay secret for long, were quickly matched by other teams. “Arms race” is an accurate way to describe it, but it’s important to realize that it was an arms race between teams, not individuals. Team doctors were trying to stay ahead of other team doctors; the riders’ job was simply to be obedient.
^§

I rode the 1997 Tour, and survived. Riis was heavily favored to win, but to the world’s surprise, he was surpassed by a teammate, a wide-eyed, muscled twenty-three-year-old German named Jan Ullrich. Ullrich was a genuine phenomenon, with a fluid pedal stroke and incredible power for such a young rider. Watching him, I agreed with most observers: Ullrich was clearly Indurain’s successor, the guy who was going to dominate the Tour for the next decade.

As for Postal, we did pretty well for a rookie team; our leader, Jean-Cyril Robin, finished 15th. I was 69th overall, the fourth Postie (Jemison was 96th, half an hour behind me; George was 104th). I wasn’t the greatest rider in the world, but I was far from the worst. The new 50 percent hematocrit rule wasn’t a big headache—in fact, I kind of liked it, since it seemed to reduce the frequency of strongman acts (there was still no test for EPO, remember). Thanks to the white bags and Pedro’s spinner, it was easy to stay in the mid-forties. And if anybody on the team got too high, they could always lower their hematocrit by taking a speed bag—an IV bag of saline—or simply chugging a couple of liters of water and some salt tablets, a process we called “getting watered down.”

In a Paris hotel after the Tour finished, I stood in front of a mirror and looked at my body. Slender arms. Legs with actual veins. Hollows in my cheeks I’d never seen before. A new hardness in my
eyes. I went downstairs and met with the team and Thom Weisel and our sponsors. We raised champagne glasses and toasted the team’s achievement. Weisel was pleased, but even then, with the bubbly in his hand, he was already talking about next year, when we’d
really
get it done.

By the spring of 1998 two of the Eurodogs had gone home, left the team. Scott had decided to go into the family business; Darren had decided to get a job in finance. George and I moved from the Dee-Luxe Apartment in the Sky to a modern three-bedroom apartment in the heart of Girona, near the Ramblas. We were sorry to see them go. They were good guys; we missed them. But we were also learning how our world worked. Some guys kept up; some didn’t.
^‖

*
After he was let go, Steffen protested via a letter sent to Postal team manager Mark Gorski that read, in part, “What could a Spanish doctor, completely unknown to the organization, offer that I can’t or won’t? Doping is the fairly obvious answer.” Postal responded via its lawyers, informing Steffen that he would be sued if he made any public statements that caused financial damage to the Postal team. Steffen consulted a lawyer and decided to drop the matter.

†
Verbruggen, a former sales manager for Mars candy bars, likened the new rule to blood-testing paint-factory workers for lead exposure, just to make sure nobody got sick. When others pointed out that Verbruggen was essentially legalizing doping with EPO (as one Italian team director put it, the new rule was the equivalent of allowing everyone to go into a bank and steal as long as they kept it under $1,000), Verbruggen, who was famous for his short temper, called the analysis “bullshit” and told them to “shut up.” The message to the teams and riders was clear: as long as your hematocrit stayed under 50, nobody would care.

‡
Hamilton’s 1997 decision to start using EPO may have been based on an inaccurate assumption about his teammate, Marty Jemison.

“That spring, Tyler and I were in the same boat, hanging on by our fingernails,” Jemison says. “I raced clean through the spring. Then in June, just before the Dauphiné, Pedro [Celaya] came to me and said if I was going to make the Tour team, I needed to be healthy. He taught me, he provided everything. So yeah, I did what the others did, starting in June and then in the Tour. But my Liège result was an honest result. I just had a good day.”

Jemison, who won the U.S. national championship in 1999, rode just two Tours for Postal, a fact that might be attributed to the way the EPO era changed how teams assessed riders’ potential. “I had a natural hematocrit of 48, so EPO didn’t add that much horsepower to me,” he says. “The longer I was [at Postal], the more I saw that I was no longer being groomed for the A team. Clearly, they were looking for riders who could deliver a whole new level of results.” Jemison left the team after the 2000 season.

§
Excessive displays like Festina’s tended to occur whenever a new doping innovation appeared. They’d happened most notably in the spring of 1994 at the Flèche Wallonne race, when three Gewiss riders simply rode away from the rest of the field at an unthinkable speed. In the cycling world, this type of team domination had never happened before; it was the equivalent of an NFL team winning a playoff game 99–0. In addition, seven of the race’s top eight finishers were all Italian, demonstrating that EPO innovation, like the Renaissance, began in Italy and traveled outward.

After the race, Gewiss team doctor Michele Ferrari was asked by a journalist if his riders used EPO. “I don’t prescribe the stuff,” he said. “But you can buy EPO in Switzerland without a prescription, and if a rider does, it doesn’t scandalize me.” When the journalist pointed out that numerous riders had died from using EPO, Ferrari said, “EPO is not dangerous; it’s the abuse that is. It’s also dangerous to drink ten liters of orange juice.”

‖
The commonsense question: If everybody was using EPO, then wasn’t it just a level playing field? The answer, according to scientists, is no, because every drug affects different people differently. In the case of EPO, it is particularly illusory, due to the varying opportunities for improvement created by the UCI’s 50 percent hematocrit limit.

For example: Hamilton’s natural hematocrit is typically 42. Taking enough EPO to get to 50 means he could raise his hematocrit 8 points, an increase of 19 percent. In other words, Hamilton could add 19 percent more oxygen-carrying red blood cells—a huge increase in power—and still test under the hematocrit limit.

Now let’s consider a different rider who has a natural hematocrit of 48. Under the 50-percent rule, that rider could only take enough EPO to add 2 points, or 4 percent more red blood cells—a power increase one-fourth of Hamilton’s. That might be one of the reasons Hamilton’s performance increased so rapidly when he started taking EPO.

Also, studies show that some people respond more to EPO than others; in addition, some people respond more than others to the increased training enabled by EPO. Then you have the fact that EPO shifts the performance limits from the body’s central physiology (how much the heart pumps) to the peripheral physiology (how fast the enzymes in the muscles can absorb oxygen).