The Secret Race: Inside the Hidden World of the Tour de France: Doping, Cover-ups, and Winning at All Costs

I discovered when I went all out, when I put 100 percent of my energy into some intense, impossible task - when my heart was jack-hammering, when lactic acid was sizzling through my muscles - that's when I felt good, normal, balanced.

Slowly, inch by inch, I felt myself recovering. After a few weeks, the darkness began to recede; my appetite for life returned. Haven was wonderful; she understood and nursed me through these weeks until I felt strong enough to go out in public, to get on my bike again.

Here’s what I was learning: secrets are poison. They suck the life out of you, they steal your ability to live in the present, they build walls between you and the people you love.

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.

I guess when you risk hell, there's not much left to scare you.

One day I'm a normal person with a normal life,” he said. “The next I'm standing on a street corner in Madrid with a secret phone and a hole in my arm and I'm bleeding all over, hoping I don't get arrested. It was completely crazy. But it seemed like the only way at the time.

truth is a living thing. It has a force inside it, an inner springiness. The truth can’t be denied or locked away, because when that happens, the pressure builds. When a door gets closed, the truth seeks a window, and blows the glass clean out.

As it turned out, the story he told wasn’t about doping; it was about power. It was about an ordinary guy who worked his way up to the top of an extraordinary world, who learned to play a shadowy chess match of strategy and information at the outermost edge of human performance. It was about a corrupt but strangely chivalrous world, where you would take any chemical under the sun to go faster, but wait for your opponent if he happened to crash.

You can grade your performance in a race the same way you would grade a test in school. If you cross the finish line in the lead group, then you earned an A: you might not have won, but you never got left behind. If you are in the second group, you get a B—not great, but far from terrible; you only got left behind once. If you’re in the third group, you get a C, and so on. Each race is really a bunch of smaller races, contests that always have one of two results: you either keep up, or you don’t.

Lance is Donald Trump. He might own all of Manhattan, but if there’s one tiny corner grocery store out there without his name on it, it drives him crazy.

Dr. Ashenden, in the wake of the confessions of Hamilton, Landis, and others, had gradually come to understand doping from the bike racer’s point of view. “Before, I saw them as weak people, bad people,” he said. “Now I see that they’re put in an impossible situation. If I had been put in their situation, I would do what they did.

You’ve spent your career inside this elite brotherhood, this family, playing the game alongside everybody else when suddenly—whoosh, you’re flushed into a world of shit, labeled “doper” in headlines, deprived of your income, and—here’s the worst part—everybody in the brotherhood pretends that you never existed. You realize you’ve been sacrificed to keep the circus going; you’re the reason they can pretend they’re clean.

Lance worked the system—hell, Lance was the system.

Then there’s the superstition about spilling salt. One night midway through the Tour of Italy, my CSC teammate Michael Sandstød decided to risk breaking the rule. He purposely knocked over the salt shaker, then poured out the salt in his hand and tossed it all around, laughing, saying, “It’s just salt!” We laughed too, but more nervously. The next day, Michael crashed on a steep downhill, breaking eight ribs, fracturing his shoulder, and puncturing a lung; he nearly died.

In 2002 Hamilton crashed early in the three-week Tour of Italy, fracturing his shoulder. He kept riding, enduring such pain that he ground eleven teeth down to the roots, requiring surgery after the Tour. He finished second. “In 48 years of practicing I have never seen a man who could handle as much pain as he can,” said Hamilton’s physical therapist, Ole Kare Foli.

The peloton was Facebook on wheels-and during this period, information was flying.

We got through it. Haven made excuses for me to friends, and made an appointment with a terrific doctor, who put me on Effexor, 150 milligrams a day, enough to get my brain straightened out.