The Secret Race: Inside the Hidden World of the Tour de France: Doping, Cover-ups, and Winning at All Costs
by Tyler Hamilton
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Below are the most popular and impactful highlights and quotes from 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.
Bjarne recommended his special technique: come home from a training ride, chug a big bottle of fizzy water, and take two or three sleeping pills. By the time you woke up, it would be dinner, or, if you were lucky, breakfast.
And Ferrari was right, as always. On the last climb, a nasty 12-kilometer ascent called the Joux Plane, Pantani finally cracked.
The deadly mistake that Tyler, Floyd, Roberto [Heras], and the rest of them made when they left Postal was to assume that they’d find other doctors who were as professional. But when they got out there, they found—whoops!—there weren’t any others.
Ullrich was like a superman—or, to be more accurate, a superboy. He’d come up training in East Germany, where the coaches lived by the maxim Throw a dozen eggs against the wall, and keep the ones that don’t break. Ullrich was the unbreakable egg, a Cold War kid who, like Lance, had grown up without a father and, with the help of the East German state, had turned his energy into the single most impressive physique in cycling history.
I don’t understand the whole fuss at all. If you test someone 215 times and he is always negative, then the problem is in the test itself. Well, I’m not responsible.
that’s my story. Not a shiny, pretty myth about superheroes who win every time, but a human truth about one normal guy who tried to compete in a messed-up world and did his best; who made big mistakes and survived. That’s the story I want to tell, and keep telling, partly because it will help the sport move forward, and partly because it helps me move forward.
Lance and I were tired, dehydrated, hungry, ready to come home and take a nap. Then this small car comes tearing up the hill behind us at top speed, nearly hitting us, and the driver yells something as he goes past. I’m mad, so I yell back at him. But Lance doesn’t say anything. He just takes off, full speed, chasing the car. Lance knew the streets, so he took a shortcut and managed to catch the guy at the top, near a red light. By the time I got there Lance had pulled the guy out of his car and was pummeling him, and the guy was cowering and crying. I watched for a minute, not quite believing what I was seeing. Lance’s face was beet red; he was in a full rage, really letting the guy have it. Finally, it was over. Lance pushed the guy to the ground and left him.
Here is the secret: You can't block out the pain. you have to embrace it.
It’s funny; the media would go on to treat The Look as if it were Lance’s superpower, something he unveiled at big moments in races, but to us, it was something that happened more often on the team bus or around the breakfast table. If you interrupted Lance while he was talking, you got The Look. If you contradicted what Lance was saying, you got The Look. If you were more than two minutes late for a ride, you got The Look. But the thing that really set off The Look was if you made fun of him. Underneath that tough exterior was an extraordinarily sensitive person.
if his numbers were off, Armstrong got nervous—a point that was underlined in January of 1999 at Postal team training camp in Solvang, California. The whole team rode a 10-kilometer time trial, and then had their blood tested afterward; the blood values and the time were combined into an overall fitness score. When the scoring was done, Lance was second—Christian Vande Velde was first. But rather than tell Lance, Bruyneel tweaked the result slightly so that Lance finished first. As George Hincapie told New York Times reporter Juliet Macur: “We didn’t want to tell Lance because it would have upset him, but no one ever told Christian, either. We kind of didn’t want to upset the hierarchy.
The world is full of bastards, the number increasing rapidly the further one gets from Missoula, Montana.
Livestrong sent a lobbyist to visit U.S. Rep. Jose Serrano (D., NY), who sits on the House Appropriations Committee, in order to talk about USADA and its pursuit of Armstrong.
Lance called the process “unconstitutional,” complained about access to evidence, and issued what might rank as one of the most ironic tweets of all time: “It’s time to play by the rules.
