Book of the Month: 'The Secret Race: Inside the Hidden World of the Tour de France: Doping, Cover-ups, and Winning at all Costs' by Tyler Hamilton and Daniel Coyle

 

For his millions of devoted supporters, Lance Armstrong was an iconic figure. The cancer survivor, who roared back to win an unequalled seven Tour de France races was revered as one of the greatest sportsmen to have lived.

But now his reputation is in tatters. Last month, Armstrong dropped the drug charges filed against him by the US Anti-Doping Agency. Then came the hammer blow: the publication of ‘The Secret Race’, an explosive book written by Armstrong’s former team-mate, Tyler Hamilton. Hamilton’s first-hand account, written in collaboration with author Daniel Coyle, is an extraordinary insight into the murky and deceitful world of professional cycling. His compelling tales lay bare the extent of Armstrong’s drug-taking in graphic detail.

So, why did Hamilton tell the story? Why lift the lid on his former team-mate? Having lived through the drug-ridden culture of cycling, Hamilton could no longer bare the web of lies he was caught up in and so decided to reveal the truth to help both himself and his tainted sport move forward. There is also an over-riding sense that the book is an attempt by Hamilton to repair his own reputation, after he tested positive in 2004.

 

The book expertly grapples with the life-changing dilemma faced by every cyclist: to dope or not to dope. According to Hamilton, there is trend that occurs in the cycling word: ‘first year, neo-pro, excited to be there, young pup hopeful. Second year, realisation. Third year, clarity – the fork in the road. Yes or no. In or out.’ As with the vast majority of cyclists of the time, Hamilton elected to ‘join the brotherhood’ as he feared that a failure to ride faster could spell the end of his career.

Now he had become part of the ‘brotherhood’, Hamilton underwent a carefully controlled drug programme to try and obtain the optimum volume percentage of red blood cells in the body (without exceeding the forbidden 50%). Hamilton, therefore, took ‘red eggs’ (testosterone) for recovery once every week or two, and was injected with EPO (a blood booster) at races from team doctors.

It was at this early stage of his career that Lance Armstrong joined Hamilton’s Postal Team. The ultra-competitive Texan was intent on winning at all costs. As Hamilton put it, ‘Lance believed in his bones that if he worked hard, he was entitled to win every single race.’ Such was his determination to be the best, Armstrong was always afraid that ‘someone else was going to outthink, outwork and outstrategize him.’ With this being the case, the intensity in training sharply increased, as did the level of clever planning in the lead up to well-renowned races. Nowhere was this more apparent than the 1999 Tour de France. Here, Armstrong paid a Frenchman, Philippe, to ‘follow the Tour on his motorcycle carrying a thermos full of EPO and a prepaid cell phone.’ In between particularly gruelling stages, Armstrong called Philippe and he would ‘zip through the Tour’s traffic and make a drop-off.’ The leading members of the Postal Team, namely Armstrong, Hamilton and Kevin Livingston would then inject themselves with EPO before hastily getting rid of the evidence. With Armstrong on a ‘different level’ to the rest of the field, he stormed to his first yellow jersey.

 

Even after enjoying victory, Armstrong was hungry for more success. Wary of the measures taken by his rivals, he encouraged Hamilton and Livingston to accompany him to Spain for the first of what was to become another readily used technique in the cycling world: blood transfusions. The first time Hamilton had blood pumped into his body he felt a profound effect: ‘when you have more red blood cells, your body doesn’t obey the same rules…you go harder than you think you can.’ Such was the impact it had, riders went to desperate measures to carry out a transfusion. Most obviously, Hamilton recounts the time Armstrong had a blood transfusion while lying on the floor of his team bus.

All this begs the obvious question: how did cyclists such as Armstrong beat the drug tests? The answer, as Hamilton explains, was that it was remarkably straight forward: ‘In fact, they weren’t drug tests…they were more like discipline tests. If you were careful and paid attention, you could dope and be 99% certain that you would not get caught.’ This was because testers would only visit cyclists between 7am and 10pm, providing a nine hour time frame to take anything that would quickly leave the system. Moreover, the testing system was archaic. Remarkably, a test to detect EPO was only developed in 2000 (it had been commonly used since the late 80s). In comparison, doctors dealing with the cyclists were forward-thinking and intelligent. For instance, Hamilton refers to the ‘micro-dosing’ techniques (smaller doses of EPO injected directly into the vein which left the body quicker) employed by Michele Ferrari, a close confidant of Armstrong.

Bernhard Kohl, who finished 3^rd in the 2008 Tour de France, summed up the chaotic nature of the testing system when he said that ‘I was tested 100 times with drugs in my body. I was caught, but 99 other times, I wasn’t.’

But while Hamilton has now faced up to his past mistakes, Armstrong continues to live a lie. The powerful evidence submitted in this compelling book, though, is enough to quash Armstrong’s claims once and for all.