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 (14 page)

A couple days before, we got prepared. We used the secret phone to call Philippe, who zipped through the crowds and made his delivery. Since we wanted to keep the EPO out of our hotel, we usually did the shots in the camper. It worked like this: we’d finish a stage, and go straight into the camper for cleanup, get a drink, and change clothes. The syringes would be waiting for us, sometimes tucked inside our sneakers, in our race bags.

The sight of the syringe always made my heart jump. You’d want to inject it right away—get it in you and then get rid of the evidence. Sometimes del Moral would give the shot, sometimes we’d do it ourselves, whatever was fastest. And we were fast—it took thirty seconds at most. You didn’t have to be precise: arm, belly, anywhere would do. We got into a habit of putting our used syringes in an empty Coke can. The syringes fit neatly through the opening
—plonk, plonk, plonk
—you could hear the needles rattle. And we treated that Coke can with respect. It was the Radioactive
Coke Can, the one that could end our Tour, ruin the team and our careers, maybe land us in a French jail. Once the syringes were inside, we’d crush it, dent it, make it look like trash. Then del Moral would tuck the Coke can at the bottom of his backpack, put on aviator sunglasses, open that flimsy camper door, and walk into the crowds of fans, journalists, Tour officials, even police, who were packed around the bus. They were all watching for Lance. Nobody saw the anonymous guy with the backpack, who walked quietly through them, invisible.

In the stage 8 time trial Lance did well, winning over Zülle by nearly a minute (I didn’t do too badly, finishing fifth). But it was stage 9 that everybody was waiting for—the climb to Sestrière. The first big climb of the Tour is a coming-out party, the moment the race really begins. Everybody’s watching because this is when the Tour contenders finally show their cards.

The morning was cold and rainy. The early part of the race brought lots of attacks; everybody was trying to prove himself. Frankie did a magnificent job as road captain, watching the potential breakaways like a hawk, making sure we didn’t let any contenders get away. We protected Lance as long as we could, then fell back, leaving him with an elite group of contenders. A few long-shot guys broke away; then Escartín and Gotti, who were thought of as the best climbers, took off after them. The script of the race looked clear: Lance had done well, but now it was time for the real climbers to take over. Escartín or Gotti would most likely win.

Then, with about eight kilometers left, something unexpected happened: Lance attacked, rode down Escartín and Gotti, and soloed away to take the stage win. I knew Lance was going well; I could hear the roar ahead of me on the road, and I could hear Johan and Thom Weisel shouting jubilantly over the team radio. But it wasn’t until that night, when I saw the highlights on television, that I realized how strong Lance had been.

“Armstrong has just ridden across like they were standing still!”
commentator Paul Sherwen shouted. Lance’s attack on Escartín and Gotti was even more impressive because of the way he did it—not standing, as most attackers do, but sitting down. His cadence barely changed. He just kept riding, churning that gear, and the other riders fell away. I knew how strong Lance was—we’d trained next to each other, day after day. But this got my attention, just like it got everyone else’s. This was a new Lance, one I hadn’t seen before. He was on a different level.

The doubters started in immediately. We later heard that some old hands in the press room had laughed out loud when Lance made his winning move—not in admiration, but because they thought his doping was so obvious. The stories the next day were filled with accounts of Lance the “extraterrestrial,” which is the code they use to describe a doped rider. The French newspaper
L’Équipe
said Lance was
“sur une autre planète”
—on another planet.

Then it got worse. The French newspaper
Le Monde
uncovered the fact that Lance had tested positive for cortisone after the prologue, which caused a small but intense shitstorm. Not just for Postal, but for the entire Tour, which could not afford another doping scandal. They had the perfect comeback story in Lance, who embodied the Tour’s triumphant return from the dark cloud of the Festina Affair. Now everything was suddenly at stake.

Postal and Lance handled it in a simple way. They produced a cover story: they said Lance had a saddle sore, and, according to reports, backdated a prescription for a cortisone-containing skin cream.
^‡
Though the doubters pointed out that Armstrong had failed to account for the prescription on his pre-Tour medical form, nobody aside from a few journalists seemed to care. The UCI didn’t
want to catch Lance; they accepted the prescription, and the Tour of Renewal rolled on.
^§

That was when the Tour became a different kind of sport; one that was all about controlling the story, which meant controlling the journalists. In 1999, as in every other year, most Tour de France journalists wanted to focus on the drama and romance of the race and avoid the doping issue if possible. But not all of them. A small group was focused on asking tough questions. Armstrong called this second group the trolls. The game was simple: the trolls tried to drag Lance down, and he tried to fight them off.

At first, Lance wasn’t very good at this game. He was defensive, off balance, touchy. “It’s been a week, and nothing’s been found,” he said in one interview, his voice rising too much. “You’re not gonna find anything. If it’s
L’Équipe
, if it’s channel 4, if it’s a Spanish paper, Dutch paper, Belgian paper, there’s nothing to find.” Another time, he pointed out: “I’ve never tested positive. I’ve never been caught with anything.”

Never been caught with anything?

But Lance caught on fast. I remember at a press conference one journalist pointed out that many people found his success to be nothing short of a miracle. Did he see it that way? Lance, who’s not religious, thought about it for two seconds, then delivered a genius answer.

“It
is
a miracle,” Lance said. “Because 15 or 20 years ago I wouldn’t be alive, much less starting the Tour de France or leading the Tour de France. So yes, I think it’s a miracle.”

When the trolls kept harping on the cortisone story, Lance did what he did best: he decided to take them on directly. He started by
calling
Le Monde
(a newspaper with a sterling reputation) “the gutter press,” and “vulture journalism.” He beefed up his denials; instead of focusing on himself, he focused on the motives and credibility of his attackers. At one point in a press conference, when a reporter kept digging, Lance said, “Mr. Le Monde, are you calling me a liar or a doper?”

I couldn’t imagine saying something like that, or what I would’ve said if the reporter had replied, “Actually, I’m calling you both.” But Lance showed me the raw power of the pure attack. He pulled it off because he believed—still believes—that what he did wasn’t cheating, because in his mind all the other contenders in the race were on cortisone, had their own version of Motoman, and everybody was doing everything they could to win, and if they weren’t, then they were choads and didn’t deserve to win.

I’ve always said you could have hooked us up to the best lie detectors on the planet and asked us if we were cheating, and we’d have passed. Not because we were delusional—we knew we were breaking the rules—but because we didn’t think of it as cheating. It felt fair to break the rules, because we knew others were too.

Are you calling me a liar or a doper?

I think that was the moment when Lance started winning. He showed them he wasn’t like the rest, he wasn’t going to duck or mumble some half-assed denial and wait for the trolls to drag him down. And it worked. The stories in the next day’s media cycle didn’t dwell on suspicions or positive tests; instead they told of Lance’s fight against these charges, a fight that couldn’t help but remind people of Lance’s fight to come back after his illness. He took on the doubters, just like he took on cancer, and it worked.

The writers weren’t the only people Lance had to deal with, of course. There was also French rider Christophe Bassons. Bassons was an interesting guy: a massive natural talent (his VO
₂
max—maximum oxygen consumption, a measure of aerobic capacity—was 85, two points higher than Lance’s score) who not only refused
to take dope, but broke omertà by speaking out openly against it. His teammates called him Monsieur Propre—Mister Clean. The real problem, from Lance’s point of view, was that Bassons wouldn’t keep his mouth shut. As he rode the 1999 Tour, Bassons was also writing a column for
Le Parisien
in which he was telling the truth: that the Festina Affair had changed nothing.

Lance decided to fix things. The day after his win at Sestrière, he rode up to Bassons during the race and told him that his comments were hurting the sport; Bassons replied that he was telling the truth; Lance suggested that Bassons go fuck himself, and that he should get out of the sport.

At this point, riders could have rallied to Bassons’ side; spoken out. But for whatever reason—perhaps fear, perhaps the strength of Lance’s personality, perhaps force of habit—they didn’t. During the stage and the following day, it became clear that Bassons was isolated. No one defended him. No one would talk to him, not even on his own team. Bassons understood, and dropped out the following day.

Throughout all this controversy, we were coming together as a team. With Lance in the yellow jersey, we had to use all our strength to control the race. It got tougher. We’d already lost Jonathan; then we lost Peter Meinert Nielsen to severe tendinitis in his knee. Each day was the same: Johan would begin by outlining some difficult plan, usually one that called for us to control most of the race. Then Lance would give us a pep talk, and our hearts would fill up with the importance of this moment, with the sheer unlikeliness of us, the Bad News Bears in a couple of shitty campers, winning the biggest race in the world. And it worked: each day we would go bury ourselves, and keep Lance safely in yellow.

As the Tour wore on, the riders who did not have access to Edgar took the brunt of it. They were riding stone-cold paniagua, and they were doing one heck of a job, so we looked for ways to help out. One night during the second week we found that we had some extra Edgar—a couple thousand units, maybe. What to do? We
didn’t want to throw it away, and we didn’t want to risk pushing our hematocrits too high. Lance was the one who made the suggestion: give it to Frankie. Someone was dispatched to his room; it turned out that Frankie was so exhausted that he was already asleep. Frankie nodded wearily and accepted the offer.

With each passing day, we drew closer to the Paris finish. We tried not to think about winning; we tried to focus on containing Zülle and the other contenders. But on July 21, when we rode into the Pyrenean city of Pau with Lance’s lead intact and the final mountain stage behind us, the possibility became real. Unless something went drastically wrong—a crash, illness, or injury—Lance would win the Tour de France.

The only bad news was that we’d heard that one of our team was cracking: Philippe. Motoman was exhausted. I felt for him: following the Tour day after day, week after week, must’ve been brutal. Crowds are immense. Roads are closed. Hotels are completely booked. So Philippe camped, bivouacked, improvised shelters in road stops and parking lots. On one of his phone calls to Johan or Lance, Motoman confessed he was cracking. He couldn’t do it anymore. Fortunately, by now the race was safely in hand. With a week left, Motoman was told he could head home to Nice.
^‖

Near the Tour’s finish, Lance suggested to Kevin and me that it
would be nice if we found a way to thank Philippe for his hard work. We knew that Lance was buying Rolexes for some of the soigneurs and coaching staff, so Kevin and I decided to do the same for Philippe. We chipped in cash, and Kevin’s fiancée, Becky, picked up the watch in Nice and carried it with her to Paris.

The last week went like clockwork; so smooth that when we finally clinched it, we couldn’t quite bring ourselves to believe it. After crossing the finish line, we made that traditional ride down the Champs-Élysées, saw the Arc de Triomphe surrounded by a massive crowd waving American and Texas flags, got off our bikes and wandered around the cobblestones in happy disbelief, hugging our wives, our families, each other. I remember champagne bottles popping, a million flashbulbs going off, a guy in the crowd playing a tuba. It felt like we were inside a Hollywood movie.

The victory party was equally fantastic. Thom Weisel rented the top floor of the Musée d’Orsay, a Beaux-Arts museum on the banks of the Seine; about two hundred sponsors, family, and friends attended. Weisel was in his glory, toasting everyone in sight and reminding us that we had just won the Tour de Fucking France. I remember seeing Lance’s agent, Bill Stapleton, on the balcony, making calls, making plans—Letterman, Leno, Nike, the
Today
show, you name it—his phone was flashing like Times Square. At one point during the party, Lance’s cell phone rang. He stood up, took the call, and came back a few minutes later.

“That was cool,” he said. “That was President Clinton.”

It was a time to thank the people who made it all possible. Lance went to the podium and said, “I wore the maillot jaune onto the Champs-Élysées today but my responsibility for that was equal to just about the zipper. The rest of the body, the sleeves, the collar
were there because of my team, the support staff, and my family. And I mean that from the bottom of my heart.”

Amid all the craziness, over in a quiet corner of the hall, we made time for a private ceremony. Kevin and I presented a tired, happy Motoman with his Rolex, his reward for helping to make the victory possible. We gave him a hug, and he tried it on. It fit perfectly.
^a