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 (16 page)

Eating meals with Ferrari was a nightmare. He’d eagle-eye each bite that went into your mouth; a cookie or piece of cake would bring a raise of the eyebrow, and a disappointed look. He even persuaded Lance to buy a scale so he could weigh his food. I never went that far, but with his guidance, I tried different strategies: I drank gallons of sparkling water, trying to fool my stomach into thinking it was full. My body, which was being pushed like never before,
didn’t understand—it needed food, now! But here, as in so many things, Ferrari was right: as my weight dropped my performance improved. And kept improving.

This was a different sport than I was familiar with. Our opponents weren’t other riders or the mountains or even ourselves; they were the numbers, these holy numbers that he put in front of us and dared us to chase. Ferrari turned our sport—a romantic sport where I used to climb on my bike and simply hope I had a good day—into something very different, something that was more like a chess game. I saw that the Tour de France wasn’t decided by God or genes; it was decided by effort, by strategy. Whoever worked the hardest and the smartest was going to win.

This is probably a good time to address an important question: Was it possible to win a professional bike race clean during this era? Could a clean rider compete with riders on Edgar?

The answer is, depends on the race. For shorter races, even weeklong stage races, I think the answer is a qualified yes. I’ve won smaller four-day races paniagua with a hematocrit of 42. I’ve won time trials in similar condition. I’ve heard of other riders doing the same.

But once you get past a one-week race, it quickly becomes impossible for clean riders to compete with riders using Edgar, because Edgar is too big of an advantage. The longer the race, the bigger the advantage becomes—hence the power of Edgar in the Tour de France. The reason is cost, in the physiological sense. Big efforts—winning Alpine stages, winning time trials—cost too much energy; they cause the body to break down, hematocrit to drop, testosterone to dwindle. Without Edgar and the red eggs, those costs add up. With Edgar and the red eggs, you can recover, rebalance, and keep going at the same level. Dope is not really a magical boost as much as it is a way to control against declines.

That spring in Nice we trained harder and longer than I’d ever
imagined I could train. It worked. Here are a couple of journal entries from 2000. (Note: By March 30, I had already been racing for nearly six weeks. Also, I wrote “HR” next to my hematocrit so that people would think it was my heart rate. Clever, eh?)

MARCH 30

Weight: 63.5 kg (139 pounds)

Body fat: 5.9 percent

Avg. watts: 371

Watts per kilo: 5.84

HR [hematocrit]: 43

Hemoglobin: 14.1

Max heart rate: 177

Madone time: 36.03

MAY 31

Weight: 60.8 kg (134 pounds)

Body fat: 3.8 percent

Avg. watts: 392

Watts per kilo: 6.45

HR [hematocrit]: 50

Hemoglobin: 16.4

Max heart rate: 191

Madone time: 32:32

In sixty days, I went from being in the middle of the pack to being within shouting distance of Ferrari’s magic number for winning the Tour—a 10 percent improvement in a sport where half a percent can decide a big race. The timing was perfect for me, because the Dauphiné Libéré, the weeklong race in the French Alps that served as a traditional tuneup for Tour contenders, was just around the corner. I knew Lance wanted to win it, but I thought
that perhaps I could acquit myself well, cement my role as his top lieutenant.

It was around this time that I started to notice a shift in my relationship with Lance. He knew my numbers. He saw where I was, and how fast I was improving. I noticed that on the times when we trained side by side, Lance would edge his front wheel ahead of mine. I’m stubborn, though, and I’d respond. It became a pattern: Lance would edge out six inches, and I would respond by putting my wheel one centimeter behind his. Then he’d edge out another six inches, and I’d respond—one centimeter behind. I always stayed one centimeter behind, to let him control the pace. That one centimeter separating us came to mean a lot. It was like a conversation, with Lance asking the questions.

How’s that feel?

—Still here.

This?

—Still here.

Okay, this?

—Still here, dude.

At the time I was proud of it—of proving what a strong lieutenant I was. Only later did I realize how this contained the seeds of disaster.

The other part of my apprenticeship had to do with life at home. Haven’s a natural organizer, and she dove into our new life in Nice. She took French lessons. She handled shopping, banking, paperwork, you name it. She found a great produce market and raided it every day; she would chop my salad into small bits, figuring it would take less energy to digest it. That was the kind of small but important touch that made me appreciate her. Haven wasn’t just along for the ride, she was ready to do whatever it took to help me out, to be a part of our two-person team.

We got along great, with one exception. Walking. I know this sounds crazy, but one of the first rules I learned as I entered topflight bike racing was this:
If you’re standing, sit down; if you’re sitting, lie down; and avoid stairs like the plague
. Bike racing is the only sport in the world where the better you get, the more you resemble a feeble old man. I’m not sure of the physiology behind it, but the truth was, walking and standing for extended periods wore you out, made your joints ache, and thus set back your training. (Five-time Tour de France champion Bernard Hinault hated stairs so much that during some Tours, he would have his soigneurs carry him into the hotels rather than walk.) This meant that when Haven wondered if I wanted to go for a Sunday stroll on the beach, or a hike in the nearby mountains, or a walk to the corner market, I would usually beg off.
Sorry, hon, I gotta rest
.

I was kept busy, however, by other household errands, many of them revolving around Edgar. First I had to get it, which was more complicated now that the team was no longer carrying EPO to races. This meant buying the first of my many secret phones—prepaid cell phones. I’d use the secret phone to call del Moral or his assistant, Pepe Martí, and tell him I needed some “vitamins” or “allergy medication” or “iron tablets” or whatever code word we were using at the time. Then I’d drive to meet Pepe at some rendezvous point, and pick up a supply of red eggs and EPO from Dr. del Moral’s clinic. I normally bought about twenty injections’ worth, enough for about two months. I carried it in a soft-sided cooler with some ice packs, and del Moral would add a phony prescription for Haven—usually something about blood loss due to a menstrual condition—on the off chance I got stopped by the cops and searched, which, thank God, I never did.

Unlike Lance, I wasn’t comfortable putting white boxes with the label AMGEN or EPREX next to my Diet Cokes. So I developed a system. First I soaked the outer cardboard packaging in water until it was unreadable, then I tore it up into tiny pieces and flushed it
down the toilet. Then I used my thumbnail to peel the sticky labels off the glass EPO vials, which in that day were about an inch and a half tall and a half-inch wide, and flushed the labels as well. Then I wrapped the whole thing in tinfoil and put it in the back of the fridge, behind a pile of vegetables. Later, trying to be clever, I bought a fake root beer can with a secret screwtop compartment, like you’d order from the back of a comic book, but I worried someone would mistake it for a real can of root beer and try to drink it. Foil turned out to work best, because nobody wants to open up small, wrinkly packages that look like leftovers. The system worked well, except for one drawback: the balled-up labels were sticky, and tended to find their way into my shirt or pants pockets. Many times, I would be out at dinner or the grocery store, reach into my pocket to get something, and my hand would come out with an EPO label attached. Oops.

That was mostly it. No big menus of drugs; just Edgar and testosterone (Andriol). One red egg of Andriol every week or two during training was usually enough; though if you needed a smaller boost you could poke an egg with a safety pin, squeeze out some of the oil onto your tongue, and save the rest for later. Ferrari came up with a way of mixing Andriol with olive oil; he put it in a dark glass bottle with an eyedropper, for little boosts. I remember getting some of the oil from Lance at a race once: he held out the dropper and I opened my mouth like a baby bird. At del Moral’s suggestion I tried some human growth hormone for one training bloc—a half-dozen injections over twenty days—but it made my legs feel heavy and bloated and made me feel like crap, so I stopped.

I took a shot of Edgar about every second or third day, usually 2,000 units, which sounds like a lot but in fact is only about the volume of a pencil eraser. I’d inject it under the skin, in either my arm or my belly; the needle was so small it barely left a mark. Quick-quick, and then you have a little sparkle in your blood.