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 (18 page)

No Lance.

I could hear Johan on the radio, urging him on. Time ticked by.

I started feeling a little nervous. I could see Alex Zülle and Spanish climber Haimar Zubeldia catching up to me; others were following them. But where was Lance?

Time kept passing. Still more contenders rode up; it was getting crowded. But still no Lance. Then, Johan’s voice.

Lance cannot make it. Tyler, you ride
.

I checked with Lance.

Go. Just fucking go
.

I launched an attack as we came along the Tom Simpson memorial, 1.5 kilometers from the lighthouse-like weather station that marks the top. I went deep, maybe deeper than I’d ever gone to that point. The world narrowed to a bright hallway. I felt Zülle and Zubeldia nearby, and then felt them fall away. I felt the spectators, felt my legs turning the pedals, but they didn’t feel like my legs anymore. I gave everything; I made the last right switchback turn to the line, and crossed it.

Chaos. People grabbing me, screaming into my ear, media crowding around. I’m delirious.

I had won on Mont Ventoux.

A Postal soigneur grabbed me, wrapped a towel around my neck, and steered me toward the team bus. The bus was so quiet. I sat down, unclicked my helmet, let myself begin to take this in. It felt surreal.

I’d been stronger than all of them.

I was now a favorite to win the race.

The bus door wheezed open. Lance climbed grimly onto the bus, his head down. He sat ten feet away from me, toweled off, didn’t say a word. I could see he was pissed. The silence became a bit uncomfortable.

A few seconds later the door opened again—Johan, a concerned expression on his face, headed straight for Lance. He touched Lance on the shoulder, sat next to him, spoke softly, reassuringly. Like a nurse or a psychiatrist.

“This was no big deal, man,” Johan said. “It was probably the altitude. Perhaps you have been training too hard, no? We will talk to Michele. The Tour doesn’t even start for three weeks. Don’t worry, there is plenty of time.”

After a few minutes of this, Johan asked, “So, who won?”

Without looking up, Lance pointed at me.

Johan blushed, full red. He walked over and gave me an awkward hug, shook my hand, congratulated me. I think he felt embarrassed; he knew what a huge victory this was, and he’d ignored me completely. Now he made up for it.

But Lance stayed cranky. That night at dinner, when everybody was toasting my victory, he would barely make eye contact. It was like he was having an uncontrollable reaction, like an allergy: my success in the race—which was good for Postal, and therefore good for him—drove him bananas.

Late in the next day’s stage, Lance and I managed to break away. I was thrilled at first—if we held on, it meant that I would go into the overall lead, and, just as important, we would show that Postal was the strongest team in the world going into the Tour. The thing was, it felt like Lance was trying to drop me. He kept accelerating on the final climbs, going way faster than we needed to go. Then he’d bomb the descents, going so fast we were both on the edge of crashing. I finally had to yell at him to slow down.

We crossed the line together. I finished that day wearing the leader’s yellow jersey, the polka-dot jersey for best climber, the white jersey for most points. Winning the Dauphiné, a race whose former champions included Eddy Merckx, Greg LeMond, Bernard Hinault, and Miguel Indurain, instantly put me on the map. People started mentioning me as a possible Tour contender. But underneath, I was wondering about the way Lance had tried to break me on those climbs. It was the same pattern from our training rides:
Can you match this? This? This?

The last night of the Dauphiné, Lance and Johan came to my hotel room. I expected them to talk about the race, or maybe plan for the upcoming Tour. Instead, they told me that on Tuesday, two days after the race ended, we were going to fly to Valencia to do a blood transfusion.

*
In his books and on his website, Carmichael asserts that he worked as Armstrong’s coach throughout his seven Tour victories. In a
USA Today
interview in July 2004, Carmichael described a system in which Armstrong sent his daily training data to Ferrari, who forwarded them to Carmichael, who then adjusted Armstrong’s training accordingly.

In interviews for
Lance Armstrong’s War
, however, Ferrari said he had never communicated with Carmichael. “I do not work with Chris Carmichael,” he said. “I work for Lance. Only Lance.”

Here is what Postal riders say on the subject:

Jonathan Vaughters: “In two years, I never heard Lance refer to Chris one time.”

Floyd Landis: “Give me a break. Carmichael’s a nice guy, but he had nothing to do with Lance. Carmichael was a beard.”

Christian Vande Velde: “Chris had nothing to do with Lance’s daily training. I think his role was more like a friend, someone to talk about the bigger picture.”

†
After seeing Frankie’s performance in the mountains of the 1999 Tour de France, Betsy confronted Frankie and asked him, “How the hell did you ride so well in the mountains?” Frankie refused to answer. Betsy drew her own conclusions: that Postal had a doping program, and that Ferrari and Armstrong were at the center of it.

In the years that followed, Betsy became a passionate anti-doping advocate, and a thorn in the side of Armstrong and Postal. Her involvement deepened in 2003 when she assisted David Walsh with his book
L.A. Confidentiel
, and when she was asked to testify under oath in 2005 about the 1996 hospital-room scene as part of Armstrong’s legal battle with SCA Promotions. Over time, Betsy Andreu became a clearinghouse of information for journalists and anti-doping authorities alike.

“It’s funny,” she says of her role. “Lance likes to portray me as this fat, bitter, obsessed bitch who’s out to get him. But all I’ve cared about from the beginning is to get the truth out.”

Frankie, on the other hand, takes a different approach. While he gave a limited confession to
The New York Times
in 2006, in which he spoke of being introduced to performance-enhancing drugs in 1995 while on Motorola with Armstrong, and admitted to using EPO to prepare for the 1999 Tour de France, he mostly chooses to remain silent about doping—a stance that can create a unique tension in the small ranch home they share with their three children. In the summer of 2010, federal investigator Jeff Novitzky interviewed Frankie for two hours by phone. When Frankie hung up the phone, Betsy noticed he looked shaken. She asked him what he’d said. “I don’t want to talk about it,” Frankie said. Betsy phoned Novitzky and asked him. Novitzky laughed. “He’s your husband,” he said. “Go ask him.”

‡
Vaughters said that he had a candid conversation with Crédit Agricole’s doctors before he signed the contract, in which he told them he’d been doping on Postal, and therefore couldn’t be expected to achieve the same results. “It was all on the table before the contract was signed,” he says.

Chapter 7
 
THE NEXT LEVEL

AS A BIKE RACER, over time you develop the skill of keeping a poker face. No matter how extreme a sensation you feel—no matter how close you are to cracking—you do everything in your power to mask it. This matters in racing, when hiding your true condition from your opponents is a key to success, since it discourages them from attacking. Feel paralyzing pain? Look relaxed, even bored. Can’t breathe? Close your mouth. About to die? Smile.

I’ve got a pretty good poker face; Lance has a great one. But there’s one guy who’s better than either of us: Johan Bruyneel. And it was never so well used as that night at the end of the 2000 Dauphiné, when he told me about the plans for the blood transfusion. I’d heard about transfusions before, but it was always theoretical and distant—as in, can you believe that some guys actually bank their blood, then put it back in before a race? It seemed weird, Frankenstein-ish, something for Iron Curtain Olympic androids in the eighties. But Johan, when he explained the plan during the Dauphiné, made it sound normal, even boring. He’s good at making
the outrageous sound normal—it might be his greatest skill. It’s something in his expression, in the certainty of his big Belgian voice, in the supremely casual way he shrugs while laying out the details of the plan. Whenever I watch the likable gangsters on
The Sopranos
, I think of Johan.

As Johan explained it, Lance, Kevin, and I would fly to Valencia. We would donate a bag of blood, which would be stored, and we’d fly home the next day. Then, at a key point during the Tour, we’d put the bag back in, and we’d get a boost. It would be like taking EPO, except better: there were rumors of an EPO test being developed for the 2000 Olympics, and word was, they might be using the test during the Tour. I listened to Johan, nodded, gave him my poker face. When I told Haven about it, she gave me the poker face right back (wives get good at it, too). But part of me was thinking,
What the hell?

Maybe that’s why I was late the Tuesday morning we left for Valencia. There was no reason to be late—everybody knew Lance despised lateness above all things—but on that crucial morning we were running late by a full ten minutes. I raced our little Fiat through the narrow streets of Villefranche; Haven was hanging on to the oh-shit bars, asking me to slow down. I kept speeding up. It was eight miles to the airport in Nice. During the trip, my cell phone rang three times. Lance.

Dude, where are you?

What’s going on? We’re about to take off
.

How fast can that fucking car of yours go? Come on
!

We screeched into the airport parking lot; I walked through the security area and onto the runway. I’d never been on a private jet before, so I took in the scene: the leather seats, the television, the little fridge, the steward asking me if I would like anything to drink. Lance acted casual, as if private jets were routine—which for him, they were. He’d been riding them fairly constantly since the previous July, courtesy of Nike, Oakley, Bristol-Myers Squibb, and the
other corporations who were competing for the privilege of ferrying him around. The numbers were unbelievable.
USA Today
estimated Lance’s income at $7.5 million, he was getting paid $100,000 per speech, and his new memoir,
It’s Not About the Bike
, was an instant bestseller. You could feel the flow of money, the new possibilities it opened. Now we didn’t have to drive to Valencia. We didn’t have to worry about customs or airport security. The jet, like everything else, was now part of our tool box.

The engines revved, the wheels went up, and we were airborne. Below, we could see the Côte d’Azur, the mansions, the yachts; it felt surreal, like a fantasy world. In the plane, my lateness was forgiven. Lance was confident, happy, excited, and it was contagious. The confident feeling increased when we landed in Valencia and were met on the runway by the Postal team: Johan, Pepe Martí, and del Moral. They showed up with sandwiches,
bocadillos
—it was important to have a little something in our stomachs beforehand.

From the airport, we drove south for half an hour through a marshland as Johan and del Moral talked about the transfusion. It would be so simple, they said. So easy. Extremely safe, nothing at all to worry about. I noticed Johan talked more to Kevin and me than to Lance, and that Lance didn’t seem to pay attention; I got the feeling this wasn’t Lance’s first transfusion.

We pulled up near the village of Les Gavines at a beached whale of a hotel called the Sidi Saler, luxurious and quiet, free of the tourists who’d be arriving later in summer. We’d already been checked in; we took the elevator up to the fifth floor, moving through the deserted hallways. Kevin and I were directed into one room facing the parking lot; Lance got his own room next door.

I had expected to see a sophisticated medical setup, but this looked more like a junior-high science experiment: a blue soft-sided cooler, a few clear plastic IV bags, cotton balls, some clear tubing, and a sleek digital scale. Del Moral took over.

Lie on the bed, roll up your sleeve, give me your arm. Relax
.

He tied a blue elastic band below my biceps, set an empty transfusion bag on a white towel on the floor next to the bed, and wiped the inside of my elbow with an alcohol swab. Then the needle. I’d seen a lot of needles, but this one was huge—about the size and shape of a coffee stirrer. It was attached to a syringe that was in turn attached to clear tubing that led to the waiting bag, with a small white thumbwheel to control flow. I looked away; felt the needle go in. When I looked again, my blood was pumping steadily into the bag on the floor.

You often hear “blood transfusion” tossed around in the same breath as “EPO” or “testosterone,” as if it’s all equivalent. Well, it’s not. With the other stuff, you swallow a pill or put on a patch or get a tiny injection. But here you’re watching a big clear plastic bag slowly fill up with your warm dark red blood. You never forget it.

I looked over to see Kevin hooked up in the same way. We could see our reflections on the closet-door mirror. We tried to cut the tension by comparing the speed with which our respective bags were filling:
Why are you going so slow? I’m dropping you, dude
. Johan shuttled between the rooms, checking on us, making small talk.