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 (32 page)

I had to piss, badly. I looked down, expecting to see the usual slight discoloration from the BB. But when I looked down, I was pissing blood. Dark, dark red, almost black. It kept coming and coming, filling the toilet like a horror movie.

I felt myself panicking. I told myself it was going to be okay. Maybe just 15 percent of the bag was bad. I’d still have the other 85 percent. I was still okay, right? I drank some water, lay on the bed, tried to rest.

My fever kept rising. My headache got worse. Then I got up to piss again. I didn’t want to look down. Then I did.

Pure red.

Then I knew I was in trouble. The bag was bad. Something had happened, either in Siberia or on the way to Limoges: the bag had been warmed up or been damaged; I’d transfused a bag full of dead blood cells. My body felt toxic. I started shivering, felt nauseous. I remembered seeing Manzano get airlifted out last year when he got sick; he went to a hospital, nearly died. My headache got worse, until it felt like my skull was being cracked and peeled off my brain, piece by piece. I got my phone and set it next to me on the bed, in case I had to call for an ambulance.

Haven came; she could see something was seriously wrong. I told her what had happened, but not all of it—I didn’t want to scare her. I lied; I told her I’d pissed some blood, but was feeling better. She got me aspirin, did her best to make me comfortable. I told her not to tell anybody. Not the doctors, not my teammates, not my director. At the time, it felt like a strategic bit of denial—
if I don’t tell them, then it didn’t happen
. But now I can see that I mostly felt ashamed. My back was fucked. My blood was fucked. My entire Tour—everyone’s hard work, our big chance—was turning to shit.

I spent the night lying next to Tugs, shivering with fever, telling him goodbye.

You keep going. That’s the horrible, beautiful thing about bike racing. You keep going. The next morning I rode, gritting it through a flat stage. Then came the first test of the Tour, stage 10, a slog through the Appalachian-like Massif Central. I was burning matches all day to be with the front group. When we hit the climb of the day, the Col du Pas de Peyrol, things got serious and I got dropped. The main problem was my back: when I went hard, I couldn’t make myself hurt. Sickness I could deal with. Pain I could deal with, but not being able to go hard enough to have pain—that was truly tough.

I lost seven seconds that stage. A tiny amount, but it showed the truth: I couldn’t keep up. Afterward, Lance and I found ourselves next to each other. Our blowup a few days earlier had cleared the air. Now there was eye contact, talking.

“Fuck, that was hard,” Lance said casually.

—Yeah, I felt like shit, I said, honestly. I was suffering at the end.

Lance turned to me and I got a good look at his face. He looked healthy: pink, bright clear eyes, no trace of suffering; he had a glint in his eye. That’s when I knew: his comment was a way of testing me. He wasn’t suffering. But he got me to admit I was. It was like he was giving me a needle, a little
fuck you
.

I wasn’t the only one struggling. Though he hadn’t crashed, Ullrich was having a hard time: gasping on the big climbs, struggling to keep up. He wasn’t himself the entire Tour; he had good form, but he was struggling to keep up and went on to finish fourth, the first time he’d finished lower than second. Later, I heard rumors that Ullrich had also had a bad bag of blood. I have no idea if it’s true or not, but given his performance it makes sense.

Mayo wasn’t doing any better. The crash hadn’t injured him, but it looked like he’d lost horsepower. He got so frustrated that at one point he got off his bike and wanted to quit. We all were falling away. Lance was the only one left standing.

My Tour ended on stage 13 to Plateau de Beille. As it happened, it was the same day for which our foundation had combined with Outdoor Life Network and Regal Entertainment Group to hold a fundraiser in which the Tour would be broadcast live at nineteen movie theaters across the U.S. I had hoped it would be a good day for me, but instead viewers saw me sliding back, my face weirdly calm. I’m sure they were looking for some fight, but I didn’t have any. I couldn’t move my legs; I couldn’t feel pain; my back felt like it was in a vise.

I kept going.

My director, Álvaro, saw what was happening. That morning, he’d instructed me to go as far as I could, then we would see. I knew he was talking in code: he wanted me to abandon.

I kept going.

My teammate Nic Jalabert slid in beside me. I’d brought Nic from CSC because I liked his easy manner and his hardworking nature. He was the younger brother of Laurent Jalabert, the French world champion, and, perhaps as a result, cast a skeptical eye toward the craziness at the top of the sport. Once, in a 2003 race in Holland, we’d been in a crash and I’d gashed my hand badly on a chain ring. I leapt to my feet and started chasing, trying to catch up. I was riding like hell, pushing the old wall, and blood was dripping down into my wheels, spattering everywhere, when I felt Nic’s hand on my shoulder.

Tyler, it’s just a bike race
.

At first I didn’t understand. Then I looked at myself and I saw that Nic was right. It’s just a bike race. Finish 6th, finish 60th, finish 106th, did it really matter? Do your best and let it go. That day, we’d slowed down and ridden together to the finish.

Now, as I struggled to keep up with the peloton on Plateau de Beille, I felt Nic’s hand on my shoulder. He didn’t say anything but I could feel what he meant:
Tyler, it’s just a bike race
.

I relaxed. I let my legs stop moving. I coasted to the side of the road, along a small stone wall, and, for the first and only time in my career, got off my bike while I could still ride.

No job too small or tough.

As it turned out, no job was too tough. This job, though, suddenly seemed too small.

That night, I was supposed to get my second BB from Ufe. To save him the trip, I phoned him. I spoke carefully, in case anyone was listening, and told him that I’d just dropped out, and we didn’t need to meet for “dinner.” But before I could complete the sentence, he jumped in, his voice agitated, talking a mile a minute.

“It’s all gone crazy. Everything’s lost, gone. So sorry, man.”

—What?

“He got stopped. Police. Had to throw everything away. I’m so sorry, man. So sorry. I can’t believe it, it’s so crazy …”

I hung up quickly, unnerved that Ufe had spoken so openly. Later he explained: the courier had been stopped in a police roadblock, and had panicked, thrown the blood bags into a ditch by the side of the road. I didn’t care at the time. I was bummed to lose one, but we had more where that came from. I didn’t suspect any foul play—though later, when a friend told me that the same thing had happened to Ullrich, part of me wondered.

I went home to recover. I watched a few minutes of the Tour on television. I could see Postal up front, dominant. All of them together, George, Chechu, Floyd, leading the way up the big climbs, the old blue train. It was a demonstration just like the old days before Festina: one team using its advantages to take the race by the throat. Lance won a bunch of stages in that last week, including several that he didn’t have to win, in order to send his message: he was still boss. And when an Italian rider named Filippo Simeoni challenged Lance (Simeoni had testified against Ferrari in court, and spoke openly about doping), Lance made
sure Simeoni paid the price. When Simeoni broke away to try to win a stage, Lance, who was in the yellow jersey, single-handedly chased him down and brought him back to the pack, making a “zip the lips” gesture.

In short, everything was back to normal.
^‡

*
Jonathan Vaughters, who attended the race, says, “After the climb, Floyd [Landis] was completely white; he looked like death warmed over. I asked him what was up, and he told me he had donated a bag of blood just before the race.” According to Landis, Postal’s Tour de France team had undergone a transfusion a few days before the Dauphiné.

†
This was not the only time Armstrong informed anti-doping authorities about his rivals. In 2003, a few days before the Tour, he’d sent an email to the UCI, the World Anti-Doping Agency, and Tour de France organizers expressing concern over the use of artificial hemoglobin by Spanish riders.

‡
According to Landis, Postal performed two transfusions to the entire team during the 2004 Tour de France. The first was after the first rest day in a hotel in Limoges. Riders were taken in small groups to a room and told not to speak. For safety, team staffers were stationed at each end of the hallway. To guard against the possibility of hidden cameras, the air conditioner, light switches, smoke detector, and even the toilet were covered with dark plastic and taped off.

According to Landis, the second transfusion occurred between stages 15 and 16, when Postal instructed their bus driver to fake a breakdown on the road to the hotel. While the driver pretended to fuss with the engine, the team lay on the bus’s couches and received their transfusions. Tinted glass and curtains prevented any passersby from looking in. Blood bags were taped to the cabinets with athletic tape. Armstrong received his transfusion while lying on the bus floor.

Landis said Postal transported the blood bags inside a dog kennel in a camper driven by a team assistant. “They laid out the bags on the floor of the kennel and covered them with a piece of foam and a blanket; the dog went on top of that,” Landis said. “It was simple. Once the blood bags are out of the refrigerator, it takes 7 or 8 hours for them to warm up. That way they didn’t have to mess with coolers or refrigeration or anything that would alert police. They could just drive to the team hotel, put the bags in a cardboard box or a suitcase, and carry them in with the rest of the team’s gear; nobody would notice.” Landis said the dog’s name was Poulidor.

Chapter 13
 
POPPED

HERE’S A MOTTO FOR my generation of cyclists:
Sooner or later, everybody gets popped
.

It works, because it’s true:

Roberto Heras: 2005

Jan Ullrich: 2006

Ivan Basso: 2006

Joseba Beloki: 2006

Floyd Landis: 2006

Alexandre Vinokourov: 2007

Iban Mayo: 2007

Alberto Contador: 2010

And so on. It’s not that the testers suddenly became Einsteins, though they did get better. I think it has more to do with the odds over the long run. The longer you play hide-and-seek, the more likely it is that you’ll slip up, or they’ll get lucky. It’s inevitable,
really, and maybe it was inevitable from the start. Maybe I should have seen it coming. But that’s the funny thing about fate: in the end, it always comes as a surprise.

When I returned to Girona from my crash-abbreviated 2004 Tour, I set my sights on the Athens Olympics time-trial race in August. The Games were going to be my chance to rescue my year. I spent a couple of weeks in Girona resting up, letting my back heal, getting my head on straight. Maybe it’s the old ski racer in me, but the Olympics have always meant a lot to me (just hearing that theme song still gives me goosebumps).

I dove into the usual drill. I trained super-hard, spending day after day on the time-trial bike. I hit the Edgar, dialed up my values, energized by the knowledge that, though it would be a world-class field, I’d have the advantage of competing against riders who were exhausted from the Tour.

Race day at the Olympics was a furnace: windy, with temperatures approaching 100 degrees. As always in a time trial, riders headed off one by one; I would be among the last to go, along with Ullrich, Ekimov, Bobby Julich, and Australian Michael Rogers. The course would take us through two 24-kilometer laps along the seafront near a town called Vouliagmeni. There were little houses, narrow streets, and sailing boats; if I squinted a little, I could almost pretend I was back home in Marblehead.

I started well, rolling down the ramp and firing on all cylinders. As usual, stuff went wrong: the heat melted the tape holding my radio earpiece, and so I tore the thing out of my ear. For a second the wires dangled near my spokes, and I thought,
Uh-oh, here we go again
. But the crash gods were on my side for once; the wires fell harmlessly to the pavement. I settled in and trained my sights on the three in front of me: Ekimov, Julich, and Rogers (Ullrich, starting behind me, was having an off day; he’d finish seventh). I liked riding without the earpiece and not knowing the split times; I focused on the sound of the wind and the hiss of my tire on the hot pavement.
I felt I was going well—hell, I
knew
I was going well. But I didn’t know if it would be enough.