NEW BOOK: The Secret Race: Inside the Hidden World of the Tour de France: Doping, Cover-ups, and Winning at All Costs

As a long-time fan of professional bike racing, I read Tyler Hamilton's new autobiography with some preconceived notions shared by many. Doping among riders has been part of professional cycling's long history almost from it's beginning, so why all the fuss now? It's part of the sport: always has, always will.

Second, any meaningful story about the events of the past sixteen years cannot avoid featuring cycling's star character, Lance Armstrong, who continues to face serious efforts to prosecute...or as he says, persecute. Aren't such efforts meaningless and in fact detrimental both to cycling as a sport and to Armstrong's many charitable efforts? It's water way, way under the bridge, so what would busting him now accomplish?

Thirdly, given Tyler Hamilton's long history of cheating and coverup, why should we believe anything he has to say now? To that point, Daniel Coyle proves to be an effective co-author.

Having already written an outsider's account Lance Armstrong's War with Armstrong's cooperation, Coyle possesses valuable familiarity with professional cycling without the emotional stake held by those who are also fans. He already had a rough outline of the sport's history with doping, and Tyler Hamilton provides the hard-to-obtain details from an insider.

Coyle took care in selecting which of Hamilton's anecdotes to include in the book, corroborating wherever possible the accounts of other witnesses. Each chapter is extensively footnoted, including many incisive comments by one of Hamilton's former team mates, Jonathan Vaughters.

So, yes, the book's accounts are credible.

The Secret Race explains why doping as practiced within professional cycling in recent years is a serious problem, and it has destroyed many lives both figuratively and literally. More importantly, it points to the cycling's only hope for meaningful redemption.

This is a story about the deeply in-bred culture of bad actors who control the sport: the team owners, coaches, sanctioning bodies, sponsors...and Lance Armstrong. Bring the bad actors to justice, and younger cyclists may once again believe that they can race clean and still win.

The Secret Race weaves together all the significant doping scandals of the past 15 years. Although the publicity surrounding this book is driven by the interest in Lance Armstrong, the book exposes a sport-wide culture where doping was expected and the infrastructure to support it was easily accessible to the best riders. The pressure to win and the money riding on the outcome meant that cheating was/(is?) almost inevitable in pro cycling- especially given the ineffective testing standards during Hamilton's day.

Hamilton: They've got their doctors, and we have ours. Ours were better than theirs.

Andy Hampsten, the American who rose to professional cycling's elite ranks after winning the Giro de Italia in1988, eventually found himself out-muscled by nobody competitors who suddenly transformed themselves, turbocharged by the new blood booster called EPO.

In the mid eighties, when I came up, riders were doping but it was still possible to compete with them...bottom line, a clean rider could compete in the big three-week races. EPO changed everything...all of a sudden whole teams were ragingly fast, all of a sudden I was struggling to make time limits... As the 1996 season went by...everybody knew what was up, everybody was talking about EPO, everybody could see the writing on the wall.

Many have a blasé attitude towards athletes' use of performance enhancing drugs, because "it was a level playing field; they all doped." That would be fine if all athletes have the same access to the new technologies and the same protections from being caught.

For years I believed the Lance Armstrong story, about a genetically gifted athlete who beat his cancer and then dominated the sport of professional cycling mainly by training harder and smarter than his competitors. His physiological talents and his professional work ethic cannot be denied.

But the Lance Armstrong myth, on which he created an enormously successful commercial brand, only partially explains his success with cycling. Lance also proved to be more ruthless, better-resourced, and politically cunning than his competitors. The difference is Lance had a story-book narrative that appealed to the general public and therefore sponsors and industry hacks. Protection from within the UCI sounds ridiculous - which is what Lance counted on - and most people would never believe such a thing.

Example: another powerful doping method that came in vogue among cyclists in the late 1990's involved the harvesting of a one's blood prior to a big race and then re-infusing it either before or during the race. Lance retained the services of the notorious Dr. Michele Ferrari, and paid Ferrari to work only with him.

That left most of his closest competitors seeking the services of the equally-notorious Dr. Eufemiano Fuentes.
Problem is, Dr. Fuentes sometimes suffered from organization lapses, in in numerous instances re-infused the wrong blood into his clients.

Tyler Hamilton was busted in 2004 after a doing control test detected traces of someone else's blood in his. While Hamilton now admits to accepting illegal transfusions of his own blood, he was only caught after Fuente mixed up blood supplies from various clients while the blood was being processed in his lab. Bad luck for Lance's competitors who did not have their own personal doping service!

Ironically, one possible side-effect of taking EPO is an increased risk of certain cancers, including testicular. There is strong evidence that Lance did a lot of EPO before his cancer diagnosis in 1996.

This book provides a valuable cautionary tale even for those who are not fans of professional cycling. Tyler Hamilton was in effect a made man, working within a league of organized crime.

As Daniel Coyle writes in the book's prologue:

He pointed to the crook of his elbows, to matching spidery scars that ran along his veins. "We all have scars like this," he said. "It's like a tattoo from a fraternity."

Or from a gang.

The book describes acts of collusion, intimidation and conspiracy by prominent members of professional cycling representing the athletes, team management, commercial sponsors and governing bodies. Most of all, it recounts many instances of their omertà, or code of silence.

The corruption of professional cycling grew out of an environment dominated by hypercompetetive characters, large sums of money, powerful enabling technologies and weak independent oversight.
Jonathan Vaughters said:

This is what happens when there’s no auditing. It’s a larger fabric of the way people behave in a corrupt culture...there’s a cheat-or-be-cheated mentality. You have the UCI in a position of promoting the sport and regulating it. There’s no way they’d have done a good job. And then along comes a guy like Armstrong who’s a great story and is going to drive all this interest in the sport... “Why kill the golden goose?”

We find the same conditions present in other corrupt parts of our society, inside and outside of sports.

Wall Street, anyone?

UPDATE: The US Anti Doping Agency has investigated Armstrong and plans to make public its dossier of gathered evidence before the end of the year. USADA, which has already banned Armstrong and stripped him from his victories since 1998, is acting beyond the eight-year statute of limitations normally applicable within the framework of the World Anti-Doping Code. USADA is nonetheless proceeding against Armstrong, because the law states that the eight-year statute is invalid in cases where the accused influenced the witnesses who could have testified against him, concealed proof or lied under oath. USADA will try to prove that this has happened in the Armstrong case.

See also my previous post, Our Dope(r) Culture.

Thanks as always for reading and please stay in touch!