Well, from the first … if you are the type of person still harbouring doubts about Lance Armstrong; if you have recently thought “it is possible that he doped but it is really not certain”, I have to say this book is rather convincing … and I have to admit I am now rather convinced.
But anyhow, the book is not primarily about Lance and this is a good thing. It is first and foremost a love story : love for cycling, love for races and love – this sounds corny, I know –for life. Hamilton’s writing is clear and often filled with humour. Yet the subject is dead serious : we’re talking here of cyclists injecting all kinds of products into their bloodstream and messing around with bags of their own blood. They have serious accidents, ride with broken body parts and are constantly reformulating the lies that constitute the tapestry of their everyday-life. Ah yes, and a few racers also die along the way. All in the name of money and power.
The Secret Race is however never depressing, probably because : 1) Tyler Hamilton is at peace with himself, feeling he has said the truth about his own doping, 2) he writes about what he loved more than anything else in the world for many years, bike racing. So in short, if you want a book that is hateful and condescending, an anti-Lance dithyramb of sorts, this is the wrong book for you.
In fact, Hamilton feels sorry for Armstrong. Sorry for his failure to acknowledge what more and more people are convincingly presenting as the truth. And on more than one occasion, we get the impression that Hamilton is directly addressing his former U.S. Postal teammate, nudging him forward, mocking him softly : Come on Lance, we all know you’re the best, just a little effort, you can also tell the truth, it’s not too late!
The text is chronologically organized in sixteen chapters that follow Tyler Hamilton’s career between 1994 (begins pro racing) and 2004 (wins Gold medal at the Olympics in Athens and tests positive for blood doping), with a first chapter introducing us to his youth (ski racing at Wildcat Mountain in New Hampshire and already a love for suffering, “I’m good at pain”) and the last three chapters being an “outro” of sorts where he recounts his coming-out as an ex-doper and the evolution of the various American investigations launched around LA from 2010 onwards.
In 1996, U.S. Postal’s first year and the year in which Bjarne Riis won the Tour de France injecting himself with 4000 units of EPO every 2 days (which led him to achieve the astounding hematocrit level of 64), Hamilton was barely able to stay with the peloton : “the race would start and the speed would crank up, and up, and up.” His teammates and himself defined themselves as “pack-fill” and were systematically dropped despite the insults hurled at them by their directeur sportif.
To fight fire with fire. The following year, 1997, U.S. Postal hired several new riders including Viatcheslav Ekimov (“his blond mullet in midseason form”), Adriano Baffi (the “muscled strongman”) and George Hincapie (“combining a liquid pedal stroke with a gritty, never-say-die Belgian mentality”), and perhaps more importantly, took a new more “competitive” direction with the addition of Dr. Pedro Celaya on the medical team. But Hamilton did not dope right away. He could see that after each race, the best riders of his team would receive neatly folded little white bags that had previously been kept in the fridge of the mechanic’s truck, but he strongly wanted to believe he could compete “pan y agua” (on bread and water), as was derisively said in the peloton.
This illusion lasted for exactly two weeks, the first two weeks of the season. After a particularly difficult Tour of Valencia, Dr. Celaya offered him a small red pill containing testosterone (“a little red egg”, “a capsule”, “I Could see it was filled with liquid”). And then, after being dropped from the pack at Liège-Bastogne-Liège, Hamilton takes his first EPO shot : “It was so easy. Just a tiny amount, a clear liquid, a few drops, a pinprick on the arm. It was so easy, in fact, that I almost felt foolish – that was it? This was the thing I’d feared?”
Things change immediately, Hamilton goes from being a cyclist who was very competitive in America but rather lacklustre in the extra-terrestrial world of European cycling, to a cyclist who regularly finds his way into the top 20 and even top 10 of the world’s biggest races. In that year’s Tour de France, he finishes 69th.
While not explicitly going too far into the details, Hamilton seems to have positively revelled in the effects of doping since it allowed him to push his physiological limits and suffer like never before in both training and races : “I felt almost giddy : this was a new landscape.”
In 1998, Lance Armstrong joins the U.S. Postal squad, returning to cycling after a little over a year spent successfully fighting cancer. This is a miracle in itself, but he is not yet ready for the Tour de France. By not participating, he notably avoids the Festina affair and its multiple aftershocks. In 1999, Armstrong brings Dr. Michele Ferrari along for the ride. Hamilton then gets a first-hand experience of training-methods based almost exclusively on quantitative factors, where athletes are mathematical problems to be solved. Their first meeting is in a rest area by the side of the road and Dr. Ferrari is waiting for the cyclist with a scale, skinfold calipers, syringes, a hematocrit spinner, a calculator. …. and the results are bad, “Ahhh, Tyler, you are too fat. Ahhh, Tyler, your hematocrit is only 40. Ahhh, Tyler, you do not have enough power. Tyler, you will not finish Liège.”
Incidentally, Dr. Ferrari’s main obsession is not hematocrit levels or power output but rather the athlete’s weight. This variable being the hardest but most efficient way to increase a cyclist’s wattage per kilo (Ferrari established at the time that to win the TdF you had to be able to produce an average of 6.7 watts/kg (for a 30 minute effort)). And it is probably also the most difficult thing for the Doctor to control, hence the disturbing intensity of his gaze during communal meals, as “he’d eagle-eye each bite that went into your mouth.”
At the time EPO was everywhere and Lance Armstrong seems to have just barely hid it in his everyday life. Early in the season that year, Hamilton was unable for two weeks to obtain EPO due to a trip to the US. Once back in France, he asked Armstrong if he could spare a few doses, “Lance pointed casually to the fridge. I opened it and there, on the door, next to a carton of milk, was a carton of EPO, each stoppered vial standing upright, little soldiers in their cardboard cells” (note : Hamilton has a definite tendency to aestheticize dope in his descriptions). At the 1999 TdF, given the tighter controls resulting from the Festina affair, the EPO is delivered by the aptly-named Motoman, Armstrong’s gardener now transformed into an undercover-motorcycle-delivery-man. And Armstrong won his first Tour de France …
Because doping is an arms race of sorts in which you are quickly left behind if you pause too long to take a breath, U.S. Postal riders soon pass to the next level, blood transfusions (collection and reinjection a few weeks later of 500 ml of their own blood), a complex and delicate process that requires great precision – and that can be disastrous. Hamilton describes it all in great detail : the private jet trips to meet the doctors in Valencia, how Lance has his own private room apart from the others for the blood collection, how the reinjected blood is cold and makes you shiver for hours.
In 2001, Armstrong gives signs of feeling threatened by his teammate’s always-improving performances and, coincidentally, Hamilton no longer has access to the team’s institutionalized blood doping. During the Tour, Armstrong will not hesitate to humiliate a struggling Hamilton during a rough stage : “What the FUCK are you doing, Tyler?’ As the other riders watched Lance shoved me forward. ‘Cover the fucking break!’ ” Hamilton eventually finished the Tour 94th, completely disgusted, vowing to never again race on the same team as Armstrong.
The rest of the book depicts Hamilton’s rise, fall, and then his rebirth as a human being (who no longer races). The race descriptions are often lovingly detailed, recounting for example the profile of the course, the good or bad words of the directeur sportif, etc. There are training technical details that will be of interest to some (an insistence for example on long 40 seconds-on/20 seconds-off sessions), even if you do feel that the authors have toned-down this aspect, probably to not overly frighten the North American readership that has a reputation for not having the strongest bicycle culture.
This eagerness to accommodate a wide public sometimes verges on the somewhat irritating, for example an unexpected first place finish becomes a NFL team winning a football match 99-0, U.S. Postal is like the army while CSC is like Apple, the Tour de France is the Indy 500 while the Tour of Italy is NASCAR, etc. It is difficult to ascertain if this watering-down should be attributed to the authors (Hamilton’s story has been put into written words by Daniel Coyle, who was also responsible for checking facts and establishing a system of complementary footnotes) or the editor.
Another detail we could have easily done without : the authors have a tendency to over-interpret certain events to prove their point. For example, a post-race phone call during which Armstrong cryptically asks his interlocutor how many apples he should eat and when would be the best time to do so becomes a conversation with Dr. Ferrari about EPO. Or another supposed Armstrong call to the UCI president is “too” friendly and this signifies an implicit complicity. We are not saying that the authors are incorrect in their interpretation, but these episodes are truly anecdotal and they unnecessarily dilute the quiet force of the coherent avalanche of facts reported by Hamilton.
So, all in all, this book is a must-read!