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 by Daniel Coyle, Tyler Hamilton Page B
Authors: Daniel Coyle, Tyler Hamilton
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win.”
Chapter 5
BAD NEWS BEARS
IT MAY NOT LOOK like it, but bike racing is the quintessential team sport. The leader stands on the shoulders of his teammates—called domestiques, servants—who use their strength to shelter him from the headwind, set the pace, chase down attacks, and deliver water and food. Then, just out of sight, there’s a second level of domestiques: the team director, the soigneurs, the mechanics, the drivers, the interconnected grid of people who are essentially doing the same thing. Every race is an exercise in cooperation—which means that when it goes well, it creates a kind of high like I’ve never felt anywhere else; a feeling of connectedness and brotherhood. All for one, one for all.
The 1999 Postal team was one of my favorite teams of all the ones I’ve ever been on. Not because of the remarkable things we accomplished together, but because of the extreme amount of fun we had while we were doing it. Now, looking back, I have mixed feelings about the methods we used to win the Tour. But I can’tpretend that being on this particular team was anything but a complete blast because (1) Postal didn’t do anything that other smart teams couldn’t have done, and (2) we had absolutely nothing to lose.
We had Frankie Andreu. The field general, the road captain, with his gravelly Ajax voice you could hear from a hundred yards away. We had my Girona roommate, George Hincapie, the Quiet Man, who was maturing into one of the strongest riders in the world.
We had Kevin Livingston, newly signed from Cofidis, who was the engine, both socially and on the bike. Kevin was a brilliant climber, and an equally brilliant comedian. I’ve seldom laughed harder than when Kevin and I went out for beers—he could do dead-on impressions of everyone on the team (including Lance, though he wisely kept that one under wraps). During races, though, Kevin had a serious ability to “bury himself,” that is, to push himself to his breaking point and past it, in the service of a teammate, especially when that teammate was Lance. Kevin’s relationship with Lance went way back: when Lance was recovering from chemo treatments, Kevin had been the one to take him for his first rides.
We had Jonathan Vaughters, the Nerd. If Bill Gates had decided to become a cyclist, he might’ve been like Jonathan. Genius-level smart and naturally talented, Jonathan was known on the team for four things: (1) his ability to climb; (2) his incredibly messy hotel rooms, which looked like a laundromat had exploded in them; (3) his even-more-incredible gas, caused by the protein shakes he was constantly drinking; and (4) his tendency to ask uncomfortable questions, especially when it came to doping. While the rest of us simply did what the team doctors told us to do, Jonathan read books on sports science and designed his own training programs. He was always probing: Where did this stuff come from? What does it do? He was visibly more nervous about doping than the rest of us, but he was certainly no teetotaler: in fact, he set the record for climbing Mont Ventoux, one of the sport’s toughest, most legendary peaks.
We had Christian Vande Velde, an easygoing, immensely talented Chicago kid whose claim to fame, besides being strong as hell, was that his father, John Vande Velde, played one of the evil Italian cyclists in the classic movie Breaking Away (some of the guys could recite the lines by heart). Christian was twenty-three, in his second year in Europe, and was taking everything in with wide-open eyes; he reminded me a little bit of me.
We had Peter Meinert Nielsen from Denmark and Frenchman Pascal Deramé, two big motors for the flats, and two good-natured guys. We had a crackerjack team of soigneurs, including Emma O’Reilly from Ireland and Freddy Viane from Belgium, who were whip-smart and funny to boot.
Then we had another type of teammate: the invisible kind. The person nobody talks about, but who is perhaps more
Chapter 5
BAD NEWS BEARS
IT MAY NOT LOOK like it, but bike racing is the quintessential team sport. The leader stands on the shoulders of his teammates—called domestiques, servants—who use their strength to shelter him from the headwind, set the pace, chase down attacks, and deliver water and food. Then, just out of sight, there’s a second level of domestiques: the team director, the soigneurs, the mechanics, the drivers, the interconnected grid of people who are essentially doing the same thing. Every race is an exercise in cooperation—which means that when it goes well, it creates a kind of high like I’ve never felt anywhere else; a feeling of connectedness and brotherhood. All for one, one for all.
The 1999 Postal team was one of my favorite teams of all the ones I’ve ever been on. Not because of the remarkable things we accomplished together, but because of the extreme amount of fun we had while we were doing it. Now, looking back, I have mixed feelings about the methods we used to win the Tour. But I can’tpretend that being on this particular team was anything but a complete blast because (1) Postal didn’t do anything that other smart teams couldn’t have done, and (2) we had absolutely nothing to lose.
We had Frankie Andreu. The field general, the road captain, with his gravelly Ajax voice you could hear from a hundred yards away. We had my Girona roommate, George Hincapie, the Quiet Man, who was maturing into one of the strongest riders in the world.
We had Kevin Livingston, newly signed from Cofidis, who was the engine, both socially and on the bike. Kevin was a brilliant climber, and an equally brilliant comedian. I’ve seldom laughed harder than when Kevin and I went out for beers—he could do dead-on impressions of everyone on the team (including Lance, though he wisely kept that one under wraps). During races, though, Kevin had a serious ability to “bury himself,” that is, to push himself to his breaking point and past it, in the service of a teammate, especially when that teammate was Lance. Kevin’s relationship with Lance went way back: when Lance was recovering from chemo treatments, Kevin had been the one to take him for his first rides.
We had Jonathan Vaughters, the Nerd. If Bill Gates had decided to become a cyclist, he might’ve been like Jonathan. Genius-level smart and naturally talented, Jonathan was known on the team for four things: (1) his ability to climb; (2) his incredibly messy hotel rooms, which looked like a laundromat had exploded in them; (3) his even-more-incredible gas, caused by the protein shakes he was constantly drinking; and (4) his tendency to ask uncomfortable questions, especially when it came to doping. While the rest of us simply did what the team doctors told us to do, Jonathan read books on sports science and designed his own training programs. He was always probing: Where did this stuff come from? What does it do? He was visibly more nervous about doping than the rest of us, but he was certainly no teetotaler: in fact, he set the record for climbing Mont Ventoux, one of the sport’s toughest, most legendary peaks.
We had Christian Vande Velde, an easygoing, immensely talented Chicago kid whose claim to fame, besides being strong as hell, was that his father, John Vande Velde, played one of the evil Italian cyclists in the classic movie Breaking Away (some of the guys could recite the lines by heart). Christian was twenty-three, in his second year in Europe, and was taking everything in with wide-open eyes; he reminded me a little bit of me.
We had Peter Meinert Nielsen from Denmark and Frenchman Pascal Deramé, two big motors for the flats, and two good-natured guys. We had a crackerjack team of soigneurs, including Emma O’Reilly from Ireland and Freddy Viane from Belgium, who were whip-smart and funny to boot.
Then we had another type of teammate: the invisible kind. The person nobody talks about, but who is perhaps more
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