Can EPO Kill?

Introduction

Once in a while I read a magazine article that gets my dander up.  In such cases I may offer a rebuttal in these pages, not because my readership is vast, but because the offensive writer might see my post and decide to go toe-to-toe with me.  I’d love that.

In this post I take on Mark Johnson and his VeloNews article titled “Book Excerpt:  Dr. Ferrari Was Right,” published on July 8, 2016 and updated on March 15, 2017.  The title refers to the disgraced cycling team doctor Michele Ferrari and his infamous quote about recombinant human erythropoietin (EPO), the drug of choice among cheating cyclists, being no more dangerous than orange juice.  Johnson makes the interesting observation that while EPO use is widely associated with death by heart attack, no causality has ever been established.

If this observation had been made in a brisk 200-word essay, I’d be grateful for it—I appreciate having a myth debunked.  But Johnson’s annoying and tedious 6,500-word article goes way too far, slinging mud at anti-doping journalists and anybody else who still thinks cheating is lame.  Read on as I savage Johnson’s essay.

Repetition as a rhetorical technique

In  junior high we all learned the basic essay formula:  state your thesis; support it through a number of examples; then restate it in your conclusion.  Those of us lucky enough to get more advanced instruction learned to mix this up a bit.  For example, you might skip the up-front thesis statement, presenting information that gradually leads the reader to come to your thesis on his or her own; following this, you can state your thesis at the end or even leave it merely implied.  Most good nonfiction writing does some version of this.

Johnson, however, gets to the point early on and then beats us over the head with his assertion, no fewer than 16 times by my count.  He starts with this:  “While the Dutch riders Rouet referred to were never conclusively linked to death by EPO, the fabrication served a larger anti-doping moral agenda and the missionary effort to impose purity on sport.”  As he develops his essay he reminds us of his position again and again.  Here are some examples: 

• “The story’s claim that the drug was responsible for 18 cyclist deaths was based on speculation”
• “What was not provable in 1991, or today, is that the drug killed a rash of cyclists”
• “EPO deaths made for good news stories, even if there was no autopsy evidence that EPO was actually killing cyclists”
• “No evidence exists to support the claim that EPO caused any of the cyclists’ deaths in the early 1990s”
• “Turning back to the EPO fiction”
• “While there is no evidence directly linking EPO to any competitive cyclist deaths in Europe”
• “The EPO-kills fabrication”
•  “The fictional nature of drug-death stories”

Okay, we get it, dude!  It’s almost as though Johnson is hoping by sheer repetition to get our heckles up against this confusion of anecdote with science.  I might start to feel annoyed by all the journalists who conflated correlation with causality, except I’m far more annoyed by Johnson’s logorrhea.  Fine, state your thesis at the beginning and the end, maybe even at the 3,000-word point just in case we forgot.  But 16 times?  What, do you think your readers all have ADHD?

Bludgeoned by evidence

To Johnson’s credit, he does back up his assertion by citing many articles that promote the EPO-equals-death idea without providing solid evidence.  A couple of illustrative examples, and allusions to other articles, would have convinced me that this unproven assertion is widespread.

Unfortunately, Johnson feels the need to bolster his case again and again, delving at length into seven different articles, along with a painstaking analysis of the matter by Bernat López, a Spanish professor similarly fascinated by the tendency of journalists to perpetuate one another’s hasty conclusions.  López must have even more time on his hands than Johnson, as he did a “meta-analysis” of 56 “academic texts” on this issue:  36 citing the dangers of EPO, and 20 arguing against the claim that EPO has killed cyclists.  Johnson blathers further by restating López’s conclusion—that no hard evidence causally links EPO with cyclists’ deaths—four times.

How much evidence do we need?  This overabundance of refutations turn Johnson’s article into some kind of journalistic Whack-A-Mole.  Okay, fine, nobody has proven EPO is deadly!  We get it!  Why go on and on like this? 

The answer to this question, I assert, is that Johnson wants to lead us toward a more subtle thesis, which he doesn’t support nearly so well, and which ultimately pisses me off.  Let’s sneak up on this hidden agenda by exploring some more of Johnson’s journalistic missteps.

Sensationalist language

Throughout his story, Johnson does a most curious thing:  while paraphrasing other journalists, and insinuating that they’re resorting to sensationalism, he employs sensationalist language of his own, again and again.  When he occasionally quotes an article directly, I see a striking disparity between the other journalist’s language and Johnson’s.  For example, a New York Times writer states that “the consequences [of EPO abuse], in some cases, may be deadly.”  Johnson sums up the article with this zinger:  “The New York Times startled readers with news of a killer stalking the roadways and velodromes of Europe.”  A killer stalking the roadways?  Seriously?

A caption in the same Times article read, “Mr. Draaijer’s widow believes that the drug recombinant erythropoietin was involved with his death.”  The Times later ran a correction, acknowledging that this caption reflected mere speculation on the widow’s part.  Johnson’s conclusion:  “Despite the correction, the rumor was already set:  EPO was a new drug of athlete destruction.”  Johnson, calm down!  Stop being so dramatic!

Here are some other examples of Johnson’s bombastic language:

• a killer set loose among the peloton
• scary new athlete killer
• a mass killer
• Grim Reaper haunting bike races and marathons
• press-supported notion that EPO was indiscriminately slaughtering cyclists in the early 1990s
• EPO’s black reputation in sports as a drug of mass destruction
• colorful, body-strewn doping history

By employing this kind of language when paraphrasing the articles he denounces, Johnson is committing an aggregate “straw man” fallacy:  he presents a weakened (in this case exaggerated) version of his opponents’ arguments in order to knock it down.

Johnson doesn’t include hyperlinks to the articles he cites, and I couldn’t find all of them, but I did check out the New York Times article.  Nowhere did I find anything like Johnson’s hyperbole.  I found responsible, carefully worded but qualified assertions:

• Doctors and blood specialists say the drug may be implicated in the deaths of as many as 18 European professional bicycle racers in the last four years
• Only anecdotal evidence links EPO to these deaths
• An autopsy did not specify the cause of death

I also happen to have clippings from two other articles on this topic.  While they both do suggest a link between EPO use and death, their wording is also cautious and understated, exactly as you would expect from a responsible journalist.

For example, “Cycle of Tragedy” by Ron Kroichick in the San Francisco Chronicle, May 9, 2004, states, “The absence of definitive causes ... underscores long-standing suspicions about performance enhancing drug use in cycling.”  While his article suggests a link, Kroichik never uses sensational language like “scary new athlete killer” or “drug of athlete destruction.”

Similarly, in “The Hardest Test,” in The New Yorker, August 21, 2000, Julian Barnes writes, “The assumption was that [the athletes’] heart rate had dropped during sleep and became simply insufficient to pump the blood. To counter this, EPO takers were said to get up in the middle of the night to exercise.”  Note the careful language here:  “the assumption was” and “were said to.”  Barnes doesn’t even assert that these reports can be proven. They lend themselves reasonably well to hearsay, but not to being substantiated.  After all, what athlete would go on record saying, “Yeah, I get up to exercise during the night because of all the EPO I take”?

An inconvenient truth

While Johnson derides the idea that EPO killed athletes, he does concede that the notion isn’t far-fetched.  He quotes hematologist Dr. Allan Erslev as saying, “The combination of lower blood volume from dehydration and higher hematocrit from EPO would increase blood viscosity and be not only detrimental to muscular action but also the cause of possible life-threatening thrombosis.”

Beyond this—and flying in the face of his earlier naysaying—Johnson concedes, “My own search of medical literature finds plenty of warnings about the dangers of too much EPO…. A 1996 study of dialysis patients was halted because patients on high EPO dosages suffered more heart attacks than a control group on lower amounts of EPO.”

Now, wait a second here.  If we have substantiation of the various claims that EPO thickens the blood, and medical research does show a link between EPO and heart attacks, is the implied causality in the death of these cyclists really so absurd?  Is it really “fictional,” a “fabrication,” a “fable,” and a “myth”?  Johnson makes no effort to explain why nothing has been proven in the case of cyclists, as though EPO’s risks didn’t have solid medical evidence behind them.

Does it really not occur to Johnson why this evidence doesn’t exist?  Has he not considered that team doctors of deceased athletes would prefer to sweep their EPO use under the carpet?  Has he not contemplated that when a cyclist dies and his family is grieving, no authority wants to step up and say, “Hey, if it’s any consolation, this guy was a lying cheating scoundrel”?  The governing body of cycling, meanwhile, has been infamously good at looking the other way when it comes to doping.  So the real question is, who exactly was supposed to come forth and investigate these deaths?

Sure, journalists would love to cry foul, but how are they going to gain access to damning evidence?  Who is going to let them snoop around the cyclist’s deathbed?  Johnson complains when an autopsy isn’t carried out (“there was no autopsy evidence that EPO was actually killing cyclists”), but as the Times writer pointed out, this causality cannot necessarily be established by an autopsy.

Meanwhile, what other explanation has been offered? If EPO didn’t kill these athletes, what did?  Did they drink milk from rbGH-treated cows?  Did they microwave food in plastic containers?  Did their parents just not love them enough?

(Johnson does offer up one theory, suggested by López and his survey of EPO research:  “If the researchers behind the 20 papers came up with any one Grim Reaper haunting bike races and marathons around the world, it was the damaging effect of extreme and prolonged training.” Well, isn’t it easier to train yourself to death when you’ve used EPO to speed your day-to-day recovery?  Maybe the relatively slow replacement of red blood cells is nature’s way of giving athletes the rest they need.)

Is death the only reason to condemn EPO?

Okay, let’s set aside the possibility that EPO has actually killed anyone.  Let’s assume, for the sake of argument, that EPO is never fatal.  Does that mean it’s okay?  Is that what Johnson is trying to say?  He seems inclined to vindicate the illegal use of this drug.  His vitriol verges on mocking the antidoping effort—not its efficacy, which is an easy target, but its very aim.

The height of this strange attack is a statement Johnson cites from López:  that “because the general public is largely indifferent to the drug-regulating policies that are the bedrock of anti-doping organizations, anti-doping missionaries played up the deadly EPO myth as a way to gain sympathy from a public that has an otherwise insatiable appetite for legal and illegal performance- and lifestyle-enhancing drugs.”

Granted, this is López’s assertion, but because Johnson trots it out (without calling it out as the raving of an obvious dipshit), he seems to agree.  WTF?!  Since when does the public have this insatiable appetite for drugs?  I don’t!  I want to see clean athletes!  The anti-doping “missionaries” (you can just hear the contempt in López’s voice) have had my support (or “sympathy,” if you must) all along.  I don’t agree that the public is against doping controls, and moreover I don’t believe that the public would demand the risk of fatality as a prerequisite for getting on board with an end to doping.

To his credit, Johnson does a fine job of explaining how EPO overrides the body’s natural ability to regulate blood cell production.  But he doesn’t seem to grasp, or at least acknowledge, that this is a very scary proposition.  Perhaps he never read Matt Rendell’s chilling article about Marco Pantani, “The Long, Lonely Road to Oblivion,” in The Guardian (March 7, 2004).  Check out this bit about what doctors found when, after a terrible crash, Pantani was admitted to an Italian hospital for multiple compound bone fractures: 

On his arrival at Turin’s Centro Traumatologico Ortopedico at 3.20pm, doctors were startled to discover blood values that were abnormal, almost bizarre: his haematocrit, or red cell count, was 60 per cent (50 per cent is high); his haemoglobin was 20.8g per 100ml (18g is noteworthy). These values then plummeted: on 25 October, with 15.9 per cent haematocrit and 5.8g haemoglobin, it took a transfusion to save his life.

After which the anaemia miraculously cleared. Someone, it seemed, had injected Pantani with the genetically engineered blood-booster erythropoietin, known in sport as the doping agent EPO. At the age of just 25, Pantani’s body had grown so dependent on these injections that it could no longer produce red blood cells.

Oh. My. God.  To tamper with the body’s ability to regulate blood cell production doesn’t sound safe whatsoever, whether it actually kills you or not.  Why does Johnson hold out for proof of fatality?  Isn’t EPO scary enough as it is?

What really gets me about Johnson is his scornful attitude toward the anti-doping mentality, and his insistence that raising suspicion about unsolved deaths in the EPO era is somehow more irresponsible or unfair than the EPO use itself.  “The fiction served as propaganda,” Johnson whines, “that made it professionally and personally suicidal to challenge the morality and righteousness of the antidrug movement.”  Isn’t the antidrug movement intrinsically moral and righteous?  On what moral ground could a cyclist challenge drug controls?  Do we have a God-given right to cheat by using dangerous drugs?

I struggle to understand what Johnson is really after here.  What version of cycling would he prefer?  A sport where those willing to take the greatest risks to their health (and their livelihood) are allowed to dominate, with a crushing, tactically minimalist style of putting all their doped teammates at the front of the pack and grinding everybody down until nobody is left to challenge their doped-to-the-gills leader?

I love this sport because, as a former racer with a sadly meager hematocrit, I found ways to succeed through grit, perseverance, patience, teamwork, and tactical acumen.  As such, I want to see all kinds of racers have a chance, not just those who respond particularly well to drugs.

For Johnson to attack the anti-doping movement, on the basis of insufficient evidence of EPO’s role in the deaths of cyclists, is seriously off-base.  I’m offended by his snide attitude, his bombastic and sensationalist language, and his audacious attempt to claim the moral high ground.  I hope Johnson’s book tanks, and that nobody mistakes his dogged rhetoric and tedious repetition for actual logic, judgment, or insight.

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Book Review - "The Secret Race"

NOTE: This post is rated R for mild strong language.

Introduction

In this post I review The Secret Race —  Inside the Hidden World of the Tour de France:  Doping, Cover-ups, and Winning at All Costs, by Tyler Hamilton and Daniel Coyle.  I describe why I didn’t like the idea of buying this book; why this book is important and admirable; a general assessment of its readability and what it has to offer besides sordid doping tales; and the importance of the footnotes Coyle provides.  At the end I’ll address the obvious question of whether or not you should read this book.

Why I didn’t buy this book

I got this book at the library.  Of course I’ll pay good money for good writing, but I didn’t want to further enrich somebody who has made enough money already by cheating at sport.  If Tyler hadn’t doped, his career would have likely been short and/or mediocre and he’d have made tens of thousands instead of many hundreds of thousands of dollars, and wouldn’t have a book to his credit.  (As Coyle described in his forward, Tyler had approached him in 2004 about writing a book, similar to Lance Armstrong’s War, but about Tyler.  Coyle wasn’t interested:  “I liked Hamilton, and his feats on the bike were amazing and inspiring, but when it came to being the subject of a book, he was fatally flawed:  he was simply too boring.”)

If Tyler had pledged to donate all the profits from this book to, say, a junior development program for cyclists, I’d have bought a dozen copies and given them as gifts.  (I have no problem with a solid co-author like Coyle keeping his profits; after all, he never cheated.)  By donating his profits Tyler could have given back to sport he stole from, while also defusing the predictable argument that Lance’s legal team made—that Tyler was making up all kinds of lies just to make money selling books.

Why this book is important and admirable

We shouldn’t be too hard on Tyler for doping—obviously he wasn’t alone.  Indeed, one of the main points of the book is that practically nobody in that era could have made good money riding clean.  Whether or not that position is entirely true, it must be said that prior to this book, only one of the positive tests and rider suspensions of the last dozen years had yet led to a satisfying confession (and if Floyd Landis wrote a book, I might check it out too).  This sport has long lacked a complete picture not only of the shame and repercussions of getting caught doping, but of the trials and terrors of doping successfully.  Because of this lack, a rider of Tyler’s era could be forgiven for having taken the wrong message from rider suspensions—that you just better not get caught.

As mentioned a couple years ago in a blog post comparing Lance Armstrong to Eminem, I’ve long wished a rider found guilty of doping would come all the way clean, as Eminem has about his own drug problems.  Where are the tales, I wondered, of how scary it is getting a blood transfusion in a motel room; where’s the lurid life story, equivalent to Eminem’s, to scare our junior cyclists away from doping?  Where Eminem is brutally honest, doping cyclists—even convicted ones—have so often continued being as secretive as possible.

Well, I got my wish—this book gives plenty of gory details.  For example, Tyler describes a routine visit he made to Dr. Eufemiano Fuentes to have blood taken out of his body, to be transfused later:  “When the bag was full, I hopped to my feet.  I usually held my arm over my head for a few minutes, applying pressure with a cotton ball—but I had no time for protocol.  I taped on a cotton ball … and headed for the exit.  Then I was outside, on the streets of Madrid, racing down the street toward a cab, dragging my roller bag across the cobblestones, hoping I wouldn’t be late [for my flight home].  I was maybe two blocks from his office when I felt a strange wetness in my hand.  I looked down.  My hand was dripping with blood.  My sleeve was soaked.  I looked like I’d just murdered someone.”

Even more disturbingly, Tyler describes a botched transfusion of previously frozen blood he received in a hotel room during the 2004 Tour:  “[Fuentes] wasn’t there, so the Phonak doctors handled the transfusion; it went smoothly.  I went back to my hotel room to wait for Haven and Tugs to show up.  But a few minutes after I got there, I started feeling bad.  I got a headache, and felt my forehead:  I was burning up.  I had to piss, badly.  I looked down, expecting to see the usual slight discoloration from the [blood bag].  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….  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….  My body felt toxic.”

Beyond the service he performs in scaring the crap out of anybody who might think about blood doping, I admire Tyler for having the cojones to be so frank about Lance.  Obviously a vast amount has been written about Lance’s doping, but not as much about him being a bully, being insecure, and being a leader—probably the leader—in the doping culture of the last decade.  There is some very damning stuff in this book about Lance’s character, including something truly illuminating:  the notion that Lance was actually proud of his doping—of how clever he was at it.  For example, he came up with a plan to have EPO brought to his Postal team by motorcycle during the ’99 Tour de France.  One of his assistants, whom they called Motoman, would carry the EPO in a thermos and use his motorcycle to zip through the traffic and crowds.  Tyler writes, “Lance practically glowed when he told me about the plan—he loved this kind of MacGyver secret-agent stuff.”

Sure, the USADA testimonies of many other riders also portray Lance as a bully, but not in such detail, and it must be remembered that this book came before there was so much momentum to the story.  And of all the people in this world whom Lance hates—there must be many hundreds by this point—I can’t imagine a greater target for his wrath than Tyler has made himself by writing such a detailed account.

(It’s hard to imagine being literally afraid of any bike racer, but Lance is different.  He is the only athlete I’ve personally ever felt scared of.  I encountered him at the 2003 T-Mobile Classic in San Francisco, after he’d dropped out of the race, changed into street clothes, and given an interview.  He walked right by me, and I noticed his expensive leather jacket had a big pile of bird shit on it.  I almost tapped him on the shoulder and said, “Lance, man, some bird crapped on your jacket!”  But suddenly I had this feeling that if I laid a finger on him I’d be clobbered by his bodyguards.  (What kind of bike racer has bodyguards?)  Years later, because of Lance’s legendary vindictiveness, I was almost afraid to post, to this blog, an unkind spoof I wrote about his defense team.  Instead, I sent it as an e-mail to friends, claiming I came across the story in “Ladies’ Home Journal.”  A friend convinced me that a garage door wouldn’t fall on my head if I put it on albertnet, and so far he’s been right.  In contrast, I wrote a similarly brazen humor piece for dailypeloton about Floyd Landis, without ever worrying that he’d sic anybody on me.  I think if Floyd read that he’d probably just shrug, or maybe even laugh.)

Above all, Tyler’s book has helped the public understand how widespread doping was in that era, and he has brought to light the corruption above the riders’ heads that allowed doping to go on for so long.  I’m tired of reading about younger riders complaining that they’re bearing the brunt of all these confessions by the previous generation.  That’s a really narrow view.  All the Lance-era Americans who have recently confessed are helping to create a sport in which the younger dudes can be competitive without doping.  That’s a lot better career prospect than the “dope or quit” choice Tyler’s cohort was faced with.  Sure, many of the USADA witnesses have gotten a pretty sweet deal—only a six-month suspension, and they get to keep the big money they made during their dark past—but we can’t hold that good deal against them.  (What are they going to do—ask for a longer suspension?)  And in coming clean they still have to suffer the shame of confessing, and the hit to their reputation.  If the sport is actually cleaning up, the next generation will never have to go through all that.

How’s the read?

The Secret Race is a good read—depressing, but certainly engaging and well-written.  In this review I won’t dwell on the combination of fascination and depression I felt when reading about the doping itself.  Anybody who has read the rider affidavits on the USADA website already knows what I’m talking about.  Suffice to say, these guys did a tremendous amount of doping—more than I ever would have expected.

The prose in this book isn’t as razor-sharp as Coyle’s in Lance Armstrong’s War.  In a sense, I think that’s a testament to how well Coyle has allowed Tyler’s own voice to come through.  I get the sense that these really are Tyler’s words, and that Coyle’s main contributions are asking the right questions, drawing Tyler out effectively, and organizing vast amounts of anecdotes into a coherent narrative.  The book rings a lot more true than Lance’s autobiography, It’s Not About the Bike, which had a strong whiff of ghost-writer embellishment about it.  (Not that I didn’t enjoy that book, in my naïve rubber-bracelet days.)

Beyond the doping, there’s a lot of interesting day-in-the-life bike racer stuff in this book.  For example, there are anecdotes about diet.  Tyler describes having a meal in the presence of Doctor Ferrari, who was obsessed with the weight and body fat of the riders he coached.  “Eating meals with Ferrari was a nightmare,” Tyler writes.  “He’d eagle-eye each bite that went into your mouth; a cookie or piece of cake would bring a raise of the eyebrow, and a disappointed look.”  He also describes how Lance’s own discipline once let him down and he ate three pieces of cake:  “The other Postal riders watched him eat with a sinking feeling:  they know what was going to happen.  The next day in training was supposed to be an easy day.  But the cake changed that.  Instead, Lance had the team do a brutal five-hour ride, to burn off the cake only he had eaten.”  After Tyler left Postal, he continued to run up against the weight/diet obsession; his team manager Bjarne Riis advised him to “come home from a training ride, chug a big bottle of fizzy water, and take two or three sleeping pills.  By the time you woke up, it would be dinner, or, if you were lucky, breakfast.”

There are also some funny tales in the book.  Tyler describes the boredom of being at a training camp in Tenerife with new teammates who didn’t speak much English.  “We stayed in a big empty hotel on the top of a volcano; I roomed with Roberto Heras, and for almost two weeks we did nothing but ride, sleep, and eat….  We ate in the empty dining room.  We wandered the halls.  Roberto would try to say, ‘I am so fucking bored’ but since his English wasn’t great, he would say, ‘I am so fucking boring.’  That became our motto for the trip.  I am so fucking boring.”  

Another funny anecdote concerns the crappy camper that Postal had during the ’99 Tour, before they made it big.  It belonged to the team’s head mechanic, Julien deVriese.  “We called it Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, because everything shook when you drove; the cabinet doors tended to fly open on the gentlest curve; every hinge squeaked frantically; it was so loud that, when under way, you could barely talk over the din.  Julien had one rule:  No shitting in the camper.  He was very clear on this rule.  We could tell because every time we saw him, he would point his big finger at us and say, ‘No shitting in the campa!’ in a husky voice.  We informed Julien that shitting in the camper was likely to improve it.”

Of course Lance looms large throughout the book.  Tyler describes how, during the 2000 Dauphiné Libéré, Lance had an off-day on Mount Ventoux, and Tyler—with Johan Bruyneel’s blessing—soloed to victory.  After the race, Bruyneel went straight to the team bus, thinking only of Lance.  “’This was no big deal, man,’ Johan told Lance.  ‘It was probably the altitude.  Perhaps you have been training too hard, no?  We will talk to Michele [Ferrari]….’  After a few minutes of this, Johan asked, ‘Who won?’  Without looking up, Lance pointed at me…  That night at dinner, when everybody was toasting my victory, [Lance] 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.”

Tyler describes how his ongoing improvement, and particularly a stress test he did with Ferrari in which he beat Lance’s record for a certain climb, began to make Lance feel threatened.  As a result, in the 2001 Tour, Tyler wasn’t given any EPO or blood transfusions, and thus struggled just to keep up, eventually finishing 94th.  In one stage, he struggled to make pace on the front:  “I felt a hand grab my jersey by the neck and pull me back, hard.  Lance’s voice, yelling in my ear at the top of my lungs.  ‘What the FUCK are you doing, Tyler?’ …  After that stage, Johan asked me to apologize to the entire team for my poor performance.”

Perhaps most illuminating of all is the very clear depiction of how the doping culture at Postal worked.  Nobody pushed the drugs on the riders.  Quite the opposite:  a rider wasn’t even offered them unless he made it into Lance’s inner circle.  Tyler describes the white lunch bags that these riders were given by soigneurs after a race:  “They were given only to the stronger riders on the team—Hincapie, Ekimov, Baffi, Robin.  The guys I thought of as the A team.  That’s when I felt a sinking realization:  I was on the B team.”

So when Pedro, the team doctor, finally offered Tyler a capsule of synthetic testosterone—a “red egg”—Tyler didn’t hesitate to accept it, and (at the time) felt no shame.  Quite the opposite, actually:   “The red egg was a badge of honor, a sign that Pedro and the team saw my potential.  I felt like this was a small step toward making the A team.”

Coyle’s footnotes

The Secret Race is a memoir, not an exhaustive journalistic exposé, but Coyle provides copious footnotes in which he elaborates on certain points, often citing other sources to validate Tyler’s claims. A good example is how Coyle describes the Catenay-Malabry doping-detection lab study that found EPO in six of Lance’s fifteen urine samples from the ’99 Tour.  The study itself isn’t news, but Coyle lines it up with Hamilton’s claim that that Motoman, the guy who delivered EPO to the Postal team, became exhausted and went home after stage 14.  “All samples taken after stage 14 tested negative,”  Coyle points out. 

While he’s at it, Coyle completely torpedoes the tired old “level playing field” argument that enables many diehard Lance supporters to ignore the importance of his doping:  “Perhaps more interestingly, it looks as though Lance was in the minority [of Tour de France EPO users] in 1999.  Of the eighty-one urine samples taken during the 1999 Tour that were not Armstrong’s, only seven tested positive for EPO, or 8.6 percent.”  Probably at least one or two of those positives were from Lance’s teammates.  In other words, Postal won the ’99 Tour largely because they were using EPO and most of the others weren’t.  Perhaps the others had been scared straight by the Festina scandal in 1998.  After the ’99 edition, noting what EPO could do for a former Tour also-ran (Lance had one 36th-place plus three DNFs), the other riders may well have decided it was “game on,” and went right back to doping.

(The notion that Postal’s EPO use in ’99 was the exception rather than the rule, and the notion that Lance pressured his teammates by claiming everybody else was doing it, is corroborated outside of this book by an instant-messaging transcript cited by cyclingnews between Jonathan Vaughters and Frankie Andreu.  The transcript—available on USADA’s website—was evidence in the SCA lawsuit of that year.  In the chat, Vaughters tells Andreu that Credit Agricole, the team he rode for after Postal, didn’t dope:  “So that’s when I realized Lance was full of shit when he’d say everyone was doing it.  As crazy as it sounds - [team leader] Moreau was on nothing.  His Hct [hematocrit] was 39.”)

Coyle’s notes are helpful when it comes to the matter of Tyler’s own impression of the risks he took, which may not be the same as Coyle’s impression.  To my mind, Tyler doesn’t always seem to grasp just how dangerous his doping truly was.  He lists cycling injuries he’s had—“elbow, shoulder, collarbone (twice), back, hip, fingers (multiple), ribs, wrist, nose”—and concludes, “When it comes to the risks of EPO, they tend to feel pretty small.”  He doesn’t seem to acknowledge the categorical difference between a relatively simple bone injury and the very complicated matter of blood chemistry.  I find it odd that he would compare the risk of crashing to the risk of doping even after the botched blood transfusion he describes, where he was pissing blood and running a high fever and had nobody to turn to for medical help. 

Coyle writes more frankly about the danger of blood doping than Tyler does when it comes to Tyler’s positive test.  Tyler doesn’t seem to have thought too hard about how he managed to have somebody else’s blood in his body.  He describes his defense, which was based on the test equipment or protocol being faulty, and seems to still doubt the veracity of the test. 

While Tyler doesn’t dwell on the question, Coyle does, in an extensive footnote:  “Presuming the blood test was accurate, how did someone else’s blood get inside Hamilton’s body?”  He cites Dr. Michael Ashenden’s analysis of the situation:  “Freezing blood is a multi-step procedure that includes several transfers and mixings with progressively stronger concentrations of glycol…  Because the cells are alive, you have to babysit this machine for hours at a time, and keep everything straight.  In a situation where Fuentes and his assistant, Jose Maria Batres (aka Nick), were handling the blood of dozens of riders, it would be possible to envision a scenario where Hamilton’s and another racer’s blood were accidentally mislabeled and/or mixed.  In addition, according to Spanish newspaper reports in 2010, Batres was suffering from dementia.”  I am struck by how lucky Tyler really was:  if the foreign blood he got hadn’t happened to be compatible with his, he’d be dead.

Should you read this book?

If you haven’t been glutted by all the rider testimonies against Lance; if you have been glutted but just can’t get enough of this guilty pleasure; if you’d like to get the perspective of a doping cyclist and an answer to the question “Why would you ever do that in the first place?”; if you’re looking for a way to find compassion for an entire generation of doping cyclists; if you’d like to get a feel for what it’s like, day-to-day, to be a world class pro rider; if you don’t mind reading something as depressing as it is gripping—then I think you should read this book.  But I’m not saying you should buy it.