Biased Blow-By-Blow - Liège-Bastogne-Liège 2014

Introduction

Sure, there are other real-time online feeds of great bike races, but they’re too mainstream, too shackled by the principles of fair, balanced, non-profane, and dead-serious reporting.  This report, being filed by an unpaid blogger with strong opinions, may be just the thing for you if you’re tired of commentators holding, or biting, their tongues.

Biased Blow-By-Blow - Liège-Bastogne-Liège

So, as I join the race they've got about 65km (40 miles) to go.  There's a breakaway with a little under five minutes on the peloton.  Europcar is on the front of the peloton chasing, probably working for Thomas Voeckler, who isn't a bad rider and, more importantly, looks just a little bit like a young Robin Williams.  Look closely at his face and you'll see what I mean.

The break, of course, is doomed, and not just because it's a bunch of nobodies.  I'll name them anyway because there isn't much else to report right now. You've got Pirmin Lang, riding for IAM Cycling, which I'm pretty sure is sponsored by a dog food company here in the US.  Speaking of pets, this is sad:  my cat is so old she's reluctant to try to jump up on my lap as I sit here at the computer.  Say, that reminds me ... is Jens Voigt in this race?  Nope ... though he'd have had a better shot than Andy Schleck who, true to form, has already dropped out.  (This happened earlier; I read it in another live feed.  If you think that's cheating, consider that from a journalistic perspective it's the most professional thing I do.)

While I'm on the subject of who isn't here, Chris Froome was supposed to ride Liège-Bastogne-Liège today, but announced yesterday that he would not be riding, due to a yeast infection.  I'm kind of relieved, actually.  I had no problem with Bradley Wiggins riding Paris-Roubaix a couple weeks back, because (other than being on Team Sky) he's a slightly credible rider, and anyway he wasn't a favorite and I knew he wouldn't win (though he did ride well).  But with Froome, nothing is impossible.  His greatest talent as an athlete is how beautifully he responds to drugs.  I mean, take a guy like Vaughters.  His hematocrit was naturally high, meaning there was only so much that EPO could do for him.  But Froome went from a nobody to dominating the Tour de France without seeming to break a sweat, so I wouldn't be surprised if he could win just about any race on the calendar as long as he gets enough of whatever he's getting.  He could probably win a marathon, or a pro wrestling match, or swim across the English Channel.  And I hate to see him win, not just because he's a cheating scumbag, but because he makes the race boring by accidentally dropping everybody.

Michael Koch, the grandson of the former NYC mayor, is in the break for Cannondale.  Jacobus Venter is there, riding for MTN- Qhubeka.  Does that team make you nervous?  Well, you had Gerald Ciolek on that team winning Milan-San Remo last year, but that's not what I'm talking about.  It's "Qhubeka."  Normally when we see a "Q" that is not followed immediately by a "u," we're looking at an extremist mideastern terrorist cell.  So I think that company, which makes gluten-free construction materials, should consider a spelling modification if it's to sell better in western markets.  By the way, I've guessed at some of the details of this paragraph.  If I get around to it I'll have my fact-checker go through it.

An online correspondent, hearing of this breakaway, writes in, "I'd totally be there if I was racing!"  This isn't as outlandish as it sounds, because this correspondent is a retired pro.  I replied, "In the break? I don't think so. They'd never let a rider of your caliber get a gap."  By the way, if you e-mail me, you too can participate in this report.  (Note:  if you're reading this after the race has ended, you are too late.)

The gap is down to 2:40 so I better finish profiling these poor doomed breakaway riders.  First, a final comment on Jacobus Venter:  his given name was Jacob, but that didn't sound Roman and badass enough for him, so he applied the "-us" himself.  This is not without precedent:  the writer Tobias Wolff was originally named Toby.

Matteo Bono (Lampre-Merida) is in the break, and no, I've never heard of him either, though his name sounds familiar for the wrong reason.  Rounding out the group is Pieter Jacobs, who could buy a vowel and follow Venter's lead, riding for Topsport Vlaanderen-Baloise, a team so obscure I'm pretty sure it's made-up and this is just some fan who jumped in there.

My fact-checker has alerted me to a glaring error I made earlier.  Froomestrong is not out due to a yeast infection as I'd stated.  (I thought that sounded weird.)  Turns out it's just a chest infection.  This blog regrets the error.  Also, that thing about Jacobus Venter?  Yeah, I made it up.  It's true about Tobias Wolff though.

With 45 km to go, they've hit the most famous climb, La Redoute.  Tony Martin (Omega Pharma-Quick Step) is doing a lot of the work.  Here's an interesting bit of trivia from last year's race:  Tony Martin got a little bit of accidental publicity when, with less than 1 km to go, the Eurosport announcer was so excited describing Dan Martin's winning attack, he called him Tony Martin.  This wouldn't be any big deal if it were Phil Liggett or Paul Sherwin, who are famous for such glitches, but I was surprised to hear it from what's-his-name.  Check out the video if you don't believe me.

Wow!  A Giant-Shimano rider has totally attacked!  He looks really good.  I think it's Warren Barguil, a young Frenchman.  He's a tall guy though, so perhaps it's one of the Dutchmen on this team.  If he makes this stick, and the right riders bridge up, everybody will know his name.  Okay, he's been joined by an Omega Pharma guy, not sure who, and a Trek guy.

The break has completely disintegrated.  I mean, the guys still exist in the material world, but they're not working together anymore other than Venter and Bono.  Bono tells his director, over the race radio, "I'm not saying we're a better  breakaway than the Beatles, but we are more of a breakaway."  No, he didn't really say that.  That was the other, lamer Bono, and of course I paraphrased.

Barguil and the other two have been caught, which is a relief because I don't have to figure out all their names.

With 40K to go, the leading duo has 1:11.  A couple other breakaway-shrapnel guys, Lang and Jacobs I think, are floating halfway between the break and the peloton.  I can't imagine what motivates these guys to keep slogging away instead of letting the peloton catch them, and then curling up into a fetal position and sucking their thumbs like I would do in that situation.

Jan Bakelants (Omega Pharma) takes a stab at attacking but is brought back pretty quickly, before I could even report on it.  He has one of the most badass names in the peloton.  Bakelants ... sounds like what you'd build some giant industrial machine out of in the 1950s in some Iron Curtain country.  (He's Belgian though.)

La Redoute is over, without all the excitement we'd been led to expect.  The Côte des Forges is next.  It's not that long and not that steep, but then these guys have got to be pretty tired after 230 km (142 miles) of racing.

A Garmin rider, with nerdy handlebars, has attacked.  He's also rocking nerdy Micky-Mouse sunglasses.  The peloton needs to catch him pronto to avoid the shame of being bested by such a clownish figure.  God, they're like the bars on my mom's Univega touring bike in the '80s.

Bakelants needs a new bike but where's his team car?  He looks as frustrated as a guy in line at the DMV.  What a shame.  Ah, he's on a new bike now, but will have to chase like a mofo.  (Quick aside:  I once used the word "mofo" at the dinner table, and my dad, a professorial type, said, with an air of delighted curiosity, "What's a mofo?")

The Garmin rider, Alex Howes, has a pretty good gap.  I am left to ruminate on his chances while my Eurosport Internet feed goes to commercials for products with silly slogans like "made from sport."  Here's an ad for Turkey ... the tourist destination, not the meat.  Odd, isn't it, that we see ads for beef, but never turkey?

So, 26 km to go and still not a major move.  Fairly big bunch with a small breakaway with a smallish gap.  Looks like ... Jerome Baugnies of Wanty-Groupe Gobert which is such a silly team name, I'm glad I'm not a radio or TV commentator because I'd burst out laughing.  And it looks like they're caught anyway.

There are two climbs to go.  The Côte de la Roche-aux-Facons is next, about 1.5 km at 8 or 9% if I heard the announcer right.  Andy Schleck attacked on this climb in 2010, the year he won this race, back when he was a bike racer instead of a great, sad human mystery.

Speaking of past winners who doped like crazy, this race has a lot of them.  I've always liked Alexandre Vinokourov--I can't help it--but he obviously doped, and won this in 2005 and 2010.  The perennial doper Alejandro Valverde won here in 2006 and 2008.  The blantantly cheating scumbag Danilo Di Luca doped his way to a victory here in 2007.  And of course we'll never forget how the enthusiastic doper Tyler Hamilton won in ths race in 2003, the only American in history to win this (or any of the monuments).  Frankly, I can’t remember the last time an American contested a major Ardennes classic.  At least in 2003 we had two Americans—Lance and Tyler—bring their A-game, and their A-pharma, to this race.  It seems these days that the American’s can’t be bothered.  (There are five Americans racing today, but all in support roles.)

A flurry of activity as the peloton hits the Côte de la Roche-aux-Facons.  Michal Kwiatkowski (Omega Pharma) is right in the mix, and of course Valverde.  Samuel Sanchez, looking weird in the red and black BMC kit (I can only ever picture him in the orange of the dearly departed Euksaltel-Euskadi team), has attacked but is kind of floating around off the front without a clear plan of action.

Only 17 km to go and no huge attacks.  The main group seems to have all the big contenders still.  Some Saxo-Tinkoff guy has attacked and Vincenzo Nibali (Astana) has gone with him.  Ah, and here's a Katusha rider joining them, so Valverde and Philippe Gilbert (BMC) have bridged up, dragging the others with them.  Not sure who the Katusha guy is ... it's not race favorite Joaquim Rodriguez because he dropped out earlier.

The Tinkoff-Saxo rider was Roman Kreuziger and he's still stabbing the field occasionally.  I think I'm the first commentator to use "stab" directly, not as part of the phrase "take a stab," so if it catches on, remember you heard it (well, read it) here first.

Still an oddly large peloton with 13km to go.  With so many climbs, it's kind of remarkable more guys haven't been shed.

The Côte de Saint Nicolas is still to come, in about 5 km.  It's kind of a beast, climbing about 200 meters (656 feet), with pitches of almost 11%.  That should separate the men from the boys, or at least the lubed from the clean.  I hate to say it, but these Ardennes classics aren't as exciting for me because drugs would seem to help more here, with all the climbing.  So far as I know there isn't a syringe payload that will help you on cobblestones.  Maybe that's why the history books of this race is so sullied in comparison.

I wonder if Frank Schleck can do anything without his brother by his side?  Those two do seem awfully emo when deprived of each other's company.  Maybe they should be doing doubles tennis instead.

Mathias Frank (IAM Cycling) launches a pretty sweet attack on the climb.  He looks really solid, no sign of strain.  Oh, and here's a big attack from Daniel Moreno (Katusha).  Somebody else is with him, I can't tell who.  They've got a decent gap, considering they're near the end of this climb.

Valverde launches a move!  Gilbert chases him down instantly.  Dang it, I can't tell who it is with Moreno.  Back in the group some Europcar guy attacks. 

I don't think it's Moreno in the break.  I think it's Giampaolo Caruso.  And with him is Domenico Pozzovivo (AG2R La  Mondiale) and they've got about 12 seconds.

Nibali is hammering on the front!  Man, he's just dragging this really long peloton, all strung out in a line.  A Belkin rider has attacked and has a small gap.  It's only 2.2K to go so Caruso and Pozzovivo might just make it ... the last kilo is slightly uphill.

The gap is down to 9 seconds.  If it doesn't open back up, I think these guys may be doomed.  Speaking of doomed I have big fears that my video feed will go away in the final 300 meters.  That's happened too often to be accidental.  I tried to get a backup feed going, from Sporzo, but it wouldn't launch.

Oh, these leaders are really suffering.  There's a sluggishness about them that doesn't bode well for them.

Dan Martin is leading the chase.  Kreuzinger on his wheel.  Man, Martin must either be feeling really great, or riding really stupid, because he's doing a ton of work.

Valverde is drilling it!  Gilbert is fighting to get his wheel.  Dan Martin crashes with 300 meters to go!  Valverde is going for it, but here comes Simon Gerrans!  He's got the win!  I'd never heard of Orica Greenedge until last year but they seem to be one of the best sprinting teams now.  I'll have to see the replay of that sprint because my video was freezing a bunch at the end.  Man, that two-man break very nearly made it.  Here's the super-slo-mo:  Gerrans came right off Valverde's wheel and just blew him away.  Now I've got my cat's ass in my face as she rubs her ear on my PC monitor.  Misha, get out of here!

So Valverde was second, looks like Kwiatoski third.  They're on the podium already with other riders still out on the road, dribbling over the line in large and small clots.

The big favorite, Gilbert, just never really seemed to do anything but a) react, and b) not react.  He'll be pretty bummed with eighth place today.  Caruso hung on for fourth place, which goes to show how close that break was making it.

Gerrans is being interviewed in French, which is fairly impressive because he's Australian.  Says he was feeling lousy with 30km to go but his team helped him out.  (He doesn’t say how.  What, did they give him some big pushes?)  I didn't catch much of the interview because my wife showed up and interrupted, saying, "He's kind of cute!"  She wasn't trying to make me jealous or anything ... more like throwing a conciliatory bone because between the doping and the gaunt physiques of pro cyclists, she's not exactly a fan.

Man, gobs of ads here.  I was hoping to see a super-slo-mo of the podium celebration but I guess this coverage is over!  Yup, Eurosport is on to snooker now.  (Snooker?  Are you kidding me?)

So, pretty exciting race, though I prefer big throw-down attacks to field sprints.  I particularly enjoy watching attacks on climbs, so things are slowed down a bit and you can savor the spectacle of miserable suffering.  And as one of my online correspondents points out, Liège-Bastogne-Liège should end in groups of ones and twos.  What I'd really like to see is a video of Bernard Hinault's amazing win here back in 1980.  I should search YouTube for that....

Thanks for tuning in, if you did, and if you didn't, how on earth are you reading this?

Santa Denial, and How Lance Armstrong Taught Me To Lie

Introduction

When Robin Williams, a longtime friend of Lance Armstrong, was asked how he took the news that Lance had been doping, and lying about it, all along, Williams replied, “It was like when I found out about Santa Claus.”  This makes sense.  The Lance myth is a lot like the Santa myth:  something that millions of people believed, in part because it’s such a sweet story, they wanted to believe it.

This past Christmas, when I was lying to my younger daughter about Santa, I was surprised how easy it was compared to past years.  Why should this be?  After much soul-searching, I realized that it’s because I paid such close attention this past year to the Lance saga, and how it was that he successfully lied for so long. 

In short, this post explains how Lance taught me to lie.

First, a disclaimer

I want to be very clear that I’m not in favor of lying, unless it’s to my kids about Santa or the Tooth Fairy.  That’s why, until I subconsciously absorbed some important lessons from Lance, I had so much trouble with these lies.  It just felt wrong trampling over my kids’ reasonable skepticism, which as a parent I normally like to instill.  So, even though my lying skills have improved, my moral compass has not strayed, and I’m not lulled into any “grey area” nonsense.  I offer up this essay to you not as a how-to guide, but as an intellectual investigation.  Who knows, perhaps a knowledge of lying technique can help us be more skeptical.  I sure wouldn’t want to be played like a sucker again, after defending Lance for years.

Interestingly, I’ve witnessed a similar evolution of the lying skills and techniques of Lance himself.  In the early days of his lying, he wasn’t so smooth.  In fact, it wasn’t until the accusations went from a trickle to a stream to a full inundation that he mastered his skills at deception.  For example, if you can find the video footage of his press conference regarding the Discovery sponsorship, you’ll see some awkward, inexpert evasion.  Nothing as clumsy as Floyd Landis’s first denial (i.e., when he was first asked point-blank if he doped, he said, “I’m gonna say no…”), but pretty clumsy.

Technique #1:  convince yourself first

It’s pretty clear from the Oprah interview and others that Lance doesn’t actually regret cheating at sport—he just regrets getting caught.  He doesn’t present his doping and his deception as particularly heinous or unique crimes; I think he found a way, very early on, to square all this internally.  He took moral comfort in having convinced himself (and his team) that everybody else was doping too; in having used his massive celebrity to give comfort to cancer survivors (whether or not he made any progress toward funding actual research); and in having generated a vast amount of wealth for the bicycle industry.  In light of all this good he was doing, he must have felt as though depriving some cheating European of those Tours de France was really no big deal. 

So it is with the Santa myth.  To witness the idealistic, innocent, and pure trust my child puts in me, and to take advantage of it with a bald-faced lie every year, requires similar rationalization.  So I remind myself that the truth would only hurt, and that my kid couldn’t be trusted to keep it to herself.  I think of all the kids on the playground whose holiday experience would be damaged by too early a revelation, and all those letters to Santa that wouldn’t be written, and so forth, and thus I rationalize my position.  This was easier this year after I read Lance’s (or was it Tyler Hamilton’s?) description of the vast number of team support people (mechanics, masseuses, coaches, doctors, PR folks, etc.) whose careers depended on his “discretion” (i.e., lies).

Technique #2:  make your lie big and bold

Remember all that mealy-mouthed stuff in “Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus”?  The writer (i.e., liar) resorts to a sideways trick of turning Santa (the living, breathing man) into something abstract, with statements like “He exists as certainly as love and generosity and devotion exist” and by comparing him to fairies.  It’s easy to see why the writer would do this, but it’s amateurish.  When Lindsay asked me straight-out this year, “Daddy, are you and Mommy really Santa?” I knew this was no time for prevaricating.  So I snapped at her:  “Why do you love cancer so much?!”  No, of course I didn’t really say that.  That was Lance’s retort when the journalist Paul Kimmage accused him of doping.  It was big, bold, and (best of all) beside the point.  It’s the logical fallacy my older daughter once referred to as “red lobster.”

So what I really said to Lindsay was, “That’s crazy talk!  Of course we aren’t Santa!”  She looked so relieved.  This was the look of a kid who is all too happy to place her dad’s honesty and integrity above that of some stupid kid on the playground.  Once she had the answer that she wanted all along, her skepticism went right out the window.  Yes, I felt slightly bad about the power I had over her and how I was abusing it, but more than that I thought, “Wow, that was a way better response than I’d have made last year, which would have been the old answer-with-a-question dodge, like ‘What makes you ask that?’”

 Technique #3:  suspend disbelief by throwing a bone

Okay, so you’ve lied to yourself first, and then you’ve told the lie boldly and firmly, and your audience wants to believe you anyway.  That’s a good start.  But what about that niggling doubt that an intelligent person would naturally have?  If left alone, that doubt might start to fester, and end up being to Truth what a grain of sand is to a pearl.  Best to nip doubt in the bud, which can be accomplished easily with a few plausible explanations.

I was as amazed as anybody when Lance went from being a one-day classics racer to a Grand Tour stage racer (by way of cancer).  I’ve seen classics racers evolve into stage racers over time, like Sean Kelly, but even Kelly never won the Tour de France.  So from the very first doping accusations against Lance, I had the beginnings of doubt.  But Lance, in one of his novels, explained that the cancer stripped off the unnecessary upper body muscle he’d had from his swimming days, reconfiguring him as a stage racer.  It didn’t matter that he hadn’t actually lost any weight; I wanted to believe, and that explanation was good enough.  Lance also mentioned his higher cadence as a major asset to his stage racing; it didn’t bother me that I myself get more power out of a lower cadence.  I only cared that his transformation was explained in some way.  (So it is with Chris Froome’s believers, who accept his silly explanation—finally getting over parasitic worms—for suddenly going from mediocre cyclist to the world’s best stage racer.)

The ability of an explanation—whether it’s solid or not—to help suspend disbelief is something Malcolm Gladwell has called “the Photocopier Effect,” after an experiment by a Harvard social scientist, Ellen Langer.  Langer had just a 60% success rate cutting in line to use a photocopier when she merely asked nicely.  But if she gave a reason, like “I’m in a rush,” her success rate went to 94%.  The crazy thing is that when Langer gave a pointless reason, like “because I need to make some copies,” her success rate was still 94%.  The point is, if you throw someone a bone, you’ll get somewhere, whether it’s a good bone or not.

Not that all explanations are created equal.  I never bought Alberto Contador’s “tainted Spanish beef” explanation for his positive clenbuterol test, and I don’t believe Michael Rogers’ “tainted Chinese beef” explanation for the same, and I don’t believe Jonathan Breyne’s “tainted Chinese beef” explanation either.  Tyler Hamilton’s “chimera” (i.e., prenatal evil twin) explanation for his blood doping positive would be laughable if it weren’t so sad. 

So when Lindsay questioned the authenticity of Santa Claus, I threw her the best bone I could.  After denying that my wife and I were actually Santa, I said, “That’s not to say that there aren’t people who impersonate Santa Claus.  Have you ever seen Santa in a mall?  Definitely a fake.”  See?  Now she had an explanation for the fact that somebody had (evidently) questioned Santa’s existence to begin with.  I went on to describe a fake mall Santa who made me cry because when I asked for a “bow and arrow” it sounded like “bone arrow” and I couldn’t make the fake Santa understand what I wanted.  Another red herring, right up there with Lance’s higher pedaling cadence!

Technique #4:  Embroil others in your lie

One reason I believed in Lance for so long was that no disgruntled former teammate ratted him out (until one finally did and all the others followed).  As we now know, Lance didn’t achieve this cooperation by sitting everybody down and formally conspiring in the way that a James Bond villain might.  No, it was all subtle:  if you want to be in the inner circle, you better ride well and show your allegiance, and if you do, you may get a white paper bag, and if you use the substances therein and benefit appropriately, you’re going to the Tour!  But by the way, now you can’t say anything, ever, because you’d have to come clean yourself.  It’s kind of like when my big brother would steal two cookies from the jar, stuff one in my mouth, and say, “You tell, I’ll tell.”  Except the gag order on the Postal team was implicit.

So it was when I brought my older daughter Alexa in on the Santa deception.  I knew she wouldn’t believe in Santa forever, and I dreaded the day when I’d have to come clean and admit I’d been lying all along.  It was just my luck that when that moment finally came, I’d recently read Tyler Hamilton’s book and had learned of the power Lance had through speaking softly and wielding financial repercussions. 

Predictably enough, the first domino to fall was the Tooth Fairy.  (I think that myth is more fragile because teeth are lost one at a time, so you don’t have the momentum of mass belief that the Christmas season entails.)  Of course once your kids know you’re capable of routinely lying to their faces about the Tooth Fairy, they figure out the Santa deception almost instantly.

Alexa was blunt:  “Okay, Dad, I know there’s no Tooth Fairy.”  I was equally blunt in my reply:  “You’re right.  There’s no Tooth Fairy.  And now that you know that, you won’t be surprised when you no longer get any money for losing a tooth.”  That was the extent of it.  Alexa, of course, is no fool:  she instantly grasped that if she later decried Santa as a fake, she could kiss her Christmas stocking—and all that candy—goodbye.

So when Christmas rolled around, Alexa not only kept Mum about Santa, but—of her own volition—took an active role in perpetuating the myth.  Hours before Lindsay confronted me about Santa, Alexa (in Lindsay’s presence) threw me a perfect softball:  “Hey Dad, does Santa give lesser presents to kids in poor communities?”  I casually replied, “Well, yes, a really fancy gift in a poor community could cause a lot of envy and strife.  So Santa naturally scales it down.  Meanwhile, in very affluent communities he has to give fancier gifts because the kids are so jaded.”  For Lindsay to hear this intelligent discussion among older, more worldly people was a perfect ruse.  And when Lindsay later asked if my wife and I pretend to be Santa, Alexa said, with an exquisite facsimile of eye-rolling annoyance, “That’s what she keeps trying to get me to believe.”  I couldn’t ask for a better accomplice.

Should I be thanking Lance?

I suppose I could thank Lance for helping me learn how to lie.  But I’m not sure how much use I’ll have for this skill once Lindsay knows the truth about Santa.

That said, I suppose we could all thank Lance for all the stunning entertainment he’s given us over the years, from the seven Tour de France victories to the botched comeback and on to the thrilling scandal, which brought about a veritable orgy of self-righteous pontificating from so many journalists, bloggers, and Internet haters.  Meanwhile, Oakley and Trek could thank Lance for generating so many sales; after all, these companies get to keep all that money they made.

But before we start thanking the guy, we should remember that, unlike lying about Santa, Lance’s deception was not a victimless crime.  He robbed all the clean cyclists, and the clean would-be cyclists (who left the sport rather than doping), as well as the would-be clean cyclists (those lured into doping by the culture Lance so generously fueled).  Lance should get coal in his stocking.

Doping and the Talent Conundrum

Introduction

On Thursday I was inexplicably tired and crashed out in the early evening.  My wife woke me up.  “Hey, check out this thing in the new ‘New Yorker,’” she said.  I didn’t want to open my eyes and groaned, “Just read it aloud.”  She replied, “No, I think you should see this.”  So I sat up, irritably, thinking, “This better be good.”  What she showed me was that the magazine had published a letter I’d sent in.  There it was, actually printed on the page, signed “Dana Albert” and below that “Albany, Calif.” 

How about that!  To be honest, I wasn’t that surprised, because I’d already exchanged e-mails with one of the “New Yorker” fact-checkers.  (That’s right, they even fact-check their mail to make sure they don’t give traction to someone’s misconceptions.)  But I hadn’t been very optimistic; I figured fate would somehow interfere, like some really great letter would show up that they needed to make room for. 

Now, you may suppose that the whole point of this blog post is for me to celebrate getting quasi-published in a great magazine.  And it is true that I’m really stoked about this; in fact, I’m thinking of having some sandwich boards made up so I can stand on a street corner and call out to people, “‘The New Yorker’ printed my letter!”  But actually, the truth is almost the opposite.  Writing in had seemed a futile act, so I figured as a consolation prize I could at least share my thoughts on this blog.  When the magazine did print my letter, my delight was slightly eroded by the tiny disappointment of having a great blog topic that I now had no reason to pursue.

So I’ve decided to turn my consolation prize into a greater examination of the original topic, which was doping in sports.  In this post I’ll go more deeply into the matter than the confines of a letter to “The New Yorker” could possibly allow.

Malcolm Gladwell on doping

My letter concerned an article by Malcolm Gladwell.  Let me start of by saying that I have huge respect for this writer, the author of (among other things) The Tipping Point and Blink, both not only bestsellers but books that deserve to be bestsellers.   I’ve eagerly read Gladwell’s “New Yorker” articles the whole way along.  In fact, he’s the kind of writer who is so persuasive that when I read him, I get the sinking feeling that I’m outsourcing my brain and accepting his treatises wholesale instead of merely considering them.  Yeah.  That kind of writer.

Given my adulation of Gladwell, I was excited when, flipping through the  September 9 “New Yorker,” I saw his article “Man and Superman,” about doping in sports.  I mean, this is a topic I know something about.  I’ve been a competitive cyclist for over thirty years, winning a national collegiate title along the way, and have been a loyal fan of the professional sport since I was a kid.  On this blog I’ve written about the doping exploits of Lance Armstrong, Missy Giove, wannabe bike racers who dope in the name of journalism, and Tyler Hamilton. I’ve laid out (albeit satirical) legal strategies for fallen heroes Floyd Landis (here) and Lance Armstrong (here).  Moreover, I’ve done a (perfectly legal) experiment to examine the effect, on my own athletic performance, of the polar opposite of blood doping.  Getting to read a Gladwell article on something I’m so interested in was a tantalizing prospect, especially considering that the best thing I’ve ever read about doping in cycling was also in “The New Yorker,” back in 2000.

You can read Gladwell’s article here but I’ll summarize it briefly.  He starts by describing an ageing Finnish man who won seven Olympic medals over twelve years, and whose hematocrit (i.e, natural red blood cell concentration) is so high his face is almost purple.  He’s a freak of nature, one of those natural-born athletes who, Gladwell puts it, “carry around in their blood, by dumb genetic luck, the ability to finish forty seconds ahead of their competitors.”  Gladwell goes on to compare natural ability with that which can be gained through enhancement, both surgical and pharmaceutical.  He ponders the oddity that performance-enhancing surgery is tolerated but doping is not, contrasting baseball player Tommy John’s “bionic arm” with Alex Rodriguez’s suspension for doping.

Gladwell then moves on to Lance Armstrong and his illegal blood transfusions:  “Before we condemn him, though, shouldn’t we have to come up with a good reason that one man is allowed to have lots of red blood cells and another man is not?”  Gladwell describes Tyler Hamilton’s book about doping, and explains Hamilton’s insistence that EPO doesn’t enable a rider to avoid hard work, but to actually work harder, thus using (as Gladwell puts it) “science, intelligence, and sheer will to conquer natural difference.”  Gladwell ends his essay, “Hamilton and Armstrong may simply be athletes who regard this kind of achievement as worthier than the gold medals of a man with the dumb luck to be born with a random genetic mutation.”

Frankly, I was shocked to come to the end of the article with so much of the topic left totally unexplored.  I’d thought that Gladwell’s challenge to “come up with a good reason” not to dope was the baiting of a rhetorical trap, so that we could be surprised later by his deeper insight.  But this never comes.  Instead, his article left me with the impression that he really buys this “level playing field” nonsense that some athletes, and some fans, use to justify or tolerate cheating.

Come up with a good reason not to dope?  How about death?  Oddly, the fact that doping is dangerous is completely missing from the article.  Gladwell seems to suggest that fair play is the sole reason doping is illegal.  This seemed such a glaring oversight that, upon finishing the article, I wrote my letter to “The New Yorker” on the spot.  I asserted (and it feels funny to be quoting myself), 

Gladwell misses an important point:  unlike athletic talent, doping is dangerous.  Athletes have died from using drugs like EPO; and infusing blood—sometimes blood that was previously frozen—in a non-hospital environment is perilous.  Doping is ethically wrong because it incites competitors to similarly endanger themselves.  Banning drugs isn’t just about fairness; it’s about protecting athletes.

My other issue

Okay, so Gladwell left out the part about danger and death.  Big deal, right?  But actually, that isn’t my only issue with his article.  (It was, however, the only issue I could bring up in a very short letter to a magazine.)  My other problem with his article is that it views athletic talent far too simplistically.

It’s tempting to see talent as a binary matter:  you either have it, or you don’t.  And to some degree, this is true.  Last fall, I watched my daughter, who was eleven at the time, running in a cross-country meet.  One of her classmates, also eleven, blew everybody else away—even kids two years older (which can make a huge difference at that age).  This girl ran with incredible fluidity and grace and seemed barely winded at the end, unlike my daughter who arrived among the last third of the runners, red-faced and puffing like a locomotive.  There is no question this classmate is gifted in a way that my daughter is not.

My daughter, of course, found this really discouraging.  It’s natural to think, after such a drubbing, “Why even bother?”  It’s surely why a great many kids dabble in sports but then quit.  It’s also probably a rationale for a whole lot of doping by athletes talented enough to make the big time, but who feel they aren’t quite talented enough to be the very best.

The Gattaca Fallacy

The refusal to accept genetic limitations is at the core of the 1997 movie Gattaca.  In the sci-fi world of this film, most humans are genetically engineered, and those with imperfections are labeled “in-valids” and doomed to a lower-class existence and menial work.  The main character, Vincent, was conceived without scientific intervention; not only is he nearsighted, but has a heart defect.  He refuses to let this prevent him from being an astronaut, and undergoes various black-market surgeries so that he can impersonate another man who has a perfect genetic scorecard but (unbeknownst to society) is a paraplegic.  This movie makes the case that effort and determination make more difference than genetic perfection; after all, its hero does succeed in becoming an elite astronaut once he’s deceived the gatekeepers into thinking he’s perfect.

But there’s a pivotal scene in the movie that really irks me.  Vincent’s brother Anton, a cop, has discovered Vincent’s deception, and is threatening to expose him.  They agree to settle the matter with a swimming competition on the open ocean.  Anton fully expects to prevail because he’s genetically perfect, a “valid.”  So he’s astonished when Vincent beats him.  “How are you doing this, Vincent?” he gasps as they thrash among the waves.  For the scene to work the moviegoer is expected to share this disbelief, so he can be properly moved by Vincent’s response:  “You want to know how I did it?  This is how I did it, Anton.  I never saved anything for the swim back.”

The problem with this scene is that it is, or ought to be, completely unsatisfying to anybody who has worked really hard at sport.  It’s a mere variation of two simplistic ideas:  the initial premise that talent is everything, and the contrarian notion—redolent of ABC After School Specials—that if you dig deep enough, and want it bad enough, you can beat a more talented opponent.  Sometimes this is true, but often it is not, and the movie only glances at the surface of what really happens in athletic competition.

In my head, I rewrite the dialogue:  “You want to know how I did it?  This is how I did it, Anton:  I fricking trained.  I mean, duh!”  For this little parable to be satisfying, the brothers would have to be identically conditioned, which never figures into the plot.  That Gattaca is otherwise a pretty good movie shows that either these scriptwriters don’t fully understand what goes into athletic success, or don’t expect moviegoers to.  I call this shortcoming the Gattaca Fallacy:  the simplistic idea that everything boils down to a simple match between talent and “heart.”  Sure, these are important elements of success, but there are countless others.

What is talent?

In his article, Gladwell targets one specific measure of talent:  hematocrit.  Hematocrit is a great example of a biological trait that can be easily quantified.  It’s a realm where some people are certainly more gifted than others.  (And, it’s something that can be modified through drugs or transfusions.)

But there are other types of inborn athletic ability that don’t necessarily go hand-in-hand with a high hematocrit:  for example, VO(2) max (oxygen uptake capacity) and lactate threshold (i.e., how hard you can go before your muscles accumulate too much lactic acid and you have to back off).  Before an athlete decides he can’t compete fairly against somebody with a higher hematocrit, he should consider whether his other gifts can compensate.  It’s short-sighted to measure one trait and decide nature has dealt unfairly with you, and that you deserve to correct this.

An example:  When Jonathan Vaughters, a teammate of Armstrong, left US Postal and joined Credit Agricole, he was shocked to discover that the team leader, Christophe Moreau, had a hematocrit of only 39%, but was apparently riding clean.  And yet Vaughters had a (putatively) natural hematocrit of 52, which is so high had a special dispensation from his doctor—a “hall pass,” as he called it—so that he could pass the doping tests.  Clearly, hematocrit isn’t everything; Moreau was the better rider.

Also, the notion that doping merely neutralizes genetic gifts is problematic because responsiveness to drugs is itself a talent.  From the standpoint of doping, Vaughters lacked a certain talent:  he couldn’t benefit from EPO the way other riders could.  In the doping arms race, Vaughters was outgunned.  He had this trait that helped him be competitive, while other riders had different traits benefiting them.  His main gift, thanks to doping, was now largely irrelevant, while theirs were not.  The fact is, drugs don’t affect everybody equally, so an anything-goes sport—where athletes are free to use “science, intelligence, and sheer will to conquer natural difference”—still wouldn’t be fair.

Meanwhile, talent isn’t always measurable.  Some athletes have a talent for suffering; some for tenacity; some for drudgery (a more important talent than most fans realize).  Some athletes, though they may have low numbers in the easily measurable categories, are especially efficient (e.g., a cyclist whose pedaling is more fluid).  Some athletes are better in the heat than others; some are less fazed by cold.  In addition to his other gifts, Armstrong had a rock-solid immune system, which is somewhat rare in a sport where everybody is perennially close to being over-trained and has a body fat percentage in the single digits.

Meanwhile, talent isn’t always physical.  Tactical instinct, boldness, and psychological mettle are all talents, and depending on the sport involved, can be just as important as muscular strength and aerobic capacity.  In a perfect, dope-free world, these talents would compensate for physical shortcomings such as a lack of “random genetic mutation.”  Everybody has different gifts, some more than others, and you put them all in the pot and stir.

Success without talent

Let me give you an example of success without talent.  I am not a classically talented athlete.  I washed up as a swimmer, was always picked last in gym class, and achieved nothing in my first year of bike racing.  In fact, I didn’t win a race until my fifth year.  My hematocrit fluctuates between 39 (which is almost anemic) and 42 (the low end of average).  Moreover, I don’t have much in the way of fast-twitch muscles, which are what sprinters have.  But over the years I learned how to really suffer, and I paid attention, and through sheer necessity figured out how to be more efficient than a lot of other riders.  At thirteen, I was the only rider drafting off to the side in a crosswind; the others lined up right behind the rider ahead. 

When I was fifteen I raced in a hilly, multi-lap criterium, and got into a three-man breakaway.  (Truth be told, it was not an impressive field.)  I was pretty sure I could beat one of my rivals, but the other was really strong, especially when accelerating out of the corners.  I wasn’t at all confident I could beat him in the final sprint.  So with a few laps to go, at the bottom of the uphill section, I said to the slower guy, just loudly enough to be overheard, “We need to drop this guy.  He’s slowing us down.”  This whipped the faster guy into a lather, and to assuage his ego (and prove me wrong) he went to the front and took this absolute monster pull, all the way to the top of the climb and for the next half-lap as well.  Once he pulled off so I could take my turn, I attacked him with everything I had.  Stunned, he let a gap open up and couldn’t close it.  Now it was a two-man break, with the strongest guy off the back.  The point of the story?  If I’d been stronger, or had been doped, I wouldn’t have needed to be clever.

The interplay of various gifts and abilities—boldness, cunning, strength, experience, teamwork—is what makes a sport like bicycle racing so fun to watch.  That is, until somebody gets too far ahead in the doping competition and merely bludgeons the peloton to death, like Armstrong did with his über-doped Postal team (and like Christopher Froome is widely believed to be doing with Team Sky).  Gladwell is correct in stating that successful doping requires intelligence, but doping can also nullify intelligence, along with other gifts.  The race is always closer, always better when everybody is clean.  If you try to level the playing field with drugs, you’ll sell short the riders who don’t handle drugs well, the riders whose veins are harder to find, the riders who are afraid of needles, the riders who depend on savvy or tenacity, and the riders who have integrity.

The downside of “talent”

On the face of it, you can never have too much talent … right?  Well, I think that’s almost always true.  But I think there are a couple of exceptions worth pointing out, especially as regards the developing psyche of a young athlete.

First, there’s a trait that is often mistaken for talent, but is really its evil twin:  precociousness.  I’m talking about the kid who, in terms of physical development, gets a head start on the others and so is able to beat them at sports.  A related scenario is the kid (often the one with older siblings) who develops that killer instinct—the sheer will to win—earlier than his peers.  (I’ve seen this in my daughters’ soccer games, where lots of girls are unaccustomed to acts of aggression.)  The problem with precociousness is that it’s a flash in the pan:  sooner or later the various developmental trajectories converge and what had seemed to be talent turns out not to be.  I imagine this can be hard on a kid who is used to success but sees it run dry as his opponents catch up.

(Gladwell points out, in Outliers, that among young hockey players, those with birthdays closest to the age-class cutoff—that is, who started out older than their peers and thus are further along developmentally—have statistically had more success.  Their early promise leads to better coaching, and higher achievement far beyond childhood.  Thus, starting your kid in school later can give him a boost in school sports—but I imagine this advantage will erode as more and more parents adopt this strategy.)

Where I’ve really seen talent fall short is when its value is overestimated by the athlete himself.  He figures, “I didn’t train any more than these other guys, but I beat them anyway.  I’m just special.”  This can lead to a slap in the face when talent alone is no longer enough.  Faced with unexpected failure, this athlete can be forgiven for underestimating his opponents’ work ethic, and merely concluding, “I guess I’m not special anymore.  I had it, and now it’s gone.”  I’ve seen really talented athletes quit early, and it’s a shame.

In The Tipping Point Gladwell describes the tendency to erroneously ascribe behavior to fundamental character traits:  “Psychologists call this tendency the Fundamental Attribution Error (FAE), which is a fancy way of saying that when it comes to interpreting other people’s behavior, human beings invariably make the mistake of overestimating the importance of fundamental character traits and underestimating the importance of the situation and context.”  It’s not a huge leap to extrapolate on this, to the idea that behavior is analogous to performance, and that situation is analogous to conditioning.  That is, those with talent, because of their early success, may overestimate its importance and underestimate the importance of training, effort, and savvy.  Thus, talent can interfere with diligence.

Conclusion

I do not understand why innate intelligence and athletic talent are so often assessed so differently.  Gladwell, in a “New Yorker” article called “The Talent Myth,” examines the talent-obsessed hiring policies of Enron and asks, “But what if Enron failed not in spite of its talent mind-set but because of it? What if smart people are overrated?”  It’s a mystery to me why, in his most recent article, Gladwell never seems to ponder whether athletic talent can also be overrated.

If I were Lance Armstrong, seeking to rehabilitate my image after my infamous comeuppance, I couldn’t ask for a better article than Gladwell has written with “Man and Superman.”  But the clean competitors out there, and the fans who value them, deserve more than another Gattaca Fallacy.  If pro sport has any chance of being clean, its practitioners (not just athletes but coaches, managers, and doctors) will need to have a far more nuanced view of talent, potential, and what a level playing field really looks like.

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.

Stage Play - Lance's Defense

Introduction

As I’ve mentioned before, I sincerely hope that Lance Armstrong is being honest about never doping. But given the tide of recent confessions among his former teammates, things aren’t looking good.

If I allowed myself to become more cynical, perhaps I wouldn’t be so surprised by the aggressive stance Lance’s attorneys have taken. Instead of being taken aback by Tyler Hamilton’s recent testimony, they quickly developed a nice, pat story to tell. They responded with pure speculation about Hamilton’s motives: “Tyler Hamilton just duped the CBS Evening News, 60 Minutes and Scott Pelley all in one fell swoop. Hamilton is actively seeking to make money by writing a book, and now he has completely changed the story he has always told before so that he could get himself on 60 Minutes and increase his chances with publishers.” Lance’s attorneys’ latest stunt is to demand an apology from “60 Minutes” and CBS.

But what if Lance’s defense team decided the situation was hopeless, and their best bet would be to cut their losses and confess? How would they convince Lance to go along? To explore that scenario, I wrote this play.

Note: what follows is a work of fiction. Any resemblance of its characters to any person, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

LANCE’S DEFENSE

A Play in One Act

Dramatis Personae:

NELSON, a member of Lance’s defense team

BRAD, another member of Lance’s defense team

CLINT, third member of Lance’s defense team

STENOGRAPHER

Scene:

A conference room

[Enter NELSON, BRAD, CLINT, STENOGRAPHER. STENOGRAPHER sets up equipment and waits for meeting to convene.]

NELSON: Okay, let’s get started. First off, it’s pretty obvious, with all Lance’s buddies singing like canaries to grand juries, that he’s not going to be able to deny this stuff anymore.

BRAD: Right, that’s plain as day. And yet he’s refusing to admit anything. We’re kind of stuck.

CLINT: No, no, we’re not stuck. We just have to present this confession in a way that Lance can handle it. We have to work this out so he can still stand proud. He’s not going to do time—he’s too wealthy for that—but he has his legacy to think of. His reputation. His ego.

NELSON: Exactly. He can’t be apologizing. First thing we need to do is deflate the sense that this big lie is really that big. I’m thinking we need to frame it like, well … we need to move it into that same gray area where you lie to your kid about the Tooth Fairy. Kind of coax the peeps into the sense that they kind of knew all along and looked the other way.

CLINT: Right, and whatever he says, he can’t be looking all squirmy and weak like Tyler Hamilton. He has to be bold without seeming defensive. He has to attack!

[CLINT pounds fist on table]

BRAD: Yeah, but it can’t be a snipe-y attack like Floyd Landis and Tyler did. Lance has to rise above. They attacked him personally; he won’t be so petty. He has to attack something besides individual people.

NELSON: Hmmm. Try this on for size. Lance could attack the very notion that his doping was wrong. He has to make his doping okay. Like some kind of necessary thing. Like some kind of, I dunno, manifest destiny type of thing.

CLINT: Manifest destiny! Love it! It’s so … American. And that’s who we need to convince here—the Americans. The Europeans never liked him anyway and who cares.

NELSON: Right, this is all about winning over the American people. So. What’s important to Americans, really? What makes us tick? Power, obviously, for starts.

CLINT: Yeah, power. Winning. And money.

BRAD: But we’re not so simple as that. We also like just generally feeling superior. That’s where the bigger challenge is with Lance. Americans’ feeling of superiority can sometimes take the form of moral indignation.

[NELSON scratches his head.]

NELSON: Right. How do we tackle that?

BRAD: Well, we can try to keep the focus on the power, money, and winning, while simultaneously working to remove the moral indignation as an option. Hmmm. We have to—

CLINT: We have to make moral indignation seem silly.

NELSON: We absolutely do. And we can. It wouldn’t take much—kind of a realist approach. Play to people’s cynicism. Didn’t Lance gain power? Didn’t he win, instead of some damn Frenchman?

CLINT: Exactly. Americans respect winning and they respect money. They respect the creation of wealth. And didn’t Lance help Trek sell a bazillion bikes? Didn’t he help Oakley sell a bazillion pairs of shades? Didn’t he raise hundreds of millions of dollars for cancer research? Was he not the consummate professional? No matter what happens now, all those companies get to keep all that money he made for them. Is that fair, that Lance goes down after these corporations milked him dry?

[BRAD drums his fingers on the table.]

BRAD: That’s a little tough to position but you’re right. The thing is, how do we get around the fact that he lied all these years? The peeps are still going to be tempted to feel morally superior.

NELSON: We have to squash the moral high ground. We have to real-world that thing to death. So here’s what we do. Lance was lying to protect his family, and his team, and even his competitors who were racing dirty. He was lying to protect cancer funding. And if you side with Floyd and Tyler, you’re siding with people who rat out their friends. We’ll spin this so that it’s all about Lance not doing that. He’s not going to rat out his team doctors, his coach, his manager, anybody. He’s not going to out any of his former teammates who managed to never have that positive test. He won’t rat people out to avoid prison, and he won’t do it to sell books.

BRAD: Yeah, okay, that’s starting to sound pretty good, but can we sell people on that? Can we really make a martyr out of this guy?

CLINT: Well, if all we had was honor, maybe not, but remember, we got the full package here. Lance is powerful, he’s a winner, he’s studly—people already like him! Give them a righteous hook of any kind, they’ll bite. And it’s a pretty good hook, I think!

NELSON: It’s not going to work for everybody, but then he’s always had haters. This is good stuff. This is solid.

BRAD: But there’s still the matter of cancer survivors, cancer victims, people who read magazines and get misty-eyed. You know, your idealists. They can make a lot of noise.

NELSON: Right, and worse—they can make a stink without even being that loud. One bald-headed cancer victim tearing up and blubbering “I believed in Lance!” could really damage the cause, if one of our enemies puts her in the limelight.

BRAD: Couldn’t we have Lance apologize to the cancer victims, and them alone? Like, everybody else was part of the sport, part of the machine, but these cancer people deserve an apology?

CLINT: Absolutely not! Listen to yourself! That could unravel the whole thing! It would be like admitting he was wrong. That can’t happen. He has to be bold. He wants to be bold.

NELSON paces back and forth.

NELSON: Right, Lance has to take the offensive line on every front. I like what we were doing earlier with him being indignant, and him being the only guy who’s not naive. People hate feeling naive. Lance’s cancer message has to be as strong and as street-smart as the rest of his platform.

CLINT: Yeah, yeah. Completely. And we can do it while staying true to what everybody already knows about this guy! Like, in his book he says that force of will doesn’t beat cancer, that some people with bad attitudes manage to survive while others with a real fighting spirit nevertheless die. Lance wasn’t smurfy about it, which is frankly one of the only things I liked about that book. So he could knock this idealist thing on its ass.

NELSON: Yes, he could. Remember, he’s an atheist! His first wife was the Christian and trying to get him to give God some credit for surviving cancer, but Lance wouldn’t do it!

BRAD: Dude, how are we going to work that in? A defense based on godlessness?

CLINT: No, no, forget the atheist part, it’s just that this guy is a realist and that can work for us if we position it carefully. Like, we’ll have him say, “Look, hope doesn’t win bike races, and hope doesn’t beat cancer. Hope is good, we need hope, but hope can’t do it all. You think I cracked my ass all those years on that bike just to raise hope? I did it to raise money, to develop drugs! Drugs that actually cure cancer and save lives!”

NELSON: Beautiful. It’s such consistent messaging. He’ll say, “I’m here to tell you that drugs fricking work. Chemo saved me from cancer, and EPO saved me from chemo. Yes, drugs helped me win bike races but drugs also keep your children from getting polio. How many of you don’t have a prescription for something? And does it work? Are you glad that it works? What would you have these cancer victims do: hope, and pray, and think about rainbows and unicorns and crap and just hope they get well? Or do you want to arm them with the best pharmaceuticals money can buy, the best new drugs we can develop? And where do you think that development money going to come from?”

CLINT: Love it. Love it. He’ll be like, “You think I care if my drug use keeps some sniveling Frenchman off the podium, who’d have spent his prize money overstuffing a goose until it explodes so he can eat its liver as pâté de foie gras? Hell no, I did what I had to do to be a financial engine for cancer research! I’m talking about real sacrifice for real money to buy real drugs, that work, that save lives!”

NELSON: Pâté de foie gras! Beautiful! Don’t stop! Don’t stop!

CLINT: “What would you all give up for a more gentlemanly sport of bike racing? How many cancer victims would you sacrifice at the altar of fair play? What do you want, Queensberry rules for every sport? Should I have fallen off the back of the pack, gasping and weaving, and let some doping Spaniard win the race so I could raise a few hundred bucks for cancer research instead of a few hundred million?”

NELSON: Perfect. Lance turns the accusations on their heads. “Am I a cheater? You’re damn right I’m a cheater! I cheated cancer! I cheated death! I cheated Floyd and Tyler and everybody else who was trying to cheat me! And I won! And I want you to win! Win with me!”

CLINT: I can see it. Posters. Giant print ads in the subway. “CHEAT DEATH. CHEAT CANCER. CHEAT WITH LANCE. CHEAT WITH BRISTOL-MYERS SQUIBB!”

CLINT pumps his fist.

BRAD: Whoa, slow down there. We’re getting a little giddy here, let’s not overstep.

CLINT gets up out of his chair.

CLINT: Right, of course you’re right, this is a great start but I’m starting to get a little too worked up. Let’s get this transcript printed out and take a fresh look at it tomorrow so we can fine-tune the messaging before presenting it to Lance. I’m ready for a beer or six right now.

NELSON slides back chair, stands, rolls his shoulders.

NELSON: Yeah, let’s call it a night, get some drinks. In fact, I feel like getting some whores. You guys feel like whores? Hey, steno, don’t record that part. Did you just record the whores thing? Stop typing, we’re done here. Strike that part. Hey, man, why are you packing up so fast?

STENOGRAPHER puts away his equipment, hastily exits.

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