The Secret Race: Inside the Hidden World of the Tour De France: Doping, Cover-Ups, and Winning at All Costs: Inside the Hidden World of the Tour De France: Doping, Cover-Ups, and Winning at All Costs Read Online Free PDF Page A

made me swerve even more and now European Guy was screaming louder, riders were starting to stare, and I was dying of embarrassment. European Guy rode up next to me, so he could yell directly in my face.
    Then someone moved between the angry European and me. Lance. He put his hand on European Guy’s shoulder and gave a gentle but firm push, sending a clear message— back off —and as he did, he stared European Guy down, daring him to do something about it. I was so grateful to Lance I could have hugged him.
    As the race went on over the next few days, I slid back with the other work ponies. Lance got stronger. He ducked a potential disaster at the end of the stage 5 time trial when, because of a screwup with traffic control, he was nearly crushed by a dump truck that was driving onto the racecourse. But Lance saw the truck coming, and managed to slip through an opening with an inch to spare on either side. He finished second that day to Ekimov. Afterward the presswanted to talk about the near miss—he’d almost died! But not Lance. Instead, he talked about how he should’ve won the race. That was Lance in a nutshell: cheat death, then get pissed you didn’t win.
    All in all, I was pretty impressed with the Texan. But what really impressed me happened that July. That’s when, from the safe distance of a TV screen, I watched Lance ride the Tour de France—the toughest race on earth, three weeks, 2,500 miles. For the first few days, he did pretty well. Then came stage 9, a 64-kilometer time trial: the race of truth, each rider sent off at one-minute intervals, alone against the clock. I watched in disbelief as Lance got passed by Tour champion Miguel Indurain. Actually “got passed” doesn’t do justice to how much faster the Spaniard was going. It was closer to “got blown into a ditch.” In the space of thirty seconds, Indurain went from being twenty bike lengths behind Lance to being so far ahead that he’d almost ridden out of camera frame. Lance lost more than six minutes that day, a massive amount. A few days later he abandoned—the second year in a row he’d failed to finish.
    I watched, thinking, Holy shit . I knew how strong Lance had been only two months before, and how well he could suffer. I’d seen him do things on a bike I could barely imagine, and yet here came Indurain, making Lance look like a work pony.
    I had always heard the Tour de France was hard, but that’s when I realized that it required an unimaginable level of strength, toughness, and suffering. That was also the moment when I realized that, more than anything, I wanted to ride it.

    I’d hoped my little success at the Tour DuPont might catch the eye of a professional team. It seemed I was wrong. I spent the summer of 1994 continuing to ride as an amateur, listening to Coach Carmichael’s increasingly bland cheerleading. Off the bike, I ran the hauling business, painted houses, and waited for my phone to ring.
    One afternoon in October, while I was painting my neighbor’s house, my phone rang. I sprinted inside, still splattered with paint, and picked up the receiver with my fingertips. The voice on the other end was gravelly, commanding, and impatient—the voice of God, if God had woken up on the wrong side of the bed.
    “So what’s it gonna take to get you on our team?” Thomas Weisel said.
    I tried to play cool. I had never talked to him before, but like everybody I knew Weisel’s story: fifty-something Harvard-trained millionaire investment banker, former national-level speed skater, masters bike racer, and, above all else, a winner. In the coming decade these guys would be a dime a dozen, enduro jock CEOs who traded golf clubs for a racing bike. But Weisel was the original of the species. For him, life was a race, and it was won by the toughest, the strongest, the guy who could do what it takes. Weisel’s motto was Get it fucking done . I can still hear that gravelly voice: Just go get it done. Get it fucking done