“Not normal” was Armstrong’s own murmured phrase for other riders who surpassed themselves, and he surely knew what he was talking about. Some commentators called it “extraterrestrial,” and L’Équipe, the splendid French sports paper, wrote that Armstrong was “sur une autre planète,” oblique hints that there was something suspicious. He passed the field as if everyone else were standing still and he were on a motorbike. That “Tour de Farce” was won by Marco Pantani, who was then disqualified from the next year’s Giro, the Italian Tour, for “irregular blood values.” Five years later he was found dead from a cocaine overdose.įrom the time Armstrong won his first Tour, his domination was breathtaking - or disturbing.

The 1997 Tour had been won by Jan Ullrich, strongly suspected of using cortisone, and in 1998 came the Festina doping scandal.

For his first three Tour victories he had no more loyal and hard-working team rider than Hamilton, and Hamilton seemed to many of us covering the race one of the true heroes of the Tour: he finished the 2003 race after fracturing his collar bone near the start and riding for three weeks in acute pain.Īll the while shadows were lengthening over bike racing, and the new champion. He was congratulated by President Bill Clinton after his first victory, then befriended by a fellow Texan, President George W. As the world knows, Armstrong not only recovered from testicular cancer to race again as leader of “the Posties” but won the greatest bike race. These are very dark times for bike racing.įorced by injury to give up ski racing, which was his first love, Hamilton turned to cycling, showing enough flair to join the team that became the United States Postal Service. This devastating indictment of the worst doping scandal - and the greatest conspiracy - yet seen in competitive sport led to the decision by the International Cycling Union, the cycling governing body, to strip Armstrong of his seven Tour de France titles and bar him from the sport for life. With its faults, the book is riveting enough, although today, some weeks after its publication, it reads like a trailer to the 200-page report from the United States Anti-Doping Agency released last month. My old buddy Edgar.” These seemingly obscure allusions to the author of “The Raven” are explained as the plot - in more than one sense - unfolds in “The Secret Race,” Hamilton’s confessional memoir, written with Daniel Coyle. “Hey dude, you got any Poe I can borrow?” The scene was Lance Armstrong’s villa in Nice, in 1999, the year that he first won the Tour de France, and the speaker was his teammate Tyler Hamilton.

The secret race by tyler hamilton