Free The Secret Race: Inside the Hidden World of the Tour De France: Doping, Cover-Ups, and Winning at All Costs: Inside the Hidden World of the Tour De France: Doping, Cover-Ups, and Winning at All Costs by Daniel Coyle, Tyler Hamilton

push yourself to keep up.”
    I acted tough, but he could tell how much I appreciated hearing that. He leaned in close.
    “You are an amazing rider, Tyler. You can push yourself to the limit, even when you are completely empty; very few people can do this. Most riders, they would abandon. But you keep going.”
    I nodded. I could feel where he was going, and my heart started beating faster.
    “I think you perhaps have a chance to make the Tour de France team. But you have to be healthier. You have to take care of your body. You must make yourself healthier.”
    The next day, I took my first EPO shot. It was so easy. Just a tiny amount, a clear liquid, a few drops, a pinprick on the arm. It was so easy, in fact, that I almost felt foolish—that was it? This was the thing I’d feared? Pedro gave me a few vials of EPO to take home along with some syringes. I wrapped it all up in foil and put it in the back of the fridge and, soon after, showed it to Haven. We talked about it for a few minutes.
    “This is the exact same result as sleeping in an altitude tent,” I said. That wasn’t completely true, of course, first because sleeping in a low-oxygen enclosure, or altitude tent (a legal method of boosting hematocrit) is a big hassle and gives you a headache, and also because it doesn’t improve your blood values nearly as much. But the reasoning sounded good enough for both of us. We knew this was a gray area, but we also knew that the team doctor thought it was a good idea, for my health. We knew we were breaking the rules. But it felt more like we were being smart.
    Besides Haven, I didn’t talk about my decision with anyone. Not Scott, or Darren, or George, or Marty. They might’ve been like family, but telling them would’ve felt weird, like I was breaking a team rule. Now, I can see that the real reason I didn’t want to tell was that I was ashamed. But back then, it felt like I was being savvy. I was becoming, in the word the Europeans liked to use, professional. ‡

    A lot of people wonder if taking EPO is risky to health. I’d like to reply to that concern with the following list:
    Elbow
    Shoulder
    Collarbone (twice)
    Back Hip
    Fingers (multiple)
    Ribs Wrist
    Nose
    Those are the bones I’ve broken during my racing career. This is not an unusual list in our profession. It’s funny: in the States, everybody connects bike racing with health. But when you get to the top level, you see the truth: bike racing is not a healthy sport in any sense of the word. (As my former teammate Jonathan Vaughters likes to say, If you want to feel what it’s like to be a bike racer, strip down to your underwear, drive your car 40 mph, and leap out the window into a pile of jagged metal.) So when it comes to the risks of EPO, they tend to feel pretty small.
    What does being on EPO feel like? It feels great, mostly because it doesn’t feel like anything at all. You’re not wiped out. You feel healthy, normal, strong. You have more color in your cheeks; you’reless grumpy, more fun to be around. These little clear drops work like radio signals—they instruct your kidneys to create more red blood cells (RBCs), and soon millions more are filling up your veins, carrying oxygen to your muscles. Everything else about your body is the same, except now you have better fuel. You can go harder, longer. That holy place at the edge of your limits gets nudged out—and not just a little.
    Riders talked of an EPO honeymoon, and in my experience it was true—as much a psychological phenomenon as anything else. The thrill comes from the way a few drops of EPO allow you to break through walls that used to stop you cold, and suddenly there’s a feeling of new possibility. Fear melts. You wonder: How far could I go? How fast can I ride?
    People think doping is for lazy people who want to avoid hard work. That might be true in some cases, but in mine, as with many riders I knew, it was precisely the opposite. EPO granted the ability to suffer