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 Page B

Madeleine and into Courchevel. Later, we all realized what was happening: Festina was playing a new card. Something that went beyond EPO. Over the next day or so, the rumor circulated that Festina was using something called perfluorocarbons, synthetic blood that increases oxygen-carrying capacity, and for which there was no test. Using PFCs held huge, potentially life-threatening risks. The following year, a Swiss rider named Mauro Gianetti had ended up in intensive care; doctors suspected he’d used PFCs, though Gianetti denied it. But as Festina had shown, there were also rewards—which meant that these innovations, too powerful to stay secret for long, were quickly matched by other teams. “Arms race” is an accurate way to describe it, but it’s important to realize that it was an arms race between teams, not individuals. Team doctors were trying to stay ahead of other team doctors; the riders’ job was simply to be obedient. §
    I rode the 1997 Tour, and survived. Riis was heavily favored to win, but to the world’s surprise, he was surpassed by a teammate, a wide-eyed, muscled twenty-three-year-old German named Jan Ullrich. Ullrich was a genuine phenomenon, with a fluid pedal stroke and incredible power for such a young rider. Watching him, I agreed with most observers: Ullrich was clearly Indurain’s successor, the guy who was going to dominate the Tour for the next decade.
    As for Postal, we did pretty well for a rookie team; our leader, Jean-Cyril Robin, finished 15th. I was 69th overall, the fourth Postie (Jemison was 96th, half an hour behind me; George was 104th). I wasn’t the greatest rider in the world, but I was far from the worst. The new 50 percent hematocrit rule wasn’t a big headache—in fact, I kind of liked it, since it seemed to reduce the frequency of strongman acts (there was still no test for EPO, remember). Thanks to the white bags and Pedro’s spinner, it was easy to stay in the mid-forties. And if anybody on the team got too high, they could always lower their hematocrit by taking a speed bag—an IV bag of saline—or simply chugging a couple of liters of water and some salt tablets, a process we called “getting watered down.”
    In a Paris hotel after the Tour finished, I stood in front of a mirror and looked at my body. Slender arms. Legs with actual veins. Hollows in my cheeks I’d never seen before. A new hardness in myeyes. I went downstairs and met with the team and Thom Weisel and our sponsors. We raised champagne glasses and toasted the team’s achievement. Weisel was pleased, but even then, with the bubbly in his hand, he was already talking about next year, when we’d really get it done.
    By the spring of 1998 two of the Eurodogs had gone home, left the team. Scott had decided to go into the family business; Darren had decided to get a job in finance. George and I moved from the Dee-Luxe Apartment in the Sky to a modern three-bedroom apartment in the heart of Girona, near the Ramblas. We were sorry to see them go. They were good guys; we missed them. But we were also learning how our world worked. Some guys kept up; some didn’t. ‖
    * After he was let go, Steffen protested via a letter sent to Postal team manager Mark Gorski that read, in part, “What could a Spanish doctor, completely unknown to the organization, offer that I can’t or won’t? Doping is the fairly obvious answer.” Postal responded via its lawyers, informing Steffen that he would be sued if he made any public statements that caused financial damage to the Postal team. Steffen consulted a lawyer and decided to drop the matter.
    † Verbruggen, a former sales manager for Mars candy bars, likened the new rule to blood-testing paint-factory workers for lead exposure, just to make sure nobody got sick. When others pointed out that Verbruggen was essentially legalizing doping with EPO (as one Italian team director put it, the new rule was the equivalent of allowing everyone to go into a bank and steal