A Dog Named Poulidor

Raymond Poulidor (right) and Jacques Anquetil, not giving each other much room(via frankgomezg.tumblr.com)

One of the oddest details in The Secret Race is the name of a dog. There is a footnote at the end of the chapter on the 2004 Tour de France detailing Floyd Landis’s allegations about doping on the Postal Service team during that Tour. Landis describes how the blood bags for in race transfusions were transported (including the infamous broken down bus incident):

Landis said Postal transported the blood bags inside a dog kennel in a camper driven by a team assistant. “They laid out the bags on the floor of the kennel and covered them with a piece of foam and a blanket; the dog went on top of that,” Landis said. “It was simple. Once the blood bags are out of the refrigerator, it takes 7 or 8 hours for them to warm up. That way they didn’t have to mess with coolers or refrigeration or anything that would alert police. They could just drive to the team hotel, put the bags in a cardboard box or a suitcase, and carry them in with the rest of the team’s gear; nobody would notice.” Landis said the dog’s name was Poulidor. (p. 218)

A pretty odd procedure overall, especially for those not fully initiated into the cloak and dagger world of world class blood doping, but that last sentence…Coyle just drops that in there without any explanation of why the name of the dog is notable.

Although it is unclear whose dog this is, it is undoubtedly named after Raymond Poulidor, the éternel second. Poulidor, the beloved French rider and great Tour de France rider, had the misfortune to have his career overlap with first Jacques Anquetil and then the great Eddy Merckx, so despite setting the record for most podiums at the Tour de France with eight (later tied by Lance, at lest temporarily), Poulidor never won, and in fact never even wore the yellow jersey. He did win once at the Vuelta in 1964, but at the Tour he settled for three seconds and five thirds spanning from 1962 until 1976.

It would be interesting to know whose dog it was and why they named it after the éternel second. Although without facts, several explanations suggest themselves. First, it is possible it is just a coincidence, a dog owned by an old French cycling fan. Second, it could be a cautionary name, a warning to a team that was only concerned with the top step of the podium. However, Poulidor’s Wikipedia page offers a third alternative. According to the page, Poulidor was, completely by chance, the first rider ever tested for doping at the Tour de France, so perhaps someone had a sense of humor and decided it was appropriate to have Poulidor guarding the blood bags at the Tour de France. In any case, it seems unlikely that readers would all know who Poulidor is so it is odd that he drops it in without explanation. Perhaps Coyle just included it as an ‘easter egg’ for people who know, figuring that it would take too much time to explain about Raymond Poulidor, but that it was too juicy a detail to omit. Although there may not have been space for the rider, it is a shame that there is not more information about the dog.

Gargantuan Needles and Life in the Sixties

The Secret Race, by Tyler Hamilton and Daniel Coyle, is partly about putting very large needles in cyclists arms and then freezing bags of their blood to be transfused at an opportune time in the future, and it does provide some juicy tidbits about the USPS juggernaut and its years atop the pro-peloton, but mostly the book tells the story of the rise and fall of Tyler Hamilton as a professional cyclist and about the destruction wrought on the pro-peloton by doping. It does not survey the whole scene, but is rather a vertical slice through the era, exposing many frayed threads that deserve to be followed up. The book is not, and does not purport to be, a complete history of the doping era, rather it is the story of one rider, his decisions and choices, and his subsequent ascent to the top ranks of professional cycling by taking the requisite descent into the depths of the doping culture that permeated the sport. As a crucial teammate for the most successful rider (Lance Edward Armstrong, maybe you’ve heard of him?) of the era, Tyler Hamilton was brought into the world of doping and learned to train and be a professional with its assistance. From there he struck out on his own rising nearly to the peak of the sport before it all came crashing down with a series of doping positives and he was exiled from the fraternity.

Now, the history of cycling is obviously drenched in doping and doping allegations, but as he tells it, Hamilton arrived with a generation of idealist young American cyclists just as the sport was hitting bottom (well one of the many) with the Festina scandal during the 1998 Tour. Despite being associated with drugs from the beginning, the nineties (or the sixties as the riders called them, because that is what everyone’s hematocrit level was, well above the generous 50% allowed by rule) plumbed the depths because the introduction of autologous blood doping and of EPO (or ‘Edgar’ as it was yclept by one of the Posties in reference to Edgar Allan Poe, a nickname used throughout the book) proved to be much more effective than the amphetamines, steroids, or other forms of doping of previous eras. The steady improvement of this blood doping in the nineties meant that by 1998 the doping was systematic and pervasive, with teams providing regimens for their riders (at least the better ones) and the best teams were best at doping. Everyone assumed everyone else was doping and a race to the bottom ensued. When a new technique was discovered or refined, teams would be cartoonishly good  until everyone else caught up and everybody awaited the next advance. Into this cauldron stepped Tyler Hamilton and the United States Postal Service team trying to put an American imprint on a European sport.

Festina promotional materials featuring Christophe Bassons (via the Cycling Archives, click to view larger)

However, as the new team was facing the strains of competing at the highest level, the Festina scandal, while not exactly cleaning up the sport, forced a change in how teams and riders interacted.  Because of the negative publicity and the renewed interest in doping control, the teams and their sponsors were wary of being involved and so stopped their direct oversight and implementation of the programs. However, since the testing was not good enough to catch a careful doper, this decision did not stop the practice, it simply pushed the risk of doping onto the riders who were then responsible for finding their own doping doctors and buying their own drugs so they could continue to compete, efforts in which they were tacitly or explicitly supported by their directeurs sportifs.

Although he briefly experienced this golden age of team led doping, Hamilton spent most of his career in the world created by the Festina scandal, having to manage his own program. He had taken lessons at the feet of a (eventual) seven-time Tour de France champion and he believed that he could follow a similar path. However, as Jonathan Vaughters says in the book, professional doping is not a trivial problem because of the testing and because competent, effective doctors do not generally get into doping:

…they’re doping doctors for a reason. They’re the ones who didn’t make it on the conventional path, so they’re not the most organized people…The deadly mistake that Tyler, Floyd, Roberto [Heras], and the rest of them made when they left Postal was to assume that they’d find other doctors who were as professional. But when they got out there, they found–whoops!–there weren’t any others.  –p.232–

In fact, it turned out that Lance Armstrong was attached to Michele Ferrari for a good reason, namely that he was very good at what he did. As the testing did improve, a rider needed a good doctor to keep himself (or herself, presumably even harder since there’s less money in women’s racing, but also less testing?) from getting caught, a difficult proposition as Hamilton learned first hand. However, even from the second tier of doctor, this advice and pharmacological support did not come cheap and once teams were out of the doping picture, only successful riders could afford the high fees (Hamilton talks of paying Dr. Eufemiano Fuentes $50,000 for blood freezing plus performance bonuses). This high cost of participating meant that the best techniques were limited to the already successful riders, and created a vicious/virtuous cycle separating those at the top from the rest, leading one to wonder what kind of investments there were in young riders and whether they were offered payment plans to help start their paths into doping. In fact Hamilton says that the year Fuentes brought his freezer online he promised to only offer the service to him, Jan Ullrich, Ivan Basso, and Alexandre Vinokourov, only his elite clients, further limiting access.

However, leaving cost aside, one is naïvely tempted to think that with the rampaging free fire zone that existed, there was still a level playing field for riders with decent doctors, albeit a much faster one. However, one of the things that Daniel Coyle reiterates in the book (see esp. footnote on p.62) and Jonathan Vaughters has emphasized in his recent discussions of doping is that doping inherently creates winners and losers because different riders have different strengths and different weaknesses that may or may not be remedied with the drug of the day. They also have different reactions to the drugs, so even if their skills might be a good match for a drug, they might not respond well to its use. So while the revolution in EPO and homologous blood doping helped everyone it did less to help that riders with high natural hematocrit levels (like Jonathan Vaughters). These riders were then at a disadvantage because their natural advantage was lessened and riders with different skills could greatly improve their climbing with the extra oxygen carrying capacity.

For riders with higher natural hematocrit levels, however, things were not all bleak, as they could gain substantial benefits during stage races, where after a week of racing their levels naturally declined. In these long races blood doping really shone, with judicious use of blood bags (BBs in the book, extracted with the very large needles) or micro-dosing EPO, a rider could keep his hematocrit level where it was at the beginning of the race, avoiding the natural drop-off one experiences after weeks of racing. Understanding this, one wonders whether the constraints of his doping program were one of the reasons that Armstrong exclusively focused on one long stage race, the Tour de France. While in the past the great riders like Fausto Coppi, Eddy Merckx (really sui generis and not to be used for comparison purposes to anyone), Bernard Hinault, and Jacques Anquetil were seen as great champions after winning a variety of races and not because of dominating a single race, even the Giro or the Tour, Armstrong was criticized during his career for not trying more than just (easy to say) the Tour each year, and perhaps it was related to the mechanics of peaking with his drug program and how it interacted with his training and racing. In any case, the blood doping benefited different riders to different degrees and therefore did not merely make the races faster (although it did do this), but also seriously distorted the competition.

In discussing how doping helped him, Tyler Hamilton tries to be very upfront and for the most part succeeds. However, both he and Jonathan Vaughters in his interviews seem to be defensive about their actions. They both worked very hard to succeed in cycling and they want to justify their talent on the merits, to pick out things that they deserved, races they won on pan y agua or to say that they beat a bunch of dirty riders anyway. They are understandably conflicted between feeling guilt from having cheated, but also pride from the hard work it took them to succeed. One of the shames of doping is clearly that it sullies the pain and suffering that is at the center of the sport. The pain and struggle of those doping is no longer pure and in the face of that they seem to want to be able to salvage something good, some truth: the fact that they accomplished this thing and it was good, out of the wreckage of the lies. The problem, perhaps arising from a sport that has not come to terms with the era yet, is that they are not yet facing this problem straight on. With the sport as a whole refusing to acknowledge the depth of the problem, the riders who do speak up are shunned and they cannot fully put their accomplishments, tainted but nonetheless accomplishments, in context of what was going on around them.

This lack of accountability by cycling does a disservice both to the riders who have come forward and to those who did stay clean, to the fact that there is a choice, even if it comes along a slippery slope and at a point when a young rider has already made large sacrifices to be a professional. One glimpse of what might have been, and mentioned in passing in the book, is Christophe Bassons, who was at ground zero of the sixties, having become notable as the only person on the infamous Festina Squad who was not doping. He is an interesting rider in that he managed to ride clean while everyone else was dirty, partly due to the fact that his VO2 max was higher than Lance’s. While not amazingly successful, he competed successfully and even won a stage of the Dauphiné Libéré in the infamous year of 1998. In some alternate reality we may have seen Bassons and Armstrong or Ullrich battling for the Tour, but as it was, Bassons’ outspokenness about doping led to him being ostracized from the cycling fraternity and he quit the sport, showing the danger of picking the alternative path. However, as Vaughters and Hamilton know intuitively this alternative reality is not accessible, one cannot recreate an ideal past, one must just deal with what is left. The truth may set you free as the final line of the book says, but it cannot change the past.