The Secret Race: Inside the Hidden World of the Tour de France: Doping, Cover-ups, and Winning at All Costs by Tyler Hamilton
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
The Secret Race is supposed to be about Tyler Hamilton, about a simple kid from the east coast who has natural talent, funnels that into bike racing, rises, falls, and is now in recovery. It’s supposed to be a book about doping, about how everyone in the cycling world dopes, about how seductive the glory of winning can be, how it can convince an honest kid to play the same game as everyone else. The Secret Race is supposed to be about guts, hard work, insurmountable obstacles. In the end, though, The Secret Race is just another tell-all about Lance Armstrong.
And now that Armstrong has come out and confessed to doping, this is even more true. Can’t really blame Hamilton, though, for writing yet another book about Lance. In America, at least, among those of us who are not die-hard bike-racing enthusiasts, the sport is Lance Armstrong. The sport is doping.
That’s the take away from The Secret Race—the real game is how one finds way to take EPO, use blood bags, testosterone, and a whole plethora of other banned substances. It’s finding ways to avoid the tests, fool the tests, pass the tests. It’s the game of working with—not just against—the officials, to keep the sport alive. And alive, of course, means lucrative. Pro cycling is corrupt because there’s money to be made off of men who have one goal in mind: to win at all costs.
Win at all costs might as well be Armstrong’s mantra, he the patron saint of pro cycling (and doping and playing chess with the officials). Hamilton is his apostle, and The Secret Race is an epistle, an easy to read, fairly compelling tragedy in three acts. Sports writer Daniel Coyle co-authors with Hamilton, and together they keep the pace easy enough to follow along but exciting enough to keep the pages turning.