The Secret Race by Tyler Hamilton

Author:Tyler Hamilton [Hamilton, Tyler]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Cycling
Published: 2011-12-31T23:00:00+00:00

9

New Start

I felt like I was on a movie set, a postcard come to life. I was sitting in a lawn chair looking out over the hills of Tuscany. Olive trees, golden light, full-on Michelangelo stuff. It was August 31, 2001, a month after the Tour ended. A few feet away from me sat the tall, bald, still muscular form of my new director, Bjarne Riis of Team CSC–Tiscali. We’d spent the last day together talking about the team, about my 2002 race schedule, about equipment, about training. Now he leaned in.

“What methods did you use at Postal?”

The question caught me by surprise, so I stalled. I’d expected Bjarne to inquire at some point, but I hadn’t imagined that he’d be quite so forward about it. I’d thought Bjarne would be the cool, robotic Dane, play it low-key. But, as I was discovering, I was wrong.

Bjarne’s secret was that beneath his Danish cool he had a wild and creative Italian brain. It wasn’t just the fact that he owned this beautiful villa near Florence or liked to listen to opera. It was more about how Bjarne approached the question of constructing a Tour-winning team. He was open to new ideas, he wanted to hear what I thought about nutrition, training, uniforms, everything. I liked him enough that I’d taken a pay cut to ride for him, in part because, unlike Johan and Lance, Bjarne didn’t act as if he had all the answers. If riding for Postal had felt like being in the army – shut your mouth and do your job – then riding for Bjarne looked like it might be like working for Apple – think different.

Our training camp was a good example. Instead of the usual routine (warm-weather spot, day after day of training rides), Bjarne did the opposite. He brought us all to a freezing forest in Sweden, and had a former special forces soldier lead us through a survival course. It was one of those experiences that sound sort of cheesy and corporate, but it really brought us together as a team. There’s nothing like starting a fire in the snow to help you get to know one another.

Riis’s Renaissance mentality included all elements of the race. Like the rest of the peloton, Bjarne was vastly impressed with Lance’s and Postal’s strength, and now, as he leaned ever closer to me, he was hungry for the details. Names, numbers, techniques – what methods did we use? At that moment, I got the impression that Bjarne was ready to hear anything. If I had told him that Postal’s method was to drink bleach with ostrich eggs, he would have listened. And considered it.

But here’s the weird part: When Bjarne asked me what methods we used at Postal, I lied. I played dumb. I told him that as far as I knew, we didn’t have any special methods; that we just used EPO. Testosterone. Cortisone. Actovegin. Some guys liked HGH; other than that, nothing special.

Bjarne leaned back in his chair.

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