Customer Reviews

From Lance to Landis: Inside the American Doping Controversy at the Tour de France

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Midway through the third stage of the 1924 Tour de France, Henri Pélissier (winner of the 1923 Tour) abandoned. Journalist Albert Londres found him drinking hot chocolate at a train station restaurant. The interview Pélissier gave is still important. After explaining what the suffering racers endured he showed Londres the various pills and potions he took to both improve his performance and mitigate his misery. "We run on dynamite," he said.

Over the years the types of dynamite have changed. In the 1930s chemists synthesized amphetamines and racers soon learned how they could help and harm. Tom Simpson died in 1967 from the effects of dehydration, diarrhea and amphetamine overdose.

In the 1970s, the overuse of corticoids nearly killed 2-time Tour winner Bernard Thévenet. When he went public with his misdeeds, explaining that his use of steroids was the usual practice in the peloton, he received abuse from his sponsor, the public and his fellow riders.

In the 1990s EPO made doping necessary if a racer wanted to win. Riders like Marco Pantani and Bjarne Riis ran their hematocrits to a nearly lethal 60%. Any racer wishing to compete with these men and their like were forced to either stick the needle in their arms or retire. This is not just my guess. Many racers from that era (Andy Hampsten, for one) have gone public with how the sport was transformed by a drug that could dramatically improve a racer's power output.

Today, with a reliable test for EPO available, racers have gone on to new strategies, including old-fashioned blood doping. The best racers can spend over $100,000 a year on both the drugs and the technical expertise to avoid detection. Since this technology is so expensive, it is generally only the lower-paid lesser riders who get caught by dope tests.

That brings us to Walsh's book and the demand that he find a "smoking gun" before he levels any accusations. Smoking guns are almost impossible to find. In 1960, Tour de France doctor Pierre Dumas walked in on Gaston Nencini while he was calmly transfusing his own saved blood in his hotel room. That's not going to happen today because what Nencini was doing to win the 1960 Tour was not illegal. Yet, Nencini was doing exactly what most doping experts think modern racers are doing, performing autologous (using their own saved blood for later injection) blood doping.

I urge any person concerned with the obvious problem of rampant doping in sports to read this book. Walsh isn't a sensationalist. He is a man who hates cheaters. This book is the result of his belief that Lance Armstrong, like almost all of the rest of the professional peloton, used banned performance-enhancing modalities. By necessity, he must build a circumstantial case, but that should not be a justification to reject his conclusions out of hand. I finished the book feeling that Walsh had had indeed made his case.

An old, retired Italian pro with close connections to the racers of today once sat me down and explained much about doping. He concluded by saying, "Bill, they are all dirty."

I would have liked Walsh to organize his information a little better. Still, that didn't keep this book from curling the hair on the back of my neck. Even those who fervently believe in Armstrong's innocence will learn much about modern professional cycling from this book.
-Bill McGann, Author of The Story of the Tour de France

I read this book in one 15-hour sitting. Utterly engrossing. I had heard all of the rumors about Betsy Andreu, Emma O'Reilly, Prentice Steffen, Stephen Swart, etc. But nothing prepared me for the IM conversation between Jonathan Vaughters and Frankie Andreu. If you are left with any doubts about the pervasiveness of doping in cycling, or of Lance Armstrong's participation in said doping, after reading that conversation, you are either one of two things: 1. In complete denial, whether due to a heartfelt connection with Lance or extreme Americentrism, or 2. Connected to Lance financially. For that is the final lesson here: it's all about the money. I have read both of Lance's books and Floyd's book. Not one stands up to the challenge when confronted with Walsh's investigation. He has made a convert out of me.

Being a serious cycling fan from the 80's, I strayed away from the sport around 1991 and never read or watched a single minute of coverage again until 2002 when I began following the Tour de France again. But now (in 2002) something was different: I remembered this race being about the grueling faces of riders struggling to climb mountains, but these guys were now flying up long mountain passes looking like machines - they usually weren't even breathing through their mouths.

Something wasn't right about all of this, but I just placed it into the back of my mind and sort of got halfway caught up in all of the Lance hoopla. Now, this book "From Lance to Landis" has explained everything: how doping took on a huge increase with the introduction of the drug r-EPO in the early 90's, and how it transformed the sport in the 90's and 2000's.

There is so much circumstantial evidence in this book that it leads one to ask the question, "just what is a smoking gun, anyway?" The evidence against Lance and Landis is overwhelming. When this much smoke exists, do we really need to see the gun? Then again, don't we see the gun itself with regards to the '99 Tour? How is that not a smoking gun? Anytime a 'procedure' exists anywhere in life, it can be brought into question by simply "questioning the procedure" - this is why the dopers will always have somewhere to put the blame regardless of how guilty they may be.

It is of interest to note Armstrong's official response to this book as found on his website. Lance continually tries to beat home the idea that of his 600+ acquaintances through his years of cycling, only 2 have come forward and spoken against Lance (the Andreu's). However, in this book, I can guarantee you that there are no less than 40 sources that the author cites directly in reference to Lance. That's just a plain fact.

Another fact that becomes obvious upon reading this book is that the problem of doping in cycling has been a problem far, far beyond the two individuals of Armstrong and Landis. The entire sport has been dominated by doping for many years, from the riders, to the teams, to the journalists, to the directors and organizational bodies of the sport.

All in all, if you are interested in the subject matter of this book, it is extremely well put together. Highly recommended.

It amazes me that so many people are willing to believe that Lance and Tyler are innocent of the charges made against them. Mr. Walsh does a very good job of putting the flesh on the bones of the evidence against these two athletes.

As a life-long diehard fan of pro cycling and a former medical team member of a major international UCI event I had heard some of these same stories before, from some of the same sources Mr. Walsh cites. I never knew what to make of them, but it is interesting how it all comes together with multiple sources in this text.

Anyone who thinks that Lance was clean in his seven TDF victories needs to read chapter 19 of this book. It completely debunks the urban legends about "how Lance changed after cancer". He clearly cheated, plain and simple.

Think what you will, but if Jonathon Vaughters and Frankie Andreu are to be believed in a candid moment between them Lance and his posse have pulled off one of the most disgusting acts of fraud in all of sport. Too many people have a vested (i.e.financial) interest in making sure the "legend of Lance" keeps being repeated. Thanks to Mr. Walsh, and others, who refuse to drink the Kool Aid.

I didn't want to read this book and didn't want to know that to win or stay in the bike race a person had to cheat. David makes a great case for the cancer of the sport that's been around since photosynthesis. Someone asked me what I thought. I said, "you have to read it to begin to grasp something we don't want to know about". He reveals an ugly side of being human and the cruelty toward others who strive for higher ideals. I am dissapointed in my sports heros. Thanks David for the peak behind the curtains. Now I understand why the Germans pulled out of the TV coverage this year. This is a must read for the sports world.

Since this book is about a controversial topic, I think it's only fair that I describe the beliefs I had about doping in cycling in general and Armstrong specifically before I read this book.

I got interested in cycling because of Armstrong, and I really started paying attention to the Tour in 2003, when he was trying to win his fifth. I bought his first book, "It's Not About the Bike", a few days before he won the Tour. I believed in him, but was never a LiveStrong-bracelet-wearing fan. I had heard the accusations of drug use but believed in the "I've never tested positive" line and enjoyed his victories.

Over the years, though, I got more suspicious, especially after Andreu's admission and Operation Puerto. I stopped paying much attention to cycling. When Armstrong decided to come back, I thought it would be interesting to watch, and watch I did: nearly every stage of the just-finished Giro. But before I got excited about cycling and the Tour again, I wanted to do a little more digging and decide whether I believed the sport was clean and whether I believed Armstrong was clean. I read a lot of things online, and listened to and watched interviews as well. From all of that, I decided that I was about 75% certain that the whole sport is dirty and about as certain with respect to Armstrong. So that's where I was before I began reading this book.

The book itself is well-written, easy-to-read and informative. I think that it could have been longer and more detailed, with more in-depth explanations about some of the analysis by experts, especially Ashenden. I also think that it would have been nice if it had included end notes, but Walsh is a newspaper journalist, and that's not really their style. I think he does make it clear where things come from -- interviews, depositions, etc.

Despite its title, it focuses mostly on Armstrong, and there's just a short section at the end about Landis. (The final appeal hadn't been completed in Landis's case when this book was published.) However, Walsh does cover a lot of ground -- from Greg Strock to Tyler Hamilton to Marco Pantani, and more. (This is another reason I think it should have been longer.) Walsh's reporting is credible, and he has done a good job of using multiple sources, when he can, to give you a good picture of different events. His style is to give you the information he has and let you decide, which I like. I also liked the section about Pantani near the end and the quote about how the man is more than the cyclist.

After I finished this book, my certainty levels about the sport and Armstrong have changed: they're now at 99.99% for both. It's too bad, too, because I would love to start believing in professional cycling again, but I don't think that's going to happen anytime soon. Yes, I realize doping has been around as long as the Tour, but there was a time, before r-EPO (and who knows what else they take), that clean riders could still compete and even win. If we could go back to that, I'd be thrilled.

I hope that Walsh writes a follow-up to this that covers more ground and includes updates on the outcome of the Landis decision. I would also like to see that follow-up (should he ever write it) include a section on some of the new types of testing that some people like Ashenden and Greg LeMond have proposed.

I think that, in life in general, most people believe what they want to believe, so if you are an ardent Armstrong fan, this book may not be for you. But if you have some doubts, and/or are willing to at least consider the other side of the story, I would recommend it.

(If you're curious, there are a lot of interesting video and audio interviews online with various people's views on this topic. I found some especially good ones on [...]. I am in no way affiliated with either web site -- just thought the interviews were good.)

Even to the most well-read US-based cycling fans and cyclists, the current reporting and debate on the existence or non-existence of drug abuse in cycling is a very cloudy topic. Rumors, hearsay, ambiguous reports, and misleading statements fly around, alternatively giving the appearance of doping in cycling either as a monolithic, opaque cabal, or a motley collection of clueless riders, team managers, doctors, and assistants in a convoluted web of trickery and incompetence.

David Walsh has managed to offer a very coherent, readable, enlightening picture of how things were, how things came to be, who the players are, and clarify some of the misunderstood ideals in the subject. I do not know if his offering is necessarily 100% accurate, but his book is a real gem in organizing disparate reports from various athletes, team staff members, and sources from governing bodies in the sport. Walsh does a fair job in underlining evidence and recorded information, and his own propositions. For that, he deserves credit.

This book connected various dots gathered from published information and recorded testimonials pointing towards the end-goal of his investigation: which is that Armstrong and Landis conclusively doped. One cannot help but feel that although Walsh managed to show that many pieces of evidence point to that conclusion, he falls just short of that ultimate goal. Hence the earlier parts of the book -- where he was laying down the background story -- reads more cohesively than the latter parts of the book where he tried to point the discussion towards his primary thesis.

Whether you have chosen to believe whether Armstrong (or Landis) had doped in their career, I highly recommend this book. It offers a picture of how different practices came to permeate the sport, and who the primary players are, and the pressures within the peloton to follow the practices of other teams.

Prior to this book, I read "The death of Marco Pantani" by Matt Rendell. Simiarly to Walsh's book, Rendell examined medical records, various testimonies and recorded interviews and news reports, and tried to put those in a coherent picture. However, Walsh does a better job in writing the narrative to accompany his pieces of evidence, and propositions.

I found this a very interesting read which provided a wealth of background information that you don't often come across in the sports magazines, which in the US tend to be very Lance-centric, often quoting his statements without checking their veracity. This book gives everyone their 15 minutes at the microphone.

The book discusses the development and types of doping in professional cycling through interviews with ex-cyclists, dopers, coaches, and medical experts. We follow Armstrong's career from his early days in the US through his seven Tour wins, building a picture of life inside the team through interviews with fellow riders and support staff.

The oft-quoted press hyperbole regarding Armstrong is analysed and compared with known data (the huge heart, low lactate development, high hematocrit levels, and the miraculous physical redevelopment post-cancer). Each one is looked at in turn, examining what is claimed and what the data we have on Lance actually shows.

It also shines a light on the whole L'Equippe re-testing scandal of his '99 urine samples and gives a more detailed account of what actually happened than is often reported in the press.

Setting aside the damning circumstantial evidence, the book also gives us an insight into Armstrong's world during his TdF years and the drive and determination he showed towards winning this annual race at the expense of everything else.

I found the book well documented and referenced and was able to follow up reading mentioned articles, such as the Ed Coyle medical study of Armstrong from '92 - '99, and the Vrijmann Report, which supported the books interpretations as accurate.

Armstrong has announced his return to professional cycling since the writing of the book. It will be interesting to compare the results he is going to publish online with those recorded during the years of the Coyle study, and with the added knowledge provided by the book.

The heart of this book seems to be nothing less than an English version of the French book L.A. Confidentiel, of which Walsh is a co-author. That work has heretofore not been rendered into English for fear of libel litigation by Lance Armstrong. Indeed, when brief excerpts of it were published in The Sunday Times, which employs Walsh as a sportswriter, Armstrong sued for libel.

Preceding and interspersed with Confidentiel, however, are two excellent and original historical analyses: first, of the early years of steroid doping and the toll it took on cyclists; and second, of how r-EPO became all but ubiquitous in elite cycling during the 1990s and transformed the sport. The book is also garnished with a chapter on Tyler Hamilton and one on Floyd Landis but they are brief, superficial and incongruous.

Walsh sets out his case that Armstrong is nothing more a scheming doper in great detail and sometimes at the ponderous pace of an evidentiary proceeding. As Armstrong frequently notes, he has never failed a doping test. The author's argument therefore rests on two pillars: an alleged admission by Armstrong in his hospital room in 1996 that he had used various doping agents; and the unlikelihood, without doping, of his domination of the Tour from 1999 to 2005 after mediocre performances in earlier years. Armstrong's inherent physiological parameters are also described as strong but by no means those of a champion.

The author stops short of accusing Armstrong of a sophisticated doping routine orchestrated by the notorious Italian doctor Michele Ferrari but that is clearly the other shoe to be dropped. His arguments are persuasive. Very persuasive. No doubt Armstrong's lawyers have already spent many hours poring over the book in search of grist for their mill.

I've read the book two times and not as a member of the "Nail Armstrong" brigade but because it does give insight to professional road cycling and I do call it that because we need to remember that cycling is wide and varied, up to the kid riding his tricycle down the street. He's more respectable than many of those riding described in this book who basically have no kind rules placed on them. Okay, the UCI and others say it is changing, but professional cycling has always had this kind of substance abuse and most likely always will. The thing is, is with the EPO or r-EPO making it's way into the sport by the late '80s/'90s, a cyclist's performance could now start to grow up to 30% better for a cyclist than a performance without. So, in other words, Walsh is telling us a story we need to know. A story where often it is not new information but he somewhat coordinates the information for a better understanding by the reader. This is information we deserve to know, how with the r-EPO, cyclists that would be nowhere near leading in the mountains, now were up in the pack and cyclists not using but that should be leading in the mountains were nowhere near the front. Really quite ridiculous. Whereas speeds riding on flat roads and speeds on the mountains now became similar, whereas one team using r-EPO before it was a known commodity did the extraordinary finishing 1-2-3 in one famed race. This is a book about cyclists getting those extra wings while other 'clean' cyclists fall behind the pack.

I remember the recent tour where Vinokourov broke away from the pack, doing a fantastic job and reknown cycling commentator Phil Ligget exclaiming "I don't believe it! This is impossible" and yes, I felt the exact same way but in a suspicious cynical way and voila, the rider was promptly caught in drug tests concerning this episode. German TV soon thereafter decided not to broadcast what they termed as "chemical exhibitions." That episode was a lot like the way Floyd Landis stormed back in that one race and I believe both happened within a year of each other, 2006 and then with Vino in 2007. Still, I have no personal resentment against these two individuals.

The science angle is about as understandable as possible per Walsh's narrative and this is no easy feat. High-Performance Cycling is an example of a book with a lot of science talk on cycling that might leave the layman unsure of what he just read.

To those who often say that the likes of Walsh and others are just taking pot shots, why should one turn a blind eye towards Armstrong, the backdated prescription he was issued in 1999 that cleared his use for a substance found in his system, his relationship with the notorious Dr. Ferrari, giving the 'shush' sign to Simeone during a Tour De France stage (similar incidents purportedly with Robin and Bassons, anti-dopers) and in fact, the witnessing of Armstrong saying he did use performance enhancers and the Armstrong camp clearly going after many detractors via legal avenues and why doesn't Armstrong speak against the use of these substances? It's good that this book could not be stopped because it's not about the book.