From Lance to Landis

About a week after Floyd Landis’s book hit the shelves, the Irish sports journalist David Walsh released From Lance to Landis: Inside the American Doping Controversy at the Tour de France. A day or two after it came out, I took another trip down to the Strand in Union Square and picked up a copy of the hardcover for the low, low bargain price of $12.97.

Understandably, I realize my previous book reviews tend to be a bit long-winded (because I feel it’s important that if you’re going to review a book, you might as well support the review with actual information), so I’m going to attempt to spare everyone from dozing off while I do this.

When it comes to this read, my humble opinion is, if you’re at all interested in the professional side to cycling, go out and buy the book. It’s almost long at 334 pages, but those 334 pages are interesting pages. Will the book convince you that both Lance Armstrong and Floyd Landis have doped (meaning they cheated) during their professional careers? I believe it will. It sheds a lot of light on their individual careers, although most of the book is dedicated to investigating Armstrong.

For example, the book starts out by highlighting the early career of a teen cyclist by the name of Greg Strock. The kid had talent, rode for the national team, and then was doing amateur stuff overseas while working with a Belgian trainer and his buddy soigneur who gave the kid lots of injections along the way. Eventually, Strock became way too sick and stayed that way long enough so that he returned to the States. When his doctors here in the US figured out what it was, they realized it was something that almost everyone gets at one point in his or her life (think of it as something like a cold), but it affected Strock so much worse than usual--exhausted all the time, constantly sleeping, joint and hip pain, etc--that it basically ended his cycling career.

So why does David Walsh open with a chapter about a guy you’ve never heard of? Because while Greg Strock was a year younger than Lance Armstrong, they were both riding for Chris Carmichael on the national team at the same time. Armstrong was on the A team and Strock was on the B team. They rode under similar supervision for years and later, once Strock was sick and decided against a future in cycling, it’s noted that his condition, as serious as i was, typically produces a high incidence to testicular cancer in other men who have suffered the same condition.

It’s not hard to put two and two together.

Then, while it’s circumstantial, there is evidence that is quiet damning. Frankie Andreu, Armstrong’s former teammate on the Motorola and US Postal teams, makes this statement: “God knows what happened during that winter, but Lance came back the spring of ’96 and he was frickin’ huge. He looked like a linebacker. It was ‘Holy sh*t, man, he is big.’ Obviously, we all noticed it and he knew we did. He said something about [Dr. Michele] Ferrari not realizing the effect the weight room was going to have . . . but with Lance it was more than just seeing him big. I mean, he was big, but he could now rip the cranks off the bike like never before.”

Dr. Michele Ferrari is the Italian sports doctor who I believe is now in jail for helping athletes dope. Maybe he’s not in jail, although I do know an Italian court found him guilty of unethical practices in his dealings with athletes. And this is the doctor Lance chose to hire after a few seasons in the early ‘90s after EPO hit the peloton. Walsh explains that it was mostly the Italian teams doing it and they were destroying everyone, including Armstrong and his teammates. The rest of the riders knew what was going on, but most of the team doctors, especially on Motorola, weren’t advocating that kind of “medical program” for their riders. But then Lance hooks up with Ferrari and he starts trouncing everyone . . . convincingly.

The list goes on and on. In the end, the evidence is circumstantial and based mostly on depositions during civil lawsuits, testimony provided by Lance’s former teammates, his former soigneur, and others who have contact with him within the realm of professional cycling.

It’s also interesting to note that during a deposition, an instant message conversation between Frankie Andreu and Jonathan Vaughters was entered as evidence. During the conversation between the two former teammates, Vaughters explains to Andreu that Landis told him that on the second rest day of the 2004 Tour de France, both Armstrong and the team’s director, Johan Bruyneel, called Landis to the bathroom so he could watch as the two men flushed his blood refill down the toilet.

By that point in the race, Landis had already signed with the Phonak team for 2005 and if anyone isn’t aware, Armstrong never handled defections from his team in a very professional manner. So if Armstrong was confident he could win the Tour that year without a ton of help from Landis, why not mess with him a bit?

If you ask me, it’s all rather f*cked up, yet somehow believable at the same time.

Again, it’s a good book. Well worth the time to read it.

And apparently it’s impossible for me to write a review under 850 words. That’s my bad.