i Because cycling writing ends up being a compound of sports, chemistry and metaphysics, footnotes have become a necessary feature of the micro-genre—until the sport cleans up completely, consider them an unfortunate side effect of the doping culture. Erythropoietin, or EPO, is a synthetic drug, easy to use and for years entirely undetectable, that boosts performance by over 10 percent in a sport that once counted a winning edge in a fraction of a percentage point.
ii I’ve always found it interesting that, unlike so many sportsmen and women, Armstrong has rarely, if ever, invoked God in his two books, thousands of press conferences and two televised confessions. Here’s a working-class kid from Texas (okay, Austin, but still) who has never so much as thanked the Creator for a stage win. It took me a while to understand why: his story is a secular Christ myth—he doesn’t invoke God because he is a god.
iii The Tour de France’s first champion was also the first champion to be disqualified—a proto-Lance Armstrong, or Alberto Contador, or Floyd Landis, or take your pick. In 1904, he used an outside mechanic to help repair his bike (then illegal), and cheated by taking a shortcut. One gets the sense that if EPO existed, the Little Chimney-Sweep would have ridden with the stuff in his canteen.
iv As Hugh Dauncey and Geoff Hare, the editors of The Tour de France: 1903-2003, point out, “The marketing logic was impeccable: L’Auto organized a race that only a newspaper could report.”
v Perhaps the most egregious (currently unproven) example of this is Alexandr Vinokurov’s 2012 London Olympic road race gold medal. Vinny, who was notoriously partial to performance-enhancement drugs prior to his bust in 2007 (followed by a two-year ban), is said to have offered Columbian Rigoberto Urán a bushel of euros to win the two-up sprint. Vinny comes from Kazakhstan, where oil money flows like EPO, so Rigoberto could’ve named his price.
vi A healthy, elite male athlete will have a hematocrit level of between 42 and 45. Once the level starts nudging up from there, something fishy is afoot. To minimize the rising body count that rampant EPO use was ushering in—between twenty-three and twenty-seven professional cyclists have died in their sleep because their blood viscosity was roughly equivalent to a milkshake—the UCI set the upper limit of the “acceptable” range for a hematocrit level at 50. US Postal cyclists would routinely post results of 49 and 49.5, which incited UCI representatives to privately mewl about this flagrant abuse. (Censure or bans were, of course, out of the question.) When this rule was instituted, there were no tests for EPO, so the idea of capping hematocrit levels seemed like a good idea. In retrospect, less so.
vii Cycling seems to have engineered a proper bad boy in Peter Sagan, the 23-year-old Slovenian wunderkind. Standing on the podium for the prize giving at the 2013 Flanders Classic, he pinched the bottom belonging to a podium girl-the selfsame cohort of young models in evening gowns that the UCI insists aren’t a sexist throwback. His ministrations are being treated as a sexual assault, and there is nothing in his personality to suggest that this will be his last act of off-the-bike antics.
viii I take it as a given that the reader is familiar with Armstrong’s two-part “confession” on Oprah’s OWN Network in January 2013. The reader, I hope, will take it as a given that Armstrong hardly came clean—he did not admit to his so-called hospital confession in 1996, where in front of friends he is said to have told a doctor that he doped from ’92 to ’96. And he didn’t own up to doping in his comeback in 2009, or to doping in his new discipline, the triathlon.