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NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • WINNER OF THE WILLIAM HILL SPORTS BOOK OF THE YEAR AWARD
The Secret Race is the book that rocked the world of professional cycling—and exposed, at long last, the doping culture surrounding the sport and its most iconic rider, Lance Armstrong. Former Olympic gold medalist Tyler Hamilton was once one of the world’s top-ranked cyclists—and a member of Lance Armstrong’s inner circle. Over the course of two years, New York Times bestselling author Daniel Coyle conducted more than two hundred hours of interviews with Hamilton and spoke with numerous teammates, rivals, and friends. The result is an explosive page-turner of a book that takes us deep inside a shadowy, fascinating, and surreal world of unscrupulous doctors, anything-goes team directors, and athletes so relentlessly driven to win that they would do almost anything to gain an edge. For the first time, Hamilton recounts his own battle with depression and tells the story of his complicated relationship with Lance Armstrong. This edition features a new Afterword, in which the authors reflect on the developments within the sport, and involving Armstrong, over the past year. The Secret Race is a courageous, groundbreaking act of witness from a man who is as determined to reveal the hard truth about his sport as he once was to win the Tour de France.
With a new Afterword by the authors.
“Loaded with bombshells and revelations.”—VeloNews
“[An] often harrowing story . . . the broadest, most accessible look at cycling’s drug problems to date.”—The New York Times
“ ‘If I cheated, how did I get away with it?’ That question, posed to SI by Lance Armstrong five years ago, has never been answered more definitively than it is in Tyler Hamilton’s new book.”—Sports Illustrated
“Explosive.”—The Daily Telegraph (London)
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Creators
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Publisher
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Release date
September 18, 2012 -
Formats
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Kindle Book
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OverDrive Read
- ISBN: 9780345530431
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EPUB ebook
- ISBN: 9780345530431
- File size: 2356 KB
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Languages
- English
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Reviews
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November 15, 2012
With the assistance of Coyle (Lance Armstrong's War, 2005, etc.), Olympic gold medalist and former professional cyclist Hamilton dishes the dirt on the clandestine culture of doping so endemic to his sport. "I'm good at pain," writes the author, who was a longtime U.S. Postal cycling squad teammate of Lance Armstrong. Readers soon learn that this addiction to pain is an absolute requirement to survive his pressure-cooker life as a professional cyclist, a masochistic existence that makes the physical risks run in sports like football and pro boxing look trivial. Hamilton's story is also partly the story of once-revered cycling celeb (and now disgraced doper) Armstrong, as the two were rivals for years. Hamilton chronicles the entire rise-and-fall arc of his professional career, going from his beginnings as a clean-living anti-doping idealist in the early 1990s to becoming a slave to the intense competitive pressure to ingest a chemical smorgasbord of performance-enhancing substances just to keep up with everyone else. Any notions of cycling as a clean sport go out the window immediately. Hamilton's unsparing account of the damaging (and often dope-fueled) physical and mental toll that top-level cycling takes on its practitioners, not to mention the constant pressure to evade drug testers and beat the drug tests themselves, is a decidedly bleak and unglamorous portrait of the sporting life. For Hamilton, compounding this maniacal all-or-nothing quest for victory was the fact that he had to constantly deal with Armstrong, who comes off as Stalin on a bike: a sociopathic rage-prone prima donna who went to great lengths to destroy the lives of those who threatened his reputation. Fascinating, surprisingly disturbing look at the layers of corruption behind the sleek facade of professional cycling.COPYRIGHT(2012) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
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