'The Secret Race' attacks all the Armstrong arguments like the great rider himself attacked mountains. That claim is getting more and more meaningless by the day, it seems. So the most significant aspect from Hamilton's work is not that he has evidence Armstrong doped – we knew that already from his '60 Minutes' interview – but rather it's the undermining of Armstrong's famous PR crutch, namely that he never failed a drug test. In one of the more clandestine anecdotes, Hamilton writes that a courier nicknamed 'Motoman' would ride up to Armstrong with prepaid cell phones and thermoses of EPO. In other words, although the subterfuge reads like a screenplay for an episode of '24,' evading the drug police wasn't all that difficult. 'If you were careful and paid attention,' writes Hamilton, 'you could dope and be 99 percent certain that you would not get caught.'

Performance enhancing drugs were wrapped in foil, in Coke cans, even in a vacuum cleaner.

This wasn't Jose Canseco going into a bathroom stall with a syringe this was an entire network of codes and informants, including wives as sentries, leaving the testers in the dust like a fallen rider writhing in pain behind the peloton. At the end of the day, though, all the stuff is happening behind closed doors. 'Compartments and compartments and compartments. 'It was sort of a Russian doll,' says co-author Dan Coyle, also interviewed by phone Wednesday. The result is overwhelming: testimony not only about when and how the alleged doping was done, but how many layers it took. And Hamilton enlists more than a few credible witnesses to take the stand in this book – teammates, rivals, friends. In fact, you can expect many to conclude Armstrong recently dropped his fight with anti-doping authorities because a mountain of witness 'evidence' like this was about to surface. But don't expect many minds to change.Īrmstrong's detractors will point to this book as the ultimate prosecution of cycling's greatest American hero. One would think reading this book would make Armstrong's supporters feel sick, too. The boy told Hamilton he wanted to be a cyclist. He calls the book 'a sad story' and, when asked if he would have pursued cycling if he knew at the start of his career what he knows now, he says, 'I don't think so.' He insists he wants very much to help clean up the sport, but he quietly offers an anecdote about when he asked his 10-year-old nephew what he wanted to be when he grows up. Hamilton doesn't exactly gloat about his findings. He writes simply: 'The UCI didn't want to catch Lance.'

Hamilton does more than hint that cycling had all the incentive in the world for Armstrong to keep clean and keep winning.

The secret race book