Secret Race
by Coyle, Daniel, Hamilton, Tyler · first published 2012
70% recommend30% neutral
Why HN recommends it
First-person account of life as a professional cyclist in the late 1990s and early 2000s, including the doping culture and the US Postal team's organization; praised as gripping and a useful inside view of the sport.
Summarised by Claude from recommending comments
Over the course of two years, Daniel Coyle conducted more than 200 hours of interviews with cyclist Tyler Hamilton and spoke candidly with numerous teammates, rivals, and friends. The result is an explosive 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 succeed that they would do anything - and take any risk, physical, mental, or moral - to gain the edge they need to win.
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…Karnazes, Born to Run by McDougal, The Belgian Hammer by Lee, Eat & Run by Scott Jurek, Racing Through the Dark by David Millar, Slaying the Badger by Moore, Running on Empty by Marshall Ulrich and The Secret Race by Tyler Hamilton. Would I be better off if I'd spent that time reading "literature" instead? I don't know, but I'm sceptical. OTOH, I have a whole pile of stuff lying here by Nietzsche, Kieerkegard,…
on “Taleb: The future will not be cool” ↗No they weren't. Read the Tyler Hamilton book ("The Secret Race"). That's the book which really brought down Armstrong. In it he makes clear how much better organized the US Postal Service team was than anyone else (except maybe T-Mobile and ONCE). When he left…
on “The Man Who Brought Down Lance Armstrong” ↗I read Frankenstein recently and its pretty intense. Recommended. Probably the most exhilarating read for me in a long while has been "The Secret Race" by Tyler Hamiliton. But don't take my word on it, read the reviews.
on “Ask HN: What are some good books?” ↗The book "The Secret Race" by Lance Armstrong's teammate Tyler Hamilton gives a good perspective on what was happening at the time. At one point Hamilton was standing on an Italian street trying to hide the blood dripping down…
on “Cycling Doping Fallacies” ↗…Great Influenza by John M. Barry (p:546); The Rise and Fall of the Dinousaurs by Stephen Brusatte (p:404) ++; The Double Helix by James Watson (p:144) Sport: Run or Die by Killian Jornet (p:208); The Secret Race by Tyler Hamilton (p:290) +; The Rise of the Ultra Runners by (p:304); Tom Dumoulin by Patrick Bernhart (p:203) Fiction: Anthem by Ayn Rand (p:105); Fountainhead by Ayn Rand (p:704); The Bourne Identity…
on “Ask HN: Books you read in 2022 and recommend for 2023” ↗…racing. I read things like Running Through The Wall, Born To Run, Slaying The Badger, Running on Empty, Racing Through The Dark, Eat & Run, The Belgian Hammer, Run!, It's Not Just About The Bike and The Secret Race. Fascinating stuff, for anyone who is interested in either running or bicycle racing.
on “My Summer Reading List” ↗This is a more broad interpretation of "getting things done," but The Secret Race is an excellent book about what it was like to be a professional cyclist in the late 90s/early 2000s, doping and all
on “Ask HN: Books about people who did hard things” ↗…that the causation could have been the other way around. The EPO could have made him more susceptible to cancer. There is a mountain of evidence that the drug cheating was systematic. You can read The Secret Race, or draw your own conclusions from the $5 million false claims act settlement.
on “Tumor-derived erythropoietin acts as immunosuppressive switch in cancer immunity” ↗…and ultimate engulfment by, an athletic subculture. Muscle also contains insights into “why people dope” that go beyond what the cyclist Tyler Hamilton and others have explained in books like the “The Secret Race.” After publishing the book Fussell more or less dropped out of sight. He has no website and has not done much to try to cash in further on his book. > I found Sam Fussell and he was generous enough…
on “Sam Fussell: An interview with the author of Muscle (2014)” ↗…This is what Armstrong tried to do with Frankie Andreu. There are serious long and short term health implications to that, see Tyler Hamilton's description of taking a "bad" blood transfusion in The Secret Race. Many professional cyclists died from "mysterious" night time heart attacks. Some just young neo-pros. Can you really say that they understood the risks of over thickened blood? I think we'd all be…
on “The Man Who Brought Down Lance Armstrong” ↗One of Armstrong's team mates from US Postal days wrote a tell all biography after he was banned for doping: Tyler Hamilton the secret race, in it (paraphrasing) he said he saw athletes from every professional sport in the waiting room of the private doctor who was doing his doping.
on “Exposed by a Strava KOM: The Many Lives of a Fake Pro Cyclist” ↗…Postal teammates routinely did blood doping during the Tour de France. They smuggled frozen blood in a hidden compartment and arranged secret transfusions in hotel rooms. All the sordid details are in "The Secret Race" by Tyler Hamilton. https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/212873/the-secret-r...
on “Chess’s Cheating Crisis” ↗