The Secret Race
Inside the Hidden World of the Tour de France: Doping, Cover-ups, and Winning at All Costs
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The Secret Race is a definitive look at the world of professional cycling—and the doping issue surrounding this sport and its most iconic rider, Lance Armstrong—by former Olympic gold medalist Tyler Hamilton and Daniel Coyle.
Over the course of two years, Coyle conducted more than two hundred hours of interviews with Hamilton and spoke candidly with numerous teammates, rivals, and friends. The result is an explosive book that takes us, for the first time, 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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Tyler Hamilton was once one of the world’s best-liked and top-ranked cyclists—a fierce competitor renowned among his peers for his uncanny endurance and epic tolerance for pain. In the 2003 Tour de France, he finished fourth despite breaking his collarbone in the early stages—and grinding eleven of his teeth down to the nerves along the way. He started his career with the U.S. Postal Service team in the 1990s and quickly rose to become Lance Armstrong’s most trusted lieutenant, and a member of his inner circle. For the first three of Armstrong’s record seven Tour de France victories, Hamilton was by Armstrong’s side, clearing his way. But just weeks after Hamilton reached his own personal pinnacle—winning the gold medal at the 2004 Olympics—his career came to a sudden, ignominious end: He was found guilty of doping and exiled from the sport.
From the exhilaration of his early, naïve days in the peloton, Hamilton chronicles his ascent to the uppermost reaches of this unforgiving sport. In the mid-1990s, the advent of a powerful new blood-boosting drug called EPO reshaped the world of cycling, and a relentless, win-at-any-cost ethos took root. Its psychological toll would drive many of the sport’s top performers to substance abuse, depression, even suicide. For the first time ever, Hamilton recounts his own battle with clinical depression, speaks frankly about the agonizing choices that go along with the decision to compete at a world-class level, and tells the story of his complicated relationship with Lance Armstrong.
A journey into the heart of a never-before-seen world, The Secret Race is a riveting, courageous 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.
Lance Armstrong’s War
One Man’s Battle Against Fate, Fame, Love, Death, Scandal, and a Few Other Rivals on the Road to the Tour de France
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Daniel Coyle’s New York Times bestseller Lance Armstrong’s War takes a fascinating, in-depth look at a staggeringly talented yet flawed sports hero as he faced his greatest test: a record sixth straight Tour de France victory.
Now with a new epilogue covering Armstrong’s quest to win an 8th Tour de France, this “intimate, insightful, unflinching look at the greatest athlete of our time” (Jon Krakauer) explores the remarkable drive and accomplishments of a controversial champion—a must read for fans of John Feinstein and David Halberstam, as well as readers of Lance Armstrong’s own It’s Not About the Bike and Every Second Counts.
In the heart of Cabrini-Green, Chicago’s most notorious housing project, a group of kids and their white-collar coaches triumph over the odds through Little League baseball. A narrative tour de force that reveals not only a deeply troubling image of the way things are, but also a glimpse of the way they might be.
Hardball was adapted into a movie starring Keanu Reeves in 2001.
After the loss of her only son, Sara Black finds herself spending more and more time at the Seattle hospital where she is a nurse, tending to “the tall man,” the victim of a gunshot wound whose identity has remained a provocative riddle-until he starts talking. As the man she knows as Samuel draws Sara into a strange and chilling story about his past on an Alaskan island, she must face some truths of her own, as well as the realization that the patient to whom she’s devoted herself may not be who he says he is.