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a big shake-up in its organization. After the 1996 season, team director Eddie Borysewicz, the 1984 Olympic coach and Armstrong’s former mentor, was not asked to return for another season. Prentice Steffen, the team’s doctor, wasn’t invited back, either.

      Steffen had been in a team hotel room during the 1996 Tour of Switzerland when two Postal riders—Tyler Hamilton and Marty Jemison—approached him to talk. Jemison brought up the team’s medical program. He said the team wasn’t getting anywhere with the current program—the riders were getting crushed at that race, the team’s first big European competition—and asked Steffen’s advice.

      “Do you think there is something more you could be doing to help us?” he said.

      Steffen considered this a euphemism, and felt that Jemison was asking for performance-enhancing drugs. He remembers it as a wink-and-nod conversation that he knew would not go anywhere because, having conquered substance abuse himself, he was against the use of drugs.

      “No, I can’t really get involved in that sort of thing,” Steffen answered.

      Hamilton has denied that the conversation ever happened. Jemison said they had spoken with Steffen that day, but that they were asking for legal products, things like vitamins and amino acids. Whatever transpired, Steffen felt that the riders and team management began distancing themselves from him. Mark Gorski, the team’s general manager and a 1984 Olympian, stopped returning his calls and e-mails. The next thing he knew, he had been replaced by a Spanish doctor, Pedro Celaya.

      Steffen had been with the team for several years and was hurt by his unceremonious departure. There were no formal good-byes; the team just let his contract lapse. Fuming, he wrote a letter to Gorski. “What would a Spanish doctor, completely unknown to the organization, offer that I can’t or won’t? Doping is the fairly obvious answer.”

      The team’s response came from its law firm. In it, Steffen was threatened with a lawsuit if he made public his accusations.

      Borysewicz had also lost his job with the team. Though he had been caught up in the blood doping scandal of the 1984 Summer Games, several of his riders on the Postal Service team said he never offered them anything of the sort. He had told them that he didn’t want to be involved in another doping scandal. He was replaced in 1997 by Johnny Weltz, a Dane and a former rider who had spent most of his career with the Spanish ONCE team, which was known as one of the dirtiest teams in the sport. Weltz would join Celaya, a doctor who some riders claimed knew his way around the doping of athletes. (The United States Anti-Doping Agency would eventually slap Celaya with a lifetime ban for doping athletes, but Celaya denied being involved with any drug use. The case was in arbitration in early 2014.)

      A new regime was in place that would lay the foundation for Armstrong’s return to the team the next year after he survived cancer. Nothing about the sport’s doping culture had changed since he left.

      As soon as their teammates left their apartment in Girona, Spain, Darren Baker and Scott Mercier went to work. They looked under beds, in drawers, inside jacket pockets—any and all possible hiding places inside the bedrooms of Tyler Hamilton and George Hincapie, their roommates and fellow Americans on the United States Postal Service team. Finally they stumbled upon a shoebox filled with small pill bottles at the bottom of Hincapie’s closet. Tucked among bottles of vitamins was a small tan bottle of testosterone.

      “No way!” Mercier said.

      “What? That’s it? I was sure there would be more,” Baker said.

      That’s all they found, but they’d found an answer to their question: Were their teammates doping? Yes. At least one of them was.

      In 1997, Hincapie was only twenty-three, but had long been one of the top cyclists in the United States. The son of Colombian immigrants, he grew up in Queens and began cycling when he was eight. His father, Ricardo, had been a competitive cyclist. George Hincapie would train with his older brother, Rich, in Central Park. On weekends, the Hincapies drove to races in New Jersey, Connecticut and all over New York. Unlike Armstrong, who was a late bloomer as a pure cyclist because he had been concentrating on triathlons, Hincapie was only twelve when he won his first national championship.

      In school, he daydreamed about racing in Europe, maybe even in the Tour de France. Ignoring homework, he planned training schedules. He tried one semester of college, at Hofstra University, but decided academics weren’t for him.

      He took his first vitamin shots with the United States national team, in Italy. In Europe, he said, injecting vitamins was so common that supermarkets sold syringes “next to the apples.” At the 1992 Olympics, he received injections from national team trainer Angus Fraser—later accused of doping young riders, though Fraser denies ever doping anyone—but Hincapie assumed his injections were legal supplements, like vitamins B12 and C.

      Early on as a pro on the Motorola team, he saw a teammate inject what he assumed was EPO. Another teammate had a drawerful of drugs that he bequeathed to Hincapie when he left the team with an injury. The team’s soigneurs, including Hendershot, gave Hincapie injections, but he never questioned what was in them. He said his mentor, Frankie Andreu, who’d already been a pro for several years and later raced for the Postal Service team, introduced him to EPO.

      “It was just standard,” Hincapie says, referring to the doping in Europe’s pro peloton. “It was shocking, but I didn’t have a Plan B. At that time, it wasn’t like, ‘Well, shit, I’ve got to cheat.’ It was, like, ‘I’m not going to let myself get cheated. I have to do this.’”

      At his first Grand Tour—the Vuelta a España in 1995, when he was still clean—Hincapie struggled to stay with “the fattest, most out-of-shape guy in the race; that’s how hard it was.” He realized then that no matter how hard he worked, he would never succeed unless he doped.

      For thirty years, his father woke up at 4 a.m. to work in the baggage department for United Airlines at LaGuardia Airport. His mother drove a city school bus for ten years. “That focus and commitment to something was really passed on to me,” he said. “I was going to do what I wanted to do, one hundred percent.”

      So when faced with the decision of whether or not to take performance-enhancing drugs, Hincapie followed his close friend Armstrong’s lead: He went all in. In a year’s time, Armstrong would be back on a team with Hincapie and the two would race together and dope together. It was a partnership that would take them places they’d never imagined—places marked with both glory and grief.

      Baker and Mercier were two riders on the Postal Service team—perhaps the only two top riders—who said no to doping. Though they had never seen their teammates use performance-enhancing drugs, they were suspicious that their roommates, Hamilton and Hincapie, had gained ground on the EPO-fueled Europeans. How could they do that?

      Hincapie, the tall, lanky sprinter whose strength was his speed and power on flat roads, had grown stronger in the mountains. Hamilton, a small guy with freckles, icy blue eyes and wavy auburn hair, had also been climbing better than ever.

      Neither had seemed like the type who would dope. Hincapie, nicknamed Big George, was quiet and an all-around nice guy who was as well liked in the peloton as he was with fans.

      Hamilton might have been plucked from a J. Crew advertisement featuring a boy and his golden retriever. He was a New Englander and former prep school ski racer whose family dressed him in button-down shirts and taught him to be kind and polite. At a glance, Hamilton came across less as a professional athlete and more as a teenager on a bike who tossed your morning newspaper onto the roof instead of the porch.

      Armstrong would join the team in 1998. In his year or so away from the sport, the doping culture had not changed. Just because the squad was sponsored by the Postal Service, an independent agency of the United States government, didn’t mean the team would follow the rules. Perhaps the opposite held, with the high-profile sponsor putting even more pressure on riders. In charge was Weisel, the financial wizard with a fierce competitive streak, so fierce that he has been said to hire some employees not for their financial acumen but for their ability to help his company win corporate track-and-field competitions.

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