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had been shipped to a sports camp when he was around eleven or twelve, leaving his family and friends behind. He was fine with it, considering the alternative, which would have been a factory job. At camp, three shifts of kids rode ten bikes, and those kids dutifully took “vitamins.” It was a life chosen for them. Most American cyclists, for that matter, had nothing to fall back on if they failed. Only a handful attended college.

      Baker and Mercier were a couple of rare exceptions. Baker had been a finance major at the University of Maryland, Mercier an economics major at the University of California, Berkeley. So they didn’t look at doping as a life-or-death decision. They were in the sport because they loved it.

      “It’s a bike race,” Mercier says. “It’s a fun way to make a living, but it’s a bike race, c’mon!”

      Hincapie hated hearing that, and he hated Mercier because of it. Sure, Mercier had options, but riders like him and Armstrong did not—at least, they felt they didn’t. Armstrong feared that he’d have to work at Starbucks if cycling didn’t work out for him.

      While teammates cursed them under their breath, Mercier and Baker joked about the rampant drug use. Mercier would shake the locked refrigerator on the team truck to hear the glass vials rattling inside. “Hmm, I wonder what’s in there? Oh, the special lunch. These are my special B vitamins,” he’d say to Baker, laughing as EPO vials made their cheater’s music.

      To Baker and Mercier, it was obvious the sport had been taken over by doping. Mercier noticed riders in their twenties and thirties with acne, a common side effect of steroids, and some who seemed to have developed big brow bones, a possible side effect of human growth hormone.

      At the Tour DuPont in 1994, Mercier had walked into a bathroom and noticed two Spanish riders sharing a stall. He heard one say, “Poco más, poco más,” then saw a syringe fall at the riders’ feet. “I thought it was gross,” Mercier says. “It felt to me like heroin addicts. I felt like, wow, if I have to do that, this is not the sport for me.”

      At the same race, Mercier had pulled up at the start of one stage along Armstrong, who had such brawny arms that he had to cut his jersey sleeves. His legs rippled with muscles. Mercier said, “Man, Lance, you could be a linebacker, you’re so huge. You could play for the Cowboys.”

      Armstrong’s answer: “You think?”

      Three years later, Mercier was confronted with doping head-on. At the Postal Service team’s training camp in 1997, the Spanish team doctor Pedro Celaya withdrew blood from the riders so he could test their hematocrit levels. Mercier’s was 40.5.

      “To be professional in Europe, maybe 49, 49.5,” Celaya told him.

      “Gracias, Pedro, how do I do that?”

      “Special B vitamins. We can talk later, OK?”

      Mercier walked away from it knowing EPO was in store.

      In the spring of that year, Mercier had a four-week break during which he was going to his wife’s home country, South Africa. He would travel there after competing in the Tour of Romandie, in Switzerland, take two weeks off and train for two weeks. Before the race ended, he met Celaya in a hotel room to discuss the upcoming training schedule.

      Celaya handed him a calendar with several little circles and stars marked on certain dates. Next, according to Mercier, came a Ziploc bag filled with pills and vials of liquid. Though Celaya says he was never involved in doping, Mercier claims that Celaya was very much a part of the team’s doping scheme. Mercier said he could recall exactly the exchange he had with Celaya when the doctor allegedly handed him the bag of pills and vials.

      “What’s this, Pedro?” Mercier asked.

      “These are steroids,” the doctor answered.

      “Are these going to make my balls shrink up?”

      “No, no,” Celaya said, laughing. “You go strong like bull. No racing, for sure you test positive. But it will make you go stronger than ever before.”

      Mercier alleges that Celaya told him to buy some syringes once he arrived in South Africa, and showed him how to extract liquid from the glass vial. Then he advised Mercier to put the drugs in his front pocket for his flight. If a customs officer stopped him, Celaya said, just say the drugs were vitamins.

      Mercier made it to South Africa without incident. Once his training was supposed to begin, he took out the bag of drugs and the calendar that told him what to take and when. On some days, he was supposed to take the green pills first thing in the morning, then later in the evening. Some days at lunch, too. The instructions told him to stop taking the pills on a Sunday before a race in the United States the following Saturday. That’s how fast the drugs would exit his system; he wouldn’t test positive. Getting away with doping would be easy, if he decided to take that step.

      Mercier’s wife, Mandie, said she couldn’t make that decision for him. She didn’t want her feelings about it to taint their relationship. He looked at her and said, “I’m not going to take these.”

      Mercier lasted only three days on Celaya’s training program. The fourth day, he could only get his heart rate to 70 percent of its maximum instead of the 85-95 percent the program required. His legs were shot. For days after that, he was so exhausted and sore that he could do only 80 percent of his workouts.

      Then he needed to take a few days off. There was no way he could make it through the two weeks of workouts without drugs. With steroids, he would’ve recovered from each hard workout and train to his body’s full extent the very next day.

      Struggling through those workouts, he knew if he raced the next season, he had to be a doper. Hincapie was right. Riders simply couldn’t race clean and be competitive anymore. The drugs seemed necessary. Besides, taking them had a huge upside: better results and bigger paychecks.

      But Mercier decided to quit the sport. He’d finish the season, but would turn down a contract extension from the Postal Service. His dream was over.

      While people have called him courageous and morally strong because of that decision, he is, on one level, embarrassed. He says quitting the sport showed that he was too weak to resist temptation.

      “I don’t think I’d ever be able to stop doping,” he says. “I thought it was a slippery slope.”

      Mercier finished that season and his career at the Vuelta a España. Even though he had been a strong climber, the sprinters—known for their bursts of speed on straightaways—were outclimbing him. The peloton was flying up mountain passes. He had been in third place going into a massive climb early on in one stage. But one by one, riders were overtaking him, as if he were moving in slow motion.

      The Vuelta a España also claimed Baker, whose retreat from the sport was thought to be tragic for the fact that he was considered by many to be an amazing natural talent. Jonathan Vaughters, a rider from Denver who would join the Postal Service team the next year, said Baker was good enough to be a top 10 rider at the Tour—“if he would’ve doped, of course.” At that final Vuelta, Baker himself told Sam Abt of the New York Times that he once had been as good as Armstrong. “I was strong most of the time, I was just as strong as Lance Armstrong, maybe even stronger on the climbs. But he was always more hungry for the win than I was.”

      Baker knew, when he was selected for the national team, that riders at the top of the sport were doping. “Everybody knew it,” he said, “and everybody talked about it.” Riders recited five-time Tour winner Jacques Anquetil’s famous line—“Leave me in peace, everybody takes dope”—and repeated what Fausto Coppi, a two-time Tour winner, had told a television reporter. He said he only took dope when he needed to, “which is almost all the time.” Baker understood those sayings to be the truth, and he felt pressure to use drugs, but declined.

      He had been constantly challenged. At the world championships in 1995, he claims that the doctor working with the U.S. national team slipped Baker several pills after Baker complained that other riders seemed so much more energized than he was. Baker did not want to reveal the doctor’s name,

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