{"id":557,"date":"2013-02-04T10:00:13","date_gmt":"2013-02-04T18:00:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/?p=557"},"modified":"2013-01-21T09:48:06","modified_gmt":"2013-01-21T17:48:06","slug":"the-secret-race-review-on-goodreads","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/2013\/02\/04\/the-secret-race-review-on-goodreads\/","title":{"rendered":"The Secret Race– review on Goodreads"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/a>The Secret Race: Inside the Hidden World of the Tour de France: Doping, Cover-ups, and Winning at All Costs<\/a> by Tyler Hamilton<\/a><\/p>\n

My rating: 3 of 5 stars<\/a><\/p>\n

The Secret Race<\/em> is supposed to be about Tyler Hamilton, about a simple kid from the east coast who has natural talent, funnels that into bike racing, rises, falls, and is now in recovery. It\u2019s supposed to be a book about doping, about how everyone in the cycling world dopes, about how seductive the glory of winning can be, how it can convince an honest kid to play the same game as everyone else. The Secret Race<\/em> is supposed to be about guts, hard work, insurmountable obstacles. In the end, though, The Secret Race<\/em> is just another tell-all about Lance Armstrong.<\/p>\n

And now that Armstrong has come out and confessed to doping, this is even more true. Can\u2019t really blame Hamilton, though, for writing yet another book about Lance. In America, at least, among those of us who are not die-hard bike-racing enthusiasts, the sport is<\/em> Lance Armstrong. The sport is<\/em> doping.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s the take away from The Secret Race<\/em>\u2014the real game is how one finds way to take EPO, use blood bags, testosterone, and a whole plethora of other banned substances. It’s finding ways to avoid the tests, fool the tests, pass the tests. It\u2019s the game of working with\u2014not just against\u2014the officials, to keep the sport alive. And alive, of course, means lucrative. Pro cycling is corrupt because there\u2019s money to be made off of men who have one goal in mind: to win at all costs.<\/p>\n

Win at all costs might as well be Armstrong\u2019s mantra, he the patron saint of pro cycling (and doping and playing chess with the officials). Hamilton is his apostle, and The Secret Race<\/em> is an epistle, an easy to read, fairly compelling tragedy in three acts. Sports writer Daniel Coyle co-authors with Hamilton, and together they keep the pace easy enough to follow along but exciting enough to keep the pages turning.<\/p>\n

View all my reviews<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Secret Race: Inside the Hidden World of the Tour de France: Doping, Cover-ups, and Winning at All Costs by Tyler Hamilton My rating: 3 of 5 stars The Secret Race is supposed to be about Tyler Hamilton, about a simple kid from the east coast who has natural talent, funnels that into bike racing, … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “The Secret Race– review on Goodreads”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-557","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reviews"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p24y52-8Z","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/557","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=557"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/557\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":558,"href":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/557\/revisions\/558"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=557"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=557"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=557"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}