Customer Reviews
A Facinating Insight to unspoken truths - By: Mr. T. J. Hopton, 09 Oct 2008 
As a cycling fan of the Tour & and the pro tour calendar I have been captivated from first page to last page of this book. Like so many other readers I have read all of Armsrong books & Landis "Positivly False"
The tour organisors have always said no one rider or team is bigger than the tour, there is a credible argument raisedin this book to suggest that Armstrong generated so much media tour publicity & associated financial gain that people looked the other way & the vault of silence was enforced by Armstrong to discourage anyone who spoke out about drugs.
Having an open mind regarding the use of drugsin cycling you cannot dismiss a number of pieces the author researches on Armsrtong that strongly suggest & convince he has used a number of performance enhancing drugs to progress his careerin cycling & the Armstrong empire.
Jean Marie Leblanc the tour organisor reviewing such evidence on Armstrong said "He fooled me & has fooled us all"
Well written and researched book - By: F. Cassidy, 27 Jun 2008 This is a good read. Walsh obviously spent a long time researching his material for the book, which is presentedin a very professional manner. Not oncein the book does Walsh make an unfounded allegation, everything is backed up with evidence.
Being a keen amatuer cyclist, I am well aware of what goes onin the professional peleton & it upsets me to hear people defend Lance Armstorng or any other cyclist for that matter who has tested positive. This for me is the root of the problemsin cycling, nobody wants to knows, everyone is happy to turn a blind eye. People like Greg Lemond, Paul Kimmage & David Walsh should be listened to by all, the work they have done has often landed themin hot water & on the receiving end of much critism, but someone has to try & turn the tide.
This book is not all anti-Lance, for me it's more a story beginning with where cycling really began going south almost 20 years ago & where it has come since then. It describes how the bestin the game abused the trust of their supporters & exposes the dirty truth of what cycling has become.
I thoroughly enjoyed this book & would recommend it to anyone curious about what really goes onin the professional peleton.
dont bother! - By: David Bayliss, 15 Apr 2008 
my advice to you is dont bother wasting your time reading this book- the guy who wrote it is a non believerin work hard & suffering ,riding 6 hours a day wind rain or shine any day of the yearin order to prepare for the tour de france.the author has itin for americans winning frances sport he had itin for lance & now floyd. as lance calls him, hes a troll!!
if you wanna read a decent book, read floyds book or one of dan coyles, well worth the money.
Lance to Landis - By: Bill McGann, 13 Feb 2008 Midway through the third stage of the 1924 Tour de France, Henri Pélissier (winner of the 1923 Tour) abandoned. Journalist Albert Londres found him drinking hot chocolate at a train station restaurant. The interview Pélissier gave is still important. After explaining what the suffering racers endured he showed Londres the various pills & potions he took to both improve his performance & mitigate his misery. "We run on dynamite," he said.
Over the years the types of dynamite have changed. In the 1930s chemists synthesized amphetamines & racers soon learned how they could help & harm. Tom Simpson diedin 1967 from the effects of dehydration, diarrhea & amphetamine overdose.
In the 1970s, the overuse of corticoids nearly killed 2-time Tour winner Bernard Thévenet. When he went public with his misdeeds, explaining that his use of steroids was the usual practicein the peloton, he received abuse from his sponsor, the public & his fellow riders.
In the 1990s EPO made doping necessary if a racer wanted to win. Riders like Marco Pantani & Bjarne Riis ran their hematocrits to a nearly lethal 60%. Any racer wishing to compete with these men & their like were forced to either stick the needlein their arms or retire. This is not just my guess. Many racers from that era (Andy Hampsten, for one) have gone public with how the sport was transformed by a drug that could dramatically improve a racer's power output.
Today, with a reliable test for EPO available, racers have gone on to new strategies, including old-fashioned blood doping. The best racers can spend over $100,000 a year on both the drugs & the technical expertise to avoid detection. Since this technology is so expensive, it is generally only the lower-paid lesser riders who get caught by dope tests.
That brings us to Walsh's book & the demand that he find a "smoking gun" before he levels any accusations. Smoking guns are almost impossible to find. In 1960, Tour de France doctor Pierre Dumas walkedin on Gaston Nencini while he was calmly transfusing his own saved bloodin his hotel room. That's not going to happen today because what Nencini was doing to win the 1960 Tour was not then illegal. Yet, Nencini was doing exactly what most doping experts think modern racers are doing, performing autologous (using their own saved blood for later injection) blood doping.
I urge any person concerned with the obvious problem of rampant dopingin sports to read this book. Walsh isn't a sensationalist. He is a man who hates cheaters. This book is the result of his belief that Lance Armstrong, like almost all of the rest of the professional peloton, used banned performance-enhancing modalities. By necessity, he must build a circumstantial case, but that should not be a justification to reject his conclusions out of hand. I finished the book feeling that Walsh had had indeed made his case.
An old, retired Italian pro with close connections to the racers of today once sat me down & explained much about doping. He concluded by saying, "Bill, they are all dirty."
I would have liked Walsh to organize his information a little better. Still, that didn't keep this book from curling the hair on the back of my neck. Even those who fervently believein Armstrong's innocence will learn much about modern professional cycling from this book.
- Bill McGann, Author of the Story of the Tour de France
A Book Every Fan Should Read - By: James Hogarth, 01 Jan 2008 Read "Its not about the Bike" & then read this for the most terrific counterpoint to the Armstrong fandom we all, including me, swallowed for so long. Walsh has dedicated his life to uncovering the facts & sometimes his links & evidence are necessarily a little tenuous & repetitive. However, overallin my eyes he dramatically proves his case. One's opinion of Armstrong emerges battered but even more complex & fascinatingin some ways. Its clear that Walsh does sympathise with him & that Armstrong really had no alternative to doping if he wanted to win as he did.
Read Armstrong's denials & some of the reviews on this page & you do realise how unwilling we have become, as a society, to accept that our heroes can be less than perfect. This book shows that LA was far from saintly but an amazing & fascinating human & athlete all the same. Its clear from this book though that modern cycling & sport as a whole are a serious mess & we need to have a serious rethink about the celeb money-culture that dominates them.
