How Tyler Hamilton sheds light on doping world and Lance Armstrong

Lance Armstrong, left, alongside his compatriot Tyler Hamilton during the Tour de France in 2003

I met Tyler Hamilton in the lobby of a Toulouse hotel during the 2003 Tour de France. Hamilton was performing what seemed at the time like one of the greatest rides in the history of the race, appropriately in the centenary Tour; he was fighting his way through it with a double crack in his collarbone and was highly placed overall. It made a great interview for the Observer; my companion and I left feeling quietly impressed with the guy. I had heard that the American, from Marblehead, Massachusetts, was quiet, even boring, but he was perfectly eloquent at talking about the pain he was enduring.

It was difficult not to be inspired by the suffering Hamilton was going through, just as it was difficult not to raise eyebrows and wonder what the hell was going on when he rode away from the entire field in the Pyrenees, up the steepest climb of the race, broken collarbone and all, to win in Bayonne. Struggling to stay in contact with the leaders seemed within the bounds of possibility; winning a stage by four minutes did not add up.

So it was not a massive surprise to learn that Hamilton had injected a bag of blood the night before the stage to Bayonne, increasing his performance by 3%, or so he writes in his account of his doping journey, The Secret Race: Inside the Hidden World of the Tour de France: Doping, Cover-ups and Winning at All Costs. That is pretty much what the book, written jointly with the American journalist Daniel Coyle, inspired in me: not surprise so much as the occasional jolt of shock at the grimy practicalities and the odd drop of my jaw at the means Hamilton says that he, Lance Armstrong and others used to stay ahead of the testers and the police.

In the broader sense this book is old news, at least compared with Willy Voet's Breaking the Chain, which I translated following its publication in 1999. Voet's revelations were fresh; the Festina scandal had broken less than a year before it appeared. In the same way that the Armstrong saga has been a 10-year drip-feed of revelation, we have had eight years to get used to the idea that Hamilton was riding on blood transfusions, because he was busted for blood doping in 2004, while leaks during the Operación Puerto inquiry left no room for error about his prolific drug-taking.

What Hamilton's account does do is offer an initial, and deep, insight into the evidence that Armstrong refused to confront when he opted out of arbitration in the case that the US Anti-Doping Agency had built against him and his associates. Armstrong's surrender – with its implicit acceptance of the charges the Usada had raised against him – made a contorted kind of sense on 25 August, as it does now, given the material in the book.

Looking back to 1999, I was naive to assume that year that the threat of police raids would make the cyclists leave their drugs at home. While the fear seems to have made many of them ride clean (a vast percentage of the samples from 1999 tested later for erythropoietin were clean), that in turn rewarded those who took special measures and doped up. In the case of Armstrong and Hamilton this meant hiring a motorcyclist, nicknamed Motoman, to transport their EPO.

The following year, with a new test in the pipeline for that blood booster, Armstrong and US Postal switched to microdoses of EPO (to reduce "glowtime", as they call the period when a rider will test positive after an injection) but primarily to blood transfusions – a bigger boost to performance but involving trips to Spain by private jet to have blood removed before it was reinjected for the key moments in the race. Blood doping later became more sophisticated, once Hamilton had left Postal and taken up with the egregious Dr Eufemiano Fuentes, alleged supplier of blood doping services extraordinaire, albeit one who insists he is innocent. Blood is taken out and reinjected in epic quantities; it is frozen and manipulated. Occasionally it goes off, to disastrous effect.

The methods used for concealment are the stuff of the underworld: multiple pay-as-you-go mobile phones, constantly changed, codes for the numbers of rooms in obscure hotels where blood is taken out and put back in, elaborate measures to dispose of evidence, on one occasion hiring a flat in Monaco for one transfusion, hidden there for a month with Hamilton and his then wife, Haven, keeping an eye on it. But above all, constant paranoia, fear of the opposition, fear of discovery. It is sport but not as mere mortals can imagine it or report it, in the case of my colleagues and I. We suspected and conjectured, while being unable to put our disquiet into print; quite how we could have uncovered it I cannot imagine, given the elaborate measures to which the drugtakers were resorting to ensure secrecy.

Amid the blood there are telling insights into Armstrong: "He believed – still believes – that he wasn't cheating, because in his mind all the contenders in the race … had their own version of Motoman, everybody was doing everything they could to win and, if they weren't, they were choads [an insult particular to Armstrong, somewhere between a chump and a toad] and didn't deserve to win."

If there is a note of optimism that can be taken from this book, it is not from Hamilton's story, but the background: testing, more and more stringently, particularly out of competition, clearly does have an effect: it piles on the pressure, forcing the drug takers and the men who run the blood banks into mistakes, such as traces of banned drugs unintentionally finding their way into a bag of blood which then show up positive. Testing does not net them all – Armstrong never failed a test – but it catches enough to make a difference.

Hamilton's downfall, that positive for blood doping in 2004, it seems, is most probably due to an error by Fuentes, who was seemingly supplying so many names in the peloton that he may have given the American the wrong bag. (In a wry-smile footnote that you simply couldn't make up, it seems that his sidekick may have suffered from dementia.)

This is not an account that will engender a great deal of sympathy, at least not in my mind. Hamilton suffered severe depression, sacrificed his marriage and lost a million dollars fighting for years to maintain the lie that he had raced clean. He does not paint himself as a victim: he had a choice and he made the choice. His story, and that of the seven-times Tour winner with whom it runs in parallel, is a defining example of what we all tell our children: one lie leads to another, they grow and take on a life of their own.

Any residual feeling I might have felt for a man who fouled up his life as Hamilton did evaporates on page 19, after his account of that stage win in Bayonne, where he writes: "You can call me a cheater and doper until the cows come home. But the fact remains that in a race where everybody had equal opportunity, I played the game and I played it well." The ultimate drug taker's argument: they all did it, so I had to do it. Not everyone in that race had access to Fuentes or Motoman. Hamilton did not have to do it. They do not have to do it.