Wheelmen: Lance Armstrong, the Tour de France, and the Greatest Sports Conspiracy Ever Author: Visit Amazon's Reed Albergotti Page | Language: English | ISBN:
1592408486 | Format: PDF
Wheelmen: Lance Armstrong, the Tour de France, and the Greatest Sports Conspiracy Ever Description
Review
"A chilling tale, and many of the anecdotes Albergotti and O’Connell collected sound like they were actually crafted in a TV-drama writers’ room."
—The Atlantic
"Reed Albergotti and Vanessa O’Connell uncovered plenty more shocking details about the full extent of Armstrong’s drug use as well as the many people and institutions that helped him."
—The Daily Beast
"The most comprehensive book on the subject … a colorful and thorough retelling."
—USA Today
"Captivating . . . a level-headed view of the culture and business of cycling."
—The Economist
"The book is rich in details, facts, and figures."
—Velo News
"Wheelmen is all the truth-and-reconciliation the sport needs."
—The Philadelphia Review of Books
"The only thing ever missing was the truth. In Wheelmen, we get it."
—Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
"A detailed account of Armstrong's eventual descent into disgrace."
—The Guardian (UK)
"The definitive book on Armstrong."
—The Montreal Gazette
About the Author
Reed Albergotti is a white-collar crime reporter for The Wall Street Journal. He is also the son of a fanatic amateur cyclist who served as the director of cycling competition in the 1984 Olympics. An accomplished bike racer himself, Reed speaks the sport’s odd language.
Vanessa O'Connell, an award-winning reporter at The Wall Street Journal for seventeen years, has covered tobacco, alcohol, guns, insider trading, and the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. She has a knack for exposing the nature of corporate America and how it sometimes manipulates the score in making its money.
- Hardcover: 384 pages
- Publisher: Gotham (October 15, 2013)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 1592408486
- ISBN-13: 978-1592408481
- Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 6.3 x 1.5 inches
- Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
Simply stated, this is an absolutely terrific book that reads more like a novel than non-fiction.
For those who think they know the story I think that you will be surprised. My reaction to this book is the same as to the Steve Jobs biography written by Walter Issacson, which my mother gave me as a gift about a year ago. I was a little concerned when I got it because I thought I knew enough about Jobs, Apple, PC industry history etc. for it to not be interesting. Of course, I was wrong because Issacson tells us all a lot of things that we didn't know about the man. In that regard, this book is similar in that there is much more depth and breadth to this story than I ever knew. I will give the reviewers who claim they learned nothing new the benefit of the doubt, but unless they were somewhere part of the inner workings of the cycling world in a profound way, it is hard to believe that this could be possible.
The authors piece together the history of this "conspiracy" by starting at the beginning and introducing the main characters that get the ball rolling. What is surprising is how the characters change but the "character" of Lance Armstrong really doesn't as his career ascends. From living here in Texas I knew to some degree what a jerk Armstrong was - anybody paying attention could tell that he was as ruthless as a mob boss in trying intimidate people who were working with the investigators responsible for his case based on the things that came out over the last couple of years.
This is an amazing period for cycling fans who followed the ascendance of Lance Armstrong and Tyler Hamilton and Floyd Landis in the 1990s and 2000s and marveled as they were discredited and fell from grace, condemned as cheaters. For those reading on the topic, the first great text is the USADA's own report on cheating at the U.S. Postal team. It's vivid, detailed, shocking (or was when it was released), and freely available online. Then came Tyler Hamilton's book, The Secret Race, which describes his own decision to cheat and how it all fell apart. If you are going to read only one book on this topic, Hamilton's is so far the best. Now we get Wheelmen, by two reporters from the Wall Street Journal. The last in this round will probably be Cycle of Lies: The Fall of Lance Armstrong by Juliet Mancur of the New York Times. That one comes out next year.
These books overlap each other, and a reader might reasonably wonder whether or not it makes sense to read more than one. For me, the answer is very much yes. The USADA report is amazing as a primary source. Hamilton's book gives additional, vivid detail including an extended discussion of how and why great riders chose to cheat, and what it felt like when they did. It also provides some color on Thomas Wiesel, Chris Carmichael, and other players in the doping story who were not discussed in the USADA report because they weren't directly involved. Wheelmen, by contrast, purports to be about the "business" of Lance Armstrong and his doping conspiracy.
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