Eight years later Operación Puerto showed us just how much our hope had been misplaced. In Breaking the Chain Willy Voet (aided by his own Agatha Christie, Pierre Ballester) served as a sort-of Hercule Poirot, pointing out the evidence and the missed clues that would explain much of what had gone on in cycling prior to 1998 and that Tour de Farce which had rolled off from Dublin and ended caught up in what we all hoped was to be the worst doping scandal our sport would ever see. The evidence of a crime was obvious, but it was not always clear just who the guilty parties were, or even what the real crime was. I even had the opening line worked out: ‘A man with huge shovel-like hands, greying hair and a tanned, weather-beaten face was waiting at the airport.' OK, so it would have taken a couple of chapters before the gun was produced, but you get the drift.'įor many cycling fans - those of us who've wanted to understand the reality behind the feats we've watched or read about and not just live in the moments of epic heroism - following cycling has been like living in a real-world crime thriller: week by week, month by month, the evidence mounted up about just how mired in doping our sport had become. 'Its opening chapter would be scripted straight from the Raymond Chandler school of thriller writing (‘When in doubt, have a man come through the door with a gun') and begin not in 1962 with a baby boy and a kindly staff nurse at the Rotunda hospital in Dublin, but twenty-two years later when the boy arrives in Paris in search of fame and fortune. In his introduction to the 1998 edition of Rough Ride (in which the title lost its indefinite article), Paul Kimmage noted how his original intention for the re-issue of the book was that it would be re-worked in the style of a hard-boiled noir: It's the story of a sport so corrupted by its own mythology that it has lost all touch with reality and seems incapable of heeding the warnings given to it. And if that alone doesn't tell you what went wrong in our sport as cycling dragged itself into the twenty-first century then you really do have to read Hamilton's story.

If David Millar's Racing Through the Dark is this generation's A Rough Ride then Tyler Hamilton's The Secret Race must be Breaking the Chain.

Note: this review originally appeared elsewhere in 2012

Weaknesses: Hamilton is just trying to say he was never as bad as Lance Armstrong (for that matter, he was never as good, either) Strengths: More readable than the USADA report What it is: Tyler Hamilton's tell all tale of doping and deceit Author: Tyler Hamilton (with Daniel Coyle)

The secret race by tyler hamilton