Photo credit: Jo Hanley
I realized that I wanted to write a book about cycling in the fall of 2012. As a casual fan of the sport, I had been following the slow drip of revelations about Lance Armstrong’s drug use over the previous months, interested in the extent of the scandal and in the way these discoveries recast the recent history of races I remembered. What made me think that cycle racing could be a subject for fiction, however, was a revelation by Armstrong’s teammate, Tyler Hamilton, which would later appear in Hamilton’s book,
The Secret Race.
According to Hamilton, Armstrong’s US Postal team had a special code for the banned hormone — Erythropoietin, or EPO — which had fueled so much of their success...