Wheelmen: Lance Armstrong, the Tour de France, and the Greatest Sports Conspiracy Ever

We probably should have known better. When something is too good to be true… We were duped, but I feel like we need to take some of the blame. We wanted to believe in this level of sports competence…every year…for seven years…by a man who would be considered old in any other sport…and a cancer survivor. Okay, but enough about me.

What surprised me about the information I learned here is Lance’s early home life. His mother never finished high school and was pregnant with Lance at sixteen when her father threw her out. Lance was an exceptional and driven athlete as an early teen, but when he wanted to compete in triathlons with strict age requirements that precluded his participation, his mother modified his birth certificate. show more So he learned early that the rules did not really apply to him. And that grasping behavior? When enough is never enough? I guess we know where that came from.

I really disliked this book, not only because the writing is more breathless and sensational than it needed to be. The documents collected tell the story of a man who is immensely unappealing and manipulative and the worst sort of role model. We also learn something about the other folks involved in the sport: the teammates, the spouses, the officials, the medical staffs, the press. It was big business, and their business was to sell a product. I may have been a dupe, but I don’t believe for a second all those other folks were.

Even when a former teammate came out with allegations, dates, remembrances of drug doping during races, it was still tricky to prove. One cannot help but feel just a little betrayed by all the folks that agreed to go along with this. They did it because “everyone else did.” Yes, the Tour de France is a hard race. And the world can be a tough place. At least they got to wear spandex in their work rather than body armor.

O’Connell and Albergotti corral a huge amount of material for this exposé. Too much, really. A few less details and a little more reflection would have gone down better with this reader. The authors lacked the necessary narrative to allow us to place Lance’s megalomania in perspective. A character of this dimension is unusual and we the public could use a little help in dealing with the details of someone else's life choices, given his great talents. Is the lesson to strive, but not that much? Is celebrity addicting? Armstrong was not just an ordinary guy with a dirty little secret. This misses the size of his delusion, and ours. Forget Lance for a moment. In a sense, his future has already been written. What are our lessons? Did we do this?

I listened to the Penguin Audio of this book, read by Santino Fontana. Fontana read well, though he is perhaps too gleeful in sections of heart-rending discovery. I supplemented listening with the text by Gotham Books, an appropriately-named publisher for a manuscript depicting characters with such outsized lives. show less

This book was fantastic. It was well-documented and well-written. It wove together many different stories in a brilliant narrative. Sure, everyone else was doping but nobody covered it up and lied in such a sociopathic way. A couple times while reading the book I found myself wondering if Lance actually had convinced himself that he never doped and that was his own reality. Whatever, the case, the book is fantastic look at the rise of cycling in America, how it captured a young and talented triathlete, how that triathlete overcame cancer, and then cheated and lied his way to the top. I would highly recommend this book to any sports fan.

Excellent telling of the rise and fall of a true American A**hole. With this and Tyler Hamilton's "The Secret Race", you pretty much have the story of doping in the world of professional cycling from the 1990's until the present. I hope those days are finally over, but only time will tell.

This book was really interesting and well-written, and I read it throughout the course of a single day. But I feel like it was published too soon. Several times in the book the authors mention that the outcome hasn't been determined yet, or won't be known until 2014, etc. The paperback book's afterward contains more drama that clearly wasn't known as of the original publication of the book. It seems like the authors rushed this to press so it would still be timely, even though there were large holes in the plot (so to speak).

Lance Armstrong was one of the best cyclists in last 20 years. His wins were built on a foundation of illegal doping and performance enhancing drugs. It's not about the bike; It's all about the needle.

I first came to road cycling during the rise of Mr. Armstrong and his seven wins of the Tour de France. His story as a cancer-survivor coming back to win the biggest race in the world was an inspiration. But, it was all built on lies. The United States Anti-Doping Agency stripped him of all of his cycling wins since his recovery from cancer.

Reed Albergotti and Vanessa O'Connell write a devastating tale of Mr. Armstrong's rise and meteoric crash. The book is very well-written and well-researched. We only saw Lance on his bike. The book show more takes us through what was happening on the team bus and hotel. show less

Riveting story of the rise and fall of Lance Armstrong, cycling and the industries surrounding it. I’m not sure what I think of Armstrong. On one had, everyone was doing it. On the other hand, he’s not taken personal responsibility for something he clearly had control over. Very well written and enjoyable.

Though it took me a long time to get through (through no fault of the book itself), it was worth it. Wheelmen is an exceptional book about the fall of a sporting hero and an intimate look at the dark secrets of the sport of cycling. As long as there are men like Armstrong in and around cycling, doping will never disappear. Wheelmen does an excellent job of exposing this dark, doping underbelly of the sport that so many (myself included) love dearly.