The Texas Cyclist

He won seven consecutive Tours de France from 1999 to 2005, the first after stage-four testicular cancer that had metastasised to his lungs and brain. He raised an estimated $500 million for Livestrong. He was stripped of every Tour title in October 2012 by the US Anti-Doping Agency's Reasoned Decision. He confessed to Oprah Winfrey in January 2013.

Roland Mercer's biography follows the arc from a Plano, Texas, childhood with a single mother and a triathlon father he barely knew, through the 1992 U.S. Olympic cycling team, the 1996 cancer diagnosis, the U.S. Postal Service team, the Tour years, the Livestrong empire, the Floyd Landis federal whistleblower suit of 2010, the 2012 USADA finding, the Department of Justice civil action, the $5 million settlement of 2018, and the post-cycling years on the WEDŪ podcast and the Move media company.

What emerges is a portrait of a great endurance athlete and a programmatic doper — an enduring contradiction the cycling press, the cancer-survivor community, and the federal courts have all spent the last decade trying to reconcile.