“I kept picturing that guy on the ground, crying and pleading, and Lance pounding away,” Mr. Armstrong chased down a motorist who passed too closely and pulled the man from his car at the traffic light. He recalls how during one training ride Mr. Hamilton saw it in his contempt for rivals or people he simply disliked. Armstrong’s personality gets another airing here. European cycling had by then been transformed by the arrival of cloned human hormones, particularly erythropoietin, or EPO, which stimulates the creation of oxygen-rich red blood cells, boosting performance by about 5 percent, or, according to the book, “roughly the difference between first place in the Tour de France and the middle of the pack.” With a bigger budget, the team moved from the cycling backwater of the United States to racing in Europe in 1996. Hamilton came after his team attracted the United States Postal Service as a sponsor. Where doping was concerned, the turning point for Mr. A year later he further enriched his dentist by continuing to ride, and grind his teeth, after breaking his collar bone during the first stage of the Tour de France. He finished second over all but needed 11 teeth recapped. Hamilton kept on riding, grinding his teeth as a distraction. In 2002 he crashed near the start of the three-week Giro d’Italia and fractured his shoulder. Hamilton was as famous for his ability to endure pain as for his race results.

The authors limit the tedious technical details as best as they can (doping is complex, legally, logistically and scientifically) and generally avoid a sensational tone in telling the often harrowing story. Coyle displayed in his first cycling book, “Lance Armstrong’s War,” from 2005, they have produced the broadest, most accessible look at cycling’s drug problem to date.

Hamilton’s co-author, Daniel Coyle, “The Secret Race” is much more than just one disgraced cyclist’s confessions and accusations. The journalists David Walsh and Pierre Ballester long ago published some of the allegations against Mr. Armstrong’s who has since confessed to cheating and lying himself. But impatient readers can turn to “The Secret Race” by Tyler Hamilton, an Olympic gold medalist and one-time key teammate of Mr. The United States Anti-Doping Agency has not set a publication date for that exposé. After Lance Armstrong decided last month not to contest doping charges and a move to strip away his seven Tour de France titles, he left the cycling world anxiously awaiting the release of a report documenting the illicit ways he boosted his performance.

The secret race by tyler hamilton