Vaughters’s autobiography adds to a literature born of professional cycling’s glasnost period. With the doping of Lance Armstrong and other riders of the ’90s and ’00s now acknowledged, the excesses of the era may be laid out candidly. Like Tyler Hamilton, whose book “The Secret Race” was published in 2012, Vaughters was a teammate of Armstrong’s on the formidable United States Postal Service team. He details the reality of racing in an era in which drug use “wasn’t the difference between first and second place, it was the difference between first and last.”

These reflections are given perspective by Vaughters’s career after racing. Having managed a successful World Tour cycling team since retiring, he is better able than others to understand doping as a systemic issue. He explains the financial precariousness of life as a professional cyclist and the pressures put on teams by sponsors eager for results. He outlines an incentive structure that made cheating almost mandatory and recalls his frustration with a sport “trying to make scapegoats out of a few riders who had been caught doping.” However, Vaughters doesn’t extend this context to discussing his own drug use, which is painted as a profound personal transgression. Such simple self-flagellation jars against an otherwise nuanced depiction of how athletes can find themselves led into cheating. It’s hard, even for someone who has chafed against it, to downplay the narrative of personal guilt, though this might have been an even more powerful book had Vaughters done so.