WHEN I VISITED PAPP last summer, he wasn't too psyched to show me his current living situation. "Humiliating," he said, giving his mom's prosaic brick house a dull glance before leading me to the garage. "You do what you have to do." The garage was full of closed boxes. Papp, compact and slim with gelled hair, manicured nails, and pressed clothes, still looked sharp and fit, like a preening roadie.

"Here are my trophies," he said, pushing aside a cardboard flap and showing me a third-place cup from some forgotten Latin American race. "This stuff is significant as far as experiences," he added, "but as far as athletic accomplishments? They aren't meaningful anymore." After Papp confessed, he was stripped of all his titles dating back to 2001.

We left, driving to dinner at an expensive Pittsburgh restaurant in Papp's recently purchased jet-black 2004 Audi sedan. Despite the humble job he was holding down as a software salesman, he still liked to roll large, especially when someone else (like me) picked up the tab. "I should've been heir to the Rockefeller fortune," he said on our second night out. "I would've made a great Gatsby."

I could almost identify with Papp's sense of loss. What cycling freak hasn't envisioned himself living the high life of a top European racer? Unlike most of us, though, Papp had the talent to put himself dangerously close to his dream. Growing up in the town of Bethel Park, Papp displayed loads of potential: He won four junior state road-racing titles and built his reputation as a sprinter, specializing in shorter or flatter races. He did it without much family support. His mother was a widow and hoped Joe and his younger brother, David, would stick to simple pursuits like the Boy Scouts.

"Joey was so precocious, and I wondered how he got into cycling at all," she says. "It was so outside of what we did."

Like another Pennsylvania prodigy—Floyd Landis—Papp started climbing through the ranks. Landis, originally a mountain-bike racer, ultimately caught the attention of the elite European-based road squads. Papp toiled for also-ran teams sponsored by a local hospital chain and Franco Harris, the former Pittsburgh Steelers running back. In 1995 he was invited to a one-race tryout alongside Tyler Hamilton on a rebuilt team that would become the Lance Armstrong–led U.S. Postal Service squad. Papp didn't make the cut.

Yet he did well enough—a third-place finish at one Pennsylvania road race, a win at the state criterium (short-course) championships—to maintain a belief that he could accomplish more. His handlers didn't see that happening.

"Joe wanted to be a Tour de France–type rider, but no matter what he did, he wasn't going to be that," says Mike Fraysse, a former Olympic cycling coach who worked on and off with Papp for a decade. "If he would've stuck to what he was doing, he could've been one of the top racers in the U.S."

Papp had delayed college to ride, but he went back, graduating summa cum laude from the University of Pittsburgh in 2000. Soon after, he returned to racing full-time and subsequently got smoked at events in Ireland and Massachusetts. The whippings were brutal. "I thought, This is what it is now?" Papp told me. "I love my sport so much, and yet I'm reduced to crying? Fuck that." Later, a teammate told Papp that bike racing was changing dramatically. Even minor-league riders in the U.S. were following the European lead by taking performance-enhancing drugs. Did he want the number of a rather helpful doctor?

Papp didn't agonize very long. He drove far from Pittsburgh to see the doctor, a woman who concluded, with a wink, that his relatively low red-blood-cell count could use a boost. She had just the thing: recombinant erythropoietin (EPO), a drug designed to fight anemia by bumping up one's red count. Put EPO in a healthy pro cyclist's veins and it works like an afterburner, increasing the amount of oxygen that can be delivered to working muscles.

Papp wanted to mix it up with the world's most talented riders, so he got the drugs, locked himself in his bedroom, and jabbed the needle. About a month later, the benefits kicked in. Racing in a local criterium, Papp dusted a strong field. "I remember thinking, Ha-ha," Papp told me.

Did he remember anything else from his doping debut? Like a sense of guilt or sadness? "That was all conveniently put in a box," he said. "Then the box was thrown up on a shelf."