Bad Blood (18 page)

And me
…

Does this make me one of them? Here, on a wet night in a nondescript town in rural France, have I finally – definitively – shifted off the fence, and crossed the bridge to the other side, taking my place alongside the nerdy naysayers, when I could be hanging with Cool Hand Lance, as he high-fives his way to another lucrative sponsorship deal?

I tell myself that I love cycling –
I still love cycling
– but, most of all, I suddenly understand, in the dim light of Laval’s Foyer Culturel as Laurent Roux bows his head and confesses his sins and an unexpected wave of sadness washes over me, I hate doping and I hate the misery that goes with it.

Laurent Roux may have been ready to bare his soul, but there are not many present to witness his catharsis. The auditorium in Laval is only half full.

The people listening intently to Roux and Bassons, Voet and Roussel, are those who’ve braved the pouring rain and who care,
really
care, about being tricked and conned by dopers. When they open the debate to the floor, there are some poignant moments. An old man’s voice trembles and he is close to tears when he stands up to question the panel, berating the journalists present for not being more combative and campaigning.

Bassons, a more hardened character now than the boyish and vulnerable rider who was bullied out of the 1999 Tour, offers the old man some hope. He is feisty and eloquent, emerging as a worthy spokesperson for a generation who did not want to
dope
, but who understood the inevitability of it. He is pragmatic about what cycling has put him through.

‘I didn’t care that there were riders more successful than me, but it was annoying that they didn’t want to look at the real reasons why they were faster than me,’ he says. ‘I never wanted to be a big star or anything, because I enjoyed racing so much that the competition was enough. So I rode according to my own limits, to try and improve my performance. I raced against myself.’

Bassons agrees that the UCI’s fifty per cent health-check test only exacerbated a dire situation and allowed doping to continue. It didn’t prove the use of EPO, it was unfair to athletes with naturally high haematocrit, it labelled riders as dopers without providing concrete evidence of any wrongdoing, it didn’t attack the trafficking or supply of illegal EPO – it was a red herring, a PR move, a Band-Aid when in fact major surgery was needed.

Bassons is energised enough to give those who want to listen a glimmer of hope, but as the small gathering files out onto the wet street, I wonder where are the rest of them? Have people given up? Have they admitted defeat? Have they become so accustomed to doping scandals that, when rider after rider makes a mockery of the Tour de France they can just, with a Gallic shrug, say
tant pis
?

A MATTER OF LIFE AND DEATH

IN THE VENDÉE
region of western France, the 2005 Tour is about to begin. We wait in a humid aircraft hangar of a press room for the arrival of Lance Armstrong. Nearby sits Paul Kimmage, a ghost from the Tour’s past, a former professional contemporary to Greg LeMond and Bernard Hinault. He seems uneasy. Restlessly and reluctantly, he is attending the start of the Tour on behalf of the
Sunday Times
.

Armstrong’s control of the media was now so complete that few voices of dissent were heard. There was not to be a repeat of the Armstrong-Walsh showdown in Pau in 2001. By this stage of his career, Jogi Muller and his assistant, Mark Higgins, ensured that the microphone only ever reached friendly hands.

On the rare occasions that a ‘difficult’ question was asked – and by that I mean an inquisitor intrigued by Armstrong’s ethics somehow managing to snatch the microphone – Muller and Higgins would spring into action. Muller would glare accusingly at the Tour’s own press officials and Higgins would point his digital camera at the troll concerned, capturing his act of defiance.

Lance, realising that he was being questioned by one of the non-believers, would slowly fix his gaze on his inquisitor, with The Look, his ‘Me? You question me? How
very
dare you!’ glare on his face. Muller, Higgins and Johan Bruyneel, manager of Armstrong’s new team, the Discovery Channel, would follow suit. Armstrong would pause, growl a one-line response and move on.

Eventually, there is a flurry of activity and Lance arrives. He
confidently
fields the opening questions. Then, unexpectedly, Kimmage puts his hand up. Discovery’s media minders seem unsure as to who he is, until he opens his mouth, starts asking a question and suddenly everybody remembers what Paul Kimmage is best known for.

‘Lance,’ he says, ‘has your preparation for the Tour de France changed in any way following the conviction of your performance consultant, Michele Ferrari, for sporting fraud?’

Lance’s eyes narrow in recognition.
Ah, a troll
. Realising that he is being questioned by one of Walsh’s acolytes – worse still, a smuggled-in, treacherous troll who used to be a pro – he turns his gaze on his inquisitor.

So, it’s you, Kimmage …

Higgins presses the shutter on his digital camera and the muffled click fills the silence. Soon this troll will be filed along with the others. Bruyneel joins Lance in the glaring contest. The pro-Lance lobby turn, crane their necks and glare too. The long and meaningful pause ends.

‘Absolutely … not,’ growls Lance.

Another transatlantic voice piped up with another bland question on chateaux and wine and Kimmage’s temerity was quickly forgotten. Later that day, as I rummaged in the boot of my car, I clocked Kimmage, boredom etched across his features, strolling aimlessly among the press cars and team buses.

‘Hello, Paul,’ I said. At that time, I believe I was still seen by him as complicit – soft on doping, soft on the causes of doping. But he was cordial enough. ‘Enjoying yourself?’ I asked.

‘I can’t wait to get out of here,’ he said.

‘Happy with that answer?’ I asked, referring to Lance’s response to his question.

‘What d’you expect?’ he shrugged.

‘They took your picture,’ I said.

‘Do they do that all the time?’ he asked.

‘Only for the troublemakers … you should be honoured.’

I told him he should talk to Philippe Gilbert, the Belgian rider
who
spoke openly about doping, suggesting he would make an interesting interviewee. Then, inevitably, we started to talk about David Millar.

Prior to the collapse of his career in the aftermath of the Cofidis scandal, Millar had refused Kimmage an interview, citing his whistle-blowing history as justification. Kimmage was still seething. I could see why. In response to Millar’s rebuttal, Kimmage had sent him a copy of his pioneering book,
Rough Ride
, the first of cycling’s confessionals.

‘For Millar to have the nerve to say to me, “With your reputation …”
What the fuck is that
?’

‘He’s still a big kid,’ I responded. ‘I don’t think he can cope with all this, he’s out of his depth. He’s too vulnerable to deal with all the shit in the sport.’

‘You feel sorry for him, do you?’ Kimmage said sharply.

‘Erm, a little,’ I said hesitantly. ‘It’s not like he planned it all. He’s not a megalomaniac or control freak. David’s chaotic. You said that you were a victim. Isn’t David too?’

Kimmage’s eyes narrowed. ‘Yeah – and a very successful one at that,’ he said.

After that, Paul Kimmage and I had unfinished business. I wanted to talk to him more, about his experiences during his transition from rider to journalist, and about his anger with Millar.

We met again at the end of 2006, in a café in St Christopher’s Place, tucked away behind Oxford Street. Shoppers laden with bags sat hunched over lattes and hot chocolates as the uphill march towards Christmas continued. Kimmage was leaving it all behind, flying to Australia to report on the Ashes series. His Christmas lunch would be seafood and white wine, eaten under blue skies in sandals and shorts, far from the fog and frozen ground, the cancelled flights and motorway misery.

Kimmage has made a remarkable journey, from anonymity in the peloton to a feature writer on the
Sunday Times
. His journalistic career was built on the success of
Rough Ride
. The
book
details a naif’s battle to retain his integrity – much to the scorn of all around him – and is one of the best sports books ever written. But in writing it, he had broken the
omerta
and
Rough Ride
ensured that, in cycling at least, Kimmage’s name became a dirty word.

We order coffee. He tells me he’s only agreed to meet me because of the tip I gave him about Philippe Gilbert. I explain what this book is about. He listens and then quickly takes me aback by saying that, ultimately, our journey has been the same. ‘You invested your trust in the sport and it was betrayed. Like me.’

When, in 2006, Kimmage went back to the Tour, he covered the whole event. ‘In a perverse sort of way I enjoyed it,’ he says. ‘But I’m pretty sure I won’t go again, because I find it very hard to deal with people when I go back.’

Paul ran into some old acquaintances on the 2006 Tour. They were awkward encounters. It wasn’t easy coming face to face with those who, in team cars and behind microphones, were propping up a system that he now despises and wants to tear down.

‘Most of the guys I raced with I’m now on pretty good terms with, but when I see the status attributed to other people who are held up as icons, some of them complete and utter fucking liars, it really drives me crazy. I find that very difficult.’

He took his bike and rode in the Etape du Tour, the weekend warrior’s race within the race, run over the route of one of the Tour’s key stages, a few days before the pros tackle it for real.

‘I love cycling, really love it,’ he says. ‘Absolutely. And I do love the Tour, it’s a great event … but it’s just a complete tragedy that it’s been destroyed in that way.’

In a way, Kimmage’s return to the Tour, documented in the
Sunday Times –
they could have called it ‘
Rough Ride II: No one likes him and he don’t care
’ – had a perfect ending. The climax of his three weeks on the 2006 Tour saw Floyd Landis’ ‘wonder’ victory in Morzine, a win that has became infamous for the positive testosterone test that followed soon afterwards.

Even before Landis crossed the finish line alone after his marathon attack, Kimmage was shaking his head. ‘I couldn’t believe it. People I knew were jumping around like kids in sweet shops, but I thought it was complete bollocks. I don’t know anybody who can recover from being as bad as that, to then killing everybody the next day, without recourse to doping.’

A week or so later, following the confirmation of his positive test, it was Landis whose name was mud. Kimmage says he got a kick out of that.

As a shy and puritanical young professional in Europe, Paul Kimmage felt the pressure for a long time before he succumbed to doping. Curiously, though, he does not regard himself as a doper.

‘I doped three times, in three criterium races, races that were fixed. Tell me, what was the benefit of doing that? So I don’t regard myself as ever having doped, although quite clearly I used amphetamines three times. In some ways it was a good thing to have done, because anybody who told me afterwards that the drugs didn’t work, I’d just laugh at, because they transformed me.’

But Kimmage remained a naif, at least compared to his peers. ‘Thierry Claveyrolat used to laugh about it, the notion that I was a doper,’ Kimmage recalls of his late former teammate, winner of the ‘King of the Mountains’ classification in the Tour. Claveyrolat turned on Kimmage when
Rough Ride
was published, soon after the Irishman quit racing. But while Kimmage left the dopers behind and built a career in sports journalism, Claveyrolat was one of those whose life seemed blighted after he retired from racing: there was a car crash, a failing bar business in a claustrophobic Alpine valley and finally a tragic and lonely end. Late one night, after he’d rolled down the shutters and closed up, Claveyrolat blew his brains out in the basement of the bar.

‘Cycling’s brought you a lot of sadness, hasn’t it?’ I say to Kimmage.

‘No,’ says Paul, ‘not at all.’

‘Are you bitter?’ I ask.

‘That,’ he replies, ‘is the perception. For eight years there were degrees of it, yes, until the Festina Affair. Maybe it’s an air I give off sometimes, but then after Festina, I had people coming up to me saying, “You were right.”

‘But why would I be bitter? When I finished cycling in 1990 I walked into a great job on an Irish newspaper that gave me three times the salary I’d earned as a professional bike rider. I had no incentive to write that book, because it was only going to be trouble. It would have been the easiest thing in the world to go back to the Tour each year, say hello to my great pals, and be one of the boys.’

Kimmage says that he felt betrayed when he was racing. ‘I thought, either shoot your mouth off now or you can set out to try and sort it out for the next generation. People forget about the number of kids who have died, kids who I rode with who died a year later. If one of their parents had come up to me and said, “You knew about that …
You knew – and you said nothing
,” what’s my defence? I haven’t got a defence.’

Like Walsh, he has a bone to pick with one particular rider. In Kimmage’s case, it’s David Millar. Kimmage never liked Millar much in the first place and he certainly does not buy into the notion that a self-confessed doper can be reborn clean.

‘One strike and you’re out,’ he says. ‘I find it hard to accept that he is now being heralded as a whistle-blower. He didn’t blow any whistles, didn’t do any favours to cycling. I don’t think he even scratched the surface. With the best will in the world, much as I would like to invest some faith in David Millar, I’ve no reason to. He has just treated me with total disrespect.’

Kimmage is not optimistic for the Tour’s future. ‘It’s just self-perpetuating,’ he says, reiterating that the only mistake I’ve made is of giving people a second chance. He tells me I’m guilty of
believing
that people can change for the better. ‘They only get one chance,’ he says.