Authors: Jeremy Whittle
Bad Blood (8 page)
CSC has some expertise at this. In the past, the team has split races apart by sending the entire team to the front of the field in bad weather, usually driving rain or crosswinds. Riis wanted them race-hardened even before the season begins.
‘They have to ride a bit harder, work in the wind a bit harder,’ Riis said. ‘Technically, it’s more demanding and they have to work together more.’
Not all Italians love cycling. The occasional driver overtook, horn blaring, fist raised as the CSC convoy of team cars and hangers-on moved across the Tuscan landscape. The riders ignored it. They pedalled smoothly ahead of us in three uniform groups.
The wind picked up, tugging at their shoulders as they hunched over the handlebars. Dusted with snow, the Apennines
loomed
large. This, however, was a flat day’s training, with the emphasis on speed and fluency. There was to be no cruel assessment on the steep slopes of Monte Serra.
Back in the mobile manager’s suite, assistant
directeur
Tristan Hoffman began telling a tale about one of my colleagues.
‘This journalist sent me a text in the middle of the night. It said: “Don’t let’s fight. I loved the sandwich. Can’t wait to see you again.” So it wakes up my wife and she says, “Who’s this from? What sandwich?!” She’s seven months pregnant and I’ve just got home from a trip! So I told her, “Call the guy,” but she doesn’t believe me and thinks I’ve got my excuse ready in advance …’
Everybody guffawed at Hoffman’s misfortune. I laughed uneasily and tried to defuse the situation. ‘Well – he’s always getting phone numbers mixed up. He’s done a similar thing to me …’
Riis’ face suddenly turned to thunder. ‘He did it to you too?
What an asshole!
Can’t he use a phone?’
An hour later, the normally impassive Riis finally came to life. He stood grinning like a schoolboy over a new train set, watching proudly as one by one his riders sped down the windswept road from a standing start, in a mock time trial. One by one they came back to the impromptu start and finish line, mouths open in exhaustion, as a delighted Riis slapped them on the back in encouragement. Chilled to the bone, we climbed back into the Espace and headed for the hotel.
It was nearly lunchtime.
Hoffman had sandwiches on his mind again. He reached into the coolbox on the back seat and pulled out a roll, wrapped tightly in foil. ‘Looks like
prosciutto crudo
,’ he guessed.
‘No,’ snapped the monotone voice in the front passenger seat. ‘It’s
prosciutto cotto
,’ said Bjarne Riis, correcting him.
Bjarne Riis’ career spanned an era of huge cultural changes in cycling, a period in which doping transformed itself from a
cottage
industry into the currency of success. As a rider, he was first a
domestique
to the last Frenchman capable of winning the Tour, Laurent Fignon. Then he established himself as the guiding light of the Telekom team, and plotted the downfall of Miguel Indurain.
Later, he became a mentor to Ferrari and Cecchini protégés, Evgeni Berzin, Jan Ullrich, Tyler Hamilton and Ivan Basso. As a
directeur sportif
, he was a bitter rival to US Postal’s powerbrokers, Armstrong and Bruyneel, during their seven-year dominance of the Tour.
Throughout that period of almost twenty years, Riis has adapted to the needs of his sport. He is a chameleon, able to maintain his footing on shifting sands. He is the professional scene’s Everyman, one minute doping himself on an everyday basis, the next manning the ramparts in the battle for clean sport. He has been buffeted by scandal but seems capable of constantly reinventing his place in the sport’s hierarchy.
He was a self-appointed peacemaker in the Festina Affair and, nine years later, found himself in the eye of the storm once more, as the fallout from Operacíon Puerto, the 2006 doping investigation in Madrid, settled on his star rider, CSC team leader Ivan Basso.
Following that scandal, Riis instituted radical anti-doping checks within the CSC team and now exhibits an acute understanding of the financial relationship between his sponsor’s brand and his team’s image. But many find it almost comical that Bjarne Riis is pleading for transparency, accountability and a clean sport.
The man who once responded to a direct question about his own attitude to doping with a smirk and the response ‘I have never tested positive’ wants us to forget his past. ‘Cycling needs me,’ he says.
OK, Bjarne, and maybe it was all a long time ago, but these things are not easy to forget.
And so it was that finally, eleven years after his unexpected win in the 1996 Tour de France, Bjarne Riis – as haunted as
anyone
in cycling by the ghosts of that decade – sat down and confessed.
‘I have taken EPO,’ he said in a press conference in Copenhagen. ‘It was a part of everyday life as a rider.’
There is a clip on YouTube of Bjarne Riis addressing the media in Copenhagen, head bowed, confessing his sins and seeking absolution. Was he a worthy Tour de France winner, somebody asked him. ‘No,’ he said, ‘I am not.’
And once the dam had broken, the truth about Bjarne’s EPO habit came pouring out. ‘I have taken doping,’ Riis said. ‘I purchased it myself and I took it myself. I did things that I shouldn’t have and I have regretted that ever since. Those were mistakes that I take the full responsibility for and I don’t have anyone to blame but myself. I am a lot wiser now, both in my personal and in my professional life.’
But Riis, who admitted doping himself throughout the most successful years of his career, seemed to be in no hurry to return his 1996 yellow jersey. ‘I’m proud of my results even though they were not completely honest. I’m coming out today to secure the right future for the sport. My jersey is at home in a cardboard box,’ he said. ‘They are welcome to come and get it. I have my memories for myself.’
Riis’ confession, delivered with humility and gravitas, was received with scepticism and scorn. If the original clip makes dramatic viewing on YouTube, far better value is Team Easy On’s subtitled bastardisation of his confession, easily the best of a crop of bitching and vitriolic attacks. Ashen-faced in contrition he may have been, but for people who’d spent more than a decade listening to his lies, now was the time to put the boot in.
Team Easy On’s voiceover, straight out of a Dutch brown bar, takes Riis’ doping excesses to a surreal conclusion, listing skunk, opium and heroin among his preferences. ‘It’s funny that you ask about my physical condition,’ runs the voiceover, as Riis stares sombrely into the camera, ‘… because my heart
eksploded
,
and
because of that I had to go to Africa because I have many connections in Congo … So I went down to a guy called Pepsi Franck and bought myself a whole new heart …’
So much for the myths and legends of the Tour de France: Riis, once feted as a national hero in Denmark, was now an Internet freak, to be ridiculed over and over again. But not everybody in his home nation found it so easy to see the funny side.
Lars Werge, one of Riis’ chief tormentors through a decade of suspicion, was vindicated by Riis’ admission of guilt. But it left a bitter taste in the Danish sports writer’s mouth. ‘I was angry that he had been lying for so many years. And it made me angry that he thought, that by telling the truth, it would all somehow be OK. It was like a marketing stunt.’
Werge was not alone in thinking that Riis’ motivations were not solely founded on a desire for truth and reconciliation, but also from a need to salvage crumbling relationships with his disenchanted sponsors.
‘Some people felt sorry for him and over the next few days a lot of people were interviewed about him,’ Werge recalls. ‘I said that maybe it would be better if he left cycling. But I was criticised for saying that because people knew that he was in a sport in which it was difficult to tell the truth.’
There was guilt, shame and a little self-pity to be found in Bjarne Riis’ statement that day. The vulnerable boy from a broken home, desperate for his father’s approval through his achievements as an athlete, was suddenly visible.
‘We all make mistakes. I think my biggest mistake was to let my ambition get the better of me,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry if I’ve disappointed people. To those for whom I was a hero, I’m sorry. They’ll have to find new heroes now.’
Part Two
Positive Thinking
‘History repeats itself – the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.’
Karl Marx
In the wake of the crippling Festina Affair of the 1998 Tour de France, Lance Armstrong’s first victory in 1999 was acclaimed as a ‘Tour of Renewal’. A new generation of riders – including David Millar – was breaking through. With this influx of youth came a surge of hope that the sleazy habits of the past might finally die out. That optimism did not last long
.
The scale of the Festina investigation and the subsequent trial in Lille had revealed the abject failure of the sport to police itself. The UCI took much of the blame, although the governing body’s president, Hein Verbruggen, put up a staunch defence. But Verbruggen, guardian both of cycling’s ethical well-being and its commercial health, had an obvious conflict of interest
.
It became increasingly clear that the UCI’s doping controls had become inadequate; instead, the police did their work for them, with a series of raids at races and at the homes of individual riders that further revealed how endemic doping had become. This was precisely how Millar, at the time the reigning world champion and British cycling’s golden boy, was caught
.
Paradoxically, the period immediately after the Festina Affair was also the moment when things might have changed for the better
.
The Pandora’s box of secrets had been opened. A new era in a sport notorious for doping might have begun. Another generation of fans and riders might have been spared a great deal of anguish. Yet there was no discussion of what kind of sport professional cycling in the modern era should be. The opportunity to discuss the brutal demands of the racing calendar, the health needs of the riders and the composition of the banned list of doping products slipped away. Instead, doping practices were merely driven further underground
.
The moment had been lost: the lid slammed shut again
.
Armstrong carried on winning to become the most dominant champion in the history of the sport, creating a tidal wave of wealth in his wake. Without a moment’s thought for the consequences, the sport scrambled to make the most of the opportunity. Meanwhile, the UCI, torn between ethics and commerce, froze in the headlights once more as the untapped wealth of the stateside market hove into view. Armstrong and Bill Stapleton had known that, if all the right circumstances combined, Lance could bring unimagined wealth into cycling. Hence the Texan’s firm refusal to dirty the sport’s image by acknowledging the extent of cycling’s doping problem and Verbruggen’s insistence on shooting the messenger for the next six years
.
‘
I am sick of the myth of widespread doping,’ Armstrong had said as the 2000 Tour began. Yet by the end of 2006, no less than five of his key teammates – Frankie Andreu, Tyler Hamilton, Roberto Heras, Floyd Landis and one other anonymous former US Postal rider – and countless peers and rivals had either tested positive or admitted to doping. The runaway train was still careering down the tracks
.
As the authorities across Europe became more actively involved in breaking up doping rings, trust within the sport broke down. Room-mates and best friends gave each other up. A climate of fear and paranoia took hold. Police raids and scandals proliferated, fuelled by an unprecedented development in cycling: the culture of the whistle-blower. The law of silence, the
omerta,
appeared to be finally losing its grip
.
In France, the whistle-blower’s talisman was Christophe Bassons; in Spain, Jesus Manzano; in the USA, Matt DeCanio and, in Italy, Filippo Simeoni. None of them were afforded any protection by Verbruggen or the UCI and, in what was little more than a witch-hunt, they found themselves ostracised, written off and even threatened, as if their experiences were invalid, their careers expendable. Yet when star riders fell foul of traditional dope tests, they vehemently proclaimed their innocence. In contrast with those such as Millar, whose brutal police interrogation led to a swift admission of guilt, Tyler Hamilton and Floyd Landis called in their lawyers and attacked the credibility of the testing procedures. This only further polarised the sport and created a draining moral maze
of
acronyms, legalese and technicalities, in which even the most hard-bitten anti-doping campaigner soon became lost
.
Supported by lawyers, sponsors and fundraising websites, such as ibelieveintyler.org and floydfairnessfund.com, Hamilton and Landis went on the offensive. As Armstrong’s career closed with a seventh successive Tour win in 2005, and a tub-thumping speech exhorting us all to believe in the sport, the
omerta
clung on
.
Still the scandal continued. Riders blamed their federations, the media, French testing procedures, anti-Americanism, the UCI, the IOC, LNDD, WADA, USADA – in short, everybody but themselves …
FALLING DOWN
IN 1998, DAVID
Millar, a fresh-faced second-year professional cyclist from Scotland (via Malta, Hong Kong, London and Biarritz), said: ‘When I’m out training and someone shouts “doper”, I feel like I want to stop and swing for them. It upsets me to think that people assume every pro is on drugs.’
In 2006, David Millar, making his comeback following a two-year ban after he confessed to using EPO, said: ‘I fucked up, I cheated and I have to live with it.’ David Millar never failed a drugs test. So what happened?
November, 2003: David Millar, world champion, Tour de France stage winner, Olympic hopeful – and self-confessed dandy – is on the dance floor in a Manchester bar vigorously shaking his bony ass. I observe the scene, perched unsteadily on a wobbling bar stool.