Rough Ride (27 page)

One month after the final chapter
of Rough Ride
was delivered to the publishers in 1990, professional cycling was rocked by a spate of sudden and mysterious deaths. Twenty-six-year-old Johannes Draaijer, a fourth-year professional with the PDM team, had just returned home to Nijamerdum after the opening races of the season when he died in his sleep on 27 February. The results of the autopsy sent tremors through the sport. Six months before another Dutch professional had also died in his sleep. Bert Oosterbosch, a former World Champion and Tour de France stage winner, had a heart attack. He was thirty-two.

It was a worrying time for those who earned their living in the
peloton,
especially when the trend continued with the death of the 1989 World Amateur Champion from Poland, Joachim Halupczok. Rumours began to circulate about a new wonder drug called Erythropoietin (EPO) which had just come on to the performance-enhancing market. A naturally produced hormone which stimulates the production of red blood cells (and increases aerobic capacity), there was no factual evidence linking its abuse to any of the deaths. It wasn't until October 1997, when the wall of silence finally cracked, that we were offered the first real clues. The picture that emerged was shocking. In the six years since the death of Johannes Draaijer, the sport had edged its way to the brink of the abyss.

Sandro Donati is secretary of the Italian National Olympic
Committee's scientific commission on doping. A former national athletics coach,
he established his reputation as an anti-drugs crusader in the 1980s when
he rowed against the tide by opposing the blood 'transfusion' methods propagated
by the celebrated Italian sports doctor, Francesco Conconi. In 1993 Donati
turned his attention to cycling. For two years he had been hearing stories
about the extensive abuse of testosterone, Human Growth Hormone (HGH) and
EPO in the peloton – abuse that wasn't being reflected in the number
of positive controls. Adamant that the sickness must be purged, he decided
to investigate. In order to breach the law of silence, he guaranteed complete
anonymity to those who agreed to co-operate. Catching the transgressors wasn't
Donati's objective: his goal was to highlight the extent of the abuse by exposing
the inefficiency of the controls. Twenty-one riders and seven doctors were
interviewed. Confessions were also secured from team managers and racers who
had recently retired. All the interviews were recorded and each tape was allotted
a secret code and seal.

When he had completed his investigation, Donati's dossier told a depressing tale. There was the confession of the top Italian 'Y' and his explanation of how he had narrowly cheated death after a stage of the Tour of Italy. Boosted before the stage by an injection of EPO, he had gone to bed that night and slept peacefully for two hours, unaware that the oxygen-enhanced blood, flowing through his veins, was rapidly thickening to treacle. EPO is transformed into a lethal cocktail, not during a race when the blood is pumped around the body by a 180 beats-per-minute, high-revving, super-fit, heart rate but at night when the revs drop way below the norm. As Y's pulse dropped to a low of twenty-five beats per minute, his blood began to clot and his heart began to stall. Had he not been sharing with a team-mate, there is every chance they would have found him dead in the morning. But Y was lucky. His team-mate heard him struggling for breath and immediately raised the alarm. When the team doctor arrived he immediately administered an injection of Warfarin to thin the blood. Y lived to tell the tale. Others were not so fortunate.

When Donati began to probe into the death of Joachim Halupczok (who raced for an Italian team), he was informed that a
soigneur
with whom he had been in contact, was a well-known trafficker of EPO. And then there was the case of the former World Champion 'X' – rushed, close to death, to the emergency ward of his local hospital, just a few weeks after he had beaten the best in the world. Shocked by the gravity of the situation – 80 per cent of Italian professionals were abusing EPO – Donati submitted his secret dossier to the Italian Olympic Committee in February 1994. 'The abuse has spiralled out of control,' he told them. 'In some of the races, they are now climbing hills at speeds they used to reach on the flat! And why? Because the majority are pumped to the gills with shit like EPO, HGH and testosterone. For the good of sport, it is imperative we act immediately to stamp this out.' But not everyone on the committee was as committed to immediate action as Donati. There was the fall-out to be considered . . . the financial implications . . . the frenzy it would trip in the press. Donati had presented them with a dossier that was too hot to handle. For the next year and a half they allowed it to cool.

The three seasons that followed were the most bizarre in the history of the sport. In pharmacies, sales of Aspirin (a blood-thinning agent) soared. In the classics, losers started winning and then quickly returned to the ranks of obscurity. In the tours, entire teams were being mysteriously wiped with curiously selective bacteria. Professional cycling became a dangerous game in the 1990s. Every race was like an episode of
The X-Files.
Every month brought a new and unexpected twist.

1 In April 1994, two months after the suppression of Donati's report, three riders from the Italian team Gewiss – Moreno Argentin, Giorgio Furlan and Evgeni Berzi – broke clear with eighty kilometres to race in the classic Flèche-Wallone and finished first, second and third. One of the journalists covering the race was Jean-Michel Rouet from
L'Equipe.
In fifteen years of reporting, he had never seen anything like it. 'I was intrigued by the result,' he explains. 'It just wasn't possible for a classic to be dominated in this way! The next day I went to the Gewiss team hotel to interview Emmanuele Bombini, the
directeur sportif.
Bombini had been called back to Italy on business and I was just about to leave when I noticed three Italian journalists talking to Michele Ferrari, the Gewiss team doctor. My Italian isn't great so I asked my driver to interpret and we had only sat down when the conversation turned to EPO. "I don't give it myself," Ferrari told us, "but if others are doing it, well . . . why not? It's no more dangerous than orange juice." I couldn't believe it! Two days later when Ferrari had been fired by the team and the story was all over the papers, Hem Verbruggan (President of the UCI) gave a press conference on the morning of the Amstel Gold Race. Insistent that there was minimal abuse in the sport, he began reading us statistics to back up his theory. It was total hypocrisy. We were writing about a product that couldn't be detected and he was quoting us statistics from dope control.'

2 Later that summer, on the morning of another major race, the peloton had just left the start when syringes were found in a mobile toilet beside the assembly area. After a quick survey by the organisers, the culprits – all from one of the smaller teams – were identified and selected for 'random' dope control when the race had finished. No action was taken. All tested negative.

3 In 1995 the French Federation conducted 1,235 dope tests. Twenty were positive, that is 1.61 per cent.

4 In April 1996, three weeks before the start of the Giro d'Italia, NAS – the anti-drugs unit of the Italian police – was alerted to unusually high sales of EPO in the region of Tuscany. Immediately making the connection, they began to formulate plans for a surprise raid on the race. Noting that the race was scheduled to start on 18 May with a prologue and two stages in Greece, they decided to make their move three days later on 21 May, when the race returned to Italian soil after a ferry crossing to the southern port of Brindisi. On the morning of 20 May, however, they made one fatal mistake. Unsure when exactly the first ferry was due to arrive, a call was made to the Italian Olympic Committee to check the schedule. Somehow the teams were tipped off and the next morning, when they assembled for the short crossing to Brindisi, twelve unmarked cars were seen to take the northern mainland route back home involving a diversion through Albania, Montenegro and Croatia. Each was driven by a different team official. Each carried a small refrigerator. EPO must be stored at a temperature of between two and eight degrees Celsius.

5 Later the same year, during one of the major Tours, three journalists happened to be staying the night in one of the team hotels. At three a.m., after a night spent on the town, they were about to hit the sack when they noticed a door had been left ajar. Drawn to investigate by the noise, they walked through and found one of the stars of the Italian peloton hanging from a door frame doing stretching exercises. The rider immediately dropped to the floor and slammed the door shut. When your blood is thicker than it should be, stretching is another means of avoiding a clot. Only circumstantial evidence, but not the kind of thing you want the press to witness.

6 At a training camp shortly before the Olympic Games in Atlanta, two prominent racers were randomly dope tested by their National Olympic Committee. Both tested positive and were immediately withdrawn from the team. No other sanction was imposed. The UCI was not informed. The IOC (International Olympic Committee) was not informed. The affair was kept 'in the family'.

7 Reflection of a French
directeur sportif
in 1996: 'There was a time when the only question a rider would ask before signing a contract was "How much?" Today, you can be sure he will ask three: "Who is the team doctor? Who is the team lawyer?" And then, "How much?"'

8 In late June 1996 Philippe Bouvet, the chief cycling correspondent at
L'Equipe
got a call from Roger Legeay, the team manager of the French team Gan, who wanted to explain the reason he hadn't included two of his better riders in his selection for the Tour de France. Philip Gaumont and Laurent Desbiens would not be riding, Legeay announced, because they were both serving six-month suspensions after testing positive (anabolic steroids) when they finished first and second at the Tour of Vendee in April. Bouvet, who hadn't received any official communication about the positive controls, was stunned. But there was more. Legeay also announced that he was firing Patrick Nedelec, the team doctor. Doctor Nedelec, who was also a member of the French Federation's Medical Commission and officiated regularly on the Tour de France, had prescribed the drugs to Gaumont and Desbiens the previous winter.

9 Jacky Durand, a former French national champion, was also netted for steroids in the summer of 1996. Handed a six-month suspension which should have kept him out of competition until 1997, he was racing again as early as September. Again, there was no official communication from the Federation that Durand's suspension had been cut. The first Philippe Bouvet heard of it was when he spotted his name on a start list.

10 The Spanish team, Once, were victims of a mysterious
bout of gastro-enteritis during the Tour of Spain in 1996. It
seemed most of the team was affected. One who was not was
the Swiss, Alex Zulle, who held the race lead. Infected creamed
rice was offered as the official explanation for the sickness –
Zulle was the only member of the team who hadn't eaten any.
Jean-Michel Rouet, who was covering the race for
L'Equipe,
thought the explanation bizarre: 'In many ways it was a re-run
of the PDM affair in 1991; other teams who had stayed in the
same hotel as Once and eaten the same meal weren't sick. The symptoms were also bizarre: with gastro-enteritis, you are running to the toilet day and night, but whatever they were doing at night, they never seemed to have the urge during the day and we wrote that it wasn't normal. We didn't say it was EPO or anything else, just that it wasn't normal and were immediately blacklisted by [Laurent] Jalabert [Once's top rider] and [Manolo] Saiz [Once's
directeur sportif]
for the rest of the race.'

On it continued to the end of 1996 like a runaway train. Fear had gripped the peloton. Suspicion was everywhere. Cynicism reigned. The more journalists questioned, the more officials covered up. Rouet and Bouvet had had enough. Rumours began to circulate that they had begun an investigation and uncovered information that would shake the sport to its roots. As winter approached, there was an overriding sense that something had to give. On 23 October, it did. In an open letter published in
L'Equipe,
Daniel Baal (President of the French Cycling Federation), Roger Legeay (President of the French Professionals League) and Jean-Marie Leblanc (Director-General of the Tour de France) announced their concern that the battle was being lost in the war against drugs. The letter, which was addressed to the French Minister for Sport, Guy Drut and the President of the UCI, Hein Verbruggan, urged the International Olympic Committee and various state bodies and international federations to 'invest in the scientific research' that would restore the credibility of dope controls. 'If it is confirmed that blood tests are a more effective means of detection, then we must change the legislation immediately. We must stop the development of forbidden practices which put athletes' health at risk and sport under suspicion.' The letter also stressed the need to 'continue the research into the use of corticoids and testosterone, despite the legal problems that have been encountered in this domain and to reinforce the fight against the continued use of anabolic steroids outside the period of competition'.

For the three most powerful men in French cycling to go public on a subject that has always been taboo erased any remaining doubts about the gravity of the situation. The letter was, as Philippe Bouvet observed in the same edition of
L'Equipe,
a '
cri d'alarme'.
'For sure we didn't need to wait until the autumn of 1996 to discover that the problem of doping exists. Or that the problem exists in other sports than cycling. But it exists a lot in cycling. Proof? No, apart from the one or two who occasionally get caught (and you really do wonder sometimes how that even happens), there is no proof. But let's not kid ourselves that we don't have a problem.'