Bad Blood (22 page)

When, his 2006 racing season torn in half by Operacíon Puerto, he finally confessed, not to doping, you understand, but instead to just thinking about it, he shrugged his shoulders, as if he was a Rimini nightclubber pondering the price of a tab. His half-hearted admission was greeted with derision, yet Ivan still didn’t get it. Even months later, as he continued to train and plan his comeback, he was baffled by the contempt that had greeted his sly admission of a moment of weakness.

Basso had begun 2006, training in Italy, as CSC’s star rider
and
Armstrong’s heir apparent. At the team’s January get-together, in the Hotel Caesar in Tuscany, he had been accorded star status. Bjarne Riis had made Basso into a contender. With his help, he had lost his hesitancy and come out of his shell. At the team’s midwinter ‘boot camps’, Ivan had learned to make fear his friend. He had forced himself to overcome his nerves, jumping off cliff tops into a dark and icy sea, while Bjarne looked on, grinning.

The alliance with Riis had fast-tracked Basso’s progress. He was brimming with confidence and ambition. His test results on Monte Serra’s steep climb at the start of 2006 were said to be fifty seconds better than a year earlier. By any standards, he had made phenomenal progress.

Riis wanted Basso to fill the vacuum at the top of the sport; there would be no more living in the shadow of Lance. Even when locked in rivalry with Armstrong during the Tour, Basso had remained in the American’s thrall, calling him during the race to offer his ‘help’. Riis had not approved of the friendship, established when Lance tried to help the Italian find the best possible care for his mother Nives, at that time seriously ill with cancer. It irritated Riis, who had spent so long in the shadow of the Armstrong-Bruyneel partnership.

Halfway through the 2005 Tour I asked Riis if Basso – like Ullrich – was suffering from an ‘Armstrong complex’.

‘Isn’t everybody?’ he replied enigmatically, with that icy, distant smile.

With Armstrong retired, Ivan had hoped to ease himself into the king’s vacant chair. He adopted the Texan’s intimidatory style, gently admonishing young journalists who asked silly questions about doping. Ivan, like Armstrong, didn’t like insinuations about doping, nor did he like doping whistle-blowers. In particular, he didn’t like compatriot Filippo Simeoni, who he dismissesd as a ‘
testa di cazzo
’ – a dickhead.

He also found himself struggling with his loyalties. Bruyneel and Armstrong had courted Basso, lining him up as the successor
to
the US Postal-Discovery Channel dynasty. But the Italian opted to stay with Riis and CSC. Now, he would become a ‘capo’, a don. He planned to win the Giro d’Italia and the Tour in the same season, just like Marco Pantani had done in 1998.

Success would ensure legendary status – perhaps he might even replace the late lamented Pantani in the
tifosi
’s affections. Victory in the Tour de France would make the transition complete. Armstrong and Bruyneel, meanwhile, would be left to kick a few cats, as the rider who slipped through their fingers became the hottest property in the sport.

As darkness fell outside the hotel, and a wintry sun dropped into the Tuscan horizon, I waited in the bar to talk to the rider touted as cycling’s next dominant champion. Team press officer Brian Nygaard led me down the hotel corridors to Ivan’s room. We stood in the doorway as the Italian held court from his massage table.

Carlos Sastre, his teammate, was also there, outlining a problem he had with his racing shoes. As the unassuming Sastre looked on, Basso gave instructions to CSC staff. Finally, after a wave of his hand, the room cleared and Basso beckoned me to his side.

‘
Ciao Ivan, come stai
?’ I said, exhausting my Italian in a single sentence. We had met before, when he was a virtual unknown. Like now, that was also a rushed encounter. Nonetheless he outlined his grand plan. The Giro was his priority, he said; riding the Giro and Tour would not be too hard, he could win both; he hadn’t spoken to Lance much because Lance, you see, was always so busy and yes, he and Bjarne had a
very
close working relationship.

‘I have a stronger personality now,’ Basso said. ‘Bjarne likes to hear what I think and doesn’t just tell me to do this or that. He’s open-minded.’

Three months later, Basso won the Giro d’Italia with ease and arrogance. It brought him the affection of the
tifosi
. They loved him, although not in the same unconditional way that
they
had loved Pantani. But like Pantani in 1998, the extent and ease of Basso’s dominance, the new-found swagger that he seemed to relish, was resented by some of his rivals.

Then, just days before the race ended, it all began.

As Ivan Basso neared victory in Milan, the rumours about his Spanish connections gathered pace. There was a flurry of doping allegations emerging in Madrid, centred on Manolo Saiz,
directeur
of the Liberty Seguros team, but which also seemed to connect Basso to sports doctor Eufemiano Fuentes. There were arrests, blood bags, CCTV footage, lists and codenames. Operacíon Puerto was about to devastate European cycling.

Basso denied any involvement, as did Jan Ullrich, also riding the Giro and also, according to the Spanish media, implicated in the affair. This, it turned out, was the calm before the storm. The Madrid raids, just as the 2006 Giro d’Italia reached its climax, kicked away a cornerstone of the cycling establishment and sparked a frenzy of allegations. Saiz was a key figure both in Spain and within cycling as a whole, influential in the modernisation of the sport. He had managed a long line of major stars. He had also walked out on the 1998 Tour, in protest at the police raids during the Festina Affair.

Saiz’s arrest was the watershed moment in an investigation that had begun earlier in 2006, with the installation of hidden cameras at two locations in central Madrid. First, the Guardia Civil installed surveillance equipment in a laboratory used by haematologist, Jose Luis Merino Batres. Then, officers from the Spanish UCO investigative unit moved to a nearby address, at Calle Alonso Cano, where an apartment rented by Eufemiano Fuentes became the focal point of the police operation. When in late May they raided both addresses, they found over two hundred bags of blood, steroids, growth hormone and, of course, the ubiquitous EPO.

The police arrested Saiz after he met both Fuentes and Batres in a Madrid café. He had with him a suitcase containing a large
amount
of cash. Fuentes in turn arrived with a cold bag. There was a discreet exchange between them, which the police videotaped. When Saiz was stopped after leaving the meeting, a search of the bag revealed coded bags of blood and other products, all of which, so the police claimed, were the paraphernalia of doping.

By the time the Tour set up camp in Strasbourg, the connections between Fuentes and certain riders appeared irrefutable. In an unprecedented display of unity, it was the ProTour teams themselves, forced into action by their own ethical code which stated that riders implicated in police investigations should be suspended, that agreed to eject those involved. Faced with damning allegations against Ullrich and Basso, neither T-Mobile nor CSC had much choice.

In total, nine riders were sent home from the Tour, even before it began. Johan Bruyneel,
directeur
of the Discovery Channel team, which was at that time unaffected by the Puerto investigation, was among the most voluble supporters of a hard-line stance.

For Basso and Ullrich, Strasbourg was a catastrophe. In the aftermath of their expulsion, both of them were implored to take DNA tests, but they refused. Basso’s sly smile remained fixed on his face when he appeared at the back of the Holiday Inn and fought his way through the media before climbing into a car and speeding away. Ullrich stood glassy-eyed in front of the camera crews, and gave a half-hearted defence of his reputation, reiterating that he was innocent. Then he too was gone, installing American Floyd Landis of the Phonak team, formerly teammate to Lance Armstrong, as the new race favourite.

After Basso left, Riis, with CSC press officer Brian Nygaard by his side, appeared before the media, in an attempt to defend his team leader and, by proxy, himself. They were jostled and hemmed in by camera crews, photographers and journalists as they made their way into the Strasbourg media centre.

Riis, perhaps through his naivety, or perhaps through arrogance, seemed unperturbed by the mayhem around him. Then I realised
why
. ‘You must be getting used to this, Bjarne …’ I thought, remembering the chaos of the Festina Affair.

Riis confirmed that the decision to take Basso out of CSC’s Tour team had been his, but he was vague about Basso’s dealings with Fuentes. Suddenly, it seemed that Bjarne and Basso were not so close after all. ‘It’s impossible to watch somebody twenty-four hours a day,’ he shrugged as he struggled to distance himself from his team leader in a rambling and self-justifying monologue, in which he said a lot, but clarified little.

Back in Spain, Operacíon Puerto threatened to be an earthquake. In the 500-page police report, a list of 200-odd leading athletes were connected to Fuentes and his activities. Other professional sports – tennis, football, athletics – were rumoured to be involved. The UCI’s recently elected president, Pat McQuaid, seemed deeply confused even as he fuelled that notion, saying that ‘footballers, tennis players and athletes were on the list’. His comments were recorded on tape, yet he almost immediately retracted them, only to reassert them at the World Championships in Salzburg three months later.

Rafael Nadal, playing at Wimbledon, pre-empted any negative publicity by denying rumours of an allegation connecting him to Fuentes. At the World Cup, FIFA laughed off the suggestion that some of those still playing in the competition might have been among Fuentes’ clients. Doping was apparently only cycling’s problem.

It seemed certain that the net would tighten and that heads would roll. But soon after the 2006 Tour ended, the problems with furthering the investigation began. The codes labelling each bag of blood and in Fuentes’ records had to be matched to individual riders. Who, for example, was ‘Birillo’? Who was ‘amigo di Birillo’? The Spanish media, supported by the claims of those in Italy and elsewhere who knew Basso well, alleged that ‘Birillo’ was in fact the name of his dog.

The Tour continued, but CSC press conferences took a surreal turn. Questioned repeatedly, Riis and his riders insisted time
after
time that they did not know the name of Basso’s dog. The bags labelled simply ‘Jan’ proved less of a puzzle – at least as far as T-Mobile’s management were concerned.

With characteristic clumsiness, Ullrich, so it seemed, had dug his own hole. T-Mobile claimed he and his coach, Rudy Pevenage, had not told them the truth about their alleged contacts with Fuentes. Presented by the UCI with evidence suggesting that both Pevenage and Ullrich knew Fuentes well and had been in regular contact with the Spaniard, T-Mobile took a hard line and pulled their leader out of the Tour.

‘Take a DNA test,’ T-Mobile’s director of communications Christian Frommert repeatedly told Ullrich. Riis asked Basso to do the same. Both riders refused. Basso remained in Italy crying foul, but ‘Ullé’s’ relationship with T-Mobile was beyond repair. Midway through the 2006 Tour, they sacked him. Six months later, still protesting his innocence, he quit the sport.

Basso spent July 2006 in Italy, smouldering, watching the Tour on his plasma screen, his lawyers talking for him. He would be exonerated, they said. He was innocent of any wrongdoing. Throughout the autumn of 2006, their legal mantras ran alongside those of Tyler Hamilton and, following his positive test, Tour winner, Floyd Landis. They will be exonerated. They are innocent. They will ride the Tour again. To date, none of them has.

As winter settled on the Mediterranean, the Spanish investigation was faltering, weighed down by legal procedures, a reluctance on the part of the Spanish judicial system to accelerate the process, and by the clear indication that the Guardia Civil swooped on Saiz and Fuentes too soon. Rumours circulated that no charges would be pressed.

Still, neither Ullrich nor Basso submitted to DNA testing. Their lawyers remained bullish, denouncing the allegations even as the UCI requested more substantial evidence from Madrid so that they could instigate their own investigation. It was not forthcoming.

Despite the pleas of the UCI to await further developments, Ivan Basso was initially cleared of any wrongdoing by CONI, the
Italian
Olympic Committee. Perhaps he could go back to CSC and pick up where he left off. But his relationship with Riis, strained by the events of Strasbourg, had become irretrievable. The spell had been broken. He and CSC parted company. So much for the special relationship between the Italian and his Guru.

But Basso had been busy behind the scenes, cultivating another special relationship.

On 8 November, 2006, four months after Johan Bruyneel had lobbied for his expulsion from the Tour de France, Ivan Basso signed a two-year contract with the Discovery Channel team, formerly sponsored by US Postal and part-owned by Lance Armstrong. Both Basso and Bruyneel indicated that, hypothetically, at some time in the future, should he be asked and if it was under the right circumstances, that maybe – just maybe – Ivan would submit to DNA testing.

Riis had supported Basso’s suspension because, like most other
directeurs
, he had believed that a gentleman’s pact was in place dictating that no ProTour team would hire riders implicated in Operacíon Puerto. Basso’s move to Discovery left him in a state of shock.

Suspension by CSC had driven Basso’s market value to its lowest level for years, because he was seen as damaged goods. Discovery secured his services at a far cheaper price than if the Italian had raced, and, in all probability, won, the 2006 Tour for Bjarne Riis and CSC. Their decision to sign Basso was widely criticised. Bruyneel, Stapleton and Armstrong, the driving forces behind Tailwind Sports, the management company of the Discovery team, were unperturbed.