Bad Blood (23 page)

Two years late and flying in the face of the post-Puerto ethical pact between the leading teams, and against the wishes of the UCI, Armstrong and Bruyneel finally had their man. Even better, Basso’s suspension by CSC in July 2006 – under pressure from, among others, Bruyneel – had actually worked in their favour.

Yet the honeymoon period was short. Basso never raced in anger for Discovery, leaving the team by mutual agreement the
following
spring, following his confession of ‘attempted doping’ to CONI. ‘Yes, I am Birillo,’ he finally admitted, that same sly smile playing on his lips. Basso was banned from racing once more. The Operacíon Puerto investigation, stagnant for more than a year, was finally reopened in February 2008.

Eufemiano Fuentes had worked in cycling for many years, stretching back well before the Festina Affair. His name is well known within the milieu, even if his exact skills remain unclear. The man in the eye of the Operacíon Puerto storm was arrested on 26 May, 2006 and released on bail of 120,0000 euros the following day.

At first Fuentes was indignant over his treatment. Then, unmasked, the 51-year-old became a tabloid celebrity. There he was, scuttling across the tarmac to his plane – the Machiavellian doctor to the stars, unshaven, hiding behind his shades, a bottle of water clutched in one hand, his mobile in the other – looking like the man who broke the bank at Monte Carlo.

He started talking to newspapers and radio stations, defending himself as a ‘man of honour’. In an interview with Spanish radio, displaying a little of the boastfulness that tainted Michele Ferrari, he was keen to point out the range of his client base: ‘I’m indignant that they’re saying that I worked only with cyclists. I’ve worked with other athletes in athletics, tennis and football.’ Maybe, but we have only ever heard about the cyclists.

By December 2006, with the investigation mired in confusion after a series of conflicting rulings in the Spanish courts, there had been little real progress. Nonetheless, Fuentes believed he had become a marked man. He even claimed to have received death threats.

Like Michele Ferrari, Fuentes’ comments on doping and ethics only fuelled concerns over the extent of his influence in professional sport. Like Ferrari, Fuentes sought justification by claiming that he had never endangered the health of his clients.

‘In twenty-nine years as a professional, none of my clients has had the slightest health problems. I protect the health of the
athletes
who come to me. Doping is the use or abuse of a substance or medication by somebody who doesn’t have the knowledge, experience or skills to use it.

‘It’s elite sport that is dangerous for the health. It’s the overloaded racing calendars and the criminal routes that the organisers design to put on a show that are dangerous,’ he said of cycling’s European circuit.

Fuentes favoured legalisation of ‘therapeutic’ doping. ‘Doctors must have the freedom and autonomy to be able to decide whether to administer this or that treatment, independent of whether it’s doping or not.

‘In cycling, they established a maximum haematocrit of fifty per cent, but they never fixed a minimum limit,’ he said. ‘It’s better to ride the Tour de France at fifty-three per cent haematocrit than at thirty-one per cent. Letting a rider take on the Alps with a haematocrit of thirty-one per cent – that’s putting his life in danger.’

September 2006, four months after Puerto, and autumn sunshine floods the streets of Salzburg as the World Road Racing Championships take over the city streets. Children dance through the Mirabell flower gardens and onto the Pegasus steps, made famous by
The Sound of Music
. Their parents look down delightedly from the top step, arranging their kids in pecking order, youngest to oldest, ready to be pixelated for their digital memories.

A stone’s throw away, across the Mirabellplatz, there is little time for child’s play.

Three months after the expiry of his two-year doping ban, David Millar is about to make his comeback for the Great Britain cycling team. Some felt that, in the circumstances, Millar’s return was indecently hasty. Not Team GB’s pragmatic performance director, David Brailsford, who had supported Millar through his ban and who now welcomed him back with open arms. Two years later, Dwain Chambers became a pariah following his selection for the British team. Millar’s return, in contrast, went relatively unnoticed.

David looks as fit as I have ever seen him, lean, focussed and ambitious. Yet among his Great Britain teammates, his rehabilitation creates a sense of unease. Nicole Cooke, firmly established now as Team GB’s leading light on the road, struggles to hide her disappointment at his inclusion in the national squad.

In the pit lane, Cooke is warming down after racing in the women’s time trial. Experience has taught me that after racing she is usually best left alone for a while before being asked questions. So I bide my time before saying hello and switching on the tape recorder.

‘You’ve been a fierce critic of those riders who’ve doped in the past, Nicole …’

‘Well, who wouldn’t be?’ she snapped back.

Deliberately and carefully choosing her words, she expanded on her theme. ‘I really think that if someone makes the conscious decision to dope they also have the choice not to, so once they have had one chance to make a decision and they make the wrong one, then they should pay the consequences.’

So you don’t agree with David Millar returning to the British national squad?

‘Rules are made – not by myself – and you have to accept the rules. If a time comes post-cycling when I could make some positive changes to the sport then maybe I’d get interested, but I can’t change the situation we’re in now. So David’s here as part of the team … and so am I.

‘I think David respects me, and I’ – she paused – ‘I respect … the position that David’s in. I’m not going to waste time thinking about David’s situation and I don’t suppose he will spend time thinking about mine.’

Twenty-four hours later, on the finish line of the elite men’s time trial, Millar freewheels to a halt and unclips his aerodynamic racing helmet. As he lifts it off his head, a waterfall of sweat cascades down his face and neck.

It hasn’t been a vintage performance. He is asked some inane questions. He shrugs and offers deliberately inane answers. The
huddle
around him disperses and shuffles back across the road to greet the next breathless finisher.

A burly figure strides out of the crowd and embraces him. I crane my neck and recognise Gordon, David’s father. They chat briefly and David hugs him goodbye. Then he turns and weaves his way through the crowd and away towards his GB team car, parked discreetly among the deserted backstreets. As he begins to pedal away, I catch his eye.

‘Jez – where have you been?’ he says.

We chat briefly. He tells me that, in the post-Puerto climate, as one of the few riders willing to discuss doping openly he has ‘loads of offers’ from other teams. ‘Ironic, isn’t it,’ he says, ‘but my PR value is pretty good these days …’

So, after he said that, I felt obliged to tell him about the story I’d been working on. Even as David made his comeback from his ban, and with the Puerto scandal raging around the Tour, it emerged that he had been training in Tuscany with Luigi Cecchini, protégé and friend of Conconi and Ferrari, Hamilton and Riis.

In Salzburg, there was confusion over how this alliance began. Millar’s new manager, Max Sciandri, now retired from racing, hardly helped things when he gave some awkward justifications to the German press.

‘David had some training sessions with Cecchini in May and June in Lucca,’ he said. ‘It’s a delicate issue. David is a pro and I can’t tell him what to do. Everybody sets their own limits. I am a friend of Cecchini, but right now there is no relationship between David and Cecchini.’

Sciandri himself, also an adviser to British cycling, is another former protégé of the Tuscan-based Cecchini. Like Conconi and Ferrari, Cecchini is one of the doctors, the mythical figures behind a generation of champions, whose Tuscan treatment rooms transformed careers.

Cecchini, like Ferrari, seemed to inspire intense loyalty. Armstrong never deserted Ferrari, even when – or perhaps because –
most
of the media were calling the relationship ill-advised. Tyler Hamilton had a similar attitude towards Cecchini. At the press conference after he won his Olympic gold medal in 2004, the Bostonian called Cecchini a ‘second father’.

Millar had first spoken about his contact with Cecchini in July 2006, when talking to British journalists William Fotheringham and Richard Moore. A day before the Salzburg time trial, the connection resurfaced when the German media picked up on the story.

Later, I called David Brailsford, the Team GB manager. At first he was reluctant to elaborate, but then said: ‘If Dave had a relationship with Cecchini, we would say thank you and goodbye. I told him he shouldn’t have done it and that Team GB don’t want to have any association with Cecchini. I have complete confidence in Dave. He knows that in this climate he has to be very careful as to who he associates with.’

Yet a few weeks later, in an interview with French magazine
Velo
, David said that he had worked with Cecchini – with Team GB’s knowledge – for three months or so.

‘I was clear with Cecchini,’ Millar told American journalist James Startt. ‘Doping was out of the question. Maybe it was a mistake, but I never hid this collaboration. My federation was aware and I repeat, Cecchini was the first to believe in me.’

So, as David stood there beyond the finish line in Salzburg, I decided to tell him.

‘I wrote a story about you and Cecchini,’ I said. David nodded. ‘I wanted to tell you to your face before anybody else does, or you read about it on the web.’

He nodded again and mumbled something like, ‘Fair dos.’

‘I just wanted to tell you to your face,’ I repeated, hopeful that he would say something that would make me feel less of a Judas.

But he didn’t. He just stared past me.

‘Yeah, well … I better go,’ said David and he rode off down the street.

SAVING THE WHALE

JANUARY, 2007. EVEN
now, faithless as I am, it’s all still so seductive.

In the wind and rain, I catch a flight out to Spain on the day after David Beckham’s megadeal with the AEG entertainment group – also owners of the Tour of California bike race – was made public. A few rows in front of me on the plane, Jamie and Louise Redknapp scan the tabloids, as if in disbelief of Goldenballs’ Midas touch. We touch down in Majorca on a warm afternoon of long shadows and dappled sunshine.

The next morning, I sit by a cliff-top swimming pool drinking coffee, watching the comings and goings of T-Mobile personnel and guests, as the German sponsor makes ready for its 2007 team launch. The team’s management staff of
directeurs
and coaches appears. They are wearing sharp suits and sunglasses, as they line up for yet another photocall. They stand at the edge of the pool, contented smiles and gelled hair. I turn my face upwards for a moment, close my eyes and, after the cold and damp of the English winter, relish the warmth of the sun.

This is the unveiling of the all new T-Mobile cycling team that embraced the changes enforced on them by the fallout from Operacíon Puerto. Jan Ullrich is long gone, but on this glowing January morning, it feels as if the team are breathing a long-awaited sigh of relief and relishing his absence. They have a new team boss, Bob Stapleton. The youthful 47-year-old multimillionaire, who rides his bike almost every day, bounds on stage at the team presentation and tells anybody who will listen that T-Mobile ‘believes in clean and fair sport’. The ‘new’ T-Mobile,
says
the press release, ‘wants to be a team that fans like, believe in, and ultimately trust.’

In the past, Majorca’s Club Robinson, tucked away in the far south-east of the island on the Cala Serena bay, became Club Ullrich for ten days or so. The grounds would be overrun by German tabloid journalists and camera crews, desperate for images that captured Ullrich in the throes of his annual fight against the flab. After a misspent winter, Ullrich was sometimes so unfit that he was unable to train with his teammates. He’d be reduced to huffing and puffing in the slipstream of a team car for hours on end. These sessions often degenerated into farce, as paparazzi motorbikes choked the roads and sparred for shots of a heavy-jowled ‘Kaiser’ playing catch-up with his fitness. He would amaze us all, months later, when, skin taut on his bones, he lined up for his annual showdown with Lance Armstrong at the Tour.

Stapleton was not the only one in Majorca extolling the virtues of change. His fine words were supported by Christian Prudhomme, the new director of the Tour de France.

Prudhomme’s presence was a ringing endorsement of T-Mobile’s brave new world. ‘We’ve never seen what happened in Strasbourg in any other sports,’ Prudhomme said. ‘Don’t forget that Operacíon Puerto has links to football as well – and what did they write about that? Just a line or two!’

Stapleton, less than six months into his new role, looked on as Prudhomme talked to the press. The wiry Californian, made rich by his skills in the telecommunication business, had set about ridding the team of the old cliques. A pragmatist with a ready smile and a firm handshake, he was a good talker at ease with the media.

Stapleton had cleared out the dead wood, or so we thought. He said the right things about the need to combat doping. But there was general bemusement when, following Discovery Channel’s capture of Ivan Basso, T-Mobile broke ranks with the other ProTour teams and their gentleman’s agreement not to
sign
any of those alleged to be involved with Puerto, by making a bid for Spaniard Alejandro Valverde.

Perhaps fortunately for Stapleton’s brave new world, the deal failed to come off. ‘I’m not a diplomat,’ he smiled as we sat talking by Club Robinson’s pool on another perfect Majorcan morning. ‘My friends laugh at me when I’m caught in the middle.’

THE AMERICAN’S FRIENDS

BOB STAPLETON WAS
T-Mobile’s clean-up man, but he was also a member of a discreet and informal stateside organisation of silver-haired but cycling-mad CEOs called the Champions Club. The Champions Club get-togethers are a far cry from the Sunday club runs of Catford CC or the Merseyside Wheelers. Membership requires a $100,000 admission fee, which may explain why the Champions Club has a limited number of members. It is perhaps the wealthiest cycling club in the world with several members appearing in
Forbes
rich lists. No wonder American commentators had taken to calling cycling ‘the new golf’.