Bad Blood (3 page)

We aspired to the physique of a Moser or Hinault, but knew little of their dietary regime. So we invented our own. Occasionally Peter began the day with a rollmop herring washed down with a can of Stella. I’d roll my eyes in mock disgust, while spreading marmalade on a bacon and Stilton sandwich.

Peter relentlessly fuelled my growing interest in cycling. He persuaded me to spend forty quid on a bike from a junk shop on Holloway Road. We rented
Breaking Away
, the cult American cycling movie, and slumped on the sofa, watching it again and again, until we could recite the script. I pottered around town on the bike, commuting from Clapham to Islington and back, gradually getting fitter and faster. I’d ride into the West End,
cruise
through Mayfair and Soho, climb up to Highgate and then head back home through Chelsea and Battersea, racing buses and taxis on the way.

Andy joined us on rides around Richmond Park. He was cooler than both of us because he had an aluminium-framed bike with the latest Campagnolo groupset. He also wore Lycra kit, while we remained stubbornly and painfully loyal to wool. One summer’s morning, the three of us rode out of London through the suburbs of Tooting, Mitcham and Carshalton, out into the lanes and green fields, beyond Reigate and onto the North Downs. I struggled up the hills and swooped down the descents until, several hours later, we pedalled, kings of the road, into Lewes in Sussex.

It was my first real bike ride. Exhausted, sore and raw, I fell asleep on the train back, a crick in my neck, a pain in my arse and angry tan lines on my legs and arms. We rode back to the flat from the station at twilight, past pubs and pavement tables, oddities, foreign and unexpected.

My woollen cycling jersey, stained white with dried salt from my sweat, sagged from my aching shoulders. I drank endless mugs of hot, sweet tea, then sank into a hot bath. I relived the ride and planned the next route as I fell asleep.

I was already addicted.

AFTER DARK WITH GREG AND BERNARD

HOVERING BETWEEN MY
new obsession with cycling and a stalled career, I became fixated with the sense of escape that my bike gave me. I started to have problems sleeping. Too many nights ended prone on the sofa, in front of a TV screen, deep into the small hours, watching videotape of the Tour de France. In the early hours of warm summer nights, I would ride through deserted streets into central London, relishing those stolen hours and imagining the city as my territory, a secret cycling playground. But it exhausted me and after a while, even those nocturnal sorties didn’t free me from the guilt of being a disappointment to myself and to others. I’d climb the stairs to the flat, bike on my shoulder, mind buzzing, and seek another escape, watching, over and over, tape of the same race – the 1986 Tour.

That year’s race, won by Greg LeMond, was full of intrigue and panache. Both those qualities came in abundance from his team captain Bernard Hinault, who put the hapless LeMond through hell as he reneged on his promise to help him become the first American winner of the Tour, and instead morphed into his most dangerous rival. In the bite-size highlights package on Channel 4, it was enthralling.

It all climaxed in a tense time trial in the hills around Saint-Etienne. By that point LeMond and his team captain were no longer on speaking terms. At the dinner table, their La Vie Claire team was split into two camps: Francophile versus Anglophile. LeMond had become jittery, fearful that his own team was working against him.

LeMond’s paranoia was fuelled that day, when he crashed, had problems with his racing shoes and was forced to make a bike change. Bertha LeMond, watching the race with Greg’s wife Kathy, leapt off her seat in frustration when she heard of her son’s misfortunes. ‘Aww, sh …
shoot
,’ she said, before clasping her hand over her face, mindful of the American camera crew standing alongside.

That’s how quaint the Tour was back then, in the years before the old world collided with the new. No effing bad language, no mobile phones or earpiece tactics. Instead, a fraternal hug, a shrug, a smile, a Le Coq Sportif polo shirt and a chilled
vin rouge
at sunset.
Camaraderie et amité
…

Greg LeMond can remember all that. He can remember his pioneering ambition, his constant anxiety, the time gaps chalked on a blackboard, the click-clack of typewriters in the press room, the fag-puffing journalists surrounding him,
l’Américain
, on the finish line. He can remember the sheer daring and adventure of the whole damn thing.

There are pictures of LeMond, tanned, youthful, blond, smiling broadly, almost disbelievingly, on the Paris podium in 1989 after he won his second Tour de France by eight seconds from Laurent Fignon. The American is wide-eyed, exultant, near hysterical with joy. A morbid Fignon, ponytail lank with despair, stands beside him, lost for words for once, his face blank with shock, beaten by an American in his home city.

LeMond’s success that year remains the narrowest victory margin in the Tour’s history.

That win was all the more incredible because he had been close to death following a hunting accident in early 1987. His fight back to Tour de France glory, in the most dramatic finale in the race’s history, was American cycling’s Hollywood story – until Lance Armstrong came along and beat Greg’s three wins and a comeback from being shot with a stunning hand: a return from cancer and seven straight Tour victories.

If LeMond was resentful of Armstrong’s success, he had reason to be. As the Armstrong brand took the sports world by storm, with its numerous lucrative extensions, LeMond’s groundbreaking achievement was almost forgotten.

Nonetheless, LeMond has always been well liked. The late Rich Carlson, a former editor of mine at
Winning
magazine in the mid 1990s, was naturally a huge fan both of American cycling and of Greg.

‘Jeremy, there’s something about him,’ Rich told me, struggling to find the right words. ‘He’s … well – he’s just …
folks
,’ he said.

Not long afterwards, Rich got sick – very sick – with leukaemia. Greg flew down from Montana to his bedside to see him. The last time I spoke to Rich, down a transatlantic phone line, his disembodied voice tight with pain, he described his illness as a demon on his back. He had been thrilled to see Greg once again, because he knew that he was dying.

Back then, post-LeMond and the late-1980s generation of Andy Hampsten, Steve Bauer, Ron Kiefel and Davis Phinney, North American cycling was, if not in the doldrums, then anxiously awaiting its next Tour de France star. Rich and his magazine badly needed a new hero. Sure, the Armstrong kid was capable of winning a couple of Classics, but he would never have the charm or tactical nous, or the big comeback story, to be able to compete with LeMond.

But we all underestimated him. Rich Carlson, like many others, would have been astounded to have seen Lance win seven consecutive Tours, just as he would have been appalled to see his two cover stars, Armstrong and LeMond, both all-American heroes, at each other’s throats.

But because of their polarised stance on doping, Greg LeMond, my TV hero in the flickering light of the midnight hour, and Lance Armstrong, the pivotal figure in my time covering cycling, cannot stand each other.

EPO IS A THREE-LETTER WORD

IN 1998, AS
Lance Armstrong took his first steps towards a full comeback as a professional athlete following his recovery from cancer, the ethical battle in cycling was being tossed around on a sea of acronyms. But it was one three-letter word that took centre stage: EPO.

Armstrong did not ride that summer’s Tour, when the house of cards finally collapsed and the full extent of cycling’s doping culture was laid bare by the Festina Affair. So crippling were the revelations of systematic doping that the 1998 Tour came close to being abandoned.

Somehow, despite numerous arrests and police raids, walkouts by disgruntled teams and an unprecedented show of disgust by the French public – which included mooning from the roadside at the suitably ashen-faced Tour boss Jean-Marie Leblanc – the race made it to Paris. The Italian climber Marco Pantani won the Tour, and was hailed as a saviour.

So intrusive were police raids on team vehicles and hotels, it was assumed that all those left racing were competing ‘clean’. Surely the French drugs squad had found everything that could be found? By the time the stragglers reached Paris, nobody imagined that Pantani himself might be tainted.

The Tour survived the scandal, but the Festina team was irreparably damaged. Managed by Bruno Roussel, it had started the 1998 race as the world’s top-ranked professional team. Their star rider was Frenchman Richard Virenque. He was a perennial favourite, capable of sporadic brilliance on the most coveted and romantic terrain of the Tour, the showpiece mountain stages
in
the Alps and Pyrenees. With each victory, he would weep tears of joy on live TV. Frenchwomen of a certain age swooned. Rural France, desperate for a new people’s hero, took him to its heart.

But Virenque and his Festina teammates were false idols.

The 1998 Tour had started in Dublin. On his way there, while taking a back road to avoid border controls, team
soigneur
Willy Voet was stopped and arrested. Voet was Festina’s drugs mule. He was on a road trip across Europe transporting doping products to Ireland.

Taken into police custody, Voet didn’t stand up well to interrogation. By the time the peloton returned to France, a fleet of ferries docking at Roscoff in Brittany, he had spilled the beans. Meanwhile, Roussel cracked and told the police that Festina had a medically supervised and systematic doping programme, the products paid for by the riders out of their salaries and prize money. Virenque denied it all – ‘Don’t turn this into a detective story,’ he ranted, ironically, as it turned out – and made a tearful exit from the race when the team were inevitably kicked out. He even published a book,
My Truth
, further rejecting allegations of doping, before finally breaking down in a Lille courtroom and confessing.

1998 had been expected to be a watershed moment: the Tour’s great myth, that the peloton competed only on bread and water, had been definitively exposed. The culture of doping was no longer acceptable, neither to the Tour’s new audience, nor to the corporate sponsors that were pouring money into the sport. Things had to change.

But they didn’t.

When I covered my first Tour de France in 1994, I was aware of the possibility that a minority of cyclists used drugs. Tales of cheating were as old as the Tour itself. I knew that, in the earliest years, riders used to hop between start and finish on the train. I knew about steroids, corticoids and amphetamines. I knew that the most desperate even dabbled with blood transfusions. But I
knew
little of erythropoietin, to give EPO its full name. Blood doping remained only a distant possibility, the domain of pockmarked, desperate East Europeans. There may have been the odd rogue competitor, but the Tour de France was built on decent, old-fashioned values – in everything I had read, the chivalry, self-sacrifice and honour of the sport shone through. In contrast with world football, the Tour had clung to Corinthian values. Or so, in my naivety, I thought. Yet I soon learned that blood doping had become as common as a yellow card in the Champions League.

The more time I spent in press rooms and team hotels, the more I stood among team cars and on finish lines, the more I chatted across dinner tables where tongues were freed by red wine, the more I understood that doping was everywhere. Cycling had long been a sport of dubious reputation; what I hadn’t realised was how inextricably linked it had become to medical technology. Information and gossip about what new products were being used by which rider shot back and forth. And behind it all, was the silence; the unspoken understanding that none of us would give away any trade secrets, because that would be ‘spitting in the soup’.

One night, standing outside a Parisian bar with a group of veteran Tour journalists after Miguel Indurain had taken his fifth successive win, conversation revolved around who was taking what and when, how efficiently such a product worked, which rider had been indiscreet, letting slip in a bar somewhere that he had a ‘wonder’ product that would change his career. ‘We have a big problem with EPO,’ one of our party said, darkly. By that, he meant rEPO, the artificial version of the naturally produced hormone found in our livers and kidneys. It performs a key function, regulating the manufacture of red blood cells, something which becomes even more important if you’re an elite endurance athlete, desperate to find more oxygen during competition.

The more deprived of oxygen we are, the more EPO our
kidneys
provide and the more red blood cells zip through our bloodstream carrying oxygen. Hence the attractions for athletes of training at altitude, or sleeping in an altitude tent. Helicopter pilots, one Italian study revealed, would make great endurance athletes – if they weren’t flying around the Alps and Dolomites, that is.

When a synthetic form of EPO, called rEPO, was developed in the 1980s to treat kidney failure, and anaemia in cancer and HIV patients, it didn’t take long for athletes and their doctors to wake up to the possibilities of enriching the oxygen-carrying capabilities of their blood. Even better, there were no tests within sport to detect its presence.

The potential of rEPO proved particularly seductive in lengthy cycling races, such as the three European tours of France, Italy and Spain, where staving off fatigue and promoting recovery could make the difference between success and failure. In a race as brutal as the Tour, for example, the depletion through fatigue of the red blood cell count, or haematocrit, can be crippling.

No wonder rEPO proved so irresistible to the peloton. It was hugely efficient, undetectable, readily available and, with an estimated twenty per cent improvement in performance, it seemed to guarantee success – or at least survival. It made racing faster, as suddenly everybody in the peloton became an accomplished mountain climber. Overnight, riders who had never won a major race before became uberchampions, their income rising almost as dramatically as their haematocrit. The product endorsements flooded in. They were featured on the covers of Europe’s sports newspapers and magazines. After years as also-rans, no marks, they suddenly became stars.