Bad Blood (6 page)

A BOARDROOM IN MAYFAIR

JULY, 2001. I
am walking down Park Lane with Greg LeMond on our way to lunch with a major international oil company to discuss the multimillion-pound sponsorship of a new cycling team and Greg is recounting the tale of his worries about Lance and his spat with Hinault and, yes, I’m listening, but I am also remembering all those late nights watching Greg racing and thinking this is a bit like that Talking Heads song with the ‘And you might ask yourself: How did I get here?’ line.

Greg is heavier these days than he was, frozen in time on that flickering TV screen in 1986. His hair is greying rather than blond. His face is more sombre and less open than that of the prodigious kid in the yellow jersey. But I can still picture him on Alpe d’Huez, side by side with Hinault, two genuine legends of the Tour, untainted by the suspicion that has dogged every Tour winner since his retirement.

And now, here I am, hoping that, maybe, we might do business together.

In the spring of 2001, an email had dropped into my inbox saying ‘I’ve got £18 million to spend on sponsoring a cycling team. Do you have any contacts who could help me with this?’

I didn’t get emails like this every day, and it has to be said that cycling does attract its share of eccentrics. This, however, wasn’t one of them.

His name was Jon, and the multinational oil company he worked for wanted to develop a more eco-friendly global image. Bicycle racing seemed to be an ideal vehicle for this.

I took him seriously. We met for coffee. He told me that the
plan
needed an internationally renowned figurehead who could deliver. I had Greg LeMond’s business card in my wallet. Last time we’d met, he’d expressed an interest in trying to put a team together. So I sent Greg an email.

LeMond, who spent much of his time hidden away on his ranch in Montana, was just resurfacing after an ill-fated venture with an American team. He had supplied his own branded bikes to the Mercury-Viatel team, led by a young and enthusiastic former mountain-biking dude called Floyd Landis and managed by the inimitable John Wordin.

Wordin was a gung-ho character, a lean and intense over-competitive dad, lacking in the diplomacy required to gain acceptance on the European scene. At times, his closest sporting relative appeared to be Brian Glover’s deranged PE teacher in
Kes
. Wordin, a man apparently battling a midlife crisis, trained with his riders during the day and then fought to balance the books in the evening. Mercury-Viatel’s early promise was short-lived, but the eagle-eyed saw that the raw and rebellious Landis was Mercury’s star talent; ironically when the team that rode LeMond bikes collapsed in financial disarray, Landis was snapped up by US Postal as a support rider and understudy to Lance Armstrong.

The disintegration of Mercury meant that LeMond’s name was once again absent from the European scene – except for when some journo asked him about Lance. That always made the French press twitch with anticipation, especially when Greg told David Walsh of the
Sunday Times
, as Lance homed in on Tour victory number three, that he was ‘disappointed’ in Lance’s relationship with Michele Ferrari. Many wrote his words off as sour grapes – Lance’s third victory had equalled Greg’s career haul – but that comment began a bitter feud with Armstrong which continues to this day.

When we met, Greg’s disenchantment with the peloton was palpable, yet he still wanted to stay in the industry. He believed change was possible. At lunch, we ate well with Jon and his
colleagues
from the major multinational in a wood-panelled dining room overlooking Hyde Park. LeMond was charming and effusive and hid his disillusion well. But when, over coffee and petits fours, they asked him directly if he could run a team that was clean and still win, his expression darkened.

‘I wouldn’t want to run a team that wasn’t clean,’ he answered.

Despite those anxieties, negotiations continued, finally to peter out a few months later. As it transpired, Greg would have other issues to deal with. Soon after he got back from our meeting in London the war between Armstrong and LeMond began in earnest.

A BRUTAL BEAUTY

LIKE MOST ITALIANS
, Michele Ferrari grew up steeped in the love of cycling. In truth, it was impossible for him to avoid it. If football is integral to British culture, then cycling is just as deeply embedded in the Italian psyche. The great Italian races – Milan-San Remo, the Giro d’Italia, the Tour of Lombardy – are all part of the rhythm of the year, demanding as much coverage in the sports pages as the Champions League or Serie A.

To Italians, sport is about aesthetics, and cycling is about the beauty of a man in union with his machine. It is an obsessive relationship, verging on homoeroticism, fuelled by a century-old tradition, that is encapsulated early every summer at the Giro, where the
tifosi
gather, their camper vans clinging to the mountain sides.

They dot the high passes of the Alps, Apennines and Dolomites, pointing the way to the summits from the valley floor. Ageing, salami-touting, mahogany-skinned couples line the roadside, half-cut on
vino rosso
, wet-eyed and dreaming of past heroes: Coppi and Bartali, Gimondi and Moser, Bugno and Pantani.

The old men emerge from the shade of their camper vans as the
gruppo
pedals through the bends far below and climbs steadily nearer. Lovingly, they unfurl their flags and banners, taking care to choose their spot, ready to run alongside their young heroes, the olive-skinned, brown-eyed, beautiful ones: the Italians.

But recently they have suffered. The Italian cycling scene has long been obsessed with romance, panache and machismo; but
the
dark side of that obsession, a long-standing fascination with performance enhancement, has been laid bare by a series of high-profile scandals. The most painful one of all left the Italian peninsula in a state of trauma and self-loathing.

Marco Pantani’s demented and drug-addled death in a lonely hotel room left a nation in tears. He had been their most beautiful son, a Giro and Tour winner, a heroic gimp in the mountains of Europe, a charismatic but vulnerable athlete who achieved a state of grace and beauty when he sped up the high passes, beyond the reach of his rivals. Pantani was such an explosive mountain climber that he once even brought Lance Armstrong to his knees.

Pantani saw himself as an artiste, a mystic, a guru of the mountains. He developed a habit of talking about himself grandiosely in the third person. He denigrated the scientific methods of others, portraying himself as a rider of whimsy and inspiration, racing on feel and instinct. He railed against the homogenisation of sporting champions, the dour efficiency of automatons such as Jan Ullrich and ‘Robocop’ Armstrong.

And, fittingly for such a romantic, he died on St Valentine’s Day, 2004.

I can remember where I was. We were back from dinner, half watching the news on the BBC, when Pantani’s face appeared and the newsreader blandly announced, before telling us to look away now if we didn’t want to spoil the suspense of
Match of the Day
, that Marco Pantani, the Italian cyclist, winner of the 1998 Tour de France, was dead.

At least he pronounced his name correctly.

Pantani had died, alone, in an out-of-season beach resort on the Adriatic, a jabbering Viagra-fuelled crack and cocaine freak, lying in a pool of his own blood. He had barricaded himself into his wrecked hotel room, before apparently embarking on one final pharmaceutical orgy.

His full and lengthy decline as an athlete and human being
is
charted in Matt Rendell’s admirable
The Death of Marco Pantani
, a near-definitive account of a doper’s fall from grace and an alarming insight into the darker intricacies of Italian sport. Rendell’s book makes for grim reading. God knows how those who profited from Pantani’s success and his endless comebacks make sense of his sordid end and their part in his tragic life – and in his gruesome death.

Pantani’s death was cycling’s Diana moment. But, as Rendell noted, he had been dying for a long time. His was the final betrayal, the moment when many in Italy cried real tears, because cycling had used and abused him, because of collective guilt over his fate and because there had been something so childlike and vulnerable about him when he had first charmed the sporting world.

His unpredictable and volatile nature – he was as likely to be brought crashing down by a stray cat as he was to seal a spectacular win – and his defiant
Italianness
ensured his iconic appeal. Once, on a freezing New Year’s Day in Flagstaff, Arizona, I walked through the door of a local coffee shop and came face to face with a life-size poster of Marco, staring insolently back at me from behind the Gaggia coffee machine.

Compared to the beefcake champions he challenged – Miguel Indurain, Ullrich, Armstrong – he seemed fragile and under-prepared. His persona flew in the face of the increasingly predictable corporate control of sport. His neuroses and frailties, his impish riding style, his ability to overcome insurmountable odds, appealed to Everyman.

Ten years before Pantani died, I had followed the 1994 Giro, the race in which he first made his mark. At that time, he was naive and awkward, hardly cool, yet Italians were in a feverish state about their new star. He was spindly, balding as opposed to shaven-headed, lopsided, but suddenly brilliant and beautiful in the steepest climbs. He intoxicated his compatriots, sating their need for sporting success achieved with flair and sensuality.

Five years later, he had changed. He wore earrings and
bandanas,
was locked in an on-off relationship with a former night club dancer, had become self-destructive and was apparently already overfamiliar with cocaine. Yet only the previous year, in 1998, he had been hailed as cycling’s saviour, the ‘divine’ Marco, redeeming a Tour tainted by the Festina Affair.

That July, when Pantani skipped away towards the highest peaks and final victory, leaving Ullrich, the churning one-paced diesel far behind, he took the hopes of millions with him. But it was an illusion, another stinging betrayal. Within a year, belief in Pantani had been dramatically extinguished. He was evicted from the 1999 Giro on the cusp of final victory. He’d failed the UCI’s haematocrit health check, his blood level – analysed no less than eight times – hovering between fifty-two and fifty-three per cent. This did not definitively prove that he had artificially boosted his red blood cell count, but it didn’t matter. In the chaotic moments that followed, Pantani was destroyed. He was no longer an innocent. The ensuing scandal broke him, both as a man and as an athlete.

Incredibly, it seems certain that he was a junkie when he rode his final Giro d’Italia in 2003. Cocaine, EPO, crack, Viagra – they all gave him what he craved: success, money, affection, love and power.

Pantani’s death was both symptomatic of, and the inevitable culmination of, the unchecked excesses of Italian cycling. His greatest successes came at the very zenith of the EPO years, in the mid to late 1990s. It seems logical to believe that his use of recreational drugs and his subsequent addiction problem was fuelled by his apparent familiarity with doping products in his professional life.

This is the darkest corner of his death, the no-go zone. In the painful aftermath of his death, it was easier for those who knew him to portray him as an unreachable cocaine freak, a wilful drug addict bent on self-destruction, than to ask how he got there and who in cycling held his hand, whispering encouragement, as he travelled down that path.

How could a junkie have competed in three-week stage races, existed within the cycling bubble, without being seen for what he was? For all the tears, Pantani’s death was hardly a surprise to anyone who knew him well, yet how he was allowed to go to his death remains a mystery. This was cycling’s law of silence as a funeral shroud.

By the end of his life, Pantani’s identity, as a human being and as an athlete, was dictated by drugs. He was a work of fiction, unable to realise his true worth, robbed of self-knowledge by the institutionalised doping that surrounded him and to which he’d surrendered himself. Pantani, the mountain guru, the self-styled ‘Pirate’, the artiste who spurned science and who wore his heart on his sleeve, was as brutalised and cynical, as steeped in self-deception, as any of his peers. Pantani was a flag-bearer for the riders of what became known as Generation EPO, an elite class of cheats that included many of the highest earners of the time. Some of them could handle the day-to-day doping rituals – others, like Pantani, couldn’t.

One of those who could handle it and who used it to his advantage, was Bjarne Riis. The Dane was one of a growing number of riders who headed to the heartlands of Lombardy and Tuscany. Many of them, after years of anonymity and isolation, were hungry for success; riding for Italian teams soon sated their appetite. To achieve this success they wholly embraced the Italian philosophy of cycling. And because of that, their careers trace a shady path, of too many doctors, too many allegations, too many tales of soaring haematocrit – and in Riis’ case, a banal confession, ten years after the event, of everyday doping to win the Tour de France.

THE TROUBLE WITH BJARNE

IN THE LOBBY
of an Italian hotel, Bjarne Riis looks through me as if he has never clapped eyes on me before, despite the fact that we have met on numerous occasions.

This is his defence mechanism, perhaps a vestige of an awkward adolescence, a childhood in a broken home; on the other hand he could just be rude. The thing is, with Bjarne, you can never quite tell.

Over the years, partly by accident, partly by design, Riis has cultivated an air of mystery. He could be a deeply complex man, imbued with near-mystical, quasi-shamanic motivational abilities; or a charlatan, cycling’s idiot savant who has made a virtue out of saying little, perhaps simply because he has little to say – and plenty to hide.

Either way, he has a strangely compelling charisma and, in his second career as founder and guiding light of the CSC team, he has been phenomenally successful. Riis has an impressive work ethic and an eye for detail. His riders vouch for his guru-like qualities and for his close-knit relationships with his staff. He is serious and studious and takes his team into the Scandinavian wilderness each winter for military-style training camps. He has rekindled the careers and ambitions of Laurent Jalabert, Bobby Julich, Ivan Basso, Tyler Hamilton and Jorg Jaksche, among others.