by Paul Kimmage
It was when he wrote off the BMW that I started to realise he was cracking. It was the night before the Grand Prix of Wallonie in 1988, our last year together. He started drinking whiskies at the dinner table, just kept knocking them back. The lads were making fun of him, but I tried to make him stop. I knew that inside something was eating him. After dinner, they decided to drive into town to stare at the prostitutes in the shop windows. Andre took the BMW, with Esnault in the front seat, Rault and Pineau in the back. There was a dual carriageway in front of the hotel, with a traffic light on the junction. The light was red. Andre didn't stop. He put his foot to the floor and the car screeched across the four lanes, but luckily nothing was coming. The other lads couldn't believe he would do something so irresponsible and screamed at him to stop. He did, but the decision wasn't his. The gates of a level crossing were down a kilometre up the road. The two lads in the back didn't hesitate to jump out, but Esnault, content to play the hard man, stayed. The gates were raised and Andre put his foot down, but instead of going into town he decided to head out into the countryside. The car was moving much too fast on the small tracks and he ran off the road on a tight right-hander. The BMW mounted a pile of stacked tree trunks and stopped. Esnault was thrown forward and hit his head on the windscreen, but wasn't seriously hurt. Andre looked at the undercarriage and realised the car was gone. Rault and Pineau arrived on the scene in a different car, and persuaded him to go back to the hotel. Next morning, the Belgian police arrived and started to ask questions. Andre owned up to having had an accident. The car was towed to a garage, good for only spare parts. Everyone had a great laugh. Andre laughed too; but inside, I knew, he was screaming.
He's pretty low now but he won't admit it. I suppose that's why he takes refuge in Africa. In a way it's like the old days – he can travel and race. But more than anything else, he can hold on to the dream just that little bit longer. Africa won't last for ever, and he knows it, but the future has never concerned him. Africa is an escape. The day he walks on to the factory floor the dream will end.
It's a terrible pity he never married. Marriage might have given him a sense of responsibility, kept him on the rails. He was terribly fond of a lovely girl who lived just down the road, but he could never make the first move.
We left the sad reality of the empty apartment and drove to Annecy. There was just time for a stroll around the lake before nightfall. He told humorous stories of his travels in Africa and we laughed about the good times we had spent together at RMO. We had a couple of beers and later had dinner in a restaurant. At the end of the meal he asked the waiter for the bill. It was typical of him, always first to put his hand in his pocket, give you his last penny. But Ann and I had invited him out. He was our guest and I insisted on paying. He agreed, but said he'd pay next time.
He came to stay with us for a weekend shortly after. I was covering a rugby match, so Ann collected him from the railway station. He gave her flowers and a chocolate cake. It was a nice weekend, but I noticed his frequent uneasiness. As if his skin wasn't fitting him properly. He seemed happiest when we went to the village bar. He liked the ambience, playing the 'tierce' (betting on horses), drinking a few beers and smoking. He smokes quite a lot now, Marlboro – 'They sponsored the races in Africa.' In the mornings he'd get up early and slip out to the bar for a read of the paper and some coffee. He'd return to the house with some fresh baguettes and we'd have breakfast together. One thing was troubling me: a former team-mate of ours had told me that Andre was still dabbling with amphetamines for kicks. On the day he was due to go home I invited him out for a beer and asked him about it. He smiled and denied he was still using it. He said he had dumped his stock and was clean. I wasn't totally convinced. I told him about my plans on writing a book and of its content. I told him I was going to 'cracher dans la soupe'. He laughed and said I was right, but I knew there was no way he would ever do it himself. To him, it would be like ratting on your mates and Andre would never rat on his mates. The fact that they didn't give a shit about him made no difference. I asked him about his experiences.
'In my first two years with (Jean) de Gribaldy at Sem I never touched the stuff, perhaps once in my second year at a criterium. Then I signed a contract with Système-U. This was the old Système-U team. I met up with a lot of chaudières there and picked up some bad habits. Once, twice, three times, the more I charged, the harder it became to stop. Every time I used it I noted it in my diary and each year I found I was using it more and more.'
André never tested positive in his career. Not once. He rarely took a chance when there was control. The shame was in being caught. It says a thing or two about the number of controls in France each year.
He was supposed to come for another weekend before leaving for the winter in Africa, but he never did. The phone never rang. Perhaps my probes about the drugs issue had made him uncomfortable. I don't really know. I have not seen or heard from him since.
One of my biggest criticisms of L'Equipe and of the French cycling press in general is that they never talk to people like Andre. The absence of adequate controls in France is common knowledge, but rarely highlighted. The papers and magazines know about the problems, but choose instead to fill their column inches with portraits of the stars – of present 'greats', Fignon, LeMond, Kelly, Roche; of 'greats' from the past, Hinault, Merckx, Anquetil. Of greats. When Philippe Brunei from L'Equipe came to interview me during last year's tour I told him about Chappuis.
'Go and talk to him, he will give you a great piece.'
He agreed, but the interview was never done. It is as if the Andre Chappuis's of the world do not exist; and yet under the carpet there are crowds of them. They have great stories to tell but no one will ever hear them.
I don't know if I will ever meet Andre again. When I'm in France I'll go looking for him, but I'm not sure he will be there. In Ireland, my door will always be open to him, but I know he won't come knocking. In my four years in the peloton, of the hundreds of professional cyclists I've had the pleasure and often displeasure of meeting, he stands alone. He was the most likeable and most decent of them all.
EPILOGUE
THE SOUP TURNS TO BLOOD
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 po
sitive 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.<
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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.'
