by David Millar
I didn’t race in the 1998 Tour de France, when that dark world was finally exposed for all to see. The Festina affair was triggered when a Festina team car, searched as it crossed the border from Belgium to France, was found to contain a substantial quantity of drugs.
The Festina team was filled with the French darlings of the time – Richard Virenque, Laurent Brochard, Pascal Hervé, Didier Rous and Christophe Moreau. It was the biggest doping scandal to ever hit cycling and dramatically revealed what had been hidden within the professional ranks for years.
If the customs officials had not stopped that Festina car, and if the French police had not made arrests and begun investigating the Festina team, there is no doubt in my mind that nothing would ever have changed. Professional cycling had reached a point at which it was incapable of confronting or fixing its own problems; the sport had failed, monumentally. The enforcers of criminal and civil law had to act in order to begin the long and difficult clean-up that has been going on ever since.
That year’s Tour became a farce, as arrests, raids, interrogations and overnight stints in cells punctuated the race. That led to rider strikes and team withdrawals. It was all very dramatic, but it also meant that many guys then had to race without their usual drugs – which may have been the main motivation for some of them to quit the race.
The 1998 Tour had started in Dublin – there were tales of drugs being dumped overboard from the ferries taking the convoy across to France and I’ve since heard of other innovative transportation methods – unmarked cars, motorbikes, even friends in the publicity caravan – being used by teams who dared try to outwit the French police.
How true these stories are is debatable, but there’s no doubt that it would became the least-doped Tour in years. Ironically, it was Marco Pantani who won the race overall, the same Pantani whose cocaine addiction led to a premature death and whose huge talent was ruined by drugs.
But for young, clean riders the grand exposé was wonderful news.
Watching riders get arrested, hearing about the dope-dumping from the ferry and imagining the panic that most of the riders would be feeling at the prospect of racing for three weeks without their usual medical stock, tickled us.
It was a revenge of sorts on the dopers, whose charged-up performances had made our lives hell.
In our naivety we thought it would change the sport overnight. Surely now that everybody knew what was going on, the powers that be would be forced to act? Unfortunately this did not happen.
The initial joy of what this meant for clean riders was quickly replaced with resignation and despondency, as we realised what the Festina affair had done to the image of the sport. The shouts from bystanders, when we were out training, usually of ‘Allez, allez!’ were now replaced with ‘Allez les dopés!’
It hadn’t crossed our minds that we would be tarred with the same brush as the riders who had been caught doping. From then on, as far as the public was concerned, being a professional cyclist meant you doped. It didn’t matter who you were – a 20-year-old neo-pro or a 32-year-old Tour winner – they saw the same person.
Now, we were all dopers. Not only were we fighting the world in which we lived and worked, we were on the defensive when confronted with a member of the public. It was around this time, when I found that I had to defend myself on an almost daily basis, that I decided it was best not to tell people I was a pro cyclist, unless it was absolutely unavoidable.
Even so, many people just assumed I was doping. Back in Biarritz I went to see my neighbours, a very sweet retired couple who looked after my mail when I was away. We had the now inevitable conversation about drugs in cycling and the drama of that year’s Tour. Yet I didn’t expect them to be so supportive, almost apologetic, for the way in which cycling was being vilified. The lady treated me almost like a grandson, and when her husband wasn’t in the room, she took me to one side.
‘David,’ she said, ‘we’ve always known that you dope - we know it’s impossible to do it without it. But promise me you’ll be careful and look after your health, won’t you?’
I was lost for words.
The elderly in France, who’d grown up with the Tour, understood that it was a preposterous sporting challenge. In their pragmatic manner, they didn’t see it as being humanly possible, and considered it part and parcel of the job to do what one had to do in order to survive and to perform.
That didn’t mean they believed doping was right, but for them professional cycling was a brutal sport that only desperate or crazy men would become part of – a ‘peasant sport’, because there was no way a member of the bourgeoisie would choose to become a professional cyclist.
This was a far cry from the romantic and ultimately naive perspective held by the modern generation of Tour fans. There’s no doubt that the older generation’s view, no matter how pragmatic, was wrong, but was it better to be naive and to believe in what was essentially a corporate-funded fraud?
Before heading off to the Tour de l’Avenir that autumn, I hooked up with Jay Sweet – another Australian cycling buddy – and enjoyed the final days of the summer party season in Biarritz. We were a little delicate by the time we got to the race. I came down with bronchitis prior to the prologue, but somehow I still managed to win it. Then I avenged my time trial defeat of the previous year before finally pulling out of the race, due to illness.
That was my season done and dusted. In the aftermath of the Festina affair, it had been hard to gauge the feeling in the peloton but among the younger pros there was a feeling that what had happened was perhaps going to change the sport for the better. Our optimism proved unjustified.
9
THE VDB SHOW
I spent the winter of 1998 training alone in Biarritz. While the sport came to terms with the aftershocks of Festina, I clung to the belief that it was all going to be different in 1999.
New anti-doping measures were being introduced, the most important of these being the longitudinal testing programme. The plan was to test each rider’s blood four times a year in order to create a rudimentary profile that would supposedly reveal who was manipulating their blood. The thinking was that dopers were specific in their doping and that the majority of them would target certain events, such as the Tour de France. In theory, their blood profile in the summer would bear little resemblance to that established in the periods of the year when they weren’t ‘prepared’. These quarterly tests would make it possible to spot who was doping and – just as importantly – who wasn’t.
Initially, this sounded great. In reality, it meant nothing. There were no sanctions attached to an anomalous longitudinal test, and, even if a rider’s profile suggested doping, there was no way to target them with specific anti-doping controls as a ratified EPO test didn’t even exist at that point. Nor were there tests for many of the other products that were used.
That problem was compounded by the fact that there was no previous experience of blood profiling among professional cyclists – there was little understanding of what was ‘normal.’ After a while, I realised that it was not much more than a PR exercise, to appease the people who needed appeasing, rather than being the cure that it was proclaimed to be.
Yet my belief that things were changing was reinforced by my start to the ’99 season. In my first race, Etoile de Besseges, I was fourth overall, and from there I was thrown into the Tour of the Mediterannean. Cofidis needed an expert time triallist to lead the team in the team time trial stage and – much against my will, as I’d lined up a date with a Swiss girl – I was that man.
I missed the date and rode my frustrations out in the team time trial stage at Besseges, powering around the course with zero consideration for my teammates. Instead of shepherding my flock, I blew them all away. Single-handedly, I dragged the team to the finish, but also dropped five of them in the process.
L’Équipier, my teammate, on the look-out for another leader to ride for – Francesco Casagrande had been banned for a positive testosterone cont
rol the year before – was impressed.
After we’d recovered a bit and were rolling back to the team bus, l’Équipier came alongside me and said the first flattering thing I’d heard from him.
‘David, that was incredible – I didn’t think you were so strong,’ he said. ‘I’ve never seen anybody do that in a team TT before – and I’ve seen a lot of riders. Where are you racing next?’
I knew that, without Casagrande, l’Équipier was a bit lost. He needed a raison d’être and I sensed that he was mulling over his options, probably with our teammate Frank VDB Vandenbroucke at the top of his list. But after that conversation, I realised l’Équipier had also made me an option.
Up until then I hadn’t raced alongside VDB. That was about to change at my next races, the Trophée Luis Puig and Vuelta Valenciana, in Spain. I would be joining the guys who had been out there for a while, a group that included VDB and his sidekick, Philippe Gaumont. Those of us racing on the French programme had already been hearing stories of their shenanigans in Spain. Word got back to us that Gaumont had been living on the edge since the training camp in January.
Before Luis Puig and the Valencian race, the whole team had got together at the Cofidis annual party following our presentation in Paris. The next morning, we flew to Spain. As we left Paris, it was immediately obvious that Gaumont was still on a high from the night before. When we got to Madrid, where we had a 2-hour wait before our connecting flight to Alicante, Gaumont disappeared. When he finally returned to get on the plane he was in an even worse state than before.
‘What has Gaumont been up to?’ I asked a teammate as we waited to board the flight. ‘Jesus, he looks a mess.’
Gaumont was a strange character, the most alpha of males in what was very much a man’s world. He was physically imposing, especially for a cyclist, but also quite charismatic to match. Philippe was also articulate. He could be the most charming and thoughtful person, but also the most intimidating and cruel. The best policy with him was to keep a low profile and avoid attracting his interest. If he decided to intimidate you, he’d never let go, and if he chose to like you he would do his utmost to drag you into his world.
I first came onto Philippe’s radar in one of my earliest races, the Tour du Haut Var. The team had missed the breakaway and had been chasing for most of the race. I was completely wrecked, couldn’t do my turns at the front any more and slid back through the peloton. Soon after that, I saw Philippe drifting down the side of the bunch looking angry. Eventually he spotted me and unleashed all his fury on me. It was scary as well as humiliating.
Off I went, back up to the front, riding hard until I was cross-eyed and almost falling off my bike. When we hit the decisive final hill, I was dropped immediately. Then, once again, I saw a Cofidis rider ahead of me, going very slowly looking over his shoulder. As I got closer, I realised it was Philippe.
‘Oh shit,’ I thought, ‘now what have I done.’
But his mood had changed. As I got up alongside him he smiled and patted me on the back, telling me I’d done well. He then rode with me all the way to the finish, chatting. That was typical Philippe, enraged one minute, considerate the next.
The Gaumont who boarded that short flight to Valencia was clearly the raging Philippe. I was told he’d drunk two bottles of champagne while waiting for the connection, and also tossed in some sleeping pills for good measure.
I was stunned when I was told this. ‘He’s taking sleeping pills?’ I said in disbelief. ‘But it’s lunchtime . . .?!’
Gaumont was a mess, but like the rest of us, he was in his Cofidis team suit and so was allowed onto the plane. More than once, he tried to light up a cigarette. Fortunately somebody from the team was able to stop him before it got totally out of control, but it was clear that he was a loose cannon.
Things didn’t get any better when we landed. We watched with nervous hilarity at the baggage carousel, as he rummaged through bags, piling them up around him, muttering: ‘My bike, I need my bike. I’ve got to get to the hotel.’
Still nobody intervened. Eventually, Gaumont found his bike bag and suitcase and marched out to the waiting bus. Once outside, he opened up the bike bag and started struggling to build his bike, while the bemused bus driver looked on.
By this time, it was about six in the evening and the hotel was still 90 kilometres away, not that Philippe would have had the motor skills or wherewithal to change into his cycling clothing, let alone to put his bike together and actually ride it.
Eventually one of the team directeurs did what should have been done hours before: he talked Gaumont down until they managed to get a semblance of control over him. Once on the bus, he promptly passed out.
Philippe didn’t turn up for dinner, but his odyssey hadn’t finished. Later that night, he was seen wandering the hotel corridors, dragging his suitcase, sobbing, saying: ‘I want to go home . . . Where am I? I need to speak to my wife . . .’
A couple of the senior riders who knew him well stepped in. They tied him to his bed and stripped the room of anything that could get him into trouble – wallet, phone and sleeping pills.
The next day, the management sat the team down and told us it was unacceptable behaviour and there would be consequences if anything like it ever happened again. But I don’t believe that Gaumont was ever reprimanded.
It was the first Stilnox-fuelled mess witnessed collectively by team personnel. During that year we were to see such excesses at their most extreme. Stilnox was often behind this wild behaviour.
Stilnox, or Zolipdem, is a sleeping pill. If you take it when you’re in bed you won’t notice any real side effects; if you take it and try to stay awake then the side effects are quickly noticeable. Thirty minutes after taking it, you’ll start to feel a little strange, almost a little drunk, and you might find yourself bumping into walls or walking into doorframes.
Your brain still feels like it’s operating normally, but the rapid decline into total loss of control has begun. If you don’t fight it and just go to bed there are no problems. But the longer you try to stay awake, the greater the loss of control. I learned that the ticket to getting maximum ‘side effects’ was to take more than one pill and have a couple of alcoholic drinks with it. Within an hour or so you could find yourself acting and feeling the same way as if you were completely drunk.
On Stilnox, however, you wake up feeling rested: that’s because at some point the pills can’t be fought any longer and you pass out into a deep sleep. There’s still the memory blackout to deal with but, in a nutshell, it’s like waking up after a big night of drinking without a hangover.
Stilnox and other sleeping pills had been used for years in European cycling. The life you lead on a stage race, such as the Tour, Giro or Vuelta, affects people in different ways, but contrary to what people might think, deep sleep is not the easiest thing to achieve when your body is as drained as that of a pro rider after a long day of racing. For some riders, after a big stage in a long race, Stilnox was often the only way to get a good night’s sleep.
So many things come into play; you may not cope well with constantly sleeping in different rooms with different beds, with differing lengths and different mattresses. There’s also the comfort of pillows and sheets – in fact, I always take my own pillow on the road with me. Then there’s the efficiency of the air-con, or the lack of air-con; maybe it’s too noisy or too quiet – and there’s also how you cope with sharing rooms with a teammate. It’s not exactly conducive to a good night’s stress-free sleep, and sometimes the worry about sleeping badly and not recovering well for the next day is enough to make sleeping pills seem attractive. That’s why, for a long time, taking sleeping pills was considered quite normal – in fact most of the older riders didn’t think anything of using them.
At the World Championships in 1997, we were staying in a hotel that ticked all the boxes for a bad night’s sleep. A couple of days after I’d arrived, I ended up chatting to a member of the old guard when I was out trai
ning on the course.
‘The hotel’s terrible,’ I told him. ‘I’m sleeping like shit.’
‘Take Valium,’ he responded. ‘I use it all the time, you’ll sleep like a baby.’ I ignored his advice.
Of course, if used responsibly – not beyond the recommended doses or frequencies – sleeping pills are fairly harmless. Unfortunately, responsibility was not a characteristic of the pro scene at that time. The recommended doses were seen almost as a challenge by some pros. This was particularly the case with the Cofidis team of 1999. Gaumont and Vandenbroucke, in particular, took this to levels that most doctors would doubtless deem impossible.
I didn’t really know the scale of what was going on inside the team when I got to Spain. Gaumont and VDB could be charming when they were in the mood, but there were continuous rumours that they were out of control, running amok in hotels late at night. There was a story doing the rounds in the peloton of them ‘borrowing’ the team camping car late at night and taking it to a local brothel. Like many other tales of excess, this seemed pretty far-fetched. Of course, it turned out to be true.
I continued my good form in Valencia. Lance Armstrong, now with the US Postal team, had returned to the sport after his illness. I had been sitting at the back of the bunch on the first climb of the first stage, chatting to him, when all the attacking started. He was in a bad way and told me that if I was feeling as good as I looked I should go with the break, so taking his advice, off I went.
I ended up attacking, then moving clear on my own and building a 3-minute lead. ONCE and Kelme, at that time Spain’s two best teams, joined forces to chase me down, which seemed to me an overreaction, as we still had 80 kilometres, the final 40 of which were flat and far from in my favour. But that reaction did show that I was beginning to earn respect from the peloton. They were not taking any chances with me taking time on the opening stage of a five-day race – that revealed that they feared me.
