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.
Even though medical supervision was still required, EPO made blood manipulation generally accessible for the first time. And with it, a new generation of sports doctors emerged who openly refused to condemn its use in sport. At the forefront of these was Michele Ferrari, an Italian whose name was to become inextricably linked to that of Lance Armstrong.
There’s no doubt that Ferrari – nicknamed ‘Schumi’ after Formula 1 legend Michael Schumacher – helps his clients go faster. But he is expensive and only the best-paid riders can afford him. Ferrari, who is still actively working with several leading riders, maintains that all his advice is ethical, but in 1994, challenged by French newspaper L’Equipe about EPO use, he scoffed at concerns over blood doping, in an exchange which has passed into the folklore of the sport. (It is worth remembering that at this time EPO was not banned, nor was there a test to detect it.)
L’EQUIPE: Do your riders use EPO?
FERRARI: I don’t prescribe this stuff, but you can buy EPO in Switzerland without a prescription. If a rider does that, it doesn’t scandalise me.
L’EQUIPE: But EPO is dangerous – ten Dutch riders have died in the last few years.
FERRARI: EPO is not dangerous: it’s the abuse of EPO that is. It’s also dangerous to drink ten litres of orange juice …
After saying that, Ferrari became something of a pariah. The team he advised at the time, Gewiss, soon dispensed with his services. As concerns over EPO abuse grew, riders became discreet over their contact with him. He stayed clear of the major races yet hovered unseen in the background of the sport, maintaining his big-name clients.
But despite the warnings of the European press, EPO use in cycling became rampant. It was, and remains, a wonder drug. It is easily available, portable and user-friendly. It achieves results. But there are dangers.
The tales of riders, haematocrit levels soaring, blood thick as sludge, being woken during the night by panicking team staff to prevent cardiac arrests, have become cycling’s urban myths. Most journalists have a story of the night they stayed in the Team X hotel and were disturbed in the early hours by slamming doors, panicked voices and the steady whirr of riders training on stationary bikes in their bedrooms, battling to speed their circulation.
They were the lucky ones; some of the others didn’t wake up in time.
To state the obvious, blood is fluid. Thickening it beyond the heart’s tolerance, through overuse of artificial EPO, can prove fatal. It remains impossible to put an exact figure on the number of athletes who have suffered heart failure through their blood being thickened to deadly extremes. But these days, only the most blinkered dispute that EPO use in cycling became endemic and in some cases led to fatalities.
Some European media reports estimate that between 1987 and 1990, up to seventeen Dutch and Belgian cyclists may have died due to their ill-fated dalliance with EPO. It is certain that many more have since experimented and then become regular users. Those riders were the hapless guinea pigs of a doping revolution.
Twenty years on, the use of EPO has become more sophisticated. Now smaller and more regular doses – known as ‘micro-dosing’ – are in vogue. ‘Artificial boosting of haematocrit levels a week or more before a race can be maintained by micro-dosing with EPO three times a week – and still go undetected,’ says Michel Audran, a Montpellier-based doping expert.
Faced with this tidal wave of blood doping, with Ferrari’s ambivalence over the dangers of EPO, and with growing fears over the riders’ health, what did the UCI do?
Until the 1998 Festina Affair provided irrefutable evidence of widespread EPO use, the UCI remained in denial. Cycling, like other sports, had been desperately in need of a definitive EPO test. But at the same time, the development of a successful test could have proved a commercial disaster for a sport that was enjoying a global boom in popularity. If most riders had mastered the use of EPO, a flurry of high-profile positives would have been a public relations nightmare.
How many riders would be caught and how well known would they be? What would be the repercussions legally? What would this do both to corporate and public support of cycling? Would the sponsors cut and run? Faced with this dilemma, the UCI froze in the headlights and opted for a fudge.
In 1997, the UCI introduced blood ‘health checks’. In an attempt to end the rampant abuse of EPO, a fifty per cent haematocrit level was imposed and early morning blood testing introduced. For most observers, there was a palpable sense of relief. But the riders, supposedly behind the test’s introduction, were more ambivalent: the UCI’s visiting medical team was quickly nicknamed ‘the vampires’.
The ‘health checks’ were not a doping test – EPO itself was still undetectable – although it was clear that those with haematocrit levels beyond that magic and seemingly arbitrary figure of fifty per cent would be under intense suspicion. There was no punishment for a failed test; merely a two-week suspension from racing, to ‘protect the rider’s health’. Once back under the fifty per cent threshold, riders were allowed to resume their careers.
But the suspicion grew that the fifty per cent limit was in fact a tacit legalisation of EPO use, although this suggestion has been vehemently denied by UCI presidents Hein Verbruggen and his successor, Pat McQuaid. It’s clear that those with naturally high haematocrit, say of forty-six or forty-seven per cent, have a significant natural advantage over athletes with lower haematocrit. With the fifty per cent limit in place, those with naturally lower haematocrit levels – sometimes as little as thirty-six per cent – now had free rein to top up their red blood cell count and to overcome their natural inferiority. Thus donkeys became thoroughbreds. Everybody could be champion for a day. Unwittingly a level playing field was created, though perhaps not of the kind that the UCI intended. Verbruggen, however, considers this analysis to be ‘bullshit’.
In fact, the UCI went to court to defend their reputation
after the Festina Affair. They were awarded one euro in damages, but, McQuaid says, the ruling ‘stated that the UCI couldn’t have done any more to inform the riders of the dangers of doping’. Yet many experts disagree. Mario Cazzola, of the University of Pavia School of Medicine’s Haematology Division, believes that the UCI’s ‘health check’ was inherently flawed. The UCI had based their fifty per cent limit on the results of tests carried out in competition during the Tour of Romandie. However, Cazzola suggests that the baseline for the ‘health check’ should have been established through out-of-competition testing. Out-of-competition haematocrit – when athletes are not suffering the strain of intense competition – should be higher than in-competition haematocrit, when fatigue takes its toll on the red blood cell level. The results of the in-competition ‘health checks’ revealed that many of the riders seemed to have a surprisingly high haematocrit level of forty-nine per cent – some three per cent higher than the figure the UCI itself deemed ‘average’. Even so, the UCI’s suspicions were not aroused and they held to the planned fifty per cent limit. Perhaps, given the commercial growth of the sport and the pressure from teams and riders to not undermine them, this limit was no surprise. At fifty per cent, everybody was a winner; the UCI showed that it was getting tough – and the riders could still dose up on EPO.
Cazzola believes that the fifty per cent limit is an inducement for athletes to ‘top up’ their blood through micro-dosing without risk of detection: ‘This is the only explanation I can provide for the elevated haematocrit values frequently found in some professional athletes. Haematocrit levels greater than forty-seven per cent are found in only one or two out of a hundred elite soccer players.
Bad Blood Page 3
