Only a handful of British professionals have proved capable of racing in Europe. Some of them, like Yates, stayed the course and lasted a decade or so, while others struggled to learn the language, failed to get results and finally returned home.
Matt Stephens was a highly talented British pro, a former national champion, capable of far more than simply eking out a living on the stuttering British circuit, something he combined with his job as a customer services manager for Marks & Spencer in Chester. Seven years after the demise of his European career, and now a police officer, when I ask him if he knew of any professional riders who were doping, he says, ‘I think people who have doped – people who haven’t doped – will still say to you that they don’t want to make any comment, not because they want the sport to continue the way it is, but because people are frightened of saying anything and getting their livelihood taken away from them.’
At thirty-eight, he still loves cycling and races regularly on the British circuit. He manages to balance work, family and training, squeezing in about ten hours’ training a week.
Like others before him, he had always dreamed of racing in Europe, but thought the chance had passed him by. So when, in 1999, he was made an offer by the Linda McCartney team, it didn’t take long to make a decision.
‘I’d almost given up when the McCartneys hired me, because I was nearly thirty. I was at peak form and my natural strength was at its highest. I was pretty much the number one on the UK circuit.’
Stephens had been riding for a Harrods-sponsored team until the middle of 1999. ‘There was a mutual respect between Sean Yates and myself and I’d had contact with him and Julian. The McCartney guys were taking it to another level and they offered me a rolling contract to the end of the season.’
Stephens did well enough to be offered a ‘good deal’ for 2000. ‘It was good enough to pack in my day job. It was something I’d always wanted to do and something that I knew probably wouldn’t come around again.’
He was paid an initial salary of £20,000, plus occasional bonuses. ‘To be honest, that was what a lot of the guys on the team were on at that time. I had no illusions, but I couldn’t have accepted anything less than that. I was hopeful of developing it and staying pro for five or six years, building up to something quite reasonable. With a sponsor like McCartney and people like Sean on board, I was pretty certain it would continue. It looked like a good proposition.’
The highpoint of Stephens’ year with the McCartneys came at the 2000 Giro d’Italia. ‘It was the peak of my career really. I was on the start ramp for the prologue among all the guys I’d admired growing up. It was no mean feat for a British rider. I was so chuffed, being there with Marco Pantani and the others.’
The fact that the day before the prologue, Stephens, like all the riders in the Giro field, had been invited to an audience with the Pope, illustrates the importance of cycling to Italian life. ‘Eddy Merckx was there as well. I’m not a religious person, but that in itself, going to the Vatican, was quite awe-inspiring.’
Stephens remembers that during that Giro there was a great team spirit among the McCartneys. ‘We had a good laugh, although I was disappointed because I crashed early and was basically getting through each day.’
In the end, despite his best efforts, he was forced to quit the race in the final week, almost within sight of the race finish in Milan. ‘I cried,’ he recalls. ‘To get that far, given the condition that I was in, was still fantastic.’
Yet it was on that Giro that Stephens realised the extent of cycling’s dark side.
‘You are aware of what’s going on. It is an eye-opener. But Britain is an island – we’ve got a different culture. For example, British Cycling has this academy – you can ride clean with the academy but end up abroad where they’ve got a completely different ethic. I know that it’s just so corrupt.’
Even now? I ask. ‘There’re guys now who are preaching who I know have been some of the worst abusers of drugs. EPO use was pretty rife – everybody knows that. We were quite rigorously tested by the “vampires”. [The Giro] was edgy, because you knew that certain individuals were doing it, that hotels were raided by the police. It had got to the stage where you knew you could end up inside. It was quite frightening, but it was just glossed over by the glamour of the sport.’
Stephens admits that he was tempted to dope, but he didn’t. ‘It’s there, it’s available if you want to go down that route. People have got to make decisions, but the temptation was there because you knew how much difference it could make. I’d worn the British champion’s jersey clean and I thought “Why can’t I continue like that?” But then you go to Italy and it’s like, shiiit – it’s just another level entirely. Climbing the mountains you think “This is impossible – what’s going on?” There’s a big gap in performance if you’re not taking anything. And you could still technically take EPO at that time, as long as you were sensible with your levels.’
Stephens has been depressed by the doping scandals of recent years. He is in favour of the introduction of DNA testing as a means of establishing blood profiles. Others are not convinced. Some leading riders are against DNA testing on principle – it’s an invasion of privacy, they say, we’re not common criminals. But that reticence clearly rankles.
‘Why the hell shouldn’t riders give a DNA sample? As a police officer I had to give a DNA sample otherwise they wouldn’t let me have the job. You can say that it’s an infringement of human rights, but if you have got nothing to hide and you love your sport – and you’re not doing the gear – then what’s the problem?’
In the end, Stephens’ own European dream was short-lived. The unravelling of the Linda McCartney team in January 2001, when Julian Clark’s promises of continuing sponsorship came to nothing, was, he says, ‘awful’.
Until Clark’s last stand, Stephens had believed he’d agreed a contract with the team for 2001. ‘I felt like I’d been punched in the stomach. I had a mortgage to pay and no job. I had to sign on.
‘Julian was a very chatty guy and I got on with him well. I considered him a friend and I think he had the best intentions. He had the patter and a hell of a lot of drive. His intention was to realise a dream. At the end of the day, we rode a Grand Tour and we rode some brilliant races, but we didn’t know the truth about the finances. He did very well in shielding us from that.
‘I just wish he’d have handled it differently. What he should have done was told us that he couldn’t guarantee a team for the next year and that we could go out and look for other teams to ride for. But I think he had dug such a hole that he couldn’t get out of it.
‘I know he had initial talks with Jaguar and Jacob’s Creek … but on the back of that, he basically bankrolled the team with loans in lieu of sponsorship money that was never going to turn up.
‘The primary thing was the name McCartney – we thought it was invincible. But it wasn’t.’
There were thirty-five to forty full- and part-time jobs lost in the debacle, with Julian Clark seen as the villain of the piece.
‘The worst part was that I’d spoken with Dave Millar that summer at the National Championships and he’d asked me if I’d like to ride for Cofidis the following year. I’d said, “Yeah, I’d love to,” but also that I believed in the way the McCartney team was going and was hoping to build it up for the next year. So I turned down a ride with Dave … But on the other hand,’ says Matt Stephens, ‘look what happened to Cofidis and Dave – maybe that was fate intervening.’
THE END OF THE AFFAIR
AS THE 2000 season loomed, Clark was torn between remaining a big fish in a small pond, by developing the team as a UK and USA squad, or trying his luck in Europe, where risks were higher, but rewards far greater. Once Julian had taken the plunge and opted for Europe, he moved the team to the south of France, near Toulouse. The stakes had got higher. Julian and his team were now committed to winning at the elite level.
Toulouse, with an international airport and a g
ood motorway network, was an ideal location. ‘It was far easier to get back and forth from races in Europe. From England, with a limited budget, you can’t do it.’
Clark moved his wife, Tracey, and their two kids out to France and set up an office and a service course, or team warehouse, for equipment and spare parts. The team’s budget had increased by only £150,000, but Clark remained optimistic of further sponsorship.
‘There was an ongoing plan for Heinz to come on board. McVitie’s had the licence to sell and distribute Linda McCartney foods, but they were only sold in the UK. For the Linda brand to be sold worldwide, Heinz planned to buy the frozen-food division of McVitie’s, including Linda McCartney foods. It was supposed to be done before the 2000 season and they were going to come in to enable us to go to the next level. But this dragged on and on. Meantime, I’d gone to Toulouse, set up there, was signing riders and planning to develop the team.’ To keep things going until the Heinz-McVitie’s deal came through, and to ensure the Tour de France dream remained alive, Clark set up an overdraft to cover the shortfall.
Half a dozen or so more experienced riders came on board for the 2000 season. These included Max Sciandri, the Anglo-Italian rider and Olympic medallist, who now works for British Cycling, Swiss Pascal Richard, a veteran stage-race rider and winner of the Olympic road race at the Atlanta Games, Norwegian Bjornar Vestol, Italian Maurizio De Pasquale and Tayeb Braikia from Denmark.
The 2000 Giro d’Italia proved to be a deep-end experience for Julian Clark. The pressure on him to land more sponsorship was intense and his balancing act grew more precarious by the day. ‘My overdraft was up to here,’ he says, raising his hand above his head. ‘I was still paying the riders out of my Lloyds bank account. I was sitting in the back of the team car on the phone to the bank every day. It was horrendous.’
Unexpectedly, the team won a stage in the Giro through David McKenzie, and then took second place in the following day’s stage. That made Clark increasingly convinced that, surely, Heinz would come on board. ‘But,’ Julian says, with some understatement, ‘I think maybe I was being over-optimistic.’
Working alongside Clark at the Giro was assistant directeur Chris Lillywhite. Both men were taken aback by the dopinig practices they encountered at that year’s race. ‘I was like, “This is how it is – this is what real cycling is,” said Lillywhite. “This is what’s behind the real sport.” It becomes the normal thing to do, rather than the extraordinary thing to do.’
Lillywhite has very little involvement in professional cycling these days. He works in London as a plumber and he’s busy on jobs most of the week. On his days off he heads off to Stamford Bridge to watch Chelsea. He says he’s out of touch with cycling, that he was only ever a ‘small-time’ pro, but as a former Milk Race winner and one of the outstanding riders of his generation, his name still resonates with British cycling fans.
‘I was a small-time rider based in the UK,’ he remembers. ‘The drugs thing was there but it wasn’t prolific when I was a rider. In the 1980s there was maybe a little bit of amphetamine going around. I would say it was quite innocent compared to how things are now.
‘From being a small-time rider on small teams, and then being catapulted into European cycling, did open my eyes to the fact that to get on and compete with the best, you had to be “preparing” yourself. They call it “the programme” – whether that’s taking illegal substances is down to how you interpret it. But it opened my eyes to how involved the medical side was.
‘I’d played at racing for ten years in the UK, but it was easy street. You know, you ride around for an hour in a city centre, pick up your money – but then you go to Europe and see guys busting their balls, doing all sorts of stuff to their body and quite often, not even making as much money as we were in the UK. They wanted to climb the ladder, to get to the top.
‘I never took any drugs during my career. As far as my sporting career goes, I never felt I needed to, because I wasn’t at that level.
‘But,’ he says, ‘I’d do it now, one hundred per cent. Because looking back at my career, I feel like I underachieved and I feel like I could have done a little bit better, I could have got a European contract.
‘I didn’t have the hunger to do it – I wasn’t willing to do what it took. I think I could have achieved a lot more. If that had involved some sort of medical programme, then, looking back, I would have done it.’
The only time I ever travelled with the Linda McCartney team on a European race day turned into a very strange day indeed. Julian arranged a seat in the number one team car driven by Sean Yates at the Belgian Classic, Ghent-Wevelgem. At the first feed zone of the race, I hopped into the passenger seat alongside Sean when he pulled over to pick up more food and drink from the team soigneurs.
Yates flung the car back into the race convoy and I quickly realised that things weren’t going well. Spencer Smith, the former world triathlon champion, who was hoping to break into road racing, had been the first to quit, and Max Sciandri, supposedly the team’s Classics specialist, was having an off day.
Things got worse. Sciandri was left behind by the front group of riders and found himself racing in no-man’s-land. At one point he was overtaken by a muscular one-legged rider in Cofidis kit, a moment that did little for Max’s already fragile ego. Later, David Millar told me that his Cofidis team also sponsored a high-achieving, amputee paralympian, who often snuck onto the back of race convoys to test himself against the pros.
Race radio wasn’t working well either. Madonna occasionally crackled across the short-wave announcements as the signal came and went, filling the team car with doodling beats as we strained for news of what was happening at the front of the race. When the race radio’s signal finally came back, we found out that Erik Zabel, then leader of the Telekom team, had crashed – after an encounter with a rogue pony.
Sciandri meanwhile rode on, but his mood was sombre. Off the pace, off the back, out of contention – Sciandri’s failure spoke volumes about the team’s true place in cycling’s pecking order. Finally, after he’d dropped further behind, Yates pulled alongside his team leader once more.
‘Is that it?’ he bellowed bluntly at Sciandri. Max braked and slowed to a halt, clipping his feet out of the pedals in one motion. He climbed into the team car with barely a word. I was demoted to the back seat. Max sat beside Sean, his defences up, adopting the monosyllabic sulk that characterised other disappointing moments in his career. We drove on to the finish, passing US Postal’s Frankie Andreu, Yates’ old Motorola teammate, further along the road. Yates slowed the car, wound down a window and called out a greeting. The American looked across with weary eyes.
‘Oh – hi Sean,’ responded Andreu, disinterestedly, as he pedalled on towards the finish.
Julian Clark’s grand design finally collapsed in January 2001. Crippled by lack of sponsorship, the Linda McCartney team fell apart at its pre-season get-together. The financial insecurities that Julian had battled to stave off came home to roost. There was no deal with Heinz. All the broken promises and missed payments turned team personnel against him. Julian went to ground. In the fallout, he took most of the blame, his defence further undermined by his absence, he says through illness, from the final painful meetings in a hotel in Surrey.
Clark had been undone by his own reckless ambition and by some ill-conceived strategies. The straw that broke the camel’s back may have been his decision to bring retired former Festina rider, Neil Stephens, to the team as a sports director alongside Yates.
Stephens had always maintained his innocence of any wrongdoing, but the Australian’s connections to the Festina Affair in 1998 made his appointment foolhardy. After all the fuss, Stephens only really worked for the McCartneys on one race – the 2001 Tour Down Under. More importantly for Clark’s bank balance and for the future of his team, the negative publicity, both in Britain and Australia, over somebody from that team mentoring young riders, appeared to give potential sponsor Jacob’s Creek col
d feet.
Not that the winemaker was expected to provide hard cash. As 2001 began, the Heinz deal, with a budget of £1.7 million, was still supposedly about to drop into place, so Julian optimistically offered Jacob’s Creek the chance to sponsor the team – free of charge. ‘I said, “We’ll show you what we can do, with a view to 2002.”’ He was also talking to Jaguar and, taking a chance, decided to order team clothing with both brands prominently displayed. All of it turned out to be wishful thinking.
‘I was driving around the péripherique in Toulouse with Tracey, and I got a call from the marketing director at Heinz in the States. “Me and the guys have had a meeting and we’re not going to go ahead with the team.”’ Julian exploded. ‘I’d always shown this guy a lot of respect and brown-nosed a bit, but I just said, “What the fuck do you mean?! What am I supposed to do now?” And he said, “I suggest you take this up with Sir Paul …”’
In the end, the stress of it all overwhelmed Julian. At the time, it was reported that he had suffered a heart attack, but he says this was not the case. Instead, his mind and body fried by the nervous exhaustion of the previous few months, he became a recluse. He was widely blamed by the Linda McCartney riders and staff, vilified as a chancer and con man in the British cycling press and publicly criticised by both Sean Yates and Neil Stephens. Some of it, he acknowledges, was deserved, but nonetheless all of it hurt. His overdraft, he claims, stood at £180,000 when the team folded. In a matter of weeks, he was declared bankrupt.
In the aftermath, Julian was depressed, but he was angry too. He still hadn’t given up, even if, in his desperation, the situation now became as comic as it was tragic. ‘I thought, well, what if I could come up with a replacement sponsor to support the British riders and me?’
After flying the flag for vegetarianism, his first port of call was, quite naturally, British Meat. Julian must have thought his luck was in when his pitch was well received by the marketing director, Alan Lamb, but events conspired against him. ‘Then came the foot and mouth outbreak,’ he recalls, ‘and that was that.’
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