Bad Blood

by Jeremy Whittle

  Stapleton nodded and listened. But he sounded as if he was shooting for the stars when he said that ‘what’s different is that T-Mobile is now a like-minded group of managers, athletes and sponsors, focussed on the mission. We consciously went through a clean-out – we changed most of our people – and now we have over twenty-five new people in terms of management and athletes. We have a medical advisory board that makes sure that all of our methods are the best, both in terms of anti-doping and in terms of athlete development.’

  A reliance on doping, he argued, is based on ignorance. ‘The philosophy behind doping starts with thinking that everybody is doing it, that to be on a level playing field it’s necessary, and that you’re disadvantaged if you don’t do it. But in many cases the riders have very little information. They hear things, they’re told things by people that seem influential and once they start, it’s a very slippery slope. It’s very hard to change. The psychology of doping is treacherous.’

  Team insiders said that T-Mobile came within a hair’s breadth of pulling out of cycling when the sky fell in Strasbourg and Ullrich’s reputation collapsed. The spin was that the sponsor had stayed to clean things up and to set a good example. Even so, there were still riders in T-Mobile’s squad whose good intentions had been questioned in the past. Giuseppe Guerini, tormentor of Filippo Simeoni, was still there, as was multiple world champion Michael Rogers, whose working relationship – although terminated – with Michele Ferrari became public knowledge during the 2006 Tour.

  Stapleton continued, explaining that the riders would adhere to a new, more personalised training regime and follow a daily ‘Pillar Strength’ routine with a team of American fitness specialists who had also worked with Jurgen Klinsmann’s highly successful German national football team. But I sat there thinking, that’s great – and where will they get that extra twenty per cent that Frankie Andreu believed EPO gave him? From a Pillar Strength routine?

  ‘We definitely have athletes who have come because they are fed up and they want to be in an environment where they feel they can develop naturally and there is no pressure. If we can bring some fresh clean faces that have a commitment to anti-doping we will regain public interest.’

  It was a stirring speech.

  When he ended it, despite my misgivings, I was, for a brief moment, up there with Bob Stapleton, flying the flag, waving to the cheering crowds, imagining that bright new tomorrow, free of the syringes and the omerta and the bitterness, embracing that new dawn that cycling so desperately needed.

  I walked away with a spring in my step and a warm and sunny feeling towards my fellow man. But then I heard Kimmage’s voice telling me, ‘No second chances …’ and then Lance’s voice, growling about ‘protecting the interests of the peloton’, and I checked myself and realised that it was really not as simple as Bob Stapleton imagined it was.

  And then I remembered that the last time I’d felt the same ‘we are the world’ glow was when the northern bottlenose whale was winched out of the Thames, with people cheering from the riverbank in Battersea Park and the collective love of the British capital willing it to survive. But the whale died.

  Stapleton had talked of creating a ‘clean and fair’ team, one that could win from March until October. The big question as the minivans ferried the press back to Palma airport, was could T-Mobile’s riders achieve results if they were all, as he insisted, clean?

  Sitting beside me in the departure lounge, a German journalist poured scorn on T-Mobile’s transformation under Stapleton. ‘How can they win any races without doping, without any leaders, when other teams are doping?’ he said. ‘This is PR bullshit. It won’t work.’

  After Operacíon Puerto cut a swathe through the starters at the 2006 Tour de France, there was a notion, based on little more than a feel-good factor, that the race was somehow purged of doping.

  On the night before his victory parade on the Champs-Elysées, Floyd Landis didn’t want to talk about doping. ‘Got any other questions?’ he snapped, at the winner’s press conference, when Operacíon Puerto became the main theme. The sentiment that, with the Fuentes network in disarray, it had been a cleaner Tour, didn’t last long. Two nights after I got home from Paris, the biggest story of all broke.

  Late in the evening, I stood in my back garden, mobile pressed to my ear. Music was blaring from an open window on the other side of the wall. My phone beeped ominously as the battery ran down.

  ‘You’re sure? At Morzine? It’s definitely Floyd?’

  The voice at the other end of the phone, speaking softly from a deserted office block in central Paris, assured me again that it was indeed Floyd Landis who had tested positive for testosterone, just two days after celebrating victory in the 2006 Tour de France.

  ‘Ouai … c’est sur. Jeremy – yes.’

  ‘D’accord, merci. Thank you – à bientôt.’

  My phone beeped once more and then went dead.

  I ran inside, grabbed my wife’s phone and called the UCI president, Pat McQuaid.

  I apologised for calling so late and then in the same breath said: ‘The positive – it’s Landis, isn’t it?’

  He wouldn’t confirm or deny the rumours.

  But he did say this: ‘I’m extremely angry. The credibility of the sport is at stake. It’s the worst-case scenario.’

  And after Pat McQuaid had said that, I knew that it just had to be Floyd.

  As he has got older, Greg LeMond has become increasingly outspoken. At first he was discreet about his opinions; now he shouts them from the rooftops.

  ‘I told Floyd Landis the other day,’ he was saying, ‘I want to believe that I would have been somebody who was strong enough to say no, but I can’t be sure of that because I didn’t come into cycling in 1993, 1994, 1995, when blood doping was rampant. I didn’t have to make that choice.’

  LeMond has been through the mill over the past few years. He has been tested by dark secrets from his childhood, by his son’s addiction problems, by his own reliance on alcohol – now a thing of the past, he says – and by the strain all of this has put on his marriage to Kathy.

  A few months after the news over Floyd’s positive test broke, Greg spoke to him on the phone. LeMond recalled the conversation. ‘He’d got two positive tests for synthetic testosterone out of one sample, and I was just saying, “Please – don’t do a Tyler Hamilton.”’

  Landis was taken aback by LeMond’s advice. Immediately afterwards, his strict upbringing in the obscure and separatist Mennonite religion showed when he told an Internet forum that he would rather ‘talk to Satan before Greg LeMond’.

  When I interviewed him over email, Landis explained further: ‘Greg basically told the press that I called him and admitted that I had doped. No such thing ever happened. I was legitimately upset when I made that comment on the forum,’ he told me.

  LeMond scorned Landis’ anger. ‘I’ve gone through my own personal change in the last three or four years and have looked at myself in terms of who I am. I didn’t want to upset anybody. I always wanted people to like me, but that was at a personal cost to me. I let people take advantage of me. I’ve decided to stand up for my own principles, regardless of whether it’s unpopular or not.’

  Landis also wrote on his website, ‘If I reveal what Greg told me, it would destroy his character.’

  LeMond insisted that he was only trying to save Landis from the pain of living a lie. ‘I told Floyd that I’d lived with a secret for most of my life and it almost destroyed my marriage.’ He paused. ‘The secret was that I was sexually abused before I got into cycling.

  ‘I felt bad for Floyd – he’d been writing the most disgusting mean things about me, comparing me to Satan. I was trying to tell him, that if he did indeed take testosterone, that to go on having to defend yourself and live in fear of somebody finding out that you really did cheat, that the cost emotionally is so much greater than the short-term shame and embarrassment of coming clean.

  ‘I’m not a saint,’ Greg c
ontinued. ‘I’ve got stuff in my life, in my past that on a personal level I am not proud of, but I am human and we all have flaws. The fact that I can tell you about being abused – I mean, four years ago I couldn’t even tell my wife without a bottle of Scotch in me. But I was really forced to face it because I was going to lose my family.’

  Poor Floyd. What a catastrophe winning the Tour was for him. For those who cheered him on, from disastrous failure to heroic comeback, who supported him to ‘victory’, the sense of waste was equally overpowering – wasted time, wasted hopes, wasted effort.

  I had never warmed to Landis. I first spoke to him one spring evening long ago when he was racing for the ill-fated Mercury team, ironically on LeMond-branded bikes. He was sitting on the edge of the curb outside the team hotel. He’d been friendly enough. But, once into the US Postal bubble, in the orbit of Armstrong and Bruyneel, his head seemed to be turned.

  On procycling, we’d developed a habit of picking out new talent, rather than sticking to the same old faces. Landis hadn’t won any big races, but he had attitude and stood out from the crowd. And he was a little intriguing too, his quaint turn of phrase, a hangover from his strictly religious upbringing, now punctuated by good ol’ boy characteristics, such as his penchant for ZZ Top.

  But with attitude and ego came petulance. Floyd had a tendency to sulk, when things didn’t work out. On the 2004 Paris-Nice, he finished third on the stage to Gap. Not such a blow you might think, but he stomped into the team bus in a huff and wouldn’t come to the door to talk to a handful of journalists waiting in the rain.

  A couple of days later, as the teams lined up on the promenade des Anglais on the final morning of the race in Nice, I decided to try again. I bounded up to him, exchanged greetings, and then said, as we had said to others before him: ‘We want to put you on the cover of procycling magazine!’

  Normally, the rider’s face lit up. Not Floyd’s. He was sullen and unimpressed. ‘Talk to my agent,’ he said bluntly and rode off down the boulevard.

  He could be as graceless in victory as he was in defeat. In his Tour winner’s press conference, two years later, the evening before his victory parade in Paris, as the repercussions of Operacíon Puerto swirled around the race, he opted to play dumb.

  Did he think that Puerto, which even Lance Armstrong, Landis’ mentor and former team captain, had described as ‘probably the biggest scandal since the Festina Affair’, and the absence of Ullrich and Basso devalued his Tour win?

  ‘I don’t know anything about that,’ he said.

  Somebody asked him again: ‘Look, as you keep asking, I’ll say that it was an unfortunate situation and none of us got any satisfaction out of the fact that they weren’t here – got any questions about anything else?’

  Floyd was the latest ex-US Postal rider to emerge from the shadow of Lance with a depressing story: a career-threatening illness or injury, a heroic comeback, followed swiftly by an indignant fan-based crusade to fight the injustice of the doping allegations made against him.

  Floyd’s immediate predecessor was Tyler Hamilton, who rode a whole Tour with a broken collarbone yet still might have won the race. But Floyd’s against-all-odds story was perhaps the more extreme, as he won the world’s hardest bike race on one leg, due to a degenerative hip injury.

  Both Hamilton and Landis adhered to the same blueprint. Hamilton fought a long battle to clear his name of blood doping, at one point citing a disappearing twin in his mother’s womb. ‘Maybe he should hire an exorcist,’ Dick Pound said. Landis, humiliated within hours of celebrating his 2006 Tour win, blamed a mid-Tour bender and came up with the ‘Whiskey Defence’.

  In fact, the alarm bells about Landis were ringing long before he won the 2006 Tour. Halfway through the race, he held a press conference and decided to tell the world about his crumbling hip joint, damaged in a training crash while with US Postal a couple of years earlier. He had a therapeutic exemption to take cortisone from the UCI; effectively a licence to take drugs to counter the pain of his hip injury.

  In the end, though, it wasn’t the cortisone that caught up with him, but the testosterone. So when in July 2006, ‘Floyd the Void’ tested positive and came tumbling down from his perch, blaming the whiskey, blaming the French lab, there was little sympathy for him. At least, not from me.

  Call it Schadenfreude, or maybe just call it compassion fatigue. There’s no doubt that his career was ruined by the ensuing scandal. But then, a part of me thinks that Floyd Landis, however intelligent, got what he and his fucked-up, hypocritical, self-serving ethos really deserved.

  After he tested positive, Floyd Landis fought back. And in doing so he made things much worse for everybody.

  His positive test, hot on the heels of Puerto, may have been the ‘worst-case scenario’ for the UCI and the Tour, but the real nadir came in the late spring of 2007, when paedophilia, doping and witness intimidation became the currency of the Landis doping hearing in Malibu, California.

  Landis had spent months protesting his innocence. He had launched the Floyd Fairness Fund, attracting huge donations from supportive fans, claiming that the case wasn’t really about him, but about the integrity of anti-doping; he had attacked WADA and their protocols and accused the French anti-doping lab in Châtenay-Malabry of incompetence and bias. Yet the two positive tests for synthetic testosterone still hung over his head.

  So the Landis camp tried a new tactic. The night before Greg LeMond was due to appear as a witness against Landis, Will Geoghegan, Landis’ business manager and an active fundraiser for the Floyd Fairness Fund, called LeMond and impersonated the uncle who had sexually abused him as a child.

  The call left LeMond in a state of shock, but through the police he traced it back to Geoghegan’s cellphone. The next morning, as he gave evidence, LeMond held up his BlackBerry with Geoghegan’s number clearly displayed. The Landis team held their heads in their hands. Geoghegan promptly apologised but Landis sacked his business manager on the spot. A day later, it was announced that Geoghegan had gone into rehab, after claiming that, unprompted by Landis, he had only called LeMond in a drunken rage. Once again, the booze was to blame.

  It’s to his credit that Greg LeMond still describes Floyd Landis as ‘a good guy’, well educated and decent. He considers Tyler Hamilton in the same light. ‘I don’t believe Tyler is some kind of thief who would cheat or steal normally. But it’s the culture of the sport that convinces an ethical normal person that this is what you have to do.’

  It’s well over twenty years since LeMond became the first American to win the Tour de France. It’s a decade since 1998, when doping first threatened to destroy the race, a scandal that fuelled the formation of WADA. From Festina to Floyd, LeMond agrees that little about cycling’s culture has really changed.

  ‘Lance always says that it’s the people who speak out who are destroying the sport. No – it’s the cheats who are destroying the sport. I’m not destroying it by speaking out, nor is Christophe Bassons, nor Filippo Simeoni or anybody else who speaks out. Because,’ says Greg LeMond, ‘if you can’t recognise there’s a problem, then you never cure the problem.’

  GRILLING THE CHICKEN

  MICHAEL RASMUSSEN COCKED his bald, sculpted head and anxiously eyed the audience of journalists dissecting his every word.

  There were plenty of questions. There were questions about what he had told his team, Rabobank, about his whereabouts in the build-up to the 2007 Tour de France, questions about what he had told the UCI, questions about why he had missed four out-of-competition doping tests, questions about why he, as a Dane, seemed so determined to avoid taking out a racing licence in his home country, where anti-doping had become a burning issue.

  It all came down to trust.

  ‘Yes – you can trust me,’ Rasmussen told the media in response to a question from Lars Werge, the equally bald, equally sculpted, and deeply inquisitive journalist from Ekstra Bladet in Denmark.

  The towering, softly-spoken Werge was Ras
mussen’s principal inquisitor. A former international high jumper turned journalist, Lars has the languid limbs of a giraffe and the cranium of the Mekon. Naturally, his physique made him unmissable, as he strolled between team cars and buses in start villages and finish areas, scrutinising the world from behind his Ray-Bans. Lars stood out. He was lofty enough to shade under on a hot afternoon.

  During the 2001 Tour, his giraffe-like physique had even alarmed the implacable Armstrong. One morning we gathered around the doors of the US Postal bus. Lance dutifully appeared and we crowded around him. Lars asked him questions about the latest doping allegations. Not for the first time, he patted them away as old, dead, meaningless, but then concluded by rather smugly telling Lars, ‘You’d understand that – if you had ever been an elite athlete.’

  Lars paused and glowered at the Texan. He craned his elastic neck and leaned closer to Armstrong. ‘Actually, Lance,’ he hissed, ‘I was.’ Armstrong was soon back in the bus.

  Now, with the Alpine stages of the 2007 Tour de France looming on the horizon and Rasmussen moving into contention for victory, Werge had to make a choice. Could Rasmussen be trusted? The ‘Chicken’, as the pale and pasty Rasmussen was nicknamed, had been anonymous since the London prologue. Now, he was ready to challenge. But his twitchy and uneasy appearances before the media only enhanced the impression of an athlete with something to hide.

  Ten days earlier, Rasmussen’s name had gone unnoticed. As the teams gathered in London for the start of the 2007 Tour, the focus had been on Vinokourov, Riis, Kasechkin, and, of course, Ferrari, as Ken Livingstone’s attempts to force Londoners to embrace his two-wheeled Utopia were washed away by grey skies, foul-mouthed builders and doping, doping – always doping.

  Fighting to hold on to his dream of success in the Tour’s London prologue, on a route that mapped out his life story, Bradley Wiggins found himself assailed by feature writers telling him that cycling was a dirty, dead-end sport. Unsurprisingly, after weeks of defending his sport, he was in a grump. Like others, he seemed exhausted and wrung out by the constant questions on drugs. To make things worse, ‘Wiggo’ had been abused by white van man while out training with his Cofidis teammates.