Even prior to that, he wasn’t speaking to many people, least of all me. A little problem had surfaced between us in the build-up to the Tour. He felt that something I’d written had betrayed his trust. That misunderstanding culminated in him sending me an angry text message.
I liked Bradley – we had even ridden the prologue route together. But then I wrote a speculative news story, legitimately quoting his team manager Eric Boyer as saying that he might be dropped from the Cofidis team for the Tour unless his results picked up.
Now if you talk to those who know the Olympic gold medallist well, they will shrug and say, ‘So what – he didn’t call you back. It’s happened before.’ But Bradley seemed such a decent bloke, bitterly outspoken about doping, and one of the few riders that I could still feel some kinship with. I hated the notion that he thought I was trying to undermine him.
Wiggins was one of the riders championed as having un-impeachable integrity and credibility – even Kimmage agreed on that. But he blew hot and cold and getting to know him well was a tall order, given his mercurial nature. Only a couple of journalists had really achieved this. But then, perhaps because of some remnants of my own youthful confusion, I had always felt drawn to the anti-Wig – David Millar.
Bradley thawed a little when we met again. ‘I thought you were stirring it,’ he said, with a wry smile. But as London’s poster boy for the Tour’s visit, there was no doubt that he was feeling the pressure of expectation of the opening weekend. Millar, in contrast, had been left to his own devices, a reformed doper coming to terms with the realities of racing in front of home crowds. But, holed up in his hotel, under the lattice of flyovers and interchanges criss-crossing London’s Docklands, the matured Millar, the reborn, evangelical Millar, was having trouble making his voice heard.
There had been gossip about tensions in his relationship with his sponsor Saunier Duval and about his relationship with the team manager, Mauro Gianetti. The rumour, that it had been over the bad habits of some of his teammates and about David’s readiness to condemn doping, had taken hold in the press room. There had been a row and Millar, the story went, had even written to the UCI to see if he could escape the team. Had it really got that bad?
We sat beneath the flyovers, chatting in the coffee bar of the Docklands Crowne Plaza. ‘Cycling is a complete mess at the moment and it’s been building up for years,’ Millar said. ‘It’s going to get worse before it gets better.’
Across the car park, Wiggins and his Cofidis teammates climbed aboard their bike-laden team coach and headed out towards the M25 to train in the quieter lanes of Essex. We watched them leave. Everything had been sorted out with Mauro, Millar said. The disagreement had been resolved. Yet that lunchtime, when his teammates took to the streets, Millar was an exception, opting to train on his stationary bike in the hotel car park.
As I was leaving, Gianetti strolled over and presented him with a new aerodynamic time-trial helmet, emblazoned not only with the Union Jack, but also with an image of Millar in the playboy days of his youth, clutching two glasses of frothing beer. It was flash, but it wasn’t the older, wiser David that I now knew. On the day of the prologue, Millar didn’t wear it.
Back in the press room, I called Pat McQuaid, who confirmed that Millar had written to him about his worries over doping. ‘They were emails discussing anti-doping in general,’ McQuaid told me. I told McQuaid of my sense of Millar’s isolation within his team. He listened.
‘Any rider who is being victimised because of his stance on doping will certainly get the full support of the UCI,’ McQuaid said. ‘There is real change going on and some people are resisting it, but I am convinced that the good will win out.’
I walked up the steps from the Tube station into the sunlit canyon of Victoria Street, paused my iPod and slid my sunglasses onto the top of my head. For a while, I just stood and stared.
Thousands of people – Ken Livingstone’s multicultural sea of Londoners – clutching Tour de France memorabilia, filled the wide road stretching ahead of me. Britain had embraced the Tour. It was going to be a success after all. The churlish begrudging editorials, on both sides of the English Channel, had been proven wrong.
I battled through the crowds in Parliament Square, crammed five deep against the barriers, waiting expectantly for the first riders to leave the start ramp. I bumped into the normally implacable Steve Taylor of Transport for London, his face flushed from the hot sunshine, eyes wide with excitement, jabbering about the size of the crowds. But he had good reason – the West End streets were jammed with people who had come to see the Tour de France.
It was overwhelming. A tunnel of humanity hemmed in the riders as they sped along the prologue route, through Hyde Park and St James’s and back into the Mall. The storybook ending, a Wiggins prologue win, with Millar hot on his heels, didn’t materialise. Instead, it was Fabien Cancellara who took the first yellow jersey of 2007. But it didn’t matter one bit. After the race, a beaming Christian Prudhomme, director of the Tour, appeared on British TV, and struggled to find the right words to capture the moment.
‘Eet was sooo … naice,’ he finally came up with, as if steeped in the sayings of Borat.
Millar, off the pace in the prologue, was missing something. He found it the next morning, in the first road stage, when he left the peloton behind and rode out into Kent at the head of the Tour, cheers ringing in his ears.
We drove across country and joined the race near Tunbridge Wells, rolling slowly through the shady lanes, listening to the updates on Millar’s breakaway on Radio Tour. Beneath our wheels, MILLAR was regularly chalked on the road. We stopped to talk to one group of fans. ‘He’s out the front, is he? Bloody brilliant!’ one said. Didn’t they care that he’d doped? ‘Course not – he’s the most honest one out there,’ we were told.
Further up the road, a group of giggling children had whitewashed bicycles and flags on the tarmac, while in a show of unbridled patriotism, another MILLAR appeared, this time alongside HAMILTON and HENMAN. The smell of British barbecues wafted through the warm afternoon air.
On the few short climbs, heading through the Garden of England and on towards the finish at Canterbury, thousands stood at the roadside, craning their necks to see the race convoy pass. Millar kept up his attack for most of the stage, but faltered before the finish, as the peloton picked up speed and then overhauled him.
All the same, he’d done enough to bag the lead in the King of the Mountains competition, for the first time in his career. Afterwards, he appeared in the team bus compound beyond the stage finish, a faux-smug grin on his face, swaggering around like a teenager in the leading climber’s polka-dot jersey.
Disappointed by his prologue result, he had ridden the stage motivated by childhood memories. ‘I can remember coming to watch the Tour in 1994, when I was a kid, up against the barriers in Brighton, waiting for four hours. Two riders came through and then ten minutes later, Chris Boardman attacked on his own – it made my whole day.
‘I wanted to say thank you to everybody – it was the one opportunity in my life to do that. There were flags everywhere and my name painted on the road,’ he said. ‘I wanted to stop and say hello to everyone. It was amazing.’
Millar was right. The opening two days of the 2007 Tour were amazing. For a moment, we were innocents again. All there was, the whole weekend, was sunshine.
The fantasy of a clean Tour and, even more fantastically, of a French winner – French national champion Christophe Moreau was enjoying inspired form – persisted until Michael Rasmussen’s stage win high in the Alps, among the tower blocks of Tignes.
Ironically, it wasn’t Rasmussen who lowered the tone – although he proved well equipped to do that later – but one of the riders presented in Majorca as among Bob Stapleton’s generation of ‘fresh, clean faces’. The news that Patrik Sinkewitz of T-Mobile had tested positive for testosterone, in an out-of-competition drugs test on 8 June, broke as the race arrived in Tignes.
Like
every other rider in the Tour peloton, Sinkewitz had signed a UCI charter renouncing doping and agreeing to forfeit a year’s salary in the event of a positive test. This was yet another empty promise.
When news of the positive test broke, Sinkewitz, having finished the stage to Tignes, was riding back down the mountainside to his hotel. The fates hadn’t finished with him. He collided with a spectator on the descent and woke up in hospital. That afternoon, the German cycling scene and T-Mobile’s battered sponsorship crashed with him.
In Germany, public service broadcasters ARD and ZDF suspended their coverage of the Tour. ‘We talked about this with the German teams before the Tour,’ Günter Struve, head of programming at ARD, said. ‘They assured us that everybody was clean. Our beliefs and confidence have been altered.’
From then on, however good a spin he put on it, Bob Stapleton was struggling. ‘He’s been caught and that’s healthy for the sport,’ he said. ‘It’s good for the sport in the long term. The team is completely devastated because they really believe in the team’s policy – they’re heartbroken about this.’
ARD, which itself had sponsored T-Mobile in the past, was unimpressed. ‘Our contract stated that we would broadcast the Tour as a competition of clean riders, not of people using doping substances,’ a spokesman said.
The Sinkewitz Affair was merely an aperitif, however. Michael Rasmussen, with his nervous darting eyes and his evasive manner, was about to take centre stage.
Before the 2007 Tour, the UCI’s new anti-doping czar, Anne Gripper, had spoken of a group of riders who trained in plain clothing, rather than in their sponsor’s outfits, to preserve their anonymity. Gripper’s ‘Men In Black’ were shady characters, apparently hoping to avoid recognition when based in the locale of their personal ‘sports doctors’. One of their tactics was rumoured to be logging false whereabouts details in an effort to avoid out-of-competition testing.
The Danish media had doubts about Rasmussen. It emerged that he had been dropped by his national federation, the Danish Cycling Union (DCU), for missing out-of-competition tests. In the days after he had taken the race lead in Tignes, the pressure on him grew. Later in the week, as the Tour convoy rolled out of Montpellier, the Dane was reduced to banging on the window of race director Christian Prudhomme’s car, saying: ‘I’ve done nothing wrong …’
Perhaps if he had been placed ninth overall, with no hope of final victory, Rasmussen might have been left alone. But it was less than a year after Operacíon Puerto and the Landis case remained unfinished business. Nobody wanted Rasmussen in the yellow jersey, leading the Tour through the mountains, seemingly poised for victory.
He was not popular in the peloton either. He rarely shared a room with a teammate and often argued with team mechanics over their refusal to adopt weight-reducing tricks on his equipment. One row was said to have been over a thin layer of paint applied to the handlebars of his bike. Lars Werge saw him as an isolated obsessive, estranged even from some of his Rabobank teammates. The skeletal climber, he recalled, ‘counted every grain of rice’, and even poured water, rather than milk, on his muesli. ‘He’s very intense,’ Lars said.
The Danish tabloids kept up the pursuit. They claimed that Rasmussen had missed up to four out-of-competition tests, under the jurisdiction of both the DCU and the UCI. His sponsor, Rabobank, mounted a half-hearted defence, but even they sounded like they didn’t want him in the race any more. Rasmussen protested his innocence, telling journalists time and time again that he would only answer questions about racing. Catcalls and booing characterised both his appearances on the finish-line podium and in post-race press conferences. Typically, his peers sat on the fence, but David Millar articulated the thoughts of many riders about Rasmussen’s continued presence.
‘He started the race knowing what would happen but did nothing to rectify the situation. Now we are all screwed, and the Tour is in the shit,’ Millar said. ‘He took no notice of warnings from the UCI. He has either been unprofessional or has used the system.’
His ‘You can trust me’ comment haunted Rasmussen. Further allegations against him surfaced, although again he refuted them. Whitney Richards, who had raced mountain bikes alongside him, claimed that in 2002 the Dane had asked him to take a box, containing cycling shoes, to Italy with him. When Richards chose to dump the box in order to pack the shoes away, he claimed to have found bags of an American-branded blood substitute.
Richards said that, after consulting with a physiologist friend, he poured the blood bags away. ‘There was no way that I would carry that onto an airplane or through customs for anyone.’
Still, Rasmussen didn’t want to talk about it. ‘I will only answer questions about the race,’ he said.
Richards waved away suggestions that he was merely jealous of the Dane’s success. ‘It’s not that. It was the press conference that got to me. Someone asked him about Bjarne Riis’ involvement with drugs and he went on about how he’s clean and then added, “You can trust me.” That’s what set me off.’
Everybody knew that Rasmussen should never have started the Tour. Now, with only the Pyrenees remaining, the prospect of him winning in Paris was becoming all too real. The UCI wrung their hands, as ASO railed against them, and both struggled to justify their inaction over his missed tests.
‘In late June, we wrote to Rasmussen and told him that he was on his last chance,’ McQuaid said. ‘His team Rabobank received a letter reiterating those concerns. But no rules have been broken. All we could do was ask the team to exclude him. The guy has a right to race and his team has a right to put him in the race. If Rasmussen wins, there will be question marks over the credibility of his victory, but we cannot operate on the basis of media rumours,’ McQuaid said.
Erik Breukink, a senior team manager with Rabobank, denied that the team had ever received any communications from the UCI. ‘We never heard anything from anybody at the UCI,’ Breukink said. ‘If they wanted to, they should have suspended him. They shouldn’t put responsibility on the teams. ASO points the finger at the UCI and the UCI points back at us.’
Stalemate smothered the race. But there was always another suspect waiting in the wings. Alexander Vinokourov of Kazakhstan, riding for the Astana team and client of Michele Ferrari, was another of the UCI’s ‘Men in Black’.
Vinokourov had expected to win the Tour, but a crash in the first week left him with knees cut so deeply that he could barely walk. He struggled on but lost time, finally breaking down on the finish line in Briançon. Yet ‘Vino’ was about to make an ‘heroic’ comeback. He unleashed an incredible display of power to win the fifty-four kilometre individual time trial, based on a circuit around Albi. If it hadn’t been for Cadel Evans of Australia taking second place, Vinokourov’s Astana team would have filled the top three placings, with teammates Andrey Kasechkin and Andreas Kloden taking third and fourth. L’Equipe hailed his success. ‘Le Courage de Vino’, it called it. No wonder one commentator described the paper as ‘the Pravda of sports journalism’.
And ‘Courage’ quickly turned to ‘Dopage’ when the news broke in Pau that Vinokourov had tested positive for a blood transfusion.
FULL CIRCLE
‘For when the one great scorer comes to write against your name, he marks – not that you won or lost – but how you played the game.’
Grantland Rice
THE PALAIS DES Congrès in Pau is one of the Tour’s more elegant press rooms. It has grandeur. It also has air conditioning, potted palms, a coffee bar and restaurant and a panoramic view of the Pyrenees. There is lots of space for camera crews and photographers. It’s a good place for a stand-off, as Lance Armstrong and David Walsh found out.
Seven years after that confrontation, Michael Rasmussen steeled himself to face a similar inquisition. If the Dane had hoped to clarify his situation over his attitude to testing procedures and to emulate Armstrong’s firm rebuttal of doping allegations, he had been poorly advised. The Chicken turned out to be no match for Big Tex.
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The curtains had been drawn behind Rasmussen to cut out the bright sunlight behind him, the lights dimmed in the Palais des Congrès. It gave his doomed press conference a funereal air. His team’s lawyer, Harro Knijff, sat on one side, his Rabobank manager, Theo de Rooij, on the other.
Rasmussen maintained that he had only failed to comply with anti-doping regulations through what he described as administrative errors. ‘I have made a mistake,’ he said. ‘The UCI has given me a recorded warning for the administrative mistake that I have made. I accept that and I take full responsibility for it. I am sorry that this situation is coming out now, when I am wearing the yellow jersey. It’s harming a sport that I dearly love and it’s harming the Tour de France.
‘I want to make it absolutely clear that I have had out-of-competition tests prior to the Tour de France and up until this morning I have had fourteen anti-doping tests during the Tour,’ Rasmussen said. ‘All the results are negative. I support my team and my sponsor Rabobank in the fight against doping and for a clean sport.’
Then the questions started. Very quickly, Rasmussen lost us. The jumble of excuses and justifications only made things worse. Yes, he had received letters warning him over his conduct, yes, he had held a racing licence in Mexico and Monaco – and, in two and a half years, had never undergone any doping controls in either country – and yes, he had mixed up names and dates and refused to accept the jurisdiction of his own anti-doping agency in Denmark.
So what about his written warning from the UCI in March 2006 over his failure to comply with the whereabouts programme? Rasmussen stated that he had telephoned Anne Gripper, UCI anti-doping services manager, on 2 April to apologise. It sounded plausible – except that Anne Gripper only started working for the UCI on 17 October of that year.
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