For Lance, though, I can imagine the face-off with Kimmage was an early hint that he wouldn’t inspire the same kind of deference the second time around. I saw him again at Milan–San Remo in March, then again at the Giro in May. We talked a fair bit at the Giro, but one thing really struck me: If he had been a capo or patron once—the unelected but also uncontested spokesman and overlord of the peloton who ruled by intimidation—he wasn’t that guy anymore. You can usually spot a capo—when they take a toilet break, the peloton slows immediately until they’ve attended to nature’s call and slotted back into the pack. One day at the 2009 Giro, I was shocked, then, to see Lance pull over to the side of the road and the peloton swish by without batting an eyelid. I caught a glimpse of Lance’s face as he realized, and his expression was one of fury and indignation, perhaps tinged with sadness. You could almost see the penny dropping—I was that guy, but they don’t think I’m that guy anymore.
At the Tour that year, Lance was extremely strong—too strong, according to the United States Anti-Doping Agency (USADA) and the 202-page report in which they laid out their evidence against Armstrong just over a year later. Lance swore to Oprah Winfrey that he didn’t dope for his comeback, but an expert quoted in the USADA report stated that the likelihood of certain anomalies in blood samples taken from Lance during the 2009 and 2010 Tours was “less than one in a million.”
In 2009 and even on the eve of the 2010 Tour, when the Wall Street Journal published allegations aimed at Lance by his old teammate Floyd Landis, I’d paid very little attention to the low, slow drumroll of controversy. Now, though, the idea that Lance had doped to ride that 2009 Tour in which I’d won six stages switched something in me. If the suffering that we sometimes endure in races is hard to convey to the ordinary punter, it’s even more difficult to describe the bitterness of knowing the pain was made even worse by other riders cheating. I had felt the same anger after the 2008 Giro and Tour, where certain riders were lit up like fireworks but were caught much too late for it to make any difference to those of us whom they had tortured on the road.
Even ignoring the immorality of it, the betrayal of the sport and the fans, it was very easy to condemn doping when you were its direct victim; the outrage came less spontaneously, less naturally when the crimes were committed years ago, when you’d been told, like I had, that back then that was the norm. It was also harder to demonize someone, like Lance, who had always treated you well and given you the impression that he liked and valued you. Having reason to believe that person had tried to cheat you out of a race and part of your livelihood—plus inflicted dire agony on you for five, six hours over giant Pyrenean or Alpine passes—immediately changed things. I can only imagine how someone like my old HTC teammate, Marco Pinotti, must have felt about Lance and the large number of other riders who had been doping in, for instance, the 1999 Tour. Or, for that matter, how Marco, who I know has always ridden clean, had even managed to finish that Tour in his first year as a pro.
As the allegations rumbled to a crescendo through and beyond Lance’s comeback, up to the moment when he was forced to confess, being repeatedly asked to give my opinion on the matter became somewhat tiresome. Some won’t believe me or will accuse me of being short-sighted or self-absorbed when I say that I, like the majority of clean pros now, simply don’t feel that what happened 15 years ago bears any relevance to us. Or rather it does, but only really on two levels: On one hand, we’ve all benefited from the slow, no doubt belated recognition of the problem and from the resulting, huge improvements in anti-doping; on the other hand, we’re also now held accountable for an era and a poisonous culture that is alien to what we know. We’re asked to comment on Armstrong and have our morals judged on the strength of what we say, when a lot of us are, rightly or wrongly, too preoccupied with the here and now to have an opinion.
Even though I was watching those Tours that Lance won, wide-eyed and innocent, I also can’t pretend that I’m eaten up with resentment or feel betrayed now that I know that it was all a big charade. As unjust, as distressing as it may be, as hard as it is for us to accept, I’m sure that Lance still feels that no one and nothing can take away the emotions of those seven Tours at the time, and the same really goes for those of us who were watching.
Whether Lance could ever have savored the pure, unmitigated joy that comes with winning clean is another issue. That, together with the money and the dignity that he’s lost, I’m pretty sure, have been the most effective punishments.
When the USADA report came out, I was at least ready to be angry with Lance, and so deliberately didn’t contact him after its release. I also gave one or two interviews to the press from which he’ll have gathered, I’m pretty sure, that I took a dim view of at least some of what he was alleged to have done. As of the time of this writing, we haven’t spoken for approximately a year.
if there’s one aspect of the Armstrong saga that continues to baffle and anger me, in addition to those claims about the 2009 and 2010 Tours, it’s the lack of consistency both in our sport and across all sports.
Objectively, even Lance’s biggest detractors will have to admit that the race to expose him at times resembled a witch hunt. When you total up all of the hours and all of the millions spent on exposing Lance and you set that against the total indifference to other riders and their doping, you can’t ignore the double standard. I know that people say and will continue to argue that Lance was the key link in the chain, perhaps the only rider who could not only influence but also dictate the culture of the sport, and I’d agree insofar as he was bigger than professional cycling for many years. The role of capo was one that he fulfilled not only in races but also in the broader realm of the sport. He could have led the revolution against doping—but equally, without doping, would he have been winning those Tours and would he have wielded the same power? I doubt it. The argument, then, that he deserved to be targeted so singularly, the sacrificial lamb on the altar of clean sport, doesn’t quite hold water.
I will certainly never be persuaded that riders who confessed their own doping and gave evidence against Lance in return for meager, six-month bans—in a lot of cases served in the off-season—were truly brought to justice. Among the riders who were offered and took these plea bargains—or “sweetheart deals,” as Lance called them—were good friends of mine like George Hincapie and Christian Vande Velde, but my relationship with those guys doesn’t alter my opinion: They were as culpable as Lance.
The problem, of course, is and will remain getting people to open up about their past when there’s no incentive. After the USADA verdict and amid the hysteria it created, there was talk of a truth and reconciliation commission that would enable riders to come forward, confess doping offenses committed within a certain time frame, and be granted clemency in return for the information they provided. I’m not familiar with the finer details, and it sounds like a nice idea … but it’s not going to work.
Why? One word: ego. Even now, when they’ve retired and there’s no threat of sanctions or public humiliation, riders cling to their careers, because that’s what their identity has been constructed on, what they’ve dedicated their lives to, the reason they’re admired.
They’re terrified of losing it all. It’s also very difficult to convince people that the stigma of having cheated can be cleansed, or will magically disappear, as soon as everything is out in the open.
So what do we do with the skeletons in cycling’s closet? Mine might not be a popular view, but sometimes I wonder why we insist on rattling them around and whether the time hasn’t come to simply concentrate on the present. To me, it’s gone far beyond the point where the soul-searching has become useful to the sport; in fact, it’s counterproductive. What more are we going to learn about the period before I turned professional and the so-called EPO Generation that we don’t already know, haven’t already heard about ad nauseam, and how will that help us now? I think journalists get frustrated when riders of my age and peer group are hesitant to ta
lk about doping—they assume this is us upholding the same law of silence, the omertà, that prevailed for so many years. I can’t speak for other riders, but I imagine that a lot are like me: It’s not that we’re nervous about expressing our opinion or have something to hide, it’s that many of us feel that we don’t know what we’re talking about and therefore don’t feel qualified to pontificate.
In 2008, my second year as a professional, the UCI introduced a much-trumpeted new weapon against doping: the biological passport. I still don’t know and don’t care how it works; I give my blood sample and forget about it. It’s the same thing with people asking me about in-vogue doping products. What do I, whose “medical regimen” consists of a multivitamin and a beta-alanine tablet (a legal amino acid, before you look it up), know about EPO or blood transfusions? No more than I know about nuclear physics. Yet if I don’t give a comprehensive, eloquent answer, I’m accused of harming the sport, not being a good role model, or being an Armstrong apologist. I could stand there bullshitting all day about anti-doping and how it should change or evolve, but it would be just that, bullshit, because someone who has never doped doesn’t know the first thing about anti-doping. To me, dope-testing is part of the post-race routine when I win and something I’m asked about, continually, in interviews. Nothing more.
Having said all of this, one thing does haunt me: the risk of forgetting to update or making innocent mistakes on my whereabouts form. Out-of-competition testing and the obligation to log your whereabouts information—input an address where you can be located for one hour every day into a central database called ADAMS—have been necessary evils since even before I turned professional. Every three months we’re asked to supply our information for the following quarter of the year, which we’re then allowed to update and change by phone or e-mail. The reality in my case, with the amount of traveling that I do even when I’m not racing, is that the three-month updates are often not much more than a guess. I have to make regular amendments, which clearly makes it a perilous exercise.
I’m lucky, in a way, that I got a nasty fright very early in my career with two missed tests at the end of 2005: one because I’d mixed up my “racing location” and “training location” on the form, and one because I’d been packed off to race in Germany at short notice and clean forgotten to update my whereabouts. Six years later, in 2011, the Mount Etna incident and then the near miss at the Tour of Britain—caused by me foolishly delegating responsibility for my whereabouts to another person—put me on one strike and nearly two. At the end of that season, I was given a further incentive not to make the same mistake again when a story appeared in the Italian newspaper La Gazzetta dello Sport with the headline CAVENDISH SKIPS A DOPE TEST. Such are the complications of keeping your whereabouts updated that probably half of the athletes registered have at least one strike against their name at any one time, but of course that’s lost in the media spin.
CAVENDISH SKIPS A DOPE TEST implies … well, you know.
The result of all this is that I’ve become hypervigilant, you could even say paranoid. I live in terror of making another slip, so much so that I’d happily carry a GPS chip or be electronically tagged to enable the authorities to locate me at all times. In August 2013, I attended Bernie Eisel’s wedding in Austria and was chatting to Bernie and another Team Sky rider, Christian Knees, the evening before the ceremony when I was suddenly gripped by panic: I hadn’t updated my whereabouts. I had to run inside to the hotel reception, get the address, find a spot in the grounds with mobile network coverage, then send my update via SMS. It doesn’t come naturally to obsess about out-of-competition testing and your whereabouts if you’re not doping and aren’t worried about someone turning up to take a blood or urine sample. I can only imagine that it’s more of a priority when you are trying to evade or fudge the tests.
Here again, in the whereabouts system, there are big inconsistencies: Three missed tests, which might be caused by something as simple and stupid as your phone battery dying or a surprise invitation to an awards ceremony, can result in a two-year ban. That’s right, two years. This, when, as I’ve already mentioned, a former teammate of Lance Armstrong can confess and get six months, and other cheats see their suspensions reduced to a year provided that they supply some information about what they did and how.
The other persistent frustration is the discrepancy between our sport and others. Take tennis. Five years after the UCI, the International Tennis Federation finally got its biological passport up and running in 2013. In 2011, a grand total of 21 out-of-competition blood tests were carried out in tennis, as compared to the 4,613 in cycling. USADA, the agency that finally nailed Armstrong, performed 19 tests on tennis players in the first three months of 2013 … and 35 on, well, I don’t know what you call people who do curling. You consider this, then you hear Andre Agassi saying that “tennis has always led the way in anti-doping” or Marion Bartoli, the 2013 women’s Wimbledon champion, insisting that “doping doesn’t exist in tennis.” I don’t want to pick on one sport in the way that others have singled out cycling, but how can she be so confident when, over more than a decade, Lance alone sailed through hundreds of tests?
The problem with statements like Agassi’s and Bartoli’s is that they perpetuate the narrative that the public has been hearing for years—namely that cycling is riddled with doping and other sports are clean. Meanwhile, at times I’ve felt like launching into an impassioned defense of cycling using the same vocabulary that Lance famously employed on the Champs Elysées in 2005—maligning the “cynics and skeptics”—but had to stop myself, first because these words have become synonymous with Lance’s cheating, and second because it can sound like you’re protesting too much. But the layman doesn’t truly realize what disparity exists between the measures in place in cycling and other sports. For example, in 2011 the UCI became the first governing body in any sport to ban all injections of even legal products aiding recovery—vitamins, sugars, enzymes, amino acids, and antioxidants. There was a feeling in cycling that a “needle culture” had been allowed to develop over several decades and anecdotal evidence suggested that legal injections were often a precursor to more serious stuff.
Some people’s bodies naturally recover well, and I’m one of the lucky ones. Rob Hayles says that you can see from how quickly my wounds heal after a crash that I’m blessed in this regard. Nonetheless, even I have noticed how much harder it is to recover, day after day on a three-week tour, with no intravenous drips. Some doctors would argue that it’s even unhealthy to deny us this option, since we reach a state of dehydration that puts severe pressure on our kidneys and liver. Again, I’m loath to pick on tennis, but the discrepancy was brought home to me again when I heard Tim Henman, in his pundit’s role on the BBC, matter-of-factly answering a question about players recovering after five-set matches and explaining that they would just use an intravenous drip. Perfectly fine, perfectly legal in that sport, but strictly forbidden for us cyclists. Even so, I welcome the needle ban—anything to ensure that the doping plague that had taken a grip on cycling doesn’t return, and anything to hopefully make people realize that we’re light-years ahead of other sports in the war on drugs.
I know we won’t change perceptions overnight. The suspicions and questions won’t go away, and those skeletons in those closets will keep on rattling. At Team Sky we had a Belgian doctor, Geert Leinders, whose earlier work with the Dutch Rabobank team has become the subject of an investigation by Belgian prosecutors, although Leinders denies any wrongdoing.
This I only discovered after I’d joined the team. Did it bother me? Well, it would have if there had been any reason to suspect that he was doping me and other riders then, but there was nothing. Zilch.
I saw very little of Geert Leinders, but the impression I formed was of a relaxed, quite cultured, and humorous man who was into music and whose most heinous crime during the few months that I knew him was the one he committed against fashion, with his slack-waisted jeans.
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sp; The last I heard, the investigation hadn’t concluded and, after he stopped working for Team Sky toward the end of 2012, he was going to pursue an art history degree. Brad Wiggins was hauled over the coals for his supposed “association” with Leinders in 2012, but, again, in the team, it would never have occurred to us that Geert might have been implicated in doping scandals unless we’d read the press. This is the problem you have as a rider now. Am I supposed to demand that my team sack the doctor, or distance myself from guys like Rolf Aldag, Erik Zabel, Brian Holm, and Bobby Julich—all former riders and confessed dopers, all of whom have treated me brilliantly, 100 percent professionally, and all of whom strongly believe that you can now compete clean?
Those guys all found a way back into professional cycling; who knows, one day so might Lance. That night in Argentina, though, as the face of a man I used to know flickered on the TV screen and tears welled in his eyes, the only sympathy I felt was for the sport I love—not Lance Armstrong.
a new start
over the course of my seven years as a professional cyclist, I have been accused of many things. Bowing to convention, though, has not been one of them.
Take any journey with a team of professional cyclists, in a plane, a train, or an automobile. Look around and you’ll see a group of young men doing what young men generally do; you’ll see headphones, glossy magazines full of gadgets and girls in bikinis, and perhaps, if you’re lucky, the odd newspaper (turned to the sports pages, of course).
When you understand this, there can be few surprises—or so my new Omega Pharma–Quick-Step teammates thought. On our flight to Slovakia in December for our first gathering of the 2012–13 winter, I could feel their eyes on me. I looked up to see Matteo Trentin in the seat next to me craning his neck to get a better view of what I was doing; the expression on his face was one of utter bafflement.
At Speed: My Life in the Fast Lane Page 21
