Racing Hard

by William Fotheringham

  Jan Ullrich is now mainly known as Lance Armstrong’s biggest rival and as one of the many riders implicated in the Operación Puerto blood doping scandal [see Chapter Five]. In 1997, however, he was feted as a possible winner of five Tours, thanks to the effervescent – and presumably drug-fuelled – form he had shown that year and in 1996. By the following spring there was incredulity at how much weight he’ d put on during the winter after his Tour win.

  Tour winner who carries a heavy burden

  9 May 1998

  It is make or break time for the Tour de France winner Jan Ullrich. After a disastrous spring, during which he was mocked by the media and took a pasting in virtually every race he rode, the German has gone into hiding at his home in the Black Forest in a desperate attempt to find form.

  Ullrich will cover 1,100km next week under the supervision of Peter Becker, his trainer since childhood and the man who built the East German cycling system. It is, say his team, a crucial phase of his build-up. With just over two months until this year’s Tour de France starts in Dublin, the 24-year-old is overweight, under-raced, and his chances of winning the event for a second year running are in jeopardy.

  The Tour winner’s most recent outing, in the Grand Prix of Frankfurt on May 1, gave grounds for cautious optimism as, at last, he was able to hold on to the front runners. Crucially, given the spotlight the German media have placed on him, he did not make a spectacle of himself in front of his home crowd in his country’s biggest race.

  The days when a Tour winner was expected to win all year round ended with the retirement of the five-times champion Bernard Hinault in 1986. Tour contenders race selectively, building their fitness through the spring to peak in late June, and aim to hold their form for six weeks at most. This is what Ullrich did last year.

  This spring, however, his build-up has been appalling. He has failed to start races which he rode last year, failed to finish the toughest events on his schedule and has spent much of those races which he has finished as last man on the road. In March he reached rock bottom in the Tirreno-Adriatico stage race in Italy, when he stopped after 22 miles before even reaching the first hill.

  After finishing last year’s Tour weighing 73 kilograms (11st 6 1/2 lb), he did too little, ate too much and ballooned to 85kg at Christmas. Now he is a more respectable 78kg but he needs to lose about a kilogram per fortnight to start the Tour on July 11 at the correct weight. “It’s possible, but only just,” says his team manager Rudy Pevenage.

  Ullrich’s weight gain meant that when he began racing in February he was forcing his body to work too hard, simply in order to haul himself over the hills. This meant he had difficulty recovering between races and became tired and vulnerable to illness: a bout of flu put him out for a fortnight in March.

  Embonpoint is only one of Ullrich’s problems. A rider’s performance in the Tour depends on the number of kilometres he has spent in the saddle, how much racing he has in his legs, as the jargon has it. Ullrich has missed so many races – he has completed two-thirds of the kilometres he did last spring – that he may not have the basic endurance to perform in the Tour. Last year, after a perfect spring, he struggled in the final few hilly stages.

  Ullrich’s team agree with his critics that he cannot afford to be troubled by another problem which will cause him to miss any more races. “If he has just a cold, or anything which puts him out for a couple of weeks, we’ll be really worried,” said Pevenage.

  The German media, so quick to rush to the Tour last year to hype up their new hero, have fallen on Ullrich as they fell on Boris Becker in his lean years. A radio show commented that the German people wanted to know about two pairs of buttocks: those of Ullrich, and Claudia Schiffer. “They are bastards,” said Pevenage.

  In France, where they like their Tour winners at least to race respectably, there has been undisguised fury in the cycling establishment. The newspaper L’Equipe – which sponsors the race – ran a picture of Ullrich, flab and all, on its front page with the comment “unworthy of his stature”.

  The Tour organiser Jean-Marie Leblanc said: “His conduct is unworthy of a Tour winner. It’s unforgivable.” The world No 1 Laurent Jalabert said it was “pitiful” to see Ullrich struggling and the double Tour winner Laurent Fignon accused him of “professional misconduct”.

  “He has only himself to blame if he put on so much weight,” said last year’s runner-up Richard Virenque, presumably trying hard not to smile. Ullrich has apparently worked that out as well. “He will be more careful in future: he has learned his lesson,” Pevenage says grimly. If he fails to win a second Tour, the lesson will be expensive indeed.

  The 1998 Tour de France was billed as a showdown between the little Italian climber Marco Pantani – of whom more later – and Ullrich, who had lost weight by hook or by crook and was in decent shape by the start. That year marked the most ambitious “international” start the race had ever seen: the Grand Départ and three days racing in Ireland.

  Riding on Eire

  6 July 1998

  Pat McQuaid, one of the organisers of the Tour de France’s Irish stages, finally realised the scale of what he had achieved last week when he walked down the main street of his home town, Bray, on the route of stage one just south of Dublin. “That’s been a rickety old road for as long as I can remember but last Monday they shut it down for two days and now it’s perfect, brand-new lovely tarmac.” Similar sprucing-up operations have been taking place the length of south-east Ireland since the Tour de France route was announced last October; virtually all the 240 miles the Tour will spend on Irish roads have been resurfaced. The build-up gained new intensity in recent weeks as the towns along the route published plans for a fete lasting far longer than the few minutes the riders will take to pass through small communities such as Sean Kelly’s Carrick-on-Suir and Stephen Roche’s Dundrum.

  Tallaght, close to the start of Sunday’s loop through the Wicklow Hills, is, according to its publicity, “en Tour” for a full week before its few seconds of glory. Cork, where the riders finish a week today before flying to France, is “in gear for its biggest festival ever”, lasting three days, with entertainment including a vast street parade of French history. Carrick-on-Suir has become “Carrick-on-Tour”, holding seminars, literary evenings, amateur cycle races and a timed race to the next town up the river Suir, Clonmel, with the prize of a car for anyone who can beat the record set, of course, by Kelly.

  The campaign to bring the Tour to Ireland has lasted several years, led by McQuaid, currently president of the Federation of Irish Cyclists, and his English business partner Alan Rushton, the man who ran the Tour’s 1994 stages from Dover to Brighton and Portsmouth. Kelly, one of cycling’s most respected figures, and Roche, Tour winner in 1987, have both done their share of discreet lobbying.

  Two factors clinched Dublin’s bid to host the start: one was the support of the Stena ferry line, which is taking three vast vessels off its scheduled routes to transport the Tour back to France next Monday. The other was France 98. The clash between the Tour start and the World Cup finals meant the Tour had to go far from its homeland, to a nation which had little chance of reaching the final. The Tour organisers looked at recent soccer form, added in the fact that Jack Charlton was not in charge any more, and the Irish bid was on.

  The Tour has never been so far from home, yet it is starting in a nation with a tradition in the race which goes back 35 years, to the day when a stocky, dark-haired young man named Shay Elliott broke away from the peloton in northern France to win the stage at Roubaix, taking the yellow jersey. He was to hang on to it for three days.

  Jean-Marie Leblanc, a former professional who has organised the last 10 Tours, remembers asking the Irishman for his autograph in the Pas de Calais back in the 1960s. Elliott met a tragic death a few years later but Leblanc’s fondness for English-speaking cyclists and things anglophone has blossomed.

  Elliott was a bulldog of a man, with what the Tour loves to call the Irish te
mperament. Leblanc recalls that he had the reputation of being “un attaquant, un gentleman”. On Friday the Tour organisers will lay a wreath at his grave in the little churchyard at Kilmacanogue, just south of Dublin, where the Tour riders will pass on Sunday en route to the Wicklow Hills, which rise in their green magnificence behind the graveyard.

  The other Irish Tour stars will be recognised as well. After Saturday’s prologue time-trial in the heart of Dublin the first proper stage of the Tour will have a ceremonial start in O’Connell Street, but the flag will be dropped to denote the start of racing in front of a sculpture in Dundrum commemorating Roche’s achievements. Stage two will have a ceremonial sprint outside the Sean Kelly Sports Centre in Carrick, en route to the Cork finish.

  Kelly won his first stage 25 years after Elliott, Roche arrived at the Tour in 1983 and for a decade the Irish could boast a redoubtable presence in the world’s greatest bike race, with Kelly’s dependable, bespectacled sidekick Martin Earley, a stage winner in 1989, to back up the two stars.

  The Kelly-Roche effect led to a Tour of Ireland, sponsored by Nissan, where the pair took on all-comers from the top of the European game. Leblanc, then in his early days as Tour de France organiser, was invited to the race as a guest and, so rumour has it, he was plied liberally with Guinness and introduced to “the craic”.

  Kelly’s lengthy reign as No 1 in cycling’s computer rankings and Roche’s magic year of 1987, when he won the Tour, the Giro d’Italia and the world championships, a feat only Eddy Merckx had managed, brought everything to Irish cycling except another Roche or Kelly. There will be no Irish starters in this year’s Tour and there are no amateur hopefuls displaying signs even of matching Earley’s solid yet modest career, let alone reclaiming the heights scaled by Roche and Kelly.

  McQuaid, as president of the Federation of Irish Cyclists, hopes Le Tour en Irelande will leave some tangible benefit, in terms of an influx of new membership, once the ferries have pulled out for France and the hangovers have subsided. But increasingly there is a feeling that the era of Kelly and Roche was a one-off event in Ireland’s relatively obscure cycling history.

  Unlike the stages in Britain four years ago, when the local councils hosting the stages complained of a lack of government support, the Irish government has stumped up two million punts for the Tour start. The President, Mary McAleese, will host a dinner for team managers; the Prime Minister, Bertie Aherne, will present the first yellow jersey after the prologue time-trial; and Dr Jim McDaid, Minister for Sport and Tourism, looks set to be a ubiquitous presence.

  Gaining government support, and the necessary finance, was the biggest challenge but others have arisen. The Irish police, the Gardaí, have been involved in a pay dispute and there were strong signs that they would take industrial action – which is known in Ireland as the “blue flu” as it involves calling in sick en masse – on the days the Tour was due. With 3,000 Gardaí operating a road closure which will effectively pedestrianise Dublin for this weekend, and operating security to prevent what one organiser called “a Grand National-type episode”, their absence could have been catastrophic.

  Ironically, given that the Tour’s Irish trip is intended partly as a homage to Roche and Kelly, there was a little local difficulty involving the 1987 winner and the four-times points victor. The dispute between Roche and l’Evenement, Rushton and McQuaid’s company, was over the level of the 1987 winner’s fee for working on the Tour and culminated in a lengthy Sunday newspaper interview in which Roche claimed he had been responsible for the Tour’s decision to come to Dublin, and he would leave Ireland in disgust at the way McQuaid had treated him.

  That seems to have been resolved, as has the question of whether the Tour should pass through Sean Kelly Square in Carrick, initially considered too dangerous by the Tour organisers, who have become safety conscious after a spate of pile-ups in the opening week of recent Tours. The locals were outraged but some discreet lobbying by Kelly ended in a compromise.

  All that remains now is to get the Tour infrastructure and caravan to Dublin – this week’s job – and then to get the 3,500 Tour personnel, 1,200 international media and 1,500 vehicles to Brittany in time to start next Tuesday’s stage in the port of Roscoff. This is the greatest logistical challenge the Tour has faced in its 95-year history; the plans for future Tours depend on it being carried out with the minimum of disruption to the riders and caravan.

  Rushton and McQuaid hope the British government will be inspired by the Irish experience to back a London bid for the start in 2004, a date already pencilled in provisionally by Leblanc. The Tour organiser’s intention is that a successful Irish start will strengthen his case for a spectacular depart to the first Tour of the new millennium – from one of the French West Indies. Today Ireland, tomorrow the New World.

  It was indeed a case of today Ireland, tomorrow the New World, but not quite the New World any of the Tour caravan had envisaged, including journalists like me. As for the dramatis personae of the Irish start, Pat McQuaid went on to head the Union Cycliste Internationale from 2005 onwards, while Alan Rushton continued to organise bike races, going on to run the PruTour of Britain in 1998 and 1999. He now works mainly in the Far East.

  3. FESTINA LEAVE, ARMSTRONG RETURNS

  When the 1998 Tour caravan arrived in Dublin, it did so minus one key member: Willy Voet, a soigneur – a helper responsible for massage, race food and basic medical care – at the Festina team. Voet had been arrested by French customs while driving to the race with a car-load of drugs, mainly EPO. It took a while for the crisis to break. The Festina scandal and its aftermath was a watershed for the sport, although not, as many of us hoped at the time, a point that marked the end of a drug-riddled past and a doping-free future.

  A week into the Tour, Festina were thrown off the race, although they did not go willingly. The fact that the Tour organisers were willing to countenance them being anywhere near the start of the stage, having barred them from the race, indicates just how hard it was for the men who ran cycling to come to terms with the shocking facts that were emerging on a daily basis. When compared with today’s zero-tolerance policies, it is also an illustration of how attitudes have hardened – and rightly so – over the last 10 years.

  New chapter in saga of the pedallers and the peddlers

  19 July 1998

  After a week of crisis as its biggest ever drugs scandal unfolded, the Tour de France avoided becoming a farce yesterday only at the last minute, when the cyclists of the Festina Watches team went back on their decision to start the stage, even though their director and masseur have been suspended as a formal investigation has begun. As French President Jacques Chirac watched from his holiday home on the route, his country’s greatest summer institution was in a state of crisis.

  Festina’s team at the Tour included the darling of the French public, Richard Virenque, and the current world champion, Laurent Brochard, as well as the double Tour of Spain winner Alex Zulle. They were banned on Friday night after team directeur sportif Bruno Roussel was charged by magistrates in Lille with supplying banned drugs for use at sports events.

  Roussel’s lawyer told the press his client had admitted that riders, team doctors, masseurs and team management were all involved in administering performance-enhancing drugs under medical supervision. This was felt to be necessary in order to prevent a situation in which the riders risked their health by obtaining the drugs for themselves.

  Since police sources in Lille had revealed a team masseur had been arrested and that his car contained a large quantity of two undetectable drugs – the blood booster erythropoietin and human growth hormone – there had been little doubt the drugs were destined for the Tour.

  However, Roussel’s confirmation that the drugs were intended to be used by his riders to improve their performance in the race meant the Tour’s management had no choice but to ban the team. “Doping took place on an organised basis in the Festina team,” said the director-general of the Tour, Jean
-Marie Leblanc.

  But yesterday morning, several of Festina’s riders, led by Virenque and Brochard, were adamant that they would turn up at the start of the seventh stage, a 58-kilometre time-trial. “I do not accept the decision,” said Virenque. “A press release is not enough for us to leave the Tour. We will start.” The response of the Tour organisers was that the riders could start, but that their times would not count.

  Then Virenque and his team-mates bowed out of the Tour at a brief press conference in a bar near the stage finish. “Legally we could continue, because we are only witnesses in this case, we have not committed any offence. We are leaving for the sake of cycling and the Tour de France,” said Virenque, before dissolving into tears.

  [This “press conference” in the Chez Guillou bar tabac is now the stuff of legend among senior Tour hacks; one I know stumbled on it while in search of cigarettes after after working late the night before, as the announcement the team were being thrown off the race came at about 11pm.]

  The Festina case may be only the tip of the iceberg. “You cannot deny that a quantity of other riders are doing the same thing, that is certain,” said Frenchman Cyrille Guimard, who won seven Tours as a team manager between 1976 and 1984. He added: “The riders are victims of the doctors and the sponsors who pay the doctors.”

  There have been persistent allegations in recent years that there is a vast trade in undetectable drugs taking place in professional cycling and, due to the amounts seized, the Festina affair lends weight to this. So does the revelation yesterday that in April, mechanics from another team taking part in the Tour de France, Dutch squad TVM, were stopped by customs near Rheims and found to be transporting 104 syringes containing erythropoietin.