His team-mate George Hincapie, the only member of the US Postal team to have ridden alongside Armstrong in all six of his Tour wins, said: “He is on the top of his game. He is stronger than ever.” Few would disagree: in this year’s race he has proved strongest in every domain that matters to a Tour winner, taking mountain-top stages, sprint finishes from a small breakaway group, a mountain time-trial, a flat time-trial and the team time-trial.
Here, too, the transformation is dramatic from even five years ago, when Armstrong led the Tour and was “constantly nervous” because he felt he could lose the yellow jersey at any moment. In this Tour, as in his fourth success in 2002, he is so far ahead of the opposition that he is turning his mind to helping his team-mates to win stages.
Yesterday the lone star of Texas was flying alongside the barriers on the Champs-Élysées. American cycle tourists had chained their bikes to the ornate columns of the Hotel de Crillon on the Place de la Concorde and children in US Postal replica kit were being hoisted on to window sills to watch sporting history being made. Security around the American embassy was intense, as it has been around Armstrong all through the Tour. The wave of cheering rippled up the avenue as eight of the US Postal team led their boss past the grandstands, his face as impassive as ever.
Amid the Armstrong victory parade the green jersey of points winner was the only issue to be settled yesterday. This has been a tight three-way battle between Robbie McEwen, Thor Hushovd and Stuart O’Grady but the Norwegian was balked on the rush to the final corner yesterday behind the stage winner Tom Boonen of Belgium, and McEwen finished ahead of his fellow Australian to secure his second title in three years.
The other unfinished business yesterday was Armstrong’s personal battle with the Italian Filippo Simeoni, who is suing the Texan for libel. It will rumble on after the Tour but to make the point that he is not intimidated by Armstrong after the “Boss” prevented him going for the stage win on Friday, the Italian escaped soon after the start and sped away again as the peloton approached Paris.
The convention is that the yellow jersey winner and his team lead the race on to the Champs-Élysées, so Simeoni’s attack was akin to breaking wind in communion. He was chased down by the US Postal team and one of Armstrong’s domestiques, the Russian Viatcheslav Ekimov, made a “horns” gesture as he overtook the Italian. He escaped again and received similar short shrift from Hincapie.
Simeoni received the day’s “combativity” award but the episode was more redolent of the playground than the world’s biggest annual sports event. It was, however, a reminder that Armstrong is not a straightforward hero. The drugs suspicions remain largely unanswered and the contents of the biography, LA Confidentiel, unexplained and the subject of legal action. The Simeoni episode perhaps helps to explain why Armstrong figured prominently in a poll of the French public’s most unpopular sportsmen in a Sunday newspaper yesterday. He was not in the lead but was not far behind Michael Schumacher and Nicolas Anelka. Given that whenever he speaks he seems preoccupied by his popularity, or lack of it, he was probably relieved merely to be third overall.
Mr Popular or not, there seems no chance of Armstrong getting jaded just yet. Seven years ago he said that, when he was diagnosed with cancer, two thoughts went through his mind: “I might lose my career”, “I might die” – in that order. After winning the 21st Tour de France stage of his career on Saturday he made it clear he still feels that way.
“This is probably the most fun year I’ve had racing bikes. I can’t explain why a 33-year-old who’s been here for 12 years should be having more fun than ever … It’s not about making history or money, just the thrill of getting on a bike and racing 200 other guys.”
Speculation about Armstrong and a seventh Tour will remain intense. Perhaps, now, his celebrity is such that he can afford to miss the race, as Eddy Merckx did in his prime, and take a sabbatical at the Giro d’Italia, the Tour of Spain or the World Cup series of single-day races.
That seems unlikely. “No other bike race has a million people by the side of the road, this is the one I love and I can’t imagine skipping the Tour de France. I would only come with perfect condition and come ready to win. I can’t imagine not being here.”
While Armstrong was racing to his sixth Tour, a different story was unfolding in Biarritz and Paris. David Millar, the golden boy of British cycling in the post-Boardman years, had been busted by the drugs police as they investigated doping in his Cofidis team. The day after the Tour finished, Millar gave me an interview, his first since his confession; it was both sobering and salutary to hear the story of a drug-taker from the inside. It was also a journalistic marathon; I drove from Paris to London in the morning, did the interview that afternoon, and filed three long stories for the Guardian in the early evening. It’s a story I was proud to get first.
The wrong gear
27 July 2004
Had it not been for an oversight in packing his suitcase last September, today David Millar would probably be celebrating finishing his fourth Tour de France, in which he has won three stages and worn the yellow jersey. He would be thinking about the Athens Olympics, about setting out to attempt something no British sportsman has achieved: two gold medals at the same games. He would also still be “living a lie”, as he puts it: a highly paid, prestigious lie.
Instead, he is sitting in a bar explaining lucidly and heart-rendingly how he destroyed what could have been a glorious sporting career by using drugs. His eyes are red at the corners and have a distant look. Occasionally, he seems close to tears. One hand drums almost constantly on his knee. He has always seemed somewhat distrait, but now he has the lost air of a man who has fallen from the heavens into an unknown world, and is trying to figure out where he is and what he should do.
On June 22, Millar was detained in Biarritz by drugs police investigating his professional cycling team, Cofidis. He emerged 48 hours later after confessing to having used the banned blood booster erythropoietin (EPO) on three occasions. The key to his downfall was a pair of syringes which had contained the drug, that he had taken before winning the world championship in Canada in October 2003.
“I used them, I forgot about them, left them in my bag, went to Las Vegas, came back, was unpacking and found them. I thought, “What the fuck has my life come to?” and put them on the bookshelf. It’s my most private place, a place no one touches. It had scarred me: I had won the World Championship by a huge margin and didn’t need to have used drugs. I had got to a point where I had wanted to win so much that to guarantee my victory I did something I didn’t need to do. I didn’t want to forget about it.”
The drug police found them when they searched his Biarritz flat after his detention, and put them in front of him late in his 48-hour detention. “At first I made up a story. I thought I could still get out of it. After 47 hours they started threatening me, they were flipping out because I had not admitted to anything. It was Thursday evening, they were going to keep me, take me to Paris in a van, keep me in for three days then put me before the judge on Monday.
“I could have carried on. I have a good lawyer in Paris and might have got away with it. But I thought, “Fuck this, I can’t live with this.” It wasn’t difficult. I was just thinking, “I can’t go through with this, I’m fucked whatever happens, it’s not 100 per cent my fault, but I’m not going to live like this.” I could have kept fighting, fighting, fighting, but fundamentally, I’m not a good liar.”
He accepts that he hung on to the syringes partly because deep down inside he wanted someone to catch him, because he had lost so much respect for himself that he no longer cared if he were caught and it came to an end. “I believe in the power of the subconscious. It was my get-out. I wasn’t happy. I wasn’t enjoying it. I didn’t like the point I’d got to. It was an extreme way of doing it, but it’s typical of my style of life.”
Born in Malta, brought up in Hong Kong and west London, the 27-year-old Millar is nominally Scottish but actually rootless, a
charismatic young man, part grunge kid, part art student, who opted at 18 to be a professional cyclist rather than go to art college. Asked how he made the journey from an idealistic youth who was adamant that he would never use drugs to a cynical professional who needed “guarantees”, Millar holds up finger and thumb. The gap between them is half an inch.
“It’s that. I was 100 per cemt sure I’d never dope. All of a sudden it escalated out of control.” It was, he believes, a form of adolescent rebellion against the demands of his sport. “It was the only thing in life that defined me. I resented that. I didn’t think about it, there was no twiddling thumbs and wondering if I should or I shouldn’t. I just walked into a room one day and did it.”
The turning point came during the 2001 Tour de France. He had won the opening stage in 2000, but a year later he fell in the first stage, and barely clung on for another nine days. Eight days in, he greeted me with hysterical laughter after one tough stage finish in Alsace. “By day nine or 10 I’d started to go mental, the managers said they would fly my then girlfriend in, but when they asked her, she was, ‘No, I’m not coming.’” That night, he saw an older professional in the team who introduced him to EPO.
Before the Tour of Spain, that September, he travelled to Italy and was shown how to inject himself with the drug. There was no risk of a positive test, he says, because the drug was used in small quantities and taken well before competition. Nor were there second thoughts. “You don’t stop and think, or it’s game over. When the line is crossed, it’s crossed. It stops being a sport.
“I had taken on a load of responsibility” – his team was invited to the race on condition that he start and perform – “and I was taking that on, being professional.” It was “mental insurance”, and there was nothing to stop him. “There was very little guidance, few options, no coach, no set-up in the team to encourage you not to do that. No other team would have pushed me through what I went through in that year. I was going bananas.”
After winning another stage of the Tour in 2002 “clean”, Millar used EPO again in 2003. This time, there were financial pressures as well. In 2002, he “had a crap year apart from winning a stage in the Tour de France. I’d saved the team’s arse there, but wasn’t in the top 100 in the world rankings. From making a lot of money I went to the basic that I had in 2002. I felt it was wrong. My salary dropped by 300 per cent. It was like, ‘I’ll make them pay me a shedload of money and run this team.’”
The drugs he took that May and August were in order to keep going during intense training over 10 days: courses of EPO taken to keep up the red-cell count, plus the use of testosterone patches to keep his level of male hormone up. Both red blood cells and testosterone drop as the body becomes fatigued, impairing performance. If they are boosted, more intense training is possible. “It’s training hard and taking a certain amount of EPO over 10 days so you can keep doing the training.” As before, stopping taking the drugs well before racing removed the risk of a positive test.
In recent years, since the drugs scandal that almost stopped the 1998 Tour de France, many top professional cyclists, particularly those specialising in the great stage races such as the Tours of Spain, Italy and France, have moved away from building condition through racing to high-intensity training camps, but it is impossible to say whether or not they are on similar programmes to the one that Millar used. He knows the solution: out of competition testing, which is currently being beefed up by cycling’s governing bodies. People in the sport, he says, genuinely don’t know whether their fellow competitors are using the drug. “I only know about me. I didn’t ask questions of other guys. Everyone is so paranoid now.”
In January 2002, I asked Millar about his attitude to drugs. I didn’t ask point blank: are you using them? Sports journalists, and particularly those who work in cycling, don’t: it is like asking if someone beats their wife. Millar’s answer was, “I don’t need to dope. I don’t have to live with myself doing that. There will always be guys ahead of me who are one step ahead of the rules. I have to live with it, because it’s their choice.” There was not an untrue word in the sentence, but it was not a point-blank denial. He looks back and says: “I hadn’t refined my answers to be ambiguous.” Later, he managed that, but felt uncomfortable.
Ironically, from the start of this year, Millar had turned his back on doping and begun racing “clean” under the influence of a British coach, Peter Keen, and the Lottery funded World Class performance programme. “I wanted to win the Olympics clean, for myself. I wasn’t good with myself. I had changed as a person.”
He regrets what he has done, and seems relieved that, for the moment, he is through with cycling. “If you go through such a big ethical change in one day it’s going to affect you on a deeper level. I was unstable, my self-esteem started evaporating. I was living a lie and that’s not good for anyone. It is so hard to explain, because I was capable of winning big races clean. I couldn’t explain it to myself. It’s very confusing. I haven’t slept well for the last two or three years.”
More sleepless nights must await. On August 4, a disciplinary commission will decide the length of his ban. He will be stripped of the world title. He will probably sell his “dream home in Biarritz”, which he has spent two and a half years having restored, but will never sleep in. Where next? He has no idea. He accepts what he has done, hopes the ban will not end his career, and now wishes to offer his services “to prevent young riders doing what I have done”.
For seven years Millar has been known as “Boy Dave” to me and my colleagues. He earned the nickname when he turned professional at the tender age of 19, and brought a fresh face, glamour, and a bit of rock-star chic to the two-wheeled world. Now, the boy faces a painful growing up.
Millar returned to racing in 2006, and has since reinvented himself as a leader in the fight for a cleaner cycling. His personal story of his downfall, rehabilitation and redemption, Racing Through the Dark, was deservedly a best-seller. Richard Virenque came from completely the other side of the spectrum, however, as this piece on his retirement shows.
Tainted hero Virenque ends polka-dot era
25 September 2004
Richard Virenque, the French rider described once as “incarnating the issue of doping” finally called time yesterday on a career in which, against the odds, he survived the biggest drugs scandal in sport since Ben Johnson to retain a place in the hearts of the French public, if not in the minds of more dispassionate followers of cycling.
“I was particularly worried about doing one year too many,” said Virenque. “Leaving cycling on the right note is something I’ve dreamed about. I don’t see what I can gain by riding the Tour de France next year.”
Virenque, who will be 35 in November, had hinted that he might quit the sport after winning a stage of this year’s Tour across the Massif Central on France’s national holiday, Bastille Day. His final appearance on a bike will be at a touring event on October 3.
The record books will note that July 14 was the seventh stage victory in the great race for the slender, piping-voiced lad from the Var who climbed with all the aplomb of a nodding dog, and that it was a springboard to his seventh King of the Mountains title, an absolute if not absolutely pristine Tour record.
The enduring images of Virenque, however, are not those of a mountain king whizzing up the passes of the Alps and Pyrenees. They are more sombre: his expulsion, face creased with tears, from the 1998 Tour after the police inquiry into his Festina team exposed their reliance on industrial quantities of the blood-booster erythropoietin, liberally laced with human growth hormone and the heroin-amphetamine cocktail known as “Belgian mix”.
A few days earlier he had solemnly announced that the allegations that Festina had used drugs were untrue, and Festina’s expulsion was followed by police questioning in which he denied using drugs, a claim he continued to make for two further years. His refusal to confess was, he said, a stance he adopted to avoid taking the blame for others who had n
ever got caught.
He was brutally lampooned by Les Guignols, the French version of Spitting Image, who created a Virenque puppet festooned with syringes mouthing the ludicrous phrase which formed the core of his defence that he had accepted drugs without knowing what they were: “Without my knowledge but of my own free will.”
Then came a tearful confession in a Lille courtroom in October 2000, that he had used the drugs “with his knowledge and of his own free will” and a lenient nine-month ban which reduced him to a bloated wreck.
His comeback, initially for a pittance with the Belgian team Quickstep, earned him some redemption, however, with victory in the Paris-Tours Classic in October 2001, and prestigious mountain stage wins in the Tour at Mont Ventoux and Morzine.
Virenque was adamant that he was now racing “clean” and, though his word carried little credibility, the results bore him out. Whereas in his pomp, in the mid-1990s, he could race through the mountains at the front for day after day, in recent Tours an epic mountain performance would be followed by a day or two when he was clearly under the weather.
His Tour mountain titles record this year was not well received by the previous holders, Lucien van Impe of Belgium and Federico Bahamontes of Spain, since four of his victories, between 1994 and 1997, were achieved with the help of banned substances. Asked recently why Virenque had not been stripped of those titles, a senior member of cycling’s governing body, the UCI, appeared surprised at the very notion.
The courage Virenque showed in his comeback meant that the public continued to turn out for him. Their red banners in the polka-dots of the mountains jersey lauded Richard “Lionheart” as a god, and recent Tours saw ever more bizarre items along the route: cows in spotty jerseys, polka-dot cars, and a 40ft-high banner on a cliff face in the Alps. Their loyalty meant that his popularity was never in question, but his credibility would never recover.
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