Racing Hard

by William Fotheringham

  Mancebo, who is now considering retirement, and Basso followed at lunch-time, after a lengthy meeting of the international teams association in Strasbourg’s Palais des Congres, where it was decided the ethical code agreed on by the teams in 2005 should be rigorously applied. The code specifies that teams should provisionally suspend cyclists who are involved in police drug inquiries, and there have been many since the Festina scandal began the clear-out within the sport.

  Critically for this Tour, the teams decided the half-dozen riders who were removed should not be replaced, even though the rules permit this. “We wanted to give a strong message to the outside world by not allowing replacements. That would be too easy,” said Patrick Lefevère, head of the teams body, the AIGCP, who added he was “ashamed” by what had happened.

  Early in the afternoon Basso’s manager Bjarne Riis returned to the conference room in the Palais des Congrès, where he and Basso had sat side by side only the day before, with Basso sidestepping questions about the affair while Riis declared himself powerless to act. “We had a chance to look at the 50-page memo and have established that he is part of the case and under suspicion,” said Riis.

  There was a certain implacable if unsavoury logic about yesterday’s events when they were put in the context of events in cycling since the exclusion of the Festina team from the 1998 Tour. The other great Tours, the Giro d’Italia and Vuelta a España, have been hit by scandals that have made the overall results from certain years virtually meaningless.

  The 2001 Giro lost its overall leader and main favourite after a police raid; the 2005 Vuelta winner Roberto Heras was recently banned after a positive test. For the Tour’s hierarchy to be shaken in this way on race eve was shocking but not astounding. Whether the credibility of the Tour could be restored, and how long that might take, was what remained to be seen.

  Operación Puerto remains the biggest clear-out of major names that cycling has seen. With hindsight it now looks like a turning point. Ullrich’s career ended here; Basso returned to the sport after a ban, but has been nothing like the man he was. What is salutary is the difference, compared to the Festina scandal, in the way the riders implicated were treated: they were given no chance of starting the race. This was, in my view, the only option available to the cycling authorities, and for once they actually grasped the nettle. However, as with Festina, Rumsas, and the Armstrong affair, Puerto was not a “conventional” doping case and it served to highlight the weaknesses in the anti-doping system.

  Casper triumphs but Hushovd steals blood and thunder

  3 July 2006

  After 1998’s Tour de Farce, welcome to the Tour de Sang. Most appositely for the city where the Marseillaise was composed, with its references to spilling impure blood, since the Tour caravan arrived here last week corpuscles have topped the agenda. Until yesterday it was a matter of whose blood, in which fridge and being kept for what purpose?

  The finish sprints that dominate the opening week, on the other hand, are pure blood and thunder. Yesterday was another reminder of that. Immediately after crossing the line, the yellow jersey wearer Thor Hushovd lay prone, doctors desperately trying to staunch the claret spurting from his right shoulder after a freak accident in the finish straight where the stocky Frenchman Jimmy Casper took victory.

  Hushovd looked as if he had been knifed in a barroom brawl but he had actually fallen foul of one of the green 18-inch high cardboard hands that are given out in their hundreds of thousands by the betting company that sponsors the green jersey awarded to the best sprinter. Hushovd, ironically enough, had won the award last year. The hands are prized by the fans, who cannot resist waving them over the crowd barriers in a way that delights the marketing men because the logos and the colour get television exposure. This annoys the sprinters, who have complained that the practice is highly dangerous because they ride so close to the barriers.

  The point was made again yesterday after one of the hands sliced open Hushovd’s upper arm like a scalpel as he made his move 150 metres out. Then he crossed the line with blood spraying his bike and his fellow sprinters’ faces. He was taken to hospital and is expected to start this morning. Tour officials last night said the hands would no longer be permitted in the final kilometre.

  “It’s very dangerous. It’s not the first time it has happened,” said Casper, who has been rubbing shoulders with the best of the fast men for several years but had never won a stage in the Tour.

  He is a team-mate of Bradley Wiggins in the Cofidis team; yesterday both the Olympic pursuit champion and his fellow Briton David Millar avoided any close encounters with publicity handouts to remain 17th and 18th overall. It is 12 years since two men flew the union flag, or in Millar’s case the saltire which is painted on his bike, in the first 20 of the Tour.

  The Marseillaise was being sung loudly and liquidly in the streets here on Saturday night, and there were signs encouraging Les Bleus on the roadsides yesterday. Casper’s win will bring forth another surge of Gallic pride. French stage wins are rare and nationally cherished items nowadays because the French media and teams consider their riders are racing in a “two-speed sport” where French teams are “clean” and those who win rather dubious. If yesterday was cyclisme a deux vitesses, Casper had a third.

  Hushovd will start this morning without the maillot jaune he won in Saturday’s prologue time-trial. He finished only ninth in the sprint and was relieved of the race lead by Lance Armstrong’s closest friend in the peloton, George Hincapie, who had finished less than a second behind the Norwegian on Saturday.

  Hincapie, the only one of Armstrong’s team-mates to complete all his seven victorious Tours, saw an opening at the final intermediate sprint, where he sneaked into third place, carrying a time bonus which meant two seconds were deducted from his overall time. That made him yellow jersey “on the road”, putting pressure on Hushovd to finish in the first three placings, which also award bonuses.

  Armstrong will no doubt be delighted, because he part-owns Hincapie’s Discovery Channel team, but he will not have smiled when his old adversary, the president of the World Anti-Doping Association Dick Pound, said he felt last week’s drug scandal had left the image of cycling and the centrepiece of its calendar “in the toilet”. Speaking on Radio Five Live he repeated the view he expressed in the Guardian last October, that cycling had been “close to being in clinical denial”.

  “If they resolve to do something about it then they have a chance to take some steps they haven’t been able to do in the past. Something has to be done about it or the risk is the sport will be ignored by some, marginalised by others, and it won’t be a sport any more,” he said.

  Dick Pound was an old adversary of Armstrong and the UCI; they had crossed swords the previous year after l’Equipe had revealed that the Texan had tested positive for EPO in the 1999 Tour.

  The double whammy from the 2006 Tour came in the week after the race ended, when the winner Floyd Landis was confirmed as having tested positive for testosterone.

  Landis case erodes all trust in Tour

  30 July 2006

  Eight days ago Floyd Landis wrapped up what may prove to be a pyrrhic victory in the Tour de France amid the gently rolling hills of Burgundy. Eight years before, over the same roads, between the same towns, another kooky character with a goatee beard, the Italian Marco Pantani, wrapped up his Tour win in 1998.

  The circumstances were disconcertingly familiar: France had made it to the final of a World Cup, the Tour had been dominated by a colossal drugs scandal and Landis and Pantani had achieved feats it was believed had put cycling back in touch with its past. In both cases, the vastness of the drug scandals – Festina in 1998 during the race, the blood-boosting ring this year, just before the start – was such that it induced an intense need for something and someone to restore belief, to redeem the event.

  It took several years for Pantani’s win to unravel amid clear evidence that he was a persistent user of the blood booster erythropoietin (EPO
); it took four days for Landis to come unstuck. There is an outside chance that the test on the American’s second urine sample will clear him this week. There is every chance it will repeat the initial verdict, ushering in a lengthy legal and endocrinological process (endocrinology being the study of the endocrine glands and their secretions) in which he attempts to clear his name. Whatever the outcome, his reputation has gone.

  In happier times in cycling, stars were given the benefit of any doubts going. There was nothing to indicate that Pantani had won the 1998 Tour under the influence of illicit substances other than the fact that he would have been stupid and perverse to do so amid the biggest drug scandal the sport had known. The assumption about Landis this year was the same.

  Landis insisted on Friday that he had not taken drugs, although the day before, when asked the same question, he hesitated and said “I’ll say no”, as if he had a choice in what to reply. But denials mean nothing in cycling because denial in the face of reality is a way of life for some. Pantani went to his deathbed swearing blind he never used EPO. Richard Virenque said the same for two-and-a-half years. The belief among the drug takers is that if you are not positive, you are not taking drugs. And that is stupid and perverse. Tyler Hamilton maintained that his positive for blood-boosting was due to the presence of a twin in his mother’s womb, which subsequently disappeared. Roberto Heras, winner of last year’s Tour of Spain, is adamant that his positive for EPO is nothing to do with use of the drug.

  Landis has hired the same lawyer as Heras, Jose Maria Buxeda, and his defence now rests on the fact that his testosterone count is naturally high and the test is flawed. Of course.

  It will, no doubt, all become part of the history of a sport that has taken denial beyond the surreal, that brought us dogs that take steroids, sick mothers-in-law who require growth hormone, wives who use EPO as a fertility treatment. It speaks volumes for cycling that the British racer David Millar stands out as a shining example because, when confronted with the evidence, he came clean, recognised his folly and dishonesty and took his punishment.

  On Thursday evening, a few hours after news of Landis’s positive test had broken, I received a message from a cycling friend, a bloke in his mid-50s who is absolutely typical of the vast unheard body of fans who race bikes for fun and who ride up mountain passes to see how far they can push their bodies and minds. “I know we are cynical [already] but this is so bloody depressing. Can we ever believe in another great ride?” he asked. Unfortunately, the answer is “no”.

  No matter how much we want to believe in some feat that harks back to Eddy Merckx and Fausto Coppi, unless we are intimately acquainted with the cyclist in question and know enough of his medical history and his personality to make a rational judgement, we must suspend belief in anything in the Tour that looks unbelievable. Wait for the drug tests, be ready for the police inquiry, expect the spin and denial.

  It is, however, utterly imperative that we do not idly believe every Tour cyclist takes drugs. I was asked a few years ago whether it was possible to race the Tour de France “clean”? “Surely not,” said my companion. “The event is simply too tough.” “Why not?” I said. Cyclists I knew were “clean”, such as Chris Boardman, had completed the Tour with a bit to spare. I would say the same about Bradley Wiggins and Millar, and others in this year’s Tour. My companion thought for a moment. “But if you can do it clean, then taking drugs to do it is unforgivable, surely?” In recent years that is what too many of the men in the upper echelons of the Tour have forgotten.

  The Landis positive was a desperate moment, although its eventual ramifications did not emerge for a further six years. The young American was stripped of his Tour title a year later – the process took that long – and eventually, after four years of denial, brought forward the evidence that led directly to Lance Armstrong’s incrimination. He had, however, been strongly advised by Greg LeMond to reveal everything he knew immediately after the positive test, but he ignored him. Had he (and indeed Tyler Hamilton) behaved with the same courage as David Millar, cycling would have looked very different in 2012.

  In the surreal parallel world that was cycling in the early 2000s, the Tour was coming to London; whatever the drug issues, the Tour remained the Tour. I was not the only one with very contradictory and confused feelings about cycling at this point.

  Childhood dream can help end nightmare

  18 February 2007

  When the Tour de France visits London in July, it will do so at a time of unprecedented crisis for cycling. The previous year’s Tour winner is unlikely to be known, unless Floyd Landis, who finished first then tested positive, is cleared of using testosterone. It is, however, likely that Landis’s version of events will be widely known, as he announced last week that his autobiography will be published just before the Tour starts. Its title, Falsely Positive, is magnificently hubristic.

  Landis is merely the tip of the iceberg. It is impossible to predict whether previous Tour de France winner Jan Ullrich, and the 2005 runner-up Ivan Basso will be at the London start. That will depend on the fallout from Operatión Puerto, the Spanish blood-doping inquiry that led to both men’s exclusion from the 2006 race.

  Behind the scenes, the men at the top of the sport cannot even seem to agree how it should be run, let alone how to deal with the doping problem. The big-race organisers and the governing body, the Union Cycliste Internationale, are bogged down in a turf war over the UCI’s controversial ProTour calendar – UCI want it, the organisers do not – that is set to go to the European Court.

  “I can see why people have lost faith in cycling, because there are so many problems,” acknowledges Bradley Wiggins, the Olympic pursuit champion and Britain’s most successful cyclist. “I’m a fan as well [as a rider], and always have been. The events of the last six months have made me think twice about whether I still love it.”

  By the end of last August, after Landis’s positive test was announced, Wiggins was a demoralised man. “It was one of the best Tours for many years, to be part of it made me proud, but a few days afterwards the whole thing evaporated,” he says. If there is one reason why people should go to the Tour when it visits London for the first time this summer, it is because of the presence of men such as Wiggins, who have publicly and proudly turned their backs on the needle and the blood bank. “There are a lot of people like me, not just a few of us,” says the Londoner. “A lot of the guys are open about being clean. You have guys in my team [Cofidis] like David Moncoutié who simply loves his sport, but isn’t prepared to go to the lengths it might take to win the Tour. He was twelfth on the Tour on bread and water and is something special.

  “The Tour was my childhood dream. When you start riding, every kid dreams of riding the Tour when you are training, sprinting for road signs and so on. For that to be reality and to happen to me was amazing. As someone who grew up as a club cyclist it’s something to be proud of for the rest of your life.”

  The birth back in September of his and wife Cath’s second child, Isabella, has helped Wiggins to put his sport’s struggles into perspective, he says. “That’s increased my belief that it’s just sport, that there are more things in life than winning in sport. I’m happy with where I am, what I’ve achieved. If I were to have to do things other riders might do to win a yellow jersey, or a Tour de France, that’s not for me. I’d rather bow out and do something else.”

  In some ways, the Beijing Olympics is nearer at hand for Wiggins than the Tour, even though there are 18 months before he defends his Olympic individual 4,000 metre pursuit title. In competitive terms the 2008 Games are just around the corner. Which is why next weekend’s World Cup track meeting in Manchester suddenly has such importance.

  “There isn’t much time to play with. In terms of competitive pursuits there is this week, the world championship in March, and next year’s Worlds,” says Wiggins, 26, between training sessions at the Manchester velodrome, where, on Friday, he will take to a track for a world-standard compe
tition for the first time since the Athens Games. “Beijing isn’t that far away. It’s less than two years and that goes quickly. My priority is a double of golds, in the team pursuit and the individual, at the Worlds and Olympics, and Manchester is a bit of a dress rehearsal.” Already, he is eyeing possible rivals for his Olympic title; the good news is that only his old foe Bradley McGee of Australia seems to be in the frame.

  The only hiccup in Wiggins’s progress this winter was a freak training accident last Thursday when he fell off a treadmill, cutting his forehead and, the physios suspected, straining his groin. He should be fit for the World Cup, however. The good news is that Wiggins is stronger and faster than he was at this time in the last Olympic cycle. In training last week he and his three team-mates in the team pursuit squad were on a time of 3min 58sec for the 4,000m, faster than they managed in taking silver behind the Australians in Athens.

  Part of his increased strength can be put down to physical maturing, but the road programme he has followed since leaving the track at the end of 2004 is also responsible. “I feel a different athlete to the one I was in Athens. I feel stronger, more mature, and having done the Giro d’Italia and Tour de France puts [the track] into perspective.

  “In terms of effort and difficulty this is easier to do. The Tour is tougher mentally; a four-minute pursuit is awful to ride in the last kilometre, the team pursuit the same, you hurt so much, but in the Tour you are up against the scale of the thing, mental challenges every day. You get to thinking, ‘I’m hurting and I’ve two weeks to go here.’”

  Wiggins has spent the winter building up for his return to the track, and he hopes the form he has found will carry him through the spring and up to July, when he will be among the contenders for that Tour de France prologue time-trial in London. “There’s a lot of expectation, not so much pressure, but this is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. Win or lose, how many guys ride the Tour prologue in their home city? It’s an honour and a privilege for someone who set out to be a professional cyclist as a kid. I can treasure that experience for ever.”