French Renaissance

by Jeremy Whittle

  ‘On the Ventoux, you have to be dead steady with your effort. I was much better at being dead steady with my effort than I ever was at bouncing it around.

  ‘That’s why a little punchy second-category climb in the Tour of the Basque Country was much harder for me than the Ventoux. On a climb like that, I’d be suffering just to hang on to the tail end.’

  Froome, he says, is also better suited to the climb than many of his rivals. ‘That explosivity that Contador and Quintana have, that just doesn’t suit that mountain. It’s a climb for someone who can grind, grind and grind out a tempo.

  ‘A rider like Froome can grind and grind his way up and then, in the last few kilometres, everyone hits oxygen debt and has nowhere to go. That makes it almost easy for a guy like Froome to walk away with the race.’ Vaughters describes his own climbing style as closer to Froome, than Contador or Quintana.

  ‘Ventoux was always a funny climb for me, not just the year I won on it, in ’99, but whenever I competed on it. I’d always be better than I was anywhere else. I’d just be riding and I’d look around and there wouldn’t be many guys left with me any more.’

  Climbs like the Aubisque, Vaughters says, and specifically the Spanish Pyrenees, are a different kettle of fish. ‘They’re choppy climbs, the antithesis of the Ventoux. Maybe the closest thing to Ventoux would be . . . well, maybe the Galibier, but not exactly.

  ‘Other than at Chalet Reynard for about 50 metres, there’s not a single flat spot on the Ventoux. It was uniquely suited to how I rode. I’d just settle into my rhythm, get to the red line and just stick it there, holding it until body parts started falling off me. Yeah, there was suffering but it was suffering where I was in the game to win.’

  Vaughters held the Ventoux record, of 56:50 for the 21.6 kilometres, until Basque climber Iban Mayo shattered it by the best part of a minute in June 2004, again during the Dauphiné Libéré and, again, at the expense of a flustered Armstrong. The Coloradan’s 1999 time now sits third fastest ahead of a leaderboard that includes the names Hamilton, Armstrong, Pantani and Vinokourov. Their histories of doping are now well known, which perhaps reveals more about the demands of the Giant than any verse or prose.

  Vaughters, by then retired, was there in June 2004, watching Mayo take the stage win. ‘I expected my record to be broken today and I expected Mayo to do it,’ he said at the time. Armstrong, meanwhile, lost just under two minutes to the Spaniard.

  Mayo’s time was so fast that Frenchman Sylvain Calzati, dead last, finished over 25 minutes behind him, in just 22 kilometres. He and five others were outside the time limit and were evicted from the race. That performance, and particularly the whupping of Armstrong on the slopes of the Giant, made Mayo a star in Spain. Suddenly, he was a contender for the Tour. Veteran cycling writer and Spanish expert, Alasdair Fotheringham, remembers the hysteria of that summer well. ‘He had the Basque cycling world eating out of the palm of his hand,’ Fotheringham says. ‘I still remember one Basque journalist calling me up, shouting – with no introduction – “Iban Mayo is God!” and then slamming the phone down again, without saying goodbye . . .’

  Maybe Vaughters’ description of his own climbing style on Ventoux also explains Armstrong’s serial shortcomings on the Giant. Ventoux, so Vaughters says, is not a climb for ‘bouncing around’. Steady, high-pace ‘grind’, as he called his own technique, was not really Armstrong’s style. Armstrong liked ‘bouncing around’, accelerating and recovering, before accelerating again, whether it was on Alpe d’Huez, Hautacam, Luz Ardiden or Plateau de Beille. He ‘got’ those climbs because he knew the sweet spots; he knew where to accelerate hard and where to take a moment to recover.

  Did all the doping fuel the capacity to ‘bounce around’, the repetition of big attacks, the high cadence, the sudden violent efforts? Almost definitely.

  The only time that ‘bouncing around’ on the Giant worked in Lance’s favour was in 2000, when he formed that unlikely tag team with Pantani. With the wind blowing over the summit and every punch and counterpunch hauling them that bit further ahead, it was no day for ‘flat stick’ grinders, such as Vaughters. But as Armstrong discovered, it was also a bad day to start giving out gifts.

  Jonathan Vaughters’ record-breaking win on the Ventoux in June 1999 set in motion a chain of events that changed his life. ‘It was a weird experience in a lot of ways,’ he says. ‘There were a lot of things at play.

  ‘One was that, for a very short period of time, I think Lance viewed me as an internal rival. Winning that time trial on Ventoux and beating him soundly was almost like a threat.’

  Once he had taken the race lead, he says that the resentment towards him became almost comedically overt. ‘Johan Bruyneel and Lance didn’t really want me to win the Dauphiné and the team tactics that were played out for the next few days were subtly trying to get somebody else to win. It was an odd thing to live through.’

  Vaughters, in the yellow jersey after the Ventoux time trial, held on to the race lead until the penultimate stage to Passy Plaine-Joux, when Alexander Vinokourov’s attacks finally paid off. ‘At that time, I was very deferent to Lance: he was Mister Alpha. I was like, “OK, if you think that’s best,” but years later you think, “That was the worst tactic you could possibly have employed to keep a rider like me in the leader’s jersey.”

  ‘Their tactics were just nuts – and then he was still pissed off at the end of the race when I didn’t win it! Like, “You let us all down . . .” ’

  Vaughters is quick to acknowledge the role drugs played in his success. He had experimented with doping before, in the early days in Europe, but never to the extent that he did that June. ‘There had been times in my career when I had doped, but in a limited way. But that Dauphiné was the first time in my career when it had been anything and everything. It was muscled up as much as US Postal Service could do.

  ‘I remember when I won on the Ventoux . . . If you look at the pictures, I’m sticking my tongue out and laughing. It was like, “Oh, I get it now.” I’d beaten all these guys, Lance, Vinokourov, Joseba Beloki, that were almost to me untouchables.

  ‘All of a sudden I was in the yellow jersey and I was ahead of them. I was leading the Dauphiné and I’d set the record up the Ventoux, but I was thinking, “So that’s all there is to it . . .?”

  ‘I’m not proud of that win, but at the same time, that era . . .’ his voice trails off. ‘From that point forward, I never spoke about that as my “best” victory in cycling. It’s the best known, but I just thought it was a freak show.’

  Now, after years looking up at the top table, Vaughters saw what it took to take his place. ‘That day on the Ventoux I answered the question, “If I train as hard as everyone else, if I dope as hard as everyone else, am I one of the best in the world?” After that I never really felt the need to answer it a second time.

  ‘From that point forward, I never doped as much. Yes, I did a little bit, but I never trained as hard, I was never as motivated. After I’d answered the question, if I’d continued to do it over and over again, then that’s just . . . greed, just gluttonous.’

  Vaughters was still only 26 that summer and recalls that his disillusion with racing, stemming from that epiphany on the summit of Ventoux, took a while to take root. ‘At that point I was just thinking, “I’ve seen the strings in the puppet show.” ’ He pauses and then asks: ‘Does that make sense?

  ‘From that moment, it was difficult to – not to take cycling seriously – but to commit. When I left in 2002, I wanted nothing to do with cycling any more. I was done. That was three years, almost to the day, after winning on the Ventoux.

  ‘So the disillusion was pretty quick. In fact, I still had two years on my contract with Roger Legeay’s Crédit Agricole team. I basically told him, “I can’t do this any more. The passion’s gone. I want to go home and I don’t want to come back.” ’

  Legeay, Vaughters says, was very fair. ‘He paid me until the end of the year and told me it
was good that I was being honest with myself. From then on, we were better friends. I have immense respect for Roger. He’s a genuine guy.’

  But he hasn’t forgotten the realisation that came to him as he stood on the top of the Ventoux. ‘The fundamental lesson of 1999 that I have always conveyed to every athlete I’ve worked with since is that, despite that win, despite setting the record, I felt no pride from that win.

  ‘I’ve told guys, “If you do dope you can win one of the biggest races on one of the most famous climbs and you will make a huge splash, but – unless you’re a huge sociopath – you will just feel crappy about it. You might win but you will become numb to the feeling of winning. In contrast, when you win for real it’s a huge release of euphoria.” ’

  There was, he says, one final hurrah. ‘When I was with Crédit Agricole and we won the team time trial in the 2001 Tour, as far as I know, everyone on that team was clean.

  ‘That was an unbelievable feeling. We’d thought, “We’re a clean team, we’re going to get our butts kicked,” so it was incredible. That was ten times more joyful than winning on the Ventoux.’

  Vaughters says that, after retiring, he never imagined returning to the European circuit. Isolated from the scene after returning to the States, he got dragged back into cycling by accident. ‘We had a junior team – 5280 – sponsored by my real estate company, kids racing around Colorado. That team started winning and we got a few more sponsors, but, I mean, I had a full-time job.’

  It was technology entrepreneur, bike-racing fan and wealthy investor, Doug Ellis, who reeled Vaughters back into the European dream. ‘Doug called me out of nowhere and in essence, over a couple of weeks, said we should build the next American Tour de France team.’

  After meeting Vaughters in 2005, Ellis’s enthusiasm for his grand plan gathered momentum. ‘I kept telling him: “Dude, you’re nuts – there’s a lot involved and you’re going to lose a lot of money and not everything is as it seems.” And he said, “Well, maybe we can change that.” ’

  So, before thinking too much about it, Vaughters found himself heading back to the south of France. ‘One of the first training camps Doug funded was at the bottom of the Ventoux.

  ‘He gave us $100,000 and that was a great start, enough to mean we could ride the Route du Sud. So the week before the Route du Sud we had a training camp in Malaucène.’

  Vaughters recalls that he loved that trip. ‘We stayed at a little American-owned gite in Malaucène. We were basically camping but it was a hoot.

  ‘I’d ride some days, motor-pace others, and then we headed to the Route du Sud. That was our first foray.’

  So there’s a trajectory there, I say. Of the Ventoux killing your dreams and then, a few years later, rekindling them . . .

  ‘Yeah, in a way, that’s true,’ Jonathan says. ‘It was beginning to bring my love of cycling back, as I had never been on a trip into that area when I wasn’t just focused on my own race.

  ‘That was the first time the Ventoux was so much more than just a profile to race up, when I saw it as a beautiful place with a beautiful landscape.’

  Vaughters says that he goes to Provence whenever he can. ‘In the middle of July, whenever the Tour comes through there, then I’m happy.

  ‘Sometimes, I’ll go down there with my wife and stay in a little hotel we know, close to Orange. I love that baking hundred-degree heat. There’s something about it, the cicadas, the lavender fields, the scorching heat, the wine. I’ve done a lot of riding around there too. I’ll usually ride for a couple of hours. I like the little roads, the gorges.

  ‘For a lot of pro riders, France is the place you don’t want to go to because you know you’re going to really suffer, but it’s the place you do have to go to to earn the decent paycheck.

  ‘And that stay in Malaucène definitely made me think of France as a really nice place to visit, rather than this hellish place of suffering I have to go to, which is how it had been until then. When you go back and you don’t have the suffering hanging over you, you think: “Wow, this place is nice . . .” ’

  Vaughters has passed on his knowledge of the Giant to other riders: ‘I have tried to give advice over the years, but the thing about the Ventoux is that it’s purely physical. A lot of climbs you can say, “Well, you hit it hard here and then you back off a bit, there’s a small descent,” but the Ventoux’s almost like an ergometer test of a mountain.

  ‘You tell the guys: “Do everything you can – don’t go into the red too early on,” and that’s about it.’

  Vaughters acknowledges, though, that the aura of Ventoux, the intimidating scale of it dominating the Rhône valley, ‘totally messes with some riders’ heads’, including French pros on his own team. ‘A rider like Pierre Rolland, he’s so . . . psychological. When the French crowds are cheering for him and he’s in the breakaway, all of a sudden, when you look at his power profiles, he’s objectively stronger.

  ‘When you see the Ventoux looming in the distance, you’re creeping across the vineyards towards it in the peloton and then, when you hit it, it’s so relentless, that totally splits his head in half . . . You can see it in his SRM power outputs – his brain does not handle it. You can see little surges in power when there’s cheering and applause. Then there’s a little break and then another surge.’

  Maybe it’s a French thing for French riders, I suggest, allied to the significance of the Ventoux?

  ‘Hmmm . . . It’s the opposite of how I was and how I’d ride the Ventoux. Somebody clapping for me was totally irrelevant. I was totally internally focused and he is totally externally focused.

  ‘But you can’t ride the Ventoux like Pierre, because it’s so unrelenting. And that’s the kind of situation when a sports psychologist might help him, you know, break it down.’

  Vaughters admits that as a rider he was so focused when climbing the Ventoux that he barely registered the presence of the Simpson memorial. It’s a strange admission for a man whose profile balances so delicately on the ebb and flow of the doping debate. ‘I didn’t even know where it was. In the races, I couldn’t tell you where it was. Years later, in 2009, when Brad [Wiggins] was riding for us, I parked at the top and walked down to the memorial. That was the first time I’d seen it.’

  But like so many others, Vaughters recognises the significance of Simpson. ‘It’s an important learning moment in the history of cycling. If you take it away, then that has a huge impact on cycling and on the attitude towards even attempting to confront doping.

  ‘It was a moment that shaped the sport. If you’re not willing to recognise what has happened, then, to use the cliché, you’re condemned to repeat it.’

  Vaughters’ belief in second chances and in redemption – his own and those of some of his riders such as David Millar, Dave Zabriskie and Christian Vandevelde – has almost always been controversial and, as in the case of Tom Danielson’s more recent misdemeanours, has also spectacularly backfired on him. In 2010, as the doping investigation that eventually led to Lance Armstrong’s downfall began to gain momentum, and their Garmin team grew in profile, Ellis and Vaughters issued a statement regarding their team’s willingness to assist with the investigation.

  ‘As long as they [Garmin team personnel] express the truth about the past to the appropriate parties,’ it read, ‘they will continue to have a place in our organisation and we will support them . . .’

  Vaughters believes that statement of intent was unprecedented. ‘No team has ever said, “If you’re honest, we’re gonna keep you.” Usually it’s the reverse. I don’t think Lance and Johan took that seriously, but then after some time they realised that our riders were telling the truth.’

  So does Armstrong, so resentful of his team-mate’s success on Ventoux in the blazing June of 1999, now blame Vaughters for his downfall?

  ‘He does,’ the Coloradan sighs. ‘That’s because when you had the critical mass of myself, Zabriskie, Danielson and Vandevelde’ – all on Vaughters’ Garmin te
am of former dopers and all ex-Armstrong team-mates – ‘those were unimpeachable witnesses. That forced the hand of others.

  ‘So if you take our policy away, of sticking by people even when they had told the truth, then the USADA investigation doesn’t get off the ground due to the lack of federal witnesses.’

  And if that happens, I say, Lance gets to keep his seven Tours de France.

  ‘Yep, don’t worry – I know that bit,’ Vaughters says, more than a little wearily.

  ‘To this day,’ says Tyler Hamilton, now selling real estate in Missoula, Montana, ‘I still can’t believe that I won on that climb. There’s the Ventoux and there’s Alpe d’Huez – those two are the most prestigious.’

  Hamilton says that the mountain’s torrid history played its part in racking up the tension. ‘You definitely feel that extra pressure, and that racing on Ventoux is a big day. There was a lot of hype about it.

  ‘Before 2000, I’d raced it in the Dauphiné, a time trial in 1999 when Jonathan Vaughters won. I think I did a decent race – maybe top ten, top 15.’ In fact, he finished ninth on the stage, more than two minutes behind Vaughters.

  ‘I’ve raced it feeling good, I’ve raced it feeling bad, but the Ventoux is always brutal. The bottom can be pretty humid and hot, with no wind, because you’re there in the trees. And the grade is just . . .’

  ‘I always tried to hold on. You always want to stay positive, but you quickly realise, once the gradient kicks in, whether you have it or not. If you get dropped on the Ventoux, that’s usually it. There’s no way back.’

  In July 2000 Hamilton, riding for Armstrong’s bid for a second Tour win, knew what was coming. They’d prepared well – in every sense. ‘We previewed the Ventoux for the 2000 Dauphiné and I’d done it before,’ he remembered. And they’d doped as well, transfusing blood at the Hotel l’Esplan in St Paul-Trois-Châteaux, a 40-minute drive across the vineyards to the north of the mountain.