How I Won the Yellow Jumper

by Ned Boulting

  France Télévisions, with their 300 staff, set up a military camp, which more closely resembles a field hospital than a canteen. They seem to eat in well-ordered shifts, but a glance over in their direction normally offers up the impression that they are subsisting on bread and cheese alone. And wine, obviously.

  The Germans have a vast presence in the compound, which appears undiminished despite the waning of interest back home. Indeed, in 2008, when they ‘weren’t covering the race’ in protest at the spate of doping offences, they still had four times as many staff on-site as we did. It has to be said, they cater miserably for themselves. Unable to eschew national cliché, they serve up a resolutely German-looking and largely pork-and-starch-based affair every day. It is mostly beige in colour. They don’t appear to enjoy it.

  I have no idea what the Belgians and the Dutch – or, come to that, the Spanish and the Italians – do to keep themselves fed. I suspect that they forage. I know that the Australians do. Having blown all their budget on getting to France in the first place, they have nothing left over in the kitty for lunch. They dig the compound over for dry tubers and nibble the succulent ends of overhanging branches.

  Yet we eat like kings.

  Philippe and his team of four live in the smallest caravan on the planet. For a month they try to grab a few hours’ kip squeezed up alongside each other like cornichons in a jar, their Union Jack curtains letting in the morning light as the sun breaks out over an alpine ridge.

  And when that happens, they know, we know, and the Tour knows: it’s time to start peeling the spuds.

  THE TOUR EATS ITSELF

  Nobody had spoken for a while. It was midnight, and we hadn’t eaten since breakfast. The starters had just been plonked down in front of us. Then Liam broke the silence.

  ‘I think he’s brilliant.’ Liam cracked a wide smile, and then went back to spreading a wedge of hot foie gras onto slice of baguette.

  He shook his head, a contented chuckle beginning to spread out within him. As it began to take hold, he looked up again, and spitting a little goose liver towards us, restated his new-found affection for Kazakhstan.

  ‘Vino. I just think he’s fucking brilliant.’

  He reached for the glass of Madiran in front of him. ‘Vinokourov!’

  Liam raised his wine, almost religiously, and saluted us across the table with the name of the disgraced Astana rider.

  His deeds had been so flagrant that they were almost comical. We could forgive him, now that we were sitting in a restaurant, tucking into a fattened and diseased animal organ.

  ‘Alexandre Vinokourov!’ we replied, in the manner of a congregation intoning the Blessing.

  A couple of hours prior to that, it’d been a little harder to see the funny side. This was 2007. It was the year when the great race ate itself.

  We had woken up in Pau, and resentfully slung our accreditation around our necks.

  It was a rest day. But not for us the restorative pleasures of the launderette. We were on our way to a hastily arranged press conference. Michael Rasmussen, the stick-thin Danish climber, had been wearing the yellow jersey for some days after a string of emphatic performances in the mountains. Yet a fug of accusation lay over the Tour all the while that he was in the lead. It all related to Rasmussen’s inability to explain his whereabouts in the spring when he had failed to inform the anti-doping authorities of his location. They had tried to contact him, and they had failed.

  As the obfuscations grew, so too did the sense that he had deliberately misled the doping controls and, rather than being in Mexico where he lived with his wife, had been in Italy, more specifically Tuscany, getting up to who knows what mischief. Every day we tormented him a little more with our questioning. We did so not on a whim or for fun, but because we believed he’d been systematically selling the entire Tour, and us and the cycling public, a huge lie.

  It was getting to everyone. The Danish TV reporter, who had the allotted task of interviewing her home country’s newest national hero every day, was going incrementally mad. Because of her particular position, she had to be more careful than others with the tone that she took, and could only soft-pedal the scepticism. After a number of days with Rasmussen wearing the yellow jersey, she was visibly dreading facing up to him, when she knew she had to adopt a tone of phoney congratulation.

  During the second week of the Tour, it was made public that Rasmussen had even been sighted in Tuscany in the spring. This was when the clamour for his head passed the point of no return. Every day he was paraded in front of the press in his yellow jersey; every day, the questioning grew more intense. Still more accusations surfaced, some of them quite bizarre. An American rider claimed that Rasmussen had asked him to smuggle some doping products in a shoebox containing new trainers.

  ASO, the Tour organisers, eventually lost patience with the Dane. He was embarrassing their race. That afternoon Marieline, their chief media officer, came to me in the TV compound when the race was just a few kilometres away.

  ‘Today, I will bring Rasmussen to you straight away.’ This was an unusual thing to say. ‘I think he has many questions to answer.’ They had seen and heard enough.

  I understood that I was not to let him off the hook lightly. It proved to be a painful exchange during which I managed to move him from a position of ‘no comment’ to an outright denial of the accusation. Often it’s not the fact of denial but the manner in which it is delivered that is most revealing. In Rasmussen’s case, he could hardly have cut a more evasive and unconvincing figure.

  But still it was not satisfactory. In an attempt to quell the growing storm, ASO called a press conference for the rest day. And this was where we now found ourselves. A big hall, looking towards a table encrusted with microphones with cables leading out of the room, onto the street and up onto satellite trucks for instant distribution across the world. Rasmussen, with a lawyer at his side, faced up, shifting in his seat as wave after wave of questions crashed against him. Matt Rendell took his place in the middle of the front row and accused him directly of registering with the Mexican cycling authorities as a means to hiding his location.

  By lunchtime, it was finally over. Rasmussen had stuck to his story, had issued denial after denial. He had held firm. We unpicked our cables, packed up our kit, found our car and headed back to the Hotel Bristol, where we were staying.

  We sat down on the veranda, where the rest day could really begin.

  Instantly the Tour vanished. Talk turned to other things, to life outside the race. We nattered in faltering French to the couple who ran the place: a tidily turned-out boutique hotel in the middle of town on which they had spent huge sums of money renovating. They were curious about our jobs, even though the Tour impacted little on their lives. They were fascinated too to witness the speed and vigour with which we now moved seamlessly on to our second bottle of Sancerre on an empty stomach. The sun was out, the wine was great and the conversation flowed easily.

  It must have been about 3 p.m. when the hotelier appeared once more, bringing with him another little bowl of black olives. He put them down and let slip a casual remark, which was to ruin our day for a second time.

  ‘It’s interesting what you were telling us about the maillot jaune, because they’ve just said something on the radio about another big-name rider testing positive. Some Russian bloke, I think.’

  We put down our glasses. Three Englishmen and a Scot looked across at him, pale with surprise. As if reflecting the shock in our eyes, he looked a little scared himself.

  ‘Alexandre Vinokourov?’ I ventured, although the question was rhetorical. I already knew the answer.

  A few days earlier, in the shadow of Albi’s magnificent cathedral, someone had got to Vinokourov. Perhaps it had happened in the dead of night. Certainly it would have been carefully pre-arranged. The accomplice might have come in through the back, where they carry the rubbish out from the kitchens. Or perhaps Vino had sneaked down the corridor, pushed open a one-way fire
exit door, and allowed his courier to slip in from some untended corner of the car park. He might have left the hotel, and gone to a safe house. We will probably never know. But either way, he got his blood.

  As he lay there, looking up at the dried little corpses of mosquitoes stuck to the ceiling of his hotel room, he would have had no idea that the refrigerated, centrifugally spun, red-cell-rich blood being siphoned into his system belonged to someone else. Perhaps it was the hidden stash of another, lesser name, a hopeless case, who had chosen this course of action in an effort to save a career that was going nowhere. The theories surrounding the case are outlandish. I’ve even heard it told that the blood might have come from his own father.

  Vinokourov may well have fallen asleep dreaming of derring-do and greatness to come. He might have imagined blasting the time trial to pieces, and then with a tip of his cap and a wink in his eye, evading the law as they hunted for signs of doping. All they would find would be blood. His blood.

  He would pass through the border undetected, heading for safety like a POW in The Great Escape. Little did he realise that a couple of days later he’d have a Gordon Jackson moment: ‘Nice blood, Mr Vinokourov.’

  ‘Thanks very much. It’s not mine, you know.’

  ‘Guards, seize him!’

  Scarcely fifteen minutes later we arrived at his hotel on the outskirts of Pau to a scene of complete chaos: a dozen police cars and vans, fifty gendarmes, a hundred or so cameramen and journalists, and now us adding to the mix.

  We asked around. No one had seen Vino being led away. The feeling was that he was still locked up in the hotel as the cops rifled through everybody’s room. We struck a deal with an Australian crew. If they waited outside the front of the hotel, we would stake out the rear. We would share our footage and spread out our resources. So we inched our way through privet hedges and herbaceous borders to the back of the hotel, where, like a not-terribly-well-drilled SAS unit, we took up our position on the far side of a raised section of lawn.

  There were a handful of police officers stationed at each rear entrance. Their job was not so much to prevent us from entering the premises, as to stop people escaping. The place was locked down, and although we were stamping all over private property, the police were more than happy for us to carry on our work.

  Police raids on the Tour are a curiously public spectacle, which must have something to do with ‘justice being seen to be done’. The gendarmes like to look their best for the cameras when they raid a cyclist’s hotel. They polish their boots, and they wear their best shirts to match their purposeful briefcases.

  I think at some point we may have fallen asleep. At the very least, I cannot guarantee that I was completely alert. It was the Sancerre, you understand. Every now and again, one of us would pop his head above the parapet and scout out the back of the hotel. Woody’s boom extended into the air like a periscope, as he lay on his back, cursing the day he ever signed up to cover the Tour de France. Not much happened as the blisteringly hot afternoon wore on. Our empty stomachs and mid-afternoon hangovers were making their presence felt.

  Then, suddenly, mayhem descended once again.

  Marc Biever, the Swiss directeur sportif of the Astana team, emerged, to everyone’s surprise, from the side of the building; the one minor loophole in our otherwise hermetically sealed approach. We joined the party late. By the time we caught up, he was submerged under a tidal wave of microphones and bodies. We had no chance. The bundle was too broad for Woody to extend his boom over the top, and the thicket of people too dense for Liam to snatch even the most obscure of headshots. So, frozen out at the margins of the storm, we waited, and wondered what on earth we could do to rescue the situation.

  But then, with a biblical parting of the waves, the mass of reporters split asunder and out popped the beleaguered directeur sportif. Quite by chance, and much to his regret, I should imagine, he walked straight into our frankly unintentional trap. Within a matter of seconds we were on him.

  Quick as a flash. ‘Marc. Do you feel let down by Alexandre Vinokourov?’

  He stopped, adjusted his glasses on his nose, and looked quizzically at me. ‘I’m sorry. What do you mean?’

  There is nothing worse than asking a hard-hitting question, and then having to ask it again.

  ‘Do you feel let down by him. By Vinokourov?’ I asked, a notch louder, inwardly tutting.

  ‘I don’t know what you mean,’ came the reply.

  At this moment, it should have occurred to me that, English not being his mother tongue, Biever might actually not have known what I meant. But through the haze of my wine-soaked reflexes, I took his understandable obtuseness for evasiveness. I pressed home my point.

  ‘I want to know if you feel let down by Alexandre Vinokourov,’ I said, once again, and now almost very loud.

  Biever looked pained at me. But he stood his ground and shrugged his shoulders. The next day, Woody said I should have ‘asked him if he felt disappointed’. It was the first and only time he has ever interfered in my job description. But I think he had a point.

  ‘Did Alexandre Vinokourov let you down?’ One final time.

  He mumbled some stuff about ‘A’ and ‘B’ samples, and with that, he was gone. I couldn’t help feeling I might have handled the interview with a little more subtlety.

  By the time we eventually settled down to eat that evening, it felt like the Tour was unravelling before us. We wondered separately whether we would have jobs to come back to the following July. We speculated on what might happen next, little knowing that the race itself would trump all our guesses.

  The next day, we watched on in amazement as Bradley Wiggins’s Cofidis teammate Christian Moreni was led away in front of all our cameras and bundled into the back of a gendarme’s car after he’d ridden to the top of the Col d’Aubisque.

  At the same time, Michael Rasmussen was being booed wearing the yellow jersey and on the podium by the small crowd who had gathered there.

  That evening the entire Cofidis team endured the indignity of a police escort back to their hotel rooms. Like Astana, they too withdrew from the race.

  And then in the dead of night, Rasmussen as well was stuffed in the back of a car, driven away to a secret location, and disappeared from view. All this happened while we stayed in Pau. All this played out while we enjoyed the hospitality of the Hotel Bristol. Whenever the Tour has taken us to Pau since, we have dropped in there for a coffee and to reminisce.

  So in 2010, on finding out that Alberto Contador had tested positive, it came as no surprise to me that the incriminating doping control had been taken in Pau. It seems to be the plughole down which reputations disappear.

  As a journalist, these stories are thrilling to report. As a cycling fan, they are toxic. And Vinokourov, through his seeming lack of remorse, remains to this day not without a curious fascination.

  Liam retains a mystifying, and enduring affection for the taciturn Kazakh. He went as far as inventing a new piece of vocabulary; ‘Kourov!’ A shorthand version of ‘Vino’, it simply means wine, and to this day he will shout it out, in a restaurant, as he raises a glass of blood-red claret to the memory of 2007.

  Of course, the Astana rider was back in 2010. He won a typical Vinokourov stage, full of defiance and spontaneity. He lapped up the applause. He believed himself absolved.

  Liam and I waited in the mixed zone to ambush him.

  ‘What guarantees can you offer that you are now riding clean?’ I asked.

  ‘This is a new Vino.’

  ‘Do you regret 2007?’

  ‘I will not talk about 2007,’ he offered, with a pained wince. Then he moved on to the next microphone.

  I’ll talk about it, though. To anyone who’ll listen.

  THE MOUNTAINS

  I drove up to within five kilometres of the summit, on the south side of the mountain. There was a café, and a small car park. I left the hire car there, hiding the key behind the offside front wheel. Then I tightened the laces o
f my running shoes, took a couple of deep breaths of frozen Provençal air and set off up Mont Ventoux.

  It was Christmas 2007. We were visiting friends who had a house at the base of the big mountain. I was thrilled to be staying this close to it, having only otherwise glimpsed its humpbacked form from the motorway, speeding past en route from the Alps to the Pyrenees, or vice versa. There is a helpful road sign, in ‘touristique’ brown, which points it out, with the words ‘Le Géant de Provence’. Despite having five completed Tours under my belt, not one of them had included an ascent of Ventoux. So I was eager to see it for myself. Even if that meant running up it.

  It was a crystal-clear, but bitterly cold, winter’s day. The gradient was steep, but just reasonable enough for me to sustain a semi-breathless jog. The road snaked upwards, and I was conscious that behind me an expansive view to the south was opening up. I kept my gaze to the tarmac though, concentrating on my rhythm, as the cold air grew a little thinner.

  With about a kilometre to go, the tarmac became shrouded in snow. Old snow, which had fallen some time ago, compacted, thawed a little and then refrozen. I scrunched into it, placing my footfalls as firmly as I could so as to avoid slipping. It was becoming hard. My calves were tightening.

  I did stop briefly to see the Tom Simpson memorial and read the various tributes and messages from a wide cross section of the British cycling scene. Wolverhampton. Tiverton. Dulwich. It was curious to see such homely place names in that volcanic setting. A concentrated drop of British sentiment, a dot of Blighty on the lunar landscape of Mont Ventoux. How close he’d been to the summit when his heart gave out. I set off again drawn towards the iconic red-and-white striped tower of the meteorological station, which marks the summit.

  Eventually I reached the top. Cresting the ridge quite suddenly, I saw what lay on the other side. Looking north, there was an endless panorama of France. Pretty much all of it.