by David Walsh
His work from the Festina trial was praised by his bosses at L’Équipe but, while there was no shortage of doping stories, L’Équipe’s enthusiasm for the subject wasn’t anywhere close to Pierre’s. The newspaper’s bosses would praise him for the work he did in Lille, but his fellow reporters in the cycling department weren’t so impressed.
Each of the major sports at L’Équipe has a separate department. Cycling, for example, had its editor, Rouet, his number two (Philippe Bouvet) and then nine reporters. ‘I’d known Jean-Michel and Philippe for a long time and they’re good guys. But when I concentrated on doping, I knew some of the others wouldn’t like it very much. They didn’t think my writing about doping was good for the newspaper, and at least two of them, Philippe Le Gars and Manuel Martinez, believed my writing was making it harder for them to get access to the riders.’
One of the bosses spoke with Pierre about his concerns.
‘He said that he didn’t think I was in harmony with the newspaper and I replied, “Am I the problem or are you the problem?” They wanted me to write some things about doping, but there were just too many doping affairs for their liking.’
While working exclusively on doping, Pierre discovered something unexpected. Always, the message came back to him that riders and everyone else complained about his work but whenever he sat down one to one with a rider and looked him in the eye, the reaction from the other side of the table was positive. ‘The ones who would actually talk had a lot of respect for what I was doing and many of them wanted me to keep doing it.’
Tensions increased on L’Équipe’s cycling desk.
At first some of the other journalists were suspicious, then they refused to speak with Pierre, and in time he became a pariah, totally alone within that group of nine. He was Monsieur Propre. His presence made people uneasy. It was a terrible time for Pierre. Philippe Le Gars and Manuel Martinez were particularly unhappy about his work. It was clear that they would have been happy if Pierre was fired.
Pierre knew that Le Gars and Martinez were friends with some of the top cyclists and liked to socialise with them. This was the time when partying bike riders would swap their performance-enhancing drugs for recreational drugs and inject pot belge, a lethal mixture of recreational drugs including heroin, cocaine and amphetamine.
People gossiped about Le Gars and Martinez. There were rumours that they had been present at some of these pot belge parties. Sensing that these same two journalists were undermining his position at the newspaper, Pierre decided to make enquiries about the social habits of his colleagues.
He spoke with Bruno Roussel, the former Festina team director; Willy Voet, the former masseur; and Jerome Chiotti, a former Festina rider. They told Pierre they knew Le Gars and Martinez had been at some of those parties, had gotten drunk with the riders and injected pot belge, sharing needles with the riders. A Festina car had been damaged on the way back from a party.
Pierre asked each his contacts to write down what they knew about the journalists, as if they were writing witness statements, and to sign them at the bottom. They knew these statements would be shown to senior people at L’Équipe and still they all agreed to make formal statements about the involvement of Le Gars and Martinez.
At first Pierre tried to work things out through Jean-Michel, but after showing the cycling editor the three damning testimonials, he realised his friend didn’t want to deal with the discovery that two of his reporters had engaged in recreational drug use with professional cyclists. Pierre believed L’Équipe’s reputation as a serious newspaper was compromised by the journalists’ behaviour.
‘I didn’t want them to lose their jobs but I wanted to say to them, “You’ve gone too far here, you can’t behave like this.” I thought they should be disciplined and reminded of their responsibilities as journalists and representatives of L’Équipe.’
Jean-Michel Rouet and Philippe Bouvet are fine journalists and good men but they are not by nature confrontational. They didn’t want to have anything to do with the three testimonials. Pierre thought, ‘That’s okay, I’ll take them higher.’ He spoke about what he’d learned to the newspaper’s editor Jérôme Bureau and his right-hand man Claude Droussent.
In February 2001, Bureau, Droussent, Ballester, Le Gars and Martinez met in a room at L’Équipe’s offices. Bureau read the statements of Roussel, Voet and Chiotti, and his anger towards Le Gars and Martinez was made clear. Though Pierre could feel the hostility of his fellow journalists, he wasn’t bothered. They thought he was the problem. He thought they were problem. Bureau and Droussent could decide.
A week or so later, Bureau arranged a meeting with Pierre. Le Gars and Martinez had received a warning about their future behaviour. Pierre wasn’t sure how the newspaper would deal with him. ‘If I had any worries it was because I felt they weren’t enthusiastic about the role I wanted for myself at the newspaper.’
Pierre wanted to be the doping correspondent on a paper that had 379 other journalists out there selling the illusion. He was savvy enough to realise that L’Équipe sells an image of sport that is about role models and heroes, great victories and heartbreaking losses, triumph and emotion, and it didn’t want to look at the backside of this. He knew he wasn’t in tune with what his bosses saw as the editorial needs of the paper.
‘For the previous six months I wasn’t able to get as many doping stories in as I wanted, so I said to Jean-Michel, “Just let me do doping and editing, I don’t mind sitting at a desk editing the work of the guys at the races, but please don’t send me any more.” When I met Jérôme I thought I would be placated and allowed to continue doing this.’
That wasn’t how it turned out. ‘I met Jérôme and he spoke to me about how people working for the same department needed to be a team and I hadn’t been a team player. He said I was wrong to have got the evidence against my colleagues and I would have to go.’
Pierre was fired a fortnight later.
L’Équipe’s view was that he had behaved improperly and they were entitled to dismiss him without any compensation. Pierre was convinced they couldn’t do this, but different people had warned that L’Équipe might try to justify sacking him and insist he wasn’t entitled to a pay-off. Pierre’s situation was complicated by the fact that his wife, Liliane Trevisan, was a basketball writer at the newspaper. Still, he wasn’t going to allow L’Équipe to get away with what he considered a totally unjust sacking.
Pierre knew a Parisian lawyer, Thibault de Montbrial, a young man who once encountered is not easily forgotten. When you get past the good looks, charm and supreme confidence, what strikes you about Thibault is his intellect and his natural affinity with journalists who challenge institutions.
Thibault knew the kind of journalist Pierre was and he liked him. When he heard the story of Pierre’s dismissal, he was staggered. He wanted Pierre not to treat this as a simple employer– employee case but as something more serious which he would take before an industrial tribunal. His professional opinion was that Pierre would be awarded a substantial sum of money as a result of the damage done to his reputation by an unjustifiable decision.
‘It was a difficult situation for me because Liliane liked her job at L’Équipe and it was going to be bad for her if I took up a big legal case against the paper. I did not want her to be affected by my situation with L’Équipe. If we’d gone before the tribunal, I don’t think she would have been able to stay there. So I decided not to go that route.
‘Thibault said it was certain we would win and the pay-off would be far greater than normal. I said to him, “Look, I just want them to pay what they should have paid when they were letting me go.” He said that wouldn’t be a problem and in the end he made them write a pretty good cheque. It was the right thing for Liliane and me because she wanted to continue working there.’
Liliane Trevisan continues to work the basketball beat for L’Équipe. Philippe Le Gars and Manuel Martinez remain reporters in the cycling department.
7
‘As you get older it is harder to have heroes, but it is sort of necessary.’
Ernest Hemingway
If you take the decision as a journalist to spit into the soup which is the peloton’s favourite nourishment, it’s best to understand why you’re doing it and to know more about the subject than those who will tell you it’s none of your business. This usually means going back to the beginning, unearthing good sources, putting together a chain of events. If there is someone who has been there before you, cleared the ground and made it easier for you to follow, so much the better.
Let me introduce Sandro Donati.
I’d heard of the work that Sandro had been doing as an anti-doping campaigner in his native Italy before I headed to a Copenhagen conference organised by a Danish organisation Play the Game in November 2000. Sandro was meant to speak early in the week but his employers, the Italian Olympic Committee (CONI), refused at the last minute to give him time off. They don’t emerge without bruising when Sandro recalls his fight against doping. They don’t like that.
Political strings were pulled, pressure was put on CONI and three days later than expected Sandro Donati landed in Copenhagen. Perhaps it was because an official arm of Italian sport had tried to prevent him from speaking, perhaps it was his natural charisma, but Sandro drew the biggest audience of the week. He didn’t come armed with slides or power-points or catchy phrases, he just told the story of his struggle against doping and against corruption in Italy. A man with his finger in the dyke. It was more than enough. We listened and we heard how sport had been poisoned. Sandro reminded us of the difficulty of exposing well-connected wrongdoers. With his eye-witness accounts from the front line, Sandro held us captive for an hour and a half.
His passion was for everything we believed that sport should be.
At the end everyone stood and applauded. They continued to clap for what seemed an eternity and there were a few tears. It was about the most inspiring sports story I’d ever heard. ‘Who’s your hero in sport?’ Since that afternoon, I’ve had an answer.
Smallish and with the light frame of the 3000m steeplechaser he once was, Sandro is a charming and sympathetic man. In the war against doping, against cheating of any sort, he is gritty and fearless. But there is a human side to his hardness: he doesn’t want to demonise the athlete but he will do what he can to have his doctor jailed. How he has persevered for so many years is something beyond my comprehension, but I know that if you spend an hour in his company, your complacency is shaken, your faith renewed.
He comes from the wine-producing region of Frascati, outside Rome, and welcomes you with such warmth that it changes the feel of your day.
‘Ciao, Daveeeed!’ he will say, throwing his arms open.
Imagine this when you think of Donati: while a national athletics coach for Italy during the 1987 World Championships in Rome, he noticed that one of the jumps credited to Olympic bronze medallist Giovanni Evangelisti looked highly suspicious. To Sandro’s eye it was a poor jump, Evangelisti’s reaction confirmed as much, but the electronic scoreboard proclaimed it a good jump. Donati spent hours scrutinising video tapes and eventually found the evidence. A distance that the Italian hadn’t jumped was already in the system, ready for an official to press the button. Donati blew the whistle. Long and loud.
The fix had been in for Evangelisti to take the bronze. Sandro could have looked the other way, kept his nose out of what didn’t directly concern him, but that would have been a betrayal. It wasn’t Evangelisti’s fault but officials in high places had thought that ‘another medal for Italy’ would make the championships a success. The trail led to the top of Italian and world athletics and Sandro followed it. He called foul on a beloved Italian winner right there in the Stadio Olimpico in Rome. Men have been slaughtered by gladiators for less but our anti-doper merely lost his job.
Too tenacious to be out in the cold for long, Sandro recovered. He had to be strong because no matter how many times you chop the head off the beast, the beast returns. Nowadays you hear Tour de France champion Bradley Wiggins say it disappoints him to have to talk about doping because it’s a sin of the past and you want to sit him down in front of Sandro, let him know that doping can never be in the past.
Knowing that the beast always regenerates never deterred him: in 1989 Sandro published a book on doping with the wonderful title, Worthless Champions. If you can locate a copy, hold onto it. A fortnight after the book was published it vanished. The publishers, it is said, were paid to withdraw it, pile them up and have a bonfire. It was lost for ever.
Still Sandro Donati kept on swinging his axe at the neck of the beast. Five years later he was head of research for CONI when he began a study on the abuse of EPO in professional cycling. In terms of the lag between cutting-edge cheating and official sport’s realisation of what’s going on, Sandro’s study was prescient. Only two years previously Claudio Chiappucci had outduelled Miguel Indurain on Sestriere in what may have been the first great EPO mano-a-mano.
Quietly Sandro went about his work. Anonymity was offered in exchange for information. The riders he spoke to wanted him to know how bad things were. The trail led to an old adversary, Professor Francesco Conconi. Their blades first crossed when Sandro became Italian middle-distance coach in the early eighties and was told early on that he should meet Conconi, a biochemist, based at the University of Ferrara.
For Sandro that meeting was a first taste of disillusion. Conconi spoke enthusiastically about a blood-doping programme which he said already had the backing of the Italian Athletics Federation and CONI. Blood transfusions weren’t specifically banned at the time, and Sandro was invited to offer up some of his runners for participation in the programme.
Sandro quickly surmised Conconi saw coaching as subordinate to his transfusions. He spoke to his athletes outlining the choice they faced. None of them wanted to become part of Conconi’s master plan. Sandro had made an enemy. A powerful one. Pressure came from above and didn’t stop.
Sandro wasn’t playing the game. He was out of step with every other athletics coach and coaches from all sports. Conconi was treating athletes from cycling, canoeing, rowing, long-distance skiing, speed skating, swimming, wrestling and athletics. Sandro kept shaking his head. No. ‘He was convinced I would be interested. He said, “We can take between thirty and forty seconds off the ten thousand metres, we can slice fifteen to twenty seconds from the five thousand metres and maybe another five seconds over fifteen hundred metres.” ’
This was the future, but Sandro Donati didn’t like how it smelt. It took him until 1985 to figure out a solution. A helpful politician, a new law; and in Italy blood transfusions were deemed to be doping. The rest of the world would follow. A small victory but the beast never dies.
Now it is 1994 and Sandro is back on the front line, this time fighting the linear descendant of transfusions, EPO. It is like a sequel to an original film: the same bad guy but with more sophisticated weaponry. An injection of recombinant erythropoietin, EPO, takes seconds to administer and within minutes the athlete’s population of red cells begins to increase and multiply. Ta da! Sandro knew this drug could destroy sport.
Dr Mario Pescante, then the President of CONI, took The Epo Dossier (as it became known) from Donati’s hands with thanks, but nothing happened afterwards. A couple of years later the report found its way into La Gazzetta dello Sport, then L’Équipe (to make this happen Donati had basically to steal it back and leak it) and Pescante lost his job as head of CONI.
The beast can’t be slain though. These days Pescante is a vice-president of the IOC and Italy’s minister for sport. Conconi proved equally indestructible. Committed to blood doping in the eighties, he became involved in assisting athletes in the abuse of EPO in the nineties, and yet he has largely been seen as being on the side of sport’s authorities. He possessed a strange talent for walking on both sides of the street.
So in the surreal world of Italian sports politics it came about that the
IOC itself asked a German pharmaceutical company to supply Conconi with EPO, so that he could carry out the research which might lead to an EPO test. This generosity would see the creation of Conconi’s infamous EPO file, his ‘study group of 23 amateurs’ who were in fact 22 professional athletes and himself. That EPO, courtesy of the IOC, was used to cheat. Welcome to the brave new world and its Orwellian dialect of doublespeak. Only a figure like Donati could have kept wading through that swamp.
Sandro and I first met in Rome in 2000. He took me to his favourite little pizzeria and I realised that in the world of anti-doping I was yomping in the foothills while Sandro had climbed to the point where he could see the general landscape. What he saw depressed him without defeating him.
Sandro told me something important: going after Lance Armstrong couldn’t be what it was all about because the bigger picture was what mattered. Cycling was far more important than one competitor and if you pursue one and become too associated with that pursuit, that is not good. What he said made sense, but I still felt Armstrong was a particular case. No other sports figure exercised as much influence in his or her discipline as Armstrong did within the peloton.
After ’98 and the Festina scandal, cycling had a renewed responsibility to tackle the doping epidemic but hadn’t done that. The biggest battleground was the 1999 Tour and Armstrong’s victory sent a message through the peloton saying, ‘Carry on as before, nothing has changed.’ And once the authorities declared the race a coronation for the saviour of the Tour de France, the sport’s immediate future became bleak.
Sandro understood Armstrong’s significance but he had become generally disillusioned with professional sport. ‘I watch the Olympic Games,’ he said, ‘but I don’t bother to remember the names of the athletes any more. It’s like theatre, but I prefer the theatre because the relationship between actor and spectator is clear. In sport’s theatre, both are still pretending it’s real.’
