Bad Blood (20 page)

Was this the athletic colossus whose duel with LeMond had fired my dreams, who had conquered Galibier, Tourmalet, Ventoux, who had ridden alone through the blizzard-swept Belgian Ardennes to win Liège-Bastogne-Liège, crossing the finish line with frozen hands and icicles dangling from his bike frame (if not his nose)? Was this the proud man of the soil who had played such sophisticated mind games with LeMond that the American had been reduced to a nervous wreck, the same man who had ridden with such carefree panache that all France had flocked to lionise him?

No – this was a middle-aged French farmer in a bad suit on an away day.

I took a deep breath and walked up to him. ‘
Bonjour, Monsieur Hinault
,’ I said. ‘
Comment ça va
?’

He glanced at me, smiled a tight smile and continued talking to a similarly green-suited colleague from the Tour organisation about lunch or taxis or how much longer he had to stand here in this draughty London square.

There was a pause. What should I say? How could I break the ice? ‘So did you laugh when Greg got mistaken for a turkey?’ might have raised a quizzical eyebrow, but would also perhaps have struck the wrong note.

So I settled for ‘
U-un signature, s’il vous plaît
…’ and I thrust the book at him. He scribbled something and pushed it back into my hand, before turning on his heel and striding off towards a waiting taxi. Another sea of tourists came between us and then he was gone. I should have known. Nobody puts The Badger in a corner.

I stood there clutching the signed book amid the pigeons and the tourists. The sense of anticlimax left me swooning. Heroes – hah! What are they good for?

In July 2007, thirteen years after my brief encounter with Hinault, the Tour returned to London and south-east England. This time it arrived against the backdrop of Ken Livingstone’s two-wheeled Utopia, of London as Olympus, a city of sporting excellence and endeavour, a city where cabbies and bus drivers looked on admiringly as you pedalled past pavement cafés through perpetually sunlit streets, rather than spitting vitriol and abuse as you got in their way when a rutted cycle lane suddenly dropped into a rainwater-filled crater deeper than the Grand Canyon.

This time the Tour de France was welcomed with open arms to the heart of the capital, with one of the most beautiful prologue routes, slaloming through Whitehall, St James’s, Hyde Park and the Mall. This time the Tour was the answer, to obesity, slothfulness, congestion, xenophobia and environmental catastrophe. The bicycle remained simple, beautiful and clean, even as the Tour – the bloody Tour – just kept on getting dirtier.

SHOOTING THE MESSENGER

‘CYCLING,’ SAID DICK
Pound, the no-nonsense agent provocateur and former head of the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA), ‘is in the toilet.’

In his time as WADA’s figurehead, this mild-mannered, carefully spoken man, with a clipped Canadian accent, became the principal hate object for dopers all around the world. I always had the impression that he rather enjoyed that status. His reputation was definitively forged by his involvement in the Salt Lake City Olympic corruption investigation. He built his career in what he described as ‘sports administration’ after a youth spent competing as an Olympic and Commonwealth swimmer.

In essence, WADA’s role is principally that of a campaigning watchdog. It monitors the success of anti-doping measures in sport, suggests improvements and establishes educational programmes so that athletes are better informed. But Pound, as president of WADA, took it a step further and added ‘ruffling feathers’ to his job description.

He did this remarkably effectively in cycling, one of the sports that he considers most damaged by doping. Among those he greatly pissed off during his tenure of the WADA presidency were former president of the UCI, Hein Verbruggen, Lance Armstrong and Floyd Landis. Pound seemed tickled by the thought of many of cycling’s most high-profile figures loathing – and fearing – him.

Among professional athletes, Pound was as welcome as Ebenezer Scrooge on Christmas morning. A lot of sports fans felt the same way. Pound’s remit, after all, was to destroy their
illusions
. Visit the forum or message boards of almost any sports website and there will be a series of rants about Dick Pound and his attitude problem, telling him to leave a star athlete alone. Pound always accepted that this came with the territory.

‘The nature of the job is to upset the established order which has allowed doping to proliferate. I’m quite happy to be known by the enemies I make. In fact, if you haven’t made enemies, I’d say you’re not doing the job. One of the roles is to try and raise the level of the public’s understanding that there really is a problem out there.’

WADA has become increasingly influential, since it was created in 1999, as a direct response to the Festina drug scandal. ‘The groundwork for WADA was laid as early as August 1998, after the Festina Affair,’ Pound explained. ‘We got together and I said nobody believes anybody any more. They don’t believe that cycling – or any international federation – will police its own sport properly. They don’t believe national authorities will look after their own athletes properly and they don’t believe in the IOC any more. So we needed an independent agency, which led to the creation of WADA. In the process of all that, I was asked to run it, but I didn’t know anything about doping, and I’d damn near killed myself doing the Salt Lake City investigations – I didn’t want to do it.’

Pound says that his appointment as head of WADA was presented to him as a fait accompli. He knew that after the Salt Lake City investigation, he was hardly a popular choice.

‘I think people understood that I could organise things and that I had no interest in covering up doping. They may not have expected the kind of progress we’ve made over the last few years. I’m sure if some of the international federations had realised how far we’d get, then they would have been much more concerned about my involvement.’

He soon came into conflict with cycling’s hierarchy. ‘I can remember, long before I was involved in anti-doping, discussing cycling’s ethical problems with Hein Verbruggen, when he was
president
of the UCI, before the Festina Affair. I was saying, “Hein, you have got a real problem in your sport and you don’t seem able to deal with it.” He said, “Well, listen – if people don’t mind the Tour de France at twenty-five kilometres per hour, the riders don’t have to prepare – but if they want it at forty-two kilometres per hour, then I’m sorry, the riders can’t do it without preparation,” as he called it.’ Verbruggen has dismissed Pound’s claims as ‘nonsense’ and denies that Pound ever spoke to him about a specific problem in cycling.

Pound never felt confident that Verbruggen was prepared to ‘rock the boat’. ‘Look at the multimillion-dollar headquarters that the UCI have in Aigle in Switzerland,’ he said. ‘That doesn’t come from amateur track cycling.’

Pound believed that Verbruggen’s skills were not right for the problems the UCI faced. ‘I don’t know what the UCI’s marketing objectives were, although I think that you could probably do some research and find that Verbruggen’s forte as a professional was in marketing.’

That’s right, I said. His background was in milk and Mars bars.

‘There’s no possible or credible way that cycling can say, “We don’t have a problem.” And football has actually said, “There’s nothing on the WADA list that would help any footballer.” When you get leaders in sport saying things as outrageous as that, then they have to be confronted.’

Pound didn’t give anybody an easy time. He argued that the media have been compromised by their cosy relationships. ‘The media – and maybe I’m generalising here, because obviously there are journalists who want to get at these things – have been
very
compliant, getting the press releases and going to the press conferences, having a glass of wine, some food and listening to stuff that’s churned out by people who are paid a lot of money to pretend there’s no problem.’

Doping, he said, is not one of the ‘shades of grey’. ‘This is cheating and for the most part it’s organised cheating. You have to confront it. Maybe people thought that I would be …
more
European than I am and try and do it quietly behind the scenes, with handshakes and winks and things like that. But I don’t think that’s what you do to draw attention to a problem of this nature. It is ethically wrong, fraudulent and causes misery for athletes and their families. Here are the rules: we’re not going to use certain drugs and doping methods. It’s as simple as that.’

In March 2005, a few years after my initial request, Hein Verbruggen, at the time still president of the UCI, finally agreed to a face-to-face interview.

In the dining room of the Long Beach Sheraton, I walked over to his breakfast table. He put his coffee cup down and stood up. We shook hands.

‘How are you, Mr Verbruggen?’ I said.

There was a pause.

‘You write too much about doping,’ he told me.

Doping already
? Here we go, I thought.

I didn’t expect to get on with Hein Verbruggen.

In 1998 he had written to
The Times
, and demanded an apology – rather pompously adding ‘on behalf of Jean-Marie Leblanc’, the Tour de France’s director – for a piece I had written on the Festina Affair. He’d also put the phone down on me on more than one occasion during the
procycling
years, once memorably bellowing into his mobile from some distant corner of Switzerland, ‘Mr Whittle, I am
sick of you
and your
bullshit
magazine.’

Yet, sipping a Starbucks latte in a Californian hotel lounge overlooking the Pacific, he was all charm, largesse and dry wit. Thoughtful and articulate, he gave me two hours of his time. I warmed to him. Let’s make a fresh start, I thought. Let bygones be bygones.

I had planned to keep the doping questions for later on, but he was straight into it, talking of corruption, race fixing and EPO within five minutes of sitting down. He joshed with me about what he perceived as the British obsession with honour
and
fair play and suddenly I remembered that, yes, of course – Hein’s a salesman, Hein’s a liberaliser and Hein’s from Holland.

As we talked, the cultural differences between us came into sharper focus. Hein was weary of the infighting. He wants us Europeans to get along. We should stop carping and understand that things in cycling are a damn sight better than they were. We should chill, relax.

It was only a few months since David Millar’s downfall, and despite the fact that Millar admitted doping to win the UCI’s own World Time Trial title, Verbruggen showed bonhomie and forgiveness. ‘How is David Millar, by the way?’ he asked. ‘Give him my warm regards if you see him.’

Unlike his many critics, Verbruggen believes he dragged cycling from the darkness into the modern ages. He illustrated this by telling me, unprompted, about the mess he inherited when he became UCI president in the mid 1980s. ‘It was an era when doping flourished – although I am not saying that everybody was doped – I’d be the last to say that. But there were insufficient controls, not enough regulations or professionalism. A group of people within the sport saw that things couldn’t go on like that, organisers like Jean-Marie Leblanc, team managers like Roger Legeay and others within the UCI. I’d say that we have excellent professionals within the UCI now. We have a rulebook, and we have much better controls for doping.’

So this then – the post-Festina, pre-Puerto era, the eight years sandwiched between the two biggest scandals in cycling’s history, – was Hein Verbruggen’s new dawn.

Dick Pound believes that cycling’s ‘deep, deep problem’ still exists. ‘I don’t think the problem has gone away, I think it’s got worse.’

The root of it all, he says, is money. Doping, he says, is big business. ‘These are not just little tablets you take out of a
supplement
bottle. The riders are paying tens of thousands of euros a year for medical treatment and preparation.’

Cycling’s high profile, particularly in Europe, means that doping scandals, like Festina and Puerto, have been big news, but, he adds, ‘it’s not the only sport with a doping problem.’

He reels off the major scandals of the past ten years and concludes that there have been so many busts, particularly in the Tour, that it’s akin to having the entire field in the Olympic final of the 100 metres disqualified.

‘A few years ago, the public watching the Tour might have said, “I wonder if any of them are using drugs,” and now they say, “I wonder if any of them are
not
using drugs.” That’s the price you pay, the price that all sports pay, for letting things get out of hand.’

Dick Pound wanted cycling to step up to the plate, to take responsibility. ‘We gave them suggestions on their testing programme, which we thought was very ineffective and designed “around” the problem, rather than to catch dopers. Up until recently,’ Pound argued, ‘the fight against doping has been pretty limited. If you didn’t find traces of a substance in an athlete’s system, then there was no doping. Yet all the people in the entourages were going unchecked and unsanctioned. Now, with public authorities able to go in and seize evidence and question witnesses, it gives us a much broader ability to get the enablers, suppliers and the medical practitioners who are assisting in all this. It gives us a much more vigorous arsenal of weapons.’

Sounds great, I say, this arsenal of weapons – police raids, secret surveillance, informers, DNA testing and so on – but what happened to athletes not doping themselves because it is wrong? What happened to the ideals of fair play, honour, respect for your rival – all the things that lift sport out of the maelstrom of everyday life and give it real meaning?

‘Yep,’ says Dick Pound. ‘I know. I agree entirely. There are sociopaths out there. That’s why we have a police force. That’s
why
we have security checks at airports. That’s an unfortunate fact of life. We’re now paying the price for the sports authorities letting this get out of control and closing their eyes to it.’