Bad Blood (21 page)

Hein Verbruggen and Dick Pound have history. They used to be friends, but are not any more. They have both been key members of the International Olympic Committee’s hierarchy. Now, because of the confrontational positions they took over doping, they are virtually estranged.

‘I don’t care about Mr Pound because he is not objective,’ said Verbruggen. ‘I don’t want to see him any more. He was a good friend of mine but he’s not now. WADA should be on the federation’s side but many federations have a problem with him. But we can’t solve the problem of doping without working with governments and that’s what WADA do.

‘Pound’s the sheriff who shoots everything that moves. WADA should be above all that and he should establish proof before he speaks. Athletes have the right to defend themselves – even if it’s with the cheapest excuse.’

Maybe it’s because of Verbruggen’s professional background in marketing that Pound irritates him so much. He sees himself as a unifier. He doesn’t want confrontation, but a quiet revolution at his own pace, that styles cycling on other successful sports franchises.

‘Look at basketball in the USA. Look at the Champions League in European soccer – I don’t want to compare cycling with those sports, only the system. If you work together, you get much more,’ he enthused. ‘It’s about making the cake bigger – you combine forces and it makes you stronger.’

That may explain why, by his own admission, he embraced the boom in road cycling among Americans. It may also explain his determination to defend his tainted creation, the ProTour, the pan-European calendar of elite races that was intended to showcase the top teams and riders, bringing with it a torrent of franchise and TV revenues – the same ProTour that didn’t want an athlete like Filippo Simeoni muddying its waters.

‘I am European, so I think in a European way. But I am not too old to learn and take some good things from other cultures. In the States, maybe they talk a bit too much about money, but you can even learn from that.’

Verbruggen’s fervour for the American way may also have been coloured by the legend of Lance. ‘What the Tour has done for France is incredible. If you put a value on that, it would be worth billions of euros. But the TV companies are there to cover the race, not the countryside. They’re there to cover the riders.’

The importance of Lance Armstrong to the growth in popularity of the Tour de France has been huge. For once, he said, the old adage about no single rider being greater than the Tour is wrong. By the end of his career, Armstrong, Verbruggen believed, was bigger than the race that had made him. This, Verbruggen said, was because Armstrong had ‘a lot of charisma, a very strong personality’.

But the Dutchman’s and the Texan’s mutually beneficial friendship made some uneasy. Verbruggen always waved away suggestions of a ‘special’ relationship, but it has been acknowledged by both men that the UCI received unspecified financial donations from Armstrong.

‘He gave money for research against doping, to discover new anti-doping methods,’ Verbruggen revealed. ‘He gave money from his private funds, cash. He didn’t want this to be known but he did it.’

In a television interview on Eurosport, Armstrong later confirmed that he had given ‘a fair amount’ to the UCI. ‘It wasn’t a small amount of money,’ he said. But exactly how much was donated, nobody knows. Some, like Germany’s former UCI committee member Sylvia Schenk, have speculated that it might have been up to $500,000.

‘We had no official information on the donation and, as a member of the UCI board, I wanted to know about it,’ Schenk said at the offices of her law firm in Frankfurt. ‘I asked how
much
was paid, when it was paid, but I never got any information. And as far as I know, it is still not clear exactly how much money was donated by Lance Armstrong and what it was used for. I don’t understand why the UCI won’t say how much it was and when it was paid.’

Schenk’s inquisitive nature didn’t endear her to the UCI president. She says that Verbruggen stopped talking to her in May 2004. ‘I was still a member of the UCI board, but he wasn’t talking to me. Whatever I suggested, regarding for example the ProTour, I was ignored. That was the way they dealt with me for years.’ Schenk was ‘very surprised’ by Armstrong’s donation. ‘It’s not what athletes usually do. It’s unusual to hear about it so much later, six months, or a year later, via the media. It already seemed to be a secret. I don’t know why. So, of course there are doubts now.’

Even Armstrong himself acknowledged that he preferred the details of his donation to remain secret. ‘It is not my modus operandi to advertise what I do,’ he said. ‘If I’ve given money to the UCI to combat doping, step up controls and to fund research, it is not my job to issue a press release. That’s a secret thing, because it’s the right thing to do. I am not the type of person who likes to get up and say in the newspaper, “Our sport is dirty, everyone is cheating.” There are other avenues to combat doping, versus trashing the sport and its players, its sponsors and spectators.’

Whatever Schenk’s concerns, Verbruggen remains a big Lance fan. He told me the story of an award that had been given to Armstrong in France. ‘You know, of course, that two journalists had written a book about him published in France, yet despite that, the French gave him this prize. It’s significant that this jury was not influenced by gossip.

‘If you saw what Lance has to go through! I think they controlled him maybe five or six times last Christmas. That’s five or six times – out of competition – at seven o’clock in the morning, at his house.’

* * *

Drug testing in cycling has always been reactive, rather than proactive. It took the death of Tom Simpson on Mont Ventoux during the 1967 Tour for the governing bodies, under public pressure, to move towards the introduction of doping controls. Until that time, doping had been swept under the carpet, even though riders such as Jacques Anquetil, who won five Tours, had openly acknowledged the widespread use of drugs such as amphetamines.

‘You’d have to be an imbecile or a hypocrite to imagine that a professional cyclist who rides 235 days a year can hold himself together without stimulants,’ the Frenchman said.

Simpson’s death was a wake-up call. The following year’s race in July 1968 was christened the ‘Tour de Sante’. But the peloton was hardly wholehearted in its support: a rider’s strike greeted the first doping controls. In truth, they have been complaining about them ever since. Even in 2007, in the aftermath of Operacíon Puerto and the disgrace of Floyd Landis, the notion of DNA profiling produced a knee-jerk reaction from many top professionals. Showing the public relations skills that had characterised the sport for more than a decade, leading riders claimed indignantly that such a move aligned them with murderers and rapists, and would infringe their human rights.

The introduction of the the fifty per cent haematocrit controls in 1997 came only after it became apparent that EPO use had reached epidemic levels during the mid 1990s. To Hein Verbruggen, this was a timely and radical intervention, rather than a Band-Aid on a haemorrhage.

‘We started doing it before the Festina Affair happened. Now, everybody is realising what we have done. What our athletes have to comply with now in terms of anti-doping is outstanding; but a big problem you always have with doping is that the riders are suspicious of each other. “What has he got that I haven’t? Don’t I have to do the same as him?”’

But the introduction of the fifty per cent haematocrit ‘health check’ also heralded the downfall of riders such as Marco Pantani.
The
consequences for him, both as an athlete and a human being, were catastrophic. Even Verbruggen can’t argue with this assessment.

‘It’s true. He was never the same again. I was there that day. And it was a terrible day. I liked the guy, he was extremely popular. But the whole system for those controls was set up with the teams and the riders. The riders had all signed and agreed. Pantani was one of them, the most popular one.’

Verbruggen says that he regrets that a foolproof EPO test had not been introduced sooner. ‘We’d been trying since 1993. During that year’s World Championships Francesco Conconi told me that they were very close to a validated test. That year was when we started to have concerns that EPO was in the peloton. After that we waited and waited, until in 1996, when I again met with Conconi at the Olympic Games in Atlanta. People think he was in the UCI’s anti-doping commission but that’s wrong. He was in our medical commission and that commission had a responsibility for cardiology, trauma, nutrition and training methods. He was developing the test, together with members of the IOC medical commission.’

But did the UCI entrust the study of haematocrit controls to the right man? Among Conconi’s protégés, during his time teaching medicine in Italian universities and working with athletes in the 1980s, were Michele Ferrari and Luigi Cecchini, yet Verbruggen fails to see any conflict in Conconi’s involvement with the development of a desperately needed EPO test.

Instead, he maintains, the battle to introduce a haematocrit test and control the abuse of EPO, was won by Conconi. ‘Conconi deserves the recognition for this. He persuaded top riders to accept the haematocrit controls. On 24 January, 1997, we got all the teams and doctors together and we decided on haematocrit controls and at the same time on a medical control system. Because the EPO test still wasn’t ready.’

And the first rider to be caught, I am thinking, was Erwann Mentheour – a client of Michele Ferrari.

OK, I said, but wasn’t the test intrinsically unfair? We may suspect, but will never know, definitively, if Pantani had EPO in his system on the day he failed the test, yet his life took a tragic turn because of that uncertainty.

‘Nobody wanted to wait. It was a real problem in the peloton. And some of the team leaders I talked to said, “The riders don’t want to use the stuff but they keep losing races.” At the time, I think we did what we could.’

But the haematocrit test was a smokescreen. It did virtually nothing to prevent or discourage doping. Many riders carried on using EPO. And given the opinions of many haematologists, the variations in natural levels and the effect of intense competition and fatigue on red blood cells, why establish the level at fifty per cent based on tests conducted halfway through a mountainous stage race?

Cue more agitation on the other side of the Sheraton’s polished coffee table.

‘I saw an interview with Giorgio Squinzi’ – the Italian ceramics magnate who sponsored the Mapei team – ‘he never liked the UCI very much and I didn’t like him. He said that having a haematocrit level set at fifty per cent was the same as telling people that they could steal up to $1,000! That is
so
bloody stupid,’ raged Verbruggen, ‘and there are still people who are willing to print this nonsense.’

I’m sorry – but ‘bloody stupid’?

Bloody stupid that a wonder drug that its users say can improve performance by up to twenty per cent was tacitly legalised?

Bloody stupid, when all research points out that haematocrit varies so greatly between individuals that it is almost impossible to agree a standard, particularly one of fifty per cent?

Bloody stupid, when Marco Pantani ended his life face down in a cheap hotel room, his career and reputation ruined – by a UCI ‘health check’?

FROM A WHISPER TO A SCREAM

WHEN LANCE ARMSTRONG
retired from racing, the Tour de France fell apart.

Without the Texan bossing the European scene, the house of cards finally collapsed. The despair and paranoia that had characterised the 1998 Tour and the Festina Affair flooded back into the sport. It was as if the Lance years of limitless wealth and unquestioned glory had all been a mirage, a dream. The whispers of widespread doping, suppressed between 1999 and 2005, as Armstrong’s became the dominant voice in the sport, became a scream.

Armstrong had finally quit centre stage in July 2005, standing alongside Jan Ullrich and Ivan Basso on the Paris podium, chastising the non-believers.

‘To the people who don’t believe in cycling,’ he said, ‘the cynics and the sceptics, I’m sorry you don’t believe in miracles, but this is a hell of a race. You should believe in these athletes, and you should believe in these people.’

These turned out to be empty words. Twenty-four hours before the start of the following year’s Tour in Strasbourg, Basso and Ullrich were kicked off the race.

Planted at the easternmost point of a vast plain that stretches from Champagne to the German border, Strasbourg, a city infamous for its bitter winters and broiling summers, welcomed the opening weekend of the first Tour of the post-Armstrong era.

Strasbourg is a genteel and conservative city of bike lanes and pedestrianisation, trams and cobbled squares, a towering cathedral at its heart. There is no litter or graffiti. In July 2006,
as
the World Cup neared its climax and Ullrich and Basso scuttled home in disgrace, sporadic football chants broke out, but that came only as the crowds spilled out from the bars around the cathedral, waving tricolour flags and singing the praises of Zinedine Zidane. For an hour or two, the city seemed almost rowdy, but soon after midnight, shutters were pulled closed and the streets were empty again.

If the World Cup and France’s unexpected success had fuelled a sense of celebration, the Grand Depart of the 2006 Tour quickly became a poorly attended wake. Armstrong’s retirement had left the door open for either of his old rivals to succeed him. Basso was fresh from a runaway win in the Giro d’Italia and Ullrich had added another Tour of Switzerland victory to his name.

But twenty-four hours before the race started, as the Operacíon Puerto doping investigation in Spain became the biggest scandal since the Festina Affair, both of them found themselves wide-eyed, frozen out, blinking in the TV lights and flashguns as their careers caved in.

Even after everything that has happened in cycling since the Festina Affair, it still doesn’t pay to speak out against doping. Just ask Ivan Basso. Confronted by the Italian Olympic Committee (CONI) over his connections to Eufemiano Fuentes and his blood banks, Basso confessed only to contemplating doping, rather than the act itself. The Italian remained loyal to the half-truths of the
omerta
, and was inscrutable, evasive, discreet.