Bad Blood (26 page)

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, we’d developed a habit of picking out new talent, rather than sticking to the same old faces. Landis hadn’t won any big races, but he had attitude and stood out from the crowd. And he was a little intriguing too, his quaint turn of phrase, a hangover from his strictly religious upbringing, now punctuated by good ol’ boy characteristics, such as his penchant for ZZ Top.

But with attitude and ego came petulance. Floyd had a tendency to sulk, when things didn’t work out. On the 2004 Paris-Nice, he finished third on the stage to Gap. Not such a blow you might think, but he stomped into the team bus in a huff and wouldn’t come to the door to talk to a handful of journalists waiting in the rain.

A couple of days later, as the teams lined up on the promenade des Anglais on the final morning of the race in Nice, I decided to try again. I bounded up to him, exchanged greetings, and then said, as we had said to others before him: ‘We want to put you on the cover of
procycling
magazine!’

Normally, the rider’s face lit up. Not Floyd’s. He was sullen and unimpressed. ‘Talk to my agent,’ he said bluntly and rode off down the boulevard.

He could be as graceless in victory as he was in defeat. In his Tour winner’s press conference, two years later, the evening before his victory parade in Paris, as the repercussions of Operacíon Puerto swirled around the race, he opted to play dumb.

Did he think that Puerto, which even Lance Armstrong, Landis’ mentor and former team captain, had described as ‘probably the biggest scandal since the Festina Affair’, and the absence of Ullrich and Basso devalued his Tour win?

‘I don’t know anything about that,’ he said.

Somebody asked him again: ‘Look, as you keep asking, I’ll say that it was an unfortunate situation and none of us got any satisfaction out of the fact that they weren’t here – got any questions about anything else?’

Floyd was the latest ex-US Postal rider to emerge from the shadow of Lance with a depressing story: a career-threatening illness or injury, a heroic comeback, followed swiftly by an indignant fan-based crusade to fight the injustice of the doping allegations made against him.

Floyd’s immediate predecessor was Tyler Hamilton, who rode a whole Tour with a broken collarbone yet still might have won the race. But Floyd’s against-all-odds story was perhaps the more extreme, as he won the world’s hardest bike race on one leg, due to a degenerative hip injury.

Both Hamilton and Landis adhered to the same blueprint. Hamilton fought a long battle to clear his name of blood doping, at one point citing a disappearing twin in his mother’s womb. ‘Maybe he should hire an exorcist,’ Dick Pound said. Landis, humiliated within hours of celebrating his 2006 Tour win, blamed a mid-Tour bender and came up with the ‘Whiskey Defence’.

In fact, the alarm bells about Landis were ringing long before he won the 2006 Tour. Halfway through the race, he held a press conference and decided to tell the world about his crumbling hip joint, damaged in a training crash while with US Postal a couple of years earlier. He had a therapeutic exemption to take cortisone from the UCI; effectively a licence to take drugs to counter the pain of his hip injury.

In the end, though, it wasn’t the cortisone that caught up with him, but the testosterone. So when in July 2006, ‘Floyd
the
Void’ tested positive and came tumbling down from his perch, blaming the whiskey, blaming the French lab, there was little sympathy for him. At least, not from me.

Call it
Schadenfreude
, or maybe just call it compassion fatigue. There’s no doubt that his career was ruined by the ensuing scandal. But then, a part of me thinks that Floyd Landis, however intelligent, got what he and his fucked-up, hypocritical, self-serving ethos really deserved.

After he tested positive, Floyd Landis fought back. And in doing so he made things much worse for everybody.

His positive test, hot on the heels of Puerto, may have been the ‘worst-case scenario’ for the UCI and the Tour, but the real nadir came in the late spring of 2007, when paedophilia, doping and witness intimidation became the currency of the Landis doping hearing in Malibu, California.

Landis had spent months protesting his innocence. He had launched the Floyd Fairness Fund, attracting huge donations from supportive fans, claiming that the case wasn’t really about him, but about the integrity of anti-doping; he had attacked WADA and their protocols and accused the French anti-doping lab in Châtenay-Malabry of incompetence and bias. Yet the two positive tests for synthetic testosterone still hung over his head.

So the Landis camp tried a new tactic. The night before Greg LeMond was due to appear as a witness against Landis, Will Geoghegan, Landis’ business manager and an active fundraiser for the Floyd Fairness Fund, called LeMond and impersonated the uncle who had sexually abused him as a child.

The call left LeMond in a state of shock, but through the police he traced it back to Geoghegan’s cellphone. The next morning, as he gave evidence, LeMond held up his BlackBerry with Geoghegan’s number clearly displayed. The Landis team held their heads in their hands. Geoghegan promptly apologised but Landis sacked his business manager on the spot. A day later, it was announced that Geoghegan had gone into rehab, after
claiming
that, unprompted by Landis, he had only called LeMond in a drunken rage. Once again, the booze was to blame.

It’s to his credit that Greg LeMond still describes Floyd Landis as ‘a good guy’, well educated and decent. He considers Tyler Hamilton in the same light. ‘I don’t believe Tyler is some kind of thief who would cheat or steal normally. But it’s the culture of the sport that convinces an ethical normal person that this is what you have to do.’

It’s well over twenty years since LeMond became the first American to win the Tour de France. It’s a decade since 1998, when doping first threatened to destroy the race, a scandal that fuelled the formation of WADA. From Festina to Floyd, LeMond agrees that little about cycling’s culture has really changed.

‘Lance always says that it’s the people who speak out who are destroying the sport. No – it’s the cheats who are destroying the sport. I’m not destroying it by speaking out, nor is Christophe Bassons, nor Filippo Simeoni or anybody else who speaks out. Because,’ says Greg LeMond, ‘if you can’t recognise there’s a problem, then you never cure the problem.’

GRILLING THE CHICKEN

MICHAEL RASMUSSEN COCKED
his bald, sculpted head and anxiously eyed the audience of journalists dissecting his every word.

There were plenty of questions. There were questions about what he had told his team, Rabobank, about his whereabouts in the build-up to the 2007 Tour de France, questions about what he had told the UCI, questions about why he had missed four out-of-competition doping tests, questions about why he, as a Dane, seemed so determined to avoid taking out a racing licence in his home country, where anti-doping had become a burning issue.

It all came down to trust.

‘Yes – you can trust me,’ Rasmussen told the media in response to a question from Lars Werge, the equally bald, equally sculpted, and deeply inquisitive journalist from
Ekstra Bladet
in Denmark.

The towering, softly-spoken Werge was Rasmussen’s principal inquisitor. A former international high jumper turned journalist, Lars has the languid limbs of a giraffe and the cranium of the Mekon. Naturally, his physique made him unmissable, as he strolled between team cars and buses in start villages and finish areas, scrutinising the world from behind his Ray-Bans. Lars stood out. He was lofty enough to shade under on a hot afternoon.

During the 2001 Tour, his giraffe-like physique had even alarmed the implacable Armstrong. One morning we gathered around the doors of the US Postal bus. Lance dutifully appeared and we crowded around him. Lars asked him questions about the latest doping allegations. Not for the first time, he patted
them
away as old, dead, meaningless, but then concluded by rather smugly telling Lars, ‘You’d understand that – if you had ever been an elite athlete.’

Lars paused and glowered at the Texan. He craned his elastic neck and leaned closer to Armstrong. ‘Actually, Lance,’ he hissed, ‘I was.’ Armstrong was soon back in the bus.

Now, with the Alpine stages of the 2007 Tour de France looming on the horizon and Rasmussen moving into contention for victory, Werge had to make a choice. Could Rasmussen be trusted? The ‘Chicken’, as the pale and pasty Rasmussen was nicknamed, had been anonymous since the London prologue. Now, he was ready to challenge. But his twitchy and uneasy appearances before the media only enhanced the impression of an athlete with something to hide.

Ten days earlier, Rasmussen’s name had gone unnoticed. As the teams gathered in London for the start of the 2007 Tour, the focus had been on Vinokourov, Riis, Kasechkin, and, of course, Ferrari, as Ken Livingstone’s attempts to force Londoners to embrace his two-wheeled Utopia were washed away by grey skies, foul-mouthed builders and doping, doping – always doping.

Fighting to hold on to his dream of success in the Tour’s London prologue, on a route that mapped out his life story, Bradley Wiggins found himself assailed by feature writers telling him that cycling was a dirty, dead-end sport. Unsurprisingly, after weeks of defending his sport, he was in a grump. Like others, he seemed exhausted and wrung out by the constant questions on drugs. To make things worse, ‘Wiggo’ had been abused by white van man while out training with his Cofidis teammates.

Even prior to that, he wasn’t speaking to many people, least of all me. A little problem had surfaced between us in the build-up to the Tour. He felt that something I’d written had betrayed his trust. That misunderstanding culminated in him sending me an angry text message.

I liked Bradley – we had even ridden the prologue route together.
But
then I wrote a speculative news story, legitimately quoting his team manager Eric Boyer as saying that he might be dropped from the Cofidis team for the Tour unless his results picked up.

Now if you talk to those who know the Olympic gold medallist well, they will shrug and say, ‘So what – he didn’t call you back. It’s happened before.’ But Bradley seemed such a decent bloke, bitterly outspoken about doping, and one of the few riders that I could still feel some kinship with. I hated the notion that he thought I was trying to undermine him.

Wiggins was one of the riders championed as having un-impeachable integrity and credibility – even Kimmage agreed on that. But he blew hot and cold and getting to know him well was a tall order, given his mercurial nature. Only a couple of journalists had really achieved this. But then, perhaps because of some remnants of my own youthful confusion, I had always felt drawn to the anti-Wig – David Millar.

Bradley thawed a little when we met again. ‘I thought you were stirring it,’ he said, with a wry smile. But as London’s poster boy for the Tour’s visit, there was no doubt that he was feeling the pressure of expectation of the opening weekend. Millar, in contrast, had been left to his own devices, a reformed doper coming to terms with the realities of racing in front of home crowds. But, holed up in his hotel, under the lattice of flyovers and interchanges criss-crossing London’s Docklands, the matured Millar, the reborn, evangelical Millar, was having trouble making his voice heard.

There had been gossip about tensions in his relationship with his sponsor Saunier Duval and about his relationship with the team manager, Mauro Gianetti. The rumour, that it had been over the bad habits of some of his teammates and about David’s readiness to condemn doping, had taken hold in the press room. There had been a row and Millar, the story went, had even written to the UCI to see if he could escape the team. Had it really got that bad?

We sat beneath the flyovers, chatting in the coffee bar of the
Docklands
Crowne Plaza. ‘Cycling is a complete mess at the moment and it’s been building up for years,’ Millar said. ‘It’s going to get worse before it gets better.’

Across the car park, Wiggins and his Cofidis teammates climbed aboard their bike-laden team coach and headed out towards the M25 to train in the quieter lanes of Essex. We watched them leave. Everything had been sorted out with Mauro, Millar said. The disagreement had been resolved. Yet that lunchtime, when his teammates took to the streets, Millar was an exception, opting to train on his stationary bike in the hotel car park.

As I was leaving, Gianetti strolled over and presented him with a new aerodynamic time-trial helmet, emblazoned not only with the Union Jack, but also with an image of Millar in the playboy days of his youth, clutching two glasses of frothing beer. It was flash, but it wasn’t the older, wiser David that I now knew. On the day of the prologue, Millar didn’t wear it.

Back in the press room, I called Pat McQuaid, who confirmed that Millar had written to him about his worries over doping. ‘They were emails discussing anti-doping in general,’ McQuaid told me. I told McQuaid of my sense of Millar’s isolation within his team. He listened.

‘Any rider who is being victimised because of his stance on doping will certainly get the full support of the UCI,’ McQuaid said. ‘There is real change going on and some people are resisting it, but I am convinced that the good will win out.’

I walked up the steps from the Tube station into the sunlit canyon of Victoria Street, paused my iPod and slid my sunglasses onto the top of my head. For a while, I just stood and stared.

Thousands of people – Ken Livingstone’s multicultural sea of Londoners – clutching Tour de France memorabilia, filled the wide road stretching ahead of me. Britain had embraced the Tour. It was going to be a success after all. The churlish begrudging editorials, on both sides of the English Channel, had been proven wrong.

I battled through the crowds in Parliament Square, crammed five deep against the barriers, waiting expectantly for the first riders to leave the start ramp. I bumped into the normally implacable Steve Taylor of Transport for London, his face flushed from the hot sunshine, eyes wide with excitement, jabbering about the size of the crowds. But he had good reason – the West End streets were jammed with people who had come to see the Tour de France.