Bad Blood (28 page)

‘Taking drugs makes your life worse. It changes you. It turns you into an animal or a monster. It changes your face, it changes your attitude. It takes over your soul. You turn into a con artist who has to lie every day. Only some guys can deal with it. Guys like me and Pantani can’t. I have been much luckier than Pantani, because I was able to save myself and he never could.’

Matt DeCanio, American cyclist and whistle-blower

There was never a golden age of fair play in cycling’s history. Cheating has always been a characteristic of the sport and particularly of the Tour de France. A hundred years ago, riders used to hop on trains to make up for their shortcomings. These days, they scour the Internet for suppliers and information on new products.

There was not any single moment when I finally realised that a sport – an obsession – that had helped me come to terms with my own dark places and to rebuild my life, had in fact become a prison of its own. Instead, my faith in those working within cycling died slowly – the ‘death of a thousand cuts’ – as scandal followed scandal, until there was no residue of faith left.

The values that had once reeled me in became distorted in a tight-knit world where decency, where doing the right thing, was regarded as naive, eccentric and futile. In this brutalised environment you had to make a choice; speak out and risk alienation, or keep your mouth shut and stay in the club. The repeated failures to change that cultural malaise were exhausting.

For me, those who have doped, endorsed doping or failed to condemn it have made a business choice, not an ethical one. The spread of that culture reflects a collective failure of responsibility that has diminished the Tour de France in every way. It has made the race a bad – even a deadly – joke.

In a problematic world, sport should offer escape; it should offer sanctuary from the casual lies and banal cruelties that punctuate everyday life. Rather than embodying the ugliest elements in human nature, it should strive to encapsulate the best.

We love sport, not for its certainties, but for its uncertainties. But uncertainty is of no use to a doper. They want guarantees of success. They hate the unknown: consistency, day in day out, year in year out, is everything for them, because they are desperate to maintain their position.

There are many team bosses, riders, coaches and promoters, who discovered their consciences only when it became financially expedient to do so. Others lost their moral compass long ago, so brutalised did they become by everyday cheating. Those people will never welcome change.

Dopers cheat us, and falsify our memories – they take the sport out of our sport. Their use of doping renders our experience meaningless. It seems that there is no moral imperative that can be brought to bear to dissuade them. Appealing to the athlete’s conscience has proven to be laughably naive, particularly in cycling where doping was ubiquitous.

‘It was like white noise,’ David Millar said of the world he inhabited. ‘The question was not “Why did I dope?” but “Why didn’t I dope sooner?”’

Paradoxically, dopers are fragile, paranoid and insecure, because they know that, on the day they don’t dope, they will have no certainty. Their status hangs by a thread, reliant on their supplier, their doctor, their network. Ironically, for people who have given their lives to the pursuit of sporting excellence, those who dope themselves will never really know what their natural limits are,
both
as an athlete and a human being. Doping is a tragic experience for them: it takes away the experience of their true identity, of their true capabilities.

The elements that came together in the mid 1990s – ineffective doping controls, an increasingly punishing racing calendar, a heightened level of media interest, a new business ethic allied to unprecedented levels of corporate investment, a global village of television and internet followers and an ineffectual governing body – led cycling into the abyss in which it has found itself.

In this climate, sport fans veer between denial and anger, posting endless rants on message boards and in blogs, their desire for truth pulled this way and that. Their patience has been tested to breaking point, their investment betrayed, their loyalty gone unrewarded. Yet so strong is their love of the sport, and in particular of the Tour, that they still want to believe. They deserve better.

Ultimately, what happens next is our responsibility.

Will we still retain our passion for professional sport if we believe that most of the performances are chemically enhanced? Will television companies still want to pay millions of dollars for the rights to legendary events, such as the Tour de France, or the Olympic Games, if audiences have become disenchanted? Will global corporations want to invest in sport if what sets it apart – its credibility as
sport
– collapses?

Who cares,
who cares
, if what we see is a show? Why does doping really matter? Why not level the playing field and legalise all products? Isn’t doping simply the inevitable consequence of a drug-dependent, technologically enhanced modern society, that embraces plastic surgery, is Ecstasy-tolerant, Viagra-fuelled – in short, aren’t all of us
doped
in some way or another?

Yes – a lot of us are, but the perversion of drug use in sport is that these athletes are not sick or injured, but are using products to go beyond their genetic limits, to achieve fraudulent success. There are other practical issues – the health of athletes,
the
health of the public, fraud and legality, addiction, trafficking – and there is the most basic morality: doping is cheating.

Legalisation of doping in sport would, as Dick Pound said, be ‘an abandonment of all ethical and moral responsibility’.

‘It’s a downward spiral,’ Pound believes. ‘If you legalise things at the top, then it becomes legal all the way down through the system. You’re going to get fourteen- and fifteen-year-olds using EPO and HGH in industrial quantities. And if that happened, and if I were a parent with a child thinking of playing competitive sport, I’d say, “Let’s do something else – it’s not worth what you’d have to do to yourself.”’

We no longer expect athletes to refrain from doping because of a crisis of conscience, because it is cheating, because it is fraudulent, because ultimately it is wrong. We expect them to refrain because they may get caught, sanctioned, fined, humiliated, banned.

In the end that is the greatest loss of innocence: that we now expect them to at least try to dope. So because we cannot trust them, we have to police them, to monitor their movements. We DNA test them; we take hair, blood and urine samples to store for the future; we rouse them at dawn for yet more testing. We don’t believe in them, or in their word, any more.

The testing is to help us believe; to prove that all is well, that they are clean – not that they are doped, because we assume that without those safeguards in place they automatically would be. The testing is in place to maintain the illusion of fair play.

And after all that, when they have been cleared to compete and they emerge from the secretive cocoons of their hotel rooms, air-conditioned buses and private jets and finally start competing, it’s a reasonable question to ask yourself:
what happened to the sport
?

The 2007 Tour de France made it to Paris, just.

Spanish rider Alberto Contador, clad in the yellow jersey, smiled and waved on the Champs-Elysées podium, even as most of France turned its back in disdain. Johan Bruyneel had led a
team
to Tour victory for the eighth year. There was a certain symmetry that a team forced to sack its leader, Ivan Basso, because of doping, should then win the Tour because a rival team, Rabobank, was also forced to sack its leader, Michael Rasmussen, for missing random drug tests. It was a convoluted, dysfunctional story, typical of the modern Tour. And as Contador and Bruyneel celebrated, the suppressed whispers of doping that had characterised the era had become white noise.

By the end of the following month, even after eight Tour wins, through Armstrong and Contador, Tailwind Sports, the Discovery Channel team’s management company, had quit the sport and renounced the search for new sponsors. ‘We were in talks with a number of companies about the opportunity and were confident a new sponsor was imminent,’ Bill Stapleton said. ‘We have chosen, however, to end those discussions.’

In the aftermath of that decision, Lance Armstrong distanced himself from the sport. ‘Clearly things need to improve on many levels, with a more unified front, before you would see us venture back into cycling,’ he said. By the end of September 2007, the Texan went further, telling the media that a continuing interest in cycling was ‘just a distraction for me’.

Bruyneel announced his retirement. ‘I’ve achieved everything that I could in the sport,’ he said. ‘I’ve always said that I wanted to stop on top and I think it’s the right time.’ But then the Astana team came calling and the Belgian reversed his retirement plans, becoming a Kazakh Bob Stapleton, charged with leading the ethical makeover that would make Astana palatable once again to the Tour organisation.

But the makeover didn’t take. Seven months later, after Bruyneel had taken over the Astana team that had quit the 2007 Tour in disgrace after Alexander Vinokourov’s positive test, the Tour de France organisation banned Astana from its events.

Not even his status as defending Tour champion could earn Alberto Contador and Astana a reprieve. His co-leader, Levi Leipheimer, set up a campaign to overturn his exile called ‘Let
Levi
Ride’. The decision to ban Astana was draconian, but, given their past transgressions, wholly deserved. Nonetheless, it split the sport once more.

Only cycling has been so bitterly divided by the war on drugs. Athletics, in the wake of the BALCO Affair and the downfall of Marion Jones, appears increasingly polarised, yet in most other sports, journalists can still cosy up to the top stars without questioning their ethics on a daily basis. As the crisis deepened in cycling, that became impossible. Doping forced us all to choose where we stood.

Looking back, it took a very long time for me to become faithless. The ubersceptics no doubt rolled their eyes in despair at my resistance to finally giving up the ghost. Yet eventually, the sport’s inability to achieve change angered me. At the same time, I realised how polluted my own life had been by the melancholy and defeatism of doping. Acknowledging the extent of that contamination was a liberation of sorts.

The essence of doping is cheating and the essence of cheating is defeatism. Doping says, ‘This can’t be done any other way; this can’t be achieved through hard work or talent, through intelligence, determination and honesty.’ All that’s left is to lie and cheat and to make others complicit to that cheating.

And living and working in an environment where those values are the currency of everyday relationships, kills you a little. It colours your belief and taints your faith in human nature. That’s how the contagion of cheating works, how the acceptance of it as a value system spreads.

It doesn’t matter that it was cycling: it could have been athletics, rugby, cricket, football, politics or corporate business. Much of life is tainted by corruption at some levels. My journey from adoring fan to embittered insider, was beautiful and bewildering, privileged and, finally, poisonous.

‘Are you bitter?’ Paul Kimmage texted me, after we had met in London that day.

I thought about it for a while. ‘Yes – who wouldn’t be?’ I replied.

Cycling still exerts a fascination for me. Every now and then I pull on some Lycra and head out into the Sussex Downs to tackle Ditchling Beacon, the toughest climb on the opening days of the 1994 Tour and a hill that every English cyclist knows well. The paint is fading now, but the last time I weaved my way up to the top, you could still make out PANTANI stencilled onto the road, just before you struggle over the windswept ridge to be greeted by a view of Brighton and the grey sea.

I didn’t ask to see the syringes at my feet, to hear the tearful confessions, to endure the tedious denials of Virenque, Hamilton, Landis, Basso, Riis and the rest. I didn’t go looking for the confrontations, the isolations, the disputes. But they became the currency of my everyday existence, an inescapable part of life on Tour. That experience changed me. I realised that I could never go back to the way we were – Bernard, Greg and I – in the twilight hours of a rented room, ignorant and enraptured, out on the wild and beautiful Croix de Fer, our dreams fused together on the tattered tape of a VCR.