by Jens Voigt
But it wasn’t until 1987, when the Tour actually started in Berlin, that I had my first idea of just how big the Tour de France was. Now the Berlin Wall was still very much in place at the time, so going to see the Tour was not a possibility. But I was already in sports school in Berlin, so it was easier to get Western television as well as West Berlin radio stations that were really talking up the Tour. I’ll never forget watching the start of the race from my little television in my dorm room, with my little antenna pointed toward West Berlin. I was just captivated. All those colorful jerseys with all sorts of different sponsors were just so beautiful, so rich, compared to my solid gray East German national jersey! In addition to that, the prologue was won by a Polish rider, Lech Piasecki. That was such a watershed moment for me. I remember thinking, wow, if a guy like that can come from a Communist country and ride the Tour de France, maybe I can, too, someday! And from that day on, the Tour de France was my dream.
Now I think that Roger Legeay had an idea of who would make the Tour team a couple of months before. A couple of riders like our leader, Chris Boardman, our sprinter, Frédéric Moncassin, or experienced guys like Stuart O’Grady—guys that were proven—knew they were going to the Tour. But that wasn’t the case for a lot of us. Like I said, all the French riders wanted to go to the Tour, so there were a lot of guys competing for few places.
In hindsight, I think Roger knew for a couple of months that he wanted to put me in the Tour, but there were so many guys campaigning to be on the team, and I was just the young neo-pro! As a result, I really didn’t know until the last minute.
But I’d won my first race already at the Vuelta Ciclista al País Vasco, the first team victory of the season. And then I had a good race in the Critérium du Dauphiné-Libéré, a key warm-up race for the Tour. My teammate, Chris Boardman, won the prologue, and I got in a break with Maximilian Sciandri on Stage 1. My team director just told me to take my pulls and see where things would go, and soon enough, we had a big gap. By the finish, we had more than three minutes on the peloton, and I was wearing the yellow jersey. I was just like, “How cool is this?!” Clearly my opportunistic approach to racing was starting to pay off, even if I wasn’t anywhere near the strongest guy in the race. I was already figuring out how to find opportunities for myself. I lost the lead a couple of days later when we climbed up the Mont Ventoux, but I showed that even if I wasn’t in the same league as the great champions, I was okay. I could hold my own. And that was important for my confidence heading into the Tour. Soon enough, I had my ticket for Dublin, Ireland, where the Tour would start.
Everything was like a dream. We spent a lot of time preparing for the prologue start around the streets of Dublin, and I was really trying to learn everything I could from Chris Boardman, who was just about the best time trialer in the world at that moment.
And we were, of course, ecstatic when Chris won the race, because winning the prologue takes so much pressure off the team, it’s not even funny. It was so good to have the jersey!
You know, it’s one thing to say that the Tour de France is the world’s biggest bike race, the greatest, whatever, but it’s another thing to see it from the inside. For one, at the start, you get a completely new bike, a new set of clothes, a new helmet, new glasses, new shoes. You start out fresh. Every day you see all the cars and buses being washed down. And the riders are the same. Everyone has just had a fresh haircut. Everyone is freshly shaved. Everyone is fit and skinny. Everyone is in his prime.
You see the way people behave, the attention to everything, and the attention to us! Suddenly there are all these interview requests after nobody gave a damn about you for the first half of the year!
Generally, as in Dublin that year, the race starts with a prologue. And when you go out and do the reconnaissance of the course, there are already signs on the roads. There are already spectators. Already the speed, just in training, is so much higher because everybody is so fit. You sense immediately that it’s a much bigger game.
I’ll never forget that first Tour with Chris. You could just tell he was more focused. He talked less. He spent hours outside with the mechanics checking his bike, checking his position, discussing the best tire pressure. You could see the intensity rising.
But all this time the biggest scandal in the history of the Tour to date was brewing—the Festina affair.
While in Ireland, we were getting news and hearing rumors that one of the Festina assistants, one of the soigneurs, or physical therapists, had been stopped and that drugs were found in the car. We were hearing that there was a problem with Festina. But we didn’t know what was going on exactly. Now, you have to remember that this was before the Internet had really taken off, and it was before everyone had mobile phones. Information traveled a lot more slowly back then.
So it wasn’t until the Tour returned to France that we (the riders) understood the full scope of the Festina affair. Within a day or so, everything really blew up. We already started hearing that Festina would be excluded from the race. And the more the press wrote about it, the more we understood that we were living through the biggest scandal ever in our sport so far.
And for me as a neo-pro, I was just shocked at how organized the doping had become on that team. Everybody on my team was shocked. Everybody on that team, it seemed, was involved in the doping program one way or another. Everybody did it. Everybody knew. Everybody was part of it.
At first, in our innocent little ways, we thought that maybe the doping was just isolated to them. You have to remember that Festina, at the time, was one of the biggest teams with one of the biggest budgets. But as the race went on, we understood that Festina was not alone.
Throughout that first week or so, it seemed that not a day went by without more bad news. Police were checking cars and trucks at borders and at gas stations. Not a day went by without another rider being caught, another suitcase being found with drugs. It just didn’t stop! We were like, “Are you kidding? This is ridiculous!” The Dutch TVM team was searched, and the riders spent most of the night in jail. And teams, especially the Spanish teams, just stopped racing. They quit and went home!
Italian racer Rodolfo Massi, who took over the best-climber jersey from me in the Pyrénées, got kicked out of the race. Then we had a riders’ strike, where we were all sitting on the road. And it was just like, “Ah man, could somebody please translate for me? When is this going to stop?” Nobody knew if the Tour was going to continue. Nobody knew if the racing would actually make it to the finish line in Paris. It was that bad!
There I am in my first Tour de France, sitting on the road in the middle of a rider protest. And at one point, I just asked myself, “Is this what I signed up for? This is what I get for working so hard to become a professional?” Ever since the Berlin Wall came down, I’d had only one dream—to be a professional and ride in the Tour de France. Suddenly I just thought, “And that’s all it is?” My dream was disintegrating before my eyes. Everything was shattering before my eyes!
Even my parents called and said, “Son, what’s going on over there?”
And all I could say was, “I don’t know much more than you do!” Again, there was no Internet to speak of. Information was just traveling a lot slower.
And it continued and continued every day for the entire three weeks. Every day someone from the German press would come up to me with a question regarding some information they had heard, some source. I was so confused. I didn’t know what I was supposed to say. I didn’t possess any inside knowledge. I was just in shock mode.
Later, as riders continued to get popped over the years, I became more vocal and switched into anger mode, saying publicly, “Haven’t they learned yet? This shit is not good for our sport or for us!” But at that moment, in the middle of the 1998 Tour de France, I was too overwhelmed to even be angry.
Needless to say, we talked about it a lot around the dinner table and in our hotel rooms at night, trying to figure it all out, because let me tell you, I was no
t the only one who was confused. Nobody else really understood what was going on, either.
But when I think back on those days, I can tell you I was really happy to have a teammate and a team leader like Chris Boardman. Chris and I hit it off on a lot of things, and in many ways, we were on the same wavelength. Like me, Chris is a real family guy. And he was always saying, “You have to decide what you want. When all this is over, do you want to be able to go to a barbecue or go to the beach with your kids and be healthy? Do you want to go out in public and be able to hold your head up? Or do you want to read in the papers, or worse, have your kids read somewhere that you’ve been in prison? It’s just not worth it!”
You know, looking back, with all the other doping problems that hit the sport afterward, it’s sometimes difficult for people to recall just how devastating and how traumatic the Festina affair was for any of us who lived through it. But I can tell you that for anyone near the Tour de France at the time, the Festina affair was a real wake-up call. And for me, I can tell you that from that moment on, if anyone would have come up to me and offered me “some help,” well, I would just say, “Go fuck yourself!” There was just no way in hell I would have any of that shit happen to me! Doping just isn’t right. Doping is dangerous. Doping is unhealthy. Doping just destroys everything! I guess you can say that at least the Festina affair set me up for the rest of my career. It marked me forever.
I had other reminders of just how dangerous the doping circle can be and how it can destroy lives, as well.
I’ll never forget several years later, in 2001, after I’d worn the yellow jersey in the Tour and had managed to have quite a few wins, my hometown in Dassow named a street after me, Jens Voigt Ring.
It was great—a real honor—but unfortunately, as you all know, the doping scandals continued well after the Festina affair. Anyway, I remember coming home, and at one point, I remember my mom and dad saying, “Listen, son, we’re not there all the time with you. But if you do that shit, we would drop dead! We couldn’t live here anymore. They named a street after you. We live on Number 1 Jens Voigt Ring. If you would do that and get caught, we couldn’t go out on the street in daylight anymore. We’d have to move to another country! We would be so ashamed. We’d drop dead!”
Those were powerful words, and yet another reminder to me that doping doesn’t just hurt you, it hurts everyone you love!
I think if you talk to people who lived through the Festina affair, many will agree that it was a sort of healing shock. And for a while at least, things seemed to get better. I wouldn’t say that the racing was any slower. It just seemed more even.
Unfortunately, that period of more even racing didn’t seem to last, and two or three years after Festina, it seemed like some people had returned to their old habits, had returned to their old programs.
And so the scandals continued, reminding us that not everything had changed. In 1999, Marco Pantani tested positive and couldn’t defend his Tour de France title. There was the “Blitz” during the Giro d’Italia, the “Tour of Italy,” in 2001. There was Tyler Hamilton in 2004 and then Operación Puerto in Spain in 2006, which involved my own teammate and leader, Ivan Basso. And, of course, there was always suspicion around Lance Armstrong, a suspicion that proved to be true, as we found out many years later.
Frankly, there were times when I asked myself whether cycling could even survive. I mean, just looking back over the past 10 years at the podiums in the Giro or the Vuelta is enough to make you think they’re all poisonous. And the Tour de France obviously has had its dark spots, too. No, honestly, at times I wondered if the whole sport of bike racing wasn’t just going to stop, and that would be the end of it. There were times when I just sat there and said, “Another one? Haven’t they learned anything yet? Don’t they realize it’s not worth the risk? Don’t they realize that doping will come back and bite them in the ass?”
For me at least, and I know for many of my teammates at the time, the 1998 Tour de France was just such a jolt. People who lived through that really didn’t want to live through it again. I felt like whoever didn’t hear the bell then and there was beyond help! It was so incredibly clear that the sport had to change, and change radically.
I’m sure that being on a French team at the time heightened our awareness of the gravity of the situation. I mean, this was France, home of the Tour de France, a national landmark. And the Tour had just been brought to its knees!
In the off-season that year, there was a lot of brainstorming, as a lot of people were trying to find ways to save the sport, trying to find solutions so that the sport could regain its credibility.
Our principal team sponsor, GAN, was replaced by Crédit Agricole, and from the first day of the first training camp, the message was very clear. Roger Legeay, our manager, spoke at the first get-together, and right then and there he laid out his point of view. It was quite simple. I still remember it. He said, “Dope is an absolute no-go. This is point zero. We have a clean slate, and it’s up to us to write cycling history on good terms. We have seen what drugs have done to the Tour. We have seen how much damage drugs have done to the sport. We have seen how it threatens all our livelihoods. I would rather that we finish second, third, fourth, or tenth and know we did it the right way, than win and have to worry that a year later or two years later, the truth comes out that we were doping.” He couldn’t have been more clear.
In addition, Roger really started cutting back on the amount of outside help riders were getting and pressured us to work only with the team doctor. The reasoning was simple. If an individual rider or doctor gets into trouble, it still comes back to the team. Now that sort of thing gets really complicated in cycling, since riders are living all over the world. But Roger said clearly that if we used any other doctors, coaches, or advisers, they were obliged to file detailed paperwork with the team.
The French government got involved, as well, and started what was known as the études longitudinales, long-term testing that was very similar to the biological passport that the International Cycling Union put into place years later. With the études longitudinales we would get a letter in the mail every few weeks summoning us to an appointment at a certain hospital or clinic, where we would have to give urine and blood samples. These samples would be collected and tested over time to clearly illustrate any suspicious fluctuations in a rider that could be a sign of doping. If a rider’s testosterone level suddenly jumped up before the Tour de France, for example, that could be a suspicious sign. The authorities also made it very clear to us that the samples would be stored over time and probably would be retested. It was definitely a way to scare people off from doing crazy things.
The police were also involved. New anti-doping laws were quickly put into place. In other countries, it took a few years before doping was considered a crime, but in France, it happened very quickly. Previously, doping in sports fell only under the jurisdiction of sporting federations, but that all changed after the Festina affair. You really have to give France credit. They were simply ahead of their time and the first to take a really strong anti-doping initiative. And I know that for the French teams at the time, teams such as Crédit Agricole, La Française des Jeux, and others, it was very clear that doping wasn’t a possibility.
Personally I could feel the difference in the years that followed. In 1998 I won one race in the Vuelta Ciclista al País Vasco on what was basically a fluke. But I also spent a lot of time that year just hanging on. There were times in 1997 and 1998 where I just felt like a shit rider. I felt like I was hopeless! I felt like I was never going to be anybody. Later on, I learned why some guys were so much better.
In the years that followed, however, I won a lot more races, more consistently. In 1999, I won my first Critérium International, a much bigger race with more international riders. And, as I have mentioned, I won that race a total of five times over the years. I wasn’t hanging on for dear life anymore. I just felt closer to the best. I felt that the playing field was mor
e level.
But like I said, there were also signs that some riders were returning to their old ways, because there were still a lot of doping scandals and a lot of riders testing positive. Some performances just looked too much like those before Festina. Sometimes you would see a rider who was just shit all spring suddenly go BANG! They would make this amazing transformation from a fat little caterpillar into a beautiful butterfly, and you would have to wonder. Some guys, it seemed, would pass me without ever catching up to me.
In France, they started speaking of cyclisme à deux vitesses, cycling at two speeds. But I really never was a big fan of this term, because too many people used it as an excuse. French cycling at the time was also a bit stuck in the past. The sport was managed by a lot of directors who were old pros. And many of them thought that because they had trained a certain way 20 years ago, the young riders of the day should do exactly the same. For a while, they missed the shift to more modern training methods. They wouldn’t pay attention to nutrition. They would still have red wine on the table. Some were like, “Wind tunnel testing! Why should I do that?” They took their time using power output systems like SRM, or even simple things like interval training, which everybody does today.
And also during this time, you had to be careful not to accuse somebody wrongly, because most often you just didn’t know. The truth might come out years later about some performance, but when you’re out there on the road, you don’t know. That’s why it was always important for me to give a rider the benefit of the doubt. And I certainly didn’t want people to talk badly about me behind my back. It’s easy to point fingers. If you’re beaten, it’s easy to become miserable or jealous. It’s easy to say, “Ah, I think he’s doing this or doing that!” That’s easy. So I was very suspicious of this deux vitesses thing, even though you couldn’t help but question some performances.