Shut Up, Legs!

by Jens Voigt

  Other activities were more fun. Once we did a 10-hour go-cart race in teams. Each team would swap the car among each other and try to get as many laps on the other teams as possible. That was fun! Another year we were in Denmark in the snow, and each team had a sled with all our supplies for making fires, sleeping, eating, you name it. We would have to pull the sled in the snow from one point to another, and then, at night, we just camped in the forest in the snow.

  The main thing was that it always changed. Some years it was more about being competitive, while other years the camp focused more on staying together. But the camps were nothing if they weren’t challenging. That was the bottom line: to take each person to their physical limits so we knew how each person would behave and react in a crisis situation.

  Who is going to stick together? Who is going to break apart? Who is going to break down? Who is going to get stronger with the challenge? That way Bjarne knew what to expect from people when they were in extreme situations—which come up a lot in bike racing—because that’s what happens when you get only two hours’ sleep a night with next to no food or water. That’s what happens when you’re walking in some stupid dark forest at night, all night. People were exhausted. But they bonded. The team really bonded, because leaving somebody behind just wasn’t an option.

  And although I didn’t realize it at the time, I think it’s safe to say that my years in the old KJS Ernst Grube sports school in Berlin came in handy at those camps, because both represented a situation in which we had to pull together if we were going to make it. And let me tell you, at the end of each camp, we were proud. We always finished up with a big cookout, and after everyone took a 30-minute shower just to get warm, we had lots of great stories to tell. So the camps definitely served their purpose.

  Sure, when we were in the middle of it all, when we were in the middle of some forest, there would always be a moment when we were like, “Bjarne! Why do we have to do this every year?” But in the end, we were always glad we did. We gained trust in each other and strengthened our friendships. And since the entire staff participated, we all grew together. We all became friends for life.

  But what I remember most about the CSC years is the way Bjarne was able to get the best out of his riders. And that was never more true than with riders who were a bit older, like me, and whose careers were standing still a little bit or maybe even slowly beginning to decline. He was good at giving those riders that little kick. Look at what he did just a couple of years ago with Nick Nuyens. Nick was always a good, strong rider, but he went to work with Bjarne, and all of a sudden, he was a Tour of Flanders winner.

  I’ll never forget my first training camp with CSC in 2004. At one point, Bjarne gave a little talk, and at the end, he said, “Here on this team, I don’t want to just make you better bike riders. I strive to make you better human beings. I want you to be more aware of what you’re doing and why you’re doing it.”

  I was like, “Wow, this is going to be different!” It was a big call. But to this day, in my eyes, I think Bjarne lived up to it.

  Bjarne is good at giving you that little extra something. He’s good at giving you that boost of confidence. I’ve often thought about what it is about Bjarne, and I guess the biggest thing is that he takes every rider seriously. He treats every rider like a grown-up man. He listens to your opinion. He uses your knowledge and what you tell him, your own experiences, to come up with the best program possible for each rider so that they make the most out of each race. But not only does he analyze your racing schedule, he looks at the way you race and where you best use your energy in a race, so that you can race more efficiently. When I first signed on with CSC, Bjarne was personally involved in each rider’s training program and had his heart and soul involved in everything. That changed over the years, because the pressure of finding new sponsors and managing the team took up more and more of his time. But for a long time, Bjarne monitored every rider’s training program. It was very personal.

  One thing he did that I never saw on another team was rent a van for all the team directors. The van would follow us the whole day on our training rides. And inside the van, Bjarne was analyzing each rider with all the directors. Together they would break down each rider’s technique, pedal stroke, and position. Was one rider sitting a little to the left or right? What kind of gears did they choose? For the entire ride, they discussed how each rider looked, what their training program was. Should this rider do more intervals? Should that rider raise his saddle a little more? No one thing in itself was enormous. He just looked at every detail about every rider and tried to make every detail as perfect as possible. But if a rider could gain just 1 percent in aerodynamics and say 2 percent in diet, well, when you add it all up, that could maybe amount to a 10 percent improvement. And that, my friends, is significant!

  When I first came to CSC, Bjarne’s approach was holistic. It wasn’t just pedal harder, pedal faster. It was about looking at the whole picture. And it was a very novel approach to cycling. But it turned out to be very forward thinking, as later on, teams such as HTC and Sky employed similar approaches, and with great success, I might add.

  That and the fact that Bjarne brought together a great bunch of guys really made for some great years.

  Another success story was with my friend Bobby Julich. Bobby had really come to an end on the Telekom team. And when his contract wasn’t renewed in 2003, it looked like he might even retire. Bobby was a little jaded after his years with Telekom. After all, the team was run by Germans, which I know something about! And they weren’t going to say, “Okay, how do you feel, Bobby?” No. Instead, they were more like, “I pay you. Do your job!” And he didn’t like that. He didn’t need that.

  So when Bjarne asked me what I thought about hiring Bobby, I said clearly, “Bobby is a very good rider. He just needs a little inspiration after the Telekom years.”

  And that’s exactly what he got when he came to CSC. Bobby didn’t cost Bjarne much, since he was facing an early retirement. And I think when Bobby came that first year, he wanted to see if he had any life still left in him as a professional cyclist. But he fit right in and had four great years with us, years that included winning races like Paris-Nice, so clearly there was a lot of cycling left in him. He just needed someone like Bjarne to pull the best out of him.

  And for me, of course, I couldn’t have been happier, because I got to have my best friend as my teammate once again. How great was that? In fact, the team saw how well we got along and worked together, and they made an exception and just let us always be roommates. That was not Bjarne’s policy. As with training, he always liked to mix things up, and the rooming list always changed. But he let us stay together. I think Bjarne saw that by putting us together, he was guaranteed to have two experienced riders who had good morale, which is important for team dynamics, especially in longer races like the Tour de France. And Bobby and I, of course, were happy to be able to talk about family life, books, politics, economics, or whatever else in the evenings. We were really able to unwind. So it was a win-win situation for everyone.

  I’ll never forget the first year Bobby came to CSC, in 2004. He crashed out of the Tour de France in the time trial and was in the hospital, pretty banged up. That night after dinner, the team asked me if I wanted to go down to the hospital to see him. He was still pretty whipped out under anesthesia when we got there and was just out of it. I was standing there with him, and I said, “You know, I’ve been in some hospitals myself, and the one thing I remember is that the food is always shit, and there’s never enough of it!” Now I know Bobby likes a good hamburger, so I said, “Why don’t we just go down to McDonald’s and get some burgers and fries, so when he does wake up, he has something to eat!” And that’s what we did. Heck, we pretty much had to smuggle the burgers back into the hospital. He was still out when we got back, so we just left the bag of burgers and fries.

  And the next morning, Bobby called and said, “Ah, you’re the best! I woke up at two
in the morning, and I was just starving. And then I started smelling those burgers and I was so-o-o happy!”

  Bobby and I clicked so well. One time Bobby was sitting in the hotel restaurant during a training camp. He had already been there for a couple of days, and he didn’t know when exactly I would arrive. But as soon as I walked into the restaurant, he just looked around. It was like he had a sixth sense that I was suddenly in the room. Trey Greenwood, who worked on the team, was with Bobby, and when he saw that, he just said, “Wow, I see what they mean about you two being like an old married couple!”

  Savoring my third and final victory in the Tour de France. (James Startt)

  OPERATION PUERTO

  “Just tear all those guilty riders out of the shadows and burn them!”

  My years at CSC weren’t always fun and easy. Our team, like many others, had run-ins with doping. The first year I rode for CSC, in 2004, Tyler Hamilton, who had been with the organization up until the year before, tested positive at the Olympics and at the Tour of Spain. And even though it happened when he was no longer a part of the program, the positive tests cast suspicion on us.

  The worst moment, however, was still to come. Just before the 2006 Tour de France, our team leader, Ivan Basso, was expelled from the race for his involvement with Dr. Eufemiano Fuentes and the whole Operation Puerto investigation in Spain.

  To this day, I can still go for days or even a week without reading Cyclingnews or any of the other news outlets dedicated to bicycle racing. And the time before the 2006 Tour de France was one of those moments. I was just focused on all the last-minute preparations regarding the start of the Tour and hadn’t kept up on the latest developments around Operation Puerto.

  So I was really taken off guard once I got to Strasbourg, where the Tour was starting. As usual, we got there a couple of days early, and we were out on our last training ride with the team just the day before the start, when all of a sudden, Ivan stopped, jumped into a car, and drove off. We were just like, “What was that?”

  Perhaps I should have known that something was up the day before, when at the press conference, a journalist asked, “Hey, Ivan, what’s the name of your dog?”

  I sat there thinking to myself, “What? I have dogs. One is named Jeannie. The other one is Inka. Why is that interesting? How is that relevant to the race?” I had no idea that the names of pets were being used as code words or something. And as the news continued to unfold, I was just blown away by the depth of the doping. There were apparently more than 200 athletes from all kinds of sports, tennis, soccer, you name it. And in that 200, there were some 55 cyclists. As the details came out regarding the depth and sophistication of the doping, I was shocked. Names started to surface—surprising names. Sometimes I’d just blurt out, “Him? He’s not even a good rider. Why would he dope? What would he do without dope? Is he hopeless?” No, that was truly shocking! To see how deeply it went all across Europe.

  In some ways, I felt like I was reliving the Festina affair. But in other ways, it was so much worse. When Festina hit, it was easy to rationalize it. I figured, “Well, they’re doing what a lot of people are doing because these are bad times.” But this was eight years later. Things were supposed to have improved! You could explain Festina by saying that the whole sport had fallen into a trap. But with Puerto, it was more like this whole evil empire, a real Mafia-style organization, had been built up to make money and give a few riders an unfair advantage. For me, at least, it was much worse. And for my own teammate to be involved was just devastating.

  I, of course, was furious. And I was quoted largely in the press when I said, “Just tear all those guilty riders out of the shadows and burn them!” I actually think I said that before I found out that Ivan was involved. That didn’t go over too well, and I received a lot of criticism from fans and other riders, not to mention Ivan’s lawyers. To be honest, Ivan was okay with my criticisms, but his lawyers and his fans sure weren’t. And other riders and their fans didn’t appreciate my comments either. Some people said, “Hey, why don’t you just shut up and play it safe!” But there was no fucking safe playing here.

  The press, naturally, liked that someone was speaking out, because it made for good copy. And some riders did come up to me and thank me for saying what I said. But they were also relieved that they didn’t have to say it themselves.

  The next year I got involved with the CPA, the Professional Cyclists Association, because I thought I could maybe help the sport. We worked on a lot of things, such as encouraging teams to have insurance for riders, and we lobbied for a minimum salary for neoprofessionals. But one of the biggest things we did was to put in place the biological passport that we use today to monitor a rider’s biological levels over the years in order to determine if, perhaps, a rider has had an artificial boost. The biological passport allowed us to have indirect detection of doping in addition to the direct detection through drug controls. By monitoring each rider’s values over the years, we could see more clearly if a rider was gaining an advantage from external means. We spent a lot of time establishing the list of which substances should be legal, which should not be permitted, and what levels of certain substances—say, for instance, caffeine—would be acceptable.

  Or take cortisone, for example. Every human body possesses natural levels of cortisone. But if someone takes cortisone externally, the body will actually reduce its own production. So if you see a rider’s natural cortisone drop significantly, he is very likely taking cortisone externally. There’s really no other way to explain it.

  Unfortunately, what I learned most about working on the CPA was that I’m not a politician. I like to make 100 percent of the people happy, and as a politician, that just isn’t possible. Some people criticized me for pushing too far forward, while others criticized me for not doing enough. “Why did you stop halfway, Jens? Why didn’t you go all the way?” I was in between, and frankly, sometimes, I felt like I was the only one standing up in the middle of a battlefield. Everybody else was in their trenches, firing. And I was standing all alone between them, vulnerable. It was bad! It was really an ungratifying job, and I didn’t smile too much while I was doing it! As a result, I think it’s safe to say that politics will not be a career option for me after cycling.

  But I can tell you that as far as I was concerned, I never had a single conversation about doping with Bjarne or any member of the team. At CSC, we even had a clause in our contracts specifying that doping, or anything that was perceived to have put the team’s livelihood in danger, would result in immediate suspension. Bjarne and our team even campaigned with the International Cycling Union and race organizers to cut down on the race kilometers. He wanted to make stages shorter and generally less difficult because, well, it wasn’t the early 1990s, when people used to race on “super petrol,” anymore. If the racing wasn’t as demanding, riders would be less tempted to go back to doping just to survive.

  Now I know about Tyler, of course, and I know that he wrote a book in which he claimed that Bjarne did this and that with him. And, obviously, things came out in the press about Bjarne when Ivan’s involvement in Operation Puerto became clear. And to be honest, I never did ask him up-front about what may or may not have happened. It’s ironic, really, but none of us wanted to touch the subject. We were all just so focused on doing the best we could and doing so in a proper manner. I mean, we could read what we wanted in the newspapers or on the Internet. And really no one on the team showed any interest in bringing up the subject.

  And personally, I just didn’t see a need to make things more complicated. There was a part of me that just didn’t want to know about everything that may or may not be going on in the sport. You know what they say: Ignorance is bliss. But part of it was also a way to protect myself, because I never wanted to get into a situation where I started to think that every rider who ever beat me was on drugs. Call it a survival tactic, if you will. But if you think that you’re always getting beat by drug cheats, then why continue racing? Ob
viously, I rode through some pretty dark years in cycling. But those of us who wanted to race with dignity had to focus on the positive. We had to believe that winning clean was possible. But if you spend all your time reading or thinking about all the details surrounding every rider who gets caught doping, it will just eat away at you. I didn’t want to poison my soul thinking about it. Those thoughts can become a cancer all their own. You can’t ignore it entirely, but you can’t let the suspicion and all these evil thoughts control your life. I refused to let that happen to me.

  I knew riders who, as soon as someone got half a wheel in front of them, would go, “Oh no, what is he on?” I always preferred to think that the guy in front of me was just pushing the pedals a little bit harder than I was.

  All I can say is that, for me, there was never a hint of doping on Bjarne’s team. Never once did someone say, “You know, maybe, Jens, you could use a little help?” No, that never happened. Not even in code words, not even once! At least not to me. And you can give me a lie detector test or put me in front of a grand jury; the answer would be the same. I was never approached about doping while I was on Bjarne’s team. Furthermore, I always had the impression that Bjarne liked my attitude toward doping. He liked that I was outspoken about the issue.

  It has been widely reported and written over the years that some riders were open with their teammates about their doping and that there was real complicity between some riders when it came to taking drugs. Some guys who have come out and admitted to taking drugs try to make it look like everybody knew about drug use and everybody was in the same boat.

  No, everybody was not in the same boat! I’ve sometimes used the example that if you’re not paying your taxes or if you’re cheating on your wife, you’re not going to tell everybody. You know it isn’t right, so you’re going to keep it a secret as much as possible. And it’s the same with doping. If somebody is going to try to gain an advantage over their competition or maybe even their own teammates, do you think they’re going to tell everybody about it? No, of course they’re not going to share that information. I can tell you that no one ever came to me saying, “Come to Madrid. Come to Puerto. We’re going to sit around and change blood, and then we’re going to make millions!” No, no one ever said this to me! It just wasn’t like that! I think the people who were doing illegal or just plain dangerous things were keeping that behavior as secret as possible. So everybody didn’t know everything about everybody.