Shut Up, Legs!

by Jens Voigt

  I can only imagine that some riders must have seen each other in the waiting room of Dr. Fuentes’s office. And some must have thought, “Okay, I’m paying this guy 10,000 or maybe 15,000 euros a year to give me an advantage. But if he’s taking the same from each rider, then we’re all getting the same advantage. So, in the end, there is no advantage. In the end, we’re all on the same level. So why am I paying him all this money just to get the same treatment?”

  I’m sure that to this day there are still people who are convinced that I was doing the same thing as some others, and I just hid it better. What can I say to that? Do you think my doctor sits on the moon? I just don’t think you can really hide a sophisticated doping program today. They can check my bank account, my passport. There are no records of any trips to Madrid, no records of trips in which I flew to and from some place in the same day. There’s nothing like that. About the only bank transfer I have made in the last few years was a 5,000-euro loan to my brother to help him buy a car for his own little company that he was starting up. Except for that, I have made no bank transfers.

  The most important thing is that the people you know trust you and believe in you, and you have to trust yourself. Often I’m my own hardest critic. Okay, often I’m my biggest fan, too! But I can also be my hardest critic. And at the end of the day, I have to look at myself in the mirror and be satisfied with what I see.

  Bobby Julich and I would sometimes talk about the state of doping, and we were both just so much happier feeling like the playing field was becoming more even. And whenever somebody would test positive, boy, that just really bummed us out. We would say, “Oh man, I thought this was stopping!” But at the same time, we were both relieved to see that the controls were improving, that the biological passport was working. In addition, we were committed to leading by example and setting a good example for the young riders coming into the sport.

  A few times, as one of the oldest riders on the team, I was asked to speak at the first training camp of the year. And I’d always say, “I don’t know what you have heard or what you think, but doping on this team is a no-go!” I would reiterate that we all needed to be fully aware that if any one of us made a mistake, that person would be putting the livelihood of everyone on the team in jeopardy. So doping was just a no-go. Not even a little bit. It’s like being pregnant. You can’t be just a little pregnant, and you can’t just take a little bit of dope. I remember saying to them, “Listen to me! If I catch any of you doing it, I will hold you personally responsible for the damage you do to the team. If things turn out really bad, I will come and burn your house down! I will personally come to your place and burn your house down!”

  I was so adamant because, at the time around Operation Puerto, cycling had lost all trust. Fans didn’t trust us. The media didn’t trust us. And sponsors all had clauses in their contracts stipulating that they could pull out immediately in the event of a positive drug test. So I wasn’t exaggerating. One person’s mistake really could bring down the whole team!

  Yes, we did talk about doping in team meetings, but we talked about the fact that it was just not an option on our team. That much we talked about.

  It was soon after Puerto that Bjarne even reached out to Rasmus Damsgaard, a member of Anti-Doping Denmark and one of his most ardent critics. And what did Bjarne do? He offered Damsgaard carte blanche with regard to dope testing on our team. He let Damsgaard know that he could come test us as much as he wanted, whenever and wherever he wanted, so that he could see that we were doing the right thing and there was no doping whatsoever on our team. Damsgaard accepted Bjarne’s offer and proceeded to set up this whole whereabouts system much like the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) does today. It was Damsgaard’s system, and he could come and test any of us whenever he wanted.

  I remember it well because he had this assistant, and boy, did she travel! Damsgaard really wanted to catch somebody to prove that he was right and that our sport was really full of doping. So he would be testing us two, maybe three times a week in the beginning, in an effort to catch us by surprise. He also wanted to catch anybody who might be thinking that since they were just tested one day earlier, for example, they could take a substance and have time for it to leave their system before the next test. I remember one day I was at a wine-tasting party at a friend’s hour drinking some Glühwein, a holiday wine served warm with spices, when I got a call for a test. We were just sitting with friends having a barbecue and tasting wine when I got the call. The testers came to the house, and I did a doping test right there in the house, and my friends were all like, “Geez, Jens, your sport is fucked up!” Ha-ha, what can I say? It was all for a good cause!

  Most important, though, Damsgaard came away from the experience believing that CSC was all right. But that was pure Bjarne. Damsgaard was not our friend. In fact, he was quite the opposite. But Bjarne just invited him into the team and gave him unfettered access because he knew we had nothing to hide.

  So, personally, I only have good things to say about Bjarne and his program. I’ll never forget what he did after my bad crash in the 2009 Tour de France. I was lying in bed in the hospital between surgeries, and Bjarne called me up. He was getting married in about two days’ time, but he took the time to call me. He said, “Jens, don’t worry, you will have a contract next year. You get your surgery done and come back happy and healthy, and I promise you that we will have a contract for you. Don’t worry about a thing. The next time we see each other, we’ll sign it. But don’t stress. It’s a promise between us. You’re safe. You have a future. I know you’re strong. I know you will come back, so I want you to know that you have a contract.” And that’s exactly what happened. That’s the way Bjarne always was in my eyes—fair and correct.

  That doesn’t mean that we never disagreed, though. We did.

  We had a couple of arguments over the years. One of the biggest came during the 2006 Giro d’Italia, when I gave a stage away. I had gotten in a breakaway on Stage 19 with Juan Manuel Gárate, and because of the race situation, I had been sitting on the break all day without pulling. This was the year when my teammate Ivan Basso won the race, and he was in the pink jersey. It’s common for a support rider like me not to pull in a breakaway situation.

  At the team meeting that morning, in fact, Bjarne had asked me to cover the breakaways. There was an uphill finish that day, so the tactic was for me to get in a break. That way, if the race exploded on the final climb, I would be able to help Ivan once the leaders caught up to us. But on that day, the breakaway stayed away. From the get-go, I told the guys in the breakaway that I couldn’t pull because I was just there for Ivan. But I also told them clearly that I would not go for victory at the end of the day. And throughout the entire stage, the others in the break never once gave me a bad look or anything. But then, at the end of the day, there were only two riders left, Juan Manuel Gárate and me, and I think Bjarne got a bit excited when he saw the break was going to stay away, and I actually had a good chance to win. But I wasn’t going to go back on my word after everyone else had done all the work all day. At different times during the day, I asked Bjarne, “Hey, can I work just a little so that if we do go to the line, I can go for the stage win?” But all day long, Bjarne was adamant: “No, just wait. Do nothing!”

  So in the end, I came up to Gárate and said to him, “Hey, this is your win. There will be no trouble from me. You win, and I will be second.” But just then, Bjarne was on the radio, saying, “Okay, Jens, everything is cool in the peloton. Ivan still has two teammates. There is no trouble here, so you can go for the stage win.”

  And I was just like, “No, Bjarne, I just told Juan Manuel that it’s his win. I can’t change that.” Bjarne really wanted the victory, but I refused. “No, no, Bjarne,” I said. “I will not change my position on this one. I will not win this stage!”

  Bjarne was like, “Come on, Jens, I really want you to win this stage! You can do it!” But I would not.

  I said to him very bluntl
y, “Bjarne, there just is no honor in it!”

  Back on the team bus, Bjarne was still mad about the lost opportunity, but then, the next morning, after he had time to think about it, he came back to me and said, “Jens, that’s great! That’s what I want to see on my team! That was a good example of leadership. I was wrong yesterday.”

  You know it’s not easy for a team manager to admit he was wrong, but Bjarne had that capacity. So really, to this day, I have nothing but respect for Bjarne.

  While I was on CSC, my style of racing also changed. I didn’t have to rely only on my suicide break tactics. I could also just flat out win races such as the Tour of Bavaria, the Tour of Germany, the Tour of Denmark, the Mediterranean Tour. And, of course, when you’re looking to win the overall, you don’t go into the suicide breakaways anymore. I was the leader for the smaller and medium races, but when the team had real Tour de France contenders like Carlos Sastre or Frank and Andy Schleck, my ability to ride for myself in the world’s biggest races was reduced. But I was always okay with that. That was never frustrating for me. It’s also very rewarding to work hard and see a guy like Carlos winning, or guys like Frank or Andy on the podium in a race such as the Tour de France.

  As you get older, you come to realize that sports, like life, are not just all about me, me, me! It’s not just about winning, winning, winning. And in bicycle racing, you start asking yourself, “Okay, how can I improve the status of the team? How can I help my friend to win?” In moments like that, you have to sacrifice your own chances of victory. And to get there, you have to go through the process. You have to grow up and grow into it. But for me, at least, that transition came easily.

  Although it did not come naturally, I, too, eventually embraced high-tech training methods. (James Startt)

  TRAINING

  “Training hard is easy.

  But training smart is the hard part!”

  Bicycle racing went through so many changes in the 25 years I raced as a top amateur and professional. But, undoubtedly, some of the greatest changes came in training.

  Training in East Germany was different in many ways from the way I approached the sport as a professional. Part of it was simply that, as a young amateur, I didn’t race nearly as frequently as I did once I turned professional. But mostly, what I remember about training as an East German was the long, slow distance, the LSD, as it’s called. We just rode so many kilometers! Sure, we did some intervals when we were getting ready for a big race, but mostly our training just centered on building power and strength by spending a maximum amount of time on the bike.

  Heck, I remember endurance tests where we did a series of three-day training blocks. The objective was to see how far we could push our bodies before they were breaking down more than they were building strength. Recuperation is a key element in training, and the coaches were trying to see just how much stress the body could endure before it absolutely needed to recuperate. We would do 180 kilometers, 200 kilometers, 220 kilometers in the first three-day block, followed by one day of rest. Then we would do 200 kilometers, 220 kilometers, and 250 kilometers with one day off. Then we did 250 kilometers, 280 kilometers, and 300 kilometers with one day off. Then we did 280 kilometers, 300 kilometers, and finally 330 kilometers. Do you know what time we had to get up in the morning to ride 330 kilometers? And we weren’t riding fast. This was all LSD, long and slow. Now, LSD is great in some ways. It really makes you strong. But it also makes you slow.

  Of course, we had a lot of good results with that system, and East Germany was a strong cycling country. But we really had only a couple of big objectives each year in races such as the Peace Race or the world championships. As a result, the training was just very labor intensive. It wasn’t like in the professional ranks, where you can be racing every weekend and you have objectives all year long. When you have a Tour of Flanders one Sunday and Paris-Roubaix the next, you’re just not going to have the time or energy to do a couple of six-hour rides in-between, because when you’re not racing full gas, you’re trying to recover from racing full gas.

  My first real exposure to a more progressive approach to training came when I started working with Heiko Salzwedel on the ZVVZ-Giant team. Now Heiko may have come from the East German system like I did, but he was a track coach, and to this day, he is one of the most respected cycling coaches when it comes to the track. I think he has won world championship titles with at least four different countries. He produced world champions when he worked with East Germany, Australia, and Denmark as well as the Great Britain team and Team Sky. He worked very closely with Bradley Wiggins when he broke the hour record.

  As a track coach, he had a very different approach to cycling than my previous coaches, who were more road oriented. He was the first coach who talked to me about keeping a high pedal cadence and spinning my legs more. And his approach to speed and endurance was quite novel. He really separated working speed and working endurance. When we were working on speed with Heiko, we would do very short intervals at high intensity. But then when we worked on endurance, we really rode long, and it was not uncommon for us to go out and do 250 kilometers in a day.

  He also was experimental. He believed that the body should go through all its physical zones, from resting to a full-out effort, before breakfast. So sometimes, we would get up at six in the morning and go out for a ride. It would be short, but it would force the body through all its zones. We would ride easily for say 10 minutes, then pick it up. We would do medium intervals, higher intervals, and finally finish with full-out sprints. It might take only 45 minutes, but it prepared the body for the real workout later in the day.

  My training took an even bigger jump, however, when I moved to the GAN team in 1998. There, for the first time, the team had a full-time trainer. Heiko was a great trainer, but because the team was on a small budget, he also had to be the general manager and the race director. On GAN, we had one person, Denis Roux, who was a full-time trainer, and he really helped me take my training to the next level.

  Denis sat me down and said, “Your training has to be different now. You’re not getting dropped because you can’t race for five hours at 42 kilometers an hour. You’re getting dropped because you can’t do 55 or 60 kph for 10 minutes!” Denis understood that with all my base training from the East German days, I had enough endurance to last me a lifetime. What I needed was to train to sustain more intense efforts and be able to recover more quickly from the lactic acid created by those efforts. Bicycle racing is all about strength and recovery. Riders who can make the biggest efforts and recover fastest are the ones who will be at the front and in the breakaways the most.

  So with Denis I really started training for bigger efforts and faster recovery. I remember doing these two-hour home trainer programs. Denis was one of the first coaches to actually replace road rides with home trainer workouts, because you can train more specifically. Mentally, it’s hard, but you can get a lot out of such workouts.

  First we would do a 20-minute warm-up. Then we would do a four-and-a-half-minute big gear effort, say, pedaling at 80 rpm and a heart rate of 180 beats per minute. This would simulate a big climbing effort, and we would even sprint all-out for the last 30 seconds. Then without stopping, we would immediately do 15 minutes pedaling at 100 rpm. Together that would be a 20-minute sequence, and we would do the same effort six times for a two-hour interval workout.

  That was a good workout to simulate attacking on a climb, because often attacks come at the end of a climb. So by sprinting all-out for the last 30 seconds at the end of the sustained effort, we were essentially mimicking attacking while climbing and sprinting over the top of a climb.

  Another workout I liked was repeat one-kilometer intervals. An all-out one-kilometer effort is important in bicycle racing, especially for a breakaway rider like me, because you often need to put in really intense one-minute efforts to make a breakaway. So we would do 10 one-kilometer efforts. We would ride one kilometer all-out with full recovery to better prepa
re our bodies for a full-out intense kilometer effort.

  With Denis, I also did a lot more motor pacing; you know, riding behind a scooter or motorcycle. I never did enough of that before, and it’s so important, because it really allows you to train at race speed and forces you to spin your legs while pushing a bigger gear, which you do all the time when racing in the pack. And we would do intervals by basically attacking the scooter, which was just like attacking the pack. Such efforts are essential, because once the scooter catches up, you must be able to recover while riding behind the scooter, which is going at race speed.

  At GAN, which became the Crédit Agricole team in 1999, we really focused on intensity. In training, I rode a lot fewer total kilometers, but I did a lot more hard efforts. I honestly don’t know if there was a day when we didn’t do something intense. One day we would do medium intervals, and on another day more speed-related intervals, but pretty much every day—unless it was a real rest day—we did intervals.

  Diet also became more and more of a focus once I joined the GAN and Crédit Agricole teams. When I first started with GAN in 1998, there were still les baguettes et vin rouge on the dinner table at night. But in the years that followed, we replaced the white bread with whole-grain bread, and wine just sort of slowly disappeared, as cyclists looked increasingly to eliminate wasted calories. It’s funny to look back, though, because in the beginning, it was perfectly normal to have a bottle or a carafe of wine at the team table with dinner. One of the advantages to allowing wine was that there was no abuse, because it wasn’t a taboo in any way, shape, or form. But at the end of the day, wine still represents empty calories for a cyclist, and counting calories became more and more important to me as I matured as a professional.