by Jens Voigt
I was riding really well, too. I was perhaps even at the height of my career, but I hadn’t had a good laugh in over a month. I was helpless to make people believe in me. There was so much guilt by association that I just wanted to handcuff myself to a journalist for three months. I figured that was the only way to really show that there was no doping going on. We would sleep in the same room. We would brush our teeth together, everything! I would not leave his eyesight for three months. And only then, after it was obvious that I still rode my bike as well as ever, could I gain some credibility.
And I did have my detractors. Some people didn’t like me because I spoke my mind about doping and the importance of saying no. So many times, I would be at the dinner table at night and my teammates would say, “Hey, that was really good what you said. It’s important that people understand that not everybody is doping.” But then, the next day, somebody would ride up to me in the peloton and say, “Hey, why can’t you just shut up?”
It was a tough period in cycling. It was impossible to take the sport at face value. That made it a tough time to be a cycling fan. And a tough time to be a rider.
CRASHING
“Hey! Why do you have to multiply the pain?
Can’t you stitch one thing up after the other?”
Jens as seen by Chris Anker Sørensen (teammate with Voigt on CSC and Saxo Bank teams from 2007 to 2010):
I raced alongside Jens as a support rider for several Tours, but I will never forget his last Tour with the team in 2010. The race was in the Pyrénées, and Jens and I were assigned to cover the early attacks on the Col de Peyresourde. By the time we reached the summit, we were gapped just slightly, but then suddenly Jens crashed really hard.
Later, I heard that he was really banged up and that he managed to stay in the race by basically riding a junior-size bike for part of the stage. I could only imagine how exhausted he must be. We were rooming a lot that year in the Tour, and I was a bit nervous about what I would see when I got back to the room.
He was in the bathroom when I arrived, and all of a sudden I heard him scream, “Fuck! I can’t take it anymore!” I figured that he must be in a whole lot of pain, but then he came out of the bathroom yelling, “And now I have a stupid sunburn on my back! It’s too much!” I was speechless. His body was just filled with cuts and bruises, but Jens was mostly upset that—because the crash ripped his jersey open down his back—he now had a sunburn to contend with as well!
If I had one weakness throughout my career, it was descending. And it resulted in two of my worst crashes. Early on in my career, I was okay with going down hills at 100 kilometers per hour with just a foam helmet on my head and a nylon jersey on my shoulders. I never dropped anybody, but I wasn’t getting dropped, either. Yet over the years, I struggled to follow the speed of the downhills.
And as the crashes accumulated, my descending got worse. My worst crash without a doubt came in the 2009 Tour de France in the Alps. I have seen the pictures of me lying there on the road in a fetal position with blood streaming down from my head. Normally, that means a broken skull! And if I had landed a little differently that day, I could have ended up in a wheelchair or, even worse, I could have lost my life. It could have been really, really bad, with very little hope.
Still today, it remains one of my most painful memories and something I hate to discuss. If you only knew how many times I’ve had to talk about it, how many times I’ve had to relive it.
We were in the Alps on the final climb of the day, the Saint Bernard Pass, before dropping into Bourg Saint Maurice for the finish. Andy Schleck was in the white jersey and planned to attack Alberto Contador, who was in yellow. So at the beginning of the day, we came up with a game plan. It was one of those master plans, and we needed somebody to be in the early breakaway so he could drop back and help Andy when he attacked on the Saint Bernard. When Bjarne asked who wanted to commit to the early breakaway, he knew he only had to look at me once to get the answer he was looking for.
So that’s what I did. I got in the early break. It wasn’t easy. As a matter of fact, I remember thinking, “Gee, maybe I am getting older!” But I got in the break. And once I heard Andy was leading the attacks on the Saint Bernard, I dropped from the lead group and timed it so that the leaders caught me on this section where the climb leveled out a bit so I could help take some good pulls. When the group of favorites came up to me, there were Andy, Alberto Contador, and Bradley Wiggins left. Frankie was just a bit off the pace with Lance Armstrong, and after taking a good pull, Andy asked me to go back and pull Frankie back up. And that’s exactly what I did. All of a sudden, I crested the summit with my two teammates. At that point, we were definitely in a good position, and I thought, “Hey, we could win this stage. If I ride good tempo on the front, we could catch the break and Andy or Frank could win the stage!”
That must have been seconds before I crashed. I was pulling at the front, and Bjarne came on the radio and said, “Hey, Jens, you don’t have to do all the work here. Others can pull if they want to win the stage.” So I pulled off to go back to the team car and get a few fresh bottles for the boys. And that was my last memory!
The next thing I remember was lying on my back, looking up at the ceiling of the ambulance. My first thought was, “How in the hell did I get here?” And then, of course, a half-second later, the pain set in. I was like, “Ouch! 1 + 1 = 2. Ambulance + pain = crash!” Then I realized that I couldn’t move because they had me strapped down to prevent me from moving. And then things got blurry again, and I must have blacked out.
Now, each day on the Tour, the race organizers designate three hospitals, one near the start, one midway through the stage, and one near the finish. But when we got to the hospital, they took one look at me and said, “No! We’re just a tiny country hospital. Get him a helicopter and get him to a major hospital.”
The next thing I knew, I was being wheeled out of the hospital and toward a helicopter with its propellers already turning.
I next remember waking up on an operating table. A team of doctors was stitching together my left hand. Then, out of the corner of my eye, I noticed another team working on my face. And then I saw a third team disinfecting my right hand so they could stitch it together later. I just thought, “Hey! Why do you have to multiply the pain? Can’t you stitch one thing up after the other?” That said, I was feeling no pain at that point, because I was loaded up with painkillers.
Then I went out again, and the next thing I remember is waking up in my hospital bed at about 10:30 that night. It was the first time since the crash that I was lucid in any way. I went back over the day and the collection of scattered memories of the race, the helicopter, and the operation. And then I told myself, “Okay, get yourself together!” And slowly, piece by piece, I started moving different body parts. First, I moved my left hand. “Okay, I can feel that.” Then I moved the right hand. “Okay, I can move that.” Then I was like, “Should I move my legs? Do I still have them?” I really didn’t know. It was scary. I just didn’t have any memory or knowledge of how much damage I had collected. Finally, I moved my leg. It was painful, but I moved it. And I could feel my toes. Then I forced myself to raise my arms. That hurt a lot, too. But at least after that very painful process, I understood that nothing was broken beyond repair. And from that point on, it was just a matter of time before I was back.
So then I thought, “Okay, I’ve got to call the family.” So I pushed the button and called for a nurse to bring me a phone. I knew that the team had already called Stephanie, but I wanted to talk to her just to say, “Look, I’m okay!”
When I called her, I understood from what Stephanie was saying that the media was asking questions and reporting different things. As a matter of fact, some commentator even said, “It looks like Jens’s chances to see the next morning are about 50-50!” So Stephanie was just in shock.
I said, “Listen, honey, it’s going to be okay. I know your name, and I know we’re married. I know we have f
ive kids, and I know all their names and birthdays. I’m okay. I’m really badly damaged. But there’s nothing that won’t be okay. I just need time.”
And then I started my long, slow journey back to competitive racing. Once I was back in Germany, I had appointments just about every day, healing and rehabilitating. But while the crash looked really bad, I came out of it pretty quickly.
Two weeks later, I was walking again. And if you can believe it, by the end of the season, I was lined up for the Tour of Missouri. I was committed to the idea that I was not going to let this crash, however bad it was, end my career. I really didn’t want to be the rider who was remembered for ending his career in a bad crash.
Perhaps it was all those Jack London novels I read as a kid, but I always wanted to be in control of my own destiny. So many characters in his novels succeeded even when all the odds were seemingly against them.
Bjarne was really supportive and promised that I would have a contract the following year. So once again I was riding for Saxo Bank the following year. But, sometimes, history can repeat itself in some weird ways. Once again, I made the Tour de France team in 2010. And once again, a late-race crash in the mountains nearly brought my Tour to an end, just like it had a year before.
It was like déjà vu. This time, we were in the Pyrénées rather than the Alps. The stage started up a climb from the gun, straight up the Col de Peyresourde. I think we had six total climbs that day. Guys just went ballistic, attacking from the start, and the race was all broken up. I was just 15 to 20 seconds off pace at the top. I remember I was with my teammate Chris Anker Sørensen, and we set off in chase so we could catch the front group on the downhill.
Suddenly I heard BLAM! and my front tire blew out. I just had enough time to realize, “Oh, this is going to be painful.” The next thing I knew, I was lying on the ground.
Just one year after my horrible crash, and there I was crashing on another mountain descent. And let me tell you, about the only part of my body that didn’t hurt was my right ankle. The rest of me was all road rash. I was just lying there bleeding everywhere. When I finally got up, blood was spurting all over. I remember thinking, “This is like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre!”
But the worst thing of all was that I almost got forced out of the Tour for a second year in a row. The problem was that the first team car was behind Andy Schleck and the second had decided to go up ahead to hand out water bottles at the foot of the next climb. As a result, I had no spare bike. And my race bike was lying on the ground in pieces. I tried to call up on the radio to say, “Hey, boys, I need a bike!” But all I heard was the scratch of static.
The Tour medical staff wants to get me all bandaged up to stop the bleeding. So I’m sitting on the side of the road watching riders stream by me, one after the other, group after group. And I’m just thinking, “Oh, this doesn’t look good!”
Then the broom wagon pulls up and asks if I want to get in. And I say, “OH NO! I DON’T NEED YOU! GET AWAY!” But there I am, with blood everywhere and no bike. I honestly started thinking, “Maybe I can steal a motorcycle from a cop! Maybe I can steal a horse!” Whatever, anything to get down that mountain to a team car and get a new bike!
Finally, the race organizers got me a bike. But it wasn’t exactly what I was looking for. It was like this little yellow junior-size neutral support bike. It was way too small for me and even had old-fashioned toe clip pedals! But that was the only way I could get down the mountain. So I just took off flying down the hill on this little bitty bike! I had to ride it for about 15 to 20 kilometers until I finally got to a team car with my bike. And all I can say is that when I got on it, BOY DID I FEEL BIG!
Once I got down the mountain, I was able to reach Bjarne on race radio. He knew I was coming, so at a turn at the foot of the next climb, he found a cop and actually gave him one of my bikes, saying only, “This bike is for Jens Voigt. He’s coming. Please give this to him!”
When I got to the same turn, I heard this voice yelling, “Monsieur Voigt, Monsieur Voigt!” And, finally, I got back on one of my bikes and still had a fighting chance to finish the stage.
But first, I had to catch up to the grupetto, that pack of stragglers that’s just trying to stay on pace to make it to the finish before the time cutoff. And let me just say that desperate times call for desperate measures. I will admit that I got a few good, sticky water-bottle hand-ups. That’s when a director hands out a water bottle and then you hold on to it real good while he accelerates for a moment. Each one of those gives you just a couple of highly valuable seconds to recover and regain some momentum. They’re real lifesavers, and that was never more the case than on this day!
The first person I caught up to was the Australian sprinter Robbie McEwen. He was really struggling, and it looked like he might not make it to the finish. But I guess I looked a lot worse, because when he looked over and saw me, the first thing he said was, “MAN, YOU LOOK LIKE SHIT!” I mean, Robbie was fighting for his own survival and, by all accounts, looked pretty bad himself. But his only thought was just how bad I looked!
Even so, I was happy to hear that because, well, it meant that I was still alive. Robbie told me that another sprinter, Mark Cavendish, was up the road and that I should try and catch him, which I did. Mark Cavendish had three more teammates with him to make sure he survived the day and to help him through the stage: Mark Renshaw, Bernard Eisel, and Bert Grabsch, a strong German powerhouse. As soon as I reached them, they all repeated what Robbie had said, “MAN, YOU LOOK LIKE SHIT,” which made me super happy. Then Bernie (Bernard Eisel) came to me and said “Listen, we’re gonna go ‘flatfuck’ in the last descent, and I am sure you can’t follow our speed on a descent after a crash like you just had. If you have any energy left, go ahead and gain some time on us and we will catch you later in the descent.” That’s what I did and, fair enough, halfway through that descent, they came flying by. To this day, that was one of the biggest displays of sportsmanship I have seen in my career. They waited for me, slowing down and looking back over their shoulders to make sure I was still on their wheels. I mean, just to put this in perspective: There is Cav, a 2-million-dollar superstar of our sport, risking elimination from the biggest race in the world to slow down and wait for a beat-up, tired, hurting guy whom he probably didn’t even know all that well. He and his teammates saved my day by making their own day harder. Because they knew and I knew that every second they slowed down meant more work on the flat to chase down that grupetto. And there was still another 100km to go and one major climb left in the stage. To make it even more impressive, there was no TV crew around to capture this display of fairness and camaraderie. The four riders just decided, okay, we can’t let this guy down and leave him behind. Little stories like these are seldom told and make the beauty of sport, the beauty of cycling, to me. The surprising and unexpected moments of humanity among rivals is what, to me, is so precious about sports. Yes, fair and square, these four gentlemen saved my day. And now I can say “thank you, Mark, Bert, Cav, and Bernie.”
Finally I caught up to the grupetto, and I just stayed there for the rest of the day. I think it’s safe to say there has never been a moment when I was happier to be in the grupetto.
At one point, I started thinking of those books in the Discworld series by Terry Pratchett. In them, the protagonist, Cohen the Barbarian, is a 70-year-old guy who has survived everything imaginable. At one point, he and his band of old warriors capture a village, but then they find that they’re surrounded by an army of thousands. And his only reaction is, “Oh man, it’s going to take days to kill all these people!” And that’s the way I was that day in the Pyrénées when I was lying on the ground. I was just like, “Oh no. I’m going to Paris this year, I’m going to Paris! There’s just no way you’re going to get me out of this race a second year in a row!”
ARMSTRONG
“There would be no Porsches and no Ferraris.”
The sport got hit with another huge doping scandal in 2012, w
hen Lance Armstrong was handed a lifetime ban from cycling. I had already lived through some huge doping scandals with the Festina affair and Operation Puerto, but in many ways, the Armstrong revelations were even bigger. After all, Lance was the greatest rider, the biggest actor in cycling. He was the seven-time Tour de France winner and the Tour de France record holder, so when his own doping was revealed to the world, it had a huge effect on everybody in cycling.
Lance did so much to make the sport popular all over the world. But he did just as much to destroy it. It was almost like he single-handedly built it up only to break it down again. As the specifics came out, we discovered in detail how in-depth Armstrong’s doping organization was, how bizarre it was, and how perfectly it had been executed throughout the team.
The negative impact was huge! Everybody involved in the sport had to answer questions about Lance and doping. Did you know something? Did you suspect something? If so, why didn’t you say something about it before? It was stressful for everybody. It was like we were all guilty by association for many years. I had many questions myself. People were always asking me, “Jens, you raced in the same years. You were the same age. How could you not dope like Lance did? You must have known! You must have been part of it!”
It was exhausting. And after a while, after answering the same questions again and again, I was over it. I just kept telling people, “Look, I was a good, solid rider, but I never once had an over-the-top performance!”
I’m a good rider, period! I was good enough to get selected for the German sports school program, and as I said earlier, I was good enough to stay in the sports school year after year. You can only do that if you’re talented. But I never won a Tour de France. I had some success, sure. And that’s normal, because I’m talented and I work hard. But again, I never had any over-the-top performances. Nevertheless, the suspicion surrounding the sport made life hard for everyone in it. Lance was just such a big figure, the biggest in modern history, so it’s normal that if he’s caught taking performance-enhancing drugs, it’s going to have a huge impact on everyone else involved in the sport, too.