I am not a scientist or an authority on the technicalities of doping. I do not set out to prove that cycling has a chronic doping problem – the sport itself has ably demonstrated that. But I believe that sport has as much of a role to play in the fabric of our lives as politics or art, and what interests me is not a litany of naming and shaming but the effect of a tacit acceptance of institutionalised doping, both on professional athletes and on their fans. What does living this lie do to athletes and their families? How do they cope with the real world once their fraudulent careers are over? How do you rediscover your love of sport when it has been betrayed by doping?
I was – and remain – a sports fan who, through a happy accident, became a sports journalist. In the past, I have been as moved by the Tour de France as by anything in my life. The unpalatable truth, for me and for anyone else who loves cycling, is that the event has now become synonymous with cheating.
So it is ironic that some within cycling may ostracise me because of this book. I was once a devoted pilgrim. I have read their stories and studied their videos and been moved by their suffering. I have ridden up mountain passes and stood at the roadsides for hours on end, frozen and hungry, just to cheer them on their way. They created an elemental part of me; they nurtured my obsession and fed my love of the sport. They were my heroes.
And it is so very hard to accept, so very hard indeed, when you learn that your heroes have feet of clay.
Part One
The Bike in the Hall
‘There are three sides to every story: yours … mine … and the truth.’
Robert Evans, The Kid Stays In The Picture
London, 1993
‘Turn him around so he can see the sunset,’ said Tom Dobson. Immediately behind the smirking shadow cabinet minister’s son, Red Menace centre half David Milliband jogged over, cupped a hand to his mouth in horror and turned away.
I lay on my back on an AstroTurf football pitch in Battersea Park, my left leg crumpled beneath me. In the dusk, my teammates gathered and stood over me. I watched the clouds drift past. Birds sang in nearby trees. Our field of dreams grew dark as we waited for the ambulance.
The floodlights hummed and flickered on. A game of hockey on the adjacent pitch was momentarily halted as the blue flashing lights appeared. The players stared bemused across the pitch at the crumpled figure. ‘Shiiit, that hurts,’ I hissed as I gave up the struggle to get back on my feet. Paramedics lifted me gingerly onto the stretcher.
I had been on the pitch only a couple of minutes, taking up my usual midfield position just in front of ‘Big Dave’ Milliband. He will forgive me if I say he is a better potential prime minister than a centre half.
Milliband’s calling card was his sheer size. He’d bellow a booming ‘Dave’s ball!’ at every goal kick, regardless of his positioning. His forehead was a battering ram, sending each hopeful punt soaring back towards the opposition. We were captained by Dan Corry, a skipper blessed with the decisive leadership style of John Le Mesurier in Dad’s Army, latterly best known for a fateful email exchange on 11 September, 2001.
The other positions in the team were filled by thrusting young Labourites. A hardened Sunday Leaguer and fully paid-up mockney, I swore more than the others – and certainly a lot more than Milliband. I was a ringer, with trademark mane and headband, brought in chiefly because I had some training bibs, spare shin pads – and took corners.
That spring evening, fate intervened. A ball lofted high over my head had bounced between us all. I pivoted, volleyed the ball away and, as I landed, heard the snap of my kneecap.
New Labour’s ministerial hopefuls watched the ambulance leave. Unlike their glorious leader, there was to be no golden goodbye, no testimonial moment. My career in park football was finished. ‘I think it’s only dislocated,’ I said to the nurse, as they drove me to the Accident and Emergency wing of St Stephen’s Hospital in Fulham. ‘Maybe you can put it back …?’
As we trundled over speed bumps in the south London backstreets, she did as I asked. Detached from the pain, a gas mask clamped to my face, I watched curiously as she manipulated my knee. It felt as if she was sifting shingle through her fingers.
Later, after more gas, the Sister scissored through my boots and socks. I reached for the gas mask again and grinned deliriously as they did it. They smeared a cast from my heel to my groin and wheeled me into a ward. As a weekend warrior, I was finished.
‘Don’t expect to play sport again,’ the surgeon told me after the operation.
Not even cycling, I asked?
Maybe cycling, he said. Maybe – but not for a long time.
This, it has to be said, was a bit of a blow. I had no job and no prospects. Now I had no escape either. Sport had rescued me from isolation as a teenager and from jobless depression as an adult. As I was wheeled back to the ward through a vague fog of anaesthesia, the black dogs barked and howled.
The ever-cheery Tom Dobson came to my hospital room to watch the Cup Final. He smuggled in some cans of Stella in a carrier bag and gurned in mock revulsion when I showed him the scar. ‘It was my ball anyway, Jezzer,’ he said.
I wailed like a baby during the first agonising days of physiotherapy. Crutches, however, had their advantages. People held doors open and black-cab drivers, showing a rare glimmer of humanity, no longer refused the fare home, south of the river.
My crutches also became a prop. At a wedding in Edinburgh, the bride’s mother looked appalled, as, drunk as a skunk, I played a crutch-wielding Kenny Rogers, hobbling through a karaoke version of ‘Ruby, Don’t Take Your Love To Town’, relishing the line ‘It’s hard to love a man whose legs are bent and paralysed …’ After a while, they gave me a walking stick. Between sessions of physio, I camped on the sofa and became an expert on daytime TV. Left leg perched on a chair, remote control at my side, I started writing. I wrote for magazines, any magazine, on everything from Vanessa Feltz and her monumental cleavage to Siberian oil and gas supplies. A trickle of cheques dropped through the letter box.
More than anything, I wanted to write about sport. The editor of a cycling magazine, a friend of a friend, gave me a break. Could I go to Yorkshire to interview a young American professional? I caught a train to Leeds, and anxiously limped down a hotel corridor, preparing to knock on Lance Armstrong’s bedroom door.
Armstrong was a hothead from Texas who was threatening to take bike racing by storm. They said he had an attitude problem. They also said he was the future of the sport.
For a long time in my life, there were few things as inspiring as the Tour de France. I cherished the race and its long history. I measured the passing of time, not by Christmas and New Year, but by the annual excitement of the Tour. The grandeur and spectacle of the race, the names of the towns and the mountain passes, got under my skin as much as the sight of the sweat-streaked, glassy-eyed riders toiling across expansive ancient landscapes. I loved the fact that the Tour crossed mountain ranges, wide estuaries and endless plains, that the peloton flashed past road signs to Bordeaux and Geneva, Barcelona and Milan, Nice and Brussels. Now, they are all just over an hour from Stansted, Heathrow or Gatwick; yet twenty years ago, before cheap flights shrunk our world, the names still evoked a dizzying pan-European exoticism.
The Tour’s tradition of camaraderie et amité, nobility and honour achieved through suffering and sacrifice, its against-all-the-odds nature, has an enduring appeal. Falling in love with the Tour led to falling in love with France.
Yet as I fell in love with their landmark sporting event, the French were growing restless. They were familiar, perhaps overly familiar, with the Tour’s tall stories. They had become complacent and disenchanted, and they needed a steady flow of French champions to keep the dream alive.
In the mid 1980s the successes of a stream of English-speaking riders brought huge television audiences to the event, as a new world discovered the Tour’s old myths and legends. Meanwhile, even as they embraced the influx of tourism and revenue from the Tour�
��s bewitched new fans, the French took solace in their former glories. Year by year, as the foreign legion swamped their territory, their love of cycling faded.
By the turn of the decade, the battle lines were drawn between the old world and the new, between tradition and modernisation. The success of a young American called Greg LeMond had stirred interest on the other side of the Atlantic. LeMond had challenged Breton farmer’s son Bernard Hinault, the last bastion of French tradition and, coincidentally, LeMond’s mentor, in an epic 1986 Tour. LeMond stood the test to become the first American winner. The Tour was never the same again and Hinault, winner in 1985, remains the last French champion.
LeMond’s sheer Americanness appalled French purists. He was an innovator who saw cycling as an old-fashioned business with potential for growth. He expected to be a high earner, he wanted his wife to travel with him, he ate ice cream and he demanded air conditioning in his hotel room. The outrage at his behaviour reached its peak when he once decided to play golf on the Tour’s rest day. Pétanque, he might have got away with, but golf …? This was sacrilegious. What made him all the more remarkable was that LeMond was sponsored by a French team – led by Hinault – yet he still had the guts to break the mould. LeMond was a fan but also a foreigner, an outsider, un étranger, competing on his own terms, yet sensitive to European sensibilities. He learned to speak French and rode in Classic races such as Paris-Roubaix, in an effort to prove he was no dilettante. Nevertheless, his victory over Hinault, by then an iconic figure in French cultural life, broke the years of French resistance and ushered in a new era; incredibly, no native rider has won the Tour since. That’s twenty-two years – and counting.
The American, still riding for European sponsors, went on to win the Tour twice more. Those who have followed in his wake, led by Armstrong, have been corporate athletes, mostly riding for American brands in American teams, with little time for cycling’s history. They have surfed a wave of opportunity and created vast wealth for themselves and an entourage of hangers-on.
Armstrong was always keen to carve his own place in the sport and often sought to distance himself from LeMond’s legacy. ‘I’m not the next Greg LeMond – I’m the first Lance Armstrong,’ he would say, a little impatiently, when he first made his mark in Europe.
Ignoring Floyd Landis and his 2006 ‘victory’, quickly discredited by his positive drugs test, there have now been ten American wins, shared between LeMond and Armstrong, in the past twenty years. But it was Armstrong, the recovered cancer sufferer and tough-talking charity spokesman with his Hollywood friends and celebrity lovers, who became the poster boy for cycling’s new world.
As Armstrong took the Tour by storm, winning for seven successive years, the French became sullen and resentful, taking refuge in the notion of two-speed cycling – one group of riders (principally themselves), was clean and credible; the other group, they preferred to think of as dirty and doped. They even coined a phrase for it, cyclisme à deux vitesses.
Meanwhile, they remain as distant from Tour success as ever.
HERRING FOR BREAKFAST
I KNEW VIRTUALLY nothing of professional cycling until 1985 when I shared a flat with Peter The Architect.
Peter had a mountainous stash of bike mags – bike porn, his girlfriend called it – and an encyclopaedic knowledge of Campagnolo rear derailleurs. He knew the nicknames of all the top riders: Campionissimo, Blaireau, and less exotically, the Pocket Rocket and the Staffordshire Engine. He spent most of his time swanning around in cycling kit, usually black with a Campagnolo logo. For comfort reasons, but also perhaps for that certain frisson of anticipation, he often went ‘commando’, sans underwear. He argued that this made him more aerodynamic. He was a posh Jewish architecture student with no pants – on a bike.
Architects loved racing bikes. The post-Kraftwerk generation, all black shirts and geometric haircuts, loved cycling. They drooled over the simple purity, the clean construction – the minimalist efficiency of the machines. The clothing, defined by form and function, devoid of frippery and frills and created in cutting edge postmodernist materials, also met with their approval.
They would stand around leering at fancy lugwork and stroking the Velcro fastening on racing shoes, perving over bottom brackets and quick-release mechanisms. In fact, the biggest ‘bike perv’ of all among the goatee-sporting, Channel-4-watching, latte-slurping, risotto-eating design intelligentsia of the late 1980s, turned out to be Paul Smith, the charming English dandy from Nottingham, now a legend in menswear, who once aspired to be a professional racing cyclist.
While mountain bikes were common as muck, racing bikes were sexy, elitist, foreign. Owning one said a lot about you: you had almost certainly been abroad, you watched the Tour on Channel 4, maybe you spoke a little French, had a smattering of Italian, got your suits tailor-made in Soho, and you certainly knew where Bar Italia was. By the time we had all seen slow-motion footage of Bernard Hinault, sexy, dashing and Breton, swooping through the Alps in his Ray-Bans to the hypnotic beats of Kraftwerk’s anthem, ‘Tour de France’ – which even got namechecked by Afrika Bambaataa and the Sugarhill Gang – cycling was officially cool, very cool indeed.
Peter and I became close friends when we shared a flat in Clapham. Bikes cluttered the hall. We ate curry and drank beer. We fitted the bike-loving architecture student stereotype. He worshipped Judge Dredd, while I loved Gil Scott-Heron. We admired Le Corbusier, Frank Gehry and Rem Koolhaas – not past winners of Paris-Roubaix or the Tour of Flanders, but groundbreaking design heroes. We wore a lot of black. We loved retro styling. In July, we fed our cycling obsession by watching the Tour on 4. At weekends we cleaned our bikes. Sometimes we even rode them. Peter’s sparkling Roberts racing frame lived in his bedroom, leaning against the wall below the life-size posters of Francesco Moser and of course, Bernard Hinault.
We aspired to the physique of a Moser or Hinault, but knew little of their dietary regime. So we invented our own. Occasionally Peter began the day with a rollmop herring washed down with a can of Stella. I’d roll my eyes in mock disgust, while spreading marmalade on a bacon and Stilton sandwich.
Peter relentlessly fuelled my growing interest in cycling. He persuaded me to spend forty quid on a bike from a junk shop on Holloway Road. We rented Breaking Away, the cult American cycling movie, and slumped on the sofa, watching it again and again, until we could recite the script. I pottered around town on the bike, commuting from Clapham to Islington and back, gradually getting fitter and faster. I’d ride into the West End, cruise through Mayfair and Soho, climb up to Highgate and then head back home through Chelsea and Battersea, racing buses and taxis on the way.
Andy joined us on rides around Richmond Park. He was cooler than both of us because he had an aluminium-framed bike with the latest Campagnolo groupset. He also wore Lycra kit, while we remained stubbornly and painfully loyal to wool. One summer’s morning, the three of us rode out of London through the suburbs of Tooting, Mitcham and Carshalton, out into the lanes and green fields, beyond Reigate and onto the North Downs. I struggled up the hills and swooped down the descents until, several hours later, we pedalled, kings of the road, into Lewes in Sussex.
It was my first real bike ride. Exhausted, sore and raw, I fell asleep on the train back, a crick in my neck, a pain in my arse and angry tan lines on my legs and arms. We rode back to the flat from the station at twilight, past pubs and pavement tables, oddities, foreign and unexpected.
My woollen cycling jersey, stained white with dried salt from my sweat, sagged from my aching shoulders. I drank endless mugs of hot, sweet tea, then sank into a hot bath. I relived the ride and planned the next route as I fell asleep.
I was already addicted.
AFTER DARK WITH GREG AND BERNARD
HOVERING BETWEEN MY new obsession with cycling and a stalled career, I became fixated with the sense of escape that my bike gave me. I started to have problems sleeping. Too many nights ended prone on the sofa, in front of a TV screen, deep into
the small hours, watching videotape of the Tour de France. In the early hours of warm summer nights, I would ride through deserted streets into central London, relishing those stolen hours and imagining the city as my territory, a secret cycling playground. But it exhausted me and after a while, even those nocturnal sorties didn’t free me from the guilt of being a disappointment to myself and to others. I’d climb the stairs to the flat, bike on my shoulder, mind buzzing, and seek another escape, watching, over and over, tape of the same race – the 1986 Tour.
That year’s race, won by Greg LeMond, was full of intrigue and panache. Both those qualities came in abundance from his team captain Bernard Hinault, who put the hapless LeMond through hell as he reneged on his promise to help him become the first American winner of the Tour, and instead morphed into his most dangerous rival. In the bite-size highlights package on Channel 4, it was enthralling.
It all climaxed in a tense time trial in the hills around Saint-Etienne. By that point LeMond and his team captain were no longer on speaking terms. At the dinner table, their La Vie Claire team was split into two camps: Francophile versus Anglophile. LeMond had become jittery, fearful that his own team was working against him.
LeMond’s paranoia was fuelled that day, when he crashed, had problems with his racing shoes and was forced to make a bike change. Bertha LeMond, watching the race with Greg’s wife Kathy, leapt off her seat in frustration when she heard of her son’s misfortunes. ‘Aww, sh … shoot,’ she said, before clasping her hand over her face, mindful of the American camera crew standing alongside.
Bad Blood Page 2