‘God, Lance – your life’s turning into a fairy tale,’ I said.
We talked about defending the yellow jersey and about how far he’d come since I’d seen him in Texas, suffering through chemo, barely able to walk to the door of his house. We didn’t talk about the prospect of him winning the Tour de France. That was unthinkable.
‘This is it,’ he said as we reached the door of his room.
American professional Frankie Andreu rode in the 1999 Tour de France as a valued domestique, helping his old friend Lance Armstrong to an amazing victory.
Seven years later, Frankie was at home in Michigan, tidying up his kids’ playroom, when, in his deep, calm baritone, he told me how he’d used EPO in preparation for that 1999 Tour.
Like Kevin Livingston, Frankie was one of Armstrong’s key supporting teammates that year. He told me he had used EPO only a handful of times, and then only in training, but also that it had improved his performance on the Tour by about twenty per cent. That was enough to ensure he became part of the Armstrong legend.
‘I knew what I was doing was wrong, but I had been getting my butt kicked for ten years,’ he said. ‘I was fine with that – even though I knew I’d get on the start line and wasn’t going to win. But then I cracked and got tired of putting up with that. So I did it. But I didn’t feel totally guilty about it, because everybody else I was competing against seemed to be doing it.’
As he spoke, in my mind’s eye I saw him on the same finish lines that I had stood on, high-fiving with Lance during the good times. It was hard to believe that it was really him, revealing his use of EPO while riding for Lance. Frankie had always seemed a made guy … one of the goodfellas.
‘Crankie’ Frankie, Lance’s flatmate in Como during the pioneering ‘Euro-dog’ days at the Motorola team, and buddy to Max Sciandri, Sean Yates, George Hincapie; Frankie, standing alongside Lance, red-eyed and tearful in his black armband when Motorola’s Fabio Casartelli was killed during the 1995 Tour; Frankie, at Armstrong’s bedside when he underwent intensive chemotherapy – he had been through so much with Lance.
How could Frankie have gone over to the other side?
A BOARDROOM IN MAYFAIR
JULY, 2001. I am walking down Park Lane with Greg LeMond on our way to lunch with a major international oil company to discuss the multimillion-pound sponsorship of a new cycling team and Greg is recounting the tale of his worries about Lance and his spat with Hinault and, yes, I’m listening, but I am also remembering all those late nights watching Greg racing and thinking this is a bit like that Talking Heads song with the ‘And you might ask yourself: How did I get here?’ line.
Greg is heavier these days than he was, frozen in time on that flickering TV screen in 1986. His hair is greying rather than blond. His face is more sombre and less open than that of the prodigious kid in the yellow jersey. But I can still picture him on Alpe d’Huez, side by side with Hinault, two genuine legends of the Tour, untainted by the suspicion that has dogged every Tour winner since his retirement.
And now, here I am, hoping that, maybe, we might do business together.
In the spring of 2001, an email had dropped into my inbox saying ‘I’ve got £18 million to spend on sponsoring a cycling team. Do you have any contacts who could help me with this?’
I didn’t get emails like this every day, and it has to be said that cycling does attract its share of eccentrics. This, however, wasn’t one of them.
His name was Jon, and the multinational oil company he worked for wanted to develop a more eco-friendly global image. Bicycle racing seemed to be an ideal vehicle for this.
I took him seriously. We met for coffee. He told me that the plan needed an internationally renowned figurehead who could deliver. I had Greg LeMond’s business card in my wallet. Last time we’d met, he’d expressed an interest in trying to put a team together. So I sent Greg an email.
LeMond, who spent much of his time hidden away on his ranch in Montana, was just resurfacing after an ill-fated venture with an American team. He had supplied his own branded bikes to the Mercury-Viatel team, led by a young and enthusiastic former mountain-biking dude called Floyd Landis and managed by the inimitable John Wordin.
Wordin was a gung-ho character, a lean and intense over-competitive dad, lacking in the diplomacy required to gain acceptance on the European scene. At times, his closest sporting relative appeared to be Brian Glover’s deranged PE teacher in Kes. Wordin, a man apparently battling a midlife crisis, trained with his riders during the day and then fought to balance the books in the evening. Mercury-Viatel’s early promise was short-lived, but the eagle-eyed saw that the raw and rebellious Landis was Mercury’s star talent; ironically when the team that rode LeMond bikes collapsed in financial disarray, Landis was snapped up by US Postal as a support rider and understudy to Lance Armstrong.
The disintegration of Mercury meant that LeMond’s name was once again absent from the European scene – except for when some journo asked him about Lance. That always made the French press twitch with anticipation, especially when Greg told David Walsh of the Sunday Times, as Lance homed in on Tour victory number three, that he was ‘disappointed’ in Lance’s relationship with Michele Ferrari. Many wrote his words off as sour grapes – Lance’s third victory had equalled Greg’s career haul – but that comment began a bitter feud with Armstrong which continues to this day.
When we met, Greg’s disenchantment with the peloton was palpable, yet he still wanted to stay in the industry. He believed change was possible. At lunch, we ate well with Jon and his colleagues from the major multinational in a wood-panelled dining room overlooking Hyde Park. LeMond was charming and effusive and hid his disillusion well. But when, over coffee and petits fours, they asked him directly if he could run a team that was clean and still win, his expression darkened.
‘I wouldn’t want to run a team that wasn’t clean,’ he answered.
Despite those anxieties, negotiations continued, finally to peter out a few months later. As it transpired, Greg would have other issues to deal with. Soon after he got back from our meeting in London the war between Armstrong and LeMond began in earnest.
A BRUTAL BEAUTY
LIKE MOST ITALIANS, Michele Ferrari grew up steeped in the love of cycling. In truth, it was impossible for him to avoid it. If football is integral to British culture, then cycling is just as deeply embedded in the Italian psyche. The great Italian races – Milan-San Remo, the Giro d’Italia, the Tour of Lombardy – are all part of the rhythm of the year, demanding as much coverage in the sports pages as the Champions League or Serie A.
To Italians, sport is about aesthetics, and cycling is about the beauty of a man in union with his machine. It is an obsessive relationship, verging on homoeroticism, fuelled by a century-old tradition, that is encapsulated early every summer at the Giro, where the tifosi gather, their camper vans clinging to the mountain sides.
They dot the high passes of the Alps, Apennines and Dolomites, pointing the way to the summits from the valley floor. Ageing, salami-touting, mahogany-skinned couples line the roadside, half-cut on vino rosso, wet-eyed and dreaming of past heroes: Coppi and Bartali, Gimondi and Moser, Bugno and Pantani.
The old men emerge from the shade of their camper vans as the gruppo pedals through the bends far below and climbs steadily nearer. Lovingly, they unfurl their flags and banners, taking care to choose their spot, ready to run alongside their young heroes, the olive-skinned, brown-eyed, beautiful ones: the Italians.
But recently they have suffered. The Italian cycling scene has long been obsessed with romance, panache and machismo; but the dark side of that obsession, a long-standing fascination with performance enhancement, has been laid bare by a series of high-profile scandals. The most painful one of all left the Italian peninsula in a state of trauma and self-loathing.
Marco Pantani’s demented and drug-addled death in a lonely hotel room left a nation in tears. He had been their most beautiful son, a Giro and Tour winner,
a heroic gimp in the mountains of Europe, a charismatic but vulnerable athlete who achieved a state of grace and beauty when he sped up the high passes, beyond the reach of his rivals. Pantani was such an explosive mountain climber that he once even brought Lance Armstrong to his knees.
Pantani saw himself as an artiste, a mystic, a guru of the mountains. He developed a habit of talking about himself grandiosely in the third person. He denigrated the scientific methods of others, portraying himself as a rider of whimsy and inspiration, racing on feel and instinct. He railed against the homogenisation of sporting champions, the dour efficiency of automatons such as Jan Ullrich and ‘Robocop’ Armstrong.
And, fittingly for such a romantic, he died on St Valentine’s Day, 2004.
I can remember where I was. We were back from dinner, half watching the news on the BBC, when Pantani’s face appeared and the newsreader blandly announced, before telling us to look away now if we didn’t want to spoil the suspense of Match of the Day, that Marco Pantani, the Italian cyclist, winner of the 1998 Tour de France, was dead.
At least he pronounced his name correctly.
Pantani had died, alone, in an out-of-season beach resort on the Adriatic, a jabbering Viagra-fuelled crack and cocaine freak, lying in a pool of his own blood. He had barricaded himself into his wrecked hotel room, before apparently embarking on one final pharmaceutical orgy.
His full and lengthy decline as an athlete and human being is charted in Matt Rendell’s admirable The Death of Marco Pantani, a near-definitive account of a doper’s fall from grace and an alarming insight into the darker intricacies of Italian sport. Rendell’s book makes for grim reading. God knows how those who profited from Pantani’s success and his endless comebacks make sense of his sordid end and their part in his tragic life – and in his gruesome death.
Pantani’s death was cycling’s Diana moment. But, as Rendell noted, he had been dying for a long time. His was the final betrayal, the moment when many in Italy cried real tears, because cycling had used and abused him, because of collective guilt over his fate and because there had been something so childlike and vulnerable about him when he had first charmed the sporting world.
His unpredictable and volatile nature – he was as likely to be brought crashing down by a stray cat as he was to seal a spectacular win – and his defiant Italianness ensured his iconic appeal. Once, on a freezing New Year’s Day in Flagstaff, Arizona, I walked through the door of a local coffee shop and came face to face with a life-size poster of Marco, staring insolently back at me from behind the Gaggia coffee machine.
Compared to the beefcake champions he challenged – Miguel Indurain, Ullrich, Armstrong – he seemed fragile and under-prepared. His persona flew in the face of the increasingly predictable corporate control of sport. His neuroses and frailties, his impish riding style, his ability to overcome insurmountable odds, appealed to Everyman.
Ten years before Pantani died, I had followed the 1994 Giro, the race in which he first made his mark. At that time, he was naive and awkward, hardly cool, yet Italians were in a feverish state about their new star. He was spindly, balding as opposed to shaven-headed, lopsided, but suddenly brilliant and beautiful in the steepest climbs. He intoxicated his compatriots, sating their need for sporting success achieved with flair and sensuality.
Five years later, he had changed. He wore earrings and bandanas, was locked in an on-off relationship with a former night club dancer, had become self-destructive and was apparently already overfamiliar with cocaine. Yet only the previous year, in 1998, he had been hailed as cycling’s saviour, the ‘divine’ Marco, redeeming a Tour tainted by the Festina Affair.
That July, when Pantani skipped away towards the highest peaks and final victory, leaving Ullrich, the churning one-paced diesel far behind, he took the hopes of millions with him. But it was an illusion, another stinging betrayal. Within a year, belief in Pantani had been dramatically extinguished. He was evicted from the 1999 Giro on the cusp of final victory. He’d failed the UCI’s haematocrit health check, his blood level – analysed no less than eight times – hovering between fifty-two and fifty-three per cent. This did not definitively prove that he had artificially boosted his red blood cell count, but it didn’t matter. In the chaotic moments that followed, Pantani was destroyed. He was no longer an innocent. The ensuing scandal broke him, both as a man and as an athlete.
Incredibly, it seems certain that he was a junkie when he rode his final Giro d’Italia in 2003. Cocaine, EPO, crack, Viagra – they all gave him what he craved: success, money, affection, love and power.
Pantani’s death was both symptomatic of, and the inevitable culmination of, the unchecked excesses of Italian cycling. His greatest successes came at the very zenith of the EPO years, in the mid to late 1990s. It seems logical to believe that his use of recreational drugs and his subsequent addiction problem was fuelled by his apparent familiarity with doping products in his professional life.
This is the darkest corner of his death, the no-go zone. In the painful aftermath of his death, it was easier for those who knew him to portray him as an unreachable cocaine freak, a wilful drug addict bent on self-destruction, than to ask how he got there and who in cycling held his hand, whispering encouragement, as he travelled down that path.
How could a junkie have competed in three-week stage races, existed within the cycling bubble, without being seen for what he was? For all the tears, Pantani’s death was hardly a surprise to anyone who knew him well, yet how he was allowed to go to his death remains a mystery. This was cycling’s law of silence as a funeral shroud.
By the end of his life, Pantani’s identity, as a human being and as an athlete, was dictated by drugs. He was a work of fiction, unable to realise his true worth, robbed of self-knowledge by the institutionalised doping that surrounded him and to which he’d surrendered himself. Pantani, the mountain guru, the self-styled ‘Pirate’, the artiste who spurned science and who wore his heart on his sleeve, was as brutalised and cynical, as steeped in self-deception, as any of his peers. Pantani was a flag-bearer for the riders of what became known as Generation EPO, an elite class of cheats that included many of the highest earners of the time. Some of them could handle the day-to-day doping rituals – others, like Pantani, couldn’t.
One of those who could handle it and who used it to his advantage, was Bjarne Riis. The Dane was one of a growing number of riders who headed to the heartlands of Lombardy and Tuscany. Many of them, after years of anonymity and isolation, were hungry for success; riding for Italian teams soon sated their appetite. To achieve this success they wholly embraced the Italian philosophy of cycling. And because of that, their careers trace a shady path, of too many doctors, too many allegations, too many tales of soaring haematocrit – and in Riis’ case, a banal confession, ten years after the event, of everyday doping to win the Tour de France.
THE TROUBLE WITH BJARNE
IN THE LOBBY of an Italian hotel, Bjarne Riis looks through me as if he has never clapped eyes on me before, despite the fact that we have met on numerous occasions.
This is his defence mechanism, perhaps a vestige of an awkward adolescence, a childhood in a broken home; on the other hand he could just be rude. The thing is, with Bjarne, you can never quite tell.
Over the years, partly by accident, partly by design, Riis has cultivated an air of mystery. He could be a deeply complex man, imbued with near-mystical, quasi-shamanic motivational abilities; or a charlatan, cycling’s idiot savant who has made a virtue out of saying little, perhaps simply because he has little to say – and plenty to hide.
Either way, he has a strangely compelling charisma and, in his second career as founder and guiding light of the CSC team, he has been phenomenally successful. Riis has an impressive work ethic and an eye for detail. His riders vouch for his guru-like qualities and for his close-knit relationships with his staff. He is serious and studious and takes his team into the Scandinavian wilderness each winter for military-style training camps.
He has rekindled the careers and ambitions of Laurent Jalabert, Bobby Julich, Ivan Basso, Tyler Hamilton and Jorg Jaksche, among others.
He has always taken a paternal interest in his riders, teaching a timid Basso first how to swim and then how to win. As a team, CSC have often enjoyed long winning streaks, when they seem unbeatable. But despite that, when it matters most, Riis has often been frustrated. For years, Armstrong and Bruyneel always held the upper hand at the Tour; then, his stars – Basso, Hamilton and Jaksche – all became embroiled in doping scandals during their careers. All of which led us back to Bjarne and to what really lies behind his reclusive nature.
Bjarne had become weary of those nagging worries, ground down by the constant questioning that had dogged him for much of his career.
Even before he confessed to doping, he wanted to move things on, protesting that he couldn’t watch his riders ‘twenty-four hours a day’ and that he believed in clean sport. He has tried hard to build bridges, but he still has a difficult relationship with the Danish media; this uneasiness stretches back to the evening in 1998 when he replied to a Danish TV journalist’s question on his own use of drugs with the ambivalent ‘I have never tested positive.’
That pressure has eased since 2007, when he finally admitted to EPO use. Since then, Riis has become a virtual recluse, alienated by the sport and making only brief appearances at races, even though he remains the CSC team’s key figure. This must have been difficult for somebody with such a quietly controlling personality.
When he first became a professional cyclist, nobody paid much attention to Bjarne Riis. Perhaps it was the diffidence, which often came across as crippling shyness, and the monosyllabic conversation. Even his peers were dismissive of him. ‘Beaten by a guy like Riis!’ hissed Max Sciandri in horror, after the Dane outsprinted him to steal a rare win.
Bad Blood Page 5