Racing Hard

by William Fotheringham

  Friday 13 July, Bourg-En-Bresse

  British Cycling performance director Dave Brailsford visits the race en route to riding the Étape du Tour cyclosportive in the Pyrenees. He is photographed before the start with the four riders in the race involved with the Lottery-funded squad: Geraint Thomas, Bradley Wiggins, Mark Cavendish and David Millar. “Cav”, “Wiggo” and “Gee” are in the Tour largely through Brailsford’s policy of placing riders with professional teams who put them in races such as this, thereby increasing their strength for when the Olympics come round.

  It is probably not a coincidence that in a single afternoon Wiggins comes within seven kilometres of winning the stage after a 190-kilometre solo escape, Thomas shows his increasing confidence – at only 21 – by finishing fifteenth and Cavendish is in the mix at the finish for the third time this week, until another sprinter puts a pedal in his front wheel, taking out half the spokes.

  Add to that Millar’s strong late attempt to win the previous day’s stage and Charly Wegelius’s unsung contribution to Liquigas leader Filippo Pozzato’s stage win and the British influence has lasted well beyond Kent. The Britain Olympic squad are fast movers: while Wiggo is speeding south from Sémur-en-Auxois to Bourg, Brailsford is done for speeding by the gendarmes, an occupational hazard in the Tour convoy.

  Saturday 14 July, Le Grand Bornand

  As well as Lance Armstrong’s controversial former trainer Michele Ferrari, Vinokourov has hired one of his bodyguards, Serge Borlee, a bullet-headed man-mountain nicknamed “The Muscles from Brussels”, and his old chef, the Swiss Willy Balmat. It is tempting to chant: “Are you Armstrong in disguise?” The answer so far is no; the cancer survivor never went into the mountains with a two-minute handicap. You can buy all the help in the world, but good fortune has no price.

  [There was a double entendre here, which I hoped the reader would pick up. Vino was done for blood doping 10 days later.]

  Week 3

  Tignes, Sunday

  A victory for “Chicken”, as Michael Rasmussen is known, which turns the Tour on its head on a day of crashes. Worst off is Stuart O’Grady, who piles off a bend on the Cormet de Roselend and breaks bones in his back and a few ribs. He is carrying eight water bottles in his jersey to refuel his team-mates and the consensus is that they acted like airbags and saved him from more serious injury. Britain’s Charly Wegelius slips a gear coming out of a roundabout at 40mph and falls on his head. The impact can be measured in the fact that his helmet is broken into four pieces. He gets away with whiplash and abrasions. T-Mobile lose three riders: Michael Rogers with a dislocated shoulder, Patrick Sinkewitz, who breaks his nose after colliding with a spectator while riding to his hotel, and Mark Cavendish, whose cuts from his crash six days earlier have become infected.

  Val d’Isere, Monday

  Like hundreds of other amateur cyclists, the Observer sets off to share the roads around the stylish ski resort with the Tour pros as they spin their legs on the rest day. There is, however, only one road, and it goes up the Iseran pass, to 2,770 metres above sea level. All the Tourmen are riding it, even though they will race up it the next morning. I start the climb with the Agritubel team. Their little string is led by former French darling Laurent Jalabert – out for a spin with his brother Nicolas.

  Near the top, I am overtaken by two pros from Quick-Step who whizz past at twice my speed, wearing full training kit – tights, arm warmers, warm tops – in the 30C heat. They are not sweating, although the impression they give of being untouchable gods lessens when I catch a glimpse of them taking photos of each other on their mobile phones. Back at the foot of the climb, I encounter Bradley Wiggins and we float gently up the ascent to Tignes. Gently is relative. Wiggo is not apparently breathing, but after 2km I am a sweating, shivering wreck.

  Briancon, Tuesday

  The politicians weigh in. The new French president Nicolas Sarkozy makes a flying visit and mouths a few platitudes about how the Tour makes the French people happy and how he is there to support the organisers in their fight against doping. In which cause he hops up on the podium after the finish and kisses Richard Virenque on both cheeks. Perhaps he asked Virenque whether he remembers the last visit by a French President to the race. That was Jacques Chirac, in Correze in 1998, the day Virenque made a tearful exit from the Tour after being thrown off during the Festina drug scandal. (They didn’t meet.)

  A more meaningful intervention comes from the Kazakh defence minister Danyal Akhmetov, who sends a text message just before the stage finish to Marc Biver, manager of Astana. Alexander Vinokourov has crumbled during the stage and Biver is ordered to put the team to work for Andreas Kloden instead of the oil-rich country’s national hero.

  Marseille, Wednesday

  German cycling’s annus horribilis deteriorates further. [There had been continual revelations about Jan Ullrich and T-Mobile since the Operatión Puerto scandal.] Sinkewitz is positive for excessive testosterone (subject to a second test) and German cycling crumbles within days: TV stations ARD and ZDF suspend coverage – the first time any national broadcaster has pulled out of the Tour mid-race. Adidas abandon sponsorship of T-Mobile and the French national squad. Audi contemplate following suit. The world championships in Stuttgart in September are in question. All three major team sponsors, T-Mobile, Gerolsteiner mineral water and the Nordmilch dairy co-op, are to reconsider their future in the sport. As an illustration of how rapidly and destructively doping can impact on a sport, it is deeply sobering. On past experience, however, it probably won’t make the cheats think again. [T-Mobile were to pull out later in the year; Gerolsteiner and Nordmilch – backers of Milram – followed suit in 2008.]

  Montpellier, Thursday

  Three records are broken. Attacking in a crosswind to catch a rival unawares is something all textbooks mention and a move team managers love to try. For the first time in recent memory on the Tour, it works and Christophe Moreau is the victim. Sporting France goes into mourning, although “Titou” will no doubt merely become even more popular now that he has been unlucky, because that is how France loves its cycling stars.

  The stage win is the first for a South African, Robert Hunter, which means the low-rent Barloworld team (budget €2.5million) has outplayed all the other teams in the race bar Quick-Step and CSC. Finally, the vast amount of road furniture in the Midi means the Tour breaks the record for the number of roundabouts in a single stage. There are 49. God help us if the Tour ever visits Stevenage or Milton Keynes.

  Castres, Friday

  There has been much grumbling among the suiveurs this year about the dearth of gifts, but nostalgia for the freebies of yesteryear is nothing new. Time was, when you returned from the Tour laden with largesse from the stage towns, like Crusaders weighed down with booty, wrote Geoffrey Nicholson, the Observer’s late cycling correspondent, in 1992.

  This year we thank London for a bag, Ghent for a computer memory stick, Autun for a bottle of Chablis and Briançon for a business-card carrier and a bit of cloth, the purpose of which confused us all. (Sunglasses cleaner? Napkin? Hankie?) But Castres comes up trumps with a bag containing a Tour survival kit: energy bars, sun cream and shower gel. There are a few nasty odours emanating from Germany and Denmark right now, but at least the press corps will smell sweeter.

  [The Denmark reference was to Michael Rasmussen; questions were being asked about his failure to register his “whereabouts” for random testing during pre-season training.]

  Albi, Yesterday

  Martin Johnson, captain of the England team that won the Rugby World Cup in 2003, turns up at the race for the second day running. While Jonno’s love of American football is well documented, his passion for cycling is less well known. “I am amazed at what they do in the mountains,” he tells French television. The feeling is mutual: most cyclists can’t quite believe the things that go on in the scrum.

  Week Four

  Plateau-De-Beille, Sunday

  An opinion poll in the Journal du Dimanc
he reveals that four out of five of those questioned doubt the probity of Tour de France stage winners, or any professional cyclist winning any race anywhere. That is hardly surprising, given the nine years of almost unbroken scandals in the sport since the Festina drugs bust of 1998. There is a paradox here, though: television audiences are up, with a 52 per cent share of the viewing French public, and the roadside spectators are as numerous as ever.

  Loudenville, Monday

  Further fall-out from the collapse of German cycling following the wave of confessions about doping, the departure of the national TV stations ARD and ZDF from the Tour and the withdrawal of Adidas. Other key backers such as Audi, VW and Skoda are thinking again. So too, still more traumatically, are the bike companies who sponsor Didi Senft, the bearded crazy who dresses up as a devil and runs down the road after the riders waving a trident and yelling “Allez, allez, allez”. Senft is famous for his BO – the red suit rarely seems to get washed – so without him at least the Tour would smell a little sweeter in one sense.

  Pau, Tuesday

  We have been here before. Grilled “Chicken” is on the menu as the press question Michael Rasmussen. By the neatest of ironies, the setting, Pau’s Palais Beaumont Congress Centre, was the venue for the legendary confrontation between Lance Armstrong and the media in 2001 over Dr Michele Ferrari. During Rasmussen’s 40-minute press conference the race is not mentioned once.

  An hour or so after “Chicken” runs for his hotel, the racing seems even less relevant as the news of Alexander Vinokourov’s positive test [for blood doping] interrupts a press conference given by David Millar. The Scot leaves the room in tears. Vino’s departure leads to one funny, if slightly sick moment. A rumour does the rounds that Vinokourov’s blood may have originated from his father. The rider’s riposte is: “If that’s the case, it would test positive for vodka.” That the Tour has come down to jokes about whose blood is where reflects its dire state.

  Col D’aubisque, Wednesday

  Jeers for Rasmussen from French fans on the roadside and cheers for the backmarkers after a protest at the stage start by the teams in the race who consider they are racing “clean”. One rider, Lilian Jegou, of Française des Jeux, states: “You have more sporting credibility if you are at the back of the race.” To celebrate this new phenomenon, the paper Libération announces that it is now supporting only the lanterne rouge, as the last rider in the race is nicknamed, after the red lantern that hangs on the back of a train. In the old days, cyclists in contention for this position would “race” to lose time, without actually losing so much that they had to leave the race, because there was a certain notoriety – and lucrative appearance contracts – for the last man to finish the Tour. Acting no doubt on the biblical principle that the last shall be first and the first shall be last (in terms of credibility), Libé exhorts the current incumbent, the Belgian domestique Wim Vansevenant, to “go slower!”

  Castelsarrasin, Thursday, Angouleme, Friday

  Two days wending our way from the Pyrenees to the Cognac region, in hourly expectation of a fresh positive test or two. In Angouleme, we receive the final free gift of the Tour, a bottle of brandy. Most are duly grateful.

  With no more scandals, for the moment, the caravan indulges in its favourite pastime: gossip. Rumours and late-night text messages proliferate: that this rider or that from this or that team is positive, that new revelations from retired cyclists are imminent.

  Cognac, Yesterday

  As in 1998, the year of the Festina drugs busts, the Tour’s final time-trial has no real meaning. No doubt when Lance Armstrong turns up in Paris to glad-hand potential sponsors for [Alberto] Contador’s team, Discovery Channel – which the Texan part-owns – he won’t be putting it that way, whether or not Contador is in yellow. I remember exchanging words with Armstrong in a Paris hotel at the end of the “Festina” Tour. He believed the vast scandal was all for the good and the sport would change its ways. I was with him on that one, most Tour followers were. After this year’s events, our naive optimism now seems like a bad joke.

  The diary makes it clear how my mood developed during that Tour; the Vinokourov positive was what disgusted me most, simply because of the level of denial. He had been under fire from the start of the race, as this piece shows.

  How Vinokourov was blooded into the Tour of infamy

  25 July 2007

  One of the hallmarks of cycling’s most notorious drug cheats is hubristic denial, on the most colossal scale. If his control test is confirmed, Alexander Vinokourov will end up right on the top row of the pantheon of infamy along with Tyler Hamilton, Richard Virenque and Raimondas Rumsas.

  Asked repeatedly about his regime before the start of the Tour in London, Vinokourov cast his eyes to the floor and replied: “Why do you think that training means doping? I have done my work and I have nothing to reproach myself for.”

  Vinokourov went down the same road after his second stage win of the Tour on Sunday, accusing the president of the International Cycling Union, Pat McQuaid, of “trying to make me look like a cheat. We are always made to look like animals without brains,” he continued. “I am not a criminal. I am only trying to do my work in the best conditions I can.” By then, the blood had apparently been put in, the stages won.

  So much for the “campaign of harassment” that Vinokourov and his intense, shaven-headed manager Mark Biver complained about before the Tour started. Biver, so quick to get behind his leader when the questions were answered, wasted no time in declaring him “guilty until proven innocent” yesterday.

  It is worth looking back a few weeks to what Biver referred to as “harassment.” There were the nods and winks when Vinokourov rode the Dauphiné Libéré stage race in a state of grace, seemingly winning or setting his team-mates up to win as and when he chose. There were the rumours that he and some of his team mates were the “men in black”, said by the International Cycling Union’s head of anti-doping Anne Gripper to be training in anonymous clothing in far-off places to avoid random drug tests. There were the rumoured sightings of Vinokourov at Col de Madone near Nice, in the Canaries. With hindsight, it all has a new complexion.

  The Guardian was among those who questioned Vinokourov’s ethics before this Tour de France began, only to be slapped down by Biver, who said that we “had not quite understood”. Perhaps we understood all too well. It all makes a horrible, grim kind of sense, as did the case of Hamilton, as did those of Virenque and Rumsas.

  Vinokourov had raised eyebrows on Saturday, simply because his margin of victory was so vast, particularly for a rider who had been on his knees – literally – for the previous nine days, who had been unable to get over the biggest Alpine cols with the best the previous Tuesday. As Britain’s 1992 Olympic pursuit gold medallist Chris Boardman said, “If it looks too good to be true, it probably is.”

  By the time the time-trial came around on Saturday, Vinokourov had his back to the wall. His tour had fallen apart when he crashed on the stage to Autun nine days earlier, gashing both knees so deeply that 30 stitches were required to keep him in the race. On occasions he had barely been able to climb the podium to register in the mornings. He had clung on initially in the Alps only to lose, as it then seemed, all chance of overall victory on the stage to Briançon, when he was unable to hold the pace set by the Spaniard Alberto Contador and the young Colombian Juan Mauricio Soler. He ended the stage in tears, convinced his race was over.

  This was to be Vinokourov’s last chance to win the Tour, just as the 1998 version looked set to be Virenque’s best opportunity ever. He is now 33, well past the age at which a cyclist is at his best. He had the pride of an entire nation, Kazakhstan, and the weight of its oil millions riding behind him. He had an entire group of his countrymen riding alongside him in the country’s national colours, bearing the name of their capital city. He had pulled strings with the politicians to put the financial package behind the team together.

  David Millar could easily be understood when
he said that Vino was his favourite rider in the bunch. Vinokourov was the best road racer in the peloton, with an ability to produce the winning attack at the right time, and a never-say-die mentality which delighted the fans. His final kilometre move to win the last stage of the 2005 Tour on the Champs-Élysées was the high point of a routine seventh Tour win for Lance Armstrong.

  He is a legendary hardman, who originally turned professional in France for the Casino team. The turning point in his career came when his best friend and fellow Kazakh, Andrei Kivilev, died of head injuries sustained in a crash in the Paris-Nice “race to the sun” in 2003. “I know he is always at my side. His strength is always there to support me,” he repeated.

  But Vino’s connections, in hindsight, appear suspicious. From 2000 he was part of the T-Mobile team alongside Jan Ullrich, with whom he escaped to take silver to the German’s gold in the Sydney Olympic road race. Doping, if not necessarily systematic, was clearly endemic in the German team, if the spate of recent confessions of drug use and administration – by the team’s doctors – is anything to go by. Ullrich is now disgraced, although still in denial.