In 2006 Vinokourov moved to the Liberty Seguros team, run by Manolo Saiz, the team manager who was subsequently implicated in the Operation Puerto blood-doping investigation. Last year, to fuel his competitive anger further, he was denied entry to the Tour in spite of the fact that he had not been obviously involved in any wrongdoing.
His ejection from the Tour came after a lengthy saga in which Liberty pulled out following Saiz’s implication in Operation Puerto, upon which Vino went to Kazakhstan and put the finance together to relaunch the team as Astana. But when the Tour purged itself of cyclists involved in Operation Puerto, Astana – formerly Liberty – lost five men, which put them below the minimum required to ride the Tour.
Vino was out, the Kazakh baby with the Puerto bath water. Astana was rebuilt, with entirely new management and in what now seems like an exquisite irony, Biver went to great lengths to underline that this year’s Astana had nothing to do with the squad run by Saiz. Perhaps, but they do have this in common: Saiz also lost his leader, Roberto Heras, to a positive drug test, in Heras’s case for erythropoietin.
Vino went on to win the Tour of Spain last September, in a dominating performance in which he won a total of three stages. That performance will now be tainted with suspicion, as will Vino’s other major wins – the Liège-Bastogne-Liège Classic in 2005 and the Amstel Gold Classic in 2005.
Vinokourov’s positive was not the only major event of the 2007 Tour; Rasmussen was removed by his team, Rabobank, late on the rest day after contraditions in his whereabouts in pre-season training made his position untenable, and the day after, a positive test for Christian Moreni (testosterone) led to the exit en masse of Cofidis, including Bradley Wiggins. I found the fact that Wiggins had to leave the Tour utterly disheartening; it summed up the way that “clean” riders were victims of the drug cheats. The Vino and Rasmussen scandals were different – eight years on from Festina, much of the press was alert to lies, contradictions and evasions – so although we knew something was up in both cases, there was little we could do other than write what we knew and hope they got rumbled eventually.
The 2008 Tour was the last – one hopes – to experience a flurry of doping scandals, but before those erupted, it enjoyed a significant moment: Mark Cavendish’s first stage win.
Cavendish sprints away from the field and into the history books of the Tour
10 July 2008
British sportsmen who walk the walk as well as talk the talk are rare creatures, but Mark Cavendish proved yesterday that his self-confidence is merited. Having said he would do his utmost to win a stage in this Tour, and that this was possible because he has been faster than the other sprinters on seven occasions this year, he duly delivered on Avenue de la Chatre [in Chateauroux], with the triple world road champion Oscar Freire struggling to keep pace.
It is five years since the last British stage win in the Tour, David Millar’s victory in a time-trial at Nantes, but a huge 33 years had elapsed since Barry Hoban’s win on the Bordeaux velodrome in 1975, the last time a Briton took a bunch sprint in the Tour. Hoban managed eight stages in his career – that was the last – and if Cavendish is looking for other omens, the last Tour winner in this town was Mario Cipollini, king of the sprint for a decade in the Tour and Giro.
This was a magisterial sprint to close the Tour’s longest stage, 145 miles. The last of his pilot fish, Gerald Ciolek of Austria, pulled off at 250m to go, just after the field swept up the last breakaway of the day, the French champion Nicolas Vogondy.
Initially Cavendish sprinted side by side with Thor Hushovd, the huge Norwegian who took Sunday’s stage into Saint-Brieuc, but as the Crédit Agricole leader faded, Freire and another wily old fox, the near-veteran German Erik Zabel, edged into the picture. Cavendish, however, never looked like he was going to be caught, and finished over a bike length clear.
“I’ve won a lot in the last year and a bit and there was only a Tour win that I had still to achieve,” he said afterwards. “People always say, ‘He’s got some scalps, beaten some good people’, but I’ve been one of the best in the last year. I thought of myself as a big name in sprinting, but unless you’ve won a Tour stage you can’t count yourself a great sprinter.”
Yesterday was his 18th victory since turning professional last season although Cavendish has some way to go before he matches Hoban – twice a Classic winner as well as those eight Tour stages – but if he continues as he has begun in the last 15 months, it is perfectly attainable. After that, who knows?
Cavendish has spoken frequently about the spirit in his Columbia team and yesterday they performed in exemplary style, putting all nine men on the front in the final kilometres to counter a stubborn display from the day’s three-man escape, Vogondy, the Breton Lilian Jegou and the lanky Florent Brard.
This was a first truly major win for the American squad, born out of the ashes of T-Mobile when the German team went under last December. They launched a new-name sponsor at the Tour and are also trying to set the pace in riding “clean” under their US owner, Bob Stapleton.
This victory has implications that go beyond the Tour, too. In five weeks Cavendish will take part in the Madison relay at the Olympic Games with Bradley Wiggins. He feels an Olympic title to go with the duo’s world title will be more straightforward than winning a Tour stage, and his confidence should remain high for Beijing.
Yesterday’s win will also have inspired the British team, already electrifying in trials last week, and it will have given the team’s head, Dave Brailsford, a major selling point as he seeks to pull together a sponsorship deal for a Tour de France team in 2010. Cavendish is the first product of the British Under-23 academy, run by the former pro Rod Ellingworth, to win at cycling’s flagship event. [That squad would eventually see the light of day in the form of Team Sky – based solidly on the foundations laid by Ellingworth’s academy.]
For the future, Cavendish says he will not go for the green jersey in this Tour – “This year it’s a bit out of my reach” – although it may fall to his team-mate, Kim Kirchen. However, he will now “give it 100 per cent” to win another stage. “I have the team to do it, for sure. I’m getting a bit tired now, but the team have been remarkable the way they have looked after me and kept me fresh.”
His next likely target will be Toulouse on Saturday. Yesterday was about the Isle of Man, with a first stage victory in the Tour for an island community that has always punched well above its weight since the days of the 1966 Commonwealth Games road race champion Peter Buckley. But today, possibly, could be one for Millar, a Scot who is in third overall as the Tour tackles its first mountain-top finish at the Super-Besse ski resort.
Whether the Garmin team leader can dislodge Stefan Schumacher or Kirchen will depend more on the tactics of the day than brute strength. The pair seem to have plenty of that at present, as Kirchen showed in setting the pace for Cavendish yesterday. It is a long call, but Millar remains optimistic. Cavendish, on the other hand, was simply ecstatic.
The following day’s time-trial was won by Stefan Schumacher, who then tested positive; Millar did not take the yellow jersey. By the next year, 2009, Cavendish was established as the best sprinter in the pack, and Bradley Wiggins was waiting in the wings.
French have only memories as British eye success
28 June 2009
It has often been said that the Tour de France is to the French what Wimbledon is to the British: a global sports event in which the founding nation can no longer triumph. Andy Murray may be about to make the comparison redundant [he didn’t win Wimbledon that year, sadly, but the proviso had to be put in just the same], but this year it is business as usual for the French in the Tour.
No Frenchman will start with a hope of making the podium. None has a remote chance of winning the green jersey for points, or the King of the Mountains. Any French stage wins will be a major national achievement rather than a matter of routine. For the first time in the race’s 103-year history, British fans will await th
e start of this Tour with infinitely more optimism than their counterparts on the other side of the Channel.
The fastest sprinter in the sport, Mark Cavendish, is from these shores – the Manx shores – and will be the nailed-on favourite to repeat his four wins of last year and win the green jersey, assuming his skill and good fortune do not desert him. David Millar and Bradley Wiggins, meanwhile, have shown enough this season to be candidates for a stage win or a respectable overall placing. The length of the current French famine was thrown into stark relief recently with the news that the last Frenchman to have a real shout of winning the Tour, Laurent Fignon, is suffering from advanced intestinal cancer, which has spread to his pancreas. He is only 48.
Fignon is an intelligent, likeable man nicknamed “Le Professeur” because he has a degree and wears spectacles. He won the race in 1983 and 1984, but is remembered as the man on the receiving end of the Tour’s narrowest defeat. Fignon led going into the final time-trial of the 1989 race, only for Greg LeMond to snatch the win by eight seconds.
Since Fignon’s day, the only Frenchman to have been on the podium was the discredited climber Richard Virenque, who came second to Jan Ullrich in 1997, then fell foul of the Festina doping scandal a year later. Fignon doped too, according to his recently released autobiography We were Young and Carefree, but quit in 1993 just as cycling entered the era when EPO became widespread. Unlike Virenque, however, on his day Fignon was one of the last of the traditional cycling champions, capable of winning major one-day Classics or a Grand Tour.
Since retirement, he has gone through various business ventures and, most recently, was commentating for French television. His illness will cast a shadow over the race, but will also lead to a feeling of nostalgia for the days when the French won stages left right and centre and when there always seemed to be a Frenchman in contention for the yellow jersey.
There are various reasons for France’s lack of success, something which was already beginning to be a theme when I first covered the Tour in 1990. Some put it down to lack of effort, most notably the five-times winner Bernard Hinault, the last home rider to win the race, in 1985. “The French earn too much money and don’t make enough effort,” Hinault said. “There are champions who simply go through the motions when they turn pro. You have to put a knife to their throats to get results. The French don’t go training. No one slaps them in the face to move them forwards. They need part of their salaries blocked off, to be given back if they win.”
The respected journalist Jean-Francois Quenet says the reasons are complex. “Firstly, since the 1980s, we’ve never seen a super-class French cyclist. The raw material isn’t exceptional. Our riders have also been handicapped by doping: after Festina [in 1998], all the French teams except one, Cofidis, virtually stopped using drugs. If you have no super riders and you don’t dope, you can’t be competitive against super riders and riders who dope. We’ve had big-budget teams, but that means that anyone with any small results becomes a star, so they have a lack of motivation.”
There is another explanation, summed up by the emergence of Cavendish. His achievements underline that the sport is now far more open than in the days, which ended in the 1980s, when the French had the race largely to themselves. The Australians began emerging as a force in 1981; the Irish followed with Sean Kelly and Stephen Roche; the Colombians improved at the same time, and from 1989 onwards the collapse of the Berlin Wall meant that every impoverished cyclist from here to the Urals could look longingly at the cash on offer at the Tour.
Fignon’s plight has highlighted something else: the presence in the Tour of world sport’s most celebrated survivor of cancer, Lance Armstrong, who was quick to offer his support to the Frenchman. The seven-times winner will come into the race as a wildcard, in several senses. After three years out, no one knows what he is physically capable of. His 12th place in the Giro d’Italia was in spite of poor preparation following a broken collarbone.
It is also unclear how or if he will collaborate with his co-leader at the Astana team, the Spaniard Alberto Contador, the clear Tour favourite from his results over the past two years. But, most of all, Armstrong’s comeback has been eventful and controversial. It has to date survived his abortive attempt to construct a personal anti-doping programme, a spat with French drug testers, a dispute with the Giro d’Italia organiser and the near-collapse of Astana for financial reasons. In the next few weeks, anything is possible with Armstrong in the Tour.
The 2009 Tour was the first one I had missed in its entirety for 20 years; partly I felt I needed a break, but I also wanted to avoid the Armstrong show. His comeback was not something I anticipated with any joy. But I did bump into Bradley Wiggins the week before, at the national road race championships in Abergavenny.
Wiggins wants top-20 place in Tour de France
2 July 2009
On form, Bradley Wiggins will be the favourite for Saturday’s opening time-trial stage in the Tour de France in Monaco, but has longer-term ambitions for the overall standings. Wiggins is aware that the make-up of the Tour’s opening week means he will have a chance of taking the yellow jersey, and he has also set himself a target of a place in the first 20 overall.
“I think I’m going well enough to be up there,” said Wiggins. “The top 20 is achievable as my own personal goal. In one sense it’s not that big an achievement but it would be something to build on for the future. I don’t think I can climb with the likes of Alberto Contador or Cadel Evans, but you have to look at the second echelon of riders, the guys who are going to finish between 12th and 20th.”
The triple Olympic gold medallist showed up well in the early mountain stages at the Giro d’Italia, but saved his strength from half-distance so as to keep something in reserve for the Tour. “I was up there for 10 days there. It’s hard to concentrate every day in the Giro, because there is always a finishing circuit or a little hill in the last miles, but the Tour is more straightforward. The first week should take care of itself. If I can get close in [Saturday’s] prologue time-trial, not too far behind someone like Fabian Cancellara, and then we can do a rattler of a ride in [next Tuesday’s] team-time-trial I might have a chance of taking the yellow jersey.”
Wiggins is apparently at his lightest-ever race weight, 5kg lighter than a year ago when he was focused solely on winning Olympic gold medals in Beijing.
“I’m in the ballpark as regards power and weight, but the big thing is going to be how I recover. The big thing for me will be the third week, but I’ve never gone into the final week of a big Tour in [a high] position. The Ventoux on the final Saturday will be a killer, but I’m in the best shape I’ve ever been for a stage race.”
Wiggins went on to finish third in that Tour (fourth at the time, but he was subsequently bumped up the order after Armstrong’s disqualification); privately, he felt before the start that he could finish in the top 10, but he was not keen to make it public.
6. RISE OF THE BRITS, FALL OF LANCE: 2009–2012
Since 2009, the Tour has been transformed for the British media and fans. Suddenly, this event, once so marginal, has gone centre stage. That centres on three factors: Mark Cavendish, Bradley Wiggins, and Team Sky.
“He was a plumpish bank clerk”
19 July 2009
It was always tempting fate to put down in black and white that no Briton looked likely to match Barry Hoban’s UK record of eight Tour de France stage wins, but I have a cast-iron excuse. Five years ago when I wrote that, in a history of British cyclists in the Tour, Roule Britannia, Mark Cavendish was a plumpish bank clerk struggling to find his feet in the Great Britain Olympic team’s under-23 academy.
The scale of what Cavendish achieved on Wednesday, when he equalled Hoban’s achievement, has to be put into perspective. It took Hoban 14 seasons to win his eight stages. It has taken Cavendish only two. Hoban was glad to see his record equalled. “It’s about time, and it’s about time we had someone who can win stages in the Tour. He’s an amazingly superfast s
printer. He’s got an amazing jump, an amazing turn of speed. I think he’s matured; as a first year pro he was falling off all over the place but now he realises where he has to ride.”
The bare statistics are invidious in one sense, because comparing Hoban and Cavendish is like putting, say, the careers of Graham Hill and Lewis Hamilton side by side. When I last saw Hoban, he was living quietly in mid Wales with his wife, working as a rep for a cycle-component importer. And while his Tour stage wins and one-day Classic successes might have given him a bit more cachet when it came to flogging frames, there was no celebrity stardust about him.
The sport has changed hugely in the past 45 years. When Hoban set off to France to make his fortune on two wheels in the early 60s, European cycling was a closed, conservative world. His first team manager, Antonin Magne, had won the Tour twice in the early 30s, wore a black beret to emphasise his peasant roots, and was not particularly interested in his anglais, other than as a team man to support his leader, Raymond Poulidor.
It barely registered with him that Hoban won two stages back to back at the Tour of Spain in his first year as a pro, 1964, and was a few yards from winning a Tour de France stage. Cavendish was also initially designated as a team rider rather than a leader but quickly broke through at T-Mobile. Similarly, Hoban never enjoyed the support that Cavendish does now, because teams were far less sophisticated.
Lower fitness levels and relatively poor communications meant a sprint train like Columbia’s was hard to establish. “Sport evolves and, if you go back to the 1970s, I never, ever had a lead-out man, not once,” Hoban said this week. “Everyone was there, man to man. The way they do it now, with a team like that, if they are leading out at 65kph very few people are going to come over that. Anyone to challenge Mark going at 65kph has got to do 70kph.”
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