Boy Racer

by Mark Cavendish

  What almost no one outside the British Federation knows is that, by this time, I might already have been serving a two-year ban for doping. There'd been no big spiel about doping when we joined the Academy the previous year, but one thing we did have to take on board was the start of out-of-competition testing and a 'whereabouts' system. This meant that we had to go online and fill out forms telling UK Sport where we would be at different times of the week so they knew where to find us if they wanted us for a dope test. We could give three addresses – our home address, so in our case the house in Fallowfield; a training address, where they could find us for one hour a week, so in my case the Manchester velodrome on a Tuesday morning, and any 'exception' which for me at that particular time meant the Isle of Man. There was no obligation to fill in the training venue or the 'exception' but, for the sake of one example, I knew I'd be in the Isle of Man for a week before Christmas 2005, so I noted it down. Might as well be as helpful as possible, I thought.

  So there I am back home before Christmas – it's a Tuesday – and my phone rings. The velodrome. I take the call. 'Cav, where are you? There's someone here from UK Sport wanting to test you ...'

  I had no idea what was going on. I'd filled in the forms, done everything I was supposed to but what I didn't realise was that the 'exception' didn't change my training venue; in other words they'd still expect me to be at the velodrome on a Tuesday even though I'd be on the Isle of Man. Boom! That'll be one missed test, one strike, thank you very much. Three missed tests and three strikes equals a positive test and a two-year ban ...

  I was fuming, but at least I'd learned my lesson. Or so I thought. The next April, Ed and I were bundled off to Germany and Sparkasse, and in the chaos of last-minute packing, I forgot to fill in my whereabouts form. Wouldn't you know it – the day after I left, the testers finally found their way to the Isle of Man. Boom! Second missed test.

  By now, Rod and Dave Brailsford were going apeshit. I was lucky that they did, because for the next year and a half, until the first missed test was wiped from my record, they wouldn't leave me in peace; another oversight on my part would have been a disaster for the Academy, the Federation and potentially their Lottery funding. For me, it could have meant an indelible asterisk over everything I achieved for the rest of my career. Just ask the British 400-metre runner Christine Ohuroghu; she missed three tests in 2005 and 2006, served a one-year ban, has since won gold medals at the Olympics and the world championships and still has people calling her a 'tarnished champion'. As a cyclist, guilt already comes by association with a sport which the media have successfully – and unfairly – labelled as one of the most drug-riddled sports of them all. As far as the press is concerned, a cyclist who comes into the pro ranks having already served a doping ban couldn't look more suspicious if he arrived brandishing a smoking gun in bloodstained hands.

  If nothing else, the whole episode was an important reminder – and not the first or last – that, however much I wanted to avoid doping, by choosing cycling I'd chosen a sport where avoiding the issue simply wasn't an option.

  BY THE time I started riding as a stagiaire for T-Mobile at the end of 2006, my naivety about doping would have made even most armchair fans wince. One important lesson I had absorbed was that you could never accuse someone of cheating without any proof or assume they were winning because they were taking drugs. As it was, after that first season at the Academy, I returned to the Isle of Man to find that Christian Varley had spent the six months since he left shamelessly peddling lies about just what was the secret of my rapid progress. I'd be out for a ride and every time it'd be 'Ah, so how's it going at the Academy, Cav? Christian said they're trying to get you to dope ...' I don't know whether my predominant feeling was anger or disbelief. It beggared belief – there was nothing, nothing, Christian could have mistakenly confused with doping – no injections, no pills, nothing – in a coach with unbendable ethics, and a bunch of lads who had no interest in or curiosity about doping and certainly no knowledge of where to buy performance-enhancing drugs or how to use them.

  It would be far from the last time that I'd have to defend myself against baseless accusations. I'd never been fitter or thinner than when I turned up to the Sparkassen Giro in Germany in 2006, just before the start of my stagiaire deal, and I'd never seen my old teammate from the Academy, Tom White, looking less svelte. Tom was now riding for a South African-based team, Konica Minolta, and we hadn't seen each other in months. Professional cycling's a macho sport, but it can also be a bit like a school playground, with its petty jealousies and bullying. Hence, Tom had gone up to Ed in the middle of the race and openly accused me of doping. He'd said, 'Cav's body shape's changed. He's never been that lean before. He's doping ...'

  Ed was gobsmacked. 'Er, no Tom,' he said, 'Cav's body shape's changed because he's been doing shit loads of training ...'

  But Tom was having none of it – he was adamant that I was using drugs.

  What can you do? I just laughed when Ed told me the story. And I felt bad for Tom. But again, the episode demonstrated how a ridiculous claim founded on nothing other than supposition could easily snowball and damage a reputation – or a friendship, in this case mine with Matt Brammeier. All it needed was for Tom to tell Brammy about his 'hunch', for Brammy to confuse gossip with gospel, for me to find out, and my relationship with my former best friend was suddenly ruined. Finally, almost two years on, Brammeier and I are on good terms again.

  Varley's and Tom's accusations were symptomatic of the widespread assumption that the sole route to success in cycling took in a detour to the medicine cabinet. On the eve of my first race with the world's number-one professional team, I may have pretended to be immune to such cynicism, but a conversation I had with Rod after the Circuit Franco-Belge hinted that hadn't been entirely true. It was only my third or fourth race as a T-Mobile stagiaire and, while I hadn't exactly taken the pro scene by storm, I had seen enough to know that I could compete without any artificial help. This prompted me to explain to Rod that, when I was growing up, I'd always heard that I'd have to dope when I turned pro, but that, in the space of a few weeks, I'd realised that simply wasn't the case. Rod was taken aback; had I ever thought any differently, he asked. I replied to him that, yes, to be honest, I sort of had.

  'Cav,' he said. 'I need you to promise me something. I need you to promise me that, if ever you decide you're going to take drugs, you'll tell me straight away. I won't judge you, but I need to know straight away so that I can disassociate myself from you straight away. I don't want anything to do—'

  I didn't let him finish. 'Rod,' I said. 'You have nothing to worry about. I'm never going to take drugs.'

  Clean or not, there was simply no escape from the shadow of doping. I had joined a team, T-Mobile, whose leader, Jan Ullrich, had been kicked out of the previous summer's Tour de France for allegedly working with a Spanish doctor under suspicion of giving blood transfusions, and the whole management structure had now been overhauled as a result. Out went the old pros who had been running the team, in came a Californian businessman, Bob Stapleton, who'd never ridden as a pro, but whose zeal for the sport was the equal of anyone's in the peloton. In, too, came probably the strictest anti-doping philosophy of any team.

  All of this brings us quite neatly on to my old T-Mobile teammate Patrick Sinkewitz. Where do you start with him? Maybe by explaining that, after pulling out of the 2007 Tour on Stage 8, I'd gone to Munich to pick up the Audi we'd all been promised at the start of the season, driven up to meet Melissa in Brussels, and was in the middle of our own little romantic road trip when I received a call from Roger Hammond. He'd called to say that Sinkewitz had tested positive for testosterone in an out-of-competition control before the Tour. I came off the phone to Rog and my first words to Melissa were, 'That's it. We haven't got a team.'

  Sinkewitz and I had never been mates. He'd practically ignored me when I joined the team as a stagiaire the previous year. The first time he'd really made an effort w
ith me was at the Tour a few days before his positive test, when he could see I wasn't too enamoured with finishing 'only' ninth and tenth in Stages 3 and 4, and he made a brave attempt at cheering me up. He said that I should be pleased, because he'd never had two top tens in Tour stages in his life. It didn't make me feel any happier but I suppose I at least appreciated the concern.

  Sinkewitz followed the stupid decision to take drugs with another stupid decision. Over the next few weeks, he gave interview after interview, describing in minute detail not only how he'd bought the testosterone gel that had caused his positive test on the Internet, but also how, until the 2006 Tour, certain T-Mobile riders had been doped under the University of Freiburg and the previous management regime. He could just have saved it all for the police and their investigation but, oh no, Sinkewitz wanted to twist the knife. He said that it was his way of helping the sport; I say that, from where I was watching, it looked suspiciously as though a lawyer had told him he could have his sentence reduced if he cooperated with the police. That would have been fair enough, but Sinkewitz had then had an attack of verbal diarrhoea and blabbed to every newspaper, magazine and TV station about a system that he'd been quite happy to abuse until a few weeks earlier. Every time I watched or read one of his interviews, I felt like crying. He wasn't thinking of the consequences, of how cycling was already an easy target, especially in Germany, and of how he was almost single-handedly endangering the job of dozens of people – riders, mechanics and masseurs – who'd had nothing to do with what had gone on in the 1990s and the start of the current decade. It hadn't occurred to him that, yes, he might get his ban reduced from two years to one, but that, if he wasn't careful, he'd have no sport to come back to. It seemed to me that he felt himself to be the martyr sacrificing himself on the altar of his sport. There was just one problem with that, Patrick: you took drugs and we didn't.

  Thanks to a lot of hard work and some skilful negotiation by Bob, somehow the team finished the 2007 Tour and finished the season. But Sinkewitz had left us holding a ticking timebomb. It finally exploded in mid-November, when I was riding the Ghent Six Day with Brad Wiggins, and the news filtered through that T-Mobile were ending their sponsorship. Their contract was due to expire at the end of the following year, but company directors in Bonn had decided that the association with the team was doing their brand more harm than good – and certainly more harm than they could justify for a tariff of over ten million euros a year. My reaction was the same as it had been when Roger had called about Sinkewitz in July: 'That's it. We haven't got a team.'

  For ten days I really thought it might all be over. I'd won an almost unprecedented eleven races in my first season, I was twenty-two years old and hot property – but you try looking for a team in late November, when the squads are full and the budgets for the following season already spent. In our conversations that autumn, Brian Holm said that Bob was spending more time in the air between California and T-Mobile's headquarters in Germany than on the ground and that he was barely sleeping. Fortunately or, rather, deservedly for Bob, it all paid off: T-Mobile were so desperate to divorce their image from the team that they agreed to fulfil their financial commitment for 2008 provided that their brand disappeared on anything and everything connected with the team. Bob could rely on a large chunk of T-Mobile money but the team would now carry the name of his California-based management company, Highroad Sports.

  Almost immediately, operation airbrush began: a full DIY kit arrived in the post – black stickers, white stickers, long stickers, thin stickers. Bob wanted every trace of a T-Mobile logo, every hint of magenta, the T-Mobile company colour, to disappear from the frames of our Giant bikes. The new season would start in a few weeks, and we'd have new bikes with a new colour scheme, but that didn't matter: the corporate cleansing had to start straight away.

  Naturally, I was delighted that my future and the team's now seemed secure. My only regret was that the end of an era for T-Mobile also meant the end of the road for a lot of good, hardworking people whose link with the team had been through the company itself. Those were now losing that link and in some cases their job. They were all completely blameless, yet more innocent victims of a few imbeciles' stupidity.

  WHAT Bob Stapleton did that winter to save our team merely confirmed what I'd already suspected about the guy: he had a love for cycling that kept him striving long after most people would have thrown in the towel. Bob's a businessman, cyclingmad, but a businessman none the less – an entrepreneur who only found his way into the sport and the team when he sold his telecommunications company, Voicestream Wireless, to T-Mobile in 2000. What makes Bob unique is his passion; his scrapping to keep his dream of a successful, special, clean team alive, was the direct equivalent of me pushing so hard to get over the Col de la Colombière in the 2007 Tour that I was almost keeling over – or of my teammates grinding so hard to put me where I want to be in the last kilometre that it almost brings tears to their eyes and mine.

  Bob wanted our new team Highroad to be even stronger and united than what we'd created the previous year with T-Mobile – and even more ethically transparent. In 2007, the Slipstream team had employed an independent company called the Agency for Cycling Ethics (ACE) to add an extra layer of blood and urine controls to the testing provisions made by the UCI (Union Cycliste Internationale), the World-Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) and the riders' national anti-doping agencies. The idea of a team paying for additional, independent dope tests was rightly seen as quite ground-breaking, so it was no surprise that the move had brought Slipstream some excellent publicity; more importantly, it was widely agreed that, with the addition of the ACE testing, it had become almost impossible for the team's riders to cheat. Bob now wanted a similar, ethical warranty for our team, so contacted ACE. Very soon they had an agreement: ACE would collect and analyse an average of thirty blood or urine tests per rider, per year. In return for this extra 'seal' of authenticity on our performances, we, the riders, now signed new contracts pledging 3 per cent of our salary to finance ACE's testing.

  ACE set to work pretty early at our training camp in California in February. That was also where the problems started. We had our first ACE blood and urine tests at that camp and I was amazed to note that the needle being used to take blood samples was like a spear; the cheaper the needle, the bigger and thicker it usually is, and these were huge. Fortunately, I have big, bulging veins that are nearly impossible to miss, even with a needle like that, and, when it came to my turn, my blood disappeared up the vial as normal.

  If it had just been the needles, I'd have bitten my lip, but then there were the urine tests. These days, the dope control booths at major races are set up like forensic laboratories, and I dare say that the procedures are nearly as tight. I only wish I could now tell you that the ACE procedures were the same or even similar. Unfortunately I'd be lying: here, there was no undressing, no hand-washing, no glass screen – just an ACE employee, a pot to piss in, a toilet cubicle and an instruction along the lines of 'bring it back when you're finished'.

  I went to see Bob. 'Bob,' I said, 'I've got a problem. I've just gone in and I've taken a piss in this pot, with no one else in the room, and they're using these big syringes to take our blood. We're paying three per cent of our salary ...'

  Bob tried to placate me. He said that what ACE was doing was important and expensive. I wasn't convinced. I wondered what their motives really were, whether they really cared about ethics in cycling, like it said in their name, or whether they just saw the problems in cycling as a licence to make a buck. We were paying them hundreds of thousands of euros out of our own pockets, but for what? I certainly hadn't seen anything in California that made me think their input was going to benefit us or the sport.

  The ACE testing carried on through the spring. I never worry about my test results – why would I? – but I started to hear murmurs among the other riders and management of ACE not storing samples properly, of weeks going by without them sending us test results. Then
the 2008 Tour came. One day, we were told that ACE were in the hotel to do a blood test. At the Tour, you're trying to squeeze in as much sleep as humanly possible, so we practically rolled out of bed and into the room where a girl from ACE was waiting to do the testing. I was up first, so in I went and held out my arm. Out came the usual javelin, er, I mean needle, and into my skin. I watched the vial. Nothing. I looked again. Still no blood. I then looked down at the needle wriggling around under my skin, then up at the girl and her flustered face. No one had ever missed my vein before, but that's what she'd done. She looked embarrassed; the girl wasn't even a qualified nurse, so I tried to be sympathetic. 'It's okay,' I said. 'Why don't you just try again?'