The Climb: The Autobiography
Page 17
We had come out from breakfast downstairs to find the hotel lobby full of French police. Reporters were being kept out. Everybody else was being kept in. This was the Hôtel le Rex in the middle of Tarbres; it was not a normal morning. Chris Fischer, the Barloworld company rep on the Tour, told us to stop rubbernecking and to head to our rooms. We got up to the sixth floor and there were police there too.
We went to our rooms and left our doors open. There was activity around room 604.
The next thing I saw was Moisés Dueñas being led away by the police. He was 19th in GC, our breakout success of the Tour, and he was being frogmarched out of the place. Claudio Corti and Massimiliano Mantovani, the team doctor, were accompanying him to the police station.
You have to worry about the quiet guys. Had he killed poor Cárdenas in some mad row about leaving the cap off the toothpaste?
It wasn’t too long before somebody mentioned the word ‘doping’.
I was stunned. More stunned than if Cárdenas had been butchered. Looking back, I am stunned by my naivety. He was our GC hope. I couldn’t believe it could happen. Of course, I knew that professional cycling had a massive, long-term infection that it was struggling to get rid of. Manuel Beltrán, another Spaniard, had already been thrown out of the Tour, having tested positive on stage one. Yet I never imagined that a symptom would be so local. Our team? This guy? He seemed like such a nice man, very quiet but always friendly, and always with the hint of a smile on his face.
It was shattering.
Dueñas had returned a positive test after the time trial back at Cholet. EPO. As soon as that was announced the police turned up to search his cases and raid his room. The word came quickly that they had found a private pharmacy in there.
We left soon after to ride stage eleven. I was distracted, mad, disappointed, betrayed, confused – all or any of those things at any given time.
The more I thought about it, the more angry I got. I remember feeling that this guy had cheated us all. He had got in there and trespassed all over my dreams. He was ruining the sport I had always wanted to be a part of. I had come to this Tour, to this life as a pro, with my warped vision that it had cleaned up, that the past was the past, that the big doping/cheating scene was an abandoned and sealed mineshaft.
Now this. This wasn’t the sport I had thought I was getting myself into.
I knew enough about the team to know that this wasn’t an organized operation. It wasn’t done through the team. Dueñas had been freelancing, taking a risk at our expense, and that struck me as incredibly selfish. We all had our journeys and our backstories about getting to this level. It wasn’t easy for any of us but he had put all of our careers at risk. Barloworld were already speaking about how this was going to have huge repercussions in terms of their sponsorship. Who could blame them?
Our team was in jeopardy, our careers were in jeopardy and, if this continued, our sport was in jeopardy. Again.
People wanted to interview us, not about cycling but about Moisés Dueñas and doping.
For Barloworld, things got worse when we set out on the road. The team was in a bunch when we came to a situation where we had to cross a very narrow bridge at the same time as the road turned, descending from the Col de Larrieu.
I wasn’t involved but Cárdenas and Paolo Longo Borghini got their handlebars wrapped around each other’s while they were squeezing over the bridge. They took each other out and Borghini got flung into a small ravine. Robbie Hunter came down too, but he was okay to continue. Cárdenas hurt his ankle and had a bad, deep cut on his knee and ripped a muscle in his thigh, but he rode on for a while. Borghini broke his collarbone and abandoned immediately. They were both taken to the hospital by the end of the day.
The crash was fate’s gift to conspiracy theorists – one Barloworld rider arrested after breakfast, another couple having to withdraw a few hours later. Nobody wanted to hear about X-rays and scans and freak accidents.
Finally, Robbie Hunter got very angry with a journalist who asked him if it wasn’t just a bit too suspicious. Robbie went for him and told him where to shove his microphone. I thought, ‘Good luck to the next guy who wants to ask Robbie that question.’
To infinity and beyond. That seemed to be the route of the Tour de France 2008. Nine of us started in the Barloworld platoon and by stage twelve there were just five of us left.
Then Baden Cooke came down heavily off his bike halfway to Narbonne. He rode on for a while but had to abandon, so we lost another one.
Baden wasn’t the big news of the day though. He was just a footnote. They busted Riccardo Riccò in the morning. He had tested positive for a sophisticated new variant of EPO back on the individual time trial in Cholet. Just like Moisés Dueñas. The difference was that Riccò had made a ham-fisted attempt to escape the testers after the stage but had got stuck in traffic.
Journalists and fans had nicknamed Riccò The Cobra because of the way he struck so suddenly on days when he was in the mood. Luckily, genuine reptiles aren’t litigious.
None of his teammates in the Saunier Duval team turned up for the start in the morning. We heard later that the Tour organizers had sacked Leonardo Piepoli as well as Riccò after being dissatisfied with his answers about doping. Piepoli (one) and Riccò (two) had won three of the Tour’s first ten stages between them. If Riccò showed the audacity of dope with his lunatic charge past me up the mountain, Piepoli had been just as odd. This was the Tour de France 2008. Piepoli was born in 1971. Stage ten in the Pyrenees was his first ever stage win on the Tour.
Piepoli and Riccò stole three stages from good riders. By the end of the year we would know that Bernhard Kohl, King of the Mountains and 3rd overall, had been cheating us also. So too had Stefan Schumacher, who took both individual time trials on the Tour.
Riccò got a twenty-month ban. A couple of years later he was banned again. Twelve years this time. The Cobra was taken to hospital having become seriously ill after giving himself a blood transfusion with 25-day-old blood.
We were a forlorn quartet in the evenings back in the hotel: me, Giampaolo Cheula, Robbie Hunter and John-Lee Augustyn. We made jokes about the space we had on the bus and why we were still sharing rooms but the atmosphere was heavy with worry. Would we have pro careers after this mess? What would happen next? Would any of us get to Paris?
What happened next would wait until stage sixteen, just when we had begun to relax.
Before then, we knew we weren’t blessed, but maybe we weren’t cursed, after all. Although stage fifteen over the border in Italy had been a bad one for me – I spent too much of it in the gruppetto – I was still alive and it had been a few days since one of the team had last left the race.
We were in the mountains again. Stage sixteen was an attractively lumpy Alpine stage with two massive out-of-category climbs. First the Col de la Lombarde and then the Cime de la Bonette-Restefond or La Bonette. We would descend down the other side and into the tiny hamlet of Jausiers for the finish.
I was going okay. John-Lee was having a great day. On the way up La Bonette, John-Lee was part of a lead group of nine. Barring disaster, the stage was going to go to one of the nine. Near the top they rode over a narrow ledge high on the mountain and John-Lee decided to make a move. He upped the pace and went for it. If he didn’t get the stage he would still get some mountain points at the top and a slice of televised glory. It was the highest point of the 2008 Tour.
It worked. John-Lee stole a small lead. He hit the top first. The descent from La Bonette is incredible, just shale and escarpment to your left as you ride hell for leather. John-Lee was fearless though as he led this mad scatter down the mountain towards the finish.
Next thing, the road veered right, but John-Lee didn’t. He misjudged the turn, riding over a bank of mud like a mountain biker doing a trick and landing quickly. Then he fell down the side of the mountain.
He slid thirty or forty metres down scree and shale before he managed to stop his own momentum.
There is some madness in us all, I swear. John-Lee could have died just there. But that was far from his thoughts. Instead, he remembered his bike. He immediately started pointing down the slope at it, where it had continued the descent for some time after he had stopped his own fall.
‘What about my bike?’
The original rescuer had made it back to the top. He shrugged his shoulders at John-Lee. The second motorcyclist did the same. You could almost hear them say, ‘You have got to be joking, man.’
John-Lee had to wait until the team car arrived with a spare bike.
He got his fifteen seconds on TV though. Still, he wasn’t happy.
By the time John-Lee went down the mountain I had settled into my survival strategy.
On the mountain stages, and in the second half of the race in general, I was attempting to ride one day fast, where I could punish myself as much as possible and try to be in the front of the race or the breakaway at the most important points, then the next day my aim would be to get to the finish by expending as little energy as possible. I would ride this day lagging back in the common room that was the gruppetto, even though I could probably go faster on the climbs.
The day John-Lee came off I was going easy in order to save my body for what was to come, which was my first trip up Alpe d’Huez.
It was a massive stage, involving 210 kilometres over three out-of-category climbs: Galibier, Croix de Fer and Alpe d’Huez.
The peaks got lower in that order − Galibier being the highest − but the cumulative suffering made the day more interesting the later it got.
Galibier is an epic adventure; a long, hard mountain. A four-man break instigated by Stefan Schumacher reached the top first but I was comfortable in the group which followed them as we crested the peak of the lunar-landscaped mountain and headed down towards Col du Télégraphe and on to the small town of Saint-Jean-de-Maurienne.
Next was the Croix de Fer. Jens Voigt was doing an incredible pull for his Saxo Bank teammate Carlos Sastre. Jens was known as a rouleur, or a good racer on the flat, but this day he was riding at an absolutely phenomenal pace and I was hanging on at the back of the group, just pushing it as hard as I could.
This was my day and I was in a bullish mood. I held my ground, fending off a few French riders who came up beside me and who expected me to yield to somebody more worthy, or more French. They dropped back, cursing my name, as I waved off the suggestion of food.
I rode for a kilometre or two on the wheel of the double Vuelta a España champion Denis Menchov, who was weakening. His troubles attracted the cameras and I got into the shots – ‘Who’s that following Denis Menchov?’
Jens took us up and up. I think he was pulling for three-quarters of the ascent of Croix de Fer, before he just peeled off and literally stopped pedalling. Job done.
I was hugely impressed. I remember thinking, ‘Well, now he’s out of the race, he’s out of the stage today. Alpe d’Huez has to be as tough as they say, if even Jens has given up.’
As he was dropping back he was beside me for a few moments. He looked across.
‘You must eat,’ he said. ‘Think about feeding your legs.’
He was right. I had made a mistake and had only one energy gel left in my pocket, and all of Alpe d’Huez ahead of me. It was a compliment that he had taken the trouble to notice and to care. Jens was saying, ‘Look, you’ve done well to get this far, but now you need to eat something because I know what is ahead of you, and you don’t.’
Less than 2 kilometres later I dropped back to the car and took his advice.
Corti looked at me with a smile. Of course I needed gels and food.
I came home in 31st spot, which left me 88th in GC out of a field of 150 survivors.
It wasn’t a headline result for me but it was an indication that I could get there. I just needed a bit more experience. I was growing into the Tour. I definitely felt the second half of the Tour was better for me than the first half had been, when I was still trying to retrieve my lost fitness.
For the first time I was confident that I would get to Paris.
The team was hugely supportive. Claudio Corti, Chris Fisher and even Alberto Volpi, the hard-to-please directeur sportif, all said encouraging things. ‘You just need time and experience,’ they told me.
Paris. Four of us rode into the Champs-Élysées. Although we were a subplot, and our presence was no distraction from the pomp of the day, I took a spin at the front on one of the eight circuits which took us up the main street. The crowds, the city, the school-is-out giddiness, it all blew me away.
Reasons to be Cheerful
Survival.
The mountains.
The second individual time trial of the Tour. This took place the day before Paris, and it was longer than the previous one – a full twist. Schumacher won again but I came in 16th, just behind Jens Voigt. Today, if I subtract the names of the guys ahead of me who I now know to have doped, I feel even more pleased than I did then.
Final reckoning. My position was 84th out of the 145 who finished the race, which made me the best of the four Barloworld boys who made it to Paris.
It was done. We went out and had dinner and cocktails with the sponsors on the Bateau Mouche, up and down the river, living large for a night.
My brothers, Jono and Jeremy, had followed me to France and showed up at different stages. Jeremy arrived on one of the mountain stages, on a day when I had decided to stay with the gruppetto and save myself for a more promising tomorrow. Unfortunately, Jeremy wasn’t in on my plan.
I was riding as slowly as I dared when I heard Jeremy’s voice from the side of the road.
‘Go on, Chris. You can do it.’
‘Oh no,’ I thought. ‘I can go faster, but I can’t tell Jeremy that.’
He’d been waiting by the side of the road, looking for his brother. Now here I was in the final group.
‘Go, bro!’
I was mortified. I tried to communicate with my eyes and eyebrows that I could go faster, but not today. I wanted to shout, ‘Come back tomorrow! I’ll be pushing harder.’
We went around a switchback and were going so slow now in the laughing gas gang that Jeremy had made it to the next bend ahead of us.
‘Hey, bro! There you are again. Keep it going.’
It was the same for the next bend, and for the one after.
‘Don’t give up, bro!’
‘Great to see you, Jeremy,’ I thought, ‘but this is embarrassing.’
Robbie Nilsen came over to France too, and brought a mutual friend, Gavin Cocks. Gavin was responsible for a lot of the money and a lot of the heart behind the Hi-Q Academy back in South Africa.
When I was about eighteen years old and still in St John’s I did a race in the high country around Lesotho. Noz came with me. The race wasn’t long, less than 100 kilometres, but the attraction was the three huge mountain passes, each about 20 kilometres long, which we would ride over.
In my enthusiasm I went out too hard and a kid of about fifteen or sixteen years old took me on and beat me. His name was Edwin Cocks.
Edwin loved his bike. He gave the hours to it and I knew that we would be following similar paths.
Not too long afterwards, Gavin, Edwin’s dad, came home from work one day and found Edwin hanging from a door handle with a belt around his neck. Edwin had been having a hard time in a romantic relationship and for three years Gavin and his family lived with the thought that Edwin had taken his own life. Then some friends of Edwin’s approached Gavin with something to tell him, something they should have told him a long time ago. Edwin h
ad been playing a game which they all played at school. The idea was basically to suffocate each other and to give each other some sort of natural ‘high’ by just passing out for a few seconds and then releasing the choke. They labelled it the choking game and Edwin had tried it alone. It had gone wrong.
Gavin now actively travels around the country giving presentations at schools and talking about how dangerous it is. I know that when he looks at me, Edwin is in his thoughts. It must be incredibly hard for him, but he has a huge heart. He and Robbie have given the joy of cycling to so many other kids in the years since Edwin’s death. Without the Hi-Q Academy, I for one wouldn’t have developed the way I did, so I owe much to him.
My first Tour is forever sandwiched between memories of Mum and of Edwin. I’m proud that I finished.
I never rode alone.
14
Early 2009: Tour Méditerranéen
We had been looking forward to this. After a successful time trial earlier in the week, and having worked hard to get our team leader, Mauricio Soler, up to 3rd place in the standings, we were now in contention going into the final day of racing, which would send us up Mont Faron, overlooking Toulon. It was not a bad effort for a team on the verge of extinction, but if we wanted to win, this was the day to put in a performance. The race was most likely going to be decided on the big mountain.
There was a huge fight just to get into the climb and everyone scrambled for position. I remember thinking that this was nuts. I couldn’t believe how fast we were going at the bottom, considering that we hadn’t even got to the ascent yet.
Very quickly, however, a pattern started to emerge, with riders pulling and calling ‘gruppetto’. In other words, they would do their work, take their turn and then form a group and head up the mountain at their own easy pace.
There were about thirty of us left after a couple of minutes of the long haul, with maybe 10 kilometres remaining. We had gone up the first little rise and then the road flattened out for a way and there was a lull. We were all looking around to check who was still with us when Mauricio Soler suddenly took off. Swoosh. He went for it and attacked.