Bad Blood Page 16

  In his time as WADA’s figurehead, this mild-mannered, carefully spoken man, with a clipped Canadian accent, became the principal hate object for dopers all around the world. I always had the impression that he rather enjoyed that status. His reputation was definitively forged by his involvement in the Salt Lake City Olympic corruption investigation. He built his career in what he described as ‘sports administration’ after a youth spent competing as an Olympic and Commonwealth swimmer.

  In essence, WADA’s role is principally that of a campaigning watchdog. It monitors the success of anti-doping measures in sport, suggests improvements and establishes educational programmes so that athletes are better informed. But Pound, as president of WADA, took it a step further and added ‘ruffling feathers’ to his job description.

  He did this remarkably effectively in cycling, one of the sports that he considers most damaged by doping. Among those he greatly pissed off during his tenure of the WADA presidency were former president of the UCI, Hein Verbruggen, Lance Armstrong and Floyd Landis. Pound seemed tickled by the thought of many of cycling’s most high-profile figures loathing – and fearing – him.

  Among professional athletes, Pound was as welcome as Ebenezer Scrooge on Christmas morning. A lot of sports fans felt the same way. Pound’s remit, after all, was to destroy their illusions. Visit the forum or message boards of almost any sports website and there will be a series of rants about Dick Pound and his attitude problem, telling him to leave a star athlete alone. Pound always accepted that this came with the territory.

  ‘The nature of the job is to upset the established order which has allowed doping to proliferate. I’m quite happy to be known by the enemies I make. In fact, if you haven’t made enemies, I’d say you’re not doing the job. One of the roles is to try and raise the level of the public’s understanding that there really is a problem out there.’

  WADA has become increasingly influential, since it was created in 1999, as a direct response to the Festina drug scandal. ‘The groundwork for WADA was laid as early as August 1998, after the Festina Affair,’ Pound explained. ‘We got together and I said nobody believes anybody any more. They don’t believe that cycling – or any international federation – will police its own sport properly. They don’t believe national authorities will look after their own athletes properly and they don’t believe in the IOC any more. So we needed an independent agency, which led to the creation of WADA. In the process of all that, I was asked to run it, but I didn’t know anything about doping, and I’d damn near killed myself doing the Salt Lake City investigations – I didn’t want to do it.’

  Pound says that his appointment as head of WADA was presented to him as a fait accompli. He knew that after the Salt Lake City investigation, he was hardly a popular choice.

  ‘I think people understood that I could organise things and that I had no interest in covering up doping. They may not have expected the kind of progress we’ve made over the last few years. I’m sure if some of the international federations had realised how far we’d get, then they would have been much more concerned about my involvement.’

  He soon came into conflict with cycling’s hierarchy. ‘I can remember, long before I was involved in anti-doping, discussing cycling’s ethical problems with Hein Verbruggen, when he was president of the UCI, before the Festina Affair. I was saying, “Hein, you have got a real problem in your sport and you don’t seem able to deal with it.” He said, “Well, listen – if people don’t mind the Tour de France at twenty-five kilometres per hour, the riders don’t have to prepare – but if they want it at forty-two kilometres per hour, then I’m sorry, the riders can’t do it without preparation,” as he called it.’ Verbruggen has dismissed Pound’s claims as ‘nonsense’ and denies that Pound ever spoke to him about a specific problem in cycling.

  Pound never felt confident that Verbruggen was prepared to ‘rock the boat’. ‘Look at the multimillion-dollar headquarters that the UCI have in Aigle in Switzerland,’ he said. ‘That doesn’t come from amateur track cycling.’

  Pound believed that Verbruggen’s skills were not right for the problems the UCI faced. ‘I don’t know what the UCI’s marketing objectives were, although I think that you could probably do some research and find that Verbruggen’s forte as a professional was in marketing.’

  That’s right, I said. His background was in milk and Mars bars.

  ‘There’s no possible or credible way that cycling can say, “We don’t have a problem.” And football has actually said, “There’s nothing on the WADA list that would help any footballer.” When you get leaders in sport saying things as outrageous as that, then they have to be confronted.’

  Pound didn’t give anybody an easy time. He argued that the media have been compromised by their cosy relationships. ‘The media – and maybe I’m generalising here, because obviously there are journalists who want to get at these things – have been very compliant, getting the press releases and going to the press conferences, having a glass of wine, some food and listening to stuff that’s churned out by people who are paid a lot of money to pretend there’s no problem.’

  Doping, he said, is not one of the ‘shades of grey’. ‘This is cheating and for the most part it’s organised cheating. You have to confront it. Maybe people thought that I would be … more European than I am and try and do it quietly behind the scenes, with handshakes and winks and things like that. But I don’t think that’s what you do to draw attention to a problem of this nature. It is ethically wrong, fraudulent and causes misery for athletes and their families. Here are the rules: we’re not going to use certain drugs and doping methods. It’s as simple as that.’

  In March 2005, a few years after my initial request, Hein Verbruggen, at the time still president of the UCI, finally agreed to a face-to-face interview.

  In the dining room of the Long Beach Sheraton, I walked over to his breakfast table. He put his coffee cup down and stood up. We shook hands.

  ‘How are you, Mr Verbruggen?’ I said.

  There was a pause.

  ‘You write too much about doping,’ he told me.

  Doping already? Here we go, I thought.

  I didn’t expect to get on with Hein Verbruggen.

  In 1998 he had written to The Times, and demanded an apology – rather pompously adding ‘on behalf of Jean-Marie Leblanc’, the Tour de France’s director – for a piece I had written on the Festina Affair. He’d also put the phone down on me on more than one occasion during the procycling years, once memorably bellowing into his mobile from some distant corner of Switzerland, ‘Mr Whittle, I am sick of you and your bullshit magazine.’

  Yet, sipping a Starbucks latte in a Californian hotel lounge overlooking the Pacific, he was all charm, largesse and dry wit. Thoughtful and articulate, he gave me two hours of his time. I warmed to him. Let’s make a fresh start, I thought. Let bygones be bygones.

  I had planned to keep the doping questions for later on, but he was straight into it, talking of corruption, race fixing and EPO within five minutes of sitting down. He joshed with me about what he perceived as the British obsession with honour and fair play and suddenly I remembered that, yes, of course – Hein’s a salesman, Hein’s a liberaliser and Hein’s from Holland.

  As we talked, the cultural differences between us came into sharper focus. Hein was weary of the infighting. He wants us Europeans to get along. We should stop carping and understand that things in cycling are a damn sight better than they were. We should chill, relax.

  It was only a few months since David Millar’s downfall, and despite the fact that Millar admitted doping to win the UCI’s own World Time Trial title, Verbruggen showed bonhomie and forgiveness. ‘How is David Millar, by the way?’ he asked. ‘Give him my warm regards if you see him.’

  Unlike his many critics, Verbruggen believes he dragged cycling from the darkness into the modern ages. He illustrated this by telling me, unprompted, about the mess he inherited when he became UCI president in the mid 1
980s. ‘It was an era when doping flourished – although I am not saying that everybody was doped – I’d be the last to say that. But there were insufficient controls, not enough regulations or professionalism. A group of people within the sport saw that things couldn’t go on like that, organisers like Jean-Marie Leblanc, team managers like Roger Legeay and others within the UCI. I’d say that we have excellent professionals within the UCI now. We have a rulebook, and we have much better controls for doping.’

  So this then – the post-Festina, pre-Puerto era, the eight years sandwiched between the two biggest scandals in cycling’s history, – was Hein Verbruggen’s new dawn.

  Dick Pound believes that cycling’s ‘deep, deep problem’ still exists. ‘I don’t think the problem has gone away, I think it’s got worse.’

  The root of it all, he says, is money. Doping, he says, is big business. ‘These are not just little tablets you take out of a supplement bottle. The riders are paying tens of thousands of euros a year for medical treatment and preparation.’

  Cycling’s high profile, particularly in Europe, means that doping scandals, like Festina and Puerto, have been big news, but, he adds, ‘it’s not the only sport with a doping problem.’

  He reels off the major scandals of the past ten years and concludes that there have been so many busts, particularly in the Tour, that it’s akin to having the entire field in the Olympic final of the 100 metres disqualified.

  ‘A few years ago, the public watching the Tour might have said, “I wonder if any of them are using drugs,” and now they say, “I wonder if any of them are not using drugs.” That’s the price you pay, the price that all sports pay, for letting things get out of hand.’

  Dick Pound wanted cycling to step up to the plate, to take responsibility. ‘We gave them suggestions on their testing programme, which we thought was very ineffective and designed “around” the problem, rather than to catch dopers. Up until recently,’ Pound argued, ‘the fight against doping has been pretty limited. If you didn’t find traces of a substance in an athlete’s system, then there was no doping. Yet all the people in the entourages were going unchecked and unsanctioned. Now, with public authorities able to go in and seize evidence and question witnesses, it gives us a much broader ability to get the enablers, suppliers and the medical practitioners who are assisting in all this. It gives us a much more vigorous arsenal of weapons.’

  Sounds great, I say, this arsenal of weapons – police raids, secret surveillance, informers, DNA testing and so on – but what happened to athletes not doping themselves because it is wrong? What happened to the ideals of fair play, honour, respect for your rival – all the things that lift sport out of the maelstrom of everyday life and give it real meaning?

  ‘Yep,’ says Dick Pound. ‘I know. I agree entirely. There are sociopaths out there. That’s why we have a police force. That’s why we have security checks at airports. That’s an unfortunate fact of life. We’re now paying the price for the sports authorities letting this get out of control and closing their eyes to it.’

  Hein Verbruggen and Dick Pound have history. They used to be friends, but are not any more. They have both been key members of the International Olympic Committee’s hierarchy. Now, because of the confrontational positions they took over doping, they are virtually estranged.

  ‘I don’t care about Mr Pound because he is not objective,’ said Verbruggen. ‘I don’t want to see him any more. He was a good friend of mine but he’s not now. WADA should be on the federation’s side but many federations have a problem with him. But we can’t solve the problem of doping without working with governments and that’s what WADA do.

  ‘Pound’s the sheriff who shoots everything that moves. WADA should be above all that and he should establish proof before he speaks. Athletes have the right to defend themselves – even if it’s with the cheapest excuse.’

  Maybe it’s because of Verbruggen’s professional background in marketing that Pound irritates him so much. He sees himself as a unifier. He doesn’t want confrontation, but a quiet revolution at his own pace, that styles cycling on other successful sports franchises.

  ‘Look at basketball in the USA. Look at the Champions League in European soccer – I don’t want to compare cycling with those sports, only the system. If you work together, you get much more,’ he enthused. ‘It’s about making the cake bigger – you combine forces and it makes you stronger.’

  That may explain why, by his own admission, he embraced the boom in road cycling among Americans. It may also explain his determination to defend his tainted creation, the ProTour, the pan-European calendar of elite races that was intended to showcase the top teams and riders, bringing with it a torrent of franchise and TV revenues – the same ProTour that didn’t want an athlete like Filippo Simeoni muddying its waters.

  ‘I am European, so I think in a European way. But I am not too old to learn and take some good things from other cultures. In the States, maybe they talk a bit too much about money, but you can even learn from that.’

  Verbruggen’s fervour for the American way may also have been coloured by the legend of Lance. ‘What the Tour has done for France is incredible. If you put a value on that, it would be worth billions of euros. But the TV companies are there to cover the race, not the countryside. They’re there to cover the riders.’

  The importance of Lance Armstrong to the growth in popularity of the Tour de France has been huge. For once, he said, the old adage about no single rider being greater than the Tour is wrong. By the end of his career, Armstrong, Verbruggen believed, was bigger than the race that had made him. This, Verbruggen said, was because Armstrong had ‘a lot of charisma, a very strong personality’.

  But the Dutchman’s and the Texan’s mutually beneficial friendship made some uneasy. Verbruggen always waved away suggestions of a ‘special’ relationship, but it has been acknowledged by both men that the UCI received unspecified financial donations from Armstrong.

  ‘He gave money for research against doping, to discover new anti-doping methods,’ Verbruggen revealed. ‘He gave money from his private funds, cash. He didn’t want this to be known but he did it.’

  In a television interview on Eurosport, Armstrong later confirmed that he had given ‘a fair amount’ to the UCI. ‘It wasn’t a small amount of money,’ he said. But exactly how much was donated, nobody knows. Some, like Germany’s former UCI committee member Sylvia Schenk, have speculated that it might have been up to $500,000.

  ‘We had no official information on the donation and, as a member of the UCI board, I wanted to know about it,’ Schenk said at the offices of her law firm in Frankfurt. ‘I asked how much was paid, when it was paid, but I never got any information. And as far as I know, it is still not clear exactly how much money was donated by Lance Armstrong and what it was used for. I don’t understand why the UCI won’t say how much it was and when it was paid.’

  Schenk’s inquisitive nature didn’t endear her to the UCI president. She says that Verbruggen stopped talking to her in May 2004. ‘I was still a member of the UCI board, but he wasn’t talking to me. Whatever I suggested, regarding for example the ProTour, I was ignored. That was the way they dealt with me for years.’ Schenk was ‘very surprised’ by Armstrong’s donation. ‘It’s not what athletes usually do. It’s unusual to hear about it so much later, six months, or a year later, via the media. It already seemed to be a secret. I don’t know why. So, of course there are doubts now.’

  Even Armstrong himself acknowledged that he preferred the details of his donation to remain secret. ‘It is not my modus operandi to advertise what I do,’ he said. ‘If I’ve given money to the UCI to combat doping, step up controls and to fund research, it is not my job to issue a press release. That’s a secret thing, because it’s the right thing to do. I am not the type of person who likes to get up and say in the newspaper, “Our sport is dirty, everyone is cheating.” There are other avenues to combat doping, versus trashing the sport and its players, its spon
sors and spectators.’

  Whatever Schenk’s concerns, Verbruggen remains a big Lance fan. He told me the story of an award that had been given to Armstrong in France. ‘You know, of course, that two journalists had written a book about him published in France, yet despite that, the French gave him this prize. It’s significant that this jury was not influenced by gossip.

  ‘If you saw what Lance has to go through! I think they controlled him maybe five or six times last Christmas. That’s five or six times – out of competition – at seven o’clock in the morning, at his house.’

  * * *

  Drug testing in cycling has always been reactive, rather than proactive. It took the death of Tom Simpson on Mont Ventoux during the 1967 Tour for the governing bodies, under public pressure, to move towards the introduction of doping controls. Until that time, doping had been swept under the carpet, even though riders such as Jacques Anquetil, who won five Tours, had openly acknowledged the widespread use of drugs such as amphetamines.

  ‘You’d have to be an imbecile or a hypocrite to imagine that a professional cyclist who rides 235 days a year can hold himself together without stimulants,’ the Frenchman said.

  Simpson’s death was a wake-up call. The following year’s race in July 1968 was christened the ‘Tour de Sante’. But the peloton was hardly wholehearted in its support: a rider’s strike greeted the first doping controls. In truth, they have been complaining about them ever since. Even in 2007, in the aftermath of Operacíon Puerto and the disgrace of Floyd Landis, the notion of DNA profiling produced a knee-jerk reaction from many top professionals. Showing the public relations skills that had characterised the sport for more than a decade, leading riders claimed indignantly that such a move aligned them with murderers and rapists, and would infringe their human rights.

  The introduction of the the fifty per cent haematocrit controls in 1997 came only after it became apparent that EPO use had reached epidemic levels during the mid 1990s. To Hein Verbruggen, this was a timely and radical intervention, rather than a Band-Aid on a haemorrhage.