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  ‘We started doing it before the Festina Affair happened. Now, everybody is realising what we have done. What our athletes have to comply with now in terms of anti-doping is outstanding; but a big problem you always have with doping is that the riders are suspicious of each other. “What has he got that I haven’t? Don’t I have to do the same as him?”’

  But the introduction of the fifty per cent haematocrit ‘health check’ also heralded the downfall of riders such as Marco Pantani. The consequences for him, both as an athlete and a human being, were catastrophic. Even Verbruggen can’t argue with this assessment.

  ‘It’s true. He was never the same again. I was there that day. And it was a terrible day. I liked the guy, he was extremely popular. But the whole system for those controls was set up with the teams and the riders. The riders had all signed and agreed. Pantani was one of them, the most popular one.’

  Verbruggen says that he regrets that a foolproof EPO test had not been introduced sooner. ‘We’d been trying since 1993. During that year’s World Championships Francesco Conconi told me that they were very close to a validated test. That year was when we started to have concerns that EPO was in the peloton. After that we waited and waited, until in 1996, when I again met with Conconi at the Olympic Games in Atlanta. People think he was in the UCI’s anti-doping commission but that’s wrong. He was in our medical commission and that commission had a responsibility for cardiology, trauma, nutrition and training methods. He was developing the test, together with members of the IOC medical commission.’

  But did the UCI entrust the study of haematocrit controls to the right man? Among Conconi’s protégés, during his time teaching medicine in Italian universities and working with athletes in the 1980s, were Michele Ferrari and Luigi Cecchini, yet Verbruggen fails to see any conflict in Conconi’s involvement with the development of a desperately needed EPO test.

  Instead, he maintains, the battle to introduce a haematocrit test and control the abuse of EPO, was won by Conconi. ‘Conconi deserves the recognition for this. He persuaded top riders to accept the haematocrit controls. On 24 January, 1997, we got all the teams and doctors together and we decided on haematocrit controls and at the same time on a medical control system. Because the EPO test still wasn’t ready.’

  And the first rider to be caught, I am thinking, was Erwann Mentheour – a client of Michele Ferrari.

  OK, I said, but wasn’t the test intrinsically unfair? We may suspect, but will never know, definitively, if Pantani had EPO in his system on the day he failed the test, yet his life took a tragic turn because of that uncertainty.

  ‘Nobody wanted to wait. It was a real problem in the peloton. And some of the team leaders I talked to said, “The riders don’t want to use the stuff but they keep losing races.” At the time, I think we did what we could.’

  But the haematocrit test was a smokescreen. It did virtually nothing to prevent or discourage doping. Many riders carried on using EPO. And given the opinions of many haematologists, the variations in natural levels and the effect of intense competition and fatigue on red blood cells, why establish the level at fifty per cent based on tests conducted halfway through a mountainous stage race?

  Cue more agitation on the other side of the Sheraton’s polished coffee table.

  ‘I saw an interview with Giorgio Squinzi’ – the Italian ceramics magnate who sponsored the Mapei team – ‘he never liked the UCI very much and I didn’t like him. He said that having a haematocrit level set at fifty per cent was the same as telling people that they could steal up to $1,000! That is so bloody stupid,’ raged Verbruggen, ‘and there are still people who are willing to print this nonsense.’

  I’m sorry – but ‘bloody stupid’?

  Bloody stupid that a wonder drug that its users say can improve performance by up to twenty per cent was tacitly legalised?

  Bloody stupid, when all research points out that haematocrit varies so greatly between individuals that it is almost impossible to agree a standard, particularly one of fifty per cent?

  Bloody stupid, when Marco Pantani ended his life face down in a cheap hotel room, his career and reputation ruined – by a UCI ‘health check’?

  FROM A WHISPER TO A SCREAM

  WHEN LANCE ARMSTRONG retired from racing, the Tour de France fell apart.

  Without the Texan bossing the European scene, the house of cards finally collapsed. The despair and paranoia that had characterised the 1998 Tour and the Festina Affair flooded back into the sport. It was as if the Lance years of limitless wealth and unquestioned glory had all been a mirage, a dream. The whispers of widespread doping, suppressed between 1999 and 2005, as Armstrong’s became the dominant voice in the sport, became a scream.

  Armstrong had finally quit centre stage in July 2005, standing alongside Jan Ullrich and Ivan Basso on the Paris podium, chastising the non-believers.

  ‘To the people who don’t believe in cycling,’ he said, ‘the cynics and the sceptics, I’m sorry you don’t believe in miracles, but this is a hell of a race. You should believe in these athletes, and you should believe in these people.’

  These turned out to be empty words. Twenty-four hours before the start of the following year’s Tour in Strasbourg, Basso and Ullrich were kicked off the race.

  Planted at the easternmost point of a vast plain that stretches from Champagne to the German border, Strasbourg, a city infamous for its bitter winters and broiling summers, welcomed the opening weekend of the first Tour of the post-Armstrong era.

  Strasbourg is a genteel and conservative city of bike lanes and pedestrianisation, trams and cobbled squares, a towering cathedral at its heart. There is no litter or graffiti. In July 2006, as the World Cup neared its climax and Ullrich and Basso scuttled home in disgrace, sporadic football chants broke out, but that came only as the crowds spilled out from the bars around the cathedral, waving tricolour flags and singing the praises of Zinedine Zidane. For an hour or two, the city seemed almost rowdy, but soon after midnight, shutters were pulled closed and the streets were empty again.

  If the World Cup and France’s unexpected success had fuelled a sense of celebration, the Grand Depart of the 2006 Tour quickly became a poorly attended wake. Armstrong’s retirement had left the door open for either of his old rivals to succeed him. Basso was fresh from a runaway win in the Giro d’Italia and Ullrich had added another Tour of Switzerland victory to his name.

  But twenty-four hours before the race started, as the Operacíon Puerto doping investigation in Spain became the biggest scandal since the Festina Affair, both of them found themselves wide-eyed, frozen out, blinking in the TV lights and flashguns as their careers caved in.

  Even after everything that has happened in cycling since the Festina Affair, it still doesn’t pay to speak out against doping. Just ask Ivan Basso. Confronted by the Italian Olympic Committee (CONI) over his connections to Eufemiano Fuentes and his blood banks, Basso confessed only to contemplating doping, rather than the act itself. The Italian remained loyal to the half-truths of the omerta, and was inscrutable, evasive, discreet.

  When, his 2006 racing season torn in half by Operacíon Puerto, he finally confessed, not to doping, you understand, but instead to just thinking about it, he shrugged his shoulders, as if he was a Rimini nightclubber pondering the price of a tab. His half-hearted admission was greeted with derision, yet Ivan still didn’t get it. Even months later, as he continued to train and plan his comeback, he was baffled by the contempt that had greeted his sly admission of a moment of weakness.

  Basso had begun 2006, training in Italy, as CSC’s star rider and Armstrong’s heir apparent. At the team’s January get-together, in the Hotel Caesar in Tuscany, he had been accorded star status. Bjarne Riis had made Basso into a contender. With his help, he had lost his hesitancy and come out of his shell. At the team’s midwinter ‘boot camps’, Ivan had learned to make fear his friend. He had forced himself to overcome his nerves, jumping off cliff tops into a dark and icy sea, while Bjar
ne looked on, grinning.

  The alliance with Riis had fast-tracked Basso’s progress. He was brimming with confidence and ambition. His test results on Monte Serra’s steep climb at the start of 2006 were said to be fifty seconds better than a year earlier. By any standards, he had made phenomenal progress.

  Riis wanted Basso to fill the vacuum at the top of the sport; there would be no more living in the shadow of Lance. Even when locked in rivalry with Armstrong during the Tour, Basso had remained in the American’s thrall, calling him during the race to offer his ‘help’. Riis had not approved of the friendship, established when Lance tried to help the Italian find the best possible care for his mother Nives, at that time seriously ill with cancer. It irritated Riis, who had spent so long in the shadow of the Armstrong-Bruyneel partnership.

  Halfway through the 2005 Tour I asked Riis if Basso – like Ullrich – was suffering from an ‘Armstrong complex’.

  ‘Isn’t everybody?’ he replied enigmatically, with that icy, distant smile.

  With Armstrong retired, Ivan had hoped to ease himself into the king’s vacant chair. He adopted the Texan’s intimidatory style, gently admonishing young journalists who asked silly questions about doping. Ivan, like Armstrong, didn’t like insinuations about doping, nor did he like doping whistle-blowers. In particular, he didn’t like compatriot Filippo Simeoni, who he dismissesd as a ‘testa di cazzo’ – a dickhead.

  He also found himself struggling with his loyalties. Bruyneel and Armstrong had courted Basso, lining him up as the successor to the US Postal-Discovery Channel dynasty. But the Italian opted to stay with Riis and CSC. Now, he would become a ‘capo’, a don. He planned to win the Giro d’Italia and the Tour in the same season, just like Marco Pantani had done in 1998.

  Success would ensure legendary status – perhaps he might even replace the late lamented Pantani in the tifosi’s affections. Victory in the Tour de France would make the transition complete. Armstrong and Bruyneel, meanwhile, would be left to kick a few cats, as the rider who slipped through their fingers became the hottest property in the sport.

  As darkness fell outside the hotel, and a wintry sun dropped into the Tuscan horizon, I waited in the bar to talk to the rider touted as cycling’s next dominant champion. Team press officer Brian Nygaard led me down the hotel corridors to Ivan’s room. We stood in the doorway as the Italian held court from his massage table.

  Carlos Sastre, his teammate, was also there, outlining a problem he had with his racing shoes. As the unassuming Sastre looked on, Basso gave instructions to CSC staff. Finally, after a wave of his hand, the room cleared and Basso beckoned me to his side.

  ‘Ciao Ivan, come stai?’ I said, exhausting my Italian in a single sentence. We had met before, when he was a virtual unknown. Like now, that was also a rushed encounter. Nonetheless he outlined his grand plan. The Giro was his priority, he said; riding the Giro and Tour would not be too hard, he could win both; he hadn’t spoken to Lance much because Lance, you see, was always so busy and yes, he and Bjarne had a very close working relationship.

  ‘I have a stronger personality now,’ Basso said. ‘Bjarne likes to hear what I think and doesn’t just tell me to do this or that. He’s open-minded.’

  Three months later, Basso won the Giro d’Italia with ease and arrogance. It brought him the affection of the tifosi. They loved him, although not in the same unconditional way that they had loved Pantani. But like Pantani in 1998, the extent and ease of Basso’s dominance, the new-found swagger that he seemed to relish, was resented by some of his rivals.

  Then, just days before the race ended, it all began.

  As Ivan Basso neared victory in Milan, the rumours about his Spanish connections gathered pace. There was a flurry of doping allegations emerging in Madrid, centred on Manolo Saiz, directeur of the Liberty Seguros team, but which also seemed to connect Basso to sports doctor Eufemiano Fuentes. There were arrests, blood bags, CCTV footage, lists and codenames. Operacíon Puerto was about to devastate European cycling.

  Basso denied any involvement, as did Jan Ullrich, also riding the Giro and also, according to the Spanish media, implicated in the affair. This, it turned out, was the calm before the storm. The Madrid raids, just as the 2006 Giro d’Italia reached its climax, kicked away a cornerstone of the cycling establishment and sparked a frenzy of allegations. Saiz was a key figure both in Spain and within cycling as a whole, influential in the modernisation of the sport. He had managed a long line of major stars. He had also walked out on the 1998 Tour, in protest at the police raids during the Festina Affair.

  Saiz’s arrest was the watershed moment in an investigation that had begun earlier in 2006, with the installation of hidden cameras at two locations in central Madrid. First, the Guardia Civil installed surveillance equipment in a laboratory used by haematologist, Jose Luis Merino Batres. Then, officers from the Spanish UCO investigative unit moved to a nearby address, at Calle Alonso Cano, where an apartment rented by Eufemiano Fuentes became the focal point of the police operation. When in late May they raided both addresses, they found over two hundred bags of blood, steroids, growth hormone and, of course, the ubiquitous EPO.

  The police arrested Saiz after he met both Fuentes and Batres in a Madrid café. He had with him a suitcase containing a large amount of cash. Fuentes in turn arrived with a cold bag. There was a discreet exchange between them, which the police videotaped. When Saiz was stopped after leaving the meeting, a search of the bag revealed coded bags of blood and other products, all of which, so the police claimed, were the paraphernalia of doping.

  By the time the Tour set up camp in Strasbourg, the connections between Fuentes and certain riders appeared irrefutable. In an unprecedented display of unity, it was the ProTour teams themselves, forced into action by their own ethical code which stated that riders implicated in police investigations should be suspended, that agreed to eject those involved. Faced with damning allegations against Ullrich and Basso, neither T-Mobile nor CSC had much choice.

  In total, nine riders were sent home from the Tour, even before it began. Johan Bruyneel, directeur of the Discovery Channel team, which was at that time unaffected by the Puerto investigation, was among the most voluble supporters of a hard-line stance.

  For Basso and Ullrich, Strasbourg was a catastrophe. In the aftermath of their expulsion, both of them were implored to take DNA tests, but they refused. Basso’s sly smile remained fixed on his face when he appeared at the back of the Holiday Inn and fought his way through the media before climbing into a car and speeding away. Ullrich stood glassy-eyed in front of the camera crews, and gave a half-hearted defence of his reputation, reiterating that he was innocent. Then he too was gone, installing American Floyd Landis of the Phonak team, formerly teammate to Lance Armstrong, as the new race favourite.

  After Basso left, Riis, with CSC press officer Brian Nygaard by his side, appeared before the media, in an attempt to defend his team leader and, by proxy, himself. They were jostled and hemmed in by camera crews, photographers and journalists as they made their way into the Strasbourg media centre.

  Riis, perhaps through his naivety, or perhaps through arrogance, seemed unperturbed by the mayhem around him. Then I realised why. ‘You must be getting used to this, Bjarne …’ I thought, remembering the chaos of the Festina Affair.

  Riis confirmed that the decision to take Basso out of CSC’s Tour team had been his, but he was vague about Basso’s dealings with Fuentes. Suddenly, it seemed that Bjarne and Basso were not so close after all. ‘It’s impossible to watch somebody twenty-four hours a day,’ he shrugged as he struggled to distance himself from his team leader in a rambling and self-justifying monologue, in which he said a lot, but clarified little.

  Back in Spain, Operacíon Puerto threatened to be an earthquake. In the 500-page police report, a list of 200-odd leading athletes were connected to Fuentes and his activities. Other professional sports – tennis, football, athletics – were rumoured to be involved. The UCI’s recently
elected president, Pat McQuaid, seemed deeply confused even as he fuelled that notion, saying that ‘footballers, tennis players and athletes were on the list’. His comments were recorded on tape, yet he almost immediately retracted them, only to reassert them at the World Championships in Salzburg three months later.

  Rafael Nadal, playing at Wimbledon, pre-empted any negative publicity by denying rumours of an allegation connecting him to Fuentes. At the World Cup, FIFA laughed off the suggestion that some of those still playing in the competition might have been among Fuentes’ clients. Doping was apparently only cycling’s problem.

  It seemed certain that the net would tighten and that heads would roll. But soon after the 2006 Tour ended, the problems with furthering the investigation began. The codes labelling each bag of blood and in Fuentes’ records had to be matched to individual riders. Who, for example, was ‘Birillo’? Who was ‘amigo di Birillo’? The Spanish media, supported by the claims of those in Italy and elsewhere who knew Basso well, alleged that ‘Birillo’ was in fact the name of his dog.

  The Tour continued, but CSC press conferences took a surreal turn. Questioned repeatedly, Riis and his riders insisted time after time that they did not know the name of Basso’s dog. The bags labelled simply ‘Jan’ proved less of a puzzle – at least as far as T-Mobile’s management were concerned.

  With characteristic clumsiness, Ullrich, so it seemed, had dug his own hole. T-Mobile claimed he and his coach, Rudy Pevenage, had not told them the truth about their alleged contacts with Fuentes. Presented by the UCI with evidence suggesting that both Pevenage and Ullrich knew Fuentes well and had been in regular contact with the Spaniard, T-Mobile took a hard line and pulled their leader out of the Tour.

  ‘Take a DNA test,’ T-Mobile’s director of communications Christian Frommert repeatedly told Ullrich. Riis asked Basso to do the same. Both riders refused. Basso remained in Italy crying foul, but ‘Ullé’s’ relationship with T-Mobile was beyond repair. Midway through the 2006 Tour, they sacked him. Six months later, still protesting his innocence, he quit the sport.