Bad Blood Page 7

  Team Easy On’s voiceover, straight out of a Dutch brown bar, takes Riis’ doping excesses to a surreal conclusion, listing skunk, opium and heroin among his preferences. ‘It’s funny that you ask about my physical condition,’ runs the voiceover, as Riis stares sombrely into the camera, ‘… because my heart eksploded, and because of that I had to go to Africa because I have many connections in Congo … So I went down to a guy called Pepsi Franck and bought myself a whole new heart …’

  So much for the myths and legends of the Tour de France: Riis, once feted as a national hero in Denmark, was now an Internet freak, to be ridiculed over and over again. But not everybody in his home nation found it so easy to see the funny side.

  Lars Werge, one of Riis’ chief tormentors through a decade of suspicion, was vindicated by Riis’ admission of guilt. But it left a bitter taste in the Danish sports writer’s mouth. ‘I was angry that he had been lying for so many years. And it made me angry that he thought, that by telling the truth, it would all somehow be OK. It was like a marketing stunt.’

  Werge was not alone in thinking that Riis’ motivations were not solely founded on a desire for truth and reconciliation, but also from a need to salvage crumbling relationships with his disenchanted sponsors.

  ‘Some people felt sorry for him and over the next few days a lot of people were interviewed about him,’ Werge recalls. ‘I said that maybe it would be better if he left cycling. But I was criticised for saying that because people knew that he was in a sport in which it was difficult to tell the truth.’

  There was guilt, shame and a little self-pity to be found in Bjarne Riis’ statement that day. The vulnerable boy from a broken home, desperate for his father’s approval through his achievements as an athlete, was suddenly visible.

  ‘We all make mistakes. I think my biggest mistake was to let my ambition get the better of me,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry if I’ve disappointed people. To those for whom I was a hero, I’m sorry. They’ll have to find new heroes now.’

  Part Two

  Positive Thinking

  ‘History repeats itself – the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.’

  Karl Marx

  In the wake of the crippling Festina Affair of the 1998 Tour de France, Lance Armstrong’s first victory in 1999 was acclaimed as a ‘Tour of Renewal’. A new generation of riders – including David Millar – was breaking through. With this influx of youth came a surge of hope that the sleazy habits of the past might finally die out. That optimism did not last long.

  The scale of the Festina investigation and the subsequent trial in Lille had revealed the abject failure of the sport to police itself. The UCI took much of the blame, although the governing body’s president, Hein Verbruggen, put up a staunch defence. But Verbruggen, guardian both of cycling’s ethical well-being and its commercial health, had an obvious conflict of interest.

  It became increasingly clear that the UCI’s doping controls had become inadequate; instead, the police did their work for them, with a series of raids at races and at the homes of individual riders that further revealed how endemic doping had become. This was precisely how Millar, at the time the reigning world champion and British cycling’s golden boy, was caught.

  Paradoxically, the period immediately after the Festina Affair was also the moment when things might have changed for the better.

  The Pandora’s box of secrets had been opened. A new era in a sport notorious for doping might have begun. Another generation of fans and riders might have been spared a great deal of anguish. Yet there was no discussion of what kind of sport professional cycling in the modern era should be. The opportunity to discuss the brutal demands of the racing calendar, the health needs of the riders and the composition of the banned list of doping products slipped away. Instead, doping practices were merely driven further underground.

  The moment had been lost: the lid slammed shut again.

  Armstrong carried on winning to become the most dominant champion in the history of the sport, creating a tidal wave of wealth in his wake. Without a moment’s thought for the consequences, the sport scrambled to make the most of the opportunity. Meanwhile, the UCI, torn between ethics and commerce, froze in the headlights once more as the untapped wealth of the stateside market hove into view. Armstrong and Bill Stapleton had known that, if all the right circumstances combined, Lance could bring unimagined wealth into cycling. Hence the Texan’s firm refusal to dirty the sport’s image by acknowledging the extent of cycling’s doping problem and Verbruggen’s insistence on shooting the messenger for the next six years.

  ‘I am sick of the myth of widespread doping,’ Armstrong had said as the 2000 Tour began. Yet by the end of 2006, no less than five of his key teammates – Frankie Andreu, Tyler Hamilton, Roberto Heras, Floyd Landis and one other anonymous former US Postal rider – and countless peers and rivals had either tested positive or admitted to doping. The runaway train was still careering down the tracks.

  As the authorities across Europe became more actively involved in breaking up doping rings, trust within the sport broke down. Room-mates and best friends gave each other up. A climate of fear and paranoia took hold. Police raids and scandals proliferated, fuelled by an unprecedented development in cycling: the culture of the whistle-blower. The law of silence, the omerta, appeared to be finally losing its grip.

  In France, the whistle-blower’s talisman was Christophe Bassons; in Spain, Jesus Manzano; in the USA, Matt DeCanio and, in Italy, Filippo Simeoni. None of them were afforded any protection by Verbruggen or the UCI and, in what was little more than a witch-hunt, they found themselves ostracised, written off and even threatened, as if their experiences were invalid, their careers expendable. Yet when star riders fell foul of traditional dope tests, they vehemently proclaimed their innocence. In contrast with those such as Millar, whose brutal police interrogation led to a swift admission of guilt, Tyler Hamilton and Floyd Landis called in their lawyers and attacked the credibility of the testing procedures. This only further polarised the sport and created a draining moral maze of acronyms, legalese and technicalities, in which even the most hard-bitten anti-doping campaigner soon became lost.

  Supported by lawyers, sponsors and fundraising websites, such as ibelieveintyler.org and floydfairnessfund.com, Hamilton and Landis went on the offensive. As Armstrong’s career closed with a seventh successive Tour win in 2005, and a tub-thumping speech exhorting us all to believe in the sport, the omerta clung on.

  Still the scandal continued. Riders blamed their federations, the media, French testing procedures, anti-Americanism, the UCI, the IOC, LNDD, WADA, USADA – in short, everybody but themselves …

  FALLING DOWN

  IN 1998, DAVID Millar, a fresh-faced second-year professional cyclist from Scotland (via Malta, Hong Kong, London and Biarritz), said: ‘When I’m out training and someone shouts “doper”, I feel like I want to stop and swing for them. It upsets me to think that people assume every pro is on drugs.’

  In 2006, David Millar, making his comeback following a two-year ban after he confessed to using EPO, said: ‘I fucked up, I cheated and I have to live with it.’ David Millar never failed a drugs test. So what happened?

  November, 2003: David Millar, world champion, Tour de France stage winner, Olympic hopeful – and self-confessed dandy – is on the dance floor in a Manchester bar vigorously shaking his bony ass. I observe the scene, perched unsteadily on a wobbling bar stool.

  Teenage girls, perhaps more hopeful of a glimpse of Ryan Giggs, Joey Barton or Cristiano Ronaldo, look unimpressed as Millar throws some unfamiliar and decidedly uncool shapes.

  We are both, to paraphrase Lance Armstrong’s words about David and his love of partying, drunk on our ass.

  I had seen David do many things, but I’d never seen him dance before. Through a fog of beer and wine, I watched him duckwalk his spindly frame into a ball, before exploding back to his full height in spasms of exuberance. Like a crop-haired Russell Brand, he shimmi
ed across the floor towards me, unshaven, wide-eyed, gurning dementedly. I lurched back onto my seat and prayed for this breakneck night of excess to end.

  ‘’Nother one, Jez?’ he bellowed in my ear, as my head slumped further between my shoulders.

  David likes a drink. So do I. But this uneven contest was the shipwreck of an interview that started out innocently enough in David’s loft apartment. Chris Boardman was also there, and the three of us sat talking, sipping chilled beer as dusk fell over the Pennines. After Boardman had gone home to his wife and kids, I realised too late that I should have followed suit. Instead the evening degenerated into a sad spectacle – at least on my part.

  What is it about top athletes that allows them to tie one on and then shake it off the next day? Once, after a night spent celebrating a friend’s birthday in his favourite Biarritz bar, we’d followed Millar on a training ride into the Pyrenees, only to bale out after the first mountain pass when the photographer lost his breakfast on the ladder of hairpin bends.

  That night in Manchester, deep into his off-season, David was in his cups. I couldn’t keep up. So what did I learn from this experience? I think the key message to pass on is never drink with Olympic-level athletes – many of them are also Olympic-level drinkers …

  I liked David Millar immediately, perhaps because he was so different to other athletes that I had met. He was irreverent, intelligent and funny, with a big smile, angular good looks, and an open nature. He was interested in the world beyond his sport, and beyond The Race.

  Even now, four years after he was banned for doping in 2004, I can’t help but feel protective of him. Perhaps it’s because underneath the ‘it’s all good’ bravado, there remain occasional glimpses of a defensiveness and vulnerability. These days, he’s developed a thick skin, having been kicked from pillar to post in the aftermath of his ban.

  From our first meeting at the Tour of Switzerland in 1998, it was clear that Millar loved cycling. He had an encyclopaedic knowledge of the sport’s recent history. He was seduced by the travel, the glamour, the romance and the danger of the European scene – and, crucially for somebody who had spent a nomadic adolescence, by the same sense of belonging that first reeled me in.

  ‘I love bike racing,’ he said. ‘I love it when it’s really extreme, when it’s raining and snowing. Even on days like that, it’s your job to finish – even when you’ve fallen off and are covered in blood, or have broken a bone. That’s the ethos of the sport – if you can pedal, you carry on.’

  He lived in a small flat amid the faded grandeur of surfer’s paradise, Biarritz. Being some distance from the spring circuit of Mediterranean races and lacking a major international airport, it was an odd choice for a professional cyclist. Most riders lived in clusters in towns like Nice or Toulouse. Given his maverick nature, his leaning towards a solitary life and his ambivalence towards the professionalism of his job, it suited Millar well. He became an adopted son, a local hero – ‘un vrai Biarrot’.

  In fact, the Atlantic resort, close to the Pyrenees, buzzy, quirky and with good nightlife, was ideal for him, as he cultivated his image as a latter-day English eccentric. After he won his first yellow jersey in the 2000 Tour, the French press christened him ‘Le Dandy’. Millar loved it.

  In the autumn evenings, the racing season over, the wind whipping up the Atlantic rollers, he would shut himself away in a restaurant with local hero André Darrigade, a former Tour de France star. Darrigade had become a local newsagent, and Millar would listen, rapt, to stories of the Tour when it was still a dashing Hemingwayesque event for oddballs, rogues and renegades. The influence of past stars such as Darrigade and, to a lesser extent, mythologised characters such as five-time Tour winner Jacques Anquetil, who drank champagne, played poker, had numerous complicated romances and drove fast sports cars – sometimes all on the same night – all shaped Millar’s devil-may-care outlook.

  Yet when I got to know David better I realised that while he loved the romance of the sport, a part of him increasingly resented the demands it made of him. I could sense his internal conflict and his yearning for a more normal life. At those times, often when he most felt the pressure to achieve success, he was at his most volatile and vulnerable.

  When he won the prologue time trial in Futuroscope and took the yellow jersey on his very first day in the Tour, David wept. He hugged his mother Avril, his tears wetting her ‘It’s Millar Time’ T-shirt. One French regional newspaper called him procycling’s ‘chou-chou’ – procycling’s darling.

  My darling – and yes, before he fell into the viper’s nest, David was.

  David Millar liked to train hard and play hard. His first flatmate in Biarritz, fellow British pro Jez Hunt, struggled to keep pace with Millar’s demands for challenge and entertainment, both on and off the bike. Another British pro, track-racing veteran Rob Hayles, moved to Biarritz briefly, but was soon exhausted both by his racing schedule and the 24/7 demands of life with Millar.

  David was different to the other riders, many of whom had grown up in quiet French towns, or in the backwaters of Switzerland, Spain, Belgium and Italy. He sought acceptance, yet he remained independent and stood out from the crowd. He was middle class and exotic, and try as he might, it showed. His father flew long haul for Cathay Pacific and his mother successfully became CEO of her own business in central London. David could have gone to art school, studied photography or slipped into the easy money of the expat business community in Hong Kong. Instead, he chose to become a professional cyclist, simply for the love of it.

  Lance Armstrong, briefly his teammate at Cofidis, was an early professional contact who became a friend. Like David, Lance came from a broken home and like David, he had a difficult, in Lance’s case near non-existent, relationship with his father. But where David was vulnerable and inconsistent, Lance was ruthless and raging, both brutalised and brutal.

  Their parents’ divorce was traumatic for both David and his sister Fran. They spent much of their adolescence flying backwards and forwards between Avril in London and Gordon in Hong Kong, at that time still a playground for middle-class kids. Yet he was rootless after his parents split up, not living in one place or the other, one of those sullen preteens in airports with a label hanging from their neck. Finally, he settled in Maidenhead in Berkshire, where his mother lived.

  But Avril worried about her teenage son and encouraged him to make friends. He joined a cycling club and almost immediately won races. Soon he was competing at a high level, both in the UK and abroad. Through all his travels, David had become something of a chameleon. He was eloquent, moody and thoughtful. But he was also a boy racer, a posh lad, a drinker, a ringleader and a good talker, able to walk into a group and quickly find what was needed to fit in. That skill helped him when he first moved to France.

  When he arrived at the French-sponsored Cofidis team, another set of expats – Tony Rominger, Lance Armstrong, Bobby Julich and Frankie Andreu – were part of the all-star set-up, although when they left (Armstrong dramatically in exile because of his cancer, Rominger forced to retire, Andreu and Julich to other sponsors) Millar once again found himself isolated.

  He had to fit in somehow, so he became an entertainer, the cute lead singer to what had become an anonymous backing band of journeymen professionals. After a couple of early wins, he found himself in demand.

  There was the yellow Land Rover he’d driven down to Biarritz – ‘so Breeteesh’ – the designer labels and the dyed hair. He was soon on the covers of magazines, the peloton’s Robbie Williams. Somewhere along the way, as he yearned for acceptance in a world in which he was always likely to be an outsider, David Millar mixed up being a professional cyclist with being in a band.

  In 2003, clad in Great Britain’s team colours, his hair chopped and bleached, David stood on the podium, eyes closed, listening to ‘God Save The Queen’ as he celebrated his win in the World Time Trial Championship in Canada. Hours later, he and a group of fellow pros began a forty-eight-hour bender
that took him to a suite in the Bellagio and to a wild party that became the talk of the Interbike trade show in Las Vegas.

  Dishevelled and red-eyed the morning after, he stumbled late onto the procycling stand at Interbike for a meet and greet with the magazine’s readers. His tousled state left most of them wondering how on earth he had won a world title in the first place.

  As 2003 ended, David appeared to have it all. Paul Smith, thinking of using him as a model. Cofidis were dangling what was in essence, with bonuses, a million-euro contract. He was a world champion who talked of the importance of respect from his peers and saw himself as one of the bosses in the peloton. David’s life had become a high octane, high-wire act, fuelled by his charm, energy and opportunism.

  But he was living on borrowed time. In June 2004, Millar lost everything. He had never failed a drugs test, but, detained and questioned by the French police and an investigating judge, he admitted that at certain key periods in his career he had doped himself with EPO. The police followed the path to his door opened by the testimonies of Philippe Gaumont, his former Cofidis teammate. In his book Prisoner of Doping, Gaumont described his own initial flirtation with drug use and then detailed his subsequent immersion in institutionalised doping. Published in France in 2005, as Prisonnier du Dopage, Gaumont talks movingly of Millar, his young British teammate, tormented by his parents’ divorce, by his vulnerability, by the expectations placed upon him and by his nomadic lifestyle.

  ‘He was fragile,’ Gaumont wrote, as he detailed Millar’s excesses, fuelled by the boredom of his hotel room at training camp.

  Gaumont described the relationship between Millar and Cofidis team doctor, Jean-Jacques Menuet. ‘There was a strong link between them, because of David’s difficult childhood,’ he wrote. ‘I say difficult, but maybe that’s not the right word. David’s parents had means … and, for a cyclist, you could say that he’d had a rare education. He had studied and could have gone to art school, if he hadn’t chosen cycling … He spent his teenage years left to himself, shuttling between England and Hong Kong. He always gave the impression he had something to prove.’