Before Team Sky conquered the Tour de France, it had felt like British teams had to overcome insurmountable odds just to compete with the rest of Europe.
The Linda McCartney Foods team got closer than most. In 2000, they rode the Giro d’Italia, and won a stage, on a journey that looked destined to take them to the Tour.
But, like Icarus, the team had wings held together with wax and, after getting close enough to the sun to feel its heat, the end brought about a spectacular fall. Lionel Birnie explains.
LEEDS. SATURDAY, 5 July 2014. It feels like the apotheosis for cycling in Great Britain. Christian Prudhomme, the boss of the Tour de France, will later describe it as the grandest Grand Départ. Yes, London was immense in 2007 but if you strolled a couple of streets away from where the action was taking place, the city was carrying on as usual. Here, it feels like everyone is heading in the same direction, such is the Tour’s magnetism.
Of course, British riders had won the two previous editions of the race. I took a moment to stand still and watch the activity swirl around me as the team buses started to roll into town like some crazy circus that’ll only be here for an hour or so before moving on. I saw a young boy, probably about seven years old, in a Team Sky jersey, holding his dad’s hand, his eyes wide, his mouth half open, struggling to take it all in.
I watched as the fleet of Sky’s imposing black Jaguar cars swept in and parked up neatly in a row. I walked up the hill to where the Australian Orica-GreenEdge team had parked up and earwigged as Neil Stephens, their sports director, explained to a bunch of VIPs how the day’s stage would turn out. I saw Charly Wegelius, a sports director with the Garmin-Sharp team, talk casually to one of his riders. He grew up not far from here and part of the next day’s stage will cover the roads he cycled on his way to school. Then I saw Max Sciandri get out of the BMC Racing bus and wave to Dave Brailsford, the architect of so much of British cycling’s success. Later on in the day I saw Dave McKenzie and Matt Stephens rushing about, microphones in hand, cameramen in tow, going about their work as broadcasters on the Tour.
It wasn’t until I had a moment to think that I realised I’d been standing in some sort of cycling version of one of those Rock Family Trees, where members from different groups swap places and form new bands. I realised that something connected all of them, all of this, and drew a line back not just a decade or more to the turn of the century but further back than that. They all had something in common. The Linda McCartney Pro Cycling Team.
* * *
The phrase ‘aim for the moon and you might land among the stars’ could have been invented for Julian Clark. In the 1980s he had been one of the leading lights on the British motocross scene but a bad crash left him with two blood clots on the brain and in a serious condition. It was one crash too many and so he retired from motocross and took up triathlon. It wasn’t long before he dropped the swimming and running to focus on the discipline he enjoyed most. Clark quickly adapted to riding a bike without an engine. He was fit, strong and competitive blood still filled his veins so in 1997 he took out a British Cycling Federation racing licence and entered some local amateur events. He started in the Surrey League, taking part in handicap races, where the lower category riders set off ahead of the stronger, more experienced competitors and try to stay away for as long as possible, then try to cling on if they get caught.
Clark did not pedal with much finesse – one former teammate said his style brought to mind a man trying to kickstart a motorbike with a dead engine – but he was dogged and refused to give in. He finished ninth in his first race with elite level riders and by the end of the 1997 season had been well and truly bitten by the cycling bug.
Despite having ridden only half a dozen amateur races with club stalwarts and juniors, Clark did not spend the winter pondering how he could move up from the lowest fourth-category ranking to third category. He was dreaming much bigger than that.
Just six months later, in May 1998, he would line up alongside Chris Boardman and Stuart O’Grady of the GAN team, Neil Stephens of Festina and George Hincapie of US Postal Service and the rest of the professional field at the PruTour.
The idea hit him, Eureka-style, in the frozen food aisle at his local supermarket. He saw boxes of Linda McCartney’s vegetarian food and it suddenly occurred to him that the company would be the ideal sponsor for a professional cycling team. Vegetarianism and cycling both chimed with a healthy lifestyle.
That night, Clark and his wife Tracie stayed up until the sun came up putting together their pitch. Clark didn’t know much about cycling but in the short period of time he’d been racing, he’d been like a sponge, asking more experienced riders about the sport, reading magazines, learning about the Tour de France. And he summoned all his knowledge of motocross, of how to appeal to would-be sponsors, how to paint a picture appealing enough for a company CEO to want to step into. Motocross teams relied on bike manufacturers, equipment suppliers, oil companies and the like for their backing. Cycling teams also needed lots of expensive equipment, cars, a truck, a minibus or camper van and all that would be a lot easier to get hold of if he could attract a major sponsor.
And what about the name? Linda McCartney Foods. That was massive with its implied association with Sir Paul McCartney and by extension The Beatles, the greatest rock and roll band Britain had ever produced. If he could pull this off, Clark felt, they had something they could sell to the world. His charisma and persistence got him through the door, his passion and vision captured the imagination. If Clark was anything, he was a salesman.
The problem was that by the time Linda McCartney Foods, or more to the point its parent company United Biscuits, finally sanctioned the deal 1998 was already a couple of months old. The British cycling season was underway and all the best riders had been snapped up, many of them by a so-called ‘super team’, Brite.
All winter Clark had been forced to work under a cover of secrecy, although that wasn’t too hard because no one knew him anyway. Coming to the sport from outside gave him an advantage. He wasn’t restricted by the glass ceiling that seemed to sit over British cycling like low cloud. Over the years a handful of people in each generation had managed to smash their way through – people like Tom Simpson, Barry Hoban, Sean Yates and Robert Millar – but British riders found their progress in Europe hindered. Many promising riders had gone across the Channel only to find that riding there, in such a high level of competition, felt like their back brake was rubbing. In the 1980s, the ANC-Halfords team made a decent fist of it, making it to the Tour de France in 1987. The ANC-Halfords team was led by a dreamer, a charismatic visionary called Tony Capper.
Capper was, in every sense, a larger-than-life character. He wore his heart on his sleeve and his lunch on his shirt, which strained over a huge stomach. He wedged himself into the team car and could eat from the neutralised zone to the flamme rouge. He never truly understood racing and had an unhappy knack of criticising his riders for failing to get into a ‘soft’ break that had gone clear at sixty kilometres an hour, but he loved his boys and, by hook or by crook, he got them to the Tour de France before the house of cards collapsed.
Physically, Clark could not have been more different to Capper. He was slight, wiry, like a little bird but with a steely determination. When I first met him he struck me as being like a cross between a magpie and a chameleon, with his eyes darting about in search of something shiny and his personality ready to shift subtly to suit the company he was in. And he was a visionary, a dreamer, no doubt about that.
How else could Clark have persuaded Linda McCartney Foods and Linda and Sir Paul themselves to back a cycling team led by Mark Walsham, a gritty, powerful sprinter from Chesterfield but hardly the Mark Cavendish of his day, and five relative unknowns? Walsham was one of the star attractions of the 1980s cycling boom but by now he was thirty-five and beginning to fade. The other riders were Simon Cope, Rob Reynolds-Jones, Scott Gamble, Neil Hoban and Clark himself. When the team registered with the Union Cycliste Internationale, the sport’s governing body, Clark was automatically elevated from fourth category to elite level and became eligible to ride some of the biggest races in the world, despite being a rookie who had barely twenty hours of racing experience in his legs.
Such was the cloak of secrecy that shrouded the team’s birth it took the British cycling scene by surprise when, a couple of days before the Grand Prix of Essex, the opening round of the season-long Premier Calendar series, the Linda McCartney squad was unveiled. Just two days before the race the team’s bikes and jerseys arrived. The jerseys had been designed by Stella McCartney, Sir Paul and Linda’s daughter, and featured the logo ‘Linda McCartney on Tour’. The day before the GP of Essex, the squad visited Sir Paul’s studio at his estate in the Sussex countryside. While there, Sir Paul showed the riders all his musical instruments and recording studio, played a few songs and asked a bit about cycling. Sport is not without its famous, multi-millionaire benefactors but this was extraordinary, akin to Sir Paul McCartney deciding to sponsor his local non-league football club, while the team’s manager had his eyes set on the FA Cup final and Europe. Sir Paul insisted the team have the words ‘Clean Machine’ on the bikes and even wrote a theme tune for the team, which was posted on the team’s website. Elton John had refused to do a song when Watford reached the cup final in 1984…
Make no mistake about it, Julian Clark was dreaming of the Tour de France, of reaching the top in his adopted sport just as he had done in motocross. And as the pieces of his puzzle slotted into place he must have felt he was off to a great start, even if the roster of riders he’d been able to assemble was a little on the slim side.
The story caught Cycling Weekly by surprise too. Under the headline ‘McCartney backs GB squad’ was a small article with scant detail other than the obligatory quote from Sir Paul and Linda’s publicist, Geoff Baker, who said: ‘It was a health thing more than a veggie thing that interested Linda McCartney – it’s not as if she needs the money or the fame or anything. They are both just really keen on the healthy lifestyle of cycling.’
Linda added: ‘Cycling is the boom sport of the nineties and meat-free living is the boom diet, so there’s a natural synergy between these two very good ways of keeping fit. Cycling is also environmentally friendly.’
Truly they were ahead of their time. The sportive boom, the obesity debate and the rise of the MAMIL – the middle-aged man in Lycra – was still a decade or so away. As the old cliché goes, success or failure is usually determined by timing.
The fledgling team didn’t exactly pull up any trees. Walsham was ninth in the GP of Essex, the McCartney team’s first race, but they were hardly prolific. Their victories were few and far between. But it was almost as if Walsham had the crystal ball out – or perhaps he was reading from the wrong script, one that had yet to be written – when he said: ‘I reckon the sky’s the limit.’
* * *
Linda McCartney died from cancer in April 1998. She had been battling the disease for three years. After she died, Sir Paul requested that fans donate to breast cancer charities, or to causes that opposed testing on animals or, the best tribute of all, he said, go veggie. The cycling team had already been promoting a vegetarian lifestyle – the riders were all required to go vegetarian – and raising money for cancer charities, and so Linda’s death gave the team even more of a purpose, particularly with the inaugural PruTour less than a month away.
After a gap of three years, following the demise of the Kellogg’s Tour, Britain had a national stage race again, this time backed by the insurance giant Prudential. Clark’s crash-course in cycling history continued. He wanted to know who was who and what was what.
Sean Yates had retired as a professional in 1996 and had gone back to what he knew and liked best – landscape gardening and time trialling. He was approaching his thirty-eighth birthday but could still rip the legs off men fifteen years his junior. Clark wondered out loud what Yates was doing with himself and before he knew it, Yates was agreeing to ride the PruTour for the Linda McCartney team.
It was the perfect arrangement. Yates was a long way from shaking off the cycling bug (he still hasn’t to this day), the Linda McCartney team needed a boost of publicity, which Yates would deliver in cycling circles at least, and Clark needed to add to his understanding of a sport he found bemusing in its complexity. It helped, too, that Yates had been a vegetarian for much of his professional career and had ridden the Tour de France without eating meat. There was only one snag: Yates would have to pull out of the PruTour a couple of days early because he had to be at his brother’s wedding on the Saturday. But that still gave Clark several days to pump Yates for information. The pair shared a room during the race and Clark made the most of it, asking about the Tour, the Classics and racing tactics. Yates is not always the most forthcoming because he sees cycling as such a simple game. He can be devastatingly blunt in his assessment of other riders. Asked why one rider had beaten another at the end of a race, a typical Yates answer would be: ‘Because he was faster.’ But if you can unlock the door to Yates’s memory bank of anecdotes it’s like an Aladdin’s cave. He can remember specific climbs and descents, whose wheel he was following, who attacked when, who said what. He introduced Clark to the language of the peloton. He talked of riders getting ‘shelled’ and ‘popped’ and ‘flicked’, of ‘putting it in the big ring’ and ‘giving it full gas’. For Clark this was all new. At one point during the race, Yates told him to use the 53x12 and Clark had no idea he was referring to the gear ratio – he still thought in terms of top gear and bottom gear.
Yates does not suffer fools gladly but there was something about Clark he liked. Perhaps it was his willingness to learn but it’s more likely to be that he was prepared to suffer. And boy, did he suffer during that PruTour. Six months earlier he’d been racing against hobbyists who’d drive out to an event with their bike in the back of the car, blast round for an hour and go home for their tea, now he was rubbing shoulders with people who were preparing to ride the Tour de France, people like Boardman, O’Grady, Stephens and the rest.
During the PruTour, the plan was hatched for Yates to become the team’s manager in 1999. Clark already had big plans for expansion and, with Yates on board, it would be easier to attract better riders: Yates inspired almost universal respect from bike riders for his tough no-nonsense style. Yates took Clark under his wing during the PruTour, shepherding him through the peloton, explaining to Clark when he had to make an effort to get on a wheel to avoid losing ground. In essence, this was an intense, week-long course in bike racing practice and etiquette. At one point, Yates said something to another rider and a gap opened so Clark could settle into the string of cyclists and get out of the wind, thereby saving energy. Clark asked Yates what he’d said. ‘I told him you were my boss and to let you in or else I’d lose my job.’
Clark pushed himself deep that week but pulled out on the penultimate stage when he hit a pothole and aggravated an old motocross injury. Nine years earlier he’d fractured two vertebrae. Although he didn’t finish the race, he’d done enough to show he could survive and that, in itself, would stand him in good stead.
In June, Walsham won the Tom Simpson Memorial road race, an event named after one of Britain’s best riders, a man who had died on Mont Ventoux thirty-one years earlier. It was the team’s biggest victory of the year and although the Tom Simpson Memorial was not the biggest race on the British calendar its name resonated throughout cycling.
By the end of the season, Clark was enjoying his new profile as the owner and general manager of one of Britain’s highest-profile teams. He spoke of Sir Paul’s passion for the team and it’s true to say that he did send messages of support and enquire about the team’s progress.
* * *
Julian Clark knew how to grab people’s attention. He knew what to say to make people’s ears twitch and he had a knack for the theatrical.
So it was that the team’s new line-up stood shivering in Trafalgar Square one late January morning in 1999. There they were amid the tourists and pigeons and under the gaze of Admiral Nelson, which was somewhat fitting because by now the talk was of making it to the Tour de France in 2001. Clark had drawn up a three-year plan. Europe this year, the Giro or Vuelta next, and then the Tour. The squad would be strengthened as they went; some would make the whole journey, others would fall by the wayside, but the goal was set.
As the fourteen-strong squad of riders lined up for photographs with their bikes and a team car, I wondered out loud how Clark had got permission to stage this impromptu team presentation in Trafalgar Square. The question went unanswered, which led me to suspect that perhaps the formalities had not been completed and that Clark was winging it. Either way, it was a neat touch at a time when most team launches were held in bike shops or hotel conference rooms.
Clark and Yates had assembled an impressive array of secondary sponsors. Dunlop-Hotta were supplying the bikes, Rover the team cars. Yates helped get Motorola, who he had ridden for during his own career. Psion organisers and Zenith watches were among the other backers. Everything looked rosy and Clark said the budget had been upped to £500,000, which was a considerable whack at the time.
The new riders were a mix of British and Antipodeans: Jon Clay, Russell Downing, Chris Lillywhite, Chris Newton, Matt Illingworth, Julian Winn and Chris Walker brought experience and youth and an array of skills. Australian David McKenzie had caught the eye riding for an amateur team at the PruTour and compatriot Allan Iacuone had impressed in some European stage races. Then there was Heiko Szonn, a powerful German with almost stereotypically Teutonic looks, a man who could have been assembled from off-cuts from when Sean Yates himself came off the conveyor belt. A former junior world team-pursuit champion, he had ridden for the under-23 Telekom team before moving to England with his Australian wife. He wandered into Pete Roberts’ bike shop in East Sussex and said he was looking for a team. Roberts knew Yates and so Szonn faxed over his CV. ‘He turned up at my house asking for a chance,’ said Yates. ‘We already had the team fixed for the year but you can’t beat that for enthusiasm so we offered him a month-to-month trial.’
There was another link to British cycling’s past too. Adrian Timmis, who had completed the Tour de France for ANC-Halfords in 1987, worked for the team as a masseur.
* * *
Like many before him, David McKenzie had left Australia for Europe in pursuit of his dream: to ride the Tour de France, or failing that the Giro or the Vuelta. At twenty-three, he turned professional for Gianni Savio’s team, Selle Italia.
‘He’s like a car salesman, to look at and to talk to, and I say that only half tongue-in-cheek,’ says McKenzie of the suave Savio, a survivor of the Italian cycling scene, a pursuer of talent, a taker of risks. ‘He’d probably laugh if he saw that quote and I don’t say it as a negative. People like Gianni and the sport needs people like him. He’s probably bent the rules a bit but the sport was letting him bend the rules.’
Savio’s modus operandi was to register his teams in Venezuela or Colombia, scoop up a load of cheap talent and bring them to Europe. His teams were based and raced in Italy but he exploited a loophole in the rules to keep costs down. ‘He’d get a bunch of climbers who would get super results and he’d give them a chance. He’d get funding from here, there and wherever and you have to give him credit for that. Sure, the jersey was covered in logos, dozens of them, but he was making it work and a lot of riders owe their start to him. He presents himself well, he’s easy to get on with, he’s friendly and, more important than that, he doesn’t spin you a load of bull. He doesn’t promise much but what he does promise, he delivers.’
McKenzie was not a climber but a sprinter and after a spell with a Spanish amateur team he was offered a place by Savio. ‘My first race was the Settimana Bergamasca and I was up there in the top five with Jan Svorada and some world-class sprinters and I thought I was going to get up the ranks pretty quick. But then I went to the Giro del Trentino in the Dolomites and I got my butt kicked big time. I was back at zero.’
Although McKenzie was racing as a professional, he was not getting paid – not in money, anyway. That wasn’t uncommon at the time. Plenty of riders accepted deals that offered little more than a bike, kit and equipment, travel expenses and perhaps some cheap or free accommodation. That was how many riders got their foot on the lower rungs of the ladder before the UCI introduced its minimum wage rule.
‘Look, he paid me in kind. I was not on a paid contract but he looked after me,’ says McKenzie. ‘I was in a position where it was take it or leave it. I could have stayed as an amateur or I could take this chance. I thought I might get to do some good races, maybe even the Giro. But the thing is, he never sold me anything false. What he said he’d give me, he did, and in some cases he gave me a little bit more if he could. It’s the classic scenario – you hear it a lot from riders who say, “I never got paid.” But the question is, were you told you’d get paid? In my era there were Italians racing for minimum contracts but if they did well they got a bit under the table, tax free. If you didn’t perform, you didn’t see that cash under the table.’
In 1998, Savio gave McKenzie permission to ride for the Australian national team at the PruTour, then he rode the Tour of Slovenia with Selle Italia. ‘The McCartney team were at both tours and although I was always there in the top five or so in the sprints, I just couldn’t bloody nail it. I was still pretty young so I guess on paper I looked pretty good. Then the calls came from Julian and later Sean.
‘My first impressions were awesome. They were a small team, but growing quickly and they had the name, McCartney. It meant something to everyone. Who hasn’t heard of Paul McCartney?
‘Julian was a really likeable guy and he was so enthusiastic. He wanted to achieve things. He wasn’t saying I’d ride the Tour de France but he said the team were going to make it there and that if I was good enough I could be there too. We went to Paul McCartney’s private studio early in 1999 and he belted out a couple of tunes, showed us all his guitars and pianos and played them all perfectly. I remember doing a race shortly after that and I was talking to a friend of mine I knew from before and he was like, “What? You met Paul McCartney?”’
McKenzie won the Linda McCartney team’s first major race on foreign soil: a stage of the Tour of Langkawi in Malaysia. Allan Iacuone finished third overall, which was an impressive result considering the severity of the twenty-kilometre Genting Highlands climb. Things were off to a good start.
But back in Europe, it was harder to make progress. Despite the McCartney name, Sean Yates’s reputation and popularity, and interest from Sports Illustrated the team was unable to punch its weight. Getting the team into European races was difficult. Email had still not been fully adopted by many race organisers in France, Spain and Italy and the old-fashioned way of entering races still prevailed. Send off for an application form, fill it in, post or fax it back, then wait. Faxes went unanswered, phone calls were never returned. When Yates did get some encouragement, he’d find he was too late, that the places had been taken by French or Italian teams. ‘I rang the organiser of the Tour of Normandy and got the impression that she was not impressed by British riders. I offered to pay expenses but still no joy,’ Yates said.
Over the Easter weekend, Linda McCartney had secured invitations to two one-day races in Brittany and Normandy: the Route Adélie in Vitré and the Grand Prix Rennes. I went along for the ride at the Route Adélie to see how the new team was acquitting itself in Europe.
Yates didn’t immediately strike me as management material. He was a loner, entirely self-sufficient and he expected everyone to be like him. He didn’t seem at ease with the mother hen nature of being a team boss with a gaggle of needy chicks to look after. Bike riders on the eve of big races can be nervy, twitchy types, wrapped up in their insecurities and idiosyncrasies. Some want to shut themselves away, others obsess over their bikes or shoes, others slip into exaggerated banter to disguise the anxiety. Yates retreated into his own space and, largely, left the riders to get on with it. If asked for his advice it would often be straight to the point. Earlier in the year, when I’d asked him what he was looking for from his riders, he said: ‘It shouldn’t be down to me to make them want to ride a bike. If their attitude is not right they’ll soon realise it’s not on because they’ll be riding the Wobbly Wheelers “25”.’
If Yates had a weakness it was that he could not empathise with riders who were not capable of doing what he could still do now, at the age of thirty-eight. Often he would dish out the suffering on training rides and his riders joked that going out with Yates was sometimes as hard as racing.
The Route Adélie in Vitré was not the team’s first race in Europe but it was another education for them. I was allowed to sit in on the pre-race team talk. The riders gathered in one of the bedrooms at their hotel; some sat on the bed, others on the floor and Yates stood and gave the sort of speech that sapped my energy. I sat there thinking that had Churchill adopted this approach instead of his stirring ‘fight them on the beaches’ line, the Germans would have been in central London by tea time.
Matt Illingworth, a strong rider on the domestic scene but who was being asked to take quite a step up here, looked at the map of the circuit, which had to be covered several times. ‘Just my kind of race,’ he said. ‘It goes past the hotel eight times.’
It was just a joke, the sort of gallows humour that a cyclist who knows he’s in for a kicking would make, but Yates’s face set firm and the beginnings of any laughter was immediately quelled.
Yates kept things simple but I got the sense that he couldn’t summon up much in the way of inspiration because he knew what he was sending his riders into.
‘Ride near the front and stay out of the wind, especially early on,’ he said. ‘Ride like you deserve to be there. If you let yourself get shoved out you’ll be at the back before you know it and it’s ten times harder there. If you can get in a move, go for it. I want to see you participate in the race. If you try to do something but get shelled out I’ll be happy with that.’
Later, in the team car, on the second, or perhaps third lap, we were on a long, straight stretch of road which rose up ahead of us so we could see past all the other team cars that the bunch was being stretched into a long line. I had no idea who was putting the pressure on at the front but as the bunch jostled and jockeyed for position, transmogrifying from a bulbous pack into a thin snake, the yellow and black Linda McCartney jerseys all sank towards the back.
Yates sighed. ‘Come on boys, move up, move up,’ he said to no one in particular.
As the afternoon wore on, the Linda McCartney riders were dropped from the bunch and for a while it looked like no one would make it to the finishing laps around the centre of Vitré. Each time a McCartney rider was dropped, Yates made a token effort of asking if they were okay before accelerating in a slightly exaggerated, slightly passive-aggressive fashion to keep up with the convoy of team cars.
In the end, Heiko Szonn and Chris Lillywhite made it to Vitré but the McCartneys were in over their heads. In my naivety, I asked Yates what had gone wrong. ‘We’re not good enough,’ he said.
Szonn volunteered to ride back to the hotel – a distance of perhaps thirty or forty kilometres, partly for training, partly perhaps as self-flagellation in the face of Yates’s obvious disappointment. Yates didn’t object so Szonn pedalled off.
When we arrived back at the hotel, Yates got out of the car, disappeared into the hotel, returned in his kit, got on his bike and went for a three-hour ride. When Yates got back to the hotel, Szonn had still not turned up. It was now almost 9 p.m. and dinner was ready. ‘Where’s Heiko?’ Yates asked.
Eventually, the German arrived at the hotel having ridden sixty kilometres in the wrong direction, without a water bottle or any food, or a mobile phone. He didn’t even know the name and address of the hotel so he rode around, following signs for Vitré and kept going until he recognised a road and stumbled upon the hotel.
Yates slapped Heiko on the back and laughed a sympathetic laugh. ‘It won’t do you any harm.’ Yates would say that. Stories of his 300-kilometre training ride completing a lap of Majorca on one bottle of water and no lunch were legendary.
But that incident seemed to sum up the McCartney team during their first season in Europe. Julian Clark knew he had to take another big step forward quickly, while Linda McCartney Foods were still passionate about his project. He knew he had to head to Europe and make the team truly international. He decided to set up a base in Toulouse in south-west France, close to a hub airport.
* * *
In 1999, David Millar was a third-year professional at Cofidis and one of the most highly rated young riders around. Jeremy Hunt was still a sprinter of some repute riding for the Spanish Banesto squad. Roger Hammond had thrown himself in at the deep end in Belgium and was with the Collstrop team existing on a diet of kermesse races and semi-Classics. Chris Boardman was Britain’s only bona fide star but his career was winding down and his salary was out of the Linda McCartney team’s league.
Derby-born Max Sciandri was Italian, really, but he had switched nationality to represent Great Britain at the 1996 Olympic Games in Atlanta, where he won a bronze medal in the road race, which was won by Switzerland’s Pascal Richard. Having ridden for Motorola with Yates, he spent a couple of years with the Française des Jeux team and now it was time to move on again.
Then there were two promising young amateurs. Jamie Burrow was the number one-ranked under-23 rider in the world, had broken Marco Pantani’s record for the climb of Plateau de Beille in the Pyrenees in a stage race called the Ronde de l’Isard, and was courted by a string of top professional teams. In the end, he signed for US Postal Service. After all, who could turn down the team of the reigning Tour de France champion, Lance Armstrong? Charly Wegelius was another promising climber and he rode for the Linda McCartney team as a stagiaire, a sort of work experience placement, at the Trans Canada stage race towards the end of the summer in 1999.
Clark made Wegelius an offer which far exceeded the one being proposed by the Italian Mapei team but the chance to ride for the top-ranked team in the world was too good to refuse. Mapei were setting up a development squad of young riders and Wegelius’s contemporaries were Fabian Cancellara, Michael Rogers and Filippo Pozzato, who were also turning professional at the same time.
But the seeds were there and it felt to Clark like the stars were beginning to align. ‘In three years’ time,’ he said, ‘I’d like to think we’d be able to sign all these guys and go to the Tour de France with a British leader, a British sprinter, British domestiques and a real British core to the team. If we can prove ourselves in the next couple of seasons, why couldn’t we persuade Millar, Hunt, Hammond, Burrow and Wegelius and anyone else who comes along to join us?’
Signing Sciandri felt like the perfect stepping stone. It would give the team a defined leader and instant credibility. Although Max was not the most ruthless of riders, he knew the ropes and he was popular with others.
‘Yates called me and threw the idea on the table, then this Julian guy called. I’d had enough of the French and I was interested in the idea,’ says Sciandri. ‘I was at a race at the end of the year, the Giro di Lucca, and I saw [Carmine] Castellano, the boss of the Giro d’Italia. I said: “If I go with this English team, would you give us a place in the Giro?” He said: “Sure, why not?”
‘I met Julian. He was easy-going, chatting away and he’d done his research on who I was and what I’d done. The money he was offering was good. In lira, it was 500 million lira. To put that in context, a good apartment cost 180 million lira, so it was good money. I was coming off a really good contract with Française des Jeux but at the age I was, nearly thirty-three, it was good money.’
Sciandri helped the team attract Olympic champion Pascal Richard. One of Sciandri’s friends, Maurizio De Pasquale, signed too. There was the addition of a couple of promising Scandinavians – the sprinter and track rider Tayeb Braikia and a powerful Norwegian called Bjornar Vestøl. The team may have sacrificed some of its British identity but this was undeniably a step forward.
And Clark was buzzing about the signing of a former world triathlon champion, Spencer Smith, who tested positive for nandrolone but was cleared by the Court of Arbitration for Sport in September 1999. Lance Armstrong had gone from triathlete to Tour de France champion and although Clark wasn’t getting that carried away, he believed that Smith could be a success in cycling.
The vegetarianism was not something that all the foreign riders were familiar with. In some parts of mainland Europe, the idea of vegetarianism was completely alien then. I remember being in Spain with a vegan colleague at around that time. She ordered plain pasta without cheese or meat and the waiter returned with a plate piled high with finely shaved Iberico ham on the top and nudged her conspiratorially as if to say: ‘There you go, I’ve snuck a bit of proper food into your dish.’
Sciandri, the son of a successful Los Angeles-based restaurateur, took time to adapt.
‘It was pretty funny because the first race I did for the team was the 2000 Tour Down Under and we had to go to this opening ceremony,’ he says. ‘This girl comes round with little sticks of barbecued kangaroo on and I grabbed one and I was about to put it in my mouth when I saw Graham Watson [the photographer] and I thought, “Fuck, I’m supposed to be vegetarian.” I wasn’t but at the Giro later that year, we had a team of macrobiotic chefs with us and I didn’t touch one piece of meat, not a slice of ham, nothing, and I was flying.
‘When I was at home in Italy, this guy turned up in a van and he said he had a delivery for me. He opened the back and it was loads of boxes of Linda McCartney vegetarian food. I put a load of it in the freezer until there was no more space, I gave a load to friends and family. Luca Scinto [who rode for Mapei] took some and he really liked it. I didn’t know what I was going to do with it all. In the end, I was giving it to the dog and after a couple of days even the dog was walking up to the bowl, sniffing it and walking away.’
But despite the rumours that not all of the team’s riders had embraced the meat-free lifestyle as rigorously as they might have, they kept up appearances at races and training camps. On the face of it, everything was moving in the right direction. They won a few races, not huge events but enough to demonstrate progress, and then they struck gold. The Linda McCartney team’s place in the 2000 Giro d’Italia was confirmed.
* * *
Cycling was a hard sell in 2000. Channel 4 had bought the rights to show England’s cricket Test matches so the Tour de France was bumped from its popular early evening slot in the schedule. The PruTour was scrapped after just two editions when title sponsor Prudential pulled out, leaving Britain without a national stage race again. And the sport was still reeling from the after-effects of the Festina doping affair in 1998. For many corporations, cycling was toxic, despite the fairy tale Lance Armstrong was writing.
Although selection for the Giro d’Italia was huge news in cycling circles, it barely registered with the national press. The Giro d’what now?
Julian Clark’s concerns were closer to home. In one way, the Premier Calendar series, the bread and butter for British-based riders, was thriving. There were nineteen events, in contrast to just six in 2013, but they were small events. He would often ask what could be done to make the races more appealing. More than once he complained to me that he had nowhere to impress major sponsors. ‘I can’t take them to a Premier Calendar race and show them a finish outside a garden centre watched by one man and a dog,’ he said. ‘And if I take the team to Europe, we’re not going to win.’
But the Giro offered something else, even if the team got off to a bumpy start. Clark had hoped to make a splash with Pascal Richard, the team’s Olympic road race champion. He’d designed a special version of the Linda McCartney team jersey that featured the Olympic rings only to be told by the UCI that it wasn’t allowed. To Clark this was madness. He couldn’t see why the IOC, the International Olympic Committee, would not want its symbol shown off all year round, and he couldn’t fathom why the UCI was being so backward.
Richard and an Australian teammate, Ben Brooks, went home after the prologue in the Vatican city, citing a stomach bug. Later, it emerged that the riders had been pulled out of the race because it was discovered that they had taken a supplement that contained a banned substance and they were pulled out of the race rather than risk testing positive.fn1
* * *
By now, John Deering had been working as the Linda McCartney team’s press officer for more than a year. Friendly, bubbly and brimming with enthusiasm, he had relocated to Toulouse along with Clark the previous winter. Sometimes Deering’s enthusiasm got the better of him, at least as far as Clark was concerned. Increasingly, Clark liked to control the message, which occasionally gave me the impression that he was juggling more balls in the air than Deering and the rest of us could see. As a journalist, it could be frustrating. You’d get a whiff of a story from someone, ring Deering to find out if there was any substance to it only to be told he’d look into it and get back to you. In the meantime, a press release would arrive in the inbox confirming the story and handing it on a platter to everyone else. Again, the Linda McCartney team were ahead of their time – everyone does that now.
Deering’s passion could not be faulted. He documented his time with the team in a book, Team on the Run, which gives some insight into what it was like to be on the roller coaster with Clark and confirms that when it ran out of control and burst off the track, Deering was no more in the loop than anyone else.
The 2000 Giro d’Italia reached its second Saturday. FA Cup Final day. Deering, a die-hard Chelsea fan, had his heart in two places at once. The Blues were playing Aston Villa at Wembley, while he was in Italy working for the Linda McCartney team.
That morning, David McKenzie woke up and he just knew it was his day. He wanted to make sure the 182-kilometre stage from Vasto to Teramo had his name on it. ‘It was semi-pre-meditated,’ he says of his 160-kilometre solo attack. ‘We were a week in and I woke up feeling fresh. I knew I had good legs. I’d been sick at the Tour of Romandy, just before the Giro, and had been on antibiotics so I started the Giro a bit underdone. That morning I had a word with Sean and said I wanted to attack and he just said, “Yeah, go for it.”’
Not long after McKenzie had attacked, alone, Keith Lambert, the team’s second sports director, came up alongside him in the team car. ‘He said to me, “Mate, if you keep going like this, you’ll win the Intergiro prize”, meaning one of the minor competitions they have in the Giro. I was like, “Fuck that, I’m not out here for the Intergiro,” and I gave him the death stare and he took the foot off the accelerator and dropped back behind me and didn’t speak to me for the next hour.
‘In hindsight, that was logical thinking. Perhaps it was smart thinking. Perhaps he was doing two things: taking the pressure off while also firing me up. I felt pretty good most of the day apart from an hour or an hour-and-a-half in the middle where I was absolutely on my hands and knees, pushing myself as far as I could. I probably never pushed myself as hard as that again in my whole career. I knew this might be it. This might be my one shot and that I might never get another opportunity. I was calculating every single second I was losing going round a corner or freewheeling or taking food out of my pocket and working out whether I’d get caught 100 metres from the line or whatever.
‘With about an hour to go, Keith came up alongside me and said a guy was trying to jump across and asked whether I was going to wait. There was no way I was going to wait because the other guy would be fresh and I’d be giving him the initiative. A bit later on, when the end was in sight, Keith said: “This is what dreams are made of.” I knew exactly what he meant. Sure, it was a bit of a cliché but it was inspirational. It meant empty the tank, give it everything.’
McKenzie hung on to win by fifty-one seconds. Meanwhile, in London, Chelsea were lifting the cup thanks to a goal by the Italian midfielder Roberto Di Matteo.
When McKenzie crossed the line, he was practically hauled off his bike and given a bear hug by Deering, who was wearing a blue Chelsea shirt. The Italians loved it and Gazzetta dello Sport went big on it, with a photograph of Deering grabbing McKenzie and a piece tying in the football and the Giro. Not for the first time, it was as if all the stars had lined up in a row for the Linda McCartney team.
But Julian Clark was not happy. He couldn’t see how things stacked up to make a quirky story. This big bear of a man in a Chelsea shirt on a day an Italian scored a cup-winning goal in the last FA Cup Final to be played at the old Wembley stadium, these vegetarian oddballs winning a stage of the Giro d’Italia. All he could see was the lost opportunity to showcase the sponsors. He tore a strip off Deering for wearing the Chelsea shirt instead of a Linda McCartney jersey. It was an over-reaction but it was perhaps symptomatic of the problems that were stacking up behind the scenes.
The following day, with the team the toast of the Giro, Max Sciandri almost made it two wins from two in Prato. He had pinpointed that day before the Giro started because it was the one that went closest to his house in Quarrata. According to Sciandri, one of his breakaway companions, Axel Merckx, crashed on a descent not far from the finish but benefited from a bit of a tow from the Mapei team car being driven by Fabrizio Fabbri and flew past to win the stage. ‘I dunno,’ says Sciandri, shrugging his shoulders. ‘I was pretty disappointed and I didn’t think he could come back from that to win but I ended up getting the sprint for second. But I should have won that stage.’
* * *
So how did it all end so abruptly? How could a team that won a stage in their first Grand Tour disappear almost as suddenly as it had arrived, particularly after another expansion over the winter of 2000–01?
In truth, the problems were there throughout 2000. Wages were sometimes late but Clark always had an answer. There was a problem with the bank, or the sponsors hadn’t paid but it was all in hand and would all get sorted.
‘Of the money I was promised, I didn’t get any of it,’ says Sciandri, who shrugs again when asked why he didn’t make more of a fuss. ‘It was a great bunch of guys and I really believed in the project, in British cycling and I thought we were starting something. I genuinely thought British cycling could be the next big thing then, that all it needed was a little light and water to grow.
‘I was okay for money. I am not a guy who looks at his account to see if the money has gone in. As we got closer to the Giro [in 2000] I was thinking about the race, not worrying about the money. I got one little cheque, for about a thousand euros in today’s money, but no salary ever turned up. Julian was very good at postponing things. “It’s coming, it’s coming.” I’d get faxes of bank statements and things but there was always a problem. You know, on the fifteenth of August in Italy, on a beautiful sunny day, Julian could persuade you it’s pissing with rain outside.’
Things reached a head in December 2000. ‘I finally got this cheque for 500 million lira, everything I was owed for the whole year and I paid it into the bank,’ he says. ‘I was driving to the airport in Rome with my teammate De Pasquale and I got a call from the bank to say the cheque had bounced, that there was nothing in it. I stopped by the side of the road and couldn’t believe it. I still have that cheque at home somewhere.’
Yet Sciandri stuck around. Clark promised that sponsors were in place. More riders were being signed for 2001. Iñigo Cuesta, Juan Dominguez and Miguel Angel Martin Perdiguero from Spain, the 1998 junior world road race champion Mark Scanlon from Ireland and a twenty-year-old junior pursuit world champion called Bradley Wiggins.
There was a new sports director too. Neil Stephens, the Australian, was recruited, although Clark reacted badly when a national newspaper brought up the fact that he had ridden for the notorious Festina team in 1998, a fact that, ironically, dissuaded Dave Brailsford from hiring Stephens for Team Sky at the end of 2010.
Behind the scenes, Clark was struggling to keep all the balls in the air. Added to that, the Linda McCartney Foods brand was subject to a takeover. It was being sold by United Biscuits, and its sub-group McVitie’s, to Heinz. There was a problem. Heinz couldn’t really see the value of the cycling team and wanted to pull out.
Clark persuaded them to allow him to continue using the Linda McCartney Foods name, believing that it would attract other prestigious sponsors to the table. The association with the McCartney name was still a big pull, he thought.
Just before flying to Australia for the Tour Down Under in 2001, Sciandri gave Clark an ultimatum. Pay some of the money you owe or I’m going to call a press conference in Australia and blow the lid on things. ‘In the end, I didn’t do it, mainly because Julian said everything would be sorted when we got back to London for the team launch.’
David McKenzie arrived at the Tour Down Under in a great mood. ‘We’d just had our first baby, our daughter was two weeks old, so I was excited about that. There had been a worrying moment towards the end of the previous year. We were at the dinner table during one tour and Max said, “Hey guys, I don’t want to intrude on your personal finances, but I’m curious to know if you’ve been paid.” We all suddenly panicked and I realised I’d not been paid for three months. I got straight on to Julian and in the end I got all my money. I didn’t realise that there were perhaps only two of us who got everything they were supposed to get.
‘When we got to the Tour Down Under, I was flavour of the month – the only Aussie to win a stage of the Giro the previous summer – I was back on home soil and really excited.’
On the outside, everything looked great. The team’s new jerseys boasted two high-profile new sponsors – the Australian wine producer Jacob’s Creek, and the prestigious car manufacturer, Jaguar. On 21 January 2001, in the centre of Adelaide, McKenzie won the final stage of the Tour Down Under, the Linda McCartney team’s final race.
On the podium, the CEO of Jacob’s Creek presented McKenzie with the winner’s trophy and some wine and said: ‘Ah, Jacob’s Creek is on your jersey, that’s pretty cool.’
‘He didn’t say anything else but it was like he was surprised,’ says McKenzie. ‘I thought, hang on, they’re a major sponsor of our team and he doesn’t know? But then you rationalise it and think, well, it’s a big company, maybe he just doesn’t know about the deal.’
The deal, as it was reported back in the UK, was supposed to be worth £1.7 million. In fact, there was no deal at all.
Things began to unravel rapidly. I was working for Cycling Weekly at the time and had called Jaguar to get a comment on the company’s new involvement with cycling. I found it strange that Deering, usually so efficient with his press releases, had not been so quick off the mark. I also thought it was strange that Jaguar would sink seven figures into a cycling team and then let the team drive around in Rovers.
Someone from Jaguar called our office, having seen a photograph of McKenzie winning a bike race on the other side of the world wearing a jersey with their logo on it, in a national paper.
The man from Jaguar wanted to know who was running the Linda McCartney team and whether I’d heard of Julian Clark. After further investigations, he called back and explained that although Jaguar had been in very preliminary talks with Clark the discussions had ended before Christmas and Jaguar were not interested in cycling, as they had a Formula One team to run.
The next time the phone rang, it was Julian Clark, calling from Toulouse.
‘No, no, no, you’re speaking to the wrong guy,’ he said. ‘It’s Jaguar France we’re dealing with. The UK arm of the company doesn’t know anything about this and now you’ve spooked them you could jeopardise the whole deal.’
The man from Jaguar said there was no such thing as Jaguar France and the closest I could get to finding out what was going on was that Clark had been talking to a Jaguar dealership in Toulouse, one that had no autonomy to sponsor a cycling team.
When Clark rang again he was even more agitated and as we spoke he interrupted me saying: ‘What the fuck have you done?’ A cease and desist fax had arrived from Jaguar requesting that the cycling team refrain from using their logo and name. Worse was to come. A call to Jacob’s Creek in Australia revealed that they had donated some wine for an event the team had held at the Tour Down Under and had agreed to allow Clark to use their logo to demonstrate what a great investment the team could be for the 2002 season.
Within twenty-four hours it had emerged that neither Linda McCartney Foods, Jaguar nor Jacob’s Creek were paying to sponsor the team. Clark’s budget was little more than fresh air and the riders were all heading to London for a glitzy launch in Trafalgar Square.
* * *
Things came crashing down very rapidly. Yates and Sciandri, who had believed everything was in place for 2001, tried desperately to save the team. The riders believed that the team was safe because of the McCartney name, as McKenzie says: ‘We thought, Paul McCartney is loaded. Is he going to let us not get paid? Okay, so Julian might be a bit dodgy but we’ll survive.’
As it was, Sir Paul McCartney was by now far removed from the food company that bore his late wife’s name. The brand had been sold to a multinational company – Heinz – who had no obligation to carry on sponsoring the team and no financial commitments to it. Clark had exaggerated the size of the sponsorship deal in the first place.
The whole team met up at a hotel in Bagshott, Surrey, the day before the big launch in London. I headed there too, with Cycling Weekly’s photographer, Phil O’Connor. There were a lot of confused people, just as many fevered phone calls on mobile phones, and as more and more riders turned up to find that the team they’d committed to no longer existed, a resigned atmosphere settled over the place.
There were repercussions. Marlon Perez, a Colombian rider, had been subjected to a full body search at Heathrow airport. Pete Rogers, brother of Mick who went on to ride for Team Sky, saw the Linda McCartney team as his final shot at being a pro. He got straight back on a plane to Australia at his own expense having already paid his own way to London. Chris Lillywhite had just spent hundreds of pounds filling all the team vehicles with diesel.
Sciandri called as many people as he could. ‘I really believed we could keep it all together but the season was already starting and it was just too late,’ he says. ‘I left that hotel with De Pasquale. We just wanted to get back to Italy. It was the first time I’d ever been on Ryanair. We got on the plane and I asked for a beer and they said, “Yeah, you have to pay for them.” I was like, “What…?” It was kind of funny, really, like the last straw, but we drank six beers on the way back to Italy.’
* * *
In that hotel in Surrey, there was a little moment as the riders sat around wondering what to do. Bradley Wiggins, only twenty years old, his whole career ahead of him, knew what he was going to do. He was going to get out of there as quickly as possible. ‘I remember seeing Brad and he was like, “Hi and bye”,’ says McKenzie. Before Wiggins left, he shook hands with Sean Yates. Eleven-and-a-half years later, Yates would be behind the wheel of a Jaguar team car, Wiggins ahead of him in a Sky skinsuit, clinching Britain’s first Tour de France title in the penultimate day’s time trial. Mick Rogers, Pete’s brother, was one of his key domestiques.
And what of Julian Clark? Time makes a lot of things easier. The riders whose careers were paused or disrupted pushed on. At the time, Clark was angry and indignant, releasing rambling statements to the media that seemed to blame everyone but himself. There was a sense, initially, that he had profited while others lost out but that wasn’t the case. The money never existed.
The UCI introduced new rules to guarantee a team could pay their riders’ salaries for a year. As Sciandri said: ‘Before McCartney you could say, “Hey, I got 20 million, I’m putting a team together,” and they’d say fine. So at least we changed something.’
McKenzie refuses to bear a grudge but says: ‘It was madness, wasn’t it? Absolute madness. Now it’s easy to look back and say it’s a great yarn, because it is. I think I take people at face value and I wanted to believe because it was a great team. I don’t think Julian did anything maliciously. People thought he was pocketing money but that wasn’t true. He was living on a shoestring trying to keep it together and pay what he could. Look, it still doesn’t make it right and I’m not letting him off the hook completely, but he had to keep telling white lies to cover his arse. One lie to cover another, then another and then the lies surrounded him. If you look back now, he had a bloody good idea. It should have worked. If he was smart, he’d have gone out and hired a bloody good marketing person to get us that next sponsor to keep it going.
‘I walk around at the Tour de France and I see Sky in their lovely smart Jaguars and I wonder if anyone in marketing there ever thinks, “Hey, weren’t we in cycling before?”’
* * *
Unfortunately the story doesn’t end there for Julian Clark. He wasn’t just an ambitious schemer who dreamt too big and came crashing down to earth. Not long after the Linda McCartney team collapsed, I got a call from police investigating the fraudulent sale of some gym equipment and asking for any information I might have had on Clark and the cycling team. Clark was found guilty and sentenced to six months in prison. In August 2011 he was sentenced to three-and-a-half years for obtaining almost three-quarters of a million pounds from twenty people in and around Kent who had backed fraudulent business ventures. The schemes included importing motorcycles and selling gym equipment. When asked where their money was by his investors, Clark used delaying tactics, bounced cheques and produced forged copies of bank transfer documents. He told the court he had sold his family home and was living in rented accommodation so that he could repay £420,000 of the money he owed. One victim got back some of the £35,000 he had invested with Clark after pinning bounced cheques on the noticeboard at a motocross club in Dartford with the note: ‘Beware Julian Clark. He bounces cheques.’
Lionel Birnie is co-host of the Telegraph Cycling Podcast and covers cycling for the Sunday Times. He started his career at a local newspaper, moving to Cycling Weekly in 1998. In 2012, he founded the Cycling Anthology with Ellis Bacon and the following year published Sean Kelly’s autobiography, Hunger (Peloton Publishing). He also owns an original set of the Linda McCartney team’s short-lived 2001 cycling kit.
fn1 In December 2012, it was announced that the UK Anti-Doping Agency was investigating the Linda McCartney team. In September 2014, there was still no sign of a report from UKAD and a spokesman said no comment would be made until due process had been completed.