The boys were playing on the floor in the living room, their toys everywhere. I sat in the middle of the chaos and watched them play. It was spring 1994, and just another day at home in Luxembourg.
I’d already been out training, Mette was busy doing the housework, and I was able to just relax with the boys. It was the moments like these that I enjoyed most. But I knew that at some point I’d need to find somewhere quiet to take care of what I needed to do.
Leaving the boys to their game, I wandered out to the kitchen, opened the fridge and took out a couple of syringes from a plastic bag. Unnoticed, but with the syringes hidden in my hand anyway, I walked back through to the bedroom to be alone. I sat on the bed and opened the packaging of one of the disposable syringes, attached a needle and pulled up the plunger. This one was an insulin injection, like diabetics use. The needle only needs to go in just under the skin – typically in either the stomach or the shoulder. You only feel a small prick, and it’s all over in just a matter of seconds.
Suddenly, the door flew open, and in the few hundredths of a second that went by before I could see who was standing in the doorway, I had already gone through all the different explanations and excuses I could think of using if it was the kids. Luckily, it was Mette, who hadn’t noticed that I’d come through to the bedroom. Closing the door behind her, she looked at me accusingly. “Is that really necessary?” she asked. It was a discussion we’d had plenty of times before.
“You know it is,” I said, finishing off what I needed to do.
Back in the living room with the boys, who were still playing on the carpet, I tried to remember how it was that I’d got to this point – doping in order to win bike races. I was first plunged into a world of syringes and injections in my first year as a professional rider in 1986, and more specifically at the Belgian one-day Classic, Flèche Wallonne. On the morning of the race, I was lying on my bed in the hotel, just relaxing, when one of the team’s masseurs threw open the door and was barely inside the room before he was waving a syringe about. “Bjarne, you just need this injection,” he said, as though it was the most natural thing in the world, holding up the syringe, which was already ready to go. The masseur’s name was Jef D’Hont – a well-known figure who had been in the sport for years. He was a man who knew the game, the routines and all the tricks, and so was a person who commanded a certain amount of respect. It hadn’t taken long for me to realise that I had a lot to learn before I’d find my own place and own identity in the cycling world. But what I did already know was that I didn’t want to turn over and let a stranger stick a needle in my backside and inject me with goodness-knows-what. It was the first time anyone had ever offered to inject me with anything.
“Sorry – what is it you want me to do?” I asked him, sitting up in bed.
Jef was clearly annoyed – he was busy – and my questions were messing up his schedule.
“What’s in the syringe? Tell me,” I said.
Clearly insulted, he refused to answer, and made it pretty clear that I should just shut up, turn over, and do as he said. “Don’t you trust me?” he asked, coldly.
“I’m not injecting anything without knowing what it is,” I replied.
Jef could tell that I’d made up my mind, but he didn’t want to lose face – especially not in front of a first-year pro who was giving him attitude. He went mad, storming into the bathroom and pressing down the plunger so that the contents of the syringe went down the sink, before leaving the room without a word. I could be pretty certain that I wouldn’t be getting much help or support from him again in a hurry after that. He didn’t look like the kind of person who would let getting snubbed like that be forgotten any time soon, either. But it was my body, my health and my career, and if I was going to take any medicines, it was going to be through my own choice, and on my own terms, and something that was properly tried and tested. I certainly wasn’t going to let a Belgian masseur force me into it.
But syringes were a normal part of professional cycling life back then, I was to find out. The doctors and soigneurs would often inject us with vitamins to ensure we got everything we needed. During tough stage races, it didn’t take long to be severely lacking in all the vitamins and minerals that our bodies required. At that time, those injections were legal and, to a degree, necessary. But I still wasn’t comfortable the day that I was told that I needed to learn how to inject myself with vitamins. “It’s easy,” I was told when I raised my concerns. But in my world it was only doctors or nurses who gave injections, and only then when someone was ill.
“You can do it, Bjarne,” I told myself, the first time I was due to do it. I’d been sitting on my hotel bed for ages trying to pluck up the courage to inject the syringe full of vitamins. The syringe felt odd whichever hand I held it in, weighing up which angle of approach to use. I was thinking too much, but it was hard to actually stick a needle into your own backside, and so I gave up. After a bit of a break, I pulled myself together, stuck the needle in my buttock and pressed down the plunger. People say that the first time is the hardest. With the drama over, I was left thinking that it was nothing more than an innocent vitamin injection after all.
There were plenty of stories doing the rounds in the peloton about which riders doped, although it tended to be just whispers, hearsay and rumours. No one would admit what they were up to. There was no need to be obvious about that kind of thing. But in the first few years of my professional career, I had no idea about doping in the peloton and to what extent it went on. You heard people talking about riders who would experiment with different products, but no one seemed to have any concrete knowledge of who these riders were exactly or how they were doing it. After a while, though, I started to pay more attention to the conversations about doping that were going on – about which products people were using, how they were being administered, and who it was that could get hold of them.
The main suppliers appeared to be the teams’ soigneurs, as well as the “hangers-on”, who always seemed to be connected to different teams, and who had been on the cycling scene forever. A whole new world was about to open itself up to me, showing me a side of cycling that I maybe knew existed, but which I had perhaps subconsciously chosen to ignore. I could immediately tell that it appeared to be an accepted and integral part of the sport. My curiosity was such that I was actually tempted to find out for myself whether any of these medicines could make me a faster rider.
Pretty soon it wasn’t a question any more of whether I should try it myself, but when and how. I was still not convinced that doping could make as big a difference as some people were saying it did. But then I decided that just a small improvement would be all you needed to be in the mix at the finish, meaning better results, and in turn making you indispensable to your team. As usual, it was a drawn-out and thoroughly thought-through decision, as all important decisions were for me. In my head, I went through the arguments for and against doping. I reached the decision that I needed to try it before I could either accept or dismiss that it could make me a better rider. “I need to try it,” I told myself, already trying to justify my decision, even though deep down I knew perfectly well that it was morally wrong.
A few days later, I approached someone who was known for being able to get hold of doping products. “No problem, Bjarne,” he told me, when I told him what I was after. While I was anxious, he was the picture of calm. For him, my request was nothing out of the ordinary.
“These are what you need,” he told me, and pulled out a blister pack of 15 tablets. They looked completely harmless. “They’re easy to use,” he said, matter-of-factly. “You can just keep them in your pocket during a race. Just pop one out and swallow it with some water.”
With the pills in my trouser pocket, I hurried back to my hotel. I’d taken the first step, and it was nowhere near as bad I’d worried it would be. Back in my room, I had a proper look at the pills. It was hard to imagine that these small, unexciting-looking tablets could make me a better bike rider. They were cortisone, which relieves pain and makes you stronger.
For my next race, I put a couple of the pills in my jersey pocket. I had a chance of a good result at this particular race, and it was only for races like this that I wanted to use the pills. I let the race develop, and in the meantime reminded myself of the more specific instructions I’d received as to how and when to take the tablets: “If you’re there in the mix near the end, take two cortisone pills and a caffeine tablet – it’ll give you the power you need to do well at the finish.” My first impressions were that, sure enough, the pills did give the desired effect. I definitely felt more powerful, but it wasn’t like I was unstoppable or anything.
I was keen to test them out over a longer period to be absolutely sure that it wasn’t just some kind of psychological effect at work, thinking that I was faster just because I’d taken something. I tried a number of different types of cortisone: different pills, but also a liquid form, which I injected into a buttock, and drops, which I put under my tongue. But I remained unconvinced. It really didn’t seem to make a great deal of difference, and I began to wonder whether I simply wasn’t reacting to it. The caffeine pills that I took it with gave me cramp in my legs in one race, too. But my use of cortisone meant that the limit of what I thought was morally okay had moved forward.
At one point, I lived in a hotel room with one of the other riders from my team, who doped. One day, he brought out a big plastic tub full of all sorts of products. There were colourful ampoules, steroids, cortisone and whatever else he was able to get his hands on. He’d sit on his bed and sift through the tub like a little boy with a bowl of sweets, trying to decide which one to tuck into next. “Shall I use this one? No, that’s not right for this race. Maybe this one . . .” he’d say to himself, weighing up which product he should choose. I found it hard to believe that it was happening there in front of me. I quietly watched him as he studied each ampoule. It wasn’t like he was even offering me anything; he wanted it all for himself. The experience triggered a number of thoughts and questions in me, which I was having more and more frequently: Was this happening in all the other riders’ hotel rooms, too? Did all of my competitors have their own tub of doping products that they’d sit and sift through before every race? If that was the case, then it was pretty obvious why there were so many riders riding so much better than me all the time.
While my team-mate arranged his selection from his tub ready for the race, I was lost in my own thoughts. Perhaps the time had come to make a decision as to whether I was going to continue using what I saw as relatively harmless products, or whether I was going to graduate to the kind of stuff that was said to really make you move. Maybe the latter was what I needed if I wanted to commit to being one of the best. As things stood, it was pointless training like a madman if the others were simply getting better results than me thanks to systematic doping. But I needed to be absolutely certain that that was what I wanted. I knew myself well enough to know that when I began a new project, it had to be done properly. I was more convinced than ever of that when I watched what happened to my room-mate in the race. His own carefully put-together combination of doping products made him neither faster nor better than the rest of us.
Before anything else, though, I decided to try a stronger form of cortisone. It appeared to have a more desirable effect on me. Kenacort, as it was called, became my cortisone of choice. I lost a lot of weight and got better power in my legs, all without any side effects. It was in the run-up to the bigger races like the Giro and the Tour that I took it, and at that time it still wasn’t on the list of banned substances. Most of the time I’d just buy the ampoules myself at the chemist without a prescription, and sometimes I’d get a soigneur to get hold of it for me. But one day in autumn 1992, a rider I knew took me to one side. “Have you heard of this new stuff called EPO?” he asked me. “It works well. Perhaps you should give it a try.” The rumours were that EPO was the new wonder drug, and its use was beginning to be widespread. There was a lot of talk praising its amazing and immediate effect on performance.
I’d always been of the opinion that it was the rider who had trained the most effectively, was best prepared and who was tactically the smartest on the day who won races or did well. But it seemed as though none of that was necessary any more. Now I understood that it was those who had found the right drug who were winning races. It made me suspicious of riders who suddenly seemed to be a lot better than they were before. After a while, it became impossible to tell the difference between a rider who was doped and a rider who had trained hard and hit good form. It wasn’t so black and white any more, and I decided that it was okay for me to try EPO too, to see if it worked for me.
Mette, on the other hand, was not happy. She’d got used to me injecting myself with vitamins and minerals, but she was worried about me trying EPO. “That’s going too far,” she told me.
“But it’s something you need to do if you want to do things properly,” I said, trying to defend my decision.
“You should be careful. You don’t know what’s in all this stuff,” she warned me.
“I will be,” I promised her.
From that point on, Mette only got told what she needed to know about my doping. I protected her from it as best I could by not giving her too many details and by not letting her know to what degree I took it. But I made sure to educate myself about what EPO actually was.
EPO is an abbreviation for the hormone erythropoietin, which is produced by the kidneys and allows the body to form red blood cells. Red blood cells transport oxygen to the muscles, and the more red blood cells you have, the more oxygen the muscles get. Artificial EPO, or synthetic EPO as it’s often called, is manufactured to help patients with kidney disease, but when it’s used by athletes it helps with their endurance, allowing cyclists, for example, to ride faster for longer before they get tired. More red blood cells for a cyclist, created by the use of synthetic EPO, means that their muscles will get more oxygen – up to 10 per cent more than normal. And if that was the case, then using EPO could take me to the next level.
I bought my first ampoules of EPO from people I knew within cycling. The ampoules were small, and contained just a few millilitres of a clear liquid. I used a small insulin syringe to inject myself with it. But I was extremely careful each time I used it. If you take too much of it, your blood becomes too thick, flows slower around the body, and can give you high blood pressure or even blood clots. My first time experimenting with EPO didn’t meet with much success. In fact, it had no effect on me whatsoever.
When I looked closer at what had gone wrong, I realised that I had probably been over-cautious with how much I used, and had not used it regularly enough for it to have enough of an effect on me. More systematic, intelligent, goal-oriented training was needed if I wanted EPO to have more of an effect, so I began to note down when and how much of it I took. If I took it depending on the race calendar and organised my training around when I took it, I could make it work more effectively for me. I saw EPO as simply a tool for helping me to reach my sporting goals – a tool just like my bike, my training or my dieting. At that time, EPO still wasn’t illegal because it was so new that it wasn’t on the banned list. And there was zero risk of being caught in a doping control as there was no test for it.
During the 1993 Tour de France, the EPO I was taking had begun to take effect, and started to give me the results that people had told me it would. And that was without really even taking that much of it. It was the combination of my weight loss, serious training and systematic EPO use that made all the difference. In other words, it wasn’t the EPO alone. Losing weight meant that I simply had less mass to drag up the climbs, and I’d been able to train harder and more specifically to my goals. I was able to ride hard day after day, which had a hugely positive effect on my self-confidence, as did my improved results, and the fact that I was able to follow the world’s best riders. My results in that Tour de France demonstrated that I had moved up a level. I felt physically stronger, which meant that I believed in both myself and my strategic decisions during the race. My experiences at that 1993 Tour caused me to decide that I had no reason to stop using EPO, and any thoughts of it being morally wrong got pushed even further from my mind.
EPO use spread through the peloton, and some riders were exploring the possibility of combining its use with other doping products in an effort to improve their performance and steal a march on their rivals. From the outside, it must have looked like an unhealthy development, but for me, right in the middle of it all, it was a development that was difficult not to just run with, especially if I wanted to be able to compete with the best. It was quite extraordinary just how quickly and easily it had become the norm in the world I was working in. It wasn’t very long before the rumour was that everyone in the peloton was using EPO.
At one race I was staying at a hotel where someone had a centrifuge, which was used to measure your haematocrit level. Your haematocrit level is the measure of the amount of your blood that is made up of red blood cells. The higher your haematocrit level, the more oxygen can be delivered to your muscles. People’s haematocrit levels can vary quite a bit, but for men it would normally be between 40 and 46 per cent. Take EPO, however, and your haematocrit level will rise.
One of my team-mates was there in the room, too. We chatted while I had my haematocrit level measured, which was 47 per cent. That was an okay figure: not too high, but not too low, either. I stuck around to talk some more while he had his measured. It was 60 per cent. I couldn’t believe my eyes, but he didn’t even blink and carried on chatting as though it was nothing out of the ordinary. I didn’t show it, but I was shocked. “What on earth is going on here?” I thought to myself as I left the room.
The figure had given me something to think about. I took EPO in moderation, which would amount to taking two to three courses of it during the season, normally in the run-up to the bigger races. But here was a colleague with a markedly higher haematocrit level compared to me, and I wondered whether that meant that he took much more EPO than I did, or bigger doses, or more courses. And I wondered whether there were many other riders in the peloton who were also riding around with haematocrit levels of 60 per cent. But such speculation was pointless, as you couldn’t exactly go around the peloton asking all your colleagues what their haematocrit levels were that day. While many riders assumed that everyone was taking EPO, it wasn’t something you talked much about. It was all simply rumour, gut feeling and conjecture. “A thief thinks every man steals,” as the Danish proverb goes. That pretty much summed up how I felt.
With Gewiss-Ballan in 1994, my whole season was geared towards the Tour de France. It gave me time to gradually build my form up, lose weight, train properly and try out other doping products that might be able to be used together with EPO. Growth hormone had become popular. It was a product that stimulated muscle growth and improved the body’s ability to burn fat. A contact of mine got hold of some for me to try, but I didn’t like it. I felt as though it somehow blocked me – that my body and legs weren’t functioning properly. Maybe it worked better for other people, but it wasn’t right for me.
Still a couple of kilos overweight, but ready to go thanks to a combination of EPO and cortisone, I went to the 1994 Tour as joint team leader with Piotr Ugromov. I tried to deflect expectations of me in the lead-up to the race by playing down my chances, saying that I’d be happy to finish in the top 10.
On stage one, I was already involved in a crash when a load of riders came down with just 25km of the stage left to go. It made for a tough last part of the stage, battling not to lose too much time. By stage five, I was still suffering the after-effects of the accident, and was struggling to breathe properly. The team doctor said that I was suffering from a sinus infection, which I wasn’t able to shake off, and I struggled through the next few stages. At one point, I seriously considered quitting the race, which prompted the doctor to give me a course of penicillin in an effort to get me back to health before the race really came alive.
Stage nine was a time trial over 64km, and arguably the most important stage so far. I’d begun to feel quite a bit better by this point, with the infection on the way out of my body, and I took sixth place on the stage. I’d still lost five-and-a-half minutes to the stage winner, Miguel Indurain, however, who had massacred his closest rivals even before we’d got to the mountains. The first mountain stage, to Hautacam in the Pyrenees, was the first real test for me to find out what my form was like. No one was able to follow Indurain and my old team-mate Luc Leblanc on the final climb but, despite a late puncture, I made it to the finish in 15th place.
Following the rest day, the next stage in the Pyrenees almost sent me home. On the Col du Tourmalet – one of the toughest climbs in the Pyrenees – I feared that I was going to blow up completely. The heat had put me in difficulty: I had a stomach ache and couldn’t find my rhythm. The spectators at the roadside could tell that I was suffering, and poured water over me, which helped considerably. On the final climb, I hung on to Indurain for as long as I could, but when he upped the pace, I decided to stick to my own tempo to avoid putting myself in any more trouble. By the finish, I’d lost vital minutes, and dropped down the general classification to 18th place.
The next day was a long but flat stage to Albi, and I got into the day’s breakaway group which included Johan Museeuw, Erik Breukink and Edwig Van Hooydonck. We had a good gap back to the peloton, but there were still a number of good sprinters in the group, so I really didn’t fancy my chances if it came down to a sprint. With about 20km to go, I went on the attack. I wanted to win the stage alone. It was crazy, and perhaps downright foolhardy, but it was the only option to stop myself from being caught by the chasing bunch. A lot of the riders in our group weren’t riding strongly enough for us to keep the chasers at bay so, as I felt strong, I decided to take matters into my own hands.
Being away on my own gave me the feeling of being strong and unbeatable. The feelings that I’d had at the previous year’s Tour were coming back, and it was what I’d been looking for up until that point in the race. What wasn’t there for most of the spring had now come at the right moment. I kept the chasing group behind me, and they were eventually caught by the bunch, while I crossed the finish line pleased as punch as the winner of stage 13. Danish riders dominated the Tour that year. Bo Hamburger had already won a stage, while Rolf Sørensen won the stage the day after I did.
Bad stomach pains were cause for concern on the morning of stage 15 to Carpentras, which would take us over the fearsome Mont Ventoux. I’d actually had stomach problems since my stage win in Albi a couple of days before, and I wasn’t the only one. Other riders were suffering the same thing, which made me wonder whether there was some kind of virus going around. As we approached the climb of the Ventoux, I was beginning to feel weaker and weaker. My legs felt empty, and as a result I didn’t feel good mentally, either. I felt nauseous and, by the time we started the climb, I was locked in my own battle for survival, all dreams of a good result having gone out of the window. My team-mate, Enrico Zaina, tried his best to help me up the mountain, but I was empty. More than 15 minutes behind the stage winner, Eros Poli, I crossed the finish line in Carpentras absolutely shattered. I dropped further down the general classification as a result, and I was deeply disappointed. I finished the Tour in 14th place overall, more than 33 minutes behind the race winner, Miguel Indurain. It really wasn’t the result I’d been hoping for.
Around this time, Mette and I were on a plane travelling to Denmark. It should have been a nice, relaxed flight, during which I could have a little nap, or catch up on reading the Danish papers, but instead I sat there tense and irritable, shifting about in my seat, paranoid that all the other passengers were watching my every move. There was no doubt that I was recognised more often since doing so well at the Tour, although that’s not what was bothering me. What was bothering me was the contents of my suitcase. I couldn’t relax because my luggage contained a course of EPO packed into a miniature cool bag filled with ice and a number of syringes. The ampoules needed to be kept cold so that they didn’t go off. The thought of the customs officers going through my things and finding my secret made it impossible to relax. If I got caught with the medicines by customs, both my career and my reputation would be in tatters and the story all over the front pages of the newspapers. As I went through customs after we’d landed, I felt like I was giving off all the signs of someone with a guilty conscience. Instead, all I got was a few nods of recognition, but it was only once we were safely out at the car with our luggage that I felt that I could relax again, albeit with the feeling that this trip had put several years on me.
During the periods that I took courses of EPO, the stuff became part of our everyday life. I’d store the ampoules in the fridge, right next to the mustard, ketchup and gherkins. They were packed securely away so that curious little children’s fingers couldn’t get hold of Daddy’s things. When we had guests round, I’d take the ampoules out of the fridge and hide them in a cooler bag well out of sight.
A course of EPO normally lasted around 20 days, but you could change how much you had per day to suit you. You might take a thousand units each day, or perhaps 4,000 units every third day. How much you needed depended mainly on your weight, and you would start the course well over a month before the race you were targeting. At races, it became quite easy to spot which riders took EPO thanks to the toiletry-bag-sized cooler bag they’d be clutching when they arrived at their hotel. Many of them then quite openly went directly to the hotel bar with it. “May I have some ice cubes for this, please?” they’d ask the bartender, and fill their bags up with them before going up to their rooms. If you were mid-way through a course of EPO at the start of a stage race, you’d need to take your ampoules from hotel to hotel, which meant always having enough ice cubes, which would need refreshing a couple of times a day. The mini bars in the hotel rooms would often be full with ice cubes and ampoules. Personally, I was very careful about what I took, and recorded everything that I did. I had no desire to be careless, and neither did I feel the need to openly advertise what I was taking.
I’d buy the ampoules of EPO either with a prescription at the chemist, or through people I knew who could get hold of it for me through other channels. Because I was getting recognised more often, I didn’t dare to actually go into the chemist myself to get my EPO. Instead, I’d ask people that I trusted to get it for me, even if it meant forging a prescription in order for them to buy it. In a few cases it was riders in the peloton who were selling doping products to other riders. My impression was that the teams’ management turned a blind eye to what their riders were doing when it came to doping. I suppose that they knew what was happening but just didn’t want to know any of the details. How they actually doped varied from rider to rider. On some teams it was organised by the team doctors and the soigneurs, while on other teams it might have been an individual rider who bought the products through his connections.
I was always very cautious about where I got my EPO from. Once, though, I was convinced that it was just water in some of the ampoules I’d bought from someone. As a rule, the lids on the small ampoules were sealed, but on that occasion they weren’t. My suspicions seemed well-founded when, after a month of using that batch, there was no change in my haematocrit level at all. During a course of EPO, I’d measure my own haematocrit level using a little transportable centrifuge. All I needed to do was prick my finger and put a couple of drops of blood in the centrifuge, which spun for about five minutes, separating the blood plasma from the red blood cells, and then gave me a reading. As far as I’m aware, the highest haematocrit level I’d ever recorded was 54 per cent. On the days with a high level, my blood would be thicker and darker, although nowhere near as thick as cream or marmalade, as people have said it can be. As a precaution, I’d take aspirin during the periods I was taking EPO, which helped thin the blood and make it less risky.
Every year it cost me between 80,000 (£9,000) and 120,000 kroner (£13,500) to dope myself with EPO. It meant that I could train more – harder and for longer – and that I could recover better afterwards. The harder I could train, the better my form for the races.
Every now and again, there’d be rumours that there was a new and better drug on the way. At one race, I got a massage from a freelance soigneur who had a briefcase with him. It was open in the hotel room, and at one point I glanced over at it and saw that it contained all kinds of ampoules. Some of them even appeared to have the skull and crossbones symbol printed on them, indicating that they contained something toxic. I neither wanted to know nor try what was in those ampoules. I had no desire whatsoever to start experimenting with stuff that hadn’t been tried and tested, and which could have all sorts of terrible side effects.
“Maybe you should try Prozac,” a colleague suggested to me one day.
“What is it?” I asked.
“It’s something that will make you feel more positive,” they replied.
Prozac is an antidepressant. It sounded harmless enough, so I got hold of a blister pack of it and gave it a go in my next stage race. The pills made me feel much more positive, which allowed me to see possibilities rather than limitations. This really seemed to help at stage races, which could be very stressful mentally, and where maintaining a positive frame of mind could really help.
At the road race world championships in Sicily in August 1994, I let a group of riders get too far away from the peloton and finished ninth. Those world championships proved that I couldn’t win on EPO alone. It was pointless being doped if I was going to be half asleep in the bunch when I should have been trying to read how the race was likely to develop. It required discipline, training and ability to win races. But the decision to continue to use EPO and cortisone through my career was mine alone, and was a choice I’d made having thoroughly thought it through. No one was forcing me to swallow the pills, or holding me down while they injected me with EPO. I was choosing to inject myself, and it was a consequence of me deciding that I needed to dope in order to race at the level I wanted to compete at. It was my responsibility and no one else’s. I wasn’t proud that doping had become part of my daily routine, but it took many years before I was ready to admit that.