From the garden at our house in Vejle there was a fantastic view over the forest and the fjord. A number of ideas and strategies for the team had been conjured up while sitting in the garden.
But I had other things on my mind that afternoon in May 2007. I sat on the lawn alone other than for our dog, Oscar. My past was catching up with me – namely, my doping in the 1990s and the lies that had come with it.
A former soigneur at Telekom had written a book in which he’d revealed that systematic doping had gone on at the team in the mid-90s. An extract from the book had been given to the big German magazine Der Spiegel, and it had featured on the front cover with the title “Thick Blood”, with a picture of me and Jan Ullrich. In recent days, a number of my German colleagues from the team, including Christian Henn, Bert Dietz and Udo Bölts, had admitted doping. Telekom had now called a press conference, during which it was expected that both Erik Zabel and Rolf Aldag would also admit to having doped. Perhaps it was also time for me to do the same.
In the years since 1999, when the TV programme The Price of Silence had accused me of doping, it had acted has a hindrance to virtually everything I did. It was like having a rock in a rucksack, which just got heavier and heavier. Even though it had happened so many years ago, I was finding myself thinking about it more and more. It should have been the other way around, of course, but I wasn’t going to be allowed to forget about it. I needed to take the heavy rock out of the rucksack to lighten the load and avoid sinking into the ground – for my own sake, but also for that of my family and the team. It would perhaps give the freedom I so badly needed.
I wandered into the house and through to the living room, where I turned on the TV. On teletext I saw the headline “Zabel admits doping”. He was one of Germany’s biggest cycling stars who had won 12 stages of the Tour de France and the Tour’s green jersey as best sprinter six times. Later, I saw a clip of Zabel at the press conference. “I’m sorry that I lied for 11 years. When I read the article in Der Spiegel, I knew that it was over,” he said, and began to cry. It seemed to me that Zabel and the others were almost suggesting that they were forced to dope against their will. But that wasn’t the case at all. They were the ones who had taken the decision to dope, so I thought that they should act like grown men and take responsibility themselves for what they’d done. That applied to me, too. And now it was my turn.
Back sitting on the lawn, I thought through my decision again. I was never going to be able to escape the shadow of doping unless I was prepared to step up and admit what I’d done. I called Anne Dorthe. “I’ve decided to hold a press conference,” I told her.
“Okay,” she said. “You’re definitely sure that’s what you want to do?”
“Yeah – it’s the right time,” I said. “We’re ready for it. It’s time to let everyone know.”
“I support you,” she told me. “It’s the right thing to do, as it’s been tearing you apart. It’s time to let it out.”
Next, I called Brian Nygaard. “Are you ready?” I asked him. “It’s time. I’d like you to call a press conference, please.”
Brian knew what it was about, and set to work. The sponsors, the board, the riders and other important team contacts would need to be informed before I stood up to say my piece.
Brian and I arranged that he would call the press conference at the team’s offices in Lyngby, just outside Copenhagen, but that he’d wait to send out invitations until the evening before. “I’ve begun to prepare our strategy, but in the meantime you need to prepare what you want to say,” he told me.
It was strange to suddenly be opening up about something that had been so private but also so painful. It was a chapter of my life that I’d done everything I could to forget, and I’d tried to hide it away in a corner in order to carry on with my life. On the other hand, it was my chance to draw a line under something I really wasn’t proud of and start afresh. I felt ready to take responsibility for my actions. The accusations had followed me since the TV programme in 1999, and were a constant reminder of my past. Until then, I’d not seen any reason, or felt the need, to stand up and admit what had happened during the 1990s. I wouldn’t have been able to handle the consequences that would have affected everyone around me: my family, my friends, the team and the staff – all people who had had nothing to do with what I’d done back then. Was it right that, so many years later, they should pay for what I’d done? But after a while, it had started to affect me. Living with the secrets and lies was holding me back. During my career, Mette had often warned me against what I was doing, and so I decided to ring her to tell her what I was about to do.
“But why now?” she asked. “Why do it so many years afterwards? And do you really think that it will change anything?”
“It’s just the right time,” I told her. “Would you tell the boys for me?”
Throughout their childhood, Jesper and Thomas had known about the rumours. They had even once had someone shout “EPO pigs!” at them. Luckily, though, they’d been good at making friends who didn’t care who they were. They had grown up used to the outside world’s interest in me, and had discovered for themselves what should and shouldn’t be taken seriously. I’d never told either the boys or my dad about what I’d taken as a pro rider, as I’d never felt that I should load them or the rest of my family with such a burden.
Mentally, I’d begun to prepare myself for the kinds of questions I was going to be asked. I knew, for example, that I was going to be asked whether I regretted what I’d done. And yes, today I do regret what I did, and wish that I’d handled things differently to the way I did. But when I was in the situation at the time, and needed to decide whether to dope or not, I felt as though it was the right thing to do. It was for that reason that the press conference wasn’t going to descend into an emotional, tearful show. I was going to explain what I did, explain why I did it, and apologise for having done it. I didn’t want any sympathy from anyone.
Back then, doping had been part of the job, and the way to reach your ambitions. The choice to dope was mine. No one had made me do it. Everyone who injected themselves with EPO knew that they were doping, and doping was against the rules, so I couldn’t see why people were revealing what they did and then breaking down in tears 10 years later as though they hadn’t been master of their own lives and decisions. That just gave mixed messages.
Before the press conference, I went through the accusations made against me by the Telekom soigneur Jef D’Hont, who’d published his book earlier in the year. According to the book, Jef was known in the peloton as “Jef Waterbottle” because he had created an energy drink containing doping products. The drink apparently made riders stronger, but couldn’t be detected by any tests. In the book, Jef said that during the 1996 Tour I’d once had a haematocrit level of 64 per cent, but that wasn’t true, and I’d decided that I was going to say as much in the press conference. He had also written:
Riis could be a nice guy sometimes, but he would never give up his EPO. It’s true that the product was already popular in the bunch, but he really pushed it on. Thanks to Riis, its use escalated quickly and frighteningly.
During the Tour, Riis took 4,000 units of EPO every second day and two units of growth hormone, which was double the normal dose. There was no risk of him being caught by the drugs tests, as it simply wasn’t possible to detect those products at that time.
I’d never had any respect for Jef, and that was unlikely to ever change with the revelations he’d come out with. He doped riders himself, mixing all sorts of things together to give to young riders and injecting others with God knows what, and yet here he was acting as though he was the sport’s big saviour. That wasn’t how it was going to be with me. My confession was enough in itself – I wasn’t going to try to take anyone down with me. No one else should have to suffer the consequences of what I’d done. They’d have to make up their own mind whether they were ready or needed to say anything. It had taken me the eight years since the TV programme to get to this point and be ready to put the past behind me, and so I didn’t want my confession to force anyone to have to come forward if they themselves weren’t ready to do so.
I rang Brian and told him my thoughts. “I don’t want to sit there and say which riders did what, which directeurs sportifs knew what or which doctors took care of what,” I told him. It wasn’t my responsibility, nor my desire, to point out others and say, “They did it, too,” or, “He was the one who got hold of it for me.” It needed to be their own decision to talk about what they’d done.
I also rang the chairman of our team’s board, Henrik Schlüter, to inform him of my decision.
“That’s fine, Bjarne,” he said. “I’ll support you all the way.”
But there was someone who needed to know before anyone else. Someone who it was going to really hurt. Someone who had supported me all along, and who had hoped that it was the people accusing me of things who were wrong. My biggest fan. I wandered up to the annex where my father was busy fixing something or other. He had seen the confessions made by my German team-mates and could no doubt tell by my expression what I was about to tell him. “I’m going to go on television in the next few days and tell the truth,” I said.
He nodded, silently.
“I wanted you to know before anyone else.”
“Yes.”
“Could you look after the house for us while we’re in Copenhagen, please?”
“Yes, of course. I’d love to.”
There was no reason for either of us to say any more. He knew that I knew that this was painful for him, but that he supported me whatever I did. He didn’t say so, but I could tell that he didn’t think I should do it.
The next morning, Henrik and I drove to Copenhagen to meet Brian at one of his friend’s apartments. We went through our plan, and tried to guess the kinds of questions I’d be asked at the press conference, and tried to decide what kind of answers I’d give. We told our sponsors what was going to happen and, as far as we could tell, it didn’t say anything in the contracts with them about me standing up and talking about my past, so we had to hope that there wouldn’t be any problems in that respect. We rang Carlos and the Schleck brothers, Frank and Andy, and told them what was going to happen at the press conference, and then talked through all the different scenarios that could present themselves at the press conference, down to the last detail.
“You can expect the journalists to go really hard on you,” Brian said.
“I’m ready for that,” I said. I genuinely felt confident, resolved and mentally ready.
“They’ll also see it as a victory,” Brian continued. “It’ll be a case of, ‘We won and you lied.’ That’s how they’re going to think.”
His phone was going off constantly. The invitations to the press conference had been sent out, and a number of journalists had got an inkling of what was going to happen. Both DR and TV2 were going to broadcast the press conference live.
“That’s perfect,” said Brian. “If it’s on live television, then you’ll get to deliver your message and tell it like it was yourself. There won’t be any room for any commentators to give their interpretation; the viewers will be able to form their own opinion.”
“What’s the worst that can happen?” I said.
“That no one comes,” Brian laughed.
Henrik, Brian and I all agreed that I should be completely honest when confessing what I’d done.
“You’ll need to say exactly what you took,” said Brian.
“Does it matter?” I asked.
“Yes – as there shouldn’t be any more questions when the press conference is over,” Brian answered.
Both the team and I needed to be able to move on after the confession. We could decide what I was going to say, and how I was going to say it, but how other people were going to receive it was out of our control. None of us there in that apartment were in any doubt that the press conference was crucial to the team’s future. The worst-case scenario was that I’d have to step down as the owner.
In the hours leading up to the press conference, I relaxed in one of the rooms at our HQ in Lyngby, trying to prepare myself mentally. It seemed like a bit of a relief already – relief that my secret would soon be out in the open and I’d be able to move on with my life. The newspapers were full of speculation as to what it was I was going to announce, and a lot of them had printed reminders of the times over the years that I’d denied having used banned substances. The press had completely taken over our offices in Lyngby, with TV vans and trucks outside, and a huge number of photographers and journalists, many of whom had come early to secure themselves places in the front few rows.
Anne Dorthe was smuggled in through the back door and came to find me. “How are you doing?” she asked.
“I’m nervous about how it’s going to be received,” I admitted.
“You have nothing to be ashamed of,” she reassured me. “No matter what, there’s no one who can take your career away from you. Remember, that was how things were back then.”
Her support gave me a real lift.
“What you do and say in the future is going to have a lot more clout once you have said what you need to say,” she said.
I couldn’t help the tears welling up in my eyes as my feelings began to overwhelm me in the last few minutes before the start of the press conference.
“Go in there and be strong,” Anne Dorthe told me. “You don’t need to be unhappy about anything. It’s a very brave thing you’re doing, going in there and saying how things were.”
BS, Brian Holm and a number of other familiar faces were there to support me and to be available for the media. Anne Dorthe gave me a hug before I went into the conference room. “Be strong,” she said.
I had a few notes written down on a piece of paper and had gone through it a couple of times. Now I needed to show that strength that Anne Dorthe said I was in possession of when faced with adversity.
“Are you ready?” asked Brian.
I nodded.
The photographers clicked away as we went into the room and sat down in front of everyone.
Brian kicked things off. “Welcome, everyone. I hope you find this exciting, interesting and useful.”
As arranged, I then took over. “Good to see everyone. I have a statement that I’d like to read out. It will take a little while, but I’m sure you’ve got time to wait,” I said, and looked out over the sea of sweating journalists.
Apart from the sound of the photographers’ cameras, it was completely silent. “The time has come to lay my cards on the table,” I said. “I rode as a pro during the time that the sport was the way it was. I did things that I now regret, and which I wouldn’t have done today. I’m now ready to acknowledge my mistakes.”
My feelings started to bubble up inside, but I stayed focused and retained my façade of composure.
“I doped,” I said, and paused.
“I took EPO,” I continued, as the photographers clicked away.
I’d said it – my secret was out, and I went on to explain that I had doped between 1993 and 1998.
“It was part of my daily routine,” I explained. “But I take full responsibility for my actions. I bought the drugs myself and it was my choice to take them. I’m sorry for the doctors that have been embroiled in this, but at the end of the day I am the only one who can be held responsible for saying yes or no to actually doping.”
The general atmosphere in the room was respectful, and I was asked the kind of questions we’d expected and that I was prepared for. I began to feel more relaxed, even though I was laying my feelings on the line.
“I thought that the past could be the past, but that isn’t the case. So I want to say that I’m sorry.”
Someone asked how I now felt about my 1996 Tour victory, and the huge homecoming held for me at Tivoli Gardens in central Copenhagen when I returned home to Denmark.
“I feel okay about it. I’m proud of my results, even if they weren’t earned in an entirely honest way.”
“So you still think you’re a worthy winner of the Tour de France?” someone else asked.
“No – I’m probably not,” I answered. “But I’ll leave it up to you to be the judge of that.”
The press continued to be fair with their questions, with a German journalist the only one to turn nasty. Maybe he had expected the same kind of show that he’d seen in Germany, but he wasn’t going to get that from me. The tears were only close to coming when I was asked how it felt to tell those close to me that I had doped – and I thought of my father, who I knew was at home watching on TV.
But I kept my composure, and replied that it had been hard.
“My only comfort is that the people who know me best are there to support me,” I said. “I made mistakes, and did things that were and are banned. I take full responsibility for that. I’m part of a sport that is, I feel, now changing for the better. If that development hadn’t happened, then I’m pretty sure that I wouldn’t have been here revealing what I am today.”
I was asked whether I intended to remain in cycling.
“I’ve chosen to be part of this sport, and I believe that I have a reasonably influential role within it,” I said. “At least, it’s my ambition to be influential, in which case it’s probably appropriate for me to have resolved things when it came to my past so that I can move forward.
“I have so much to give to my team and to the sport,” I continued, “yet lately I haven’t been in the best position to do that because I’ve just not had the energy. But I’m faced with two choices. Either I can give it all up, and disappear from the sport, away from the spotlight, and just live a quiet life with no media attention. Or I can stay and do what I need to do for the team to stay on track and for me to get my energy back to work on the project, which I think is the world’s best cycling project, and in itself deserves recognition and respect.”
“But have you not considered that you might not be able to continue on the team after this?” I was asked.
“If everyone thinks that I should pack up and leave, then I’ll do that – that’s fine,” I said. “I just don’t think that that’s any kind of solution, though. I just hope that people can recognise that cycling needs people like me – someone who dares to do things differently, and who has the courage and the willingness to fight for something that everybody wants.”
“Is what happened in Germany the reason for you to be sitting here today, or has this been something that you’ve been planning for a while?” a journalist asked.
“Sitting here today is something I’ve imagined many times,” I answered. “But it was also a question of timing – of doing it at the right time.”
Brian had decided that the press conference should be “open ended” in that the journalists could keep asking questions until they didn’t have any more to ask. A lot of them focused on who had provided me with the products, what role the team doctors had played and who else had been involved. Each time, though, I repeated that I was the only one responsible for what I’d done. Some journalists were after my adviser and coach, Luigi Cecchini, who had been the subject of a number of stories. The truth was, in his time as my personal trainer he had never given me any banned products nor written me out any prescriptions for any. And since it was me who had decided to hold the press conference, Cecchini shouldn’t be involved in any respect. He’d been through enough already.
“Yes, I have cheated and lied about what I did,” I said, “and that was wrong – I know that now. But that’s not how it was back then. Doping was part of the scene that I was part of.”
Someone asked how high my haematocrit had been when I won the Tour.
“I don’t remember exactly, but it was high enough to win,” I said.
“Do you think your Tour win might be taken away from you after this?” I was asked.
“I’ve not thought about that at all,” I replied. “My yellow jersey is lying in a cardboard box at home in my garage, and can be collected if anyone thinks I shouldn’t have it any more.”
“What do you think about your own credibility?” I was asked.
“I can’t force you to believe that I’m telling the truth, but I’ll just have to live with that,” I said.
The questions had begun to dry up, but the TV crews were trying to draw it out so that I’d appear live on their news programmes. Before we finished, though, I had one last message for the Danes watching at home. “I want to say sorry, but despite everything, I still hope you enjoyed watching me ride. I did my best,” I said.
That was how I saw it. I did what I had to do to compete with the world’s best riders at that time. That was the truth, whether people liked it or not. As one of my former colleagues from the cycling world back then once said to me: “You had to choose between being at one end of the ladder or the other. You chose to be at the top end – and I would have done the same, of course.”
After the press conference, Anne Dorthe kissed me, with tears in her eyes. “It’s over now, and you did brilliantly,” she told me.
Once the media had all left, I sat and drank a beer in the canteen with the team staff, who had helped set everything out for the press conference. The text messages started to come ticking in, but one in particular gave me a lump in my throat. It was from Jesper and Thomas:
“Well done, Dad – we’re proud to be your sons.”
Their response meant everything to me. How the public, press and those within the sport reacted was out of my hands; the most important thing was that those closest to me understood the reasons why I did what I did. I didn’t need them to approve of it, but just wanted them to accept that I stood by what I did, and that I assumed full responsibility for it.
In the car on the way home to Vejle, I was even quieter than normal. In my head, I was going through every single minute of the press conference, but I felt relieved. It was as though I’d had a heavy burden lifted from my shoulders.
Plenty of experts and commentators didn’t think that I’d shown much repentance at the press conference. It irritated me that they had to show off with their oh-so-wise opinions at my expense. What did they know about how I was feeling inside? I had spent almost 10 years of my life wondering how people would react if I admitted what had happened. I’d thought long and hard about how people would see me afterwards, so don’t say that I didn’t care when I said “sorry”.
When we arrived back home in Vejle, my dad told me that a load of photographers and journalists had turned up on the driveway while the press conference was going on on the TV, and he’d had to tell them to go away.
On the Saturday morning after the press conference, I quietly took myself off into the forest to chop down some trees and split some logs, and Dad came and joined me with a quiet “hello”. We didn’t say much to each other, but I was lost in my own thoughts anyway, going through what had happened in the past couple of days. Dad didn’t say anything directly about my confession, but I could tell that it had been painful for him – and some of the reactions in the papers, which he’d gone out and bought, had hit him hard. “I want you to know that I’m always here for you, no matter what,” he told me.
Whilst we chopped wood, I just wanted him to tell me how he really felt about what I’d done. But he didn’t. He was just so loyal. Brian called me. He’d read all the papers – both the Danish ones and the international ones. “It all looks okay,” he said. “It’s pretty much what we expected.”
Dad and I stopped our work in the garden and I headed inside to check my emails. There were hundreds of them, and I read as many as I could. By far the majority of them were positive, with only four negative ones among the 500 or so mails I’d received. My next task was to take a look at the papers. They made for some tough reading. The reaction was aggressive, and it was clear that some journalists had waited 10 years or more for my confession. I’m not sure what I had expected, but I must admit that the reactions really hurt. Beneath the headline “You Cheated Us, Bjarne,” Ekstra Bladet’s cycling correspondent, Lars Werge, had written:
What you must understand is that it’s not so terrible for Bjarne Riis. He made his own choice – like he said himself – and that was to trick us all. Admitting what he did this late means nothing – the time for forgiveness has long since passed.
In Jyllands Posten, Christian Thye-Petersen wrote:
Listening from the sidelines, it sounded as though Bjarne Riis just wanted to get this over with, as there was no way back for him if he wanted to be left in peace to run his team.
So he gave what one could call a major confession with a minimal apology, triggered by events in Germany which left Riis, metaphorically speaking, with a gun against his head. But it was good that he did it.
The international press also commented on my confession. In the German newspaper Bild, their commentator had written:
Bjarne Riis proved to be the biggest doping cheat of them all. His confession will have shocked his many Danish fans.
And the New York Times, too, wrote about the press conference:
He was a national hero in the small Nordic nation of Denmark, with its proud cycling tradition. Now Bjarne Riis has revealed that he was a doper.
After reading what the papers had to say about me, I just wanted to hide myself away and lick my wounds. It had been a relief to say my piece, but it was also a psychologically stressful confession. It was a huge confession to make in front of a whole nation, and it had been such a painful thing to have had to hide for so many years. But no matter what the reaction had been, Brian and I had agreed that it would be best for me to keep a low profile – both for the team’s and my sake.
For the following few weeks, I barely went out of the house – at most taking a little walk in the area around the house. A number of journalists tried to get hold of me via the intercom at the front door, but I politely got rid of them each time. I had nothing to add to what I’d already said at the press conference.
The new Tour de France race director, Christian Prudhomme, reacted strongly to my confession. He said that I wasn’t a worthy winner of the race in 1996, and that he was considering removing my name from the list of winners. The Frenchman’s condemnation hit me hard, but it was what he said about my role as a team owner that hurt me even more.
“He’s cheated, and so I ask myself whether he deserves to run a big cycling team today,” he said.
Brian and I discussed what the Tour boss’s reaction meant for our team. “Maybe I should stay away from the Tour this year,” I suggested. That would be the worst punishment I could imagine – deserting the team for the world’s biggest race of the year.
“Let’s just wait and see what happens,” said Brian. “Let’s not make any hasty decisions.”
I travelled back to Switzerland to our house in Lugano and turned my phone off for a while. All attempts to contact me were ignored, and Brian took care of all communications. On a ride around the area near our house, I thought a lot about whether my confession had changed anything. Had I found peace with myself when it came to my past? Had the sport become cleaner? Were the critics, the teams and the sport willing to move on from here?
In truth, there probably wasn’t too much that had changed. There were still going to be riders who cheated – just like there were no doubt cheats in other sports. But you could change the past in a number of ways. My way was to introduce the anti-doping programme to the team, run by Rasmus. It showed that there was a willingness to create a cleaner sport. Maybe revealing what I’d done would help young athletes who faced the same choices as I had. Maybe they’d think that doping wasn’t the right way for them to reach their goals. It’s when faced with that choice of whether to step over that line the first time that an athlete has to be strong. Stronger than I was. Once you’d said yes to doping, like I did at the start of the 1990s, there was no way back.
My confession was hopefully the start of a process whereby I’d start looking at my life in a different way. A new beginning. My life had become easier because I didn’t need to hide anything any more. That heavy stone had been taken out of my rucksack.
At least, those were my thoughts on a good day. I also experienced a number of bad days in the aftermath of what I’d done. There would be days when I’d just sit in the office feeling completely drained of energy. I’d imagined that there was going to be a real moment of forgiveness – an understanding of why I did what I did. But it didn’t happen.
The Tour de France organisers still hadn’t announced whether I was welcome at the 2007 race. I hadn’t expected them to react the way they did, and it was as though they didn’t recognise the anti-doping measures I’d implemented within my team.
Brian and I met to talk about how we should handle the situation. Even though he tried to hide it, he was clearly surprised at just how unhappy I looked. “Are you ready to go to the Tour?” he asked me.
“I really don’t know,” I answered, honestly.
Brian knew me better than most, and it would only take him a few seconds to read my mood. I had no desire to abandon my big project, but at the same time I couldn’t subject the team, the riders and the sponsors to the negative publicity that me being there with them at the Tour could bring. The riders had prepared themselves for the event for months, so I didn’t want anything to take away from their efforts. Neither did I want to go to the race if I wasn’t welcome.
“How are you feeling?” Brian asked. “Be honest.”
There were tears in my eyes. I probably wasn’t in the right frame of mind ahead of such an important task. I was more ready for a holiday far away from the Tour de France than I was to be a leader and an inspiration.
“Are you ready to talk about doping every single day for three weeks?” Brian asked.
The year before we’d had to send Ivan home before the race had even started because of Operacion Puerto. Now, after my confession, it was very likely that I would be constantly asked about doping.
“No, I don’t really fancy that,” I replied.
Emotionally, I was feeling completely run down and really not ready to field more questions from journalists.
“If that’s how you’re feeling, then I don’t think you should go to the Tour,” he said.
“No,” I said, holding back the tears. It was the right decision, but it gave me a horrible feeling in my stomach.
Anne Dorthe and I travelled to London for the start of the 2007 Tour, where we checked in to a different hotel to the team. We went to a reception held by CSC, where I informed them that I wasn’t going to be with the team during the race. The worst part of it was still to come, though: telling the riders and the staff that I wasn’t going to be there with them in the team car. I gathered them all together after the reception for what was an emotional moment for me. “Guys,” I began, looking around at them all, with tears in my eyes. “I don’t feel up to the task of being able to lead you here on the race, and don’t want to remove the focus on the team with my presence.”
The riders respected my decision but said that they were going to miss me. For the prologue time trial, I sat in the grandstand with the sponsors. But I wanted to be with the riders to see them off, so I wandered down to where they were warming up. The photographers were all there ready to get a picture of me with my riders, and they got it. No one was going to stop me waving them off properly.
Our Swiss time trial specialist, Fabian Cancellara, won the prologue so would start the first stage from London in the yellow jersey. I then left England with my family for a holiday in the Seychelles. Anne Dorthe and the kids were pleased to be able to spend July with me for once, as it was a month that I normally spent travelling around France.
During the race I was in regular contact with Brian and directeur sportif Kim Andersen who kept me up to date with the race, how the team was getting on and to get my opinion on tactics if need be.
Fabian also won the third stage, and held on to the yellow jersey all the way until stage seven.
I should have been pleased, but I didn’t really feel that way. I couldn’t help thinking about one thing: next year I was going to be back at the Tour with my team, and we were going to make a real impact.