The hotel room was small and smelled of sweaty cycling clothes, and we were tired after a day of training in the mountains. As cyclists, we were used to living in cramped conditions like this, and were quick to find something positive in the small space that we, two grown men, had to fit into. “At least we each have our own bed,” we laughed to each other.
Carlos Sastre and I were sharing a room for a night in a hotel in the French Alps. We were on a combined training-camp-meets-reconnaissance-trip ahead of the 2008 Tour de France. Carlos was one of two captains for the race, along with Frank Schleck. Frank’s little brother, Andy, had potential as a future podium finisher but was still a bit too young and inexperienced. The Schleck brothers were good fun, approachable and well-liked on the team, as well as being extremely talented bike riders. Both were excellent climbers but still lacked a little physical power to really be considered at the top of their game yet. They had grown up on our team. They knew the team’s values and were exactly the kind of riders that I’d been trying to create on the team.
The purpose of the few days in the Alps with Carlos was for me to help fine tune his form for the mountains, where the race’s key stages would take place. But it was also important to get the team’s top riders to work well together, to be able to communicate with each other and to be committed to doing what was best for the team. The Schleck brothers and Carlos had been at odds with each other on multiple occasions. Small power games, jibes and disagreements, which, if left unresolved, could grow into something bigger and more damaging to the team. They needed to understand that they needed each other if they wanted to get the best out of the race.
In April I’d already asked Kim Andersen to do something about the situation, as it was his responsibility to handle any friction. The three of them each had their quirks, and each of them was convinced that their way of doing things was the best and only way. Carlos was particularly headstrong, and could argue for hours about the smallest things, and it was almost impossible to change his mind and convince him that there were alternative choices when it came to equipment, training routes or race tactics. “Yes, Bjarne, but . . .” he’d often say in his charming, Spanish-accented English before he put forth his argument.
Sometimes we’d had to talk things through. Carlos had often tried to run the show on his own. He didn’t want to race in the same events as the others and didn’t want to go on training camps with the other riders. They were some of the problems we talked about that evening in the hotel room. We talked about the episode that spring, when Carlos, Andy and Frank had been at loggerheads. And we talked about the results of Rasmus Damsgaard’s anti-doping work with our team, and about how widespread the doping problem still was within the peloton. “How widespread do you think it still is, Bjarne?” Carlos asked me.
“No doubt there are still some riders in the peloton who are doping,” I said.
“Yes, but don’t you think they’ll get caught?”
“According to Rasmus Damsgaard, it is very hard to dope and not get caught these days, yes,” I replied.
For the past couple of years, I’d been very wary when it came to talking to my riders about the subject of doping, as there was always a risk of being misunderstood or misinterpreted. All the more so when one of my former riders, the German Jörg Jaksche, told the press about a conversation we’d had in 2006 during his time with the team. Jörg had asked me a lot about what the doping situation had been like “back then in the 1990s”. I told him a few stories about how things were. And we discussed a particular cortisone product that I had used when I was riding. He later completely twisted our conversation in an interview he did with Der Spiegel, who had paid him to tell them the story about his own doping during his career.
Since then, I hadn’t wanted to talk to my riders too much about it, and so I quickly changed the topic of conversation with Carlos in the hotel room. We talked instead about our families, our dreams and our plans for the future. When it came to the Tour de France, we had the same dream: Carlos wanted to win it as a rider, while I wanted to win it as a team manager. “With the route as it is this year, it’ll be the most consistent rider who wins it,” I told Carlos. “If you can get a good gap on your rivals by winning a stage in the mountains, then you’ve got a good chance of taking yellow all the way to Paris.” He listened to me with a look in his eye that suggested that he knew that this year was the year that he had the greatest chance of finishing on the podium. It would perhaps be the biggest and only chance of his career, as there weren’t that many really tough competitors that he’d be up against, our team was strong and he’d put in the required amount of training on the right kind of terrain. “You have the opportunity to go right to the top,” I told him, honestly.
“Thanks, Bjarne,” he replied. “I’ll do my best.”
The only problem was that you never really knew where you were with Carlos – at least, that was my experience after the six years he’d ridden for me on the team.
“Good night, Bjarne,” he mumbled, tired from the tough day in the mountains and our conversation, which had got both of us thinking about a number of things.
As he fell asleep, I stayed awake thinking about the time back in 2001 when Laurent Jalabert had introduced me to Carlos. “Here’s the guy you need on your team, Bjarne,” Laurent had told me, pushing forward the small, slender climber who rode for ONCE at that point. With dark circles under his eyes, and with almost grey, withered skin, Carlos introduced himself to me with a “hallo”. He didn’t speak any English. Immediately, it was hard to imagine the little Spanish mountain goat as a future star on my team. But Jalabert had highly recommended him having ridden with him at ONCE, and their team manager, Manolo Saiz, tended to be pretty good at spotting potential in riders.
While with the Spanish outfit, Carlos had only been used as a domestique, but with us he’d also been given his own chance to ride. But could we get the team to ride as a unit, and get him to really believe in himself?
On the training camp in the Alps, Carlos was focused and went about riding himself into form. On his best days, he rode with an easy pedal stroke, an elegant climber’s style. He was a real talent, and someone you didn’t really have to help much to make him really good and release his potential. Occasionally we had to talk to Carlos to remind him to ride enough kilometres in training, but he always had an explanation or excuse ready. “Listen, Bjarne – I live in the mountains. High up. The air’s thinner, and there are lots of mountains, and that’s why I don’t need to train as much as the others,” he told me one day.
“What about your speed, though, Carlos? You’re not training at a high enough average speed,” I replied.
“That’ll come on its own, Bjarne. The roads around here are a lot rougher, and so it’s not possible to ride at such a high speed as on the other roads,” he said, by way of explanation.
Our conversations were a kind of battle. If I recommended a certain type of training, he’d argue that he should do the opposite. If I thought he should raise his saddle a couple of millimetres, we’d have a long conversation that would end with him keeping it the way it was. In my opinion, all his excuses were down to him not wanting any kind of structure or system to his training; that he just wanted to ride on feel alone. I also thought that he was perhaps worried about not living up to expectations – both his own and everyone else’s. And so he dismissed what might be best for him in order to reduce the amount of expectation. But if we really thought that we had the chance to get Carlos into yellow, then we needed to stop with the bad excuses. Every time we’d worked out a plan for a stage which put some form of expectation on his shoulders, he’d always try to talk his way out of doing it. In our morning meetings just before a stage or a race when we’d work out our tactics, he’d always doubt that we were in a good enough position to actually pull off what was planned, and would try to find the problem with our tactics. He’d finish things off with a “Let’s wait and see tomorrow” rather than “Yes – let’s give it a go.” So this time I’d decided to treat him a little differently in the build-up to, and during, the Tour. I was going to push him and provoke him to take chances, even though there was that risk that he could fail or lose everything. I’d decided to take a leaf out of my old directeur sportif at Ariostea Giancarlo Ferretti’s book who used to provoke me in order to make me dare to take chances.
Carlos and I cut short our training camp in the mountains because of bad weather, and I persuaded him to come to stay at my house in Switzerland in order to train a bit more.
The first half of the year had been a great success for us, with Fabian Cancellara winning Milan-San Remo, Tirenno-Adriatico and two stages of the Tour of Switzerland. Jens Voigt had got us a stage win at the Giro d’Italia, Chris Anker Sørensen got his first professional stage win at the Dauphiné Libéré and Frank Schleck had finished second at Amstel Gold. Results like those gave us good international coverage, and it was much needed. Our main sponsor, CSC, had decided to pull out at the end of the year, and so we were on the hunt for a replacement. But there was a lot of competition. Other teams like Crédit Agricole, Gerolsteiner, High Road and Slipstream were also looking for main sponsors, and ideally we all wanted a big, international company to come in. We’d been in negotiations with the Danish investment bank, Saxo Bank, for some time. They were officially a European bank, with offices in London, Geneva, Zurich, Singapore and Marbella. Its head offices were in Copenhagen, and it was owned by Kim Fournais and Lars Seier Christensen. Already in some of our earlier meetings, I could tell that we were a good match. They were ambitious when it came to sponsorship, and were keen for international exposure. If we could agree terms, they wanted to try to get onto our jerseys in time for the Tour de France, rather than wait until the new season. We agreed on a two-and-a-half year contract, which gave us the security we needed for the team.
At the press conference in Copenhagen to announce the new agreement at the start of June, there were big smiles all round. We knew that there were going to be questions about my doping confession, and about what conditions they had had written into the contract in case of there being a doping case on the team. “Bjarne is part of the front line in the fight against doping, and were we not confident that that was the case, then we wouldn’t be sitting here today,” Lars Seier Christensen told the media.
“It’s not in our nature to look back,” the bank director continued, “but I think that we’re well equipped to deal with anything that might come along.”
When I arrived at the start of the 2008 Tour de France in Brest, it was with butterflies in my stomach. The last time I’d led my team at the Tour was the horrific 2006 edition, when we’d had to send Ivan home before the race had even started. Since my doping confession, there were a number of people who thought that I didn’t deserve to come back to the race, and that I should stay away forever. Among them was the seven-time Tour winner Lance Armstrong, who told Procycling magazine that CSC-Saxo Bank and I should be sent home. The background for this was that the organisers hadn’t invited the Kazakh team Astana to the race after their star rider, Alexandre Vinokourov, had tested positive on the race the year before. Armstrong thought that if the organisers were going to kick Astana out, then they ought to also kick us out, too. No doubt his thoughts were fuelled by the fact that his former team manager, Johan Bruyneel, was now the boss at Astana. But that was their problem. I’d decided that the best way for me to come back to the race was to provide the organisers with a clean winner. Carlos was our candidate for the podium, while Frank and Andy would try for the top 10. Fabian Cancellara was our card to play for the prologue and the time trials, while Jens Voigt, Kurt Asle Arvesen, Nicki Sørensen and Stuart O’Grady would look after Carlos, Frank and Andy. We did our best to have a quiet, relatively easy first half of the race, and then my plan was to really go for it from around the halfway mark.
During the briefing ahead of the Hautacam stage, I went through our tactics for the day. “Here’s what we’re going to do . . .” I said, with a confidence that I hoped would rub off on the riders.
And it did. The team delivered the goods. We showed what we could accomplish when we worked together. We controlled the bunch, and put riders in all the right breakaways. Fabian got into the day’s main break, which got a big lead, just as I’d said would happen in the meeting. The goal was to make the other teams work in order to tire them out before we really put our plan into action once we got to the Hautacam.
Jens set a vicious tempo up the Col du Tourmalet, which dropped Alejandro Valverde and a number of the other big names, and then on the flatter section in the lead-up to the final climb, Jens and Fabian – who had dropped back from the break in order to help – again gave it absolutely everything in order to soften everyone up before delivering Carlos and Frank to the foot of the Hautacam. Those two then took it in turns to attack on the climb, putting pressure on race favourites such as Cadel Evans and Denis Menchov. Frank went off the front with the two Saunier Duval riders, Cobo and Piepoli, but wasn’t able to follow them in the last couple of kilometres, and he finished third, just a single second away from taking the yellow jersey. Sastre came home seventh, and Evans took over the overall race lead. What we needed next was a stage victory, and Kurt Asle was the man for that on stage 11 to Foix. The Norwegian did what he did best and got himself into a break, and fought it out with the remnants of the group on the line, just beating Martin Elmiger and Alessandro Ballan to take the stage victory by a whisker. The stage win gave us a real confidence boost and thrilled our sponsors, who got the publicity they were after.
By that point, the Italian Saunier Duval rider, Riccardo Ricco, had won two stages, but the talk was that he’d won them a little too easily. The reason for that became apparent halfway through the race: Ricco was caught out in a dope test, just as Liquigas’s Manuel Beltran and Moises Duenas of Barloworld had been already in the race so far. Ricco’s Saunier Duval squad chose to pull out of the race, while the papers were filled with talk of doping. At Duenas’s hotel, the police had found various banned products and medical equipment, including syringes, needles and blood bags.
On our team the conflict between the Schleck brothers on one side and Carlos on the other began to boil over. Things were tense between them, and none of them knew where they stood with each other. Carlos had the feeling that the brothers were only riding for each other and not to help him win. The brothers told him that he was imagining it. Carlos sent a few taunts their way, but was then touchy when the two boys from Luxembourg gave as good as they got. The press had got wind of the unrest, and wanted to know more. They asked who the leader was – Carlos or Frank? – and I talked a good game. “We’ll have to see what happens, and see how each of them is riding,” I said. “We’ve got a plan, but plans can change. You need to have more than just one. We’ll just go with my gut feeling.”
Jens Voigt was a little more honest than me when he was asked who decided whether the team should ride for Carlos or Frank. “That’s up to the man who pays the bills,” the German smiled.
The situation actually threatened to split the team if it got out of hand. There was a risk that the other riders would get involved, and it would ruin everything if people started choosing sides or forming little cliques. I decided, therefore, that I needed to call a meeting between Frank and Carlos. “Guys, we’re riding to win,” I reminded them at our hotel. Frustration had built up on both sides, and so we tried to talk through what the problems were.
“I just feel like they’re not riding enough for me,” said one of them.
“That’s not true,” said the other.
It played out like that for a while until after few minutes I’d had enough. “Listen, boys,” I said. “If you’re not able to work it out yourselves, then I’ll have to give you some clear orders.”
During a stage race, it’s quite easy for a rider to go into their own little world, making it difficult to sometimes see the bigger picture. And that means that silly, unimportant little things can sometimes grow completely out of proportion. If that became the case, then it was my job to give the riders some perspective. “Together, we’re stronger than anyone else, so let’s work together,” I said, putting an end to the 20-minute meeting. Frank and Carlos promised that they’d concentrate on working together instead of fighting against each other.
The mountain stage on Sunday 20 July was the stage I’d decided we were going to use to try to get the yellow jersey. On the 183km stage to Prato Nevoso, we took charge of the bunch with 40km to go. Fabian, Stuart, Jens and Nicki went to the front and upped the pace. Once on the climb, Andy took over and split the group up. Carlos, Denis Menchov and Bernhard Kohl jumped away from the other favourites with 4km to go. Frank also attacked Cadel Evans in the yellow jersey and managed to steal nine seconds from the Australian, which was enough to take the jersey. Carlos ended the day in sixth place overall, just 49 seconds down on Frank. It had become a really dramatic race, with six riders still in the hunt for victory, with just a few seconds separating them all. It meant that we needed to focus if we wanted to stand on the top step in Paris. At the hotel that evening we could be rightly pleased with the situation as it was: Frank had the yellow jersey, and both of our captains were in strong positions.
Three days later came the stage to the legendary Alpe d’Huez. It was the race’s “queen stage” with three hors catégorie – “beyond category” – climbs, which made it a day that would definitely go a long way to deciding the Tour. If anyone could get a big enough gap over the others to take the yellow jersey on Alpe d’Huez, then they’d have a good chance of holding it all the way to Paris.
At the morning meeting, I pressed Frank and Carlos to show some initiative and leadership. The others on the team would give that much more if their leaders took responsibility. “Anyone got any ideas about how we can win today?” I asked. “What do you think, Frank?”
His reply was defensive both in attitude and tactically.
“What about you, Carlos? What should we do today?” I asked.
“Win the stage on Alpe d’Huez,” he said, without hesitation. It was that kind of willingness to take a risk that I wanted to see from him.
We left the team in the capable hands of Fabian, who came to the front and smashed the race apart on the penultimate climb and on towards the final ascent of Alpe d’Huez. Once on the lower slopes of the last climb, it was up to Nicki, Kurt and Fabian, still, to lead the race at breakneck speed, making it too difficult for any of our nearest rivals to get away off the front. Then, while Menchov, Evans and the others concentrated on Frank in the yellow jersey, Carlos went on the attack and gave them something else to think about. No one could follow his easy climber’s pedal stroke. At that point, I had to make a decision in the team car: was I going to stay with Frank because I thought he could keep hold of the yellow jersey, or was it more likely that Carlos would be able to get such a big gap that he’d be able to secure the overall classification now? I decided to leave Frank in his yellow jersey behind and drove up to Carlos to support him. “Come on, Carlos!” I shouted at him from the car. “You can win the Tour today!” He increased the time gap back to the chasers, which was important when it came to the overall classification, and rode home alone as the winner of the stage.
Carlos had been the most consistent rider in the race, and it was a real triumph for the team, as Andy also came across the line in third place. Carlos now led overall, with Frank second. As Carlos was cheered up on the podium, with over a minute-and-a-half’s advantage over his closest rival, I thought back to our talk at the hotel in the Alps. What had happened at the race had proved that, as a team owner, I needed to believe in my employees, even those who weren’t always the most obvious winners. I needed to motivate them and convince them that they could do it if they dared to set themselves goals. And Carlos dared on Alpe d’Huez.
Carlos’s win also meant that the team hierarchy had fallen into place. He was the one we’d be riding for, and the Schleck brothers would have to help to secure him the overall victory. But it didn’t mean that peace had broken out. The rumours were that Carlos was about to sign with another team for the following year. As the possible Tour winner, he’d be able to push for a much bigger salary and be the team’s undisputed leader. On our team, even if he won the Tour he’d still have to share the captain’s role with the Schleck brothers. But the task there and then was to fill Carlos with as much self-confidence as possible ahead of the final time trial, and I decided that would be best achieved by delaying the chat about whether he was negotiating with other teams until another time.
But on the evening before the time trial, a story in the German newspaper the Süddeutsche Zeitung threatened to ruin everything ahead of the stage. The newspaper wrote that I had supposedly contacted Fuentes – the sports doctor accused of systematic doping in the Operacion Puerto case – on Frank Schleck’s behalf. The Danish newspapers were asking for a reaction from me, but I didn’t particularly want to have to come forward every time there was some kind of rumour. This accusation, however, was so serious that I didn’t really have much choice. “These are some very serious allegations, which we flatly deny,” I said. “I have never had any kind of contact and I would never be able to send any of my riders to a man like that.”
“But can you not understand that would put question marks next to your defence when you lied so many times yourself about doping past?” asked the journalist.
“I do understand it, yes, but I have put my own past behind me now and have other responsibilities,” I replied.
The story would hopefully go away on its own but was bound to turn up again one of these days.
The next day, I was there with Carlos every step of the way as he got ready and warmed up on the turbo trainer ahead of his time trial. “Just tell me what I need to do,” he said to me when we discussed how he should approach riding the route.
As the wearer of the yellow jersey, Carlos was the last man to roll out on the 53km time trial. He led Cadel Evans overall by one minute 34 seconds. Carlos set out perfectly, with a smooth pedal stroke and no unnecessary upper-body movements. The yellow jersey appeared to be giving him wings. In the team car, we kept one eye on Evans’s time, but it didn’t look likely that the Australian was really going to claw much time back from Carlos. “Come on, Carlos!” we shouted into the microphone. We tried to whip him along, but we could tell by Evans’s intermediate splits that the Australian really wasn’t as much of a threat as we had first thought. Carlos flew across the line in 12th place on the stage, but in a really good time, losing only 29 seconds in all to Evans, which meant he had a lead of a minute and five seconds going into the final stage to Paris.
It was the culmination of our work together, and our many conversations and disputes. And our unwavering ability to challenge each other as people, rider and employer.
The other riders came running over to Carlos, having watched his ride on TV. “Carlito!” roared Fabian, thrilled. Jens Voigt and directeur sportif Scott Sunderland hopped and danced around with joy. Everyone had worked for each other during this Tour. Our philosophy had really paid off when it counted.
Back at the hotel, I found a moment’s peace and quiet to think through the promises I’d made, and which were now going to be kept with victory in Paris. The main one was my promise to deliver a dope-free winner, but I had promised the press, the riders and the cycling world that we would become the world’s best cycling team. And this year we’d won both the yellow jersey and the Tour’s teams classification.
In Paris, Carlos was celebrated as the Tour winner, with Frank finishing sixth and Andy 12th. As a team, we then rode a flag-waving lap of honour on the Champs-Elysées. For me, it was like rewinding back to 1996. My feelings this time were a mix of pride, joy and a need to show the outside world that it had really happened. It felt like redemption having had to miss the race in 2007 but now coming back and delivering a winner. We ended our lap of honour near the Arc de Triomphe where we had some pictures taken. It was while we were there that I ran into the Tour race director Christian Prudhomme, who congratulated me. “Thanks,” I said, and then added, “and here’s your clean Tour winner.”
“I know,” he said, and smiled.
Victory at the Tour had raised Carlos’s market value and, as his contract with us also ran out at the end of the year, there were a number of rumours doing the rounds. The day after the Tour, I sat down with Carlos to talk about the future. “If I can get the money, then we can extend your contract,” I told him.
But a fortnight later, I received a call from him. “I’ve decided not to continue with the team,” he told me. It was no huge surprise.
At the end of August, the Italian media reported that the Canadian bike manufacturer Cervélo were going to be the main sponsor of a new team, with Carlos supposedly as their leader. Around the same time, I went to the Tour of Spain, where again Carlos was our main man for the title. But I was told that the atmosphere hadn’t been good. There were rumours within the team that Carlos was already trying to recruit some of our riders, directeurs sportifs and staff members to take with him to Cervélo.
On a training ride with the team just before the start of the Vuelta a Espana, we rode along next to each other and talked about the course route. I then said that I’d heard that he was trying to recruit some of my staff. He defended himself, and it descended into an argument. “Can you not just concentrate on the bike race instead of trying to play team manager?” I asked him.
That evening, I called a team meeting. I explained a bit about the situation and asked everyone to remain loyal. “I know that there’s a lot going on behind my back at the moment,” I said, “which I find hard to accept. If anyone has any problems, then they must come to me.”
During the race itself, former Tour de France winner Alberto Contador annihilated everyone on stage 13, winning the stage and taking the gold leader’s jersey, leaving Carlos down in third place.
There was more disappointment when the big Spanish newspaper El Pais published an interview with Carlos:
“There’s someone who has damaged and split the team since the start of this race, and who clearly doesn’t want anyone to achieve anything at this Vuelta.”
Is that person Bjarne Riis?
“It’s the team’s leader . . . I am just mentally exhausted. I have experienced many challenges in my 25 years as a rider, and it is sometimes difficult to accept other people’s decisions, and not least to have to live with them. You end up exhausting yourself . . . When you’ve won a race as big as the Tour and dedicated your life to the rest of the world, and when you don’t feel that you’ve been valued enough, it destroys you physically.”
Reading what he said, I felt like I should have thrown him off the race and fired him on the spot. But I decided that such action would probably do the team more harm than good. He was leaving the team anyway, and thanks to his behaviour everyone would be able to see that we wouldn’t be able to continue to work together. Brian talked to Carlos, who said he’d been misquoted. But it was a time of introspection for me. When you come up against someone saying things like that, then you have to ask yourself, “What am I doing wrong?” I’d got to know myself pretty well as a leader and felt well in control of both my strong and weak sides. My strengths were that I was decisive and could maintain my focus when things got tough. My weaknesses were that I took things too personally, that I expected people to always think the same way as me and that everyone wanted the same things as me. Sometimes I thought that I could also be a bit hard on people if I thought they weren’t living up to the expectations I had of them. Carlos was one of those I’d given a long leash to since he’d arrived on the team. He paid that trust back by continuing with his accusations, this time to the Spanish paper Marca:
“Riis didn’t like spending time with me, but couldn’t do without me, either, because he knew that I was the one who helped achieve a balance on the team . . . Between us we came up with some clear ideas, but he’s sabotaged all that.”
Even though it was tempting to respond to Carlos’s claims, I decided not to say anything in public.
He finished the Vuelta in third place overall, which was won by Contador. Saying goodbye to Carlos was sad after seven years, and it really shouldn’t have ended the way it did.
During the world championships in Italy at the end of September, the story about Frank Schleck and Doctor Fuentes reared its ugly head again. According to the document that the Süddeutsche Zeitung was in possession of, Frank had transferred 50,000 kroner (£4,500) to a Swiss bank account with the code names “Codes Holding” in March 2006. The bank account belonged to Eufemiano Fuentes. This led everyone to the conclusion that Frank must have paid Fuentes to help him dope, and Frank was called before the Luxembourg Anti-Doping Agency. It was time to have a serious talk with Frank. “What’s going on?” I demanded.
“I just wanted to know what it was all about,” he said, clearly upset. He knew that he’d been stupid and hadn’t thought. “But I’ve never doped myself,” he said.
I contacted the team’s sponsors to fill them in on what was going on, and Frank flew to Denmark to explain himself to Kim Fournais and Lars Seier from Saxo Bank. Later, Frank asked to give an explanation to the UCI’s legal department in order to clear up any possible misunderstandings. He explained that he had paid the money for a training programme, and didn’t know that the bank account belonged to Fuentes. The money transfer had apparently triggered a huge argument when Frank told his dad about it, and his dad told him not to use the training programme. With my experience from the Bo Hamburger case and from having to dismiss Ivan Basso from the team, I decided to support Frank and believe his explanation. If he was convicted by the Luxembourg Anti-Doping Agency, then that would be different, and we’d have to deal with it.
A Belgian newspaper added more fuel to the fire by publishing a list of 30 riders who had apparently recorded abnormal blood values and were sent a letter by the head of the French Anti-Doping Agency saying that their samples would be further analysed for signs of new drug CERA, which several riders had tested positive for at the Tour de France.
According to the Belgian paper, the list included Carlos, Frank, Stuart O’Grady and Fabian Cancellara. I asked Rasmus Damsgaard, the head of our team’s internal anti-doping programme, what he thought. “If one of your riders had used CERA, we would have found it in our EPO and urine tests – you can be absolutely sure of that,” he told me.
In December, the Luxembourg Anti-Doping Committee announced that they weren’t going to bring a case against Frank, and concluded that there was no proof of doping or any attempt to dope.