By the start of 1998, I’d had enough of Nice. The Americans were a strange bunch, bitching about each other incessantly, and, with Lance making his comeback after his cancer treatment, it was all getting to be too much. Cliques were forming, and it was very hard to tell where you stood with anyone—plus, they weren’t really that much fun.
So together with Jeremy Hunt, a fellow British pro, I decided to move to Toulouse, where a small group of Aussies—in fact, Henk Vogels and Stuart O’Grady, a freckled ball of energy who became a great friend—were based. This seemed like a good idea at the time.
I was left in charge of all logistics, so after packing all my things into a rental car and saying farewell to Bobby, I drove to Toulouse. Unfortunately, however, neither Jez nor I had ever been there before.
I went to some estate agents but quickly came to the conclusion that I didn’t want to be living there. I was in a no-man’s-land now. I couldn’t go back to Nice, so I decided to continue on to Biarritz.
I’d been there once before and had been struck by how beautiful it was, yet it had never crossed my mind to live there, probably because no other pro cyclists lived there. As my disillusionment with the sport grew, however, this became an appealing characteristic.
I called Eric Frutoso, my mentor two years earlier at Saint-Quentin, and he kindly offered to put me up while I decided what to do. I found an apartment in the nick of time before heading off to my first races. I lived there for the next seven years. That was how Biarritz became home.
I’d saved up some money for furniture, and I loved getting my own place together. I was nesting, and for the first time in a while it felt like I had found somewhere I could be happy. Biarritz affected me in much the same way Hong Kong had done.
New Year’s 1998, Kilkenny, Ireland. Jez Hunt looking more like a touring cyclist than the “Great British Hope” he actually was.
It’s a soulful place, precariously built on a rocky, wild coastline. The architecture is eclectic: the town is a nineteenth-century folly, built for wealthy and aristocratic Europeans. For a while, it was the only place to be in summertime, if you were rich.
When I moved there, the town was a faded version of its once chic self. The shoeless surfers outnumbered the Hermès-carrying mesdames, and no longer was Coco Chanel to be found gallivanting with fallen Russian princes. Instead, there were numerous VW vans and groups of stoned, drum-playing students. That didn’t mean there weren’t a few remnants of la belle époque, and when one did see them a perfect juxtaposition was created, of two worlds colliding, fur versus neoprene. I loved it.
Biarritz offered me an escape from a world I was beginning to hold in ever-greater disdain. I loved racing, and I loved being a cyclist, but I struggled with the people and the environment. The world of doping and the law of silence—the omertà—that went with it were eroding my self-respect.
I started to distance myself from the people, and from some of the classless idiots who were considered to be great champions. I was a mere apprentice, yet I was already losing respect for my profession. Even so, I still believed that I’d be better than the dopers when my time came, and I was confident that I could do whatever I wanted to, if I put my mind to it.
As I separated myself further from the ethos of professional cycling, I read more and more. From McCarthy and Ellroy, I bounced on to Graham Swift and Niall Williams, and then to a biography of Victor Hugo, which helped me understand why I had seen his name in every French town I’d ever ridden through. Reading felt like the only way I could be different, more cerebral. I wanted so much to be different from the archetypal pro.
Most of the time, when I raced, I got my head “kicked in,” as they say. But the rest of the time, things were better. I could actually be part of the race, and that made up for all the pain. Winning remained almost impossible, but I was better than most when it came to time trialing. I took it more seriously than others, and I took great pride in my bike and in achieving the best and most aerodynamic position.
That said, I didn’t have good equipment, and I spent my first five years as a professional battling for bits for my bike. But because I cared, the mechanics did their best with what they had. I also took every time trial seriously, because of what Guimard had told me once, when I was particularly exhausted and asked if I could take it easy in the time trial.
He’d stared at me. “You are a professional—you do every time trial at 100 percent,” he said. “One day it will serve you well if you find yourself in the leader’s jersey.” I have stood by his advice ever since.
—
That spring, I won the time trial at the Three Days of De Panne, a brutal race held in Flanders and finishing on the gray Belgian coast. Feared by every professional, the general rule of thumb is that if you make it through without crashing, you’ve had a great three days. Coming into the last day I wasn’t expecting much. After a 110-kilometer morning stage, we tackled the time trial, a simple affair out and back along the coast. I was fourteen seconds faster than the next guy, Italian Michele Bartoli, the best one-day rider at that time, and I also broke the course record. To say it was a surprise would be an understatement.
We went straight from there to another race in France, the GP Rennes, and soon after that I had another little stage race, Circuit de la Sarthe. The Italian contingent of the Cofidis team flew in to compete, and I raced with Francesco Casagrande, our Italian leader and widely seen as one of the sport’s big stars, for the first time.
I was on a high, largely because of the results of the blood tests the team had run on us all the day after De Panne. In theory, this was to make sure that nobody’s hematocrit was over the 50 percent limit. When the results came through the day before Circuit de la Sarthe started, I was a pitifully low 40.1 percent.
But instead of being disheartened by this I felt vindicated and excited; it demonstrated that it wasn’t necessary to be near 50 percent in order to win. I knew I’d raced against guys in De Panne who were fully prepared for the one-day Classic, the Tour of Flanders, a couple of days later. The blood test result made me realize that anything was possible.
In my youthful exuberance, I was telling anybody who would listen that I’d won in De Panne and broken the course record with a hematocrit of only 40 percent. I went to see Casagrande and his roommate, whom I’ll refer to as L’Équipier (the teammate), so that I could show Casagrande the test results.
I stood there, a big grin on my face, expecting Casagrande to congratulate me and say something morale boosting. But he didn’t. After a pause, he handed the result back to me and then turned to speak to his roommate in Italian.
“Perché non è a cinquante?” Casagrande asked L’Équipier, puzzled. Why isn’t he at fifty?
L’Équipier knew that I’d understood and that it wasn’t what I wanted to hear, so in his accented French he tried to say something more congratulatory. It was too late, though. I was crestfallen by Casagrande’s reaction. The damage was done.
Many of the guys I raced alongside considered it their professional duty to be as close to the limits as the rules would allow. In their world, it had nothing to do with ethics, or what was right or wrong, and certainly had nothing to do with cheating. It was simply medical preparation.
To riders like Casagrande, I was a fool, a naive young foreigner who had yet to understand the true nature of his profession. He was right in thinking I was a naive young pro, but he was wrong on one count: I wasn’t a fool.
After that shattering meeting with Casagrande, I recognized—perhaps even accepted—what I was up against. But it didn’t make me upset like the first time I’d encountered it with Jim van de Laer the year before. Instead, it made me angry.
Fuck them, I thought.
Fuck them for thinking they could judge me, or my choices. I wasn’t a fool, and I was no longer naive. I took it upon myself to prove to them that I was better than they were. I had no respect for them, these stupid men, these “professionals,” uneducated athletes who took drugs because they had no other option in life. If anything, I pitied them.
It was this attitude that would allow me to survive clean for so long in such a deep-rooted doping culture. I had no outside help, and it wasn’t something I could talk about or share, because everywhere I turned people seemed to have their head in the sand about it.
It was a dark world that existed behind the Technicolor caravan, a world that most in the sport knew about but none would challenge. It was all a big lie. And there was nothing for the clean guys to do but to carry on and stick to their guns.
I didn’t race in the 1998 Tour de France, when that dark world was finally exposed for all to see. The Festina affair was triggered when a Festina team car, searched as it crossed the border from Belgium to France, was found to contain a substantial quantity of drugs.
The Festina team was filled with the French darlings of the time—Richard Virenque, Laurent Brochard, Pascal Hervé, Didier Rous, and Christophe Moreau. It was the biggest doping scandal ever to hit cycling and dramatically revealed what had been hidden within the professional ranks for years.
If the customs officials had not stopped that Festina car, and if the French police had not made arrests and begun investigating the Festina team, there is no doubt in my mind that nothing would ever have changed. Professional cycling had reached a point at which it was incapable of confronting or fixing its own problems; the sport had failed, monumentally. The enforcers of criminal and civil law had to act in order to begin the long and difficult clean-up that has been going on ever since.
That year’s Tour became a farce, as arrests, raids, interrogations, and overnight stints in cells punctuated the race. That led to rider strikes and team withdrawals. It was all very dramatic, but it also meant that many guys then had to race without their usual drugs—which may have been the main motivation for some of them to quit the race.
The 1998 Tour had started in Dublin—there were tales of drugs being dumped overboard from the ferries taking the convoy across to France, and I’ve since heard of other innovative transportation methods—unmarked cars, motorbikes, even friends in the publicity caravan—being used by teams who dared try to outwit the French police.
How true these stories are is debatable, but there’s no doubt that it would became the least-doped Tour in years. Ironically, it was Marco Pantani who won the race overall, the same Pantani whose cocaine addiction led to a premature death and whose huge talent was ruined by drugs.
But for young, clean riders the grand exposé was wonderful news.
Watching riders get arrested, hearing about the dope dumping from the ferry, and imagining the panic that most of the riders would be feeling at the prospect of racing for three weeks without their usual medical stock tickled us.
It was a revenge of sorts on the dopers, whose charged-up performances had made our lives hell.
In our naïveté we thought it would change the sport overnight. Surely now that everybody knew what was going on, the powers that be would be forced to act? Unfortunately, this did not happen.
The initial joy of what this meant for clean riders was quickly replaced with resignation and despondency, as we realized what the Festina affair had done to the image of the sport. The shouts from bystanders, when we were out training—usually “Allez, allez!”—were now replaced with “Allez les dopés!”
It hadn’t crossed our minds that we would be tarred with the same brush as the riders who had been caught doping. From then on, as far as the public was concerned, being a professional cyclist meant you doped. It didn’t matter who you were—a twenty-year-old neo-pro or a thirty-two-year-old Tour winner—they saw the same person.
Now, we were all dopers. Not only were we fighting the world in which we lived and worked, we were on the defensive when confronted with a member of the public. It was around this time, when I found that I had to defend myself on an almost daily basis, that I decided it was best not to tell people I was a pro cyclist, unless it was absolutely unavoidable.
—
Even so, many people just assumed I was doping. Back in Biarritz I went to see my neighbors, a very sweet retired couple who looked after my mail when I was away. We had the now inevitable conversation about drugs in cycling and the drama of that year’s Tour. Yet I didn’t expect them to be so supportive, almost apologetic about the way in which cycling was being vilified. The lady treated me almost like a grandson, and when her husband wasn’t in the room, she took me to one side.
“David,” she said, “we’ve always known that you dope—we know it’s impossible to do it without it. But promise me you’ll be careful and look after your health, won’t you?”
I was at a loss for words.
—
The elderly in France, who’d grown up with the Tour, understood that it was a preposterous sporting challenge. In their pragmatic manner, they didn’t see it as being humanly possible; they considered it part and parcel of the job to do what one had to do in order to survive and to perform.
That didn’t mean they believed doping was right, but for them professional cycling was a brutal sport that only desperate or crazy men would become part of—a “peasant sport,” because there was no way a member of the bourgeoisie would choose to become a professional cyclist.
This was a far cry from the romantic and ultimately naive perspective held by the modern generation of Tour fans. There’s no doubt that the older generation’s view, no matter how pragmatic, was wrong, but was it better to be naive and to believe in what was essentially a corporate-funded fraud?
August 1998, Biarritz. Jay Sweet and I getting in some last-minute hard-core “training” before Tour de l’Avenir 1998.
Before heading off to the Tour de l’Avenir that autumn, I hooked up with Jay Sweet—another Australian cycling buddy—and enjoyed the final days of the summer party season in Biarritz. We were a little delicate by the time we got to the race. I came down with bronchitis prior to the prologue, but somehow I still managed to win it. Then I avenged my time trial defeat of the previous year before finally pulling out of the race due to illness.
That was my season done and dusted. In the aftermath of the Festina affair, it had been hard to gauge the feeling in the peloton, but among the younger pros there was a feeling that what had happened was perhaps going to change the sport for the better. Our optimism proved unjustified.