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The VDB Show

I spent the winter of 1998 training alone in Biarritz. While the sport came to terms with the aftershocks of Festina, I clung to the belief that it was all going to be different in 1999.

New anti-doping measures were being introduced, the most important of these being the longitudinal testing program. The plan was to test each rider’s blood four times a year in order to create a rudimentary profile that would supposedly reveal who was manipulating his blood. The thinking was that dopers were specific in their doping and that the majority of them would target certain events, such as the Tour de France. In theory, their blood profile in the summer would bear little resemblance to that established in the periods of the year when they weren’t “prepared.” These quarterly tests would make it possible to spot who was doping and—just as importantly—who wasn’t.

Initially, this sounded great. In reality, it meant nothing. There were no sanctions attached to an anomalous longitudinal test, and, even if a rider’s profile suggested doping, there was no way to target him with specific anti-doping controls because a ratified EPO test didn’t even exist at that point. Nor were there tests for many of the other products that were used.

That problem was compounded by the fact that there was no previous experience of blood profiling among professional cyclists—there was little understanding of what was “normal.” After a while, I realized that it was not much more than a PR exercise, to appease the people who needed appeasing, rather than being the cure that it was proclaimed to be.

Yet my belief that things were changing was reinforced by my start to the ’99 season. In my first race, Étoile de Bessèges, I was fourth overall, and from there I was thrown into the Tour of the Mediterannean. Cofidis needed an expert time trialist to lead the team in the team time trial stage and—much against my will, as I’d lined up a date with a Swiss girl—I was that man.

I missed the date and rode my frustrations out in the team time trial stage at Bessegès, powering around the course with zero consideration for my teammates. Instead of shepherding my flock, I blew them all away. Single-handedly, I dragged the team to the finish, but also dropped five of them in the process.

L’Équipier, my teammate, on the lookout for another leader to ride for—Francesco Casagrande had been banned for a positive testosterone control the year before—was impressed.

After we’d recovered a bit and were rolling back to the team bus, L’Équipier came alongside me and said the first flattering thing I’d heard from him.

“David, that was incredible—I didn’t think you were so strong,” he said. “I’ve never seen anybody do that in a team TT before—and I’ve seen a lot of riders. Where are you racing next?”

I knew that, without Casagrande, L’Équipier was a bit lost. He needed a raison d’être, and I sensed that he was mulling over his options, probably with our teammate Frank (VDB) Vandenbroucke at the top of his list. But after that conversation, I realized L’Équipier had also made me an option.

Up until then I hadn’t raced alongside VDB. That was about to change at my next races, the Trophée Luis Puig and Vuelta Valenciana, in Spain. I would be joining the guys who had been out there for a while, a group that included VDB and his sidekick, Philippe Gaumont. Those of us racing on the French program had already been hearing stories of their shenanigans in Spain. Word got back to us that Gaumont had been living on the edge since the training camp in January.

Before Luis Puig and the Valencian race, the whole team had got together at the Cofidis annual party following our presentation in Paris. The next morning, we flew to Spain. As we left Paris, it was immediately obvious that Gaumont was still on a high from the night before. When we got to Madrid, where we had a two-hour wait before our connecting flight to Alicante, Gaumont disappeared. When he finally returned to get on the plane, he was in an even worse state than before.

“What has Gaumont been up to?” I asked a teammate as we waited to board the flight. “Jesus, he looks a mess.”

Gaumont was a strange character, the most alpha of males in what was very much a man’s world. He was physically imposing, especially for a cyclist, but also quite charismatic to match. Philippe was also articulate. He could be the most charming and thoughtful person, but also the most intimidating and cruel. The best policy with him was to keep a low profile and avoid attracting his interest. If he decided to intimidate you, he’d never let go, and if he chose to like you, he would do his utmost to drag you into his world.

I first came onto Philippe’s radar in one of my earliest races, the Tour du Haut Var. The team had missed the breakaway and had been chasing for most of the race. I was completely wrecked, couldn’t do my turns at the front anymore, and slid back through the peloton. Soon after that, I saw Philippe drifting down the side of the bunch looking angry. Eventually, he spotted me and unleashed all his fury on me. It was scary as well as humiliating.

Off I went, back up to the front, riding hard until I was cross-eyed and almost falling off my bike. When we hit the decisive final hill, I was dropped immediately. Then, once again, I saw a Cofidis rider ahead of me, going very slowly looking over his shoulder. As I got closer, I realized it was Philippe.

Oh shit, I thought, now what have I done.

But his mood had changed. As I got up alongside him he smiled and patted me on the back, telling me I’d done well. He then rode with me all the way to the finish, chatting. That was typical Philippe, enraged one minute, considerate the next.

The Gaumont who boarded that short flight to Valencia was clearly the raging Philippe. I was told he’d drunk two bottles of champagne while waiting for the connection, and also tossed in some sleeping pills for good measure.

I was stunned when I was told this. “He’s taking sleeping pills?” I said in disbelief. “But it’s lunchtime …?!”

Gaumont was a mess, but like the rest of us, he was in his Cofidis team suit and so was allowed onto the plane. More than once, he tried to light up a cigarette. Fortunately, somebody from the team was able to stop him before it got totally out of control, but it was clear that he was a loose cannon.

Things didn’t get any better when we landed. We watched with nervous hilarity at the baggage carousel, as he rummaged through bags, piling them up around him, muttering: “My bike, I need my bike. I’ve got to get to the hotel.”

Still nobody intervened. Eventually, Gaumont found his bike bag and suitcase and marched out to the waiting bus. Once outside, he opened up the bike bag and started struggling to build his bike, while the bemused bus driver looked on.

By this time, it was about six in the evening, and the hotel was still 90 kilometers away, not that Philippe would have had the motor skills or wherewithal to change into his cycling clothing, let alone to put his bike together and actually ride it.

Eventually, one of the team directeurs did what should have been done hours before: he talked Gaumont down until they managed to get a semblance of control over him. Once on the bus, he promptly passed out.

Philippe didn’t turn up for dinner, but his odyssey hadn’t finished. Later that night, he was seen wandering the hotel corridors, dragging his suitcase, sobbing, saying: “I want to go home … Where am I? I need to speak to my wife …”

A couple of the senior riders who knew him well stepped in. They tied him to his bed and stripped the room of anything that could get him into trouble—wallet, phone, and sleeping pills.

The next day, the management sat the team down and told us it was unacceptable behavior and there would be consequences if anything like it ever happened again. But I don’t believe that Gaumont was ever reprimanded.

It was the first Stilnox-fueled mess witnessed collectively by team personnel. During that year we were to see such excesses at their most extreme. Stilnox was often behind this wild behavior.

Stilnox, or Zolipdem, is a sleeping pill. If you take it when you’re in bed, you won’t notice any real side effects; if you take it and try to stay awake, then the side effects are quickly noticeable. Thirty minutes after taking it, you’ll start to feel a little strange, almost a little drunk, and you might find yourself bumping into walls or walking into door frames.

Your brain still feels like it’s operating normally, but the rapid decline into total loss of control has begun. If you don’t fight it and just go to bed, there are no problems. But the longer you try to stay awake, the greater the loss of control. I learned that the ticket to getting maximum “side effects” was to take more than one pill and have a couple of alcoholic drinks with it. Within an hour or so you could find yourself acting and feeling the same way as if you were completely drunk.

On Stilnox, however, you wake up feeling rested: that’s because at some point the pills can’t be fought any longer and you pass out into a deep sleep. There’s still the memory blackout to deal with, but, in a nutshell, it’s like waking up after a big night of drinking without a hangover.

Stilnox and other sleeping pills had been used for years in European cycling. The life you lead on a stage race, such as the Tour, Giro, or Vuelta, affects people in different ways, but contrary to what people might think, deep sleep is not the easiest thing to achieve when your body is as drained as that of a pro rider after a long day of racing. For some riders, after a big stage in a long race, Stilnox was often the only way to get a good night’s sleep.

So many things come into play; you may not cope well with constantly sleeping in different rooms with different beds, with differing lengths and different mattresses. There’s also the comfort of pillows and sheets—in fact, I always take my own pillow on the road with me. Then there’s the efficiency of the air-con, or the lack of air-con; maybe it’s too noisy or too quiet—and there’s also how you cope with sharing rooms with a teammate. It’s not exactly conducive to a good night’s stress-free sleep, and sometimes the worry about sleeping badly and not recovering well for the next day is enough to make sleeping pills seem attractive. That’s why, for a long time, taking sleeping pills was considered quite normal—in fact, most of the older riders didn’t think anything of using them.

At the World Championships in 1997, we were staying in a hotel that ticked all the boxes for a bad night’s sleep. A couple of days after I’d arrived, I ended up chatting to a member of the old guard when I was out training on the course.

“The hotel’s terrible,” I told him. “I’m sleeping like shit.”

“Take Valium,” he responded. “I use it all the time; you’ll sleep like a baby.” I ignored his advice.

Of course, if used responsibly—not beyond the recommended doses or frequencies—sleeping pills are fairly harmless. Unfortunately, responsibility was not a characteristic of the pro scene at that time. The recommended doses were seen almost as a challenge by some pros. This was particularly the case with the Cofidis team of 1999. Gaumont and Vandenbroucke, in particular, took this to levels that most doctors would doubtless deem impossible.

I didn’t really know the scale of what was going on inside the team when I got to Spain. Gaumont and VDB could be charming when they were in the mood, but there were continuous rumors that they were out of control, running amok in hotels late at night. There was a story doing the rounds in the peloton of them “borrowing” the team camping car late at night and taking it to a local brothel. Like many other tales of excess, this seemed pretty far-fetched. Of course, it turned out to be true.

I continued my good form in Valencia. Lance Armstrong, now with the U.S. Postal team, had returned to the sport after his illness. I had been sitting at the back of the bunch on the first climb of the first stage, chatting to him, when all the attacking started. He was in a bad way and told me that if I was feeling as good as I looked, I should go with the break, so taking his advice, off I went.

I ended up attacking, then moving clear on my own and building a three-minute lead. ONCE and Kelme, at that time Spain’s two best teams, joined forces to chase me down, which seemed to me an overreaction, as we still had 80 kilometers, the final 40 of which were flat and far from in my favor. But that reaction did show that I was beginning to earn respect from the peloton. They were not taking any chances with my taking time on the opening stage of a five-day race—that revealed that they feared me.

The scenery around Valencia is beautiful, and it was a pure joy racing alone ahead of the peloton. I raced up the climbs, bagging all the mountain points, and then ripped down the technical descents using every inch of the road. I was twenty-two and pretty fearless, oblivious to the consequences of making just one mistake. That gung-ho attitude caught up with me, with about 50 kilometers to race.

I came roaring around a blind switchback bend to find the road kicked on, through almost 180 degrees. All that stood between me and the other side of the valley was a protective barrier. At high speed, I T-boned the barrier, took off, and saw that it wasn’t a sheer cliff, more of a very steep drop.

That season, we’d just started using shortwave radios, linking the riders and the team cars. The big heavy receiver, tucked away in my back pocket, took the impact as I slammed onto my back and began sliding down the hillside. I started grappling for something to hold on to. Eventually, I came to a halt.

In the post-crash stillness, I lay there, gripping on to bushes and rocks, trying to understand what had just happened. Above me, up on the road, the team car that was following me down the mountain had slid to a halt alongside the barrier I’d just flipped over. Meanwhile, far below, my bike was bouncing down the mountain.

Before I knew it, our team mechanic was with me, roughly pulling me back up the hill. I sat on the barrier for a moment, my head in my hands, realizing how lucky I’d just been. After peering down at the tangled remains of my bike, my team directeur asked me if I was okay, and within seconds I was being put on a spare bike and pushed off.

Despite my tumble, I was still hyped: as soon as I got back on the bike I felt fine again; so fine, in fact, that a couple of hundred meters later, when I saw photographer Graham Watson on the next hairpin bend, readying himself to take a shot, I yelled: “Graham—you just missed the most amazing crash!”

The race in Valencia was a great success for me. I claimed the mountains jersey that first day and, after deciding to defend it, found a new confidence in my climbing ability. I was playing with the big boys, riders like Laurent Jalabert, Michael Boogerd, Michele Bartoli, Alexandre Vinokourov. I finished fourth overall and won the mountains classification.

I was really beginning to think the sport was changing—it didn’t cross my mind that I was.

After the success of Spain, I was flown to Switzerland for two races, GP Chiasso and GP Lugano. They weren’t very high-profile events, but Chiasso was renowned for being physically extremely hard. Roland Meier, the Swiss rider on our team, told us: “Normally out of the two hundred who start, fifty or so will finish. If it rains, maybe fifteen.” This was not the most motivating of pep talks, but it proved very accurate.

Chiasso went straight up one side of a mountain valley, dropped down a bit farther along, did a loop, and then repeated the climb and descent. It was a savage course. It began to rain about halfway through—cold, icy rain—and as Meier had predicted, half of the field dropped out. I wasn’t overly motivated as my big objective was Tirreno–Adriatico, a few days away, but L’Équipier, my newfound loyal domestique, took it upon himself to get me to the front and string the field out into the climb.

His was the classic teammate’s kamikaze effort, riding himself into the ground as he set the pace on my behalf. I’ve done it myself and gone down in flames in the process. So inevitably, the exhausted L’Équipier finally sat up. I remember thinking: Off to the showers you go—you bastard. Now I’m out here on my own and I’ve got to race …

Soon after that, as we approached the top of the climb, it began to snow. There were about fifteen riders left, and we still had over an hour of racing ahead of us. After a brief hiatus, we all dropped back to our team cars to get what little warm weather clothing we had left. I was fully clad in thermal gear by this point, yet I still couldn’t feel my hands or feet.

As I looked around it was clear that the few guys who were left were not only the strongest, but the hardest men in the race. We rode over the summit in a blizzard and faced up to the fast descent.

It was a horrible experience. After only a couple of minutes I was chilled to the bone, shivering everywhere, and the finesse needed to brake in the wet was lost. I could barely move my fingers, let alone feather the brakes, as I’d normally do.

As we slid into the hairpins, it was simply a case of braking in time and making it through the corner. We weren’t racing on the descent—we were fighting to survive. It was an epic experience and I loved it. Some riders missed bends and disappeared into the sleet. I stayed upright to finish third, but I collapsed as I crossed the finish line and was carried to the showers in a hypothermic state. But it had been a classic day of bike racing, the kind that had enraptured me when I fell in love with the sport in Hong Kong.

The next day was a rude awakening. My disillusionment with Cofidis deepened, as instead of recognizing that I’d gone deep into my reserves twenty-four hours earlier, they told me that I had to race in what was essentially an amateur event.

“Think of your teammates,” I was told. “Do you want them to see you sleeping in, while they’re out there racing?” That was all it took for me to feel guilty. I caved in and raced.

We started at seven thirty a.m. and the course was over 200 kilometers long. I finished, but it meant I had raced over 400 kilometers in twenty-four hours. Within a day, I developed a cold that turned into bronchitis. I was still driven down to Sorrento in Italy, where I was expected to start Tirreno–Adriatico.

We stopped at Pisa for the night, but I was coughing my lungs up and knew there was no way I was going to get better in time for Tirreno. Once again, I protested. Once again, nobody wanted to listen. I knew it was useless.

“There are still two days to the start,” they said, “and then you can just ride yourself into the race. We’ll see how you are on the morning of the race.”

It was no surprise, after the workload of the previous five weeks, that I was ill. It was obvious that I should go home and rest. But the team needed me—there was nobody else who could lead in Tirreno. With Vandenbroucke leading the team on one front, Cofidis had become reliant on me elsewhere. They were better off gambling that I might miraculously recover than they were going into a major race without a leader.

I started Tirreno, but didn’t even make it through the first day. I was so angry. They’d forgotten that I was twenty-two and that I was being stretched to my absolute limit. They risked wrecking me, burning me out, and it felt like they didn’t care if that happened. I could have just refused to race, and now, older and wiser, I would have done so, but I was still desperate to impress.

I recovered in Biarritz and started training for my next race, the two-day Criterium International in the south of France. Despite my having been ill, my form held and I finished second overall, only 0.002 second behind final winner Jens Voigt. But I should have won.

My time trial bike for the final afternoon was a joke. I’d waited a year for specific handlebars, but still they were not ready. We had so few time trial wheels that I was using the same front wheel as I’d used in the road stage. It would have taken the tiniest detail on my time trial bike to have closed that 0.002-second deficit. It was a lesson that I didn’t forget.

In some ways my good results worked against me, because even though it was clear that I had already raced too much, Cofidis kept me racing. The quick recovery I had made for Criterium International disguised the underlying fatigue that had set in.

In the meantime, VDB and his clique were dominating every race they entered. There were suspicions about those successes, and Cofidis was getting a reputation within the peloton, especially the French peloton, which, in the aftermath of the Festina affair, was doing everything it could to eradicate doping.

At Paris–Nice that spring, VDB and his cabal had raced how they wanted, without any other teams being able to live with them. I’d heard stories of their actually laughing and joking about how easy it was. Some said that they were exploiting the reluctance of others to use EPO as an opportunity. There were more and more tales filtering back of extreme nocturnal activities, fueled by sleeping pills and alcohol. Cofidis was getting a very bad name within the world of cycling; in 1999, only a few months after Festina, that was no mean feat.

Then Vandenbroucke won perhaps the toughest one-day race of all, Liège–Bastogne–Liège, in a manner never seen before.

Before the race VDB had told whoever would listen where he would make his decisive attack. Yet the night before he had taken eleven Stilnox and could barely talk or walk before passing out. Within ten days of his win in Liège, he and Gaumont were arrested by the French police, over amphetamine possession. They were interrogated for twenty-four hours but nothing, other than thousands of column inches and the exposure of their relationship with an infamous “horse doctor,” Bernard Sainz, came of it. Sainz—nicknamed Dr. Mabuse—was an oddball character from Paris, a guru who coached riders and gave them little-known homeopathic treatments.

The team suspended them for a short while, but then things simply carried on as normal. I was outraged and decided that I had to talk to François Migraine, the president of Cofidis. I needed him to intervene for me. I wanted nothing more to do with VDB and Gaumont. We met at his office in Lille. We shook hands and sat down. I took a deep breath and then all my rage came spilling out.

“François, everybody is talking about how it’s not normal that our team is so strong,” I told him. “Everybody thinks Gaumont, VDB, and the rest are still doping. I’ve been told that in Paris–Nice they were laughing at people, showing off how much stronger they are. It’s not right.”

Migraine looked at me. “Have you seen them doping?”

“No, our schedules are different, so I don’t usually race with them,” I explained. “Anyway, I think anybody doping hides it well now after last year.”

“It’s surprising that anybody would be so stupid to risk it after Festina.”

I carried on. “But they’re crazy, François—they just don’t care. Things in the peloton have changed since last year, yet VDB and Gaumont have seen it as an opportunity to get an even bigger advantage.

“The team lets them get away with anything as long as they’re winning. They’ve been taking sleeping pills, drinking at night, and intimidating the riders who aren’t with them.”

Migraine looked pained. “Does Alain [Bondue] know about this?”

“It’s difficult to imagine him not knowing,” I said. “I think he’s just happy they’re doing so well. I don’t think they’d get away with it if their results were shit.”

He got to his feet. “I will have to speak to Alain about it, but if this is true, then I am sorry and I will make sure it no longer happens. I can understand why you’re so angry, David—thank you for telling me.”

Then Migraine walked across his office to where a large framed photo of Gaumont, winning Belgian classic Ghent–Wevelgem, was hanging in a prominent position on the wall. He turned and looked at me.

“David, I have had enough of Gaumont,” he said, “and I will show you how much.” Migraine reached up and took the photo down, turning it to face the wall.

“That will no longer ever hang on my wall,” he said. “I’ll make sure he does not cause any more destruction.”

Philippe Gaumont may have had his photograph removed from Migraine’s office wall, but Frank Vandenbroucke was still the golden boy.

Frank’s incredible results from the early season put him in the number one world ranking position, and the team was now excited about his finishing the year in the top spot. They genuinely didn’t seem to care about what may, or may not, have happened earlier in the season; they certainly weren’t putting any measures in place to prevent its happening again.

VDB had long been pushing the envelope on what was possible within the rules, and more than once he had just scraped in under the 50 percent UCI blood control. He was so far over the 50 percent limit the day before the 1999 World Championships in Verona that he had used two bags of plasma, brought to his hotel by a Cofidis teammate, to increase his blood volume and reduce his hematocrit—even then, he was still right on 50 percent. That, along with the painkillers and cortisone he was using, meant that when he fell off and fractured both his wrists early on in the race he was able to get back on and ride a further 200 kilometers—and, despite being unable to get out of the saddle, to finish seventh. He was then taken to a hospital, where he had both wrists put in plaster. His performance was hailed as “heroic.”

Meanwhile, I was finding it very hard to get the condition I had had at the beginning of the season and increasingly felt like I was banging my head against a wall. I decided I would race in the Isle of Man week in late June, partly for fun, partly because I needed an ego boost.

Even then, it didn’t quite work out. Chris Newton smashed me in the National Time Trial Championships. After the race, I was heading out to train on two laps of the Isle of Man Time Trial course as prep for the Manx International a couple of days later, when a cocky little Manx kid came up and asked me for my autograph.

“Awrright?!” he said. “You must be disappointed …!”

“I am a bit, just not fit enough at the moment,” I said. “Are you from here?”

“Yeah,” he said, “we live here. I’m a cyclist, too. So’s me brother.”

I was impressed. “You race at all?”

“Not that much yet,” he said, “I’m too young.”

“Ah, you’ve got plenty of time, just have fun; don’t take it too seriously till you’re older.” I signed a racing cap for him.

His eyes lit up. “Me pals are gonna be sooo jealous …!

“And, erm, can we get a photo, please? Sorry to ask, I know you must get this all the time.”

“It’s no hassle,” I said. We posed together. I put my arm around his shoulder.

The same cocky kid knocked on my hotel room door when the 2007 Tour de France started in London. He gave me a framed copy of the photo of the pair of us, arm in arm, taken on the Isle of Man that day.

“Thought you might like this, David,” Mark Cavendish said, a sly grin on his face.

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June 1999, Isle of Man. Random fan and me.