The road climbed sharply once more. I wearily lifted my backside out of the saddle yet again and cursed. Bobby Julich, riding alongside me, sensed my disbelief.
“Are you having a fucking laugh?” I spat, at nobody in particular. “This is nothing like what it looks like on TV.”
Bobby shrugged. “It’s not called La Doyenne for nothing.”
Bobby and I were riding in the Belgian Ardennes, reconnoitering the route of the brutal and unrelenting one-day Classic, known as the Doyenne–Liège–Bastogne–Liège. I was on the back foot, struggling for form, after losing most of the second half of the 1999 season to injury.
I’d lost ground the previous summer, when those of us not racing for Cofidis in the Tour had been sent to an altitude-training camp in the Pyrenees. Having spent weeks looking forward to the summer season in Biarritz, I found myself locked away in a miserable mountaintop town. It put me in a petulant frame of mind, and after our part-time mechanic had wrecked my very expensive SRM power training cranks, my mood worsened. I was trouble. I’d never partied during a camp or a race before, but now I did. In fact, I partied like it was 1999 …
It was my teammate Janek Tombak’s birthday on the last night of the camp, and, despite the dead-end atmosphere, we made an effort to celebrate. We found ourselves in some empty, shitty disco drinking vodka. Janek had some Stilnox and offered me one. I paused, and then took it, more out of curiosity than anything else, but it didn’t take long for the effects to hit me.
I don’t remember much after that, but I do remember trying to break back into the hotel by climbing over the roof and going through a window. When that didn’t work, I decided to jump off the roof, ending up in a crumpled heap, having hit the ground with such impact as to explode the air bubbles in my Nike Max sneakers.
Janek and I both thought it was pretty funny, but I wasn’t laughing the next morning when I woke up with a massively swollen ankle that I couldn’t put any weight on. I hobbled around and tried to pretend it was fine, but it was a lost cause. After X-rays, an ambulance took me back to Biarritz.
The team manager at the camp told everybody that I’d simply fallen down some stairs. In fact, we covered it up so well that even Alain Bondue refused to believe me when I told him the injury was really bad. I even got sent to a race while I was on crutches.
It took six specialists to figure out what was wrong. After more X-rays and an MRI scan, I went to a doctor in Monaco who diagnosed it from the first X-ray that had been taken. It was a clean fracture of my heel.
I lost the second half of 1999 and was unable to ride properly until November that year. But after losing so much time, I was hyper-motivated and locked myself away in Biarritz on a comeback mission. Returning from injury is hard, though that’s not really due to the injury itself, but more to do with your head coping with the total inability it has to make the body do what once came easily.
More often than not, injuries occur when you’re close to your peak fitness, so the last memories you have—the last performance markers you have—are of elite performance. Comebacks are at the opposite end of the scale, which is humbling for a professional athlete, but it also makes coming back an interesting and affirming experience.
The best thing about a comeback is that expectations are low. It’s one of the rare times that you live without that constant white noise of expectancy, be it external or internal. There’s only one goal, and that’s getting back to top fitness.
Pro cyclists face up to an obligatory “mini-comeback” at least once a year. It’s called December. As soon as the professional season ends at the beginning of October, most of us take a month, maybe more, completely off the bike. For the majority of my career I’ve taken two months off the bike and done zero exercise—no cross-training, nothing. I’d just travel around seeing family and friends, meeting up with the people I didn’t see the rest of the year, catching up on all the good times I was convinced I’d missed.
So after four months off, starting again wasn’t that much different from going through December. My right heel was permanently swollen, and the injury had changed my foot position. When I was riding, the heel began to kick out more, so instead of having my feet perfectly aligned they were now slightly off center. I didn’t like that. I have always worked very hard on the bike to make sure everything is perfect, what we in cycling like to call “form.”
Perfect “form” is judged on everything from the pedaling action, the position on the bike, the attire that’s worn and the style with which it is worn, to the way one carries oneself. The list goes on, but once you know how form is defined, you can judge it with a mere glance at a passing cyclist. For me, cycling has always been about form, so having my right heel kick out annoyed the hell out of me. It was a lingering reminder of the damage sleeping pills and booze can do to a young man.
Yet I was obsessively committed to getting back to top condition. I’d been waiting for the 2000 season ever since Cyrille Guimard had mapped out my career over lunch in Saint-Quentin three years earlier and announced that I would make my Tour de France debut when I was twenty-three—in July 2000.
Guimard was long gone from Cofidis, a conflict with François Migraine and tax problems leading to his departure after only a year with the team. This meant that, although there were other managers, Bondue and Migraine had overall control over the team, although neither of them were ever at the races or knew much about what was going on beyond our results.
By the time I got to the 2000 Ardennes Classics, Flèche Wallonne and Liège–Bastogne–Liège, nine months after breaking my heel, I was struggling for form and very much out of my depth. I was taking a hiding, and the problem with that is that you begin to think negatively. Before then, I’d believed I could beat the dopers, but now I felt like I couldn’t do anything against them.
Bobby “J” and I had remained friends after I’d left Nice, and were rooming together for the few days we were in Belgium. After racing in the Flèche Wallonne, we were so demoralized that we had emptied our minibar and commiserated together that evening. Taking on the riders on EPO seemed like an impossible task when you were clean.
That customary Liège recce—the one that had me spitting and cursing—involved riding the final 100 kilometers of the 268-kilometer race. Liège was considered the hardest one-day race, the only one where the Grand Tour contenders came out to play, and the final 100 kilometers were the hilliest.
When you watched the race on TV, it didn’t look that bad. Riding it was hell, though, which was why the recce was such a shock.
“I should’ve stayed at the hotel,” I moaned to Bobby as we tackled yet another climb. “I’d have been much better off not knowing about this.”
“Dave,” he said, “just relax. Do what you can do. And don’t think about the course or what the other guys have or haven’t done.”
“Come on, Bobby, you of all people should know that’s not going to happen. We’re fucked.”
“Well, yeah,” he said, as we pondered the numerous climbs. “Probably … and wait till you see La Redoute, that’ll blow your mind! And Saint-Nicolas—remember VDB went up it in the big ring last year? You won’t be able to do that even in training. That’ll make you realize just how fucked up it really is.”
“Thanks, man. How far is that?”
“40k to La Redoute, 70k to Saint-Nicolas,” Bobby intoned.
“What …? So that’s 230k and 260k into the race …?!” I was disgusted. “This is just stupid.”
When it came to the race itself, I got dropped and didn’t even finish, pulling out at the second feed zone, not far from where we’d begun our recce three days earlier. I was already on the ropes in the first few kilometers, and I simply couldn’t comprehend that we had over 260 kilometers of racing ahead of us. With that final savage 100 kilometers yet to come, mine really was a lost cause.
Things weren’t going well for me, and it became easy just to blame it on the fact that I was clean and too many of the others were doped. But I wasn’t alone. In the post-Festina era, many French teams and riders found themselves off the pace.
That may have been because they had, in the majority, cleaned up their act in the aftermath of Festina. Teams like Marc Madiot’s Françaises des Jeux and Roger Legeay’s Gan squad were genuinely doing everything they could to prevent doping and had a proactive anti-doping stance.
But some of the other French teams were less dynamic. I know that Cofidis turned a blind eye to their riders’ preparation, not caring which coach, trainer, or doctor their leaders used, or where cyclists went to train. (Location was a surprisingly obvious indicator of a tendency toward doping—France was a no-go because of the new doping laws, which led to Italy and Spain becoming doping havens.) Sadly, suspicious training habits and regularly anomalous longitudinal blood values weren’t of great importance to the team—results, however, were.
By the middle of the 2000 season, the French had grown increasingly pessimistic. So dark was their mood that they were beaten before they even got to the start line. The peloton à deux vitesses—the two-speed peloton—they called it. One group of riders doped, the others alongside them racing clean.
You can work out for yourselves which group was fastest.
—
I had signed with IMG in 1999. Tony Rominger, my mentor at Cofidis and now retired from racing, had been with the global sports marketing company for many years. My mum and I met Tony and Marc Biver, boss of IMG Suisse, for lunch to discuss what IMG would do for me. As we talked they told us they would take care of everything in my financial life, from contracts to tax issues.
Following my stellar start to the 1999 season, Marc had wasted no time in negotiating a new contract with Cofidis that doubled my initial two-year contract of €80,000. Despite everything, I was happy to stay with Cofidis. I was growing up with the team, and François Migraine’s promises that things would change reassured me.
So I signed one of the longest contracts in cycling, a four-year deal, that ran to December 31, 2003. I had a fixed contract of €160,000 a year, €80,000 of which was paid in France and the other €80,000 into an image contract through Luxembourg. Although the structure of it was completely beyond me, the bonus system was the most lucrative in cycling.
But I didn’t really understand what an image contract was. I had no holding company through which I signed the contract, I had no bank accounts outside of France, and to that date I hadn’t even realized that I had to pay more tax than the French were already taking from me at source. I was, to put it bluntly, incredibly naive when it came to money.
There were two reasons IMG signed me to a four-year deal. First, if I continued in my development and fulfilled all the bonus criteria, it was an amazing contract. Second, it meant that I was tied to IMG for four years and was legally bound to pay them 10 percent of all earnings (before tax) from that contract until it ended.
At the time, this didn’t seem like such a big deal as the contract appeared well negotiated. They had taken full responsibility for arranging my finances, which was something that I desperately needed guidance with. But I look back now, and it’s my firm opinion that IMG never really fully guided me, and I didn’t escape the mess this contract created until a decade later.
The deal IMG negotiated with the team meant that I was in for the long run with Cofidis. Yes, there were problems, but I was convinced that François Migraine wanted things to move on and the team to develop. Cofidis wanted me and needed me, and I was quite sure that one day the team would be built around me.
There were negatives. I didn’t like the fact that the team was tarnished, but I clung so strongly to my beliefs and ideals that I felt incorruptible. David Moncoutie and I had already survived the previous three years without doping. We didn’t plan to change that. Doping was around us, but it was never forced on us.
The riders who doped were fully responsible for their actions, sourcing their own products and paying their own coaches and doctors. The team did not play an active part in doping, but it facilitated it by never asking questions or being proactively against it in any way.
There’s no doubt that it was a demoralizing environment for clean riders, and it bred contempt toward the senior figures within the team, but at the same time we didn’t know any different. As far as we were concerned, that was how the world of pro cycling operated.
I had grown used to getting a pat on the back and being told after a good result: “Well done, David—you should be happy, you’re the first clean rider.”
Initially, I was proud of that, but it was becoming increasingly frustrating. I wanted to win clean, and I knew that, if everything went to plan, it was possible.
I hoped it would be possible at the Tour that year.
Winning at the Tour would be the ultimate “fuck you” to the dopers and the fulfillment of a dream that had sustained me through thick and thin.
—
Bernard Quilfen’s hangdog features wore a frown.
“What’s going on, David? You’re not yourself—I know you’re a much better rider than this.”
I sat on the edge of my bed, listening to my directeur sportif pull me apart. “You’ve only got two months until the Tour—there’s no room now for relaxing. You can’t go to the Tour if you carry on like this …”
We were at the Tour of Romandie in Switzerland, and Quilfen had decided to give me a talking-to. It was a good call—I needed it.
I tried to explain.
“I’ve lost control a bit, Bernard,” I said. “I wanted to take it easy for the first part of the year so that I could peak for the Tour. Maybe I relaxed a bit too much. But two months is a long time for me—I can change completely in that time. I just need the pressure to do it.”
Quilfen shook his head. “Well, you’ve made it harder for yourself now. You need to be going better by the Dauphiné Libéré or we’ll have to rethink things.”
The Dauphiné Libéré, an Alpine stage race in early June, was a dry run for the Tour.
I knew he was right. “Bernard, I’ll be good at the Dauphiné. But I’m not going to be good here, I can tell you that right now. Look—I know what I have to do. If I’m not better at the Dauphiné, then I don’t deserve to go to the Tour.”
Sure enough, I rode like shit at the Tour of Romandie, but a switch had been flicked in my head. I suffered through the five-day race, not feeling self-pity but seeing it as the first step in my grand plan. I started dieting properly and, when I got back to Biarritz, I kept training hard and looking after myself.
A month later, at the Dauphiné, I was champing at the bit. I had lost weight and was back in the race. I was focused solely on what I had to do in order to be at my best for the start of the Tour.
That included paying attention to the details, like the setup on my time trial bike. The custom handlebars I’d been promised for almost two years were obviously never going to get made, so I found myself some old cow-horn-style bars and some clip-on tri-bars and built them to the specification I wanted. I badgered our clothing sponsor incessantly to make my skinsuit tighter and better fitted. I got maps of the 2000 Tour’s first stage, a 16-kilometer time trial, and studied them, memorizing it all. I was determined that by the time the opening day came, I would have ridden the time trial a dozen times in my head.
After riding well at the Dauphiné, I headed back to Biarritz, living like a monk, my only treat being an evening walk and an ice cream. There was just one last date before the Tour, the Route du Sud, a small race in the Pyrenees.
The night before I left for the race, Jeremy Hunt arrived in Biarritz. Jez and I were planning to drive over to the start of the Route du Sud together. I hadn’t seen him in a while, so we went out for dinner, and, for the first time since that April, I had a drink—and then I had another. The next thing we knew it was five in the morning and we were stumbling back to my apartment.
There was no air-con in Jez’s battered VW Golf, and we sweated our way across the Midi to some backwater provincial town north of Toulouse. We barely talked during the four-hour drive, as each blamed the other for the excesses of the night before. Jez dropped me off at the team hotel, and we went our separate ways.
Two days later, in the race’s 20-kilometer time trial, I was flying. I caught the rider who’d started a minute ahead of me, Dutch pro Leon van Bon, but then I lost concentration and he came right by me again. It woke me up, and I switched on the power once more, winning by almost a minute. I even eliminated a rider—my Biarritz booze buddy, Jez. He didn’t think that was very cool.
It hadn’t been a stellar field in the Route du Sud, but that didn’t take away from how strong I’d felt and how fast I’d gone. I’d responded to Quilfen’s scare tactics. Now I was ready for the Tour.
—
My mobile rang.
“Hello, darling!” I immediately recognized the familiar cheery tones of my mum …
“Mum—how’s the drive going? Not too windy, is it?”
“No wind at the moment, but then we’re not moving,” she told me. “We’re a little stuck—I’m not sure if we’ll be making it down there this afternoon …”
The thought of my mum missing my debut ride in the Tour de France certainly took my mind off my nerves.
She was coming over to France with my friend Harry Gibbings in an open-top sports car.
Caterham had lent Harry one of their 7s, and he was driving Mum the hundreds of miles from England through France to Poitiers. I had an uneasy feeling it would end in tears.
Harry decided they should visit his uncle’s house in Surrey on the way—God knows why, as they were already on a tight schedule. They pulled up to the house just as a car was leaving through the gates. Harry didn’t recognize the occupants, but gave them a cheery wave and drove in.
It was only after umpteen rings of the doorbell that he realized nobody was at home. They clambered back into the Caterham and drove toward what he assumed were automatic gates. When they steadfastly refused to open, he realized he was in a fix. The gates, it seemed, did not open for any Tom, Dick—or Harry.
Harry couldn’t get ahold of his uncle or anybody else who could help, so all they could do was sit and wait. He tried to be cool about it when we spoke on the phone, but I could tell he was concerned. Eventually, Harry and my mum got out, but I spent the next few hours absolutely convinced they’d never arrive at the Tour in time. But maybe it was a good distraction in that it did stop me worrying about the race.
The 2000 Tour de France started in the Futuroscope theme park, outside Poitiers. The Tour was much bigger than I had ever dreamed it would be. I had grown used to the professional racing scene and had ridden some of its biggest races—the Belgian Classics, the Dauphiné Libéré, Paris–Nice, the Tour de Suisse—but nothing prepared me for the Tour.
The sheer scale of it was overwhelming. There were thousands of people working on it, hundreds of cars, dozens of motorbikes, numerous helicopters—even planes—and all of that was just within the race organization. Then there was the mainstream sports media: for most of them, it was the only cycling event they covered all year. Suddenly, the British press, TV, and radio journalists all wanted to speak to me. I had been doing interviews during the buildup with newspapers that had never shown an interest in me before. For the first time, I was doing TV interviews in English, and this was much more fun than doing them in French. This interest was boosted by the fact that I was the only British rider taking part, as I would be for the next few years.
There was also a documentary crew filming me. Five “players” from the race would be followed: the director of the Tour, a retired champion, a superfan, the start and finish line commentator, and a neophyte—or debutant—in other words, me. It was as if I’d stepped into some mad alternative cycling world. Everything I’d done before seemed like it had been a rehearsal for the Tour. I was finally in the Big Show.
The course for the opening time trial suited me well. It was not pan flat, but it wasn’t too hard, either. There was only four corners, and none of those were very tricky. The physical demands of it bore an uncanny resemblance to the High Wycombe CC “10” time trial I’d raced on Tuesday nights during my school holidays.
I was still badgering the team, in an effort to get all my kit just right. My bike was as good as I could get it with the equipment available and my aerodynamic skinsuit was supposed to arrive that day—but as usual it came at the last possible moment. I wanted it to be tighter and completely wrinkle-free, but it was shit, barely any different from the standard one I had.
I flipped. I’d been asking for it over and over for months and was promised repeatedly that I’d have it in time. When that didn’t happen, it caused a near nuclear reaction in me. But my tantrum had an impact, and the mother of one of our office staff spent that night stitching up the suit so that it was absolutely skin-tight. I was euphoric because I knew that the aerodynamic advantage it gave me could prove to be critical.
The riders set off one by one, and the director of the Tour, Jean-Marie Leblanc, who could have followed any one of the leading stars, chose to follow me. Tony Doyle, the former professional rider, was there working with Nike and managed to wangle a place for my mum in Jean-Marie’s car.
It was my mum’s first visit to the Tour de France, but she found herself in the best seat in the house, sitting alongside the race director following her son making his debut in the race he’d dreamed about for so long. If it was all a bit weird for me, then it was much weirder for my mum.
I felt incredibly good during the time trial, relaxed and confident. I avoided getting carried away in the opening kilometers, kept calm, and caught the three riders who had set off in front of me, overtaking the third with a couple of kilometers to go. That is one of the benefits of not going with the final wave of riders, usually the stars, among whom there are no catches to be had. Overtaking the third man, just as I was at my limit, was enough to give me the boost I needed for those final very painful minutes.
I rode the last kilometer very fast, at over 60 kilometers an hour, thankful for the fitted skinsuit, modified bars, and my ability to pedal faster than most. I knew I was going to get the best time, and when I crossed the line I was eleven seconds faster than Laurent Jalabert. It took me a few minutes to recover and return to the team bus, where we all watched the last riders come over the line. They were all slower than me, and it became clear that the only person who could better my time was Lance Armstrong.
I couldn’t watch as Lance came around the last corner and flew into the final kilometer, our times neck and neck. I had convinced myself that I wasn’t going to win in an attempt to avoid disappointment, and when the massive cheer rose up around me, I couldn’t really grasp what was happening.
July 2000, Futuroscope, Tour de France. The first time TV cameras and photographers wanted to witness me pinning on my number.
Everybody started hugging me, and before I knew it, I was crying. Bondue was hugging me, too, tears in his eyes, telling me how he’d always known I’d do it. Then I was pushed out of the bus into the throng of fans, photographers, TV cameras, and race officials, who acted as bodyguards as I was shepherded through the crowds. As I walked to the podium, trying to pull myself together, I realized that the Tour was now revolving around me, the new maillot jaune.
I wasn’t prepared for winning. I hadn’t visualized beyond the finish line, so stepping up onto the podium and putting on the yellow jersey was an overpowering experience. I was a blubbering mess. But it was good fun being the main man at the Tour, and I quickly grew to like it. I felt special, and the nice thing was that everybody seemed genuinely pleased for me. I was floating on a cloud, I was so happy.
Three hours after the race ended, after the presentation protocols, doping controls, press conference, and TV interviews were all over, I arrived back at the hotel. The mechanics were all still on a high, and I went around the team and saw as many of the riders and staff as I could. Even though it was late, I was still wearing the yellow jersey. I kept it on for the rest of that night.
