I was scared shitless before the start of the 2001 Vuelta a España.
I was worried not only that my blood levels were going to be too high and that it would become common knowledge that I’d taken EPO, but, more importantly, that I was going to lose.
We arrived in Salamanca in Spain three days before the race. I spent most of the time, day and night, sleeping. L’Équipier was the opposite. He was nervous, too, and far from sleepy. I suppose we had our different ways of handling the stress.
As usual, the team ran their pre–Grand Tour blood test on the Thursday morning. L’Équipier and I anxiously awaited the results. Thankfully, our levels weren’t as high as we thought they might have been. I was only a couple of points higher than usual, a result that could easily be explained by simply being rested and fresh. It didn’t look suspicious. I was able to relax a bit more.
Although the three Grand Tours of France, Italy, and Spain have similar formats, they have their own distinct characteristics, and the Vuelta is very different from the Tour.
The Tour is a well-oiled machine. Wherever it goes, it takes over; villages, towns, and cities have to adapt to the Tour’s requirements. At the Vuelta, there is little to suggest the race is coming until a couple of hours beforehand, and normal life continues until the last possible moment. The two races typified their cultures: the Tour is a flagship of the République Française and for that reason all-powerful and somewhat arrogant, while the Vuelta is more relaxed and takes itself less seriously. As riders, we were tiny cogs in the Tour machine, whereas at the Vuelta we were integral parts of the race festivities and could enjoy it as such.
Because of this relaxed attitude, it was hard to scout the time trial course before the race began in Salamanca. Nobody even knew where it was. There were no route arrows, barriers, or even a clear map indicating the route. So I just slept.
When I did finally see it, my worst fears came true. I had become a nervous bike handler since the crash in the Tour, and this course was very fast and technical for the first few kilometers. My cornering had been laughable in the two time trials I’d ridden since Dunkirk, in Belgium and Denmark.
The last few kilometers of the course were hard, so I decided that was where I could make the difference. I had to keep calm through the first time check, as I was sure to have lost time, then make up the lost seconds in the finale.
As predicted, I lost time in the opening kilometers, but then rode out of my skin all the way to the finish line, beating the fastest time by just one second. In contrast to my Tour win the previous year, all I felt was relief—unadulterated, pure relief. I’d fulfilled my professional obligations—I couldn’t have imagined doping and not winning. But it was all business now. It didn’t feel like sport anymore. Winning this way had never been part of my dream.
I lost the race leader’s jersey three days later in a crash in the final 10 kilometers of the stage. I bruised my lower leg quite badly, and one of the soigneurs covered it in an anti-inflammatory cream, without knowing the cream was photo-sensitive.
The next day was hot and sunny, and the part of my leg that had been covered in the cream began to burn from the inside out. This then spread and was causing me ridiculous pain as it burned my skin off. That mistake has left me with an allergic reaction to direct sunlight ever since.
It didn’t hamper my form, though, and I won stage six, escaping in the finale with one other rider before beating him in the sprint. Although I didn’t really notice any marked physical difference due to doping, things were becoming easier for me. I still felt like I suffered as much, but now I could suffer for longer and then recover faster. It was like having the form of my life, day in, day out.
Before the stage to Zaragoza, a rumor spread through the peloton that the Spanish team ONCE had fitted fifty-five-tooth chain rings on their bikes. Clearly, they knew something we didn’t.
But as I’d barely slept the night before, due to my skin burning and itching, I was neither worried nor concerned about what ONCE had or hadn’t planned. I was not a factor in the overall classification, and my two stage wins meant that the team basically had carte blanche for the rest of the race, so it wasn’t as if we had much to stress about.
In howling winds, that stage to Zaragoza became one of the fastest bike races in history, as the peloton averaged 56 kilometers per hour over 180 kilometers. It also opened my eyes to the power of doping.
When we began to hit the crosswinds in the final stages of the race, I was sitting too far back in the peloton. Within a kilometer I found myself in the third echelon of riders, watching the front of the race disappear at speeds nudging 70 kilometers an hour.
Partly due to the adrenaline rush of riders getting physically blown off the road, and partly due to the absolute panic surrounding me, I was motivated by the situation and spent the next 30 kilometers of racing bridging on my own between groups. I wasn’t that surprised that nobody could or would work with me, but I began to think it was strange when nobody could even hold my wheel.
It took me only a couple of minutes to recover from the first bridging move. I thought it was a bit odd that I felt so good, but I was beginning to have fun. Without even trying to take anybody with me as support, I went off in pursuit of the front group that was, by now, out of sight.
It was an absolutely ridiculous move, and in the unwritten rules of cycling an impossible one. I spent the next twenty minutes riding at over 60 kilometers per hour, with a cadence in excess of 115. I closed most of the gap in the first fifteen minutes and was then able to see the front group, only 100 meters ahead.
They were within reach when I started to fall apart. I was way over my limits, my breathing was out of control, and my whole body was starting to lactate. Unable to get closer, it was only because one of the riders at the back of the group saw me, and then told L’Équipier, that I finally made the junction.
L’Équipier dropped out of the safety of the group’s slipstream, came back, and towed me onto the tail end. I was in a mess, but my lone ride between the groups went down as legendary, a ride that nobody apart from the professional peloton knew about. Yet it also showed what EPO could do. My body was responding in an unprecedented way to the demands of racing.
That experience had an impact on me. I began to think of myself as two separate entities: mind and body. My body was a tool that was capable of things that I previously hadn’t thought possible. Now I knew why Frank Vandenbroucke was always pushing the envelope and seeing how far he could go. It was a game, in which he played God with his own body. And in the process, Frank lost his mind.
As the Vuelta went on, my sleep patterns worsened due to the incessant burning and itching from my allergic reaction. We’d set a deadline for my going home if it didn’t improve, but the only immediate solution to the problem was cortisone, although cortisone was illegal unless it was for tendon treatment.
Cortisone could sometimes have been used to good effect. There was a famous example of this when Jonathan Vaughters was stung on the face by a bee during a stage of the Tour de France. His eye became so inflamed that he couldn’t see. A simple cortisone injection would have quickly treated this, but because Jonathan and his team followed the rules so honestly, he ended up having to quit the race.
In my case, we found a less honest, more pragmatic solution. The team told the world that I had tendonitis in my ankle and that I’d been given cortisone for this. In fact, I’d been given an intramuscular cortisone injection in an attempt to calm the allergic reaction.
All that was needed to satisfy the UCI was for us to note this in my medical records. Then if cortisone appeared in an anti-doping sample, they would look back at my medical record and see that I had a legitimate reason. As long as the right product was listed in the medical book, and was allied to a legitimate use—in this case, tendonitis—it didn’t matter if the reason given was accurate or not.
The team doctor and others had been saying I should take cortisone since the rash first showed itself. Yet, even as an EPO user, I held off for a week on taking cortisone. I didn’t want to take it. I knew it was a powerful drug, but I also knew it was a catabolic drug that consumed the body. It was probably the most potent drug out there, yet with the right prescription it could be used legally. There wasn’t any great resistance to cortisone use within Cofidis, a stance replicated by most pro teams at the time. Even now, cortisone is abused by some, its use being hidden behind the TUEs (therapeutic use exemption certificates), which can be easily acquired.
A few days after the cortisone injection I began to lose weight. I was skinnier than I’d ever been. There were veins appearing all over my legs and my torso as the last bits of fat left on my body were eaten away by the cortisone. Once the fat was gone, it began eating into my muscle, causing my weight to drop continuously.
By the time I got to the World Road Championships in Lisbon, ten days after the Vuelta had finished, I was skin, bone—and a little bit of muscle. Logic would dictate that I felt weaker, and yet I’d never felt so strong. I felt like I could suffer more and push myself harder than ever. And that was exactly what I did in the individual time trial.
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Competition in the men’s time trial that year was fierce. Santiago Botero, Levi Leipheimer, Jan Ullrich, and I were all in contention, but I led through every time check, and on crossing the line it appeared that I was world champion. I was chaperoned to the podium, receiving congratulations on the way, not really knowing anything about where I stood but assuming that I probably wouldn’t be beaten.
But Ullrich was still out on the course. As I was taken through the crowd barriers toward the presentation, he and Hungarian rider Laszlo Bodrogi crossed the line together, and I sensed the mood change around me.
Ullrich had finished six seconds faster than my time, demoting me to second place. It’s against the rules to be paced by another rider during an individual time trial, yet this appeared to have happened on the last lap.
Ullrich had been behind Bodrogi, then had caught him. He had overtaken him only to have Bodrogi pass him. Then Ullrich caught and passed Bodrogi once more. Effectively, they paced each other to the finish. This helped Ullrich, not only aerodynamically but also psychologically, and gave him the necessary boost to move from fourth place at the last time check to fastest time at the finish.
September 2001, Lisbon World Championships. Dazed and confused by the realization that I’ve finished second after leading through all the time checks.
I was devastated. I couldn’t believe that this could be allowed to happen and wanted the commissaires to act. But the result stood. I sat in the press conference with my head in my hands, in a state of shock. It took me a good hour to pull myself together.
Later, sitting in the doping control, I said hello to the UCI anti-doping commissaire, the same guy who had also been responsible for the anti-doping procedures at the Vuelta.
We got chatting and at one point he asked if he could see how my ankle was healing. I stared at him, a baffled look on my face.
He repeated the question.
“Your ankle, David …? How is it?”
He bent down and looked directly at the burned skin and the rashes, now healing, that had covered my legs.
Finally, I twigged.
“Oh, my ankle …” I said. “Yes, much better, thanks. It healed quite quickly after we treated it.”
He was very thoughtful and seemed genuinely interested in how I was. Yet he also made it obvious that he knew exactly what was behind my supposed cortisone treatment for tendonitis. He wasn’t judgmental, but was simply making it clear to me that, even though he knew the truth of what had gone on, there was nothing he could do.