The epiphany I’d experienced on the start line of the Tour’s final stage had left its mark on me. I was twenty-nine but I still had plenty of ambition—if anything, I was more driven than I’d ever been, having realized how much I loved racing and also that my career wouldn’t go on forever.
It was becoming clear that if I wanted to be truly professional I had to live somewhere near fellow professionals in a suitable climate with the perfect roads and terrain. From my experience, there are only two places in Europe that tick all these boxes: Tuscany and Catalunya.
Before I headed off to the Vuelta a España, a race I loved, Nicole and I spent some time in Girona, about an hour’s drive north of Barcelona. Neither of us had ever been there before, but I had heard good things about it from other riders.
We’d tried Tuscany—Nicole had come out to visit me when I was training at Max’s house—but it didn’t feel right, so after speaking to fellow pro and Girona stalwart Christian Vande Velde during the Tour de France, we homed in on the Catalan city.
Christian and his wife Leah welcomed us with open arms and we stayed with them for a few days before I headed off to Malaga for the Vuelta. Girona was perfect; the weather was fabulous, the roads quiet and varied, and there were half a dozen English-speaking professionals living there, ensuring that there would always be training partners. This was key because my attitude had changed—I no longer wanted to isolate myself from my profession.
Although we were only there for a few days, we decided to make Girona our new home. Nicole was absolutely fearless in her commitment to living abroad, which made the decision to move to Spain all the easier.
I arrived at the 2006 Vuelta relaxed and fresh—the opposite of my state at the start of the Tour. But I was already starting to feel a little isolated from the team. During the last week of the Tour, when I had been exhausted but had maintained my stance against injected récup, I think they genuinely thought I was simply stupid, a fanatic regarding my cause. They had no real understanding of my reasoning or beliefs.
In my races with them I had taken to working as hard as I could. I hadn’t regained the confidence to race for myself, so it was easier to win respect by being a super-domestique. It helped me fit in and be accepted, something which, despite the ethical divide, was important to me.
When our young sprinter Francisco Ventoso won a stage in the Vuelta, he surprisingly dedicated it to me. I had become his lead-out man, something I had never even tried while at Cofidis. In another stage, a couple of days later, I put myself on the line to help another teammate. He didn’t win, and I realized that I was sacrificing myself too much, just to try and fit in. It was time to rediscover my old self-belief, even if it meant risking failure.
There was an individual time trial stage looming, and I was convinced I could win it. My form was picking up, and my physical condition was light-years away from where it had been at the end of the Tour. I could feel myself becoming one of the strongest and fastest in the peloton once again.
I may have lost my edge in the road stages, but a time trial was far simpler. I just had to get from point A to point B faster than everybody else. But there was an obstacle—Swiss rider Fabian Cancellara. In my absence from the sport, he’d developed into a monster of a rider and the undisputed king against the clock.
The time trial was in Cuenca, one of the classic Vuelta finishes. There’s a cobbled climb up through the old town before it levels off, loops out through a valley, and then descends back into the new town.
We’d ridden this finale in the previous day’s road stage and Fabian and I were clearly on the same wavelength because, with no commitments to the overall standings, we both sat up at the bottom of the cobbled climb and relaxed a little, in order to save our strength for the next day.
But there was one big difference. Fabian was chatting, joking, and not really paying much attention. Meanwhile, I stayed at the back of the group, studying the road, memorizing as much of it as I could, and gauging how long I would be able to remain on the time trial bars. Watching Fabian laughing and chatting as we rode over the course made it all the easier for me to focus—I knew I was gaining an advantage.
In the Saunier Duval team, nobody got up before nine on a time trial stage—they considered it a virtual rest day. Despite that, at seven the next morning I was out on my time trial bike, riding the course. My weary mechanic, David Fernandez, who looked at me as if I was madder than ever, had to get out of bed and open the team truck to give me my bike.
As I studied the course once more, I knew what I had to do, and that was to limit my deficit as much as I could to the top of the cobbled climb, then take time along the plateau section before attacking the descent to the finish.
I threw myself into the descent in my time-trialing position. It was possible, but it was going to be a big risk and scary as hell. I told Matxin and David, who would be in the following car during the race itself, that I would be taking a lot of risks in the final kilometers but that I knew what I was doing. If I crashed, then so be it.
Later that day, toward the end of a hot afternoon, I came over the top of the climb eleven seconds behind Cancellara. But I didn’t panic. Keeping to my plan, I chipped away just over a second on every kilometer to the finish line and narrowly beat him. My victory margin was less than a second but I came close to crashing only once. I think that was the last time anybody ever went faster than Fabian downhill.
It was the moment I’d been waiting for, certainly since my ban and perhaps since the butterfly récup needle had first dropped into my vein all those years before. I had proven my point.
In the post-race press conference, I said what I now believed in and had proven through winning, and I said it because I knew I owed it to my younger self. It was what he had always needed to hear.
“I want everybody to understand something, even my fellow professional cyclists and the fans who love cycling: I am doing this on nothing, only on bread and water. I do not believe in any injections of any sort for recuperation. We can perform at the highest level in cycling without medical help.
“Today was a purely physical test. I won, and I am 100 percent clean. Some people may not believe me, but if you know me, you will believe me after what I have been through. I love my sport, and I want everyone to know that you can win the biggest races on bread and water.”
—
Because I’d beaten Cancellara in the Vuelta time trial, great things were expected of me in the World Championships later that autumn, my first appearance in Team GB colors since winning the world title in Canada.
I flopped completely in the time trial, suffering from exhaustion and a very badly timed puncture. But I redeemed myself in the road race, ending up in the defining move of the last lap. It was the first time a Team GB jersey had been seen in the finale of the professional men’s Worlds for a long time.
A couple of weeks later, I entered the National Track Championships. I won the 4-kilometer individual pursuit, and—as I didn’t defend my title—have since kept a 100 percent undefeated track-racing record. But then beginner’s luck probably played a bigger part in that win than was acknowledged at the time.
Bit by bit, I was being accepted back into the fold. That autumn, I was invited to the Tour de France presentation, in Paris, unveiling the details of the 2007 race, scheduled to start in London. The presentation is a grand affair, held in the Palais des Congrès, just off the périphérique, and always followed by champagne and canapés.
As I mingled with the crowds in the foyer of the auditorium, I saw “JV”—former pro Jonathan Vaughters. Jonathan had dropped out of the world of pro cycling a few years earlier, reappearing every now and then writing for magazines. He was now managing a small start-up cycling team in the States.
I was surprised to see him. Jonathan had endured a hard time as a pro and eventually decided that enough was enough, returning to his Colorado home and turning his back on professional cycling. I didn’t know his full story, but it had always been clear that he was an outsider, separated from others in cycling by his intelligence as much as anything. I’d never known him well enough to notice that he was something of an outsider in all walks of life, and that the older he got the more eccentric he became.
An intellectual athlete is considered to be an oxymoron, or at least a rare bird in the menagerie that is professional sport. But there are intelligent athletes—it’s just that they sometimes lack higher education, because they have devoted so much of their youth to reaching the top in sport. The most successful athletes have an intelligence that is more like that of a very successful businessman. They are able to manage, motivate, and inspire in equal measure.
They may be out of their depth in many situations but in their world they are extremely well educated and accomplished. Jonathan has more of an education-based intellect, making him very different from most in the sporting sphere, and this sets him apart.
He has a scientific brain but is also a loner—in fact, he’s almost antisocial—and that is not the sort of personality that makes the packlike existence of professional sport very easy.
Yet he can be, and often is, very funny. He has a natural desire to provoke, like the naughty boy who lives and breathes to annoy adults. Much of this aspect of his personality is clear from his dandyish dress sense, as his sartorial taste definitely complements his quirky nature. But I have always really liked Jonathan. He’s an interesting man, and when I met him again he was in the process of building a professional cycling team.
I’d put Benny Johnson—my young protégé who’d briefly lived with me in Biarritz—in contact with JV. Benny was now based in Nice and, although back in Australia for the winter, was in search of a team for the next year. On my recommendation, Jonathan took Benny on board, but also asked, cryptically, what I’d be doing in 2008 and said that he’d like to talk to me at a later date.
This had all seemed a bit strange—I didn’t give it much more thought. After all, I was hoping to be signing for one of the bigger teams in cycling when my Saunier Duval contract ended—not a small, slightly kooky, argyle-clad outfit, filled with American kids and managed by a man who had nothing to do with the European establishment.
But there was JV, alone in the crowd, a little out of place, hanging around at the Tour de France presentation.
“Hey, Jonathan—I didn’t know you were going to be here.”
“Ah, Dave—how are you? Well, y’know. It wasn’t really planned.”
Typically, it felt like we were meeting for the first time, even though we’d known each other for ten years.
We carried on making small talk.
“Thanks for sorting Benny out,” I said. “He’s a real talent, but he’s just not had the right break. I think your team will be perfect for him.”
“Yeah, he seems real smart; I think he’ll fit in.” JV nodded. “Sooo, uhhh—listen,” he said, “come with me. I want you to meet somebody. His name is Doug Ellis—he wants to start a Tour de France team. Let’s just say he has the means.”
I followed JV across the foyer and there, standing on his own, equally out of place, was Doug, a lean, tall, personable, and friendly American, yet with nothing about him to indicate wealth or power.
We got chatting, and, as it turned out, Doug didn’t have an invitation for the presentation. I had a spare ticket, so I gave him one. Our meeting that morning was very brief, yet it fueled a curiosity in me about what JV was planning. But it would be months before I learned that JV and Doug were deadly serious in their aspirations.
When I’d started out on the road toward a cycling career, I’d never ever imagined that the Tour would one day start in London. So it was an emotional moment when the London start was fully unveiled in the Palais des Congrès that morning. The presentation also marked the end of Jean-Marie Leblanc’s reign as director of the Tour. Jean-Marie was honored onstage as he handed the reins to the incoming director Christian Prudhomme.
As Jean-Marie left the stage and walked back to his seat in the front row of the auditorium, he stopped and shook my hand. Afterward, he told me he did it so that everybody could see that he supported me.
But not everybody felt so forgiving.
Afterward, while mingling with officials from the Tour organization over canapés and champagne, I needed to pop to the men’s room. But in the warren of corridors, I got a little lost and then stumbled across a separate reception for representatives of the London start and their guests, including some British riders.
At first I was pleased to see so many familiar faces, but I quickly sensed that I wasn’t welcome there. I was still the pariah—in fact, the event had never been mentioned to me. As that realization sank in, I felt a flush of embarrassment and left. It was a harsh reminder that I had a long way to go before I would be forgiven.
—
The case that Judge Pallain had put together with the police over the previous two and a half years had finally been handed to the Nanterre prosecutor. The hearings began in November 2006 and took five days.
There was no jury, but three judges, presided over by Judge Ghislaine Polge. We were in the number one court of Nanterre, one of the most important courtrooms in France. There were ten defendants, seven of them cyclists from the Cofidis team, charged with “acquiring and possessing banned substances.” We all sat at the front of the court facing the judges, our lawyers seated behind us.
Over the course of the five days we were called up one by one to stand in front of the judges and answer their questions. All witnesses who were involved in the Cofidis affair were questioned. It was very drawn out; on one day we were in court for over twelve hours.
I told the hearing about the culture at Cofidis. “Get results and do what you have to do,” was how I described it. I detailed my stay with L’Équipier in Tuscany, and explained how I had learned to inject EPO. “Everybody pushed me on the Cofidis team,” I said. “It was torture.”
On the final day, the prosecutor presented his recommendations for sentencing and said: “When initially reviewing the case I questioned whether David Millar should even be here. Fortunately for the court, he has been present, as he’s given us an articulate point of view that has been valuable to the case as a whole.”
After all the stress, time, and money that the affair had cost me, I had in the end simply been seen as a “point of view.” It was the icing on the gâteau of justice française.
Paul-Albert had asked to give his closing argument first as he needed to leave. He had never interrupted the progress within the court, considering the best policy was simply to stay quiet and let everybody else make a show of themselves. He had told me that much of the effect of the closing argument was down to presentation.
Instead of standing up at the lectern, he had a table moved out and put at the front of the court so he was almost on the same level as the judges. He then gave an eloquent and mostly improvized discourse to the whole court. It was, to use a word he’d introduced me to, “brilliantisme.”
And that was that. Later that day I left the court in Nanterre for the last time. Shortly after New Year’s, three years after the first arrests in Paris in January 2004, the sentences were announced.
I was acquitted, while many of the others were given suspended sentences of three to six months. The soigneur, Boguslaw “Bob” Madejak, from whom the whole case originated, was sentenced to a year in prison, nine months suspended.
The court was damning about the team itself, and also found Cofidis SA and Cofidis Competition guilty, saying the proceedings had demonstrated that the riders “must absolutely obtain a result or risk seeing their contract not renewed and losing all hope in cycling.”
Finally, it was over. At last, I could move on.
—
We loved life in Girona. Waking up to blue skies was invigorating and refreshing and the Catalans were friendly and welcoming. But as the season loomed, training, first because of the court case and then because of a crash, was not going well.
Christian Vande Velde and I were becoming firm friends, although I began to doubt his fondness for me on our first training ride of 2007, when we suffered a miscommunication exiting a roundabout and I came tumbling down very heavily on my right leg.
The muscle was badly damaged, and there was nothing for me to do but rest for three weeks. It was also the last time I didn’t wear a helmet in training. Ironically, Nicole had given me a hard time over not wearing a helmet just as I was leaving the apartment.
Ten minutes later, I was lying on the tarmac wincing, with Christian standing over me.
“Damn, that’s some strong voodoo Nicole has,” he said.
Meanwhile, JV and I had started to correspond more as it became clear that his team was going to happen. Yet it seemed like such a gigantic leap. I couldn’t quite grasp what their vision was, and it took me a good couple of months before I could finally put into words what they wanted to do. Without that, I couldn’t commit to it, let alone convince others.
They wanted to create a Tour de France team that was clean and that would offer a vehicle for riders to reach the top in cycling without ever encountering doping. It would be a team that riders, fans, and the media could believe in. It would aim to give back to the sport what it was missing: trust.
The most important way of achieving this was to create an internal, yet independent, anti-dope-testing program. This would offer an insurance policy for the team, allowing its riders to be tested even more rigorously than the authorities whose responsibility it was to test professional cyclists.
This internal program would not only test for banned substances, it would also create a blood profile for each cyclist. This profile would allow those responsible for the independent testing program to monitor for the effects that the undetectable banned substances would have on the cyclist’s blood values. In other words, if it was still impossible to find the cause, then they would find the effect. It was a first generation “blood passport.”
This worked as a deterrent in that it would be extremely difficult to dope and not be caught. If you signed a contract with the team, you would be fully aware that you were committing to being more controlled than your competition, so immediately the contracted rider would be buying into what the team was about.
This was a strong psychological tool. In doing this we were taking a proactive stance in preventing doping. There would be no “ostrich politics”—the management and sponsors were making it clear that they did not want doping to take place and that they’d do everything in their power to stop it.
I had explained to the anti-doping agencies that, as a young athlete, I had given up on the sport’s authorities. It was so easy for us to dope if we wanted to, and it was so prevalent around us. In fact, I’d never had an “out of competition” anti-doping control before 2006. At the time I was doping, there wasn’t even an athlete’s whereabouts system, so even if the anti-doping controllers wanted to test me away from a race they’d have very little hope of finding me (and none if I didn’t want them to). There were no repercussions to face if they couldn’t find me. This bred contempt for the system, such as it was.
Contempt for the system and resentment of its inadequacies were often the first step toward doping. Knowing that others were getting away with it—and knowing how they were getting away with it—fueled cynicism. Faced with doping all around you, it became increasingly difficult, and then impossible, to respect those charged with prevention, detection, and punishment.
And then what—who or what were you left to rely on? A good apple in a bad barrel will more often than not be ruined. The people of influence in professional cycling were too often bad apples.
It was the hypocrisy that was the hardest thing to live with. To hear the biggest, most influential names in the sport say, “Doping? In cycling? But everything is fine!” was laughable. For a while, I had been one of those people—this is what’s easy to confuse with the oft-cited omertà. Instead of saying nothing, they would simply lie about the gravity of the situation.
There’s no doubt that, after a few years of the blood tests that were introduced after the Festina affair of 1998, there was enough knowledge and data to understand exactly what was going on. If a team boss wanted to, he could analyze his riders’ blood test results, his TUE (theraputic use exemption) certificates, or could find out who his private coach or doctor was and whether he was acting suspiciously.
Yet few ever did, and most would claim complete shock and incomprehension when one of their riders failed an anti-doping control or found themselves implicated in a doping scandal. Team bosses didn’t want to know what was going on; worse, they refused to admit they had the power to prevent what was going on under their very noses.
What Jonathan and Doug wanted to do was to change this mentality. They wanted to demonstrate that a team manager and his sponsor could assume responsibility for their actions. They implemented their internal anti-doping program as soon as the team entered the professional ranks, only three years after JV had created the original junior team in his hometown, back in 2004.
The goal was now to take this attitude to the Tour de France and, in doing so, change cycling for the better.
—
The Slipstream dream excited me so much. It gave me an opportunity to implement everything I had learned from my own mistakes and use it to help and develop others.
It was Jonathan’s less-than-orthodox thinking that made it possible for me to be a part of it. I was the first big-name professional he approached, which—considering that I was an ex-doper—seemed like madness, in the light of what he was trying to achieve.
Only JV could have the chutzpah to think that signing an ex-doper as the flagship leader of a Clean Team could work. But he was right—he knew the world of professional cycling, he had been as its mercy and had left the pro scene a disenchanted young man.
Jonathan had made his own mistakes; he’d been in the wrong place at the wrong time with the wrong people and had made decisions that he will always regret. More than anything, it was this sense of regret that drove him to make his team different from any team that had gone before. In many ways, I was to become his muse.
As I became more enthused about the Slipstream project, I contributed my own ideas. One of the things I’d learned from my time with British Cycling was how valuable a central hub is. Until recently, almost all professional cycling teams had a “virtual” existence. The main office and team HQ, where all the equipment is stored—bikes, wheels, spare parts, clothing, food, bottles, and vehicles—will be in one location.
Sometimes that will be close to a sponsor, as with Cofidis, whose team HQ was near Lille. If the team is run by one person, who has guided it through several different guises, then it will usually be found near that person’s home. For Roger Legeay, that means Paris, and for Jonathan Vaughters, it’s Boulder, Colorado.
Yet the riders and racing staff have no ties with this hub. Maybe they’ll pass through once or twice a year, sometimes not at all. Supplies for the riders are simply dispatched from the hub to each race, wherever that may be.
This works well on a logistical level, but it creates detachment on a psychological level, and the riders—left for too long to their own devices—feel all the more like hired mercenaries. They may meet once or twice a year as a semicomplete team of riders and support staff for training camps, but the rest of the season they just wait for the e-mail with the travel info that will take them to the pickup point for their next race.
When most riders are on one- or two-year contracts, it is easy to see how there is no sense of loyalty or understanding of the responsibility each rider has toward the team as a whole. The biggest teams on the pro circuit are made up of a hundred people, something that most riders are unaware of. When a rider dopes, they put all those hundred jobs at risk because in modern cycling many teams will not survive a doping scandal.
That detachment from the team’s beating heart only fuels the possibility of doping, which was why I recommended to JV that our team should have a central hub in Europe, where we obliged as many personnel as possible—staff and riders—to live.
This would also serve as a massive advantage when it came to managing the riders. The team would be able to assume responsibility for their performance, providing coaching and training sessions, nutritional and medical support, and the latest in technological and scientific advances. It was one thing to prevent them from doping, but we also had an obligation to offer them the resources to make them the best athletes they could be.
For our European program of racing, the logical location for this central hub was Girona, where the majority of American cyclists already based themselves during the February–October racing season. The team would remain registered at its Boulder office in order to keep its American license and origins, and a core team of staff would live and work there, but the majority would be based in and around Girona.
The logistics were complicated, and it took a few months to map it all out. But we needed to move forward and sell the idea to others—riders, race organizers, and eventually sponsors. Until it could stand on its own two feet, Doug was underwriting the team’s financial requirements, and, in doing so, giving Jonathan and me the freedom to create our dream team.
I was juggling excitement about the future with my disillusion about the present. Away from Slipstream, other relationships were causing me stress.
I’d had a difficult time at the early season Saunier Duval training camp and had become increasingly isolated from the team. By the time I got to the first races, I was desperate to show myself. Starting 2007 badly was the worst-case scenario for me because I was hoping to garner some good results to boost my value when it came to contract negotiations for 2008, in the hope of paying off my debts.
I had barely made a dent in my gargantuan IVA with the salary I was on from Saunier Duval. My first races of the year were a joke, but then I started to feel better before Paris–Nice, the biggest stage race of the early season. Apart from a couple of stress-relieving drinking sessions, I’d taken very good care of myself.
Because of the leg injury, I’d been put on a different program, but this separation was symbolic of my situation within the team. I had come to see how helpless I was in making any difference in the anti-doping battle if I didn’t have the complete support of those in power.
Away from racing, I was coming out as an anti-doping activist. Since our first meeting, Andy Parkinson from UK Sport had thought of a good use for me—as the keynote speaker at the UK Sport anti-doping conference in London, which took place the week before Paris–Nice began.
I’d given interviews and held press conferences, but I’d never spoken publicly in this way before. I was very nervous but decided that the best thing I could do was simply to tell my story, and to try to get across what I’d learned, in the hope that my experience could be used to support anti-doping.
Thankfully, it was a big success. It was a full house and everybody seemed genuinely interested to hear what I had to say. My performance was far from polished, but I managed to get my message across. Afterward, as we mingled over drinks, I spoke to a lot of delegates.
Many said that, before, they had always seen the problem of doping as a black-and-white issue, but by the time I’d finished speaking they understood it was, in fact, gray. What surprised me was that almost nobody there had ever heard a doper’s story, let alone met one.
One of the biggest sources of knowledge on doping is a doper. But the majority of guilty athletes never admit to doping, even when convicted, preferring to deny and then lodge appeal after appeal, rather than risk the career ruin that admission of guilt might lead to. Often, if they do finally accept their fate, they remain bitter and resentful, unwilling to help.
I was an exception to that rule. At the lowest point, I had hated my sport so much that I was happy to be out of it, so in that sense the consequences of admitting to doping, while devastating, had offered liberation of a sort.
Mine was a rare path, but one that fortuitously led to my total reform and a newfound passion in educating people on what, up to that point, had always been a hidden dark world.
As relations with Saunier Duval grew trickier, I was kept going by my increasing passion for Slipstream. JV and I were talking more regularly and in greater detail, and we both knew that I would be joining the team. Even so, we still hadn’t discussed contracts, let alone money.
The Friday before Paris–Nice began, JV invited me to dinner. I didn’t know at the time, but he is something of a gourmand, so when I arrived at a beautiful little Michelin-starred restaurant in a backstreet in Paris, lugging my bike and bags with me, I was unprepared. The only saving grace, as I bumped into the furniture under the withering gaze of the mâitre d’, was that I was impeccably attired in the Paul Smith three-piece suit I’d worn for the conference.
During the evening, we agreed that I would ride for Slipstream Sports the following year. We still didn’t discuss money or contracts. It was an old-fashioned gentleman’s agreement, sealed with a good bottle of wine and a handshake, which, considering what we were setting out to try to do, was quite appropriate.
—
I won the Paris–Nice prologue, celebrating my victory only meters away from where I’d had lunch with Jean-Marie Leblanc on that summer day in 2005.
Mum was at the race, and Paul-Albert had watched on TV. Afterward, he called to say how proud he was of me, of the comments I’d made in the post-race interview and of the high opinion the commentators had of me.
Technically, I’d ridden the course perfectly, taking the hill easier than most, but then finishing really strongly. Even when my saddle broke, 3 kilometers from the finish line, I didn’t panic and came flying through the last corner, clipping the curbs and barriers.
I had the best Paris–Nice of my career, something that impressed Jonathan no end, as he knew that my winter training had been compromised and that I’d been somewhat occupied with other duties in the preceding week. He was doubly relieved as he’d feared that decadently wining and dining me fewer than forty-eight hours before the race had perhaps not been his smartest move.
My last flash of form that spring came in the Three Days of De Panne in Belgium. I’d won the time trial there, nine years earlier, but this time I was well and truly beaten into second place by local hero Stijn Devolder. The upside was that, after the race, I met up with Matt White; we were both staying in Kortrijk until the Tour of Flanders, three days later.
I’d known Whitey for years. He’d been on small fringe teams for the majority of his career, finally getting his big break with U.S. Postal in 2001. Later, he joined me at Cofidis in 2004.
He was one of those rare riders, a fully committed domestique, with no aspirations for victory or achieving results for himself. Matt knew exactly what he was paid for and that was to work for his leaders until his job was done. Once he’d done everything he could to support their ambitions, he’d save as much energy as possible, so that he’d be able to repeat the performance the next day.
He was probably one of the best domestiques in the world. One moment his turn of speed would be ripping the peloton to pieces, as he set up his team leader, then ten minutes later he’d be in the gruppetto, asking around to find out how his leaders were doing at the front of the race.
But it is his charismatic personality that really sets Matt apart. He is a force of nature. Just having him in the vicinity raises your energy levels. Blessed with the classic Aussie dry wit that often reduces people to hysterics, he was also perceptive enough to notice if there was something wrong. He’s a good listener who always finds the right moment to come and chat; that ensured that everybody wanted to talk to Whitey.
His love for sport—all sport—was almost comical. Able to hold an educated conversation with a fan of any sport, he also acted as coach and mentor to his wife, Jane Saville, an Olympic walker.
This always perplexed me.
“Whitey,” I’d ask, “how can you coach Jane? You know nothing about walking …”
“Dave, mate,” he’d reply with a shrug of the shoulders. “It’s easy. Athletes are all the same—cyclists, walkers—whatever. They’re all insecure. You just gotta make ’em feel good; tell ’em to train when they need to train, and make ’em rest when they need to rest.”
Then, with finality, he’d say: “Yep—psychology, mate!”
But God—he loved his cycling. It was his grand passion, and he had expert opinions on everything and everyone. When it came to racing, he was a deadly serious, focused, elite athlete.
The Slipstream project needed a directeur sportif who was fresh and would buy into the ethos of the team. But we simply didn’t know where to begin. Then it hit me—Whitey would be perfect. He was only thirty-two at the time and planned to continue racing for a few more years, but, with Jonathan’s consent, I set out to persuade him.
I knew how important the directeur sportif’s role was because, in my experience, there are very few good ones in professional cycling. The role has become somewhat diluted over the years. In the old days, the DS would also be the boss of the team, and would double as employer/coach/manager/father, much as soigneurs would have been doctor/confidant/mother—as well as a masseur.
These days the directeur is less of a boss than in the past. There are so many roles within a team that the directeur has little personal contact with the riders. There are coaches, psychologists, PRs, scientists, doctors—in many ways, the only time riders will actually interact with their directeur is in the pre-race meeting and over the shortwave radio earpieces that we use during the race. It means that one of the most important relationships within a professional cycling team has been lost.
I wanted to try to bring that back, and JV welcomed the idea. I knew that Whitey was perfect for it—I just had to persuade him. That night in Kortrijk, we had a few beers, got a little tipsy, and I planted the seed in his brain. It would take me another few months of relentless persuasion before he came on board.
—
Things were going from bad to worse with Saunier Duval. On the morning of the Tour of Flanders, I saw one of our riders clearly delay his appearance for a random UCI blood test, vanishing for almost thirty minutes before reappearing to have his blood drawn.
His behavior was very suspicious. I had registered the look of fear and noted his body language when he initially found out we had been selected for blood tests. That, combined with his inexplicable nonappearance at a race two weeks earlier, pointed to his use of EPO.
His thirty-minute disappearing act led me to an inevitable conclusion. If his hematocrit had been beyond the 50 percent level, he would have been able to drop it back down below by hastily introducing plasma into his bloodstream, which takes at least thirty minutes. The whole scenario confirmed what I was finding impossible to ignore: some of my teammates were doping.
A few weeks earlier, our young Italian climber, Riccardo Ricco, had run amok in Tirreno–Adriatico. He then swaggeringly announced he would be attacking on the Poggio, the final climb in the marathon one-day Milan–San Remo race a few days later. Ricco was as good as his word and did not let the expectant media or fans down with his “panache” that day.
This was extraordinary behavior for such a young pro and was particularly suspicious as Ricco—who had failed hematocrit tests as an amateur—was renowned for constantly grazing the upper limits of the blood controls.
Ricco was about as suspect as any rider I had seen since I first turned pro. He regarded me, the repentant doper, with such complete incomprehension that when I had tried to speak to him it was like talking to a brick wall.
Although only twenty-two, he was so adept with needles that, before big races, he would sit and inject himself in the team bus. “Just some painkillers,” I was told. I’d tried to put a stop to this, but with no success.
I had told Matxin and Mauro that he was highly suspicious, yet they said there was nothing they could prove, and that anyway, they’d heard he was a freak—maybe he was just “special.” In reality, I felt that they didn’t care, so they turned a blind eye. The media saw him as the biggest, most exciting talent in cycling in years, the sponsors loved the exposure—why should Mauro and Matxin be concerned?
Ricco’s arrogance and the episode at Flanders had tipped me over the edge. I contacted the UCI saying that I had suspicions about doping practices within my team, and that I wanted them to be aware of this. They told me they were looking into it.
But there were issues. Mario Zorzoli, the UCI’s chief medical officer, is a good friend of Mauro Gianetti. I am not suggesting that this affected Zorzoli’s work, but it was indicative of a wider conflict of interests. The UCI’s positioning, as both promoters of cycling and guardians of its ethics, has always been controversial.
Even though it was obvious that the team was teetering on the edge of systematic doping, and even though I had also made it clear to Mauro what I thought, nothing happened.
Any suspicions I had became evident to the wider world at the Tour of the Basque Country a couple of weeks later. The Saunier Duval riders sent to the Basque race dominated the event in a manner reminiscent of the notorious EPO-fueled performances of the 1990s.
It pissed the peloton off. My peers were confronting me, asking me what was going on, saying it was ridiculously obvious that the team were doped up to their eyeballs. I looked like a fool, and I was embarrassed that I could do nothing to stop it.
Because they did nothing, I’d given up on speaking to Mauro or Matxin. Instead, I wrote a long letter to UCI president Pat McQuaid, following up conversations we’d had and telling him that something needed to be done.
I agree with what you said about sanctioning team management—I do think they are changing now but only because their livelihood relies on it, not for any real ethical reason. They HAVE to be more proactive, they have to sit down face to face on an individual basis with their riders and tell them not to dope—this is something that doesn’t happen.
Teams need to be held responsible for the actions of their riders. I know the directors and management say this is not possible, I beg to differ. For the moment riders have consequences for their actions, teams do not. Whether this means short-term suspensions of teams from racing or big fines I don’t know, but consequences are necessary.
Remove injections of any sort and half the battle is won, in my opinion. We do not need to inject ourselves with vitamins and sugar and amino acids to finish a three-week stage race, that is bullshit. I am proving it and am happy to be an example. I finished the Tour tired, but my health was fine. It should be considered a bad thing to inject oneself, not a necessity.
Around the same time, Christian Prudhomme, director of the Tour de France, called me, asking me what the hell the team was up to. I told him what I knew and explained there was very little I could do, that I’d tried everything I could.
Then I wrote another long letter, this time to both Prudhomme and McQuaid, asking that they get together and speak to Gianetti, saying that their combined forces would surely stop what was going on.
The current anti-doping system is being cheated by the riders with the will to do so, and, without a vast amount of money, resources and cooperation from teams, this will not be changing in the near future.
I had no problems telling both of you what I knew [about Saunier Duval] but it also makes me realize how hard it is for somebody within a team to make a difference. I don’t think there is anybody else in the peloton with my background trying to make change happen as much as I am—yet I cannot do anything in my own team! That is very scary and should be a lesson to all of us. I cannot do anything without you … all of us working independently will not do much but make noise. Working together we can make a difference, and force change.
The sport is changing for the better, but not enough and not definitively. I fear that there is simply a calm before the storm for the moment. If fundamental cultural changes do not take place, I see it all flaring up again in two to three years, and then we’re all at the end of the road …
But in 2007, the UCI and ASO, the Tour’s parent company, were archenemies. They were locked in a bitter feud, fueled by a power struggle over who controlled the sport. Lost in the midst of all this was the struggle to combat doping.
ASO was only prevented from forming a splinter group, thus removing the Tour de France and all its other events from UCI jurisdiction, because of a Brussels Directive and intervention from the French government. My gripes with Saunier Duval were an irritant in the middle of all this. But by flagging up my concerns about the team, I was walking on thin ice.
Even though the team’s attitude frustrated me, I was desperate to be selected for the London Tour start, and I knew I had to be discreet. At the same time, my good relations with the UCI and ASO, and an ever-improving profile within the media, meant that, in truth, the team couldn’t simply bench me. But I didn’t want to risk not being at the Tour, so I decided that, in the short term at least, I should keep my head down, ride out the remainder of my contract, and put all my energies into Slipstream.
But on my return from racing in the Tour of Georgia in America, Mauro called telling me that I had to ride the Tour of Romandie. The Swiss race had never been on my program and was, I felt sure, going to derail my buildup to the Tour. He also wanted to speak to me, he said. I feared the worst, thinking that I was going to be fired or told that I wouldn’t be selected for the Tour.
In fact, Mauro was very sympathetic, and I saw another side of him. He understood what was going on, he said, but there was so little he could do. The riders were pushing the limits, but he couldn’t just suspend them from racing for that, because there would be legal repercussions from the suspended riders and the team would be thrown into disarray.
When he told me that he’d heard I’d spoken to the UCI and ASO, I didn’t really know what to do or say. I just sat there, understanding that nothing would really change and that I was being appeased. I realized, too, that I was powerless.
I crashed badly in Romandie, almost replicating my injury from the start of the year. From then on, my Tour de France performance was up in the air. I knew my form would be a long way short of what I’d hoped for.
I tried to disengage myself from Saunier Duval. I knew that I’d done everything I could. I was completely open with Mauro about Slipstream, thanking him for believing in me and for giving me the opportunity to make my comeback, while explaining that Jonathan had made me an offer that I couldn’t possibly refuse.
I think Mauro was happy for me, I genuinely do. He completely understood my reasoning and wished me every success. From that moment on, our relationship was much better. I gave Saunier Duval everything of myself when it came to racing, but my head—and heart—were elsewhere, and I think this suited them just fine.
