Post-race, I was at my truck fussing around and putting on some leggings when a friend walked by with the cutest green messenger bag. She burbled about how she’d just picked it (and the matching wallet) up from Linda’s pop-up shop, and that I simply had to go check out the wares on offer. I wish I’d taken a picture, but the bag Elaine scored was insane – a lime green printed canvas vertical messenger bag with pieces of tire rubber stitched across the front in a crazy quilt pattern that just worked. It was funky, functional, and cycling-centric in a quirky and offbeat way.

I literally ran over to the van where Linda was set up.

ZOMG, the selection. The colors. The cuteness.

Backstory. Here in New England cycling circles, the Keough family is somewhat legendary, and with five sons traveling the circuit and racing their bikes most weekends, mom Linda has been actively involved in all facets of the cycle of cycling life. But in spite of her key role in the operation and countless hours spent in support of the family team effort, her passion for art and making things with her hands never waned. Since 2004, partly to keep her sanity, she’d had a cottage industry crafting handmade pocketbooks. Then one day in 2009 the calamitous event of a flat tire on an expensive handmade tire proved to be serendipitous.

Why not figure out a way to use those discarded tires (and eventually, other bike parts) and incorporate them into her bags? After some creative powwowing with the boys, the first “Re-tired gearbag” featuring a piece of a bicycle tire as a handle launched the line. And the rest, as the old saw goes, is history.

I had such a hard time choosing, but this little wristlet bag, just big enough for my iPhone, some cash, cards, a lip gloss, and keys was perfect for when I don’t want to carry a full-blown messenger bag or other commitment to shouldering:

Perfect size for the essentials

Note the clever label design

Love the Challenge Grifo tread here

Each gearbag is made by hand with re-purposed bicycle tires and parts and is a one-of-a-kind work of art that puts the fun back in functional. The outer fabric is a ballistic nylon or heavy cotton canvas material that will stand up to the kind of abuse cyclists can dish out and still look fabulous. The bags can be easily wiped clean with a damp sponge and soapy water. The selection is dazzling, with so many colors to choose from, so you can mix and match anything in your wardrobe. The interior fabric is 100% cotton and is available in all sorts of cheery colors and fun designs.

Do yourself a favor and check out Linda’s website to see all the great designs, including the possibility of a commissioned bag you help design. Or look for the Keough Sprinter van at a race near you. You won’t be sorry.

Skills, Drills and Bellyaches: A Cyclocross Primer contains detailed descriptions of the fundamentals of cyclocross as demonstrated by U.S. Cyclocross Champion Jeremy Powers with full-color images highlighting each skill in an easy-to-follow format, providing new and experienced ‘crossers a valuable resource for learning the sport.

Available for pre-order now, the book will ship the week of September 23, 2013.

The book was something of a labor of love for Schieken, well known in the U.S. ‘cross community for his witty Twitter banter, his genius #SVENNESS videos, and perhaps best of all, for his loving homage to the mysterious Twitter personality @AnonCX.

As Bill describes it, the book was borne out of a 2011 training ride with friend and coach Dan Tille:

My idea was to use Dan’s years of experience and knowledge from racing, coaching and running ‘cross clinics and pair that with detailed images of the basic cyclocross skills and techniques. The idea was to have a book that covered, in every detail, the nuts and bolts of racing cyclocross in a presentation that would not be out of place on your living room’s coffee table.

After a year of shooting and writing, and then another year of drafts, design, and editing (including 18 different versions comped by book designer Jennifer Franko Dudek), the end result is a solid primer for new racers, as well as a means for experienced riders to hone their craft. As the book blurb promises, “If you master the skills and techniques covered here, you can go into the cyclocross season with the same fitness you had last year, yet achieve better results.”

“Skills Drills and Bellyaches is an incredible addition to the cyclocross community,” Powers says. “The contents of this book are going to help you improve your cyclocross riding without doing any intervals, without any long rides, and without any rigorous training plans.” Powers added that learning the concepts and techniques explained in the book “will be one of many steps in a long journey to becoming a cyclo-boss!”

If you have been racing ‘cross for several seasons, you may ask yourself why you need a book teaching the fundamental skills of the sport. Schieken and Tille look at it like this:

Every time you dismount from your bike you are either gaining or losing time on your competition. For instance, if you are a habitual stutter-stepper on remounts, this can cost you around one second each time you get back on your bike. If you are on a course that requires three remounts per lap and you do six laps in your race, that’s 18 seconds wasted. Let’s say you have similar issues on the dismount. Same math, 18 seconds lost. You are now 36 seconds behind a competitor who is equally fit, but gets on and off the bike more proficiently. Even if you have years of ‘cross racing under your bibshorts, you can always make improvements to your game. What is discussed in this new book helps show you the way.

Skills, Drills and Bellyaches teaches the techniques and skills that all racers, from beginner to elite, should learn and apply to become a better cyclocross racer. It covers basics such as what to wear and how to get back on your bike after carrying it over an obstacle, as well as more nuanced starting techniques and how to mentally prepare for your race.

A portion of proceeds from the sale of Skills, Drills and Bellyaches: A Cyclocross Primer go to support the JAM Fund, a non-profit organization created by Jeremy Powers that is committed to nurturing and growing the next generation of American cyclists.

Those of us at Interbike and CrossVegas will get a sneak peek, and I’m happy to say I cannot wait to see the finished product and congratulate Bill.

To order your copy go to www.cyclocrossbook.com.

For more information, contact:

Bill Schieken

cxhairs@gmail.com

Sound normally reaches the cochlea by way of the auditory canal and ear drum. With the AfterShokz the sound is transmitted to the cochlea along the temporal bone, i.e., the skull. This leave the auditory canal open and ready to pick up sounds being generated around you.

The system was originally developed for military use, where radio operators not only had to hear base calling for fresh pies through the radio, but it was also thought necessary to hear incoming dangerous objects and your comrades discussing “Strictly Come Dancing.”

Now the system is available for anyone to use and I love it! As around 98.1% of my training is done solo, long rides were rather dull without Michel Thomas Spanish lessons but normal bud earphones left me unable to hear traffic until it was dangerously close.

While using AfterShokz I can hear the contents of my iPod clearly whilst being completely capable of hearing traffic around me. The system has transformed long rides into pleasant experiences without compromising my safety. Why, only today a enjoyed a lovely bit of Elgar while on a long Peak district climb with sheep clearly vocal through my ear hole.

Hook it over but not into your ears

The sound quality is excellent, maybe not deep enough bass for gangstas, but perfect for the majority of users. I even heard some subtle sound layers on a few favourite tracks that I hadn’t heard before.

The system is charged via a USB cable, and one charge has lasted more than 2 weeks so far. Volume can be changed at the control unit that also has a clip for clothing. The Sportz M2 model on test also allows calls to be taken from a smart phone, with a microphone in the control unit – though no one has called me whilst I’ve been on a ride, and if they had I wouldn’t answer anyway.

In simulated tests it worked well and I’ve used the system over the top of a Belgian-style winter cap, keeping winter wind off my ears but the tunes still flowing. I only have one criticism (and it’s minor), in that the clothing clip lacks a spring so it’s hard to clip anywhere other than at the edge of clothing. Apart from that, I have nothing negative to say about the AfterShokz, although using ‘z’ in place of ‘s’ is never to be condoned.

If you enjoy riding with music but wish to remain aware of all that is going on around you, then look no further than this unique system. Highly recommended.

AfterShokz Sportz M2 (with phone microphone)

AfterShokz Sportz 2

Paul Fournel is very much of this later order, that rare breed: a cycling author who serves up something you can actually enjoy reading. That something isn’t a how-to manual or techs-mechs porn. It isn’t about heroes or villains, biography or autobiography. It isn’t about roads or races. It’s neither novel nor poem. What it is is Vélo and the story it tells is a mix of all the things that it isn’t.  

The essays that make up Vélo have gone through an interesting publishing history. They first appeared in Fournel’s native France in 2001 as Besoin de Vélo. In 2003 they got a North American publication when Allan Stoekl translated most of Besoin de Vélo – leaving out Sur le Tour de France 1996, seventy-five pages about following the 1996 Tour – and published them as Need For The Bike (University of Nebraska Press). In the UK, after Rouleur magazine appeared on the scene six years back, the essays began to be serialised there, with translation tweaks from Claire Road. Fournel began to add new essays to Rouleur, translated by Graeme Fife, and the two – the fifty-five essays that appeared in Besoin de Vélo and Need for the Bike plus the more recent Rouleur essays – are now collected in Vélo. As well as the essays themselves, Vélo serves up Jo Burt’s illustrations which accompanied the essays in their Rouleur appearances.

Martin Ryle in a recent essay – Vélorutionary, collected in The Bicycle Reader – has criticised Fournel’s essays by saying this of them:

A dispiritingly ‘hard’ ethos of competition as much as conviviality, and speed rather than ambling […] is also present in Paul Fournel’s Need for the Bike, many of whose sketches celebrate the pains and rewards of close-to-the-limit physical exertion, in a virtually all-male French subculture whose unquestioned heroes are the coureurs of the gruelling long-distance stage-races. Fournel is associated with Oulipo, the French avant-garde writers’ collective whose best-known member was Georges Perec. Reading Need for the Bike, I thought of Perec’s W, in which obsessional and ruthless athletic competition is the basis of a fascistic social order; and then I thought of the Olympic Velodrome in London. Here is the bike as fetishised speed-machine, not the antithesis but the very sign of turbo-culture’s conquest of mind and body: flesh is imagined as steel, rather than vice versa. For every potential cyclist who might be encouraged onto the roads by such images, a dozen must be put off.”

Paul Fournel as a champion of a fetishised turbo-culture? Let’s try this excerpt and see what you think of that:

The speed of a cyclist forces you to select what you see, to reconstruct what you sense. In this way you get to the essential. It’s the title of a book or a cover which your gaze brushes against, it’s a newspaper which catches your eye, a potential gift in a shop window, a new bread at the baker’s. That speed is the right one for my gaze. It’s a writer’s speed, a speed that filters and does a preliminary selection.

Or try this:

For me, road maps are dream machines. I like to read them as one reads adventures stories. As a driver, I use them to find the shortest route, to find the long roads which join towns without going through the countryside. As a cyclist I use them for everything else. If I know the area, every centimetre of the map is a landscape laid out before me. If I don’t know it yet, every centimetre is an imagined landscape that I will explore. For example, I like maps of Brittany, which is cycling country where I’ve never ridden. It’s my storeroom, my wine cellar. It’s the masterpiece that you have in your library and which you still haven’t read.

Paul Fournel as a champion of a fetishised turbo-culture? Bollocks to that.

What Fournel’s essays really are is an exercise in mapping the geography of cycling. Geography is not just limited to the physical world and Fournel’s explorations encompass the whole landscape of cycling: from the outer world of roads travelled to the inner world the cyclist’s mind. And, like the road maps Fournel reads, the essays collected in Vélo are dream machines, transporting the reader into his or her own inner world of cycling. This is the real joy of Fournel’s essays: from the particular of his own cycling experiences Fournel is exploring universal truths which readers can relate to through their own cycling experiences. If, for every reader who finds truth and beauty in Fournel’s essays, a dozen are put off cycling by them then those dozen are no loss, for they can only be soulless, heartless creatures.

That Fournel’s essays are dream machines makes Vélo something of a oddity: a book you can claim you kept putting down and mean as praise. An example for you. Here’s Fournel talking about wind:

The strongest wind that I can remember having faced is the wind of the extreme west of Ireland. I pedalled along the coast, somewhere south of Galway, and I saw to it that I always set off riding against the wind to be sure that I could get back. I was alone, and it was a bitter flight. There was no forgiveness. All the things that can, elsewhere, allow you to cheat and to shelter yourself are not welcome here: no tress, no houses, no hedges, no hills. Nothing but the ocean wind – wet, powerful, inexhaustible. Flat out on my bike, I had the feeling I was going dead slow, condemned to using the gears of high mountains on a road that was flat.

Reading that, you effortlessly empathise with Fournel as you recall your own experiences with the wind. For me, I remember an Easter away, trying to get from Enniskillen to Killybegs and being blown to a virtual standstill as we crossed the Pettigo Plateau. Even the wheel in front seemed to provide no shelter. By the time we made it into Donegal – half as far again still to go – the thought of suffering more into that wind blowing in off the Atlantic was too much and we just stayed where we were. If, back then, I’d known about Costante Giradengo and the 1921 Giro, I’d have scuffed a line in the road with the toe of my shoe and said no further.

It isn’t always empathy that made me put Vélo down and slip off into memory. In 2000 Fournel was appointed France’s cultural attaché to Cairo:

In Cairo – where I’ve written some of these pages – I’ve had, after forty-five years of continuous cycling, my first experience of cycling severance. I just couldn’t see where I could slip a bike into this city, nor do I see – between the overburdened valley of the Nile and the deserted desert tracks – any shady countryside I could explore. […] So I’m biding my time. My bike’s wrapped up in the cellar in Paris, ready to go. I stay seated and wait, heavy and immobile.

I’m watching my thighs melt and me belly get round. I write about the bike while alternately flexing my legs under the table. I plan out routes in the desert; I read maps that show straight, arid lines stretching three-hundred kilometres between oases. I ask myself where on my handlebars I could attach compass and GPS.”

I can empathise with watching thighs melt and belly round – the real subject of Fournel’s Cairo essay – but of Cairo itself I can only say that in my experience, it’s an amazing city to cycle in. Seen from the pavement or the passenger seat of a taxi, Cairene traffic can seem like the dodgems, but once you get in between the cars its sense opens itself up and you quickly adjust to its rhythm and ways. Out of the traffic, riding along rutted Nileside tracks – or up the Sinai peninsula from Moses’s mountain to the Israeli border – were like slipping into another world, silent and beautiful. In later years I have gone back to Cairo, to explore the desert west and south of the city in a four-by-four, and each time have kicked myself for not having had the good sense to bring a bike with me.

You, obviously, won’t find the same thoughts creeping into your mind about Cairo. Maybe what Fournel writes of Paris or San Francisco will fire some mental fuses for you, make you agree with or question his experiences. Or maybe not. Not everything Fournel writes will send you off into a reverie. But you will find such launching pads in most of his essays.

The places that crop up the most in Vélo are French: the roads of the Haute-Loire where Fournel grew up, or roads defined by the Tour de France and other bike races. Martin Ryle is wrong to write Fournel off as a champion of turbo-culture but he is not entirely wrong when he says that Fournel writes of the pains and rewards of close-to-the-limit physical exertion and the heroes of bike races. Fournel himself says that “to get on a bike is to enter into a history and a legend that you’ll discover in thousands upon thousands of copies of L’Équipe.” He goes on:

It’s to forge your own fork in Saint Marie-de-Campan; it’s to jump into an air taxi after having won the Dauphiné to catch the nighttime start of Bordeaux-Paris; it’s to win the Tour de France five times; it’s to drop Merckx on the climb to Pra-Loup; it’s to keep Poulidor at bay on the Puy de Dôme; it’s to enter the vélodrome in Roubaix alone and for the second time; it’s to win the Giro d’Italia in the snowstorm of the Gavia; it’s, whether you like it or not, to fall into the chasm of the Perjuret and to die every time you climb the Ventoux on the Bedoin side … The divine solitude of the cyclist is peopled with shadows that the sun lengthens on the grain of roads.

Where Ryle is wrong in the way he writes off Fournel is to miss the soft edges of this ‘hard’ ethos Fournel – and many of us – subscribes to. Ryle is wrong to miss the conviviality of competition. All those memories Fournel recalls – of Eugène Christophe, of Jacques Anquetil, of Eddy Merckx, of Bernard Thévenet, of Marc Madiot, of Andy Hampsten, of Roger Rivière and Tom Simpson – what they’re really about is a sense of belonging, a shared heritage.

This shared heritage is one of the treats of Fournel’s essays. The real treat, though, is the effortless ease with which Fournel sucks you into his world: as I said at the start of this, Fournel is one of those rare cycling authors who you can take pure reading pleasure from, as everyone who has read Need for the Bike – which is often paired with Tim Krabbé’s The Rider when cyclists recommend books to one and another – will attest.

If you’ve already read Need for the Bike, should you want a copy a Vélo? The updating of cycling books is one of oddities of cycling publishing, how every few years an old book gets another couple of dozen pages stuck into it and you’re expected to buy it one more time. As an updated version of Need for the Bike, Vélo adds eleven new essays and some textual changes in the translation. But it also adds Jo Burt’s illustrations, the text and images combining to produce a book that is a pleasure simply to own. Of the new essays themselves, they are markedly different from the old, both in style and content and this – in a way – has the unfortunate result of upsetting the thematic unity of the original text (which tends to be the case with virtually every cycling book that gets the update treatment).

A few of those new essays do stand out, though. In one Fournel attempts to climb inside the mind of Jacques Anquetil. In another he offers a self-portrait of Abdel Kader Zaaf. The two that really stand out are further autobiographical sketches, Fournel once more revisiting his past. In one he revisits a incident that made up a brief paragraph in an earlier essay and this time spins it out to three pages. In the other Fournel writes of his father whose cycling life had come to a close while his other life carried on:

The bike left my father one Sunday morning ten years ago. It happened between Bas-en-Basset and Aurec in the Haute-Loire region of France, in solitude. He was climbing a small hill which I would not describe as laughable because cyclists – even those who are used to the Ventoux or Izoard – well know that you can explode in a two kilometres hill which doesn’t go up that much.

Let’s just say that this incline should not have been sufficient to end his riding.

‘Something’ tightened in his chest, imperiously letting him know that the bike was leaving him after seventy years of companionship.

He went home without saying anything, at the pace of his pain.

The rest of the essay picks up the story a decade on, Fournel’s father still able to recall the roads he once rode over. That, one day, the bike will leave all of us is not something we tend to give much thought to. But it will and all we will have are our memories. If nothing else, Fournel’s essays as a lock-pick for those memories, opening up for everyone who reads them memories parked from days gone by. If that’s not a good enough reason to read a good book then I don’t know what is.

Paul Fournel’s Vélo is published by Rouleur (2012, 159 pages)

After some back and forth with Nick Hussey, Vulpine’s head honcho, we determined a suitable conversion from UK to US sizing for me (I’m tall and slim, with broad shoulders and a long torso), and in super-quick time the test subject in a size 12 was delivered to my mailbox.

Upon opening the signature acid green musette bag containing the goods, my initial reaction to the cobalt blue weave of the jersey was, “How on earth did Vulpine get Issey Miyake to send bolts of fabric to them?” Because the subtly-striated, almost crinkly weave of the Vulpine jersey was so completely reminiscent of a gorgeous skirt I once owned from the Japanese designer known for his unique materials.

Close-up shot of the shimmering quality of the fabric

It almost shimmers in certain light, and has a soft and not at all itchy hand to it. I’m told from the Vulpine website that New Zealand Merino Sheep “created their wool just for cyclists,” but I’m firmly convinced that they also have a back-room deal with certain fashion houses…

Close-up of Issey Miyake’s signature crinkle fabric

The jersey is everything it’s described to be – stylish, incredibly comfortable with lots of stretch, soft, and a great thermo-regulating layer. I first wore the jersey on a crisp autumn day, about 48 degrees F with a stiff breeze and plenty of sunshine. I layered it under my Vulpine Softshell Jacket, with some 3/4-length cycling leggings below. After 20 miles and about 2,000 feet of climbing, I was somewhat “dewy” from exertion, yet perfectly comfortable and only had to unzip the jacket a wee bit for some ventilation.

Thoughtful features include carved buttons engraved with the Vulpine logo and clever “V” stitching, a silicon gripper strip at the bottom back hem to keep your backside modest, and useful but discreet rear pockets – one open for a water bottle, one flapped for an energy bar or two, and a zipped pocket for your phone or keys. The reflective tape accents and light loop are a nice touch, too.

Three rear pockets and reflective tape band and light loop

Back home, my post-ride assessment of the jersey was that it was indeed made from the flossy filament of antibacterial sheep, just as the marketing minions at Vulpine professed. In spite of doing its proper job of wicking my moisture, the jersey bore nary a trace of aroma. I gleefully hung it back in the closet for another day of battle on the byways of my ‘burbs.

After a second and third wearing, even though the jersey was still as fresh as the day I pulled it from the post-box, I thought I’d give the washing instructions a go. I’m something of a laundry rebel, and don’t really like to wash things by hand, so I was delighted that the merino jersey could be washed “seperately” (we’ll have to get with the Vulpine spell-checkers on that one) using a cool machine setting.

Care instructions handily printed on the inside back of the jersey

When the wash cycle ended, I dutifully rolled the damp jersey in a towel to remove any remaining moisture and lay it flat to dry on a laundry rack. In a few hours, the jersey was ready for wear, and looked as good as new. If you don’t use a cool iron post-laundering, the distinctive shimmer effect of the weave is even more in evidence, and the hand of the fabric is remarkably soft and seductive. I’ve worn the jersey out shopping and to lunch, and have gotten compliments from sales clerks and wait staff alike, all obviously discerning fashionistas.

If there were to be any constructive criticism at all (aside from the fact that wearing a misspelling just nags at my somewhat OCD editor’s nature), it would be to cut the sleeves a wee bit more generously. The jersey is a perfect fit in all other respects, but I feel claustrophobic when my arms are even slightly restricted and I found the sleeve circumference combined with the flatlock stitching at the ends of the sleeves to be snug for my girl-guns. I am by no means a muscle-bound specimen, although I don’t have pencil arms, either, and the close sleeve fit gives me the bicep equivalent of muffin top. Naturally, I’m considering giving up my ShakeWeight® workouts to remedy this unsightly conundrum…

So there you have it. I can’t wait for Vulpine to introduce more items to their Women’s Specific range. Now that it’s getting to be wintry weather, I’d love a long-sleeve version of the merino jersey, and some kind of thermal tights or leggings (hint, hint).

At £75.00 (I’ll leave it to you to figure out the VAT business), it’s moderately pricey but well worth the investment.

Here’s a summary of features:

• 100% New Zealand Merino Wool, 180 gram weight
• Extraordinarily odour-resistant
• Very breathable
• Cut long at rear for cycling
• Fast-drying
• Flatlock stitching for comfort
• Two rear-angled pockets
• One rear zip pocket for valuables
• Reflective band and light loop
• Embroidered branding
• Silicon waist gripper at rear, to prevent riding up
• Engraved buttons with V stitching

~ Raymond Chandler

If David Millar’s Racing Through the Dark is this generation’s A Rough Ride then Tyler Hamilton’s The Secret Race must be Breaking the Chain. And if that alone doesn’t tell you what went wrong in our sport as cycling dragged itself into the twenty-first century then you really do have to read Hamilton’s story. It’s the story of a sport so corrupted by its own mythology that it has lost all touch with reality and seems incapable of heeding the warnings given to it.

In his introduction to the 1998 edition of Rough Ride (in which the title lost its indefinite article), Paul Kimmage noted how his original intention for the re-issue of the book was that it would be re-worked in the style of a hard-boiled noir:

Its opening chapter would be scripted straight from the Raymond Chandler school of thriller writing (‘When in doubt, have a man come through the door with a gun’) and begin not in 1962 with a baby boy and a kindly staff nurse at the Rotunda hospital in Dublin, but twenty-two years later when the boy arrives in Paris in search of fame and fortune. I even had the opening line worked out: ‘A man with huge shovel-like hands, greying hair and a tanned, weather-beaten face was waiting at the airport.’ OK, so it would have taken a couple of chapters before the gun was produced, but you get the drift.”

(Had, in 1998, Kimmage realised just how much of a role blood doping was playing in our sport, I suspect he might have switched from Chandler to Dashiel Hammett. As a way of explaining just how fucked up cycling had become, Kimmage could have had a lot of fun playing with Hammett’s Red Harvest (the unacknowledged basis of Akira Kurosowa’s Yojimbo, which then begat Sergio Leone’s A Fistful of Dollars). I can just imagine Kimmage casting himself as Hammett’s Continental Op, setting the various factions against one and other as he sets about cleaning up cycling’s own sordid Poisonville.)

For many cycling fans – those of us who’ve wanted to understand the reality behind the feats we’ve watched or read about and not just live in the moments of epic heroism – following cycling has been like living in a real-world crime thriller: week by week, month by month, the evidence mounted up about just how mired in doping our sport had become. The evidence of a crime was obvious, but it was not always clear just who the guilty parties were, or even what the real crime was.

In Breaking the Chain Willy Voet (aided by his own Agatha Christie, Pierre Ballester) served as a sort-of Hercule Poirot, pointing out the evidence and the missed clues that would explain much of what had gone on in cycling prior to 1998 and that Tour de Farce which had rolled off in Dublin and ended caught up in what we all hoped was to be the worst doping scandal our sport would ever see. Eight years later Operación Puerto showed us just how much our hope had been misplaced.

In The Secret Race Hamilton serves as our guide through some of the clues and red herrings that led up to that latter scandal. Read as the dénouement of a crime thriller – the detective recasting the story you’ve just read so that things makes sense – The Secret Race is less Christie and more Ross Macdonald and Hamilton is less Poirot and more Lew Archer.

In a standard Lew Archer story, Macdonald’s Californian private investigator is called in to solve a recent crime – a stolen painting, a missing child, a dead body, whatever – but the more he digs for clues the more he unearths a problem that transcends generations and has its roots in secrets buried in the past. And this is true of cycling’s doping problem: Hamilton, Lance Armstrong, Floyd Landis, all the rest of that generation, they didn’t create the problem. They are, in part, victims of a problem rooted in cycling’s past. Victims of a culture of doping. Victims of a culture in which a blind-eye was turned to doping by everyone, from the UCI at the top down to the fans at the roadside. And in that they deserve, if not some sympathy, then certainly some understanding. And that’s what Hamilton’s ultimate plea in The Secret Race is for: understanding, not sympathy.

However, there is another crime going on here. And in many ways it’s a crime much bigger than doping. Cycling’s hustlers and grifters, cycling’s confidence tricksters, cycling’s players of the big con, they stole something they can never give back. They stole the innocence – the presumption of innocence – of those who chose to follow a different path. And they didn’t just steal from their peers. They stole from the generations that are following them: Hamilton and Landis, Bjarne Riis, David Millar, all those who lied about their doping and pleaded with us to believe that they rode clean, only to turn around and fess up, through their lies they have made it all but impossible to simply accept that the problems of the past have now gone away and that the riders coming up today are taking the opportunity afforded to them to do it clean.

Riis may have stopped being part of the problem and become part of the solution by assisting in the ushering in of independent anti-doping programmes, thus helping to force the UCI’s hand on longitudinal testing. Millar may have stopped being part of the problem and become part of the solution by helping to build and lead a clean team. Landis and Hamilton may have stopped being part of the problem and become part of the solution by giving USADA the evidence that might finally force cycling to really confront its past. But it will take a generation and more for the trust of the fans that they and others like them squandered to be rebuilt. It will take a generation and more for anyone but the most naïve cycling fan to not have doubts about, want to ask questions of, the stars of today and tomorrow. That is and will continue to be the biggest crime of Gen-EPO. Sadly, this is the crime that The Secret Race fails to acknowledge. I wonder if Hamilton or Landis or Riis or Millar or any of them realise it’s a crime they’ve committed. Or even care about.

* * * * *

Before turning to some of the things said in The Secret Race – the clues highlighted by Hamilton to explain some of what we saw between Festina and Puerto – a couple of other holes in the story need to be considered. The first is the UCI. There are two main mentions of our sport’s governing body in the story Hamilton tells. The first is the now-familiar story of Armstrong and the 2001 Tour de Suisse. The second concerns Hamilton and the 2004 Critérium du Dauphiné Libéré. Both of these I’ll return to momentarily. Apart from those two tales, though, Hamilton has little to say about how cycling was governed during his time in the peloton.

Perhaps had Daniel Coyle framed the story as less of a continuation of his earlier Lance Armstrong’s War (here, Armstrong versus Hamilton) more might have been said of the role played by the UCI in cycling’s inability to clean up its act. (Me, I couldn’t help but find some irony in the fact that Hamilton’s first experience of doping, in 1997, occurred on the eve of the GP Luis Puig, Puig being Hein Verbruggen’s predecessor as head of the UCI.) More needs to be said of the role played by the UCI in this story, through both their actions and their inactions.

The second absence is of stories that might have put some perspective on the position Hamilton found himself in. As Hamilton tells it, he had no choice but to dope. I accept that it was difficult not to dope, that the system positively encouraged it. But it wasn’t impossible. Nor was it impossible to turn your back on doping. There are riders who took those paths. Frankie Andreu and Jonathan Vaughters are just two who did and were close to the story told in The Secret Race. Perhaps Coyle should have said more about them, even if only in his footnotes. But perhaps in doing that he would have only highlighted even more Hamilton’s sense of entitlement, made us realise that the only real differences between Hamilton and Armstrong were that the Texan was far more efficient at controlling his environment and much, much better at not falling off and breaking bones at inopportune moments.

* * * * *

And so to the stories told, the clues revealed. It’s not my intention here to highlight all the revelations made by Hamilton in The Secret Race. Most of them you’ll already be familiar with anyway, they’ve been seeping out in the two years since Floyd Landis had his Damascene conversion and became the prodigal son of the anti-doping fraternity. They’ve been seeping out in the eight years since David Walsh and Pierre Ballester published LA Confidentiel. They’ve been seeping out in newspapers and on websites in the decade and a half since the Festina affaire kicked off. And, of course, they’ve burst forth since Hamilton’s book was published earlier this month.

There are some new revelations. Or, in my innocence or laziness, stories that are new to me. Those are the ones worth looking at here. There’s a story I don’t recall appearing in Breaking the Chain, that in 1997 the Festina squad had added perfluorocarbons (PFC) to their armoury (is Hamilton here just peddling peloton gossip? He does later when he says that Stefano Garzelli’s probencid bust was an echo-positive). There’s the picture offered of pro cycling’s kidult culture of codes and cliques and perceived slights that would ultimately drive even blood brothers apart.

Or there’s a story which Bjarne Riis forgot to mention in Stages of Light and Dark, about using blood transfusions before the 1996 Tour de France and on its two rest days (conventional wisdom has it that blood doping burst onto the cycling scene around about 1984, when Francesco Moser set his Hour records, but then disappeared again until 2000/2001, when the EPO test arrived. In reality, the early history of blood doping in the peloton can be pushed back into the 1970s, when Joop Zoetemelk admitted to having given it a try. What was really happening between 1984 and the new millennium is shrouded in mystery). If Riis forgot to discuss his transfusions in his autobiography, then what other recent tell-all autobiographies have been equally economical with the actualité in this regard?

Some of the stories in The Secret Race mean that we must reconsider some of the revelations previously made about cycling’s recent doping history. Take the story of the genesis of doping in US Postal in 1996, how Marty Jemison, backed up by Hamilton, had approached the team’s then doctor, Prentice Steffen, and attempted to get him to move with the times and implement a doping programme. Here Hamilton – supported by Jemison – suggests that Steffen may simply have misunderstood what was being suggested, that all that was being proposed was IV transfusions to aid recovery.

Or consider the story of Hamilton, after the 2004 Dauphiné Libéré, having been warned by the UCI’s Mario Zorzoli that his blood values were out of whack. The previous understanding of that incident was that this was a case of the UCI warning Hamilton off, trying to protect him and stop him from taking a fall when the new test for homologous blood transfusions came in later in the year. In The Secret Race Hamilton redraws that picture, tells us it was a case of Armstrong reaching out through the UCI to either put the frighteners on him or bring him down. Perhaps had Hamilton done as Armstrong had when he got called to the headmaster’s office in Aigle after the 2001 Tour de Suisse – put an apple on the headmaster’s desk and promised to write a cheque to the UCI – all his problems might have gone away.

(In one of our sport’s grandest ironies you have to laugh when you realise that Armstrong played the role of the UCI’s mole in the peloton, telling them what riders to pay attention to. The poacher as gamekeeper. Only to have himself brought to ground by the guys he’d fucked over. That’s both comic and karmic at the same time.)

For me, one of the bigger challenges to the current received wisdom concerns the role played by Luigi Cecchini in our sport. Cecchini is said to have been a protégé of Francesco Conconi, but this is a claim he denies:

Everywhere they call me a pupil of Conconi,” Cecchini has said, “but I only know him from conventions for sports physicians. I met him only once. I also was only once at the Ferrara university. Still my name is being linked with that university in the media. Why? I don’t have a clue.”

We have long been schooled to believe that Cecchini, along with Conconi and Michele Ferrari, was one of the dirtiest doctors in the sport, one of the chief architects of Gen-EPO. Pat McQuaid has even gone so far as to warn riders off working with the Italian doctor.

Others have been equally critical of Cecchini and – publicly at least – sought to distance themselves from him. Dave Brailsford had to tell David Millar to cut his ties with Cecchini after Millar hooked up with him as he prepared to return to the pro peloton following his two years on the naughty step:  “If he had a relationship with Cecchini,” Brailsford is reported to have said of Millar, “we would say, ‘Thank you and goodbye.’ I told him he shouldn’t have done it and that Team GB don’t want to have any association with Cecchini. David knows that in this climate he has to be very careful as to who he associates with.” (Why Team GB were only too willing to have an association with a client and friend of Cecchini – Max Sciandri, the man who hooked Millar up with the Italian doctor – is one of the great unasked questions of recent years.)

But those who have worked with Cecchini paint a different picture of the Italian doctor. Jörg Jaksche had only kind words to say of his Italian trainer:  “Cecchini and his family belong to the best people I have met in the cycling scene, he has nothing to do with doping, those who claim the opposite are lying!” Bjarne Riis echoed this in his autobiography:  “in his time as my personal trainer he had never given me any banned products nor written me out any prescriptions for any.” Millar said something similar in his autobiography:  “There was never ever money involved and it was never even discussed. I’m sure I’m probably the only professional rider he has ever trained for free. We got on extremely well, and I never even got a hint of him being involved in anything to do with doping.”

According to Hamilton, Millar was far from the only rider Cecchini worked with on a pro bono basis: “though we worked closely together for years, Cecco never charged me a dime.”

Hamilton’s picture of Cecchini and his methods is worth considering:

Cecco had short gray hair and big, perceptive eyes; he looked a little bit like Pablo Picasso. He also had a revolutionary and refreshing attitude about doping, which is to say he encouraged me to dope as little as possible. He never gave me any Edgar; never handed me so much as an aspirin, because Cecco believed that most riders dope far, far too much. Insulin, testosterone patches, anabolics – bah! To win the Tour, you need only three qualities.

• You have to be very, very fit.
• You have to be very, very skinny.
• You have to keep your hematocrit up.

Rule number 3 was regrettable in Cecco’s eyes, but ultimately unavoidable, a simple fact of life. Cecco made it clear: he never got involved in the dark side. He constantly told me that I did not have to engage in the risky, medically questionable, stress-inducing arms race of chasing after Substance X or Substance Y, or some Russian anabolic jelly beans. He constantly warned me about Fuentes, telling me I didn’t need all the stuff he provided. I could simplify my life and focus on what mattered: my training.”

Does this mean that we have to consider Cecchini as one of the good guys? Of course not: throughout his time with Cecchini Hamilton was doping in order to keep his hematocrit up. Cecchini was far from a latter-day Paul Köchli, determined to win clean. He seems to have believed in the Clintonian ethic of compartmentalisation and learned to play the ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ game when it came to doping.

This, though, might suggest that Cecchini had more in common with Köchli than with other doctors who believed that victory could only be found in the barrel of a syringe. This might suggest that we should revise our view of trainers like Cecchini. This might suggest we should open our minds to the possibility that the likes of Cecchini might actually have something positive to offer athletes who are willing to play clean. Something positive to offer a sport that is actually determined to police its century-old doping problem.

* * * * *

Endings are hard. The end of The Secret Race is especially hard because deadlines saw it being completed before Armstrong threw in the towel and decided not to contest USADA’s charges against him. We’ve yet to see the damage limitation, character assassination tricks that will be employed when the USADA file is finally made public. Hamilton probably has an idea of what’s in store: a repeat of his own performance in 2002 when Prentice Steffen claimed that Jemison and Hamilton had asked him about doping products back in 1996. Hamilton aimed both barrels at Steffen and pulled the trigger, questioning Steffen’s motives and pointing out his past problems with recreational drugs. “I was learning,” Hamilton says of his actions here, “when the accusations come, hit back twice as hard.”

But the ending of The Secret Race, as imperfect as it is, does reveal something. There’s a tale told early in the book which resonates in its ending and is illustrative of something important in the story of Hamilton and Armstrong. In that tale, the two were out for a ride one day when a driver cut them off. Armstrong gave chase, caught the car and laid into the motorist, punching him. Toward the end of the book Hamilton echoes this with a story from just before he quit Boulder earlier this year. He was out on his town bike, it a beat-up with fat tyres and he in jeans and tennis shoes. Two lycra-clad riders on thousand-buck bikes passed him at a junction and one of them gave him a look. On seeing the slogan on the guy’s jersey – Dopers Suck – Hamilton took this as a personal affront to his dignity and gave chase. (Hamilton doesn’t even consider that the guy might just have been eyeing up his ass.) It took him a mile to reel them in, and when he did Hamilton shook the hand of the guy with the “Dopers Suck” jersey and introduced himself as a doper who doesn’t suck:

…I rode home, and my heart was full of happiness. Because, I realized, that’s my story. Not a shiny pretty myth about superheroes who win every time, but a human truth about one normal guy who tried to compete in a messed-up world and did his best; who made big mistakes and survived. That’s the story I wanted to tell, and keep telling, partly because it will help the sport move forward, and partly because it helps me move forward.

I want to tell it to people who think that dopers are bad, irredeemable people. I want to tell it so people might focus their energy on the real challenge: creating a culture that tips people away from doping. I want to tell it because now I need to tell it, in order to survive.”

Which is where we loop back to the opening of this review and the problem with The Secret Race being this generation’s Breaking The Chain: we’ve been here before. Back then, we’d just been delivered a new hero, a guy the world could believe in, a hero with a big engine, a long history, and a great story. And the lesson was lost in the adulation of our new hero. He came from a different culture and so was beyond the taint of our sport’s past. He was clean and anyone who said different was just a fun-sucking troll. There’s no way that could happen again, is there?

* * * * *

Having started thinking of Hamilton as a kind-of Lew Archer plotting a path through a story about a part of the past still echoing in the present, let’s end this with a bit of Ross Macdonald. Here’s Archer, from the end of The Doomsters:

I stopped and leaned on a white wall and lit a cigarette. When you looked at the whole picture, there was a certain beauty in it, or justice. But I didn’t care to look at it for long. The circuit of guilty time was too much like a snake with its tail in its mouth, consuming itself. If you looked too long, there’d be nothing left of it, or you. We were all guilty. We had to learn to live with it.”

* * * * *

The Secret Race – Inside the Hidden World of the Tour de France: Doping, Cover-ups, and Winning at All Costs, by Tyler Hamilton and Daniel Coyle (2012, 291 pages) is published in the US and UK by Bantam.

By the time Marty Nothstein hung up his wheels in 2006 he was the most decorated American track cyclist of all time. In his time he had won thirty-five national championships. He’d won gold in the Pan-American Games four times. He was a triple World Champion. He was the first American to win the professional sprint World Championships in eighty years. He was the first American to win a Six Day race in half a century. And he was an Olympic gold medallist.

It’s said that one of the key benefits of hosting the Olympic Games is that the host nation pours a ton of money into sport in the hope of showing the world just how brilliant they really are. The investment starts as soon as the host city is announced and the legacy is supposed to last for years after. Host the Games and, across a range of sports, you should produce a generation of talent.

At the 1996 Atlanta Games US cycling threw a pot full of money – hundreds of thousands of dollars – at the Games in the hope of buying gold. EDS and GT Bicycles teamed up to produce the Superbike, a state-of-the-art light-weight carbon-fibre speed machine. Like many Superbike projects – think, perhaps, Lance Armstrong’s infamous F-One project – it was money down the drain. Going into the last day of the track competitions all USA Cycling had to show for their effort was one lump of metal: Erin Hartwell’s silver in the kilometre time trial. And then came Marty Nothstein’s shot at glory in the individual sprint.

Nothstein is up against the reigning Olympic champion, Jens Fiedler, a product of the East German medal factory. Fielder’s a protégé of Lutz Hesslich, himself the Olympic champion in ’80 and ’88 (the East Germans boycotted the LA ’84 Games, payback for the Western boycott of Moscow ’80). Nothstein himself has his own Eastern Bloc coach, USA Cycling’s sprint coach, the Pole Andrzej Bek, a tandem bronze medallist at Munich ’72.

In a test of pure speed, Nothstein should be able to beat Fiedler. But sprinting isn’t just speed. It’s nerve and tactics too. And tactically the German is the superior rider.

I say a prayer, as I do before every race, not to crash. I pray my competitor and I will stay safe. I’m not especially religious, but if there’s a time to believe in God, this is it. […] I prayed we won’t get hurt, but I want to kill him. I want to rip his fucking throat out. I want to win this race, and I want to make his death quick, decisive.”

In the first heat Fiedler leads off. Nothstein tries to take the lead and the two go elbow to elbow. The American backs down first and resumes his place in the German’s slipstream. The he tries a feint, moving to come around Fiedler on the outside before dipping on the in. The German blocks him, leaves Nothstein trailing in his wake. In the final lap Fiedler starts to wind it up to top speed. Out of turn one and into the back straight Nothstein’s closing on the German’s rear wheel. The he starts to pull out of the slipstream and fight though the dirty air.

Through the last turn he’s pulled level with Fiedler’s rear wheel. Fiedler pushes him high on the banking, taking the long way round, forcing Nothstein to go even longer. Fiedler’s above the sprinter’s red line, he tries to flick Nothstein. But the American’s ready. He’s well used to roughhousing it. They may be clocking seventy but Nothstein’s not backing off. In the home straight he’s up to Fiedler’s hip. Fifty metres out and every ten metres Nothstein’s closing on Fiedler’s front wheel a foot at a time. Five feet: he’s not down yet. On the line the American and the German are side by side, arms outstretched, heads down, arses up.

Photo finish. Say cheese and smile for the birdie.

The camera, shooting 10,000 frames per second, decides my faith. But I don’t need a camera to know I crossed the line first. Every racer knows whether they won or lost, no matter how close the finish. It’s instinctual. I’m my own camera. Even NASCAR drivers travelling 200 miles per hour can tell if they won or lost by an inch. But my victory is in the hands of the officials.”

After twenty minutes of scrutinising the photos the blazers call the sprint in Fiedler’s favour. One thousandth of a second. One centimetre. One nil, advantage Germany.

In the second heat it’s Nothstein’s turn to take the lead. That’s where he wants to be, where his turn of speed can leave Fiedler standing. Except the German jumps him on the start. In three pedal strokes he’s half a wheel up and again Nothstein is on the back foot. Again Nothstein is stuck in Fielder’s slipstream. Again the German holds off all the American’s attempts to take the lead as they lap the Stone Mountain track.

One lap to go. Fiedler’s weaving all over the track as I charge toward his rear wheel. He’s above the sprinter’s lane, below the sprinter’s lane. Never flagrant enough to draw the ire of the officials, just enough to keep me at bay. I’d do the same thing if I had the front. We round the last corner, and again I’m gaining ground on him. I’m the faster rider. I reach his hip, his shoulders, there’s the line. Fiedler beats me by half a wheel. He wins the gold medal. I lose.”

Note the “I lose” bit. Note that it’s not “I won silver.” Who really wants to be the first loser? Who really goes to the Games just to pick up one of the baser metals? To celebrate being given a consolation prize? If it was really the taking part that mattered, everyone would be on the podium. It’s only the winning that counts.

Nothstein and Fiedler in action, Atlanta ’96

Confession time:  I like sprinters. I like their self confidence. Maybe that’s a product of discovering this sport through Sean Kelly. You know what they say about your first love being the deepest? Maybe that’s me and sprinters. A lot of people, though, don’t like sprinters. They see them as arrogant, cocky bastards. Self confidence and arrogance, there’s a thin line between the two. Most of the sprinters I like fall on the right side of the line. Nothstein, in The Price of Gold, falls comfortably on the right side of the line. Take this bit, right after he’s been defeated by Fiedler:

As we let the gears spin out on our bikes, I ride next to Fiedler. I shake his hand. I rub his round white helmet. He pumps his fist in the air, triumphantly. It was a fair fight, a good match. I lost to a worthy competitor, one of the greatest Olympic track cyclists of all time.”

The day after his defeat in Atlanta, Nothstein started preparing for his second bite at the Olympic cherry:  Sydney 2000. The day after his defeat in Atlanta, Nothstein reset his sights on the only colour that matters in the Olympics:  gold.

Nothstein in action, Sydney, 2000

The meat and two veg of The Price of Gold is the story of the four years between Atlanta and Sydney, and the sacrifices made along the way. The story of the years before Atlanta and after Sydney are the hors d’oeuvre and dessert.

Starters first. Nothstein comes from Pennsylvania Dutch stock, his family roots tracing back to the German-Deutsch immigrants William Penn enticed to Lehigh Valley in the years before the Revolutionary War. Typically, the PA Dutch are blue collar through and through. They understand the value of hard work. But the Protestant work ethic hasn’t turned them into Puritans. They drink and they brawl. Nothstein’s father was a drinker. The son became a brawler. Through brawling he became a cyclist.

In the 1970s Lehigh Valley became a Mecca for U.S. cycling when a former Olympic skeet shooter, Bob Rodale (of Rodale Press, publishers of Bicycling magazine and of The Price of Gold), donated twenty-five acres of farmland near Trexlertown – T-Town – to the county and built a vélodrome on it. Rodale had been bitten by the cycling bug and this was his gift to the local community:  an outdoor concrete oval, a third of a kilometre round. Jack Simes – scion of one of America’s cycling dynasties – was appointed one of the new track’s directors. Friday nights at Lehigh Valley became cycling night. Even Eddy Merckx strutted his stuff in T-Town’s vélodrome.

The story of Lehigh Valley is something I’m only vaguely familiar with. Reading Bill Strickland’s Bicycling pieces, it’s a place that crops up time and again. It’s become somewhat familiar, though still somewhat vague in my mind. Nothstein’s description of the Valley fleshed the picture out a lot for me. Added focus. Made me want to learn more.

There’s a part of the way Nothstein sketches the history of Lehigh Valley that reminded me of Tom Wolfe’s description of the early days of Andrews Air Field in The Right Stuff. This is – no doubt – me carrying baggage to the table here. (Fact is, we all carry baggage with us to the table every time we pick up a book.) But there is something about the history of cycling in Lehigh Valley that recalls the early devil-may-care drinking-and-driving-and-flying years of the Andrews test pilots. Except in Lehigh Valley it was drinking-and-driving-and-cycling.

There’s a story Nothstein tells, a piece of Valley folklore, about the way T-Town drew in the best of the best, which recalls Wolfe’s description of the way Andrews drew in the flyboys. One night in 1980 a couple of SoCal cyclists, Gil Hatton and Pat McDonagh, climbed into a Plymouth Champ and headed east. Along the way they crashed, rolling the car in the desert after falling asleep at the wheel. They put the car back on the road, kicked out the shattered windscreen, tied bandannas round mouth and nose as bug shields, and continued on their way. When, days later, they pulled up in the gravel parking lot outside the T-Town vélodrome they looked a sight, dust-covered and in their thrashed car.

Another story for you:

One day in high school, I’m washing cars at my dad’s dealership, earning money for bicycle equipment, when a blue Ford Torino blows into the parking lot and launches off a three-foot slope separating the dealership from the house next door. The Torino slides to a stop in the neighbor’s gravel driveway.

From the plume of white dust the car kicks up, out steps a bike racer with a scraggly handlebar moustache and a shaggy head of red hair. I look at him in awe. That’s Whitehead. The Outlaw. Whitehead’s antics at the Friday night races inspire even reserved fans to boo and hiss. And he loves every minute of it. He flips the bird after crossing the finish line. He’s been ejected for hocking loogies at hecklers. And the louder the boos, the more Whitehead seems to win. […] I’ve never met Whitehead before, but I know that when he’s in town, stunts like this tend to occur regularly.

“Whitehead lives in California and is in T-Town for the wedding of his best friend, Gil Hatton. Together they’re the Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid of cycling. They’re crazy as hell, but calculated too. They don’t win bike races by accident. […] These are the bike racers I aim to emulate.”

All the regular’s in T-Town’s track nights earned nicknames. As well as the Outlaw there was the Bear. The Animal. The Torch. Art the Dart. Nothstein earned his nick in the keirin, slicing through the field to win from the back. He became the Blade.

T-Town’s races taught Nothstein a lot about track racing. But there was a problem with Nothstein learning his metier in the Valley’s Friday night bear-pit. In T-Town’s track races rules were seen as more like guidelines as the riders thrilled the crowd, throwing hooks, elbows, shoulders and head butts in the race for the line. Old school rough-and-tumble sprinting.

Problem is, the rules aren’t just guidelines in National and World Championships:  they’re the rules. There to be enforced. Time and time again the young Nothstein lost because the aggression – the hooking and slicing – that helped him win in T-Town got him DQ’ed. And – again – here is something good about Nothstein’s telling of his tale:  he recognises his own errors. Here he is after getting dumped out of the 1989 junior Worlds in Moscow after the second round:

I’m inconsolable. I worked so hard. I wanted a medal so badly, and it’s over just like that. Tears stream down my face and won’t stop. If I’d ridden clean, I could have won. But I didn’t control my aggression.”

Hooked

The Price of Gold is all told in the first person present tense. That’s not just a tricksy stylistic flourish, a way of adding intensity to the story. You quickly feel that these aren’t memories being dragged up from the past for Nothstein. You quickly feel that the past is very much alive for him. That the pain and the pleasure is an ever-present vivid feeling. You quickly realise just how intense Nothstein himself is.

One of the benefits of the present-tense telling of the story is that Nothstein sucks you into his world, puts you there on the bike with him. This is something only a few cycling books pull off. The race descriptions The Price of Gold are well worth reading. Yes, they’re macho, testosterone-fuelled depictions of bike racing. Cycling as a boxing match. Cycling as hunting. But that’s track sprinting at its best:  it’s the physicality of it that impresses the most. This is, after all, the side of cycling that attracted Ernest Hemingway in his Paris years.

Physicality doesn’t mean hooks and head butts and crashes (though let’s be honest here – hooks and head butts and crashes are part of the attraction):  it’s about the explosive nature of sprinting after all the tactical foreplay. Some of that foreplay has been lost in recent years as track sprinting has commoditised itself into, repackaged itself for TV schedulers, all but banning track stands. But enough of it is still there for the best sprint matches to be a magical mix of balletic beauty and athletic ability.

So how did Nothstein get hooked on his single-minded pursuit of Olympic glory? That would have been with the 1976 Games. On the TV Nothstein watched Nadia Comaneci, Bruce Jenner, and Greg Louganis win golds in the Montréal Games:

I’m enthralled with the pageantry of the Olympics, the intensity of the competition. I’m only five and the Olympic dream is becoming my dream, already. An athlete bends forward as the gold medal is draped around his neck. The national anthem plays. I jump up on the coffee table and raise my arms, ‘I’m going to win the Olympics someday,’ I shout. Cute, my family thinks.”

It was years later, though, that the role the Olympics could play in Nothstein’s life really came home to him. As a kid Nothstein would go on hunting trips with his father and his father’s PA Dutch friends. Around the campfire, stories would be told. War stories, often. This was the 1980s and the men Nothstein’s father hunted with were veterans of America’s perpetual war for perpetual peace:

‘Listen to and respect these men,’ my father told me. ‘Serving your country is a great honor.’ I’m no soldier. But when I see Ken [Carpenter], dressed head to toe in the U.S. colors, it occurs to me that I can serve and honor my country by representing the United States at the Olympics.”

This, for me, is one of the curious things about Nothstein’s story (bearing in mind my somewhat skewed view of the Olympics). For sure, yes, there is a national pride thing going on with Nothstein, the lure of the Cold War’s five-ring circus is partly about doing Uncle Sam proud. But much of what seems to have driven Nothstein seems much closer to home. He’s more community focussed. The Olympics, when he says they were a way of serving and honouring his country, I get the feeling they were more a way of honouring his father and his father’s friends. Of honouring the community – the family and extended family – he grew up in.

The community thing comes back at the end of The Price of Gold, after the Sydney Olympics and after Nothstein’s stint on the European Six Day circuit and on the road in the States. In all his years Nothstein never left Lehigh Valley. Trexlertown was always his home. Post-retirement Nothstein went on to take over the vélodrome he learned his trade in, handing on to others that which had been handed on to him. And this is the hook for me in Nothstein’s picture of Lehigh Valley:  it’s a living, breathing, real community. A cycling community:

The vélodrome [in Lehigh Valley] is my second home. The track served as my childhood playground; the lush, green infield grass, an immaculate front lawn; the concession stand, an always stocked pantry, an expansive living room seating my extended family – the fans.”

Nothstein was, largely, a product of his own drive and of the support structures that grew up around Lehigh Valley. Yes, he had the Fed’s sprint coach, Andrzej Bek, in his corner. But his personal coach was Gil Hatton, that guy who turned up in T-Town one day dust-covered and in a thrashed Plymouth. Not being a product of the U.S. Cycling Fed, Nothstein worked out his own training programmes. In preparing for the 2000 Games he looked at the time between Atlanta and Sydney as one big training block. Rather that gearing his schedule around World Cups or National and World Championships, everything was focused on Sydney:

I know this training plan will likely cost me dozens of World Cup wins, and probably a few world titles, but I don’t care. I train right through World Cup races without resting (in training lingo, tapering), so that I’m fresh for competition. Let my competitors rest and beat me now, I think. They’ll pay in Sydney. […] I’m cognizant of the risks of this training plan. If I don’t win gold in Sydney, I will surely regret the potential World Championship wins I gave up by not tapering.”

At a USOC training camp in Colorado Springs in early ’98, Nothstein watched a group of weight lifters playing basketball. The way the weightlifters burst off the ground to slam a basketball home amazed him:

I know the Olympic lifters are strong, but the explosiveness they display boggles my mind. It’s the same type of strength I use during a sprint, power combined with quickness. I need to know what they’re doing in the gym.”

 

Nothstein starts to incorporate Olympic weight lifting – clean and jerk – into his training programme. Later, in Lehigh Valley, he hooks up with a coach who’s studied the old Soviet way of training and who helps him hone his reaction time and work on his fast-twitch muscles by getting him running short sprints, sometimes held back by elasticated ropes, sometimes pulled by them. Today, these are the sort of innovative counter-intuitive training techniques you’d expect a national federation to be on the lookout for. For Nothstein, he had to find them himself.

Atlas shrugged (Howard Schatz’ iconic image of Nothstein)

Ok, isn’t it about time the D-word cropped up here? This is, after all, the height of Gen-EPO, these are the years BALCO was on the rise. Here, sadly, I have to offer the one big regret about The Price of Gold:  the manner in which it which it skates over the doping issue leaves an awful lot to be desired. Nothstein manages to be blunt and forthright on a lot of other issues. On the issue of race fixing on the track he doesn’t try to hide the fact that it goes on. On doping, though, I really felt he could have done a better job.

Sprinting for gold in Sydney

Who was paying for all of this if Nothstein wasn’t being handsomely remunerated by his fed to bring home international pride in the form of Olympic bangles and baubles? EDS. Ross Perot’s little company had turned an employees’ cycling club into “perhaps the most talent-laden track cycling team in the world.” As well as funding a track team – for which Nothstein rode – EDS had invested heavily in a $4 million state-of-the-art vélodrome in Frisco in the suburbs of Dallas. They funded a nationwide series of track meets. And they were funding the U.S. Fed to tune of about a million dollars a year. As well as paying Nothstein to ride for their team, EDS also took Gil Hatton on board as coach.

Then one day in 1999, the cycling-loving CEO of EDS got the chop and his replacement took the axe to the sporting side of the company’s marketing operations. Bye bye the Superdrome and the EDS Cup. Bye bye Marty Nothstein and Gil Hatton. Bye bye USCF. Nothstein got lucky quick enough, AutoTrader.com picked him up, albeit on a much-reduced salary. I guess you know what happened with the USCF. (Later it was revealed that the guy who ran the cycling side of EDS, Nick Chenowth, was lining his own pocket:  he got ordered to repay $1.3 million to the company, and then got more than two years in the big house.)

What it’s all about, Marty? Top: Nothstein on the podium in Sydney, flanked by Florian Rousseau and Jens Fiedler. Bottom: Nothstein with his wife Cindi, daughter Devon and son Tyler.

The price of gold can be measured in dollars. It can be measured by hours in the gym. But the real price is personal. With Nothstein, it’s not just the world titles foregone (and widening your focus here a moment, whether an over-emphasis on the Olympics diminishes World Championships). It’s the sacrifices he made on the home front. And the sacrifices his wife and children made on the home front.

 

After the medal ceremony, someone hands me an American flag. I ride another victory lap. I wave the flag above my head. Six thousand people stand and clap and cheer for me. But they’re cheering for me alone, and I didn’t win a gold medal by myself. I stop in front of my family again. I lift Tyler up like a lion carrying a cub.”

So, was it all a price worth paying? What do you think?

* * * * *

The Price of Gold, by Marty Nothstein (with Ian Dille), is published by Rodale Press (2012, 256 pages).

They cannot talk about themselves without embellishing.”

~ Akira Kurosawa

Bjarne Riis’s autobiography really should have been written as a Greek tragedy (Oedipus Wrecks? No, that’s being saved for the ultimate Lance Armstrong story). Prometheus was punished for stealing the gift of fire and Riis, too, seems to be being perpetually punished for his own sins. But, unlike Prometheus, Riis isn’t chained to a rock and having his liver plucked out by vultures every day. No, Riis has been punished by being given the anti-Midas touch: everything he grasps turns to shit.

Look at all that has happened to him with that 1996 Tour win, with Laurent Jalabert (a broken back just after being signed as team leader for CSC-Tiscali), Bo Hamburger (busted for EPO use but got off on a technicality), Ivan Basso (busted in Operación Puerto), Carlos Sastre (defected to Cervélo as soon as he won the 2008 Tour), Andy Schleck (defected to Leopard with the core of the Saxo Bank set-up at the end of 2009), and Alberto Contador (now the cycling world’s most pointless star signing). Every time the Dane seems to have got it right, something goes radically wrong.

You might think that Riis should have got the message by now and found something different to do with his life, but that’s not the Riis way of doing things. Back when he was a kid, starting out as a bike rider, the Dane was a winner. But then, as he moved through his teens, the wins dried up:

I didn’t develop physically as quickly as the others, and suddenly talent alone wasn’t enough to keep my winning streak going.”

 

When trying to qualify for the Los Angeles Olympics in 1984 Riis was told by the Danish coach that he should simply go home, hang up his bike and give up riding:

Perhaps the national coach was right. Perhaps I didn’t have it in me. And perhaps no one had ever dared to say it to my face before then.”

 

Instead of quitting, Riis, aged twenty, decamped to Luxembourg with another rider from Herning, Per Pedersen, and worked harder at turning the dream of a pro contract into reality. When the RMO squad started up at the end of the 1985 season, Riis and Pedersen were both competing for the same seat in the squad. Pedersen got the gig and Riis was left scrabbling for a ride for the 1986 season. In the end he got a gig with Lomme Driessens’s latest squad, Roland Van de Ven, alongside another Danish rider, Brian Holm. Riis’s time with Driessens was not happy:

Driessens [who had worked with Eddy Merckx, Freddy Maertens and Sean Kelly] loved telling old stories about heroes, villains and how to win bike races. I took it all in, but knew that there were only a few things that I could learn from him that were genuinely useful.”

One year with Roland was all Riis endured before he was dropped. He got a ride with another Belgian squad, Lucas. That turned out to be a disaster from which Riis was rescued only by the intervention of his fellow Dane, Kim Andersen, who recommended him for Bernard Tapie’s Toshiba squad. That turned out to be another disaster for the Dane. Until Riis got a chance to ride the 1988 Tour of the European Community as a member of the mixed Denmark-Luxembourg squad. There he was able to do a favour for Laurent Fignon. That favour paid off in spades the following January when Riis, aged twenty-four, without a ride and having to face the prospect of quitting the sport he’d fought tooth and nail to be a part of, got a call from Fignon’s directeur sportif, Cyrille Guimard, and joined Super U.

In his own autobiography, We Were Young And Carefree (Yellow Jersey Press), Fignon had this to say of Riis:

Bjarne was happy to get stuck in, he had a solid constitution and liked to work hard. Riding on his wheel was total joy, because he could do anything: go fast when he had to and go through a gap with perfect timing. I never had to tell him anything, never had to say ‘Come on’ or ‘Slow down.’ I glued myself to his wheel and didn’t have to do anything else. It’s not often as harmonious as that. I had got it right with him but I had no idea that he would make his name in any of the ways he eventually did. He had a ‘big engine,’ but this has to be made clear: he was a good rider but not capable of winning a Tour de France in normal circumstances.”

Super U became Castorama and Riis stayed a part of the team until things went tits up during the 1991 season and Fignon and Guimard realised they were heading for d-i-v-o-r-c-e. Riis was twenty-seven and had just watched a rider three months his junior finally step out of the shadows and win the Tour de France: Miguel Induráin. The Dane realised it was time to step up to the plate himself. And for the first time in his career Riis was somewhat spoilt for choice as to whom he’d ride with next: Fignon wanted him to move to Gatorade with him, and Ariostea’s directeur sportif, Giancarlo Ferretti, also put an offer on the table.

Gatorade would have been more of the same, Riis laying his future on the line for Fignon, whereas Ferretti was offering Riis the chance to ride for himself as well as working for the greater glory of Moreno Argentin and Rolf Sørensen. The choice was easy for an ambitious domestique and Riis signed with Ferretti. Two years with Ariostea were followed by two years with Emanuele Bombini at Gewiss. And then came 1996. Telekom. That Tour de France win.

That Tour de France win is where we have to loop back on the story of Riis’s rise from rags to riches and consider how it was actually achieved. Consider how and when doping entered the Bjarne Riis story. Unlike Simon Pures such as Stephen Roche who never, ever saw any doping during their careers, Riis was aware of its existence from as early as his first year in the pro ranks, at Roland. Riding kermesses in 1986 he witnessed firsthand the use of amphetamine-filled syringes. He and Brian Holm both made the same choice: doping was not for them. At the Flèche Wallonne in 1986 Roland’s soigneur offered Riis an injection:

It hadn’t taken long for me to realise that I had a lot to learn before I’d find my own place and my own identity in the cycling world. But what I did already know was that I didn’t want to turn over and let a stranger stick a needle in my backside and inject me with goodness-knows-what. It was the first time anyone had ever offered to inject me with anything.”

Riis refused to accept the injection unless he was told what it contained. The soigneur responded by shooting the contents of the syringe down the sink:

I could be pretty certain that I wouldn’t be getting much help or support from him again in a hurry after that. He didn’t look the sort who would let getting snubbed like that be forgotten any time soon either. But it was my body, my health and my career, and if I was going to take any medicines it was going to be though my own choice, and on my own terms and something that was properly tried and tested. I certainly wasn’t going to let a Belgian masseur force me into it.”

That Belgian masseur was Jef D’Hont. Ten years on from that incident at the 1986 Flèche, Riis would be reunited with D’Hont at Telekom, where the Belgian had been employed since Walter Godefroot took over the squad in 1992. D’Hont only survived a year with Riis on the team before becoming surplus to requirements at the end of the 1996 season. Eleven years after that, in 2007, D’Hont published an autobiography in which he blew the gaff on doping at Telekom.

Brian Holm, who had joined Telekom in 1993 and stayed through to 1997, also published an autobiography in 2007 and in it he confessed to having doped. Then the floodgates opened: Christian Henn, Bert Dietz, Udo Bölts, Erik Zabel, and Rolf Aldag all confessed to having doped at Telekom. Andreas Schmid and Lothar Heinrich, Telekom’s doctors at the Freiburg University Hospital, confessed to having facilitated their doping. And then Riis too finally confirmed what everyone already knew: he was a doper, just like all the rest. Unlike some of the others, though, Riis took full responsibility for his doping, didn’t try to blame D’Hont or Schmid or Heinrich. He had, he insisted, doped of his own free will.

Like many pros, Riis’ doping began with vitamin injections, which he had to learn to administer himself. Once that needle goes under the skin it becomes ever easier to rationalise the contents of the syringe, as Riis was to learn.

As well as witnessing drug use at kermesses Riis was also aware of the gossip in the peloton:

You heard people talking about riders who would experiment with different products, but no one seemed to have any concrete knowledge of who these riders were exactly or how they were doing it.”

 

Eventually Riis became a rider willing to experiment with different products. He doesn’t say when it was that he started doping (it was before 1992 and all the implications are that it was after he joined Super U) but the product – cortisone – was easily sourced. Having seen a marked improvement in his form from the cortisone, the Dane was faced with a new choice:

To continue using what I saw as relatively harmless products, or whether I was going to graduate to the kind of stuff that was said to really make you move. Maybe the latter was what I needed if I wanted to commit to being one of the best. As things stood, it was pointless training like a madman if the others were simply getting better results than me thanks to systematic doping.”

Riis moved up from the basic cortisone he was using to a stronger form, Kenacort. He lost weight, his legs grew stronger, he suffered no side-effects. Like a kid trying different brands of cigarette, Riis had found his cortisone of choice. Then, in the Autumn of 1992 and when riding for Ariostea, Riis was introduced to EPO by another rider:

I’d always been of the opinion that it was the rider who had trained the most effectively, who was best prepared and who was tactically the smartest who won races or did well. But it seemed as though none of that was necessary any more. Now I understood that it was those who found the right drug who were winning races.”

For Riis, winning was not just about finding the right drug, and EPO was just one factor in the improvement he showed during the 1993 season:

It was the combination of my weight loss, serious training and systematic EPO use that made all the difference. Losing weight meant that I simply had less mass to drag up the climbs, and I’d been able to train harder and more specifically to my goals. I was able to ride hard day after day, which had a hugely positive effect in my self-confidence, as did my improved results, and the fact that I was able to follow the world’s best riders.”

Initially Riis was only using small-ish doses of EPO. He recalls one occasion when a teammate tested his haematocrit level for him, using his own centrifuge. It was forty-seven per cent. His team-mate’s was sixty:

The figure gave me something to think about. I took EPO in moderation, which would amount to two or three courses of it during the season, normally in the run-up to the bigger races. But here was a colleague with a markedly higher haematocrit level compared to mine, and I wondered whether that meant he took much more EPO than I did, or bigger doses, or more courses. And I wondered whether there were many other riders in the peloton who were also riding around with haematocrit levels of sixty per cent.”

Having started with cortisone and graduated to EPO Riis started adding other doping products to the mix, including growth hormone:

I didn’t like it. I felt as though it somehow blocked me – that my body and legs weren’t functioning properly. Maybe it worked better for other people, but it wasn’t right for me.”

 

Prozac turned out to be a much better choice:

The pills made me feel much more positive, which allowed me to see possibilities rather than limitations. This really seemed to help at stage races, which can be very stressful mentally, and where maintaining a positive frame of mind could really help.”

Doping, for Riis, was just one element in the aggregation of marginal gains. The Dane also had an altitude chamber in the cellar of his house in Luxembourg. He dieted. Used acupuncture and herbal supplements. Tinkered with the set-up of his bike. Paid attention to his power output. Used goal-orientated training programmes. And then there was Luigi Cecchini:

He taught me a lot, and I was like his apprentice. We brought out the best in each other when we were working on developing new or different methods of treatment, training programmes or cycling equipment – anything that could help us steal a march on the competition.”

Anything, that is, apart from doping. Riis is adamant about this:

“In his time as my personal trainer he had never given me any banned products nor written me out any prescriptions for any.”

 

An important question ought be asked here: what is a banned product? To you or me a banned product is something that’s on the list of banned products. Others don’t agree with that. Back in 1994 Michele Ferrari claimed that doping was not doping if it didn’t show up in the doping controls. Many riders before and since have expressed similar views: if it can’t be tested for, it’s not doping. What does Riis think a banned product is? Here, perhaps, it’s just a minor error that Riis claims that the cortisone he first started using wasn’t banned, even though the UCI had got around putting it on the banned list in the seventies, about a decade after it was first used by cyclists and two decades before a reliable test came about. And here, perhaps, it’s also just a minor error that Riis claims that the EPO he first started using in 1992/3 wasn’t banned, even though the IOC had banned it in 1990 and the UCI a year later, although it’s use wasn’t regulated until 1997 and no test was available until 2001?

* * * * *

By the time the 1996 Tour came around everything had clicked into place for Riis. We’ve already looked at that race from three different angles (in Riishomon, parts 1 + 2, part 3 and part 4). For his stunning performance on the Hautacam Riis credits not his doping but his bike set-up, specifically his use of a smaller than normal big ring:

It was that ‘secret gear’ that did for them – I could see it in their eyes. Each time I’d attacked, I’d done so in the big ring, while they struggled in their small chain rings. It made them think that it was easy for me to be in the big ring, and that I was too strong for them. With plenty still left in the tank and completely in control, I accelerated one last time, and was on my own. None of them could follow me. This was it. Now, having broken them with my earlier attacks, I gave it everything I had, satisfied that none of them were going to be able to follow me.”

In a 1997 interview, Riis also credited Cecchini for the role he played that day:

Cecchini had told me in advance:  everything can get settled that day. The one who has the highest lactic acid threshold when it goes uphill, he’s the one who wins. And that person was me.”

 

Did doping play a role? Riis doesn’t really consider this in Stages of Light and Dark. He’s still peddling the dream, albeit having already pointed out that he was using EPO. But Riis really seems to believe that EPO was not primary factor in his success:

Bike racing was a lot more than just doping. There was also the strategy, the tactics, the mental strength and the ability to suffer.”

 

That the ability to suffer was enhanced by EPO and cortisone, that the mental strength was enhanced by Prozac, and that the strategy and tactics were impacted by doping doesn’t seem to matter. And while Riis does say that he regrets doping he doesn’t say whether that regret is based on the morality of the issue or simply a product of the problems doping and his denials caused him with the media. The latter seems to be the case, as Riis firmly believes that doping was simply “part of the job, and the way to reach your ambitions.”

One of the biggest weaknesses of Stages of Light and Dark – of too many cycling autobiographies – is the issues that are omitted. For instance, through his account of the 1994 season with Gewiss Riis has nothing to say of Michele Ferrari’s injudicious comments about orange juice and the impact they had on the team. Riis himself was not using Ferrari’s services; he’d had to choose between Ferrari and Cecchini when he joined Ariostea and once he made his choice he stuck with Cecchini. But Ferrari’s comments were important, both within Gewiss and the sport as a whole.

More importantly, though, when it comes to considering what happened in 1997 Riis omits to mention the introduction of the fifty per cent haematocrit limit and what – or even whether – that played a role in his less-than-stellar performance in the 1997 Tour.  The simple fact is that once Riis was forced to compete on more or less the same level of playing field as others (albeit one still elevated by EPO use), he was not the rider he was during that 1996 Tour. Doping may have been just one element in Riis’s performance but it seems to have been the crucial element.

Most of his poor performance at the 1997 Tour Riis credits to the Telekom team turning against him in favour of Jan Ullrich:

They said they were working for me, but it was clear that there was something going on and that it was in fact Jan who was being set up for overall victory.”

 

And then there was the state of his marriage. After the 1996 Tour ended, Riis headed off to Atlanta for the Olympics. There he met the Danish handball player Anne Dorth Tanderup and the two shared a kiss in a taxi:

Even though we’d only got to know each other for a relatively short time, it had made me want to know more about her. There was no doubt about it that she was good looking, but I knew that there was a lot more to her than that, which also attracted me.”

What happened in Atlanta didn’t stay in Atlanta and rumours soon caught up with Riis back in Denmark. The Danish media had got wind of a story and tried to stand it up. When one magazine published a story saying that Riis and Tanderup were an item, he contacted her. One phone call turned into another and the magazine’s story became true. The affair was afoot and Riis’s marriage was heading for the rocks. By the time the 1997 Tour came around Riis and his wife were in very choppy waters. Throughout that Tour it was to Tanderup that Riis turned for moral support, phoning her in the evenings. By the end of 1997 Riis’s marriage was over.

The 1998 Tour turned into a watershed for the sport. Despite all that had been happening over the previous few years, people still managed to be surprised that doping was widespread in the professional peloton. As soon as the Tour reached France after its Irish grand départ rumour spread that the gendarmes were going to hit the team hotels (something the Irish gardaí had chosen not to do). Riis immediately flushed all his EPO and got rid of his syringes and any other evidence of his own doping. Quizzed by the media as the first week of the race ended, Riis had this to say:

If this continues, there will be a number of riders who’ll simply want to go home. I’ve ridden for so many years that I’d rather stop with good memories than have to ride the rest of my career with rumours hanging over me. It’s not that fun to be a bike rider at the moment, as when people think about Festina, they immediately lump all the rest of us with them, and that’s not fair.”

Again here we should consider one of the issues omitted from Stages of Light and Dark: despite mentioning Festina’s systematic team-wide doping programme, not once does Riis mention Telekom’s own internal doping programme, which had been in existence pretty much from the formation of the team in 1989 (as the Stuttgart squad), and had started systematic use of EPO as early as 1993. There being no index to the book I can’t tell you exactly how many times Andreas Schmid, Lothar Heinrich, or the Freiburg University Hospital are mentioned in Stages of Light and Dark, but my rough tally is a big fat zero.

When the 1998 Tour ended the Dane had time to think about his own doping and ponder the imponderable: to stop, or not to stop. The biggest thing stopping Riis from stopping was that everyone else was going to carry on. Many riders came to the same conclusion and so, inevitably, doping continued unabated. Ultimately the decision was taken out of Riis’s hands: at the 1999 Tour de Suisse Riis crashed and broke his elbow. He was already giving serious consideration to retiring from cycling when his contract with Telekom ran out at the end of the season – he was by then thirty-five – and now he had the opportunity to draw a line under his pro career. Throughout his professional career Riis had been paying for personal injury insurance. In the previous year alone that had cost him 240,000 kroner (£21,000). Which is about twice his annual bill for EPO. Once Riis was able to prove that his broken elbow was career ending he left the sport with a golden parachute of more than 10,000,000 kroner (£900,000) courtesy of his insurance company.

* * * * *

Riis, of course, didn’t leave the sport. It would be worth taking the time to go through the story of Riis as a manager, but maybe not here. This section of the book is as up-to-date as it can be, ending in April 2012 and the news that Saxo Bank’s World Tour licence was not going to be withdrawn. It’s well worth reading, both for what Riis says and what he doesn’t say. Even when not revealing facts, Riis is revealing something about his own character and the issues that are important to him.

The most important issue Riis fails to deal with in this section of the book is the difficulty fans and media have with believing him today given that he denied his own doping for so long. For the most part, it would seem, Riis doesn’t really care. As he explains at one point:

I do understand it, yes, but I have put my own past behind me now and have other responsibilities.”

 

 

Funnily, this comment comes just a couple or three pages after Riis talks of having “talked a good game” during the 2008 Tour when it came to denying publicly the internal strife between Carlos Sastre and Fränk and Andy Schleck. And a couple of dozen pages before he talks of flatly denying to a journalist being in protracted negotiations to sign Alberto Contador, negotiations which Riis has just spent the previous few pages discussing.

Here of course is a problem with all sports books: athletes are expected to lie. They are expected to bend the truth in order to talk a good game. They lie about feeling weak, they lie about feeling strong. There is little or no room for honesty in sport. Honesty is a weakness and athletes must be strong. Of course, yes, there is a world of difference between talking a good game and denying doping. But the two are part of the same continuum. If you can trace a link between an athlete’s first B12 injection and their willingness to pump themselves full of EPO, then you can also trace a link between talking a good game and talking bullshit about doping. At the end of the day it’s all about providing the fans with the right amount of spectacle to keep them hooked on sport, hiding from them things that might spoil their enjoyment of the spectacle.

Riis at UK book launch (Photo: Roz Jones, courtesy of Vision Sports Publishing)

Which, of course, calls into question the point of reading Stages of Light and Dark. Of reading any cycling autobiography, especially those written by the ones who have doped and lied about their doping. I guess that depends on why you read sporting autobiographies, on what you hope to get out of them. Here it is important to stress that Stages of Light and Dark is not without its merits: within the spectrum of sporting autobiographies it is actually a good book. It adds to the store of knowledge about what was going on in Gen-EPO, even when Riis is wilfully avoiding having to deal with specifics. It adds to our understanding of what went on in Saxo Bank over the last few years, with Sastre and the Schlecks. And, of course, it’s a good read.

Lars Steen Pedersen – the ghost in the machine of Riis’s autobiography – has done a sterling job in telling Riis’s story. Pedersen is an experienced sports journalist who has ghosted other autobiographies before turning to Riis, including the boxer Johnny Bredahl and the footballer Stig Tøfting. Pedersen has managed to pull off the tricky task of making you somewhat sympathetic towards the taciturn Dane. From the off Pedersen wrong-foots you by offering a story from shortly after Riis’s May 2007 confession, a story which makes you realise there is a real person behind the façade.

Riis at UK book launch with Ellis Bacon (Photo: Roz Jones, courtesy of Vision Sports Publishing)

At the end of Stages of Light and Darke the picture that emerges of Riis is that of a proud and pragmatic man whose ambition has allowed him to fight his way to get to where he is today. Riis’s pride allows him to accept full responsibility for all that he did and not paint himself as a victim of a sport out of control, a sport in which fans, media, participants, sponsors, and governors all tried to pretend that doping was not a problem. His attitude to doping, both as a rider and a manager, has been pragmatic.

Stages of Light & Dark itself is a mix of pride – Riis still cherishes his Tour victory – and pragmatism. That pragmatism allows Riis to talk about things fans want to know – his own doping, his relationship with the likes of Sastre, the Schlecks and Contador – but that should not cause you to confuse this with a confessional autobiography: Riis is still keeping an awful lot of his story back. And, in many ways, there is more darkness than light in Stages of Light and Dark.

* * * * *

Riis: Stages of Light and Dark, by Bjarne Riis, with Lars Steen Pedersen, translated by Ellis Bacon, is published by Vision Sports Publishing (2012, 341 pages) (Originally published in Danish in 2010 as Riis, updated 2012).

“I’m sorry if I’ve disappointed people.
And for those for whom I was a hero, I’m sorry.
They’ll have to find new heroes now.”
~ Bjarne Riis, May 2007

What had really happened to Miguel Induráin in the 1996 Tour de France? All sorts of things, few of which will ever be told. But one important thing that is known is the change in personnel in his Banesto squad. The team’s doctor, Sabino Padilla, walked out at the end of 1995. Early in his career Induráin had worked with the Italian doctors Francesco Conconi and Luigi Cecchini. And it was to Italy that José Miguel Echávarri, Induráin’s directeur sportif, turned after Padilla left. Surprisingly, Echávarri was perfectly open about this:

I am seeking collaboration with [Ilario] Casoni, [Nicola] Alfieri and [Marcello] Lodi [three of Conconi’s protégés at the University of Ferrara] at least for a team get together which will be held in Palma di Majorca in February [1996]. There will hopefully be some tests in Milan followed by a week at Pamplona. At the present time the Italians lead the world in sports medicine and training techniques.

A void has been left by Sabino Padilla, the medic who has left Banesto after so many years to take a position with the football club Atletico Bilbao. Sabino, who was Induráin’s personal trainer, left without even mapping out the [1996] season. So we have to find a new medic, either in Spain or in Italy, but probably from the University of Ferrara. As of now Casoni, Alfieri and Lodi are being considered as our consultants.”

Most all of the big name riders of the time had specialists like Sabino Padilla available to them. ONCE’s Laurent Jalabert and Alex Zülle used the in-house services of Nicolas Terrados and also had the Spanish gynaecologist Eufemiano Fuentes on speed-dial. Fuentes had once been ONCE’s in-house specialist, having earned his sporting spurs blood-boosting Spanish athletes to glory at the Los Angeles Olympics, where the Americans and the Italians were also among the nations tainting their gold medals with blood. After the LA Games, Fuentes had played a role in Pedro Delgado’s victory at the 1985 Vuelta a España, as a staff member on the Spaniard’s Orbea outfit. Fuentes was also a member of Delgado’s entourage during the 1987 Tour de France that the Spaniard lost to Stephen Roche. He missed out on Delgado’s 1988 Tour victory, having switched to Manolo Sáiz’s ONCE squad. After a couple of seasons in-house with ONCE, Fuentes moved on to Amaya and then Kelme, where he finally came unstuck after Jesús Manzano’s revelations in September 2003 which eventually led to Operación Puerto.

Mapei’s Toni Rominger was a client of Michele Ferrari’s, as were his teammate Abraham Olano, his Gewiss rival Evgeni Berzin, and Saeco’s Mario Cipollini. Ferrari had learned his trade alongside Aldo Sassi when they were part of Francesco Conconi’s team that blood-boosted Francesco Moser to the Hour record twice in the space of five days in 1984. In 1994 Ferrari had compared EPO to orange juice following the one-two-three at the Flèche Wallonne achieved by Gewiss riders Moreno Argentin, Giorgio Furlan, and Evgeni Berzin. That podium lockout alone merited raised eyebrows but it had come on the back of a season which had already seen Gewiss riders winning Tirreno-Adriatico, Milan-Sanremo, and the Critérium International. Even though Aldo Sassi banned his Mapei riders from working with Ferrari in 1996 the Italian doctor continued to work with Rominger, having helped him set two new Hour records over a fifteen day period in 1994 (and, in the process, taking the record from Induráin – one of the few times Rominger actually managed to beat his Spanish rival).

The Festina boys, Richard Virenque and company, they had the in-house services of Willy Voet, an old school soigneur who changed with changing times. During his career Voet had worked with riders like Joaquim Agosthino, Hennie Kuiper, and Sean Kelly before helping Festina become one of the power-houses of 1990’s cycling. Voet finally came unstuck at a Franco-Belgian border crossing just days before the 1998 Tour de France rolled off from Dublin. The drugs found in his possession led to him becoming the scapegoat for all the excesses of Gen-EPO.

And Riis? He – and his Telekom team-mate, Ullrich – used the services of Luigi Cecchini, whose orbit Riis had come into after he joined Ariosta in 1992, where Cecchini worked alongside Michele Ferrari. After Ariosta folded at the end of 1993 Moreno Argentin had enticed Riis to join Gewiss, where Ferrari was installed as the in-house specialist until his injudicious comments about orange juice saw him (officially, anyway) become persona non grata. Riis, having had to choose between Ferrari and Cecchini at Ariosta, retained the services of Cecchini throughout the rest of his career. As well as working with Riis in 1996, Cecchini was also working with Pascal Richard (Switzerland/MG), Rolf Sørensen (Denmark/Rabobank), and Max Sciandri (UK/Motorola) – who pulled off a gold, silver and bronze triple in the road race at the Atlanta Olympics.

The Telekom team also had access to the facilities of the Department of Sports Medicine at the Freiburg University Hospital. Dr Andreas Schmid was their on-call specialist from their days as the Stuttgart squad (1989/90) until his suspension in May 2007. From 1995 onwards the team also had access to Dr Lothar Heinrich. In 1996 Schmid and Heinrich were also working for the German cycling federation, Schmid a member of their medical commission and both doctors responsible for German riders at the Worlds and the Olympics.

In 1992 Schmid had begun working with the Jef D’hont. Since the mid-seventies D’hont – like Voet, an old school soigneur – had been administering cyclists with his own home-brewed ‘special potion.’ But D’hont’s homebrew was became ever less effective as EPO took hold of the peloton. As early as the 1992 Tour de France the Telekoms realised they were getting nowhere without the use of EPO, which was being heavily used by Italian and Spanish teams in particular. Initially, individual riders sourced EPO themselves and their use of the drug was supervised by Schmid. Later in 1993 Schmid was able to source EPO for the team, with D’hont responsible for passing it on to the riders.

Once the use of EPO commenced, Schmid and Heinrich assumed a greater role within the team and, from the 1995 season onward – when Telekom’s systematic usage of doping products commenced – identified which riders were to peak for which races. In addition to EPO the Freiburg doctors were also administering glucocorticoids, growth hormone, and testosterone. Despite their improved doping regime the Telekom team was still not producing the wins and had to negotiate hard in order to secure a place in the 1995 Tour, eventually padding out the squad with a number of riders from the Italian ZG team. Drugs alone, it seemed, weren’t the answer.

* * * * *

Echávarri’s openness on the subject of doctors and the importance of Sabino Padilla in the Banesto set-up seems surprising today, and even in 1996 it was somewhat unusual. In the early 1990’s journalists like David Walsh and Paul Kimmage had spoken positively of the new role being played in cycling by men like ONCE’s Nicolas Terrados (profiled in Walsh’s Inside The Tour de France), and expressed the hope that their arrival would see the end of cycling’s reliance on doping. But even though the UCI’s big boss, Hein Verbruggen, had leapt to Ferrari’s defence in 1994, slamming the media for miss-quoting the Italian, the outcry over Ferrari’s comments – which had been reported accurately – saw a veil fall over the role he and men like him were playing in the sport.

EPO, even before Ferrari’s 1994 comments, was no secret; people had been writing about it – and the unusually high number of cyclists dying in their sleep – since the early nineties. The IOC were funding research into a test for the drug (and actually supplying EPO for research purposes), a test which was being developed by Francesco Conconi at the University of Ferrara. As one year passed into the next and no EPO test appeared (despite repeated promises that he was on the verge of a breakthrough) Conconi wrote to Hein Verbruggen suggesting the implementation of a haematocrit test, with his proposed limit being 54%. That happened in June of 1996, a month before Riis galloped up the Hautacam on his Pinarello. Verbruggen, though, was opposed in principle to blood testing. It was – and continues to be – considerably more expensive than urine tests. And, in 1996, the UCI had other ideas on where money needed to be spent in cycling: they were dreaming of new headquarters in Aigle.

A month before Conconi wrote to Verbruggen, Italy’s Nucleo Antisofisticazione e Sanità (NAS), the branch of the Carabinieri dealing with health and hygiene matters, had planned on paying a visit to the Giro d’Italia, having become aware of unusually high sales of EPO in Tuscany in the weeks leading up to the race. The 1996 corsa rosa started in Greece – it was the centenary of the modern Olympics – with a prologue in Athens followed by two stages before the race returned to Italy. The plan was for everyone on the Giro to return to Italy by ferry, across the Aegean, landing at the port of Brindisi. NAS decided that this was where they would hit the race and search everyone. When checking the exact details, NAS enquired of CONI when the ferries were due to arrive in Brindisi. Somehow NAS’s plans leaked.

Everyone on the Giro was aware of the welcoming committee awaiting them in Brindisi, especially after La Gazzetta dello Sport (part of the RCS Group which organises the Giro and the race’s newspaper of record) published details of the proposed raid. For some unknown reason twelve unmarked team vehicles decided to return to Italy overland via Montenegro, Albania, and Croatia and then all the way down the Italian boot to Brindisi. They could have saved the petrol money – because of the leak the NAS officers decided to watch the Giro on telly instead and cancelled their raid.

Unknown at that time was that CONI were part of the problem when they should have been the solution to cleaning up Italian sport. Since February 1994 they had been sitting on a report by Sandro Donati, a survey into drug use in the Italian peloton. Donati’s report was based on interviews with a small number of riders, doctors and team bosses and in it the Italian didn’t mince his words:

The abuse has spiralled out of control. In some of the races, they are now climbing hills at speeds they used to reach on the flat! And why? Because the majority are pumped to the gills with shit like EPO, HGH and testosterone. For the good of sport, it is imperative we act immediately to stamp this out.”

For the good of sport, maybe, but not for the glory of Italians at the Olympics. CONI, conflicted by their dual role of bringing home the bangles and baubles every four years and stopping athletes from cheating, figured that the glory was more important than the catching of cheats. And so Donati’s report lay buried until French and Italian journalists forced CONI to acknowledge its existence toward the end of the 1997 season.

But there was more to just sitting on damaging reports going on in CONI. Months after the 1996 Giro ended, Ivano Fannini, direttore sportivo at the Vatican’s cycling team, Amore e Vita, claimed that an important CONI official had decamped to Greece shortly after the NAS phone call and personally informed a number of teams of the reception committee awaiting them in Brindisi. Like a lot of Fannini’s claims down the years, this has never been proven.

* * * * *

Since the days of Fausto Coppi – and probably even before then – Italians had led the charge to turn cycling into a scientific sport. Coppi always gets the credit for dragging cycling out of the stone age and into the modern era. In the years after his reign it was to Italian teams that the best European pros tended to gravitate. Italian industrialists who’d grown up listening to the exploits of Coppi and Gino Bartali on the radio were splashing their money about in the sport of their youth and those industrialists expected value for money. Italian teams became the best prepared in the peloton.

Preparation doesn’t always mean doping. The simple fact is that the Italians took the sport more seriously than others. They trained properly. They targeted races and trained to peak for those targets. They used doctors who understood human physiology and didn’t rely on old wives’ tales passed from one generation of soigneurs to the next. Many of the doctors who worked with Italian teams would claim to have operated to high ethical standards. But the problem there is that one doctor’s version of high ethical standards varies from another’s. Left to individuals to decide, the limits of what is ethically acceptable will always be tested. And Italian doctors became world leaders when it came to testing the limits of what was ethically acceptable. So preparation often does mean doping.

By the time the nineties came around the Italians were rocking the sport of cycling. Go back to all those stats that bogged you down at the start of this series. The strength of the Italian peloton at the time is shown in the number of Italians who turned up at the 1996 Tour: sixty-two of their riders were in ‘s-Hertogenbosch for the race’s start, more than the combined number of French and Spanish riders. Go back and take a longer look at the results of the major races. In 1996 alone the only major races not won by Italian riders or Italian teams were the Flèche Wallonne (Motorola’s Lance Armstrong), the time trial at the Worlds (ONCE’s Alex Zülle), Paris-Nice (ONCE’s Laurent Jalabert), the GP du Midi Libre (Jalabert), the Dauphiné Libéré (Induráin), the Tour (Riis), and the Vuelta (Zülle). Armstrong was already working with Ferrari, Riis was with Cecchini, and Induráin was using the University of Ferrara. Meaning that only ONCE stopped Italians making it a clean sweep of the year. The Spanish may have been slow out of the blocks when it came to cycling but they were catching up fast. And they were playing by Italian rules.

* * * * *

Other important issues were also at play in the lead up to the 1996 Tour. As if having the judicial authorities taking an interest in the use of EPO in the pro peloton wasn’t bad enough, Conconi had a rival in the search for an EPO test. In February 1996, Professor Guy Brisson, Director of the Montreal anti-doping laboratory, floated the idea of an EPO test to the UCI. Brisson proposed to the UCI that he should carry out research on the pro peloton during the Tour de Romandie in May. Key to Brisson’s research was proving that blood tests could easily be carried out on the peloton before competition. The UCI eventually gave Brisson the green light, but only if he worked with the Institut Universitaire de Medicine Légale, often erroneously referred to as the UCI’s Lausanne laboratory. But while the IUML was independent of the UCI, the doctors working there had a very close working relationship with the cycling authorities.

Unfortunately for Brisson the riders at the Tour de Romandie were unhappy with the idea of anyone looking at their blood and refused to cooperate with his tests. In the end it was agreed that samples would be collected purely for research purposes, and that anonymity would be guaranteed. Brisson was then able to carry out his research during the Tour de Suisse in June, where he proved that blood testing was feasible. And that the riders tested were showing surprisingly elevated haematocrit levels.

The UCI claimed that Brisson’s research came to naught, that it was ineffective at indentifying the use of EPO, which was good news for those worried by what the Canadian’s research might reveal. But, when the proverbial brown stuff hit the revolving air-conditioning unit during the Festina affaire, Brisson presented an alternative viewpoint: the longitudinal analysis he was working on was more than effective at identifying cheats. The UCI, fearing the fallout from riders with deep pockets who could drag them through the courts and bankrupt them, hadn’t wanted to know.

The attitude of the cycling authorities at the time is probably best exemplified by the fates of different riders who popped positives in the run up to the Tour. Consider these cases: MG’s Fabio Fontanelli, positive for testosterone at the Amstel Gold Race; Agrigel’s Jacky Durand and Thierry Laurent, positive for nandrolone at the Quatre Jours de Dunkerque and, in Durand’s case, the Côte Picardie; GAN’s Philippe Gaumont and Laurent Desbiens, positive for nandrolone at the Dunkerque and Picardie races as well as the Tour de l’Oise (and, in Desbiens’ case, the Vendée International Classic). Fontanelli’s positive didn’t become public until August. Durand and Laurent completed the Tour even after French media got wind of their positives before the Tour commenced. Roger Legeay, on the other hand, didn’t just drop Gaumont and Desbiens – he made sure the French media knew they had been dropped, and why. The cycling authorities had simply adopted the practice of not releasing any details of positives. No news is, after all, good news. And the 1996 Tour was full of good news for the cycling authorities: not a single rider returned a positive.

* * * * *

Having confessed in 2007 to using EPO and other drugs during his cycling career, it’s no secret anymore that Riis was charged up on the blood booster during the 1996 Tour de France, as were many of his rivals. How high Riis was charged up when he galloped up the Hautacam on his pretty little Pinarello is where, after the Festina affaire broke and Willy Voet spat in the soup, Riis got one of his nicknames: Mr 60%. In Breaking the Chain (Yellow Jersey Press), Voet had this to say of the 1996 Tour:

Remember Bjarne Riis’s stunning win on the Hautacam climb in the 1996 Tour de France. The Dane, who was to win the race, literally played with his rivals before obliterating them. And the haematocrit levels of his rivals, certainly at Festina, had been blithely boosted to about 54%. His exploit was as perturbing for those in the know as it was spectacular to the uninitiated.”

According to Jef D’hont – whom Riis refused to work with – the Dane was dosing up on 4,000-unit double-doses of EPO every other day during the 1996 Tour, pushing his haematocrit level to at least 60%, sometimes 64%. Such levels were contrary to the rules employed by Schmid and Lothar for the use of EPO within the Telekom squad, wherein they favoured a limit around 53%.

Others were similarly blithely boosting their haematocrit levels to the mid fifties. In one of their investigations into doping, reporters at L’Équipe managed to get hold of Evgeni Berzin’s blood values during the 1995 season. In January the Gewiss star had shown a haematocrit level of 41.7%. By July it had risen to 56.3%. In Gen-EPO the fastest and the fittest were more and more often those willing to push their haematocrit limits highest.

How many of Riis’s rivals on the Hautacam were doped is open to dispute. Go back to the table of the top twenty finishers in the ’96 Tour and consider what happened to them in the years after 1996. All three riders on the podium – Riis, Ullrich and Virenque – have confessed, to varying degrees, that they doped. Go through the rest of the list and the riders who haven’t since confessed or been caught all carry question marks against their names by virtue of the teams they rode for. And this is where the true crimes of Gen-EPO really become clear.

You would dearly love, for instance, to believe that Peter Luttenberger’s ride throughout that Tour – throughout the 1996 season – was talent shining through. But the twenty-three-year-old climber was on the Carrera squad that was home to the young Marco Pantani. And when the NAS raided the University of Ferrara in 1998, the files they seized showed that the EPO the IOC had bought for Professor Conconi’s research purposes was actually being administered to the Carrera team, among others. Luttenberger’s name doesn’t appear in the Ferrara files. But the damage is done to him nonetheless. The Austrian domestique rode for a dirty team in a dirty peloton and, rightly or wrongly, the mud sticks to him because of that.

When the 1996 season ended Luttenberger was surplus to requirements as the Carrera team rebuilt themselves as Mercatone Uno and around the new Italian climbing sensation Marco Pantani. The Austrian moved to Rabobank where, at the 1997 Tour, he again finished second in the best young rider category, once again to Ullrich. After two years with the Dutch squad Luttenberger moved to ONCE for two seasons, then Tacconi Sport for two seasons, before finally finding some form of stability: Bjarne Riis’s nascent CSC squad signed him. The Austrian, who was more than three minutes slower than Riis climbing the Hautacam that day in 1996, spent the last four years of his career with the Dane’s squad. Unlike Riis, Luttenberger never got the chance to be more than a domestique. Only a few paupers get to become princes. Though Luttenberger did get to end his career wearing the Austrian national champion’s jersey for the time trial. Maybe he did it all clean. Maybe he didn’t. Were he to tell you it was the former, would you believe him?

How could you? When asked if they had done it clean, men like Riis, Ullrich, Virenque and so many others lied in order to protect their own reputations. Through months and years of investigations and allegations they lied. These men didn’t just steal victory and glory through their doping, they robbed the reputations of others with their denials. Through their lies they rendered meaningless the claims of the few clean riders that their modest achievements were down to natural talent alone. Since their belated confessions, Riis and a few others may have been able to recast themselves as saviours of cycling. But until they find a way to restore the reputations of the few clean riders in Gen-EPO’s peloton they should not be allowed to consider themselves redeemed. They should not be allowed consider themselves to be heroes.

Epilogue

Tuesday, July 16, 1996. The sixteenth stage of the Tour de France. The salle de presse. The massed ranks of cycling’s media watch the scene unfolding before their eyes on the Hautacam. And they laugh. What they are seeing, they know, is impossible. What they are seeing, they know, is not right. What they are seeing, they know, is the result of that decade’s not-so-secret super weapon, EPO. These men know what has been going on in cycling over the last few years. They know about men like Ferrari and Cecchini. They know what had happened at the Tour de Romandie and the Tour de Suisse. They know what had nearly happened at the Giro d’Italia. Watching a donkey like Riis gallop up the Hautacam on his Pinarello, well who wouldn’t laugh knowing what the massed ranks of cycling’s media know?

Then the media stop laughing and get back to duty, forgetting all that they know and hiding from their audience their own beliefs. This isn’t a day to spit in the soup they all drink from. This is a day to celebrate the rise of Riis, a new géant de la route, and the fall of Induráin, the deposed King. Yes, some of them will try to tell the truth, will drench their reports in euphemisms which the alert fan might notice and be able to interpret correctly. And a few of them will heed the wake-up calls and start piecing together stories which will appear over the winter and force the UCI’s hand on the issue of testing rider’s haematocrit levels, a Pyrrhic victory for the men of the press. But for most of them this is just another day in the office, and so they serve up more tales of heroism and athleticism.

The journalists themselves are, of course, only following orders. They all have editors and those editors are only too happy to tell the approved story. The story the teams and riders want them to tell, the story the race organisers and cycling authorities want to be told, the story the fans want to hear. The tale of a new era (Ullrich), a new champion (Riis), a page turned in the history of cycle sport (Induráin). The tale of an epic duel. The tale of one of the greatest Tours ever.

If only it had been true.

Virenque, Riis and Ullrich celebrate their achievements at the end of the 1996 Tour

Coda

Fifth man home that day on the Hautacam in 1996 – fifty-six seconds down on Riis – was a man who would win there a dozen years later. Leonardo Piepoli, then with the Refin squad of the Tashkent Terror, Djamolidine Abdoujaparov.

In the 2008 Tour Piepoli and his Saunier Duval teammate José Cobo went off the front of the race on the climb of Hautacam, with Bjarne Riis’s Saxo Bank star Fränk Schleck tagging along for the ride. Piepoli crossed the line ahead of Cobo, with Schleck a couple of dozen seconds down the road. Piepoli savoured the taste of victory on this miraculous mountain.

Leonardo Piepoli and José Cobo celebrate another stunning stage win for the Saunier Duval team at the 2008 Tour

Then, two days later, the news came through: Piepoli’s teammate Riccardo Riccò was positive for CERA, the new flavour of EPO all the cool kids bought. With the UCI and ASO at war over the Pro Tour, responsibility for dope testing at the 2008 race had been handed over to the AFLD and they proved to be more than capable of doing something the UCI seemed singularly unwilling to do: bust the cheats, no matter how big or small they were.

Riccò’s directeur sportif, Mauro Gianetti, immediately pulled the whole of the Saunier Duval team from the Tour. Christian Prudhomme, the Tour’s chief architect, made it clear that – as far as ASO were concerned – Riccò’s positive was not a case of one bad apple spoiling the lot. The tree it came from was rotten to the roots:

I was pretty disturbed when I saw the superiority of two riders from the same team on the stage to Hautacam, as the rest of you were, I’m sure. I have my opinion on the manager – a person who does not have good virtue – and that opinion will not change in two months, five months, six months, two years, three years … for the sponsor this is terrible news.”

Before the summer was out Saunier Duval pulled their sponsorship. Through the summer, as CONI investigated the Riccò case, Piepoli proclaimed his purity: what he did on the Hautacam he did clean. Then, as the leaves fell from the trees and the cycling year wound down, the results of re-tests of samples from the Tour came through: Piepoli was a double positive, from both the pre-Tour test and a test conducted on the rest day after his win on the Hautacam. Three months later Piepoli received a late Christmas present from CONI: a two-year ban.

One day the Tour will return to that hill above the Roman Catholic shrine in Lourdes, where miracles happen. That hill where Miguel Induráin had effortlessly chased down Marco Pantani in 1994, where Riis reigned supreme in 1996, where Lance Armstrong closed on Javier Otxoa in 2000 and where Piepoli had run rampant in 2008. One day, riders in the Tour de France will once again race up the Hautacam. When they do, let’s hope there are no more miracles on the Hautacam. Let’s hope for a hero fans can believe in.

Next: Riis – Stages of Light and Dark (Vision Sports Publishing) reviewed.

Two questions need to be asked here about the 1996 Tour de France. The first is: what had happened to Miguel Induráin? The other: what had happened to Bjarne Riis?

But before turning to those questions let’s consider one other question that ought be asked: where the hell had the Telekom team – which ended the Tour with the top two steps of the podium and the maillot vert as well as the maillot jaune along with what is today the maillot blanc for the best rider under twenty-five – come from?

The 1996 Telekom team

Hennie Kuiper was the boss of the squad back in 1991 when the Telekom sponsorship began. Since he’d hung up his wheels at the end of the 1988 season Kuiper had been running the small Stuttgart squad and, in 1990, had seen his riders bag stages in the Nissan Classic and the Vuelta a España as well as overall glory in the Herald Sun Tour and De Panne, with Markus Schleicher, Erwin Nijboer, and Udo Bölts bringing home the booty. When the team became Telekom in 1991 it was with the same core of riders as the old Stuttgart squad. Their sole win of note that first season was Ad Wijnands’ overall victory in the Etoile de Bessèges.

The following year Kuiper was out and on his way to Motorola, and Walter Godefroot – the former Belgian pro who’d sparred with Eddy Merckx – was brought on board to boss the squad along with Frans van Looy. The roster was improved, with the addition of riders like Christian Henn and Jens Heppner, who would remain part of the team’s core for the next few seasons, along with proven talents like Uwe Ampler, Etienne de Wilde, and the Madiot brothers Marc and Yvon. Even if these older riders didn’t bring home results they were the sort who would help the squad get invitations to some important races. Bölts won them a stage in the Giro and that was about it for the year.

For 1993 Godefroot strengthened the team further with the addition of riders like Rolf Aldag, Bert Dietz, Brian Holm, Mario Kummer, and Stefan Wesemann. Two sprinters from opposite ends of the age spectrum also came on board: the thirty-two-year-old Olaf Ludwig and the twenty-two-year-old Erik Zabel. Between Aldag and Ludwig the team bagged stages in the Tour Méditerranéen, the Tour de Romandie, and the Tour de France. The following year Rudy Pevenage joined the management team. Axel Merckx came on board for the one season (the team rode Eddy Merckx bikes). Jens Lehman joined as a stagiare at the end of the season but didn’t stick around. But the key signing who did stick around was a twenty-year-old kid from Rostock: Jan Ullrich. Zabel delivered wins in the short-lived Classic Haribo as well as the sprinter’s Classic, Paris-Tours. Things were beginning to click into place.

In 1995, with no major additions to the squad, Zabel delivered stages in the Tour de Suisse and the Tour de France, with Dietz and Henn bringing home stages in the Vuelta a España. And then came the big breakthrough in 1996. As well as switching from Eddy Merckx’s bikes to Pinarello’s pretty little ponies – on which Pedro Delgado and Miguel Induráin had ridden to victory in five of the previous eight Tours – the German little team that couldn’t added Bjarne Riis to their roster.

Riis’s podium place in the 1995 Tour – and a top twenty and a top ten in the two Tours before that – were in his favour, but his age (he was then thirty-one) made him a risky choice. But at least his podium finish in 1995 would probably make it easier to get an invite to the Tour. Riis was also a driven man. As a kid he’d won early and often. As he grew through his teens, though, he didn’t seem to mature as quickly as his peers and the wins dried up. He’d had to scrabble hard to get a place in the pro ranks, signing for Lomme Driessens’ Roland squad and then going through one-year contracts with Lucas and Toshiba before falling into the orbits of Cyrille Guimard and his faltering vedette Laurent Fignon. At Super-U and Castoroma Riis matured and served as Fignon’s domestique. His reward was a stage win in the 1989 Giro d’Italia.

When Fignon split with Guimard, Riis moved on to the Italian Ariostea squad bossed by Giancarlo Ferretti. Two years there saw him adding another Giro stage to his palmarès along with a stage in the Tour. When Ariostea pulled their sponsorship at the end of 1993 Riis moved on to Gewiss, bossed by Emmanuele Bombini, where he added another stage win in the Tour to his record as well as that podium finish. But Gewiss was not a happy home for the Dane, not with Evgeni Berzin as a teammate. With the Russian on the rise Riis saw a future in which he’d be a domestique once more, and so he scarpered at the end of his two-year contract. When Godefroot dangled a contract with the right number of zeroes on it in front of his nose, Riis signed for Telekom, where there were no visible threats to his leadership and he could count on the undivided devotion of his new teammates in the years to come. That was the Dane’s plan anyway.

In the 1996 Tour de France, everything was out in the open

Now let’s get back to those other two questions, the ones about Induráin’s fall and Riis’s rise.

Various people have offered various explanations for Induráin’s Tour sans. There was the fringale on Les Arcs: the Spaniard had simply forgotten to eat. There was the weather: in the Alps it was too cold, on the Hautacam it was too hot. There was his weight: some say he’d gone into the Tour above his ideal race weight, others say the rainy conditions in the first week had bloated him as he retained water like a sponge. For sure, Induráin was no Bibendum, but in cycling’s size-zero obsession every kilo – every gramme – counts. And, when you’re six foot two and horsing eighty kilos up every claim, excess baggage comes at a very heavy cost. On a ten-kilometre climb, one kilo of excess weight can cost a rider a minute in time. Or so the stattos say, anyway, and you should never argue with a statto; they’ll only baffle you with bullshit.

Two races after the 1996 Tour help put Induráin’s Tour into context. At the Olympic Games in Atlanta the Spaniard was back on form, bagging the gold in the individual time trial. Then he turned up for the Vuelta a España which, the year before, had switched to its new Autumn calendar slot. Induráin’s relationship with his national Tour was somewhat fractious. Since his second-place finish in 1991 – when the Vuelta was still run off in Spring – Induráin had avoided the Spanish Grand Tour. Banesto put a gun to his head and told him he had no choice but to ride it in 1996.

So Induráin rode the Vuelta. On the first hard day in the high hills, Induráin served up a repeat of his Les Arcs défaillance with a pájara on the Alto de Naranco, in Asturias, where in the space of the final two kilometres he surrendered a minute to his ONCE rivals Laurent Jalabert and Alex Zülle. The next day was due to finish on the Lagos de Covadonga, but Induráin was already four minutes down as the peloton climbed the Fito. Before the base of the Covadonga itself the Spanish champion pulled out of the race and effectively ended his career.

As for Riis, all sorts of explanations have been offered for the transformation of a domestique into a Tour winner. Induráin himself had gone the same route, spending the first few years of his career working for others – especially Pedro Delgado – before finally, at the age of twenty-six, becoming the boss. The only real difference between Induráin and Riis was in when they’d matured: the Dane was three months older than the Spaniard but hadn’t got his chance to lead until he had turned thirty. Riis had simply taken longer to come of age.

Do the time losses and gains in the Alps matter much when looking at where Induráin lost the Tour and Riis won it? Yes and no. Riis exited the Alps with just a forty-second cushion over Berzin, time that could easily be lost in either the Pyrénées or the penultimate day’s time trial. But Riis had delivered a psychological blow to his opponents in the Alps, especially on the truncated stage to Sestrières.

As for Induráin, the three minutes lost to Riis on Les Arcs plus the minute lost the next day in the time trial up to Val d’Isère and the half-minute lost up to Sestrières were, to say the least, unusual. But, with the Pyrénées and that final time-trial still to come, it was not inconceivable that the Spaniard could still come out on top. Richard Virenque (Festina) only had a minute on him, a minute he could (and would) surrender in the time trial. Peter Luttenberger (Carrera) and Jan Ullrich (Telekom) may have had two and three minutes on Induráin, but they were kids – twenty-three and twenty-two – and kids break easily, physically and mentally. As for Abraham Olano and Toni Rominger (both Mapei), Evgeni Berzin (Gewiss), and Riis, well Induráin had cracked each of them in the past and could still crack them in the Pyrénées. Maybe it’s true that Induráin was unlikely to win the Tour exiting the Alps but it’s also true that his key rivals could still throw it all away. Once the Spaniard was there to take advantage of that then, yes, he could still win the Tour. That’s the key to defensive cycling: put them under pressure and wait for your rivals to crack.

After the Hautacam, though, the 1996 Tour was all but over. So what had really happened on the Hautacam? Again, the explanations vary. Induráin’s previous Tour victories, some would remind you, were based on defending time gained in time trials and guarding his losses in the mountains. Letting his rivals tire and exhaust themselves trying to crack him, and then profiting from their efforts.

The more obvious excuse for Induráin’s collapse on the Hautacam was that he simply couldn’t cope with Riis’s constant changes in paces. Had Induráin simply let Riis go and climbed at his own rhythm, who knows what the outcome would have been. Perhaps had Induráin paid more attention in his apprenticeship years he would have seen this. In the 1987 Tour Pedro Delgado had played on Stephen Roche’s climbing weakness by attacking him on the climb to La Plagne. Roche simply let Delgado go and worked up the climb at his own rhythm, ceding just a small amount of time to his Spanish rival at the finish. But Induráin allowed Riis to dictate an unsteady rhythm at the base of the Hautacam and paid the price. In his years of domination Induráin had grown accustomed to watching his rivals wear themselves out trying to shake him and simply assumed – hoped? – that the same would happen again.

What had happened to Riis on the Hautacam? The attack itself was almost as daring as the manner in which it was carried it out. Riis was, after all, in the yellow jersey and even by then cycling was in thrall to defensive tactics. According to the rules of catanaccio cycling, Riis was supposed to sit back and wait for the others to crack and only then put the boot in. But Riis had paid attention during his own apprenticeship years. Back in 1989 he’d been Laurent Fignon’s domestique and stood on the Champs Élysées on that infamous final Sunday afternoon in the Tour. Riis had seen Fignon struggling to match Greg LeMond’s split-times throughout the time trial and watched in horror as the Frenchman paid the price of riding someone else’s race and pedalled squares. He watched the American cry tears of joy and the Frenchman tears of loss when it was all over. (And he and his team-mates had cried, too, at the loss of their share of the winner’s purse.) Riis was there, too, for the autopsy that followed. Was it the saddle sores that had lost Fignon the Tour? Fignon’s aerodynamically-inefficient ponytail combined with LeMond’s aerodynamically-efficient helmet and tri-bars? Or was it that Fignon simply hadn’t put the boot in when he should have in the Alps? Whatever it was, Riis learned not to make the same mistakes himself.

And so, in the maillot jaune and with advantages of between one and four minutes on his key rivals at the start of the day, Riis attacked on the Hautacam. And it wasn’t just the memory of Fignon that played a role that day. At the end of the stage Riis thanked not just his Telekom directeur sportif, Walter Godefroot, but also the former champion Fignon. The Frenchman, the Dane said, had been offering him advice throughout the race. And Fignon’s advice was simple: attack, attack, and attack again. The sacred principles of la course en tête.

So Riis attacked in yellow. And kept attacking. But where had the power for those attacks come from? Isn’t that really the big question of that day on the Hautacam? Riis flew up the climb like a Ferrari blitzing the track in Mugello. How had a donkey turned into a Thoroughbred? The answer to that, too, was simple: acupuncture. Riis used the services of an acupuncturist, John Boel, who travelled on the 1996 Tour as part of Riis’s entourage. And Boel knew of an area below the knee he called the three mile point. Jab a pin in it properly, he claimed, and you’ll get a new source of energy that’ll carry you three miles beyond where you normally give up. Riis certainly believed him. And sometimes believing is enough to make something true.

On the Hautacam that day, as well having Boel press the turbo-charge button below Riis’s knee, the Dane also played some mind games with his opponents. Riis was one of that rare breed of cyclists who actually paid attention to the machine he propelled. While Toni Rominger was farting around with switching his brake lever over – and thus propelling himself arse over tit when instinct kicked in one day and he pulled the wrong one to avoid an errant rider in front – Riis was thinking how he could use his bike as a psychological weapon. And on the day of the Hautacam stage he had his wrench monkey fit a smaller than normal outer ring. When Riis went for it on the Hautacam, spinning that big ring with ease, his rivals saw a man possessed by supernatural strength. What they didn’t notice was that he was riding about the same gear they were.

Winning and losing bike races, some would argue, really is as simple as all that.

Virenque, Riis and Ullrich celebrate their achievements (Photo: Pascal Rondeau/Allsport UK)

Next: The other explanations.