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)

~ 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).

There’s a scene in Mark Johnson’s Argyle Armada that, for me, just about sums up what’s so cool about Jonathan Vaughters’ Garmin. It’s not a scene that’s unique to Garmin, you’ll see it all the time in this strange sport of ours. And it’s a scene that appears, in modified forms, throughout Argyle Armada, at races in France, in America, in Canada. The repetition of the scene probably helps explain why some people like the team that Doug Ellis bankrolls and which Jonathan Vaughters has built. And helps explain why we like the sport of cycling.

This particular scene happens to be set in Belgium. The Garmin-Cervélo boys – Ryder Hesjedal, Christophe Le Mével, Dan Martin, Peter Stetina, and Christian Vande Velde – are out for a pre-ride of the final hundred kilometres of the Liège-Bastogne-Liège course, the Friday before the 2011 La Doyenne rolls off. Behind them in the team-car are directeur sportif Eric van Lancker and wrench-monkey Alex Banyay, Johnson riding along with them and taking it all in.

Van Lancker is pointing out things, the psychogeography of the region: the Côte de Wanne where, traditionally, the peloton gets cut down to size; the Col du Maquisard just outside Spa where a truck once lost its brakes and thrashed a house; a filling station just outside Sprimont, over La Redoute, where he himself broke away for his Liège victory in 1990; the Côte de Stockeau where so many decked it during the 2010 Tour de France. Every inch of the road has some memory attached to it, some ghost image shadowing it.

Up front, the guys are just riding along. All at once, a gang of kids rush out of a yard screaming for a bidon to be tossed to them. Vande Velde duly obliges with a souvenir. Then, on a climb near the end of their ride, there’s a small kid riding along on the pavement. The wee runt can’t even be a teenager yet but he’s decked out in full racing kit. And when he sees the Garvélo boys pass, the competitive juices kick in: he bunny-hops his little racing bike onto the road and gives chase to the pros in front.

Christophe Le Mével looks around and shouts encouragement at the kid – ‘Allez, allez!‘ – and the kid digs in. Then, after a few hundred metres, he falters and falls back. Rather than just riding on, Le Mével sits up and waits for the kid to ride up to him. Placing himself on the kid’s outside the Frenchman puts his hand on the lad’s back and takes him to the top of the climb. There he pulls a bidon from its cage and hands it over. Johnson’s back in the team car, doesn’t hear if any words are exchanged, but the sentiment is clear: ‘Chapeau you little brat, you deserve it.’ Then the Garvélos get back to the business of preparing for Sunday and the kid is left to ride on alone.

Which is that little kid’s biggest souvenir of that day, the bidon given to him or the memory of Le Mével’s hand on his back?

Argyle Armada is a look behind the scenes of pro cycling life, through the lens of a freelance writer and photographer who’s worked with the Garmin team since 2007. That Johnson is a photographer might make you think that Argyle Armada is another coffee-table photo album, but there’s a lot more to it than that. Before getting into the book itself, let’s try and look at it in the context of other cycling books.

One could look to some of the books written about Lance Armstrong – here, particularly Daniel Coyle’s Lance Armstrong’s War or Bill Strickland’s Tour de Lance – which, through the privileged access the authors were given over the course of a particular season, ended up being partly about the team as well as the rider. Or one could look at something like Jeff Connor’s Wide-Eyed and Legless, which is fully about one team, but just for one race, there the ANC-Halfords squad in the 1987 Tour de France. For me, the book that has most in common with Argyle Armada is Richard Moore’s Sky’s the Limit, the story of Team Sky’s début season, 2010.

But, whereas Moore’s book was words with a few images inserted in the middle, Johnson’s tells its story through words and pictures. Most of the photographs are illustrative: you can flick through it as a coffee-table photo album and a few of the pictures will jump out at you and make you pause. But, as you work through the text, you realise that the images are really there to add depth to what Johnson is saying. The words and images work together synergistically.

Argyle Armada, a double-page layout example. Source: VeloPress/Mark Johnson

Generally having avoided coffee table photo albums in the past (for no particular reason) I asked Johnson himself what model he had in mind when putting the book together:

What I had in mind was a series of New Yorker–like day-in-the-life chapters that were illustrated by photographs. Because there is so much political, social, and economic import to what Jonathan Vaughters is trying to do with this team, I had no interest in doing a photo-only book with captions.”

The pictures used in Argyle Armada are an important part of the package, and you’ll find selections from them on the book’s website, ArgyleArmadaBook.com. But, as well as painting pictures with light and shade, Johnson – who has a Ph.D. in English literature from Boston University – also paints pictures with words. Take some of these images: orange-shirted fans on a rock promontory peering into a valley’s profundity; fans cheering a rider up a climb and looking like thousands of agitated cilia urging a blue egg up a nine-mile trench of humanity; ossified sticks protruding from the muck and a scudding mist giving the place the feeling of a primordial graveyard; a ridge sprinkled with the confetti of fans’ camping tents; weak sunlight inscribing a rim of light around a pain-wracked visage; lurid light tracing the cheekbones of a gendarme; riders sibilating down serpentine descents. My own use of the English language may tend toward the more base end of the spectrum but there is something pleasing in seeing cycling described in such language.

Argyle Armada, a double-page layout example. Source: VeloPress/Mark Johnson

An obvious antecedent to Argyle Armada that I should mention is the series of articles Paul Kimmage wrote for the Sunday Times about the team’s 2006 Tour and which can be found in the most recent (2007) edition of his Rough Ride. Kimmage himself crops up a few times in Argyle Armada. At the Tour, Johnson bumps into him and Kimmage explains how and why he has to stop himself from returning to the Garmin bus, force himself to talk to others: “Why I like these people is that they are decent human beings. They are all good people, and I cannot say that about a lot of others.”

Oddly, that inability to say the same of others as he can of Garmin does not endear Kimmage to everyone in the Garvélo team. Andrew Talansky tells Johnson that, while it’s great that his team gives the Irish journalist hope, he personally believes that “somebody like him has no place in the sport of cycling and doesn’t deserve to write about it.” Oddly, I actually like Talansky for having that opinion. I disagree with him, that should go without saying, but that Talansky can and does say it – that I like and admire. And, as Johnson found from different riders on different topics, while they all sing from the same hymn sheet on doping, on other issues – from race radios through to internal team politics – they have and express their own opinions. They’re a tightly knit team but they’re also individuals.

The picture of the team painted by Johnson is broader than that drawn by Kimmage in 2006, not just through his use of photographs but also by his looking beyond the Tour de France. Argyle Armada isn’t a full account of Garvélo’s 2011 season, but does cover a large chunk of it. Johnson was with the team at their January/February winter training camp in Girona, then met up with them again for the cobbled Classics (the Ronde van Vlaanderen, Scheldprijs and Paris-Roubaix), and then again in the Ardennes (the Amstel Gold, the Flèche-Wallonne and Liège-Bastogne-Liège). From there it was westward ho and a trip to the Tour of California, followed by a trip back across the Atlantic for the Tour de France. After that came the USA Pro Cycling Classic and the latter part of the Vuelta a España, whose opening clashing with the Colorado race necessitated Johnson missing the first part of the Spanish Grand Tour. Johnson also had to skip out before the end of the Vuelta in order to wrap up his road season in Canada, with Serge Arsenault’s two contributions to the World Tour calendar (the GP Cycliste de Québec and the GP Cycliste de Montréal). Johnson then rounded out the season with the preparation for the 2012 team’s coming out party in Boulder in November.

Having pointed out that Johnson has been a freelancer with the Slipstream outfit for some time now I should probably disclose my own interests – prejudices – here. Not whether I blagged a review copy of the book (ask William Fotheringham, Geoff Drake, Nicolas Roche, or David Millar if they think that affects how I read a book) but that I am a fan of Jonathan Vaughters and a fan of his Garmin team. Some of that, I will openly admit, is purely parochial: Dan Martin rides for them and, like most cycling fans, I too can fly the flag for my own countrymen. Mostly, though, I’m a fan because I want to believe in what Vaughters is trying to do: clean up our sport, ethically and structurally. And because Garmin are fun.

Do you have to be a fan of the team to like Argyle Armada? I don’t think so. Part of my reason for saying that is because when Johnson is talking about individual Garvélo riders and the races he witnessed, he’s telling human-interest stories, universal stories. The other part is that, while Garvélo are the lens through which Johnson looked at the 2011 cycling season, the book isn’t really about them. It is, as its subtitle claims, a behind-the-scenes look at the pro-cycling life.

Liking Garmin, though, does add an extra edge to Argyle Armada. This was the year that the little team that could, the team that traded on their ethically-clean image more than their palmarès, grew up. Not just in the way they added lustre to their palmarès with Paris-Roubaix, stage wins, and leaders’ jerseys in all three Grand Tours and the rest. But in the way they shed their skin, lost some of their sheen.

Johan Vansummeren wears the crushed embers of the Hell of the North as he celebrates his victory in the Queen of the Classics. Source: Mark Johnson

From the dismissal of Matt White at the start of the season through to the folding of the women’s team at the end of the year, 2011 was the year Garvélo really felt the wrath of fans who began to see the team’s innocence disappear before their eyes. Add in the arguments over race radios, boycotts, breakaway leagues, the decisions made about withholding departing riders from certain races in order to stop them taking points across to others, and the Argyle armada began to look like a lot of the other teams out there: merciless, rapacious pirates. It all added up to the team losing some of their USP. Having to grow up. (At the same time, the team still maintains their own quirky, child-like charm: borrowing a fire-red Porsche during the Tour of California, sticking a roof rack on it and using it as the team car for the day is the sort of fun Vaughters and his bunch of lost boys bring to the peloton, and long may they continue to do so.)

The business of pro cycling filters throughout Argyle Armada and is, for me, something that makes Argyle Armada an important book for all who are curious about what is going on behind the scenes in cycling. Johnson himself tries to express no particular opinion, tries to get others to say what needs saying. Like most of us, he does agree that our sport needs to change, but he’s not using Argyle Armada to prescribe what that change should be. On one particular area he does let his own feelings filter through: the need for someone to come in, grab the sport by the scruff of the neck, and drag it kicking and screaming into the twenty-first century.

On this topic Johnson is particularly influenced by something that happened in baseball half a century ago. A lot of the time when we talk about the business of pro cycling we end up talking about other sports, looking to other sports – as they too look to one and other – to see what works and is worth borrowing from. Back when Hein Verbruggen was first throwing his weight around in the FICP he wanted to model cycling on tennis’ ATP Tour. Thus was born the World Cup, the successor to the Super Prestige Pernod trophy and the precursor to the ProTour and today’s WorldTour (the difference between the ProTour and the WorldTour is the same as the difference between Windscale and Sellafield: none). Today, rather than looking to tennis, many people want to model cycling on Formula 1. Baseball though is growing in popularity as the sport to look to.

Here I’ll again turn back to Richard Moore’s Sky’s the Limit and note his use of Michael Lewis’ Moneyball, a book referenced to him by Team Sky supremo and über-statto Dave Brailsford. Moneyball told the story of how Billy Beane took a little team of sluggers and challenged the big boys by turning to objective, empirical data when selecting new recruits for his team. More importantly the story of Moneyball was how an insider successfully brought outsider thinking into his sport. Moneyball does feature in Argyle Armada – the Brad Pitt film rather than the Michael Lewis book – but the baseball story Johnson most turns to is that of Marvin Miller.

Back in the 1960s Miller, who was a big shot in the United Steelworkers Union, threw his weight behind baseball and organised a players union, through which the men in the funny pyjamas were able to negotiate a slice of TV revenues and other image rights. This question of unionisation – and the need for a Marvin Miller to step forward in cycling – is something Johnson talks to various riders about. (The riders today do have a union, the CPA, but that’s about as useless as a eunuch in a brothel, and for the same reason: it lacks balls.) Each time, Johnson gets the same answer: not going to happen. None of the riders seem happy about this, but they are realists. Others can too easily play divide and conquer when it comes to the peloton. As Dan Martin tells Johnson, within the peloton “there’s always someone trying to get one over on someone else.”

Baseball is also the sport turned to by Jonathan Vaughters to explain what cycling needs to do, and not do. He himself uses a similar approach to Moneyball‘s Billy Beane when selecting new recruits for the team, but he also looks beyond the stats to find riders who are going to fit in with the ethos of his team: not just the clean living approach to cycling, but the fun-loving side of a project he’s been building since his 5280 and TIAA-CREF days. “What I’m looking for,” he tells Johnson, “is smart guys that may be a little bit goofy, because a lot of times intelligence goes hand in hand with goofiness, especially with bike riders.” The use of stats aside, what’s most important about baseball for Vaughters is the shared history and thinking that sport has with cycling.

Baseball and cycling are – give or take a few years – of similar vintage: both sports were created in the latter part of the nineteenth century. Back in the days of Bobby Walthour and Major Taylor the two sports challenged one and other for the hearts and minds of American sports fans. Cycling initially held the upper hand but, after the NCA broke away from the LAW, baseball pulled ahead. Then, in the 1920s, baseball suffered from the fallout of the Black Sox scandal and lost some popularity, allowing cycling, particularly the Six Day races in Madison Square Garden, to again came to the fore. Baseball, though, immediately learned a lesson that it took the Festina scandal to teach cycling: an outsider, Commissioner Landis, was brought in to put some stick about and make sure that history could not repeat itself. Since then baseball has gone from strength to strength (even when faced with its own doping demons).

The important lesson about baseball, for Vaughters, is how it has managed to move forward and stay still at the same time: despite all the professionalism that has been brought to the sport, all the Marv Millers and Billy Beanes who have pushed baseball forward, it has managed to cling fast to tradition. It is, Vaughters tells Johnson, “still a very quaint, old-fashioned sport. Yet it’s correctly managed.” Players, teams, broadcasters have all been able to grow rich off of baseball’s ability to professionalise itself, while the game itself is, more or less, unchanged. (Fans of baseball might want to argue some of that point, highlight how fans have been fucked over by their sport, but that’s a discussion for another day.)

Is Vaughters cycling’s Marvin Miller? I’m not sure that Johnson is saying he is, and I’m not sure if Vaughters himself sees that as the role he wants to fulfil. Yes, as he tells Johnson, he wants to be the catalyst for change, the man who lit the blue touch paper, but to be the man who brings about that change? Well, with Vaughters you never really know what he’s thinking, do you? Johnson, through his selection of interviewees, does throw up some other names that ought be considered in the Marv Miller role. Doug Ellis, Garmin’s sugar daddy – the biggest littlest team’s version of BMC’s Andy Rihs, RadioShack-Nissan’s Flavio Becca, Sky’s Rupert Murdoch – is one obvious candidate, a man who hides quietly in the shadows, the unseen hand guiding many of the pieces on cycling’s chessboard. Or there’s a race organiser like Serge Arsenault, one of Johnson’s best interviewees. I’d love to tell you more about him here, but he, too, is a subject for another day. Or you could just go and read Johnson’s book yourself and learn a bit more about him.

There are things I would have liked more of in Argyle Armada: more space for the women’s team and the junior team and how they fit into the overall Slipstream structure and ethos; more on the tensions between Jonathan Vaughters and Thor Hushovd; a more complete look at the team’s season. But these weaknesses I understand and have to excuse. The book wasn’t about the women or the kids, it was about the ProTour team. No one anywhere else has really got under the skin of the tensions between Vaughters and Hushovd. The book was never meant to be a complete picture of one team’s season, but rather a look at the sport itself, through moments in one team’s season.

That last point is what is most important about Argyle Armada. Since Festina we’ve managed to get the media to pay more and more attention to doping, forced change to happen within the sport. Now it’s time for the spotlight to shift to the business of professional cycling, time to understand more about how our sport works, understand what does work and what needs to be changed. Argyle Armada is a valuable contribution toward the shifting of that spotlight. Whether you’re a fan of the little team that could – and, in 2011, did – or you just want to understand the politics that are reshaping our sport, Johnson’s is a book you really should read.

* * * * *

Mark Johnson’s Argyle Armada – Behind the Scenes of the Pro Cycling Life is published by VeloPress (2012, 207 pages).

Next up: an interview with Mark Johnson.

Within the first 300 words of Daniel Friebe’s biography of Eddy Merckx the words ‘different’ or ‘difference’ appear four times. Over the next few pages one or other word keeps reappearing. Is it that Friebe simply has a limited vocabulary and no thesaurus? No. The choice of words is quite deliberate:

Higher, faster, stronger, said the Olympic ideal, its three pillars the very synthesis of sporting advancement – but nowhere did it mention difference. For when as early as 1968, newspapers started saying that Merckx was ‘in another league’ and ‘racing against himself,’ they weren’t only saying that he was much better than the rest. ‘No, at times it was actually like a different sport,’ observes former opponent Johnny Schleck. Different from the past, from the sport Anquetil had dominated before Merckx, and the Italian Fausto Coppi before him. Different from the one now practiced by his contemporaries.”

That word then can be taken as one of the key themes of Friebe’s Eddy Merckx – The Cannibal. Friebe isn’t just offering a portrait of Merckx himself, he offers portraits of some of the men Merckx raced with and against, the men to whom Merckx was different. Understand them – understand the era they raced in – and maybe you can begin to understand Merckx himself. (And, by the by, maybe you can also better understand the sport we know today.)

Merckx himself declined a request to be interviewed by Friebe; he’s contractually tied to his own, official project and thus not offering assistance to anyone else. But, as Friebe correctly notes, Merckx is probably the last person you should speak to in trying to understand the enigma that he has become. After all, Merckx himself only knows Eddy Merckx, and thus “can’t quite understand the fuss because his life is the only one he has ever known.”

Merckx’s palmarès, as noted elsewhere, are impressive, touching just about every race of note in our sport. Almost wherever you turn in cycling, you run into Eddy Merckx. It’s funny, then, that having declined to participate in Friebe’s attempt to tell his story, the two – Friebe and Merckx – can’t seem to avoid one and other. Like Alfred Hitchcock – or the ghost of Banquo – Merckx just has to make an appearance.

In one cameo Friebe is talking to Felice Gimondi during the 2011 Giro d’Italia, in a VIP enclosure overlooking the finish line in Macugnaga. Paolo Tiralongo is about to pip Alberto Contador to the stage win, but Friebe and Gimondi are a world away, discussing the 1968 Volta a Catalunya. In walks Merckx himself, over to the table being shared by interviewer and interviewee, and takes a seat next to Gimondi, who immediately incorporates Merckx into the story being told:

Gimondi:  Eddy, when was it that we first met? Bruxelles-Anselberg in 1963, when we were still amateurs?

Merckx:  You beat me. You made me suffer like a beast. [Laughter.]

Gimondi:  It was the only race he let me win! All the others you won after that […] That time trial in the Volta a Catalunya still burns. I still think about it now. At midnight, I was still down on the beach, the Playa de Rosas – walking up and down, up and down – trying to figure out how you’d beaten me in a time trial…

Merckx:  I’d broken my wheel. I broke two spokes. I had to change a wheel.

Gimondi:  You? In that one, too? I didn’t know that … Anyway, it took me two years to swallow what happened that day and finally understand why he’d beaten me. He was just stronger. But do you remember that Volta a Catalunya? This huge battle, knives out in every stage. One day, I had a problem after five or six kilometres, and on they all went, into battle. The next day, you had a problem, and off we all went. The jersey went back and forth two or three times that week. And then, in the end, as always, you won.

At which point in the conversation Merckx gets up and walks away, as silently as he’d arrived.

Ok, I know, that story should come with a spoiler alert, bite me. But, for me, it helps highlight one of the strengths of the story Friebe is telling. It’s not so much what Gimondi says that matters – ‘Merckx whipped my arse, it hurt at the time but I can laugh now’– but the scene itself and the way he tells his story. What the telling of that tale says about Gimondi. And what that scene says about Merckx.

* * * * *

Because Merckx touches so much in cycling, the basics of his story are familiar to almost anyone who has read a couple or three of the better-selling cycling books, or read a couple of cycling magazines for a year or two. Because Merckx is the rider against whom just about everyone else is now measured, elements of his story are constantly being told and retold. One of the curiosities of this is that Merckx’s story still feels like it happened in the recent past, isn’t yet a tale being excavated from history. But, as Friebe notes early in The Cannibal, the past is catching up with Merckx’s era:

I never saw Merckx race, and neither, in too long, will anyone have witnessed him in action. Merckx’s generation is getting older, dare we even say, old. […] The truths they never told, the memories they never shared, are nearing expiry. As this happens, a new and less gilded recollection of their era begins to take hold.”

It’s now forty-six years since Merckx took the first major victory of his professional career, the 1966 Milan-Sanremo, and thirty-six years since the last (poetically, also Milan-Sanremo). In three years’ time Merckx will have got to the end of his allotted three score years and ten, and who knows how many bonus laps he’ll have in store after that (if it’s true that a good Tour takes one year off your life and a bad one three, then Merckx – who started seven Tours – is already past his sell-by date in cycling years). It’s worth spelling out here just how much the past has already caught up with Merckx’s generation: men like Tom Simpson (his team-mate at Peugeot), Vincenzo Giacotto (his directeur sportif at Faema and Faemino), Jean van Buggenhout (his agent and manager), Jacques Anquetil (whose decline coincided with Merckx’s rise), Louis Ocaña (one of Merckx’s few true rivals in the Tour), Enrico Peracino (the Faema team doctor), Maurice de Muer (directeur sportif to Ocaña and later to Bernard Thévenet, the man who ended Merckx’s reign of terror in the Tour), and a host of others have all already passed away. If that seems rather morbid, so be it. But it’s still the truth. Whatever those men had to say about Merckx has already been said, their contributions to the Merckx story are fixed in the books they wrote and the interviews they gave. But there’s still time to hear from the men who survive. Time to see if, as Friebe suggests, the march of time has loosened their tongues, to see if distance has added clarity to their view of that era.

So what do those who knew Merckx from within the peloton have to say of him today? Consider these recollections of Merckx’s arrival on the cycling scene and his early run of victories:

Felice Gimondi:

I mean, how were we supposed to know? I had won the Tour de France in my first year as a pro [1965], I was about to win another Giro [1968]. Everything was going well … Who knows how many more Giri d’Italia I’d have won if he hadn’t come along. But he did come along. And we didn’t realise for months, years.”

Dino Zandegù:

We were all intimidated. We were. This kid just arrived, this big, handsome Belgian kid with high cheekbones – the face of an immense athlete – and pretty quickly we all realised that on the bike he was a brute. I say quickly but it wasn’t straight away. It took a while, a couple of years. We, we didn’t know, we didn’t …”

Italo Zilioli:

No wonder I looked miserable as sin when a photographer asked me to pose with Eddy just after I’d seen that [Merckx’s stage win at Blockhaus in the 1967 Giro]. Of course Eddy won again two days later. With hindsight, that should have been the penny dropping …”

Walter Godefroot:

We were too immersed in our own careers to see what was going on. To an extent, we only realised what had happened when it was too late …”

 

We didn’t realise… We didn’t know… That should have been the penny dropping… We only realised when it was too late … All comments that bear repeating, because they help paint a picture of the cycling scene as it existed back then, as it was seen back then, not how it has come to be seen with hindsight. Yes, Merckx blasted onto the scene, but it took a while for people to realise it. And, as Merckx’s decline set in, it took them longer, still, to notice that too.

You can count Merckx’s period of domination as either being between 1966 and 1976, his first and last major wins as a pro, or between 1968 and 1974, his first and last Grand Tour victories. In the latter instance Merckx left others to fight it out for just two Tours de France, two Giri d’Italia and all bar the one edition of the Vuelta a España he took part in: that’s nine Grand Tours in all for the others, compared to the eleven that went to Merckx. The picture is slightly different when you look at his reign of terror in the Monuments: nineteen to Merckx, thirty two to be shared out among his rivals. Yes, Merckx put his fellow professionals in the shade, but they had their days in the sun too. But – in the longer term – it’s racing against Merckx, being defeated by Merckx, that has added the most to their stories. Look, for instance, at Louis Ocaña. More is written about the Tour de France he lost (1971) than the one he won (1973). Or consider this comment from Felice Gimondi, the man who twice benefited from Merckx’s doping busts (the ’69 Giro and the ’73 Lombardia) and who described his time in the peloton alongside Merckx as being both friendly and beastly:

Today, I look back and I’m glad that my generation and I had Merckx. I’d have won more without him there, earned more, but life isn’t just about money. The respect, the rivalry, the memories … they’re all more valuable. Even three million euros more doesn’t have the same impact on your life as that stuff, some of the battles I had with Eddy.”

Friebe suggests that a less-gilded recollection of Merckx’s era is taking hold. Of some riders this is true, and new truths emerge in The Cannibal – one in particular from Martin van den Bossche, the Faema teammate Merckx attacked before the summit of the Tourmalet on that memorable day in the Pyrénées in the 1969 Tour. For other riders, though, the past is just getting more gilded, with an even more golden light shining on it:  when Johnny Schleck (father of Fränk and Andy) raced alongside Ocaña in the seventies Merckx was le grand con, today he has become le grand. Friebe is alive to this, referencing incidents where he is aware his interviewees may be gilding the lily, maybe being a little bit diplomatic (Merckx still wields considerable power in our sport). Ultimately, then, it is up to others to strip back some of the gilt and show the lead that lies beneath. And this is where those who chronicle Merckx’s era enter the equation. This is where they, in particular, need to pay proper heed to the role doping played in our sport back then.

When it comes to doping, Friebe takes an adult aproach to the subject, not hiding it (the first reference to the subject appears on page three) but rather discussing it a frank manner. Merckx came along just as the sport was taking its first tentative, half-hearted steps toward cleaning itself up. He arrived as cycling was moving out of what Pierre Dumas – the Tour’s doctor and an early champion of the struggle to clean up sport – called ‘the semi-scientific era,’ and into an era more and more governed by science. Cortisone arrived in the late sixties (though it wasn’t banned until the late seventies and couldn’t be tested for until the late nineties), and Jacques Anquetil made no secret of the super-ozone therapies he underwent in the late sixties, while blood-doping became a part of all sports, even cycling, as early as the seventies.

From early in his career rumours of doping surrounded Merckx, rumours as laughable as most of the stories you’ll read in The Clinic immediately following a surprise victory today:  Merckx must have had access to some secret rocket-fuel that was undetectable; Merckx was using a mystery Mongolian plant extract. Such rumours can be dismissed. But they shouldn’t ignored. They help show the sway doping held over the peloton, that it has always been an arms race, that some riders have always suspected their rivals of having something they, too, wanted to get hold of.

Friebe considers the post-EPO rose-tinted view of that era’s doping – an era, we’re supposed to believe, of pop-guns compared to the howitzers that came along later – and considers the question of how, or whether, doping contributed to Merckx’s impressive palamarès. His conclusion will probably end up pleasing few – neither those who prefer to air-brush the subject from history, nor those who want to wipe from history everyone who ever dabbled with anything on the banned list – but seems to me to be a fair appraisal of the known facts.

The Cannibal is not without its faults. A few tpyos [sic] which its editors should have picked up have slipped through [You’re one to talk! – ed.], Friebe’s dislike of the Col d’Éze – which he unconscionably omitted from his Mountain High – is now stretched to calling it the Col de la Turbie (what he has against this little bit of Ireland on the Côte d’Azur I don’t know), and the book lacks an index, which serves to makes life hellish for people like me who mine such books for stories. To be fair, though, most of these quibbles I didn’t notice on my first read, and only saw the second time round.

Why? Because The Cannibal is a fun and engaging read. Friebe races along at thriller pace, but still has time to notice the symbolism of the gladioli to be found in the hotel reception that Monday morning in the 1969 Giro, or drop in comedy moments like Roger de Vlaeminck demonstrating how to mop up spilled coffee (‘Dab! Dab, don’t wipe. Dab.’). By sitting back and acting as choir-master to the massed voices of his interviewees, Friebe allows them to tell the story in their own words. Even when he’s talking as himself, Friebe is using the voices of others, echoing, for instance, Dino Zandegù’s reference to Merckx’s team-mates as ‘Ven Den this’ or ‘Van Ben that’ (as the ghost in the machine for Mark Cavendish’s biography, Boy Racer, I guess Friebe has to be alive to the language used by others). What you get from all this is a book that’s up there with Richard Moore’s Slaying the Badger and Laurent Fignon’s We Were Young and Carefree: a book not just for die-hard cycling fans. A book that reads like a novel.

What to make, then, of the portrait of Merckx we’re left with by the last page of the book? Friebe’s Merckx is imperfect – this no God sent among us, to show a better way and be idolised. Rather he’s a man like everyone else:  an outstandingly gifted athlete who was at times fragile, at times supremely confident; a man who was at times still a child, loving his sport; and at times a cold, hard despot surrounded by lieutenants who ruled with an iron fist. He’s like a lot of the people he rode with and against. But at the same time, he’s different:  both Italo Zilioli and Louis Ocaña shared Merckx’s mental fragility, as did a lot of other riders, but somehow – unlike them – Merckx turned weakness into a strength.

A study in light and shades: Bic’s Jan Janssen gives Merckx a lesson in cool. (Photo: L’Unita)

Friebe’s portrait of Merckx is one of light and shade, one that helps to redefine Merckx for a twenty-first-century cycling audience. An audience not necessarily in thrall to a rose-hued portrait of the past, but at the same time one which knows that it is actually true – compared to today it was all a lot harder back in Merckx’s day. Not necessarily better. But definitely different.

* * * * *

 Danel Friebe’s Eddy Merckx – The Cannibal is published by Ebury Press (2012, 344 pages).

It could have all been so very, very different.

Ward Merckx was born on June 17, 1945, in the Belgian village of Meensel-Kiezegem, south-east of Brussels, in the heartlands of the Brabant. A Flanders boy, born and bred. A strong junior, when he moved up to the pro ranks it was in the service of Rik van Looy. A member of the Red Guard, a disposable sprint train component, his role nothing more than to deliver his leader to the sprint zone and then fade away. After a brief stint in France, with Peugeot, Ward Merckx returned to Belgium, where he served a string of Flandrian lions, up-and-coming stars of the future from Roger de Vlaeminck to Freddy Maertens, ending his career helping the young Sean Kelly learn the secrets of la métier. No books have been written about Ward Merckx and his is not a name recalled by many. For most he’s just another Jos Bruyère or Ronny Onghena, one of the many whose careers were dedicated to being spear carriers for the stars of their day. But some in Belgium today think of Ward Merckx as the one that got away. They wonder what place in cycling he could have carved out for himself if he’d just given his all to himself and not to others. If he’d just broken away and carved out his own career.

An innocent age. Merckx in the leader’s white jersey at Paris-Nice, 1967. (Photo: Offside/L’Equipe)

It wasn’t like that, though. And understanding how the boy who was born Edouard Merckx grew up to become Eddy instead of Ward – grew up to become a robotised half man, half bicycle – is one of the key strengths of William Fotheringham’s Merckx: Half Man, Half Bike. At the heart of that explanation is the split within Belgium between Flanders and Wallonia, a split which is probably best exemplified by Belgium’s most famous bike race, the Ronde van Vlaanderen, the Tour of Flanders.

In his Fausto Coppi biography, Fallen Angel (Yellow Jersey Press, 2009) Fotheringham noted how the Giro d’Italia – not unlike the Tour de France and the Vuelta d’España – became a symbol of national unity. In Half Man, Half Bike Fotheringham this time notes how the Ronde is a symbol of national disunity, of regional separateness. And while Merckx was Flanders born and is a two-time winner of the Ronde, he is no Flandrian. By virtue of his parents having moved from Meensel-Kiezegem to Woluwe-Saint-Pierre – having moved from the heart of the Brabant to the suburbs of Brussels, having swapped their working class roots for a middle class life, having swapped Flemish for French – Merckx became an assimilated Walloon, one who tried to site himself above either regional identity and set himself as a symbol of unity in a disunited country.

Fotheringham’s explanation of the role regional identity plays in Belgian cycling leaves the reader looking forward to a project the author hints at in his introduction to Half Man, Half Bike, research he has been undertaking for a future book on Flandrian cycling. There is, though, something in the way Fotheringham handled this subject that leaves you feeling that Half Man, Half Bike is an offshoot of a greater project, and consequently that little bit weaker for that.

Fotheringham is, it ought go without saying, an experienced commentator on our sport: he has written the book on Tom Simpson, Put Me Back On My Bike (Yellow Jersey Press, 2001). His chronicle of the British contribution to the Tour de France, Roule Britannia (Yellow Jersey Press, 2001), is brilliantly researched and wonderfully told. And his Coppi biography went far beyond the usual guff written about il campionissimo in the capsule biographies to be found in other books or which appear in cycling magazines with the regularity – and illumination – of eclipses.

That Coppi biography offers some good points of comparison with this biography of Merckx. The subtitle of the former – The Passion of Fausto Coppi – could equally be used for Half Man, Half Bike. When interviewed by Fotheringham in 1997 Merckx answered the question of why – why the years of focus? why the need to win so often and so much? – with a simple soundbite: “Passion, only passion.”

In his Coppi biography Fotheringham took two very different images of the Italian champion of champions, one from early in his career and one from later, and asked how Coppi went from one to the other. Here the question Fotheringham seeks to answer is the one Merckx has explained away as being all down to passion: why? Merckx’s answer obviously needs explication, the soundbite needs to be explored in greater depth. So Fotheringham adds another question: how did Merckx become the greatest?

The “how” allows Fotheringham to identify key moments from Merckx’s career. As well as the oft told tales from the Tour – tales which are told and retold in most of the capsule biographies of Merckx that have appeared down through the years – Fotheringham also talks about many of the other races that help illuminate Merckx’s character. One of the strengths of Half Man, Half Bike is that it contains a lot of racing action, drawing fully from a palmarès that contains notches for just about every important race on the calendar. It moves the story beyond the overly familiar Tour-centric version so often told in the capsule biographies. The depth and breath of Merckx’s palmarès, though can itself be problematic for any biographer of Merckx: space is limited. Fotheringham himself acknowledges this problem:

Capturing the essence of such a visual, sporting and human icon poses particular issues for a journalist. Ours is a reductive art: stripping what we are presented with to an immediate bite. The issues have to be explored within a limited window of time. You can’t cover them all.”

This, at times, can leave the telling of the tale somewhat matter of fact. Interviewees are reduced to soundbites, stripping some of the depth from the tales they have to tell of Merckx. My own personal preference in such things is for the author to allow his interviewees to speak, even when they go off piste and don’t seem to be talking directly to the topic. As a rule, it is the men and the women who were there and saw things firsthand who I want to hear from. My own personal preference in such things is for the author to act more as a choir master, shaping many voices into a greater whole.

Fotheringham does quote extensively from secondary sources – contemporary journalism from the likes of Marc Jeauniau and Geoffrey Nicholson and other biographers of Merckx, such as Théo Mathy, Jean-Paul Ollivier and Roger Bastide – but, by and large, the dominant voice in Half Man, Half Bike, is that of Fotheringham himself. For me, giving the interviewees the space in which to breathe, to tell the story in their own words, would have added colour to the tale, even if that would have required a bigger canvas or a reduced focus on particular events in Merckx’s riding career. At the same time, having borrowed from a quote about a robotised Merckx perhaps there is method to Fotheringham’s manner: colour would only humanise Merckx.

Fotheringham – like many others – has placed Merckx on a pedestal. The Merckx story, he says, is about competition pure and simple. Try to tell the lives of Coppi, of Jacques Anquetil or of Lance Armstrong and you must necessarily also talk about the women, the drugs, the cancer. With Merckx, we’re told, it’s all about the bike:

A lack of ‘reason’ is the only side to Merckx, whose story was described by the French writer Philippe Brunel as ‘a vocation fulfilled in exemplary style.'”

 

In order for that to be true, though, certain parts of the Merckx story need to be, well, tidied up. And here comes my main disagreement with the manner in which Fotheringham tells Merckx’s story: in short, he takes a bucket of whitewash to Merckx’s use of performance enhancing drugs.

Merckx tested positive during his career on at least three occasions: the 1969 Giro d’Italia, the 1973 Giro di Lombardia and the 1977 Tour of Belgium. Only two of those cases are discussed in Half Man, Half Bike. The first – Savona – is well known. Fotheringham’s view is simple: the tests were illegal, therefore Merckx was innocent. The second – Lombardia – is explained away by an experienced team doctor (the same Angelo Cavalli who carried out the tests at Savona four years earlier) not knowing that a cough medicine he prescribed for Merckx contained ephedrine. Having explained away both of those cases – and thus left the reader with the impression that Merckx rode à l’eau – Fotheringham barely even alludes to the third fail, Merckx’s 1977 Stimul bust at the Flèche Wallonne.

For me, as I have said elsewhere, such matters matter. Acknowledging that Merckx didn’t always play by the anti-doping rules doesn’t mean that you invalidate any of his more than 500 victories. It merely acknowledges the reality of his era, the reality of our sport. And the reality is that Merckx, while undoubtedly a superior cyclist both in terms of his physical and mental strength, was not unlike most of his peers. Alas, unlike greats that came before him, unlike Coppi and Anquetil, this aspect of Merckx’s riding career is something that he – and far too many of the people who write about him – would prefer to airbrush from history.

Does this invalidate everything else within Half Man, Half Bike? As with the impact on Merckx’s palmarès of his use of doping the answer is obviously no. But the manner in which Merckx’s doping record has been wiped clean tells you something about the story Fotheringham has spun about the man. Having declared Merckx to have been exemplary, facts have been marshalled to support that declaration, inconvenient truths ignored where they show that the fulfilment of Merckx’s vocation was not quite as ideal as some would like to suggest it was. But isn’t that the way all biographies are written? What then is the real problem here? Théo Mathy – the Belgian journalist who was in that hotel room in Savona when Merckx was ejected from the 1969 Giro, and who has chronicled Merckx extensively – said of his compatriot one time that he is a prisoner of his legend. Maybe the real problem with Half Man, Half Bike is that it fails to move beyond the legend and see the man hidden beneath.

* * * * *

William Fotheringham’s Merckx: Half Man, Half Bike is published by Yellow Jersey Press (2011, 308 pages).