Racing Hard Read online

  WILLIAM FOTHERINGHAM

  RACING HARD

  20 Tumultuous Years in Cycling

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Foreword by David Millar

  Introduction

  1. THE TOUR AND MORE

  2. TOUR DE FRANCE 1994–2003

  3. FESTINA LEAVE, ARMSTRONG RETURNS

  4. THE ARMSTRONG SAGA

  5. AU REVOIR FLOYD, BIENVENUE MARK

  6. RISE OF THE BRITS, FALL OF LANCE: 2009–2012

  7. GREAT BRITAIN – ATLANTA TO ATHENS

  8. INSIDE GB CYCLING

  9. BEIJING 2008

  10. THE ACADEMY

  11. BEIJING TO LONDON

  12. IN MEMORIAM

  Index

  About the Author

  Copyright

  FOREWORD

  My first Tour de France (in 2000) saw me finding my daily pre-start refuge in the Village Départ with the British journalists. There were never many, yet William Fotheringham was almost always one of them. I’d head to the L’Equipe stand where the daily newspapers would be dished out and join them for a coffee and a welcome chat in English. They were my little bit of home, offering a sense of normality and reality in the bizarre and often lonely world I was inhabiting. They weren’t the enemy – they were trusted compadres.

  Things aren’t like that any more. We leave our luxury team buses as late as possible and will often make it through an entire Tour de France without once going to the Départ. I no longer feel like I am sharing the journey with anybody outside of my team. There is now a huge chasm between the pro cyclist and the journalist, bridged by a team press officer and media training. This is the modern era of professional cycling and, to be frank, modern professional sport.

  But this is not how cycling began. Our biggest event is the Tour de France, and it was created by a journalist, Henri Desgrange, to promote a newspaper. The race was made spectacularly over the top in order to facilitate dramatic story-telling and therefore readership. It was journalists who made heroes out of cyclists and made the Tour de France into the legendary event it has become. Sadly, this is something forgotten by the majority of people involved in the sport these days, and most of the young riders of today will never grasp quite how much they owe to the people – the press – they are advised to tread carefully around.

  William and I have known each other since I was a whipper-snapper fresh from Hong Kong. We were equally incongruous members of the cycling world, him more of a rugby chap and me an expat brat. To this day I can’t help but refer to him as “WILLIAM-FOTHERING-HAM!” (crisp second world war RAF fighter-pilot tone required, and behind his back of course).

  William has put my career into words, from an ambitious teenager to a fallen world champion to a fervent anti-doping campaigner, team owner and father. It was when I sat with William in a London restaurant to tell him how I’d doped and lied that the full scale of how far I’d gone off the rails became apparent. The world I painted to William was a shock to him, and seeing his reaction and disappointment hit home how far removed the world I’d been living in was from reality.

  In many ways William has been a barometer for me, a constant through thick and thin. He has become the go-to writer when it comes to anything cycling, and deservedly so. With the confusion that reigns currently in cycling I think it’s important for us to have journalists like William to remind us of where we have come from and what we’ve been through. Our sport was designed to make stories – thankfully there are a few like William to write them.

  David Millar

  INTRODUCTION

  When they named a square in Sean Kelly’s native Carrick-on-Suir after the great man himself – well it was actually a bit of the road which happened to be a few feet wider than the next bit – Kelly came up with one of the all-time great Kelly-isms. It was, he said, the sort of thing that normally only happened to you when you were dead. What he meant was that it was the kind of thing that marked the end of a career or a life, rather than happening midway through.

  Being asked to put together a selection of your work going back many years has a similar feel about it for the writer. It feels strange to be doing such a thing while you are still in the saddle. The brief, you are asked, is to select your best stuff. However, most journalists, I suspect, believe that their best piece is the next, or the one after that. That’s certainly the case with me. In the same vein, what I suspect Kelly would have felt when the plaque went up on Sean Kelly square was that he still had more than a little to give, more races to win.

  “Best” in a journalistic context is an adjective that needs qualifying. As a journalist, that “best” is not the “best you can possibly create”, in the sense that a writer will craft a great piece of wordsmithery over a period of months, or years if you are Marcel Proust. It’s the best within certain limitations: the best you can provide to your paper on a given day, by a given time, in a given amount of words, with a given amount of information to hand. You never have unlimited time and you never have the number of words you want to say what you want. At the back of your mind is the core journalistic principle: the paper needs to get out on time. That deadline has to be met. That “best” is also the best that the sub-editors can make of what you’ve written, after they’ve checked your facts, looked at the spellings, and ironed out infelicities, contradictions or sheer stupidities. If it’s a piece that has the words Lance and Armstrong in it, it’s been picked over by a lawyer who knows that if he or she gets it wrong, the cost could run into millions.

  As a result, each of the pieces that follows represents a snapshot of a given story or a race taken at a particular time. There is nothing to apologize for in that, but it has to be kept in mind. Journalism is born of its moment, and part of the challenge in selecting from journalistic work is that it is largely contingent, written on a given day. The pieces you will read here weren’t written for posterity. This might surprise, given that we have now come to view much of cycling largely with the benefit of hindsight: how this or that doping story changes and accents the events that preceded it.

  Since 1998 and the Festina doping scandal, journalists who write about cycling on a regular basis – as opposed to our colleagues who dip in and out in between covering other sports – have had to do some hard thinking about how to describe what they see in front of them each day and how to convey it to the reader. You simply don’t know what the events you are seeing will mean in a week, four weeks, a year, four years, 15 years. That rider who looks so spectacularly at ease on their bike, who talks so persuasively about the unjust nature of accusations of doping, could test positive next week.

  The question of how to reflect this in our writing began to occupy the minds of me and many of my peers from 1999 onwards: at times it seemed like the only topic on the table. The method I chose, consciously, was to report what was in front of me as I saw it while making sure I included as complete a back story as I could manage about the individuals involved – in particular whether they had “previous” in terms of police inquiries or positive tests – or about what scandals were ongoing on the race. The concern was not what posterity would read. As I’ve said, you don’t do daily journalism with that in mind. What mattered was the need to enable the readers to have the same factual information that I possessed so that they too could make up their minds, although more probably I imagined they might retain the same conflicted mix: admiration for the prowess which was on display with concern about what might be hidden. It sounds obvious, but that backstory had to be based on fact: not hunches, not assumptions, not mere connections.

  The doping narrative has changed the Tour in another way for me. Over time, cycling’s drug stories and their locations – say, the obscure bar where Richard Virenque
bade a tearful farewell to the 1998 race – have become part of the Tour’s historical fabric for me, and for the way I describe the Tour, as much as, say, the site of the forge where Eugene Christophe had his forks repaired in 1919. I think that’s healthy. The history of the Tour should not be a sanitized one. If it includes the grimmer sides of human nature, the brazen lying and bizarre cheating as well as the nerveless mountain descents, battles against injury and bonkers courage in the sprints, that is as it should be: all human life is here in its complexity.

  There are common threads that run through the pieces I pulled out of the 2,500-odd I found in front of me: Lance Armstrong, doping, the Tour de France, the Festina scandal, the rise of British cyclists in the Tour, Chris Boardman, Britain and the Olympics. To start with, I separated them into different sections under separate headings; then I realised that, pretty much, the Tour, Armstrong and doping at least were all intertwined like branches of ivy. So apart from an introductory section of pieces that seemed to stand alone, and a final flourish of obituaries, I put the pieces under two umbrellas: Tour de France and Olympics.

  Apart from the initial miscellany that stands alone without fitting into any wider context, the bulk of what follows is covered by those two headings. The Tour initially, and latterly the Games, are where the Guardian’s attention has been focused in the 16 years since I was asked to become its cycling correspondent. In the 1980s, it was possible for a British writer to travel abroad to report on the feats of Sean Kelly, Stephen Roche, Robert Millar and Greg LeMond as they took on the Europeans. By the 1990s, as Kelly and company retired, that option wasn’t there any more. The Tour gradually came to be seen by Fleet Street – with the Guardian in the vanguard – as an event worth covering in its own right; the Festina scandal raised its profile still more, while the advent of Armstrong in 1999 made the Tour an event that had to be followed. The irony of that is not lost on me.

  But outside the Tour, and the doping saga, cycling has lacked coherent narratives that can be told to a non-specialist British audience, apart from the Armstrong story. The sport itself is not coherent enough in its structure: for years it has not been clear, for example, whether the best rider in the world is the world champion, the Tour winner, or the UCI-ranked No 1, let alone whether they are going to stand the test of time. The rise of the British, of Wiggins, Cavendish, Sir Chris Hoy et al, has been a delightful exception to that rule: a coherent narrative with heroes who, by and large, stuck around over the years, didn’t disappear for entire seasons, didn’t test positive and lie through their back teeth. It was also one that I could relate to as a cyclist in Britain myself.

  The selection that follows was made for a variety of reasons. Some of the pieces seemed important at the time or are now delightfully anachronistic. There are stories I was proud to put out there before anyone else managed to – most notably an interview with David Millar the day after the 2004 Tour ended, in which he gave the first account of his doping – and there are ones that I simply had fun writing at the time. Some have emotional significance – a great comeback, a rider who stirred affection or distaste – some were experiences, good or bad, that you never forget. Some are included because they gave me a chance to tip my hat to cyclists who have never had the recognition they deserve, Jason Queally being the prime example. There are two lengthier magazine pieces, which I put in because they enabled me to go into the kind of detail that is always lacking in daily newspaper work.

  There are only a few accounts of individual stages in the Tour, for which I apologize in advance. This is because most of the stage reports form part of a narrative of their own, with the various themes that develop through a particular Tour coming in at times, the next day’s stage or the crash two days ago always alluded to; they stand up as a part of that greater whole rather than in isolation. Instead, to show how a Tour develops, I thought it would be more interesting to run an entire Tour diary from the Observer, looking sideways at every day of the 2007 race.

  There are two things than run through all of the pieces: they rarely include the first person, and they are rarely judgemental. Both are personal preferences: I write about what happens and the people involved, not in order to put me or my personal opinions centre stage. I believe the writer should be discreet, almost invisible where possible. In my view, daily newspaper reporting doesn’t lend itself to separating sheep from goats. That is for the columnists. I also feel that casting moral judgement is a nuclear option for a journalist: to be used with extreme caution. I became aware when writing the life of Tom Simpson in 2001 that morality is not black and white. That was reiterated to me when I interviewed Millar after he was busted in 2004: how could you not feel sympathy for the guy’s emotional conflict and his resolution to do better, while condemning his deception and cheating? So too with Marco Pantani. Less so with Armstrong, although in his case it’s still hard to forget what we saw in the mid-1990s: a likeable, bright young man who was clearly cut to the quick by the death of his team mate Fabio Casartelli in 1995. But that is another story. And with any luck there will be plenty more of those to be read in the next 20 years.

  One virtue of a collection of this kind is that it’s an opportunity to express thanks to the many who have helped out along the way. Top of the list is Caroline, at the start of my time in journalism my partner and now my wife, who has put up with me being absent either physically or spiritually through 23 Julys on the trot (bar 2009, which I missed for reasons I explain elsewhere). Without that patience and understanding, I would be in a different profession. Our children, Patrick and Miranda, have been equally forbearing about missed birthdays and my frequent trips elsewhere.

  In the 23 years since I first covered the Tour, there have been a select group of hardy souls who have survived long spells driving through France with me, my music collection and my seesawing emotions. For their support and patience over the years, my thanks go to my brother Alasdair, Brendan Gallagher, Richard Moore, Ian Austen, Stephen Farrand, Simon Brotherton and Rupert Guinness. On the Tours between 2000 and 2007 I had the assistance, at various times, of pilote supreme and wine supremo John Dowling, without whom those Julys would have been infinitely tougher and less entertaining. In the pressroom, there are too many colleagues to name: all have provided support, encouragement and laughs over the years. You know who you are.

  I am in considerable debt to the sports editors who have given me the opportunity to cover cycling, and particularly the Tour, which is a big financial investment for a newspaper. The first was Martin Ayres at Cycling Weekly, who put me on the race in 1990. Mike Averis at the Guardian took a gamble and gave me the chance to work for the paper in the first place; I owe him many thanks, as I do to Ben Clissitt, whose support in the Armstrong years was vital, at a time when British success in the Tour was sporadic at best, and more recently Ian Prior for his backing into the Team Sky and Wiggins era. At the Observer, Brian Oliver’s interest in cycling again bucked the trend in the early 2000s – his prescience over Bradley Wiggins as a future star stands out – while more recently Matthew Hancock has continued in that vein.

  Producing any book is a major task, so in getting this one to the page, I would like to thank my agent John Pawsey, Katie Roden at Guardian Books, Richard Nelsson, Luke Bird, Kristen and Rebecca at The Curved House, Andy Armitage and Jonathan Baker at Seagulls.

  However, none of what follows would be here as it is without the commissioning editors and sub-editors who were on the end of the telephone and in front of computer screens on the Guardian and Observer sports desk over the last 20 years supporting people like me. They are rarely acknowledged but their contribution is massive both on a given day and in a cumulative way over the years. Step forward Adam Sills, Nick Mason, Neil Robinson, Mark Redding, Oliver Owen, Jeremy Alexander, Ian Malin, Chris Curtain, Chris Cheers, Jon Brodkin, Claire Tolley and Steve McMillan. It is hard to overstate the value for a writer of good editorial support: a bright idea, a correctly checked fact, a supportive word or a kick in the
backside at the right time. All the above supplied some or all of these over the years, for which I will be for ever grateful.

  1. THE TOUR AND MORE

  Where to start? The best place, it seemed to me, is in the middle of the French countryside, in a village waiting to welcome the Tour de France. A scene that is timeless, transcends doping scandals and the rise and fall of cycling within any given nation, and with any luck is one that we will see for a fair while yet. It is also a piece I remember with particular affection, as it gave me a rare chance to step outside the usual box you inhabit as a writer on the Tour – the “start-drive-pressroom-write-drive-dinner-bed” routine that makes up each day. This was also a piece that took me back to my own roots, the first time I’ d watched the Tour go by in an obscure bit of la France profonde as a cycling fan bewitched by the race for the first time.

  State visits that breathe life into struggling country

  14 July 2001

  Yesterday at about 10am the inhabitants of Mattexey, a hamlet deep in the verdant plains of Meurthe et Moselle, put up a trestle table protected from the elements by a rough shelter of scaffolding poles and plastic sheeting in the Grand Rue. Then they began preparing the buvette selling refreshments for their village’s biggest day for at least a quarter of a century.

  None of the old men in berets, flat caps and serge trousers could remember precisely when the Tour de France last came through the huddle of four farms and about 35 houses, more Austrian in appearance than French, on a crossroads on the D22, but they were unanimous that it was more than 25 years ago. And their fellow villagers were also of one voice: the Tour still has its place in la France profonde. “It gives us great pleasure, it brings the village alive, it shows the world we’re here, and it brings people here,” said the mayor Jean-Marc Fleurance.