Authors: Jeremy Whittle
His scepticism extends to those who readily offered Millar a route back into the sport. This, I am about to learn, includes myself and others such as David Brailsford, the highly successful performance director of the Great Britain cycling team. I waffle about Millar, his contrition and my hopes that, second time around, he is genuine and sincere. But Kimmage barks back: ‘No second chances.’ I feel mealy-mouthed, wet, overly liberal in his presence. Kimmage inhabits a black-and-white world and for the second time in five minutes, I am envious.
‘Brailsford may be a very gifted man, but I did have serious reservations about him embracing Millar. I found his defence of Millar very strange. I understand he was with Millar when he was arrested, which I’m not sure in his position is a healthy thing. But I got a huge kick out of the fact that he had to tell him to put all his toys away with Luigi Cecchini, even before Millar’s second coming.’
A ‘huge kick’?
He glares at me. ‘When I see Millar welcomed back like a hero … I mean – I tried to do the sport a service. But he hasn’t shat on any of his pals, he’s still playing the game, still respecting the
omerta
. And then he comes back and starts lecturing us about what needs to be done … How would that not make you bitter?’
Kimmage carries on talking. The tape is running. I’m listening, but I’m also halfway across a bridge, standing in the middle, my old cosy beliefs behind me and the cold world of the hardliners beckoning. I know now that I need to cross, to join them, but it’s hard. Kimmage stands watching from the far bank, burning crosses ranged on the hills behind him, calling me
.
Then we’re back in the café
.
‘It’s quite clear,’ he is saying. ‘Millar should not have been let back into the sport. He shoulda been banned for life. Until the sport does that, there’s no chance. But Millar …’ he says more softly, and shakes his head. ‘Y’know, I watched this guy. He just
oozes
class and talent, he’s beautiful to watch on a bike. The classiest guy I’ve ever seen on a bike.’
Don’t you think I know that, Paul? That’s why it hurts … of course I know that
.
Like Christophe Bassons and Filippo Simeoni, the whistle-blowers who came a decade or so later, the publication of
Rough Ride
sent Paul Kimmage to a lonely place. He had broken the law of silence. He was quickly ostracised, even by old mates such as Claveyrolat. When he went back to the Tour, in July 1990, he says he endured his ex-teammates spitting in his face.
‘They reduced me to nothing,’ he remembers.
Contrast Kimmage’s return to the sport with Millar’s and the reason for his anger with the idea of ‘David Millar, whistleblower’ comes more clearly into focus. ‘They hadn’t read the book, but Stephen Roche had talked to
L’Equipe
, saying that I was screwing everybody. That was enough for them. So when I went back, everybody –
everybody
– in the game thought, “Kimmage has fucked us over.” It hurt.’
Kimmage tried to leave his bitterness and pain behind and move on. His career as a writer progressed. Then, when he was at the Atlanta Olympics in 1996 and smelled a rat, the experience of
Rough Ride
served him well.
‘There was an Irish swimmer who won three gold medals,’ he says, referring to Michelle de Bruin. ‘Three writers stood up and said this is not right and I was one of them. If I hadn’t written
Rough Ride
, I’d have never been able to take that stance. I could have been accused of having double standards, of being a hypocrite. I didn’t understand that in 1990, but I certainly appreciated it in 1996.’
Kimmage says there’s nobody he admires more in cycling, at any level, than Christophe Bassons. ‘I admire him more than Merckx, Hinault, anybody. He is my absolute hero. I don’t know him, never met him, but I admire him more than anybody.’
Bassons’ stance against the peer pressure of the Festina team
won
the Irishman’s eternal respect. ‘I think about what I did and then about what he did. And for him to do it in that era, with Virenque and these boys mocking him across the table, for him to refuse to do what they did …’
We shake hands and part, him for the airport, me for a nearby Tube station. Meeting Kimmage again has been a disturbing experience. He paints a bleak picture and offers no resolution, no soft options, no compromises, no get-out clauses, no flimflam. Our conversation leaves me drained and wanting to drink a lot of red wine.
Later that night, I empty the last of the bottle into my glass. The next morning, my head fogged, I wake up early and pull the curtains open on a grey and empty dawn.
A SONG FROM UNDER THE FLOORBOARDS
INITIALLY, FILIPPO SIMEONI
agreed to be interviewed for this book, but then, weary of two years of recrimination and legal battles, as a direct result of his conflict with Armstrong, he changed his mind. He and his family had had enough trouble, he said. Speaking out had got him nowhere.
He had expected that the fallout from his spat with Armstrong would last one, maybe two seasons. The Italian had thought that he, like those who had doped and been forgiven, would have been accepted back into the fold. But no: the stand-off with Lance still cast a long shadow over his life. For those who cross Armstrong, there is usually no way back.
When he got back home from Paris in July 2004, Filippo Simeoni received a lot of support. The legendary Italian national selector Alfredo Martini sent him a letter telling him, ‘It’s Armstrong that wants to destroy cycling – not you.’ He continued racing, competing in the GP Camaiore, where once again, he came face to face with his chief tormentors. Almost to a man, they ignored him. Only Andrea Peron made an attempt to apologise. Simeoni waved him away.
It was a taste of things to come. Simeoni’s initial support faded and Armstrong won the battle for hearts and minds. Filippo spoke to his uncle in Canada, keen to find out how the North American media had handled their confrontation. His anger turned to bitterness when he was told that there had hardly been any coverage, and that what little there was had taken Armstrong’s side. At
procycling
we received a flurry of emails,
mostly
from rabid Lance fans, branding Simeoni a ‘whiner, a doper and a loser’. For a while, it all gave him extra motivation. The greatest irony came late that season, when for the first time, on the back of some good results, he was picked for the Italian national team. Most of his teammates barely spoke to him but nonetheless, Simeoni was jubilant to represent his country.
He felt vindicated when the Italian federation later began a disciplinary procedure against Giuseppe Guerini – the same Guerini who subsequently mentored young riders at T-Mobile – over his abuse of Simeoni during the 2004 Tour. Shortly before a hearing could be held, Guerini sent a letter of apology and any action against him was dropped. Most of the others barely felt any ill-effects, however; at the end of 2004 ‘Pippo’ Pozzato, still seen by many as the great hope of Italian cycling, was elected head of the Italian riders’ association. Predictably, Simeoni was appalled.
Two procedures pitting Simeoni against Armstrong looked possible, the first for intimidating a witness –
in a bicycle race
? – the second, more sustainable, for defamation. The painfully slow progress of the Italian legal system had ensured that the trial against Michele Ferrari was still ongoing in July 2004. When the Italian judiciary saw what had happened at the Tour between Simeoni and Armstrong, it started paying close attention. Simeoni had been a witness in that trial and Armstrong, so Simeoni claimed, had threatened him: hence the possibility of an intimidation charge.
The defamation suit arose from the interview Armstrong had given to
Le Monde
, in which he had denounced Simeoni as a ‘
menteur absolu
’ – an absolute liar. Belatedly, Simeoni and his lawyer decided to act. Yet, for a combination of reasons – bad timing, Simeoni’s own recalcitrance, and the labyrinthian complexities of the Italian judicial system and cycling scene – neither case went to court. Simeoni, despairing, believed it had all been for nothing.
He was wrong. His actions had accelerated change, even if
that
change would come too late, much too late, to salvage his own career.
Simeoni started 2006 in a positive frame of mind, but then in the spring he battened down the hatches when he found himself increasingly isolated. His campaigning stance against doping had not endeared him to the Italian sports media.
Simeoni had never pretended to be a saint. He had admitted to doping himself, which he testified to following his consultations with Michele Ferrari. But, depicted as a chest-beating evangelist by the press, he found the criticism hard to take.
Who does he think he is
? they wrote.
Just an ex-doper with a guilty conscience who confessed under the pressure of police investigation
. Those criticisms may well have influenced his decision to withdraw, but it’s more likely that it was the refusal of cycling’s elite teams in the ProTour to offer him a contract that finally shut Simeoni up.
Vincenzo Santoni, Simeoni’s manager in 2006 at the Naturino team, had told the Italian that he would release him from the final year of his contract, if a ProTour team was willing to take him. But in a paranoid sport, Simeoni divided loyalties. Despite his abilities as an athlete and despite discreet support from other high-profile riders, Simeoni was not in demand. In desperation, at the end of 2006, he wrote a letter to every ProTour team saying that he was still keen to race at the very highest level. None responded.
Fellow Italian pro Gilberto Simoni asked around at several teams, including his own, Saunier Duval, on Filippo’s behalf. Ironically, Simoni’s sponsor also had another reformed ex-doper, David Millar, on their books. But Millar was different. And, after his two-year ban, he had been accepted back into the peloton.
For his part, Gilberto Simoni had always been complimentary about Filippo, believing he’d make a ‘brilliant
domestique
’ for a grand-tour specialist. But neither the words of a former Giro d’Italia champion and Tour de France stage winner, nor the
growing
acceptance that doping was crippling the sport, were enough. David Millar may have experienced a kind of redemption, but Simeoni,
persona non grata
, remained exiled by the elite.
According to his close friends, Filippo has a figure in his head of how much it has all cost him – the row with Armstrong, the things he’s said about doping. Simeoni believes it all adds up to hundreds of thousands of euros, small beer to affluent superstars like Riis and Armstrong, but a fortune to a
domestique
.
When he quits racing, Filippo Simeoni plans to devote himself to running the café he owns with his brother, in Sezze, Tuscany. His final seasons will help to make up for the lost income and the humiliation he has endured since he broke the
omerta
.
Part Three
Doing the Right Thing
‘Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.’
George Santayana
BLAME IT ON THE BADGER
WHEN IT WAS
announced that the 1994 Tour de France would visit England, I was beside myself with excitement. On a pigeon-grey morning in Trafalgar Square, when Bernard Hinault was scheduled for a photocall to publicise the Tour’s visit, I skipped work and made a pilgrimage to see the legendary Badger, ‘Le Blaireau’ – so called because cornered badgers always come out fighting, although having never personally baited a French badger I can’t verify this – in the flesh.
For a long time, I endured an overpowering sense of sadness and melancholia over Hinault’s premature retirement at just thirty-two, when a sixth Tour win would surely have been possible. I felt deprived, peeved even. In the fantasy Tour in my head, in which Eddy Merckx took on Fausto Coppi, and Greg LeMond struggled to contain Charly Gaul, no other rider compared to him. I missed his narcissistic macho posturing, his arrogant taunting of his rivals, his mocking of their masculine inadequacies, as he strutted around like some demented porn star. Certainly, I hadn’t suffered this morbid state of depression when, for example, the big-nosed, balding Italian, Massimo Ghirotto, hung up his racing wheels.
But Hinault’s growling good looks, his Breton granite physique, his tendency to six o’clock shadow, his love of Ray-Ban Aviators and his D’Artagnan smile, allied to his pugilistic bloody-mindedness, had all made him so appealing. In the bland age of monosyllabic Miguel Indurain and ‘Swiss Tony’ Rominger, his flamboyant and outspoken personality was sorely missed.
The robotic anonymity of the new champions of the early 1990s made them the anti-Hinault. The Badger was the kind of
reckless
Frenchman who relished risk, a have-a-go hero who’d roar up to your back bumper at the wheel of a soft-top Peugeot, gesticulating wildly and cursing, flashing his lights and hooting, before shooting you a devil-may-care grin and swerving past on a blind hairpin, narrowly missing a Belgian camper van as he did so.
Yes, at times he could be a bit of a twat.
No pilgrimage to meet the Breton would have been complete without a copy of his absurdly bombastic biography,
Memories of the Peloton
, as Napoleonic and self-aggrandising a text as in any French oeuvre. Clutching the hardback in my sweaty paw as I emerged from the Northern Line, I nervously rehearsed a few lines of French with which to charm Saint Bernard. Perhaps we would fall into conversation, and laugh and joke; then, showing his trademark impetuosity, he would tear up his schedule, wave his minders away and suggest we head off for lunch, somewhere discreet and intimate, up the road in Soho.
But then they always warn you about meeting your heroes, don’t they?
I spotted the familiar figure adrift among a sea of Japanese tourists, loitering under Nelson’s Column, clad in a shiny green suit that must have lit up like a Christmas tree when he took it off at night. Unflatteringly, it also revealed the beginnings of a paunch, and was so ill-fitting that it displayed an alarming length of white towelling sock above his pig-nosed shoes.