As allegations of doping threaten to envelop the race once again, David Walsh is the only journalist to speak face-to-face with the man who has finally broken a five-year silence to claim that race leader Michael Rasmussen has a dope-tainted past

On Monday last, the American cyclist Whitney Richards cracked. This being the month of the Tour de France and murderous Alpine climbs, there will be no surprise at one man being unable to endure. Except that the 31-year-old Richards is an ex-cyclist and was following the race on television in the US. And it was a rest day in the Tour.

But crack he did, and the reason was a press conference at the Hotel Montana in Tignes, deep in the French Alps. Sitting in front of the microphone was the 33-year-old Danish cyclist, Michael Rasmussen, the leader of the Tour de France. Where once the wearer of the yellow jersey could have expected homage on such an occasion, Rasmussen had to deal with some questions that expressed scepticism.

Lars Werge, cycling correspondent for the Copenhagen-based daily Extra Bladet, recounted for Rasmussen the sport’s recent doping controversies, especially the confession of doping by his fellow Dane Bjarne Riis, and asked why the public should believe that he, Rasmussen, was clean. “Yes, you can trust me,” said the Tour leader. It was an impressive moment as Rasmussen looked Werge in the eye as he delivered the answer.

And that was when Whitney Richards decided that he’d had enough – a secret he had lived with for almost five and a half years was about to be revealed.

In 2001, Richards lived in Colorado and was an amateur mountain-bike racer. That same year, Rasmussen travelled to Colorado to prepare for the World Mountain Bike Championships that were being held in Vail later that year. A highly rated mountain biker, Rasmussen had won the world title two years before. He met Richards, they became friends, their girlfriends became friends and the two men went on training rides together.

A bike fan, Richards had wondered what the difference was between amateurs and pros. After riding with Rasmussen, he felt he knew. “We would be going along, I’d be struggling, out of breath, and he would be barely breathing. Any time he wanted, he could just accelerate away. Michael was and is a gifted bike racer and I just felt honoured to be on training rides with him. On a personal level I found him to be a very nice, polite guy.”

Some time in 2001, Rasmussen decided to switch his mountain bike for a road bike and went to Italy in search of a contract with a road-race team. He was handed one by the CSC-Tiscali team in 2002, later joining the Rabobank team in 2003. He and Richards stayed in touch, and there would be opportunities to meet up in 2002 as Richards was moving to Italy. Shortly before leaving Colorado that March, Richards was contacted by Rasmussen: would he mind taking over a pair of favourite cycling shoes that the Dane had left in the US? Rasmussen said that a friend would drop them off at Richards’s place.

Two days before Richards left Denver for Italy, the friend dropped off the shoes at his house. According to Richards, this friend just left the package at his door and disappeared without knocking or saying hello. The box containing the forgotten shoes was bulky and Richards decided the only way he could fit the shoes into his luggage was to discard the box and pack each shoe separately.

He cut the box open and found it contained eight cartons of what appeared to be an American-made human blood substitute, each with its own clear plastic IV set. According to the labels, the cartons were filled with a haemoglobin-based oxygen carrier, known as Hemopure, and were manufactured by the US-based Biopure Corporation. The product is made from haemoglobin molecules that have been removed from the red cells of cow’s blood and it is on the World AntiDoping Agency’s list of banned products.

Certain that he did not want to transport this product to Italy, Richards was uncertain as to what he should do. He contacted his friend, Taro Smith, who had a PhD in physiology, and asked him to come by his house. Smith examined the contents and agreed with Richards they should be dumped. They cut open the cartons and poured the contents down the sink. Sometime after arriving in Italy, Richards hooked up with Rasmussen and confronted him about the contents of the shoe-box.

According to Richards, Rasmussen was contrite at first and tried to rationalise what he was doing. “Whitney,” he said, “you know what I am, I am not educated, I’m just a cyclist and if I don’t win and do something with my career, there is no other way for me. You are a graduate, you have an MBA, I am not like that.” But, says Richards, Rasmussen then became furious when he realised the Hemopure had been dumped. He said, “Have you any idea how much that s*** cost?” and disappeared upstairs.

Their friendship was never the same after that. Later that year, Richards contacted Charles Pelkey, a writer at Velo News cycling magazine in Colorado, told him the story about Rasmussen but did so on condition that it was off the record. He also spoke with Joe Lindsey, another US cycling writer, and again spoke off the record.

About a year later, I heard the story and contacted Richards by e-mail. We agreed to meet in Milan, and spent more than four hours discussing his experience with Rasmussen and whether or not he might go public with the story. Richards seemed an utterly credible witness and there was no apparent motive for him to concoct this story. Though he wanted people to know about Rasmussen, he was not ready to come forward himself.

Part of his reticence related to his starting a new life in Italy with his girlfriend, and the fact that he knew and liked Cariza, Rasmussen’s then girlfriend who is now his wife. Furthermore he did not want to have to deal with the attention that would follow on from his accusations against Rasmussen. I argued it would be good for the public to know what the rider was up to. Richards accepted that but he did not want to be the one to finger him.

Coincidentally, Richards’s bags were thoroughly searched by American customs at Denver International Airport and he knows that had he unwittingly packed the shoe-box, it would have been discovered and he would have been in trouble. He was also stopped by Italian customs, but they were more interested in checking out his racing bike than searching for anything suspicious.

The story lay dormant for more than five years, although not entirely. In the recently published book, From Lance to Landis, The Inside Story of the American Doping Controversy at the Tour de France, I told Richards’s story about Rasmussen, but respected the American’s wish that I name neither him nor Rasmussen.

Since that encounter with Richards, I have followed Rasmussen’s career closely. He became a Tour de France star in 2005 by winning a stage and the polka dot jersey of the Tour’s best climber. He also finished seventh overall in 2005. He won his second stage in the race last year and his second polka dot jersey. But last Sunday’s victory on the Alpine stage to Tignes was his greatest as it earned him the yellow jersey of race leadership.

Then on Monday, he gave that fateful press conference and his “you can trust me” answer to the question from the Danish journalist. That was when Whitney Richards decided to break his silence. He spoke with Charles Pelkey of Velo News, the first journalist he had contacted in 2002, and told him he wanted to make public what happened between him and Rasmussen.

He told Pelkey of his shock on discovering the contents of the shoe-box. “I was blown away,” he said. “This wasn’t a pair of SIDI’s [cycling shoes], it was dog medicine or something.” Pelkey also contacted Taro Smith, the friend Richards had called at the time of the incident. “I came to his house to figure out what was in the package,” Smith told Pelkey. “The box was packed full of silver Mylar packages labelled with ‘Biopure’. Once you opened them there were clear plastic IV sets with what looked like blood inside. The box was packed full of these.” Pelkey prepared the story and after Friday’s 12th stage to Castres, Neal Rogers, a Velo News journalist covering the Tour, asked Rasmussen if it was true that he had attempted to trick Richards into carrying a banned product to Europe in 2002. The Dane looked shocked. “I cannot confirm any of that,” he said. “I do know the name [Richards].”

For a man who has successfully defended the yellow jersey through five consecutive stages, it was a bad week for Rasmussen. On Thursday evening, Jesper Worre, the director of the Danish Cycling Union, said the Tour leader would not be selected to ride for Denmark at this year’s World Championships in Stuttgart, nor at next year’s Beijing Olympics. He has missed four drug tests over the past eight months – two carried out by cycling’s governing body, the Union Cycliste International (UCI), and a further two by the Danish Cycling Union (DCU).

Following these missed tests, he received two letters of warning from the UCI and a further two letters of warning from the Danish antidoping authority for the missed tests carried out by the DCU. When journalists from Danish national television learnt of the missed tests and the letters of warning, Worre was forced publicly to confirm the story and he added that his federation would not consider Rasmussen for selection until after the Beijing Olympics.

It is normal that after three missed tests, an athlete is considered to have returned a positive test and sanctioned accordingly. Because two different agencies were involved, Rasmussen escaped with four letters of warning. Reacting to the news that he would not be selected for Denmark in the immediate future, Rasmussen accepted responsibility for not informing the antidoping authorities of his whereabouts.

“I do admit I committed an administrative error,” he said. Athletes such as the Briton Christine Ohuruogu who have been suspended for missing three drugs tests will wonder how Rasmussen could miss four and not be sanctioned. Tour de France chief Christian Prudhomme who had been stridently antidoping in the lead-up to the Tour, complained that the release of the missed tests was an attempt to discredit the race.

“If the Danish federation knew of this at the end of June, why did they not tell us at the start of July, or at least before the start of the Tour? Why are they suddenly deciding that Rasmussen can’t take part in the world championships and the Olympics?”

Prudhomme did not comment on the issue of the four missed tests by the man wearing the maillot jaune.

On Friday evening I spoke with Richards and he talked about how he felt after revealing what he knows about Rasmussen. “I have always had this weird guilt,” he said, “about holding on to something which was not of my doing. Then when I saw him answer the question about Bjarne Riis’s confession and say, ‘You can trust me’, I thought, ‘I can’t not say anything’. This is a rider who could win the Tour de France and if I’d said nothing, I would have been keeping the fallacy going.

“Yet by telling what I know, I am tearing down other people’s heroes and I don’t feel good about that either.”

He recalled the moment when he confronted Rasmussen about the cartons of Hemopure and the rider reminding him that, unlike Richards, he was not educated and cycling was his chance to make something of himself. “When he said that, I did think that the authorities and the teams are preying on these people at an early age and exploiting them. I know Michael is not some beast, he’s not like that. He’s smart, he’s focused, he’s intelligent.

“But he made a choice to involve me and that was totally wrong. Everybody has temptation in their life, but you’ve got to make the right decisions when faced by that temptation. You can stand up to the system and say, ‘No, I’m not doing that’. ”

Richards has decided to tell the UCI and the DCU about his experience with Rasmussen in March 2002. He is due to speak with the UCI this week.