By the large, red sandstone boulders of Red Rocks Park in the foothills of the
Rocky Mountains, two riders from Team Slipstream have stopped to refuel.
Today they will cycle 80 miles along a rollercoaster route, beginning in the
old mining town of Golden, continuing up Bear Creek Canyon, through
Evergreen to Idaho Springs before they return to their starting point via
Golden Gate Canyon.
The sun is burning brightly, humidity is low and the temperature is about 27C.
“As a professional cyclist, you ride the whole time, training in November
and December the same way you do in July and August,” says Ian MacGregor,
twice the United States under23 national road race champion. The days are
not always as perfect as this one. Nor is the sport that MacGregor and his
Slipstream teammate, Timmy Duggan, came to love by riding and competing
along picturesque roads such as these around their Colorado homes.
Professional cycling is dominated by dark clouds formed out of human growth
hormone, EPO and a culture of chemical abuse which has embroiled its most
high-profile participants and its greatest races. The Tour de France, which
ended in victory for the Spanish cyclist Alberto Contador, was embroiled in
scandal again by the removal from the peloton of the Kazakhstani prerace
favourite Alexandre Vinokourov, who tested positive for blood doping, and by
the decision of the Rabobank team to withdraw the then race leader, Michael
Rasmussen, for apparently lying about his whereabouts in order to evade drug
tests.
Vinokourov’s team, Astana, was expelled and the Cofidis team withdrew after
one of its riders, the 34-year-old Italian Cristian Moreni, failed a doping
test. T-Mobile, which has instituted a new programme of enhanced medical
scrutiny and a moral commitment by its riders against doping, suffered the
indignity of having one of its riders, Patrik Sinkewitz, a 26-year-old
German, ejected after the A sample from a test he undertook on June 8, a
month before the start of the tour, showed a raised testosterone level.
Even Contador’s victory became tainted amid accusations by the German medical
professor Werner Franke that documents from the Spanish Operation Puerto
investigation last year, which he has submitted to the World AntiDoping
Agency (Wada), show the Spaniard took a testosterone booster and medication
for asthma. Contador has been banned by the organisers of the Hamburg
Cyclassics from competing in the one-day race next Sunday. On Friday,
flanked by Discovery Channel team boss Johan Bruyneel and the Spanish
minister for sport Jaime Lissavetzky, he made a statement in which he denied
that he had ever “committed a doping offence” and insisted he wants “to
bring credibility . . . to the new generation of cycling”.
MacGregor and Duggan, both 24 and part of the new generation, are determined
they will compete in next year’s Tour de France. If they do, along with the
21 other riders from Team Slipstream, it could mark a watershed for a sport
which has become untrustworthy to the global audience. “Every week our blood
sample is taken for analysis by the Agency for Cycling Ethics (ACE) [an
independent agency established by Paul Scott, a former chemist and client
director at the University of California, Los Angeles Olympic drug-testing
laboratory] where they have created blood profiles for every member of our
team,” MacGregor explains, pointing to multiple needle marks in his arms.
“Even if some new, undetectable drug was developed tomorrow, they would know
as soon as I put it in my body because there would be a change in my
biological record.
“It’s a pain to do [the blood and urine tests] every week. At training camp in
January we had to do it every three days, so they could create profiles for
us. But every member of Team Slipstream is willing to do it because of the
state of cycling right now. If the entire peloton was willing to do this,
everyone in the sport would have a much easier time convincing a
disbelieving public. But there’s a discrepancy within cycling and within
teams as to the level of scrutiny among riders. This is why we need rules
that are uniform. If you have a rider who is proven to have tested positive,
he should be fired and no other team should be able to hire him. I don’t
believe in a first-offence lifetime ban because people make mistakes, but in
cases where you have multiple infractions, and multiple means two, a
lifetime ban is appropriate. That’s the only way we will save the sport for
future generations. What Slipstream is doing with the ACE programme is
something all teams and riders should press their management to participate
in. It proves to the public, to sponsors and anybody who is willing to look
and understand that the riders in this team are 100% clean.”
Jonathan Vaughters, the director of Team Slipstream, rode for the United
States Postal Service team in the 1990s. When he retired from racing in
2003, his ambition was to build “a clean team which could be competitive”.
With financial backing from Doug Ellis, a New York-based financial investor
and cycling enthusiast, Vaughters set up the TIAA- CREF team which evolved
into Team Slipstream when TIAA-CREF finished its run as title sponsor last
year. Alternative sponsorship proved difficult to attract which, Ellis
acknowledges, “pushed us to find a way to give sponsors confidence that the
team won’t turn into another Phonak”.
So in February, Vaughters and Ellis announced a partnership with Scott and his
ACE project in which all 23 members of Team Slipstream are voluntary
participants.
The cost of testing each rider is $20,000 annually – more than $400,000 for
the team – which Ellis will underwrite if increased funding for the
programme is not forthcoming. It is customary for cyclists as well as other
athletes to be tested for drugs when they win a race or finish in the top
three or four places, and random testing has become an integral part of
Wada’s crusade against cheats. What sets the Team Slipstream and ACE model
apart is the frequency and range of its testing procedures. “It is our job,
as teams, to give potential sponsors confidence that if they make a
commitment to us, they are not going to show up on the front page of a
newspaper in some scandal,” says Ellis. MacGregor appreciates the scale of
such a challenge. He cut short his studies for a degree in chemical
engineering at the Colorado School of Mines in Golden to pursue a career as
a professional cyclist.
He has never felt trapped by cycling, for he is bright enough to do other
things with his life, but he is no quitter either. Three years ago in one of
the early stages of the Tour de Beauce in Quebec, MacGregor was dropped by
the main pack with 172km to go. He found himself in a group of 10 riders who
dropped out one by one, swept up by the broom wagon, a van that follows the
race and picks up those unable to finish. With 40km left, MacGregor was the
only one of the group still pedalling. The race was long over when he made
it to the final circuits. Six weeks later he won his first US under23
national road race championship and eight weeks ago he returned to Beauce
and won a stage, the first such win by a Slipstream rider in an
International Cycling Union (UCI) event.
“That first experience in Beauce showed me that you can make things happen, if
you’re willing to show enough commitment, enough perseverance and enough
will to fight through the shitty times,” he declares. “But I feel sorry for
people who are so stuck in cycling and feel so forced to perform on a bike
that they’re willing to take chances with their long-term health. Cyclists
need to take responsibility and so do the teams, managers, directors,
doctors and trainers. No cyclist is able to just walk into a pharmacy and
figure out what to do, how to do it, how to pay for it and get away with it.
The culture of the sport needs a 180-degree shift.”
Maybe Team Slipstream can give people reason to believe again, but far away
from the Rockies the poison runs deep within the peloton.
Sponsors pull out of tainted sport
The problems that doping has brought to the sport of cycling were highlighted
last week when it was announced that the Discovery Channel team would
disband because it was unable to fi nd a sponsor. The American-based team has
provided the winner of the past eight Tours de France in the shape of Lance
Armstrong, who won seven, and Alberto Contador, right, the Spaniard who took
this year’s event last month. Contador has since been plagued by drug-taking
allegations. The Discovery Channel decided against extending its support and
no replacement sponsor could be found. ‘It’s not an environment right now
that’s conducive to a lot of investment,’ said Bill Stapleton, the team’s
general manager. Worryingly for the sport, the blue-chip German fi rms adidas
and Audi are among those sponsors reported to be considering their future in
the sport. The telecoms company T-Mobile last week surprised many observers
by announcing that it would continue to support the team that bears its
name, despite a string of high-profi le doping confessions by team management
and a failed test by a current rider. The team said that riders would
contribute part of their salaries to the antidoping effort
