Jonathan Vaughters is telling me a story about the pivotal moment of his life as a professional cyclist. It happened on a sunny Tuesday morning in the city of Pau, as he prepared for the start of the 14th stage of the 2001 Tour de France. Spirits were high in the peloton that morning; the last of the high mountain peaks had been crossed two days before and there were just six stages to race before the chequered flag in Paris.

Vaughters had never made it to Paris. In 1999, his Tour debut, he had been brought down in a spectacular pile-up on the second stage. A year later, he crashed out again, overshooting a corner at speed on a descent in the Pyrenees. His third appearance in the race had been the best to date. He had experienced the thrill of winning (his team, Credit Agricole, had the team-time trial), survived the Alps and Pyrenees, and was nailed-on to make his first Tour finish.

And then, incredibly, the curse had struck again.

The previous afternoon, while out on a leisurely ride with his teammates during the rest day in Pau, a wasp had become entrapped in his sunglasses and stung him in the eye. Vaughters was allergic to wasp stings and by the time he had returned to the team hotel, his eye was the size of a golf ball. The pain was only beginning.

“The only thing that’s going to reduce that swelling is a cortisone injection which, as you know, is proscribed,” the team doctor announced. “Take it and you’ll test positive.”

Vaughters was distraught. “But that’s ridiculous . . . I can’t see! I can’t ride my bike! How will I finish the race?”

“I’m sorry Jonathan,” the doctor replied. “I can give you the injection but you will have to abandon the race. There are no exemptions for allergies. We have to do this by the book.”

“I understand,” Vaughters conceded, “but I’m not going to abandon. We’ll see how it is in the morning.”

Sleep did not come easily that night to the 29-year-old American. Here he was, trying to compete clean against rocket machines, juiced on (undetectable) EPO, growth hormone and testosterone and he was the guy at risk of being exposed as a cheat! The irony was sickening.

The morning brought no respite. He ate breakfast with his teammates, changed into his racing kit and stepped off the team coach in Pau looking like the Elephant Man. His Tour was effectively over but as a gesture to highlight the absurdity of the doping laws he had decided to sign-on as normal, line-up for the start, and climb off his bike as soon as the flag dropped.

As he made his way to the start line, aching with disappointment, he crossed the path of a chap he describes as “a famous rider”. Most of the other racers had greeted him with sympathy that morning but this particular rider didn’t do sympathy. No, his speciality was contempt.

“Poor Jonathan and his stupid little team,” he spat. “What the f*** are you like? If you were on my team this would have been taken care of, but now you are not going to finish the Tour de France because of a wasp sting.”

Vaughters was gutted.

“I thought, ‘F***! Here I am, on this team that is really trying to stick by the books and this guy is making fun of us for playing by the rules’,” he says. “My heart just left me after that. It just made me sad, just irrevocably sad. I raced [the following year] in 2002 but that was the moment that effectively ended my career. Phew! [sighs] I was done. I didn’t want to race any more. It just didn’t seem to matter to me after that.”

He returned to his native Colorado with his wife, Alisa, and son Charlie and applied his considerable intellect to the business of selling real estate. He wrote wine columns and antique furniture reviews for specialist magazines and dabbled in stocks and shares. The transition to normal life was seamless. Almost everything he touched turned to gold. And then he did something that completely defied logic. He began floating the notion of an anti-doping cycling team that would compete in the Tour de France.

The cynics went to town on him: “What was Jonathan on?” But he wouldn’t be denied and next Saturday, when the Tour begins in Brest, “Team Clean” (aka Team Garmin-Chipotle) will join the circus on the grid. Why has he returned? What does he hope to achieve? This is the story of the revenge of Jonathan Vaughters.

IT IS often said that before you judge a man, you should walk a mile in his shoes. I have walked that mile with Jonathan Vaughters; I have spent four days in his shoes but don’t ask me to judge him. And I definitely can’t explain him. We have returned to the pivotal moment of his career — the exchange with the famous rider in 2001 — and I’ve been wrestling with the word he used to describe how he felt.

“You used the word ‘sad’,” I observe.

“Yeah,” he replies.

“Not anger?”

“No.”

“There was no element of anger at all?”

“I’m not saying there was no element of anger but it was definitely more sad . . . yeah, I will stick to that.”

“No resentment?” I press.

He sighs.

“ . . . At the injustice of it all?”

“There was some, of course,” he replies, dispassionately. “The wasp sting really brought to a head a lot of the conflict I had going on inside of me. It really brought home the fact that, ‘Okay, maybe there just isn’t justice’.”

He crosses his legs and awaits the next question. The chime of a carriage clock fills the void. His calm is unnerving. What does it take, I wonder, to get Jonathan Vaughters mad?

I’m trying my best. The interview has entered its fifth hour and the discussion has turned to his experiences of doping.

“Did you have any first-hand experience of doping in the States?” I ask.

“No, not in the US,” he replies.

“Not at all?”

“No, racing in the States is much less . . . I mean half the guys you are racing against have full-time jobs. You know? It is much, much less demanding.”

“What about when you joined the US Postal Service team in 1998?”

“In ’98? Why do you need to know that?” he laughs.

“I need to know when you witnessed it first-hand,” I explain. “I’m asking whether it was in ’98 that you witnessed it first-hand.”

“I know,” he laughs. “And I am asking you: Why do you need to know that?”

“I would have thought it was a logical extension of what we have been talking about.”

“Well, no,” he disagrees. “Essentially, you are leading me down a path where I end up having to answer questions that I can’t back out of.”

“I’m not leading you down any path,” I counter. “I’m trying to explain how you founded Team Clean. I am asking you about your experiences of doping in cycling.”

“No, that’s totally understandable,” he concedes.

“I’m not asking you anything I didn’t ask Greg LeMond.”

“No, of course, and I wouldn’t expect that. I guess I would just say that my time at US Postal Service was . . . I kind of almost have to leave that as a ‘No comment’. And you can take that however you would like.”

“Okay, fine. You are painting me a picture and I’m reading between the lines.”

“And you’re welcome to read between the lines,” he says. “I’m completely okay with that.”

“My perception is that you doped.”

“You’re an intelligent person,” he smiles. “So your perception is . . . [laughs]”

“I want a ‘yes’ or a ‘no’.”

“I know you want a ‘yes’ or a ‘no’.”

“I want to know: Did you dope? I want to know: Why did you dope? And I want to know how you felt about doping?”

“And what I will tell you is that people are free to make the judgments they want out of my cycling career,” he insists.

“Jonathan, I don’t understand what your problem is here,” I reply, exasperated. “It’s a valid question. I’m not going to walk away from it.”

“I’m not asking you to walk away from it,” he says. “I can see that you are trying to establish a background and that’s fine but what I’m saying is that I’m just not going to talk about it and that’s it. You can take that however you want.”

I take it badly. He doesn’t flinch. Later that evening, I’m venting my frustrations to his wife, Alisa, at dinner when she suddenly makes sense of him. “The thing you have to remember about Jonathan,” she smiles, “is that he’s the son of an attorney.”

AN ONLY son, Jonathan Vaughters was born and raised in Denver, Colorado.

His father, Jim, was the attorney. His mother, Donna, was a speech pathology professor. A small, wiry, boy, it wasn’t a conventional childhood. His bedtime stories were Thomas Jefferson quotes from the American Bill of Rights and his most vivid childhood memories were of watching his father in court.

“The one time my dad would be passionate was in front of a jury,” he says. “Sometimes we wouldn’t have a babysitter and he would take me with him and I’d sit there, listening as he set out his case in a very nonchalant way: ‘Well, if you could explain that to me please because I don’t understand’. It was never confrontational, but you could see him leading the witness down this path where they had no other option but to answer truthfully.

“Every fourth of July, he would sit me down and force me into reading the constitution of the United States and the Bill of Rights. That quote from Thomas Jefferson — ‘It’s better to have five guilty men go free than one innocent man in jail’ — was ground into me. He believed, although imperfect, that the legal system of the United States was one of the milestones of mankind.”

The thing that really set Jim Vaughters apart was his clients.

“He never wanted to work for a big law firm,” Jonathan says. “His clients were working-class folk who got themselves in financial trouble or were going through a divorce and we would sometimes get paid in hamburgers or firewood. That was often a source of tension with my parents but dad never backed down. He only ever took cases he believed in.”

Vaughters never envisaged a career in sport. He was hopelessly uncoordinated with any shape of ball but developed a talent for wheels in his teens - go-karts first, and then bicycles. The strategy of racing fascinated him. He had been blessed with great lungs and a mountain climber’s frame and was soon making a name for himself.

In 1993, he finished second in the Tour of Venezuela with the US amateur team and was offered a professional contract with Santa Clara, a small Spanish team run by Jose-Louis Nunes, a devout Roman Catholic and member of Opus Dei. His parents were horrified. “What about your education?” they asked. But Jonathan was sold. “I thought, ‘Sure, it’s a pretty big risk but I’m not going to get to see the world any other way.” He was 20 years old.

In the spring of 1994, he caught a flight to Valencia and began his apprenticeship as a professional cyclist. One of the earliest team talks was a sermon on the evil of doping - a message delivered regularly by Nunes over the next three years. “The team was essentially funded by Opus Dei. We had a director who had taken a vow of celibacy and went to church three times a day. ‘We’re going to change cycling’, he said. ‘Doping is immoral and unethical’. He was out to conquer doping . . . Well, I don’t think ’96 was a really great time to do that.

“My teammates thought it was absolutely ludicrous that we didn’t dope on this team. We would go to races and all eight of us would be out the back. We got made fun of, quite frankly, by some of the other riders. Mentally, the saving grace for me was that I still had nothing better to do with my life. I was the infinite optimist. ‘I’m going to improve. Things will get better. They will soon develop a test for EPO’. But boy did we suck.”

By 1997, even Nunes had lost faith; Santa Clara went to the wall; Vaughters secured a contract with a small team in the US and rediscovered the joy of winning. “The racing domestically was just a thousand times easier. I won everything that year . . . the national time trial championship . . . the national racing calendar points series . . . I was the star rider of the domestic racing scene.”

A year later, he spent the first of two seasons with the US Postal team. He raced solidly in the first season and brilliantly in the second, delivering a stand-out performance to win the Mont Ventoux of the Dauphine race, a month before the Tour de France.

“That was a massive performance,” I suggest.

“Yes,” he replies. “Did it feel massive? Did you feel happy?”

“I felt okay. I wasn’t ecstatic.” “That doesn’t make sense?” “Well, for sure, it was the best form of my life as a bike rider, but I wasn’t . . . I was just sort of . . . I will leave it at this; I wasn’t overly pleased with that victory. It was interesting to me. It answered a lot of questions. But it wasn’t the most ecstatic moment of my life by any means.”

In 2000, he left the US Postal service team for the French team, Credit Agricole. For the first time in six years, Vaughters had found his natural home. He liked the manager, Roger Legeay, and his way of doing business. The 18 months that followed were the happiest of his career . . . until the sting in the tale at Pau.

He returned home to Denver and was out walking with Charlie in the park one afternoon when he happened upon a small junior race near Denver Zoo. “I remember standing there, watching these kids have fun racing their bikes and I don’t know, it just reminded me of why I loved the sport.” He decided to race for one last season with a small domestic team that included Danny Pate, the former under23 world time trial champion. One night, they shared a room together and got chatting about the season Pate had spent in Italy and why he was never going back. “It was the usual stuff,” Vaughters says. “He didn’t feel comfortable . . . the team weren’t helpful . . . but the biggest thing he said was, ‘It just became apparent to me that a lot of guys were doping’.

“I tried to argue it with him a bit. ‘You know, Danny, I think you could still ride really well over there’.

But he totally disagreed with everything I said. ‘No’, he said, ‘it’s the same thing as cutting the course [taking a shortcut] or stealing from a supermarket, so what’s the point? I don’t want to be racing with a bunch of guys like that’.

“This was a world champion, the hottest property of that generation; they had waved all kinds of money in his face but he had stuck by his ideals. He didn’t flinch. He wasn’t cutting the course. It wasn’t even a torturous decision! How could I argue with that?”

Vaughters didn’t . . . but it did set him thinking. In Pate he had seen the reflection of his father; a defender of morals and values; a man you could not compromise. But what had been the kid’s reward? His career was going nowhere. His ambition had been shelved. What was the sport doing to its talent? What could Vaughters do to change it? He would invest some of his savings in a small development team.

“It was just a hobby at first,” he says. “Our big international trip that year [2004] was to Quebec and we did some races in the US.”

The second season was more ambitious. In March 2005, Vaughters travelled to the Tour of Normandy with Doug Ellis, a cycling-mad philanthropist from New York who had expressed an interest in the team. Ellis was smitten. “What do we need to make this bigger?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” Vaughters replied. “What did you have in mind?”

“I want an American team, with American riders, developed from a very young age and moulded into professionals. An American Pro-Tour team.”

“I’d prefer to stick with the kids,” Vaughters said.

“Why?” Ellis asked. “What’s your hesitation?”

Vaughters explained the culture of doping in the sport and the methods that he would employ to change it. They would subject their riders to the most stringent testing regime the sport had ever seen. “Doug, at the end of the day it may not work,” Vaughters insisted. “And I don’t want to blast through 15 or 20 million dollars, so I’m warning you, right now.”

Ellis decided to press ahead. “This may not be a terribly fun journey but it is going to be a challenge” he smiled.

The challenge has been easier than they imagined. And a lot more fun as well. On Saturday, Danny Pate, a clean professional cyclist racing for the cleanest professional team in cycling, will start his first Tour de France.

Take a bow, Jonathan Vaughters, your revenge is complete.

Who is Jonny Vaughters?

It was Vaughters’s move to the US Postal Service team in the late 1990s that first brought him to attention. He was part of the team that helped Lance Armstrong to the first of seven successive Tour de France wins

He became better known for his bad luck - crashing out of the Tour in 1999 and 2000. In 2001 a wasp sting on his eye during a training ride caused huge swelling. To repair his vision, Vaughters required a cortisone injection. Having this would have risked a failed drugs test and he withdrew

He announced his retirement in 2003, and with $50,000 of his own money started a development squad for young American riders. He is now sporting director of Team Garmin-Chipotle, which through the Agency for Sporting Ethics submits its riders to almost 20 times the number of drugs tests their rivals undergo

Paul Kimmage and the Tour

Paul Kimmage competed three times in the Tour de France in the 1980s, and in 1990 wrote Rough Ride, his account of life in a professional cycling team, which would go on to win the William Hill Sports Book of the Year award He has been named Sports Interviewer of the Year for the past four years. His interview with former Tour de France winner Greg LeMond was included in the submission which won him the award last year. To read more of his interviews, please visit www.timesonline.co.uk/kimmage