“Everybody cheats. I just didn’t know”
Dave (Dennis Christopher) in the film Breaking Away

Let’s start with the cheating. Let’s start with what he didn’t know. Let’s start with the training camp that morning in Solvang, California, when they left the team hotel and rode out into the valley until they reached the team cars. It was January 1999. He was 22 years old and about to embark on his second season with the US Postal team. “Okay, Christian,” they said. “This is what we want you to do.”

It was a 10km time trial. His instructions were to ride flat-out from the valley to the top of the hill, where a doctor would be waiting to take a sample of his blood. The blood would be tested for lactate. The numbers would be posted on a chart. The chart would tell the tale of the rider’s fitness and potential. Every member of the squad was being assessed.

He took his place with the big Postal stars as they lined up in the valley: Tyler Hamilton, Frankie Andreu, Jonathan Vaughters, Kevin Living-ston, George Hincapie and, last but never least, Lance. Lance with the legendary physiology; Lance, who prided himself on winning every test; Lance, so determined to win again: “Nothing personal, guys, just business.” How could he lead the team if he was not the team leader?

But here’s the twist. Lance Armstrong is not the team leader. No, the rider with the best figures that morning is the young Belgian-sounding Chicagoan, Christian Vande Velde. So you can imagine the howls at management level when the doctor arrives with the results. “Oh Christ! Who’s going to tell Lance?”

So the result is “massaged” so that Lance can feel good about himself, and Vande Velde is cheated; cheated of the buzz that comes with winning; cheated of knowing that on that day in 1999, he had more physical gifts than the man who would go on to win seven Tours de France. And for the next eight years, that’s mostly how it is.

There’s a lot more cheating and a lot more losing and he struggles constantly with injury. And two weeks ago, when he starts his sixth Tour de France, Christian Vande Velde is still a minor leaguer, performing unnoticed in the shadow of the gods. He has no ambition of winning. He has no idea how good he is. But what if he just found out?

Stories of most American cycling prodigies usually start with LeMond. This one starts with Lemont, a satellite town to the southwest of Chicago. John Vande Velde is a second-generation Belgian and inherits a deep-rooted love and talent for cycling, his grandfather’s favourite sport. John enters the family business (barricades for road construction) but the bicycle is his passion.

In 1968 and 1972 he makes the US Olympic team. In 1976 Christian, the first of his three children, is born. In 1979 he is cast as one of the Team Cinzano bad guys in the Oscar-winning movie Breaking Away. “That’s how I knew my dad was famous,” Christian says, smiling. “It was a big deal to be able to stay up past nine o’clock to watch Breaking Away when it was on TV.”

Christian had a talent for golf at high school, but there was no escape from his destiny. There was the “Vande-drome”, John’s portable wooden track on which he learnt to ride; the racing caps he was given regularly by John’s racing pals; and the fuss made for Patrick Sercu and the other famous Belgian racers who dropped by when they visited Chicago. “I liked golf but never took it seriously enough,” he says. “John Daly wasn’t my father. Why fight the grain?”

When he was 15, he travelled with a friend to a cycling camp in Wisconsin hosted by Tom Schuler, a top professional with the Motorola cycling team. It rained all week but the bug had bitten and he signed up shortly afterwards for his first race in Des Moines. It was not an auspicious debut. “I just ate shit [crashed]. All I could think of was wrecking my $85 pants and what my dad would say.”

The plus side was that the only way was up, and for the next five years he soared, securing his first professional contract in 1998 on a US Postal team that included the talented but somewhat goofy Coloradoan Vaughters. “He was a nutcase,” Vande Velde recalls. “He was a quirky, messy guy that nobody else wanted to room with and I was like, ‘Yeah, just throw me in there’. Jonathan was different from the other guys. He was relaxed and helped me with my training and diet and liked to talk about things other than cycling. He was a good friend.”

They were six months into their first season and rooming together at the Cascade Classic in Oregon when the Festina scandal broke on the Tour de France. Everybody was cheating. He just didn’t know. “It didn’t really affect me because I was so far away from all that. I was having the time of my life – ’98 and ’99 were good times for me.”

The good times got better on his Tour debut in 1999. Fourteenth in the prologue and the white jersey holder as the leading young rider, he shelved his personal ambitions and spent the next three weeks working tirelessly for Lance, but still managed to finish a superb 16th in the final time trial – a performance that astonished Vaughters. This kid was the real deal.

“We had a great time that year,” Vande Velde recalls. “There was like the three kind of lead guys in one camper, Kevin, Tyler and Lance, and the five goons in the other; I didn’t have a space to even lie in the camper . . . The only low point was at L’Alpe d’Huez. It was one of my first days in the grupetto [the last group]; I had tendonitis so bad.

“It was over seven hours and I thought I was done. I said, ‘I can’t do this any more’ and Lance looked at me and pretty much laughed. ‘You’ve gotta do it. You don’t have a choice’. But I was doing more damage than good.”

He was injured (a delicately positioned ingrowing hair follicle) for the Tour King’s second win in 2000 but returned a year later in the quest for number three, when the pressure was almost unbearable. “There was so much pressure being with Lance to do everything right,” he says. “We had a bigger team with a bigger budget and better riders and you really had to cut the mustard just to be there. It was really harsh.”

After crashing in the team time trial and again during another stage, his race ended on a miserably wet Bastille Day when he lost control on a tricky descent and hit a pole, smashing his back and breaking an arm. “I felt like I let them down,” he says. The arm kept him out for the rest of the season. The back continued to plague him to the end of 2003. Postal had had enough and offered to pay half his contract if he joined another team.

Vande Velde was distraught. “I could do these tests and knew that when everything was square, I was testing as good as anyone on the team – that’s what kept the desire alive.” But the penny had dropped. Everything wasn’t square. There was cheating. He knew it. How could you compete with that? He picked up the phone and managed to blag a place on the Liberty-Seguros team for 2004. And things just got worse.

“That whole year sucked. They dropped the ball completely. I didn’t have a visa, so I couldn’t race and I was at home for half the season.”

It was time to start begging again. He called Bjarne Riis and offered to ride for 2005 on the minimum wage with CSC, but the nightmare continued. Underraced and struggling with his back, he finished the Tour of Italy but suffered like a dog. He returned to his home in Girona, lit a fine cigar and drank two bottles of wine with his wife, Leah. He was done. It was over. He phoned Vaughters at three o’clock in the morning. “I’m hearing good reports about your new outfit,” he chirped. “Think you could do with another good director?’”

Vaughters convinced him to keep racing. He sat out the Tour and had started training again when he got the call; the call from Shaun Tucker; the offer that turned him round. Toyota had agreed to sponsor a new US team and were offering to sign him. He was thrilled. And he returned to work with CSC feeling a lot more relaxed.

But he still wasn’t confident. He remembers a stage of the Vuelta (Tour of Spain) that autumn, jumping away in a breakaway group that is moving clear of the pack. They reach the critical phase and he knows what’s coming next . . . The team car drawing slowly alongside . . . the window being lowered . . . the manager glaring.

“Can you win?” Riis barks. “What?” “Can you win the stage?” He considers his response. If he says “no”, Riis will immediately order the team to chase. If he says “yes” and fails, Riis will go berserk. It happened at least five times in that Vuelta and his answer was always the same. “No.”

Christian Vande Velde was the greatest enigma in cycling. Injuries (two broken collarbones) continued to plague him in 2006, but then, after eight years as a pro, he won his first race in Europe at the Tour of Luxembourg. He raced well for CSC the next year and had established himself as one of the best domestiques in the peloton when Vaughters presented his exciting plans for Slipstream. “There will be no cheating,” JV assured him. “You will know.”

Vande Velde wasn’t sure. He was already racing clean and liked the crew at CSC. But he also liked David Millar and Julian Dean and Will Frischkorn and Ryder Hesjedal and Danny Pate. And he absolutely loved Vaughters. “It was an American team, a new team, and I saw this as a challenge; I could work with the young Americans and tell them the good and bad things that have happened to me in the past. It wasn’t about being a leader.”

Vaughters had other ideas. After a promising start to the season at the Tour of California, he presented his masterplan. The team would prepare for the Tour at the Giro D’Italia, spend 10 days resting at St Moritz and sharpen up for the race at a training camp in the Pyrenees. Vande Velde wanted to kill him. Then Vaughters showed him the new paint scheme for the bus and Vande Velde wanted to throw up.

“At first I kind of played it off,” he says, “because it was said offhandedly: ‘Oh, your face is going to be all over the side of the bus’. I said, ‘Okay, whatever’. And then I saw it and felt very insecure that I was being picked and cast above the rest of the team.”

The insecurity continued into the first week of the Tour and on the morning of the first big rendezvous – the time-trial in Cholet – he was spotted pacing the corridor of the team hotel with headphones on.

“What are you doing?” I inquired.

“Just trying to work on my head and believe in myself,” he said.

“How can one of the best guys in the race not believe in himself?”

He shrugged. “I don’t know.”

Two days later, he attacked the leaders on the climb to Super-Besse and described in a blog how “unusual” it felt. And then on Monday, after the second Pyrenean stage to Hautacam, something extraordinary happened. Face covered in grime after more than four hours in the saddle, he was standing outside the team bus with a handful of reporters when someone handed him a results sheet. The sheet had not been doctored. That really was his name in third, just 38 seconds behind the leader, Cadel Evans. And there was a sudden spark in his eyes as his mind registered thoughts he had never previously considered.

Did he feel lucky? No. Had he pushed himself into the red or close to the limit?

No. Would Evans beat him in the final time trial?

Not certain. Had Christian Vande Velde just realised for the first time in his life that he could win the Tour de France?

YES. He felt elated. And scared. This is unknown territory.

“It’s a lot more scary to achieve things than not,” he says. “I think about winning the Tour; I think about what it would be like for my family and my life; I think of my dad on his hands and knees in front of the TV . . . It’s like a script from a movie. If I had stayed at CSC, with the same exact form, there’s no way I’d be in third place right now – I’d be on the front, working for someone else. Bjarne would never have sculpted my programme as beautifully as Jonathan.”

And the most beautiful thing of all? In a Tour once again sullied by doping, Vande Velde – sitting third after yesterday’s 14th stage – is doing it clean.

“I’m really happy to be on a clean team,” he says. “And I’m even happier now because it has just occurred to me all the questions I am going to be asked if I do well because I’m an ex-US Postal rider. I’m happy that I’m going to get a diploma from ACE [the Agency for Cycling Ethics] that I’ve had 87 blood tests this year and from last year, and that I can document everything I’ve taken and not taken. It has been a pain in the butt sometimes but it pays off tenfold and I’ll do it any day.”

He takes out his BlackBerry and shows me a message he has just received from Tom Schuler, the old Motorola pro who first encouraged him to race.

“Man o man, the boys back here in Wisconsin are riding along with you, especially the boys in the plastic jackets. They are coming over to see you on the Champs-Elysees. Seriously, if you don’t know it already, everyone back here in Wisconsin, and everyone who is a cyclist in the whole USA, is riding with you. We are all incredibly proud of you. Please don’t answer this email, just save the extra energy for the efforts in the days ahead. You are going to need every ounce to do the things I know you can do. Go baby go.”

And he smiles, a believer.