I’m posting this transcript of the Bicycling interview because in light of Lance Armstrong’s actions yesterday, it provides a picture of where the sport of cycling was in era of LA, where it is presently and where it is (hopefully) headed. ~Susan

From Bicycling Magazine, Joe Lindsey’s interview with Jonathan Vaughters:

 

When Jonathan Vaughters published his op-ed in the New York Times admitting to doping as a pro cyclist, BICYCLING requested an interview hoping to learn more about why he chose to finally come forward, and what he hoped to accomplish with his admission. He declined to address his time on U.S. Postal, citing a wish to respect the ongoing USADA investigation into alleged doping practices on the team, but was otherwise open. In a nearly two-hour conversation at his Denver home, Vaughters talked in detail about his career, his decision to dope and struggles to try to be competitive without pharmaceutical help, and how those experiences shaped his interest in the sport’s reform. This transcript has been edited for clarity and organization, but is otherwise unchanged.

I’ll start with the fairly obvious question: Why now?

Well, I think when you look back at what the reaction has been from various people who’ve decided to step forward (and admit doping), it’s been for the most part fairly negative; sometimes extremely negative. People try to place that blame in a lot of places but what stands out in my mind is the reaction of the fans. Five years ago, when someone would step forward and say ‘Yeah, I did it,’ the reaction to that individual was amazingly negative. And basically, that person in whatever capacity they might have had to improve the overall situation by being honest, they were immediately pushed aside. They never got any opportunity to help the sport to move the right direction, or even for their knowledge to have an impact on anti-doping efforts. It was immediate—they were basically neutered from any potential movement. That is obviously very dissuasive to coming forward and talking about what happened. I think basically, just as it took all the way until 2008 until I felt the time was right, that the sport was ready to have a team that was outspoken about anti-doping—that that wouldn’t have worked in 2004, or in 1996 but it did in 2008—and so it took until now for an admission to have a positive impact on the sport as opposed to a negative.

Did that negative reaction come just from fans or from others? I recall a fair bit of negative reaction from institutions as well.

That’s hard to say. You’d have to ask the individuals (who admitted) what their experiences were, but from my observation as a spectator to those events, those guys were called names and mocked by a lot of different people. It was coming from all angles.

One of my first experiences with that was the reaction to Paul Kimmage, when Verbruggen said it was simply sour grapes from guys who couldn’t cut it anymore.

Yes—I’m first to say that without—let’s start with Kimmage, and I’m sure there was someone before that, but that without Kimmage, without Frankie [Andreu], without Floyd [Landis], Tyler [Hamilton], without Jorg Jaksche, [Bjarne] Riis, you can go on and on, without all these people, the op-ed I wrote and the impact I feel like it’s having, I don’t know if that would be possible without those people. In fact, I’d say it probably wasn’t. I feel like the only reason, in a roundabout way, everything that Floyd went through and the scandal of [Operación] Puerto, like those two things, that whole three-year period, the pressure that put the sport under to clean up and put in new measures and the scrutiny it was under, that was the soil that allowed [Garmin’s] Ryder [Hesjedal] to win the Giro d’Italia clean. To me it’s not separable. If you have no Puerto, you have no Floyd Landis scandal, can you win the 2012 Giro clean? I don’t think so.

Because what else would force the sport to change?

Exactly!

Was that the catalyst for you, then? What changed between 2008 and now, or even Tyler, a year ago, and now, that allowed you to come forward?

It’s like reading a race—and what’s the right moment to attack? I don’t know what it was, but it just felt like, ‘OK, now is going to be a time when people accept this as a way forward and a positive thing and it is not going to be negative for the sport.’ I did it away from as many major events in the sport as I could. I don’t want the sensational publicity that would come if it were before, during the Tour, or even this race in Colorado. I want it to be viewed as its own event and that it’s not an attempt to sensationalize anything—it’s an attempt to get a broad audience to understand that however difficult this problem is, there is a way forward.

In the op-ed you wrote for the first time, “I chose to dope.” You never said that before, but in our interviews and with others, you haven’t denied it and this doesn’t come as a huge surprise.

I don’t think I ever denied it. If I did, I don’t remember where that was.

Over time, this became evident that it was an open secret. How did it feel to finally say it out loud?

Well, listen, I think a lot of people thought that it must have been a big relief. No, it wasn’t. The way I see it is that op-ed was part of a greater process. Frankly, I won’t be happy or feel better until I see it’s done something to change the environment. Until that, OK, great, it’s out there. Anyone in the past eight, nine years, maybe a decade, who has had a serious interest in the sport or in anti-doping and who asked me privately, ‘Have you doped?’ I always answered honestly. So the weight is not so much off—this is more what I’m hoping to be a catalyst. One, to help the continuing effort to clean up the sport, and I think it is so much cleaner than it used to be. Two, getting a greater and broader audience to understand hey, this isn’t easy. It’s not like, smack your fist, be self-righteous, ‘Get in there and clean it up.’ This is not an easy process. The reason it’s not easy is how twisted up it can be. It’s not a six-month effort, it’s not a ten-year effort. It’s as long as the sport exists, or any sport. It’s a continual hard push, no letting off the gas ever. The objective was those two things—they’re somewhat separate, but aligned.

Perhaps because you were so forthright in private, some people have viewed this as just appropriately timed PR stagecraft. How do you respond to that?

This has been written for three years. I’ve edited it over the time and I felt like now was the correct moment to have a positive impact. If someone wants to view that another way, in past years, there’s always been one reason or another that the wind has blown the other direction. With an announcement like this, there are so many people who will view it as ‘Well, he’s throwing stones,’ or ‘He’s trying to rain on this parade,’ and now seemed like a correct moment. It seemed the first moment I felt I could do this and I’m not going to get an inbox full of hate mail. Apparently I was right.

The cynical way to read that is that you doped, didn’t admit it and allowed yourself to build into a position in the sport where you have a lot of power, you have a position of importance and that you waited until you were too big to fail.

Yeah, but the bigger they are the heavier they fall. OK, look at it the other way—I’m risking more now than I would at any other point. The risk is higher than it’s ever been.

How do you mean that—the risk?

If the negative reaction was there, then I could lose sponsors, I could completely collapse the whole company if it wasn’t received well. If I’d admitted in 2004, what would I have risked? There was basically no team, or a very small team. I was retired, I was working as a real estate agent, what was the risk? But what’s the IMPACT? If I’d done that in 2004, the impact would have been zero.The impact probably would have been to vilify you, based on what other people then faced.

Yeah, the impact would have been extremely low. And so, why? What’s the point of doing it in 2004? It would be like, ‘OK, great. Moving on…’ But I think right now the impact is big. And it can be used to change things.

The early part of the op-ed talked in detail about your days as a junior. That background leads people to the accusation that you were painting yourself as a victim, the idealistic young kid who got corrupted. What were you trying to accomplish with that level of detail?

Obviously, I’m not a victim. I like to think of myself as a smart kid. So the decision was mine and mine alone. There’s no ‘I would have had to flip burgers if I didn’t do this.’ The point of illustrating that was exactly what went on in my life and my head, nothing more and nothing less. It’s telling a story, and one that probably a lot of other athletes have.Did you intend that to be representative of what other athletes went through then?

Yeah. I think it’s an extremely common story among a whole host of athletes in sports. And, some of the first people who said thank you were parents of junior riders or young riders themselves. I got a very nice note from [Bontrager-Livestrong rider] Ian Boswell, who’s not even on my team, saying, ‘Way to stick up for the sport.’ That’s illustrating what goes on or went on. I don’t know in other sports firsthand, but in cycling, I know what goes on in the head of a young cyclist who’s put in that sort of position. It’s what went on in my head and it’s my story. But it’s not indemnifying myself from any responsibility, or claiming victimhood. Of course not. Not in the least.

Do you feel like people who doped are in some sense victims of this—like of a system?

‘Victim’ might be a bit strong. There certainly are some, because there are kids who drop out of school because they want to pursue cycling and don’t have a lot of options. They’re from the south of Spain or whatever and there’s like, very little choice on their part. If they say no, then the response is ‘Fine, you can go work in the salt mines.’

They don’t get to go be a real estate agent.

Yeah, exactly. But overall, I don’t think victim is a little too strong. At the end of the day people are looking for who’s at fault. So you could read my article and say, ‘Well, it was the coach/mentor, or whatever.’ They have a part in it. Or it was the ineffective anti-doping controls. Yep, that has a part too. But no, it was the athlete’s decision. Yes, that has a part too. Everyone’s overlooking that over the course of sports, at any time there’s always the desire to cheat or to dope, but there are times at which a certain drug exists which is undetectable and so effective that it becomes very difficult to be competitive without it, and there are other times that that is not the case. And so it’s a little dependent on where you are, what period. So whose fault is the EPO generation? Here’s a drug that is so incredibly effective at making guys go fast on bikes, and whose fault is it that everyone used it? I don’t know. It was a conspiracy of…an unintentional conspiracy of modern medical science combined with slow reaction time to improve the testing combined with ambition combined with…it’s all tied in together. Pointing fingers is very difficult. So the point of the op-ed is not to say ‘This was so-and-so’s fault.’ It’s ‘Hey, let’s try to figure out how to prevent unintentional confederacies going forward.

There are a lot of steps to that equation, on a governing body standpoint, or a sponsor standpoint, or management of the team. The first reaction to the news that doping is going on is ‘Crap.’ They probably don’t like it and they want it to go away, but they say ‘Well, maybe it’s just a few guys.’ They underestimate the problem, and so the reaction time is slower and the transparency of the problem is bad because people aren’t willing to recognize it and that slows down the process.

And because the reaction is slow and the problem gets bigger?

Exactly, it leads to more people doping. And again, it’s human nature to say ‘Let’s not jump to conclusions here—we need to investigate this,’ and so on. And I understand you can’t jump in to produce new tests that may not be proved to scientific standards but that’s one area that can be improved. Let’s recognize the problems quickly and try to deal with them more quickly and more transparently as opposed to hoping they go away on their own. That helps prevent it from becoming as commonplace as it was in my generation.

When do you recall first coming into contact with or consciously realizing that there was this unintentional or accidental conspiracy?

Well, I guess the story of it is kind of funny. I turned pro in 1994 and got my ass kicked over and over again. During that year I began to learn doping was going on. There were some stories told.

Did you know what EPO was at that time?

By the end of the year I did. At the start, not really. So in 1995 it was much more apparent. I was in the Spanish pro peloton and they were talking about it. I remember one Spanish rider, I can’t remember his name, who used to stand up and flex his muscles and say, ‘Am I really this strong? Or did the chemicals make me this way?’ And so it was being openly joked about. And we were a team that was funded in a roundabout way by Opus Dei, which is an arm of the Catholic Church. Our head director, Jose Luis Nunez, went to church like four times a day. You think I’m joking, but literally four times a day. And his perspective was ‘No, we’re going to work harder than everyone else, and find all the little training methods that no one else has thought of, and look at nutrition,’ and so on. It was the original marginal gains philosophy before Sky! We were doing VO₂ max tests every week. The guys on the team—a funnier analogy to Sky—the Russians were Olympic and world champions in team pursuit, individual pursuit, points race, the best in the world at track racing and then with these Spanish guys who’d won tons of amateur races in Spain. So it was a natural group of talented young riders who should have—with all these marginal gains—just popped right in and kicked butt.

And what happened?

What happened is we were the worst team in the Spanish peloton by far.

I recall you told me once your whole team was getting dropped on climbs.

Yeah, in the 1996 Basque Country the director came up and said ‘We’re doing to do a new tactic today.’ And it was like, ‘OK, what’s that going to be?’ And he said, ‘Well because guys have been getting cut off one by one from the pack and missing the time cut or coming very close to it, now, when the first guy is in trouble, the whole team will drop back and do a team time trial at our own speed to catch back up to the grupetto in the waning kilometers of the race.’ And that was the strategy.

That’s a discouraging way to race.

Incredibly. For people who follow VO₂ max numbers, when I was getting mine tested during this period at the same lab Miguel Indurain went to, I was testing mid/high 80s. So why was I one of the very first people getting dropped? So anyway, as 1996 progressed, and we got closer to the Vuelta, all of a sudden there was a shift. And all of us riders knew at this point that we were getting our asses kicked because everyone is taking EPO in the peloton. And the management had held the line: ‘No doping.’ We weren’t getting paid enough to buy it on our own and if we had bought it, we didn’t know enough how to use it on our own.

But finally some months before the Vuelta, Nunez comes to me and he said, ‘You know Jonathan, I’ve been thinking about this, and we aren’t going to dope you. But we think that since you’re training so hard, that we want to make sure we keep your red cell count the same it was at the beginning of the year when you came from Colorado fresh.’ And I said ‘OK, sounds good.’ So he said, ‘There’s going to be some medication we’ll use to make sure that happens.’ And I said, ‘OK.’ And I quickly figured out that what he was talking about was EPO. But again, the way he phrased it to me allowed me to justify it. As much as I shouldn’t have, and been intelligent and said, ‘Wait this is bullshit,’ in my mind he had just spelled out to me that I wasn’t going to dope, we’d just make my hematocrit what it would have been had I not been riding my bike so damn much. And we’re never going to use doses high enough to push you where you shouldn’t be, so I shouldn’t worry about health consequences like stroking out. And of course there’s no chance of you testing positive. So it was like ‘Oh, well my blood’s going to be the same thickness as it is normally, so we’re just avoiding anemia right? So this is actually healthy!’ And so there won’t be health consequences and so it won’t be cheating.

Did you consciously realize those rationalizations at the time?

Of course I can look back 16 years later and say, ‘Clearly these were rationalizations.’ If I had sat down and been honest with myself, I was logical enough to realize that. But at that point in time, I was ripe soil. When you’re team-time trialing off the back to make the back end of the grupetto in every race and you hear that message, your mind is fertile for hearing that. When I look back on that I think, ‘Holy Toledo, here’s a guy who founded a team on the principles of clean racing and to make up the difference through marginal gains and hiring the most talented young athletes, unspoiled athletes, and focusing them and that little by little that the sport could be moved and changed.’ Jose Luis Nunez had the same damn dream and the same damn conviction I did. But his timing was incredibly bad. He held out for 30 months of his dream and then he cracked. And the athletes, once he cracked, the dam broke.

What did it feel like to dope?

A: It felt like I’m trying to survive and there’s a life raft and I can stop treading water and hoist myself up on that. I don’t know about transfusions; I never transfused, but EPO is subtle, it comes in slowly. You’re riding faster after three weeks but you might not notice the effect. You can see it in your SRM data that there’s a trend. There are still some days your legs feel like shit and you can’t get out of your own way and others where you have super great legs. Your body still has an up-down erratic function, but the ups are higher and the downs aren’t as low.

Was the decision hard for you? Did you ever think, “Maybe I should just leave the sport?”

Of course. But that decision had been occurring to me every race day for two and a half years. I was still in college at this point, part time in fall semester. So it was very difficult, because it was like ‘Why don’t I just go back [home]?’ But what can I say? I was stubborn. I wanted my dream. And I didn’t understand that there was no reason I had to do it, but I was able to rationalize it. When I was back in the U.S., racing here, I was the one guy who could be competitive with the dominant Coors Light team. I won Tour of the Gila at 21. My VO₂ max scores were some of the highest they’d seen at the Olympic Training Center. So I was thinking, ‘Why should I give up the dream that I’m talented at? I’m good at this? Why should being the good guy cause me to lose my dream?’

So then it became…let me put it to you this way: I had a salary of about $15,000 a year and for the 1995 season I began using an SRM which at that point in time cost about $4,000. So I spent like a third of my salary on an SRM and the reason I did that is I thought ‘If I train with these scientific methods I can overcome the doping.’ And what I learned—I have so many years of SRM data—is that you actually can overcome quite a bit of that advantage with marginal gains and correct training. But there’s a limit.

That’s why I believe today that clean racing is possible, as long as anti-doping efforts are keeping everything in a box and keeping it controlled. Because at that point in time, you could increase your hematocrit say, from 39 to 60. That represents a 40-percent increase in red blood cell carrying mass. That’s not a 50-percent increase in oxygen carrying capacity. It can be 1:1 in the 40s and then it goes to half that and then two, so it’s not a linear relationship. But let’s imagine it’s 20-percent improvement, back in ‘the 60s’ as we call them (named for the hematocrit some riders were reaching). A 20-percent power gain! Good climbers in the peloton produced 5.5 and 6 watts per kilogram at threshold. That’s the same as today. The guy at 5.5—the worst climber of this group—takes EPO and goes up 20 percent—he’s now at 6.3, 6.4 watts per kilo. So he’s leapfrogged the most talented climber. And the guy at six goes to seven, and all of a sudden the mediocre climber’s at 6.25 and the good one’s at 7, well, where’s the guy who was at 5.5 who didn’t use EPO? Who’s actually a damn talented athlete. He’s in the grupetto. So when the gains are that huge, all of a sudden marginal gains become irrelevant.

There’s only so much you can do with better training and equipment.

Yeah. So people today look at that and say ‘There could still be doping.’ And yes, there could be. And is the biological passport flawless? No, it’s not. But what it does effectively do is tie things down so that the gains that can be made doping today are so small that you actually can overcome it with marginal gains—with better skinsuits and nutrition and this, that and the other. That was ludicrous in the ’90s! You have a better skinsuit. Great. Good job. You got 1 percent. That guy got 20. Bravo.

Still, there are some pretty interesting rationalizations you go through to convince yourself this is OK.

Imagine what Nunez went through. This guy basically had to talk to God every two hours and somehow rationalized it. That was shocking to me. He was the most idealistic person ever and somehow he did it.

Do you still talk to him?

No. When that team ended that year he was such a broken man. He literally disappeared. I don’t know how to get in touch with him. I would love to say, ‘Thank you for giving me the part to carry forward your dream.’ I wanted the same dream. But I feel bad because he, I think just imploded.

One of the rationalizations made for doping is that if everyone’s doing it, it’s a level playing field. People use that to argue that doping should be legal. Should it? Would that actually make a level field?

No. There are a few arguments on that. I’ll start with physiological and we’ll go to psychological. Physiologically, let’s go with oxygen vector doping. Humans have a variety of natural red blood cell counts. Some people have a hematocrit of 36 naturally, some people have a 52. Me, in an untrained state, riding 100k a week, I’m more—I’m like 53.

You needed a TUE [therapuetic use exemption—a certificate the UCI uses to allow something that would otherwise result in a positive test or health flag] to compete once they put in the [maximum hematocrit] 50-percent rule, right? Yeah, I submitted blood records back to my pediatric days. But for EPO, the person who’s at 36, whether there’s a 50 percent limit or not is irrelevant because the biggest improvement is in the low end, that thin blood range. That person, when they’re out training every day, their body is starved for oxygen and becomes extremely efficient at pulling oxygen from not very much hemoglobin. So you dump a big amount of red cells in that person who’s already very efficient and whoa! Are they going to go fast. Conversely you take a person at 47 and do the same thing. And let’s go to 60, say the limit isn’t 50 but that the limit is that you don’t stroke out and die. That person is not going to experience anywhere close to the difference. So people say, ‘Yeah, but that’s equalizing it out.’ But imagine the guys at 36 and 47 have exactly the same VO2 at threshold and they are neck-and-neck competitors their whole life, and one chooses to dope and the other says, ‘Well then I’ll dope too.’ Then one guy is going to go a lot faster and the other guy will go a little faster. And so you have guys that train the same, are very disciplined athletes and physiologically the same but one has a quirk that’s very adaptable to the drug du jour, then all of a sudden your race winner is determined not by who’s the best, some kind of Darwinian selection of who is the strongest and fittest, but whose physiology happened to be compatible with the drug, or to having 50 things in him.

Testosterone, it’s the same thing. Even broader, talking oxygen vector doping in general, it’s the same. If you have one rider who has small muscles and one who has very big muscles, the rider with big muscles can produce a lot of torque and power, but he can’t sustain it because the muscles don’t get enough oxygen. The guy with small muscles, he can’t produce as much torque but he can ride a long time. If EPO is detectable and steroids aren’t, the little skinny guy might make greater gains by doping than the big muscular guy. But if EPO is undetectable and steroids are, the little guy is screwed. So whatever is going on, you never end up where it’s a level playing field—it’s just whatever your physiology happens to be adapted to. So you make everything legal; you can do whatever. There’s only so many drugs invented, so the winner is whose physiology is most adaptable to having 50 things in them. It never ends up that who the best athlete is wins if you just let everyone do it.

Second, what about people who, even if it is legal, have health or moral concerns about it. So you say, ‘Hey guys, this is legal.’ And someone asks, “Wait, what are the long-term health consequences?’ ‘Well you could grow a horn out of your head, but if you want to do this, you have to dope.’ So you eliminate a lot of talented athletes who don’t want to do that. Because if you do make everything legal, believe me, some people are going to push things way beyond where they are now. So some people will say no to what is essentially suicide. So is the winner then the best athlete? No, it’s the guy who’s willing to risk his health more than anyone else. So how do you ever end up with parity in the playing field on that route? It’s not that my holier-than-thou position leads me to believe that pureness is the way forward; it’s that logic leads me to that conclusion. If you’re looking to find the best athlete who can win because he works the hardest and is the most talented and has good tactics and all that, then the path of opening the sport to doping is not a plausible one to end up at that objective.

Then that gets to a deeper question, which is what are we watching sports for? Do we just want to be entertained, or do we put certain values on it like that it’s a meritocracy that rewards that talented dedicated person who trains hard?

There are different answers for different sports. I think some sports are pure entertainment. But cycling is not a pure entertainment sport.

Really? Even though the Tour was started as a publicity stunt to sell newspapers?

Yeah, maybe in some of the older cycling countries that’s the case. But in America right now or some of the other countries that cycling is pushing into, people view it as part of a health and fitness movement. It’s ‘Say no to obesity and smoking’ and so on and so forth—a healthy lifestyle. So they want to know that their racers are ascribing to the same healthy approach they do. Certain sports like the NFL, that’s an entertainment sport. No one goes out and plays football in full pads because they want to stay heart healthy. So when people watch that, it’s gladiators, it’s entertainment. And if one of them gets busted for steroids are people that shocked? No. Telling someone that a football player who weighs 400 pounds at two percent body fat, that that person might be on steroids, that’s like telling someone smoking can cause cancer. But cycling is like their little nice organic salad in Boulder, and if someone comes up and says, ‘Your little nice organic salad is going to cause cancer,’ you are going to freak out. Because that’s not the expectation we have.

You mentioned athletes who walk away for moral reasons, and you mentioned that in your op-ed. What is that loss? Who were they, people who never made it?

The best example is Christophe Bassons. It’s funny, some of the reaction I got on Twitter is a little off. You read about this guy who doped for the fondo, that’s a little disturbing. I don’t want to seem callous, but I saw very few pro riders who made it into the pro ranks because they doped. People made it because they were good and the most talented. There are exceptions but they were just that. People say, ‘Well my buddy was really good in X race,’ and so they’d have been a pro if not for doping. But from my experience at a top European team, the neo-pros were always clean. People told me in the early to mid-2000s that that changed and there was more prolific doping among amateurs. But my experience, and my generation, the guys who got into pro ranks got there on talent and hard work. What they did from there was another story. That’s my experience; I can only speak to that. Did I win Tour of Gila clean at 21? Absolutely. Of course.

Just like, say, Tyler almost certainly won Fitchburg clean.

Just like Tyler won Fitchburg clean. Killington, same thing. And then all of a sudden that comes into question—like ‘Maybe they were doping then. Oh my God, I was in college and I could have beaten him!’ Tyler along with myself, I think most of these people held out as long as they could and finally collapsed into the decision because they wanted to race at the highest level. It had nothing to do with, ‘I want to win Fitchburg.’ That’s just ludicrous. So you have a guy like Bassons, who is by far the best example of someone hurt by doping. He was a talented, talented rider. He was intelligent and outspoken. He came from less of a rough background than a lot of people, and he decided after the Festina scandal to become outspoken. He’d never doped, but he felt the environment was right [to talk]. So he could have just, he was talented enough to have still had a solid mediocre career as a pro kicking around doing OK in some races. He won a stage of the Dauphine. Who knows how good he would’ve been in a totally clean environment, but even as it was, he was the rare exception of the guy who could say, ‘I can be mediocre (clean) because I’m a damn talented rider. I can dope and become really damn good. Or I can walk away.’ And he walked away.Did he really choose to walk away? He was treated pretty poorly.

He was made fun of and pushed away because he was outspoken about it. I’ll tell you, I don’t know if he remembers or not but I would come up to him, and I didn’t speak much French at the time but I would pat him on the back and say, ‘Hey, how are you doing?’ I’d try to talk to him and encourage him because I felt like what he was doing was right. But I didn’t want anyone to see me. I felt like what he was doing was correct and quite frankly, it was not very courageous of me. I would try to talk to him quietly when no one was looking and say, ‘Hang in there,’ but did I ever do that publicly or loudly? No.

It’s interesting that being clean and outspoken led to poor treatment, but you felt it was such a toxic environment that even supporting him was dangerous. Why was that? I mean, if most of these guys don’t want to dope, then why would it be unpopular to support the guy who was saying he was clean?

Yeah. Because of the group. It was the whole peloton. It wasn’t one person, the pack was angry at him for talking about doping.

Was the sense that by talking about being clean he was implicitly accusing others of doping?

Did he really do that?

I mean was it same dynamic you got in the first year or so of Slipstream as a Pro Continental team, where people would grumble that in talking about yourselves being clean the inference was that they weren’t?

Well, you can only talk about yourself. You can’t say, “I know he’s clean.” It was a pack mentality with Bassons.

Betsy Andreu says that you were the anonymous Postal teammate who admitted to doping in that 2006 New York Times article alongside Frankie.

Well, I can’t really comment on that, but I am glad that Frankie wasn’t left to twist in the wind completely alone.

Would you consider Bassons a victim?

Yes. I don’t think he would. He’d see himself as someone who was brave, walked away and now has another job. But Bassons is the kind of guy who could’ve gotten better results had the playing field been level. But there’s also guys you could say they doped but because their physiology wasn’t coupled to it that they were victims, even though they WERE doping! You can go on and on about who was and wasn’t a victim.

Who clearly ISN’T a victim? Is there a group of people—coaches, managers, doctors, who are pretty clearly deserving of nothing but blame? Someone had to push this to happen.

Who started it? I don’t know.

What about Ferrari?

There were the Dutch guys before him! Ferrari, I don’t know what the inflection point is. Someone like Fuentes isn’t a victim though, I don’t think.

Johannes Draijjer died in, what, 1989?

I think so. And EPO would have been in phase II or III clinical trial at that point. It’s very hard to say who was the first to really push it.

So just to pick a starting point, let’s say Festina, because that really exposed for the first time how huge of a problem EPO and oxygen vector doping was—how widespread it was. The problem has been festering for decades. Is there a point where you say we need to go back and get all of this out to move forward, or do you draw a line in the sand and say, ‘From this point forward, everyone has to be clean, but we don’t look back.’

I think my perspective is you have recognize the past; you can’t ignore it or deny it. Just because people may think this is the first time I’ve recognized it, privately or to anyone who was concerned about doping or had an interest in preventing it, I’ve always been open and very aware of what I did and to deal with it. So first, you have to deal with it and understand what went wrong and use that to learn how to prevent it. If you ignore the past, how do you learn from it? Then, you move forward. So you use that knowledge to prevent things in the future. This is something I’ve thought is a good idea for a long time, but USADA proposed a truth and reconciliation committee. I think that’s a great idea.

There are so many skeletons in the closet—how much of that do we have to go through before we move on?

I won’t comment on specifics, but it’s widely assumed by a lot of people that I doped on the Mont Ventoux. So the comment is ‘You should give up that record.’ Well, actually I don’t have it. Iban Mayo does. OK, he should give it up. To me? OK, so second place was Vinokourov. Who was third? Beloki? [Actually Wladimir Belli—Beloki was fourth]. I’m fine. I will give up that record. Who do I give it to? Who do I give that prize money to? The organizer? They’re gone. I could give it to ASO.

Would you do that if asked?

I feel like the most fair thing would be to give it to anti-doping. To a fund or something that supports that. I have no desire to be known as a record holder on Ventoux. I don’t need that. I’m happy to give it up, but I don’t know who to give it up to.

There’s a lot of that kind of uncertainty. Look at Riis—he admits to doping to win the 1996 Tour and gives back his jerseys, but when you go to the ASO website he’s still listed as the winner, I think in part because of what you mention. You look at the top ten overall that year and it’s full of caught, admitted, or suspected dopers. So how does the truth and reconciliation commission work then—do you have to just forgive everything?

I think you have to treat people fairly. What fairly is, is tricky to define. I really think that it’s something I’d be happy to talk to WADA about, but it’s very tricky because there are certain people in cycling who are not only looking to tread water and it’s that they have to do this but they’re actively pushing and looking for something more. And those people are very often not athletes, but they’re managers or doctors.

And to me that’s where it gets tricky. In that aspect, you have young men who are impressionable and ambitious and in love with their sport. They will do anything to win a race in front of Mom. Those people are older, in positions in a lot of power, how they mentor that athlete makes a big difference. Are they saying ‘Let’s look at a drug that’s in phase III clinical trials and see if we can get you some. Let’s do something above and beyond.’ To me, those people, I think that’s where the tricky question is—that’s where it becomes what’s too serious to forgive, and I don’t now the exact answer but I do feel like you have to be very fair in a truth and reconciliation process, but those who manipulated young athletes to take a path they might not have otherwise taken, that’s tricky. Imagine the outcry if me, I was steering athletes to dope. If that happened, is that the athlete’s fault? Maybe. But it sure as shit is my fault. There’s no question there. You can debate the athlete and his mindset and whether he should have said no and there will be a million people with a million answers to that, but there’s no debate on the managers who pushed them there, no debate at all.

Which is a big problem, because a lot of people who are managers now came from the athlete side and have their own skeletons in the closet. How do we decide which of them are allowed to be in the sport and which not?

I think you need a broad truth and reconciliation process, and the decision needs to be left in the hands of impartial deciders. WADA would be most apt at managing that, but that’s where I think it has to go. The thing is that the improvements we’ve already made—we focus on what can be done—but we’re so far there. It’s not perfect, but that decision of dope or get out, that’s just not there anymore. We’ve come a long way. I realized Jose Luis Nunez’s dream.

Is that what we should try for—clean enough?

Think about it this way. Take it out of doping context and take it to cheating. Can you prevent 100 percent of facemask penalties in the NFL? You can go on and on. How many facemasks occur that don’t get called. Is it a lot? Probably not.

And the fewer facemasks that happen that do get called, the more people will do that.

Yeah, and so testing is the same thing. If you pull back testing, there’s fewer positives and scandals, but more doping. Increase the testing, more scandals, more positives, but less doping. That’s what are we after. If the goal is, to me, that the most talented rider on the best team with the best tactics can win and often does win, then we’re there. Is it possible that a cheater would win? Yes. Is it probable? No. That’s less than idealistic, but dammit you have to be pragmatic about solving it. The black-and-white approach, quite frankly, hasn’t worked. Keeping consistent progress that it’s always getting better. Perfect doesn’t exist in the universe. There’s no perfect snowflake. For religion, God is perfection, but as a human condition, perfect doesn’t exist. So of course we’re shooting for the best possible.

So how would you characterize the progress so far?

Enormous. There’s no passport in distance running, for example. They have hematocrit testing. There’s EPO testing, but no passport.

How would you characterize the job the sport has done in telling that story?

I think that the people working—the biopassport has been very effective in dissuading doping and preventing doping.

Even though we haven’t had a biopassport case in a few years?

Even though we haven’t had a case in years. I think it’s been very effective at keeping it so a clean talented rider can win races. The people running that are doing a good job. I get the mean data of the entire peloton because I sit on the anti-doping funding board committee, not like ‘Fabian Cancellara’s data’ but the broad numbers—and it’s getting better and better. If you draw a line from 1996 to now, it’s like [angles hand down]. Hematocrit, hemoglobin, off score, it’s all going in the right direction. That’s great. Has that been communicated very well? No!

I didn’t know that.

It has not been communicated well. That’s a pity.

Could the UCI use that data?

Why can’t they release that data? They absolutely should do that. That’s exactly what should happen. But the problem now is you’ve got such a shrill outcry that the question is who is the right person to communicate that data? Who from cycling does the public trust to come forward and say here is the data? I’m asking you.

What about Francesca Rossi? Or they could give it to Mike Ashenden. Someone from WADA?

The mean data is very encouraging and it’s a pity that that’s not communicated more, but it has to come from someone who people trust or they won’t believe it. That’s a problem that cycling faces right now is that the person to communicate that, who is it, who would the public and the media will believe? The info is there, but someone’s got to deliver the message and I don’t know who that is.

The call to legalize doping seems to come from a sense of fatigue—people don’t want to find out one, two, five years later that what they watch is all bullshit.

I agree; I want that too. But there is a certain amount of collateral damage in the effort for clean sport. That’s just the way it is. I understand why people are tired of it. As I’ve always said there’s a huge lag between perception and reality. The reality in 1996 was very, very, very bleak. Who was talking about doping in 1996?

Paul Kimmage.

OK, Paul was. One guy. Now, the problem is in a very good place. It’s not perfect but it’s better than I’ve ever seen it. And right now doping is far more of a topic. So I feel like it might be another 10-year lag time before finally the perception catches up.

So what do you do for that 10 years?

You have to keep on keeping on. People say, ‘The media needs to stop talking about it.’ Or ‘JV, you need to stop talking about it.’ I’m not talking about it because I want to. Let’s talk about wine! This is not a pleasure for me. I want my job to be focused on finding the next Andrew Talansky. But the fact is that right now it’s in the forum and, for those of us in the sport, you deal with it honestly and transparently. Or else, it just drags on.

So that’s my question about festering—how much of this has to come out?

At this point in time you’re two-thirds of the way through a dark tunnel; backing up is not an option. You’ve just gotta go through the other damn side. It continues to fester. ‘Oh let it go.’ No. It’s like if you have an argument with your wife. A bad one. Do you ever let it go? No. Over time you talk it out and come to some reconciliation. If you say ‘We’ll discuss this another time; let’s just enjoy the evening.’ Then great, but it comes back the next week or day or month. The only time that those fights come to a positive resolution is when you actually work it all the way through.

You mentioned we’re in a better place than we’ve been in, but in the op-ed you also mentioned better enforcement. What do we need?

Listen—I personally think that there are a few steps to take. Some that are for optics reasons and some for real reasons. Money is a big one. I feel that despite that everyone bitches and moans that anti-doping costs a lot, race promoters complain about this, but teams fund most of it. And as president of the teams union I feel we need more funding (for anti-doping). Race organizers are the most profitable entity in the sport in Europe, but ASO puts less than one percent of its profits to anti-doping. They need to put in a much larger sum of money. But there’s hesitation. Why? Because everyone wonders if their money is being used efficiently and correctly. Right now you have the governing body of the sport, which is promoting the sport worldwide and running its own races, and they do anti-doping. There should be greater funding and greater separation of church and state.

That’s not to say that Francesca Rossi shouldn’t be doing what she’s doing. She should absolutely do it. But maybe ultimate auditory power comes from WADA or a third party. UCI anti-doping is doing a good job, but when I go to team managers and say, ‘We should put in more money,’ I almost get spit in my face. They’re like ‘Fuck that. Why would I put in more money to an organization that only seeks to hurt my team? Not through anti-doping, but by forcing us to do races they make money off of, by imposing regulations that are counterproductive to sponsorship and to innovation in sport. This is an organization that is fundamentally hurting my organization over and over again, and I’m supposed to contribute more money to THEM? Forget about it!’ There are conflicts of interest that need to be resolved. I think every team in cycling would be willing to double their contribution and the race promoters would too if they absolutely trusted the process. That doesn’t mean it’s perfect, but they trust the process. It’s irrelevant whether there’s truth to it, but if there’s not trust to it it doesn’t work.

That raises the specter of corruption. Is that a legit question?

I don’t know. I honestly don’t know what to think about that. There’s the story of the 2001 positive [Landis alleges that the UCI helped cover up an Armstrong positive from that year]. Listen, I don’t know what happened, but what I do know is that if you want to prevent criticism, you move ultimate power to a third party and it eliminates the possibility of that criticism. Why are we not doing that? Why do we want to have that criticism? I don’t know. Let’s prevent anyone ever thinking that’s the case at all.

Disparity in punishment is another issue on those lines. People are confused because Valverde gets two years, Contador gets two but it’s partly backdated, and Gregory Bauge gets titles taken away but can race again immediately. How can we clear that up?

You can always improve the judiciary process. It’s difficult—it’s not as cut and dried. There are so many facts in those case files presented to CAS (The Court of Arbitration for Sport) that they take into account that the public doesn’t read. I haven’t looked at the evidence in the Bauge case vs. Contador vs. Valverde. So as long as we get to the point where that process is trusted you have to accept that arbiters are trying to get to the best they can.

What do you mean ‘the process?’

All the way beginning to end, not just arbitration. The entire process needs to be more transparent and audited. CAS is most of these things. You can always improve it. The undertow of the op-ed was: always push forward. No matter what you think about the present, future, past, you have to push forward or it will creep back in. At the end of the day, as I’ve said, without those guys, what my team accomplished and the ability for me to write that op-ed and have it accomplish something, without those guys that’s not possible. Without, in Frankie’s case, just being honest and Floyd and Tyler eventually being honest, it just doesn’t happen.

What do you think your punishment should be?

I think I did give myself punishment. I walked away from an existing two-year deal worth quite a bit of money.

Even though Roger told you the team would support you racing clean?

Yeah.

So why did you walk away?

Because I could feel his subtle and never overt or explicit disappointment that I could get third at Tour of the Med and second in the Midi Libre TT and I pulled off good results but when it came to the Tour, I never quite had it. Even in the weeklong races, I was never quite podium. I was close. So basically my mind was ‘OK, I know he is saying he doesn’t want me to dope. But he wants me to dope.’ Well, no, that’s not fair to Roger. He didn’t want me to dope. What I observed was that Roger was getting extremely concerned that the team didn’t have the points to stay in the top division and race the Tour. And I could see the sweat beads on his forehead of ‘If we don’t do well in this race…’ and he was getting concerned for his organization. He had put us at the precipice, the end of the [Division I] classification even though we had a very talented team, because we were clean. I wanted to help. I wanted to get results so the team wasn’t in that bad position. I was on an existing contract so I wasn’t financially incentivized to do so. And it put me in a place where I was prepared to start doping again.

And at that point it was just too…for me it became that there were too many forces coming in at the same time. There was Roger who needed points, Roger saying, ‘Please don’t dope.’ There was the wasp sting where Roger said, ‘We need to be honest,’ but others said, ‘What are you crazy, that you didn’t just put a TUE in your medical file?’ and there were persistent rumors that tons of people were still blood doping and it was all compounding. I finally was just about to independently—no doctor, nothing—but do it myself. Do it right, do as much as I could and I don’t know.

There had been too much crap in that period of seven, eight years where it all got muddy. There was so much hope when the EPO test came out. It was like ‘Oh, now it’s gonna change. OK.’ Or when the FFC did longitudinal testing, we hoped that would be broadly adapted. Or this test and that test. There was a lot of hope. But the hope was not coming to reality. It wasn’t materializing at that period of time and eventually I gave up hope. I knew that by doping I would disappoint Roger but by doing poorly I would also disappoint Roger. And by doping I would disappoint fans back home. But by not getting top 10 at the Tour—and I was the perennial top-10 hope in L’Equipe—and I knew that was never going to happen and I was sick of coming back to Colorado and having all my friends say, ‘Man, I thought this year you’d be up there, but too bad about that crash.’ And yeah, I crashed. But I crashed because I was descending like a madman after getting dropped on the climb. If I hadn’t got dropped I wouldn’t have pushed it on the descent like that. You’re sick of disappointing everyone.

You want a penalty? I pulled the plug on my dream at a very young age. I pulled the plug on hundreds of thousands of dollars. I didn’t get paid that racing for Prime Alliance or selling real estate. I quit because I was just so psychologically tormented that I couldn’t deal with it. That doesn’t mean I have a halo that, ‘I’m not going to dope.’ I had a frickin’ fridge stocked with every doping element known to mankind and I just was like, ‘I can’t do it.’

So you bought it and didn’t use it?

Correctly, no, I used some of it. I started to build for the Tour and a quarter of the way I was just like, ‘I…can’t…DO this anymore.’

So it didn’t for you feel like a moral victory to walk away?

No, I felt horrible. I felt like relief like ‘Ugh, it’s over.’ It finally got to the point that the tension and pressure of trying to create a new career from nothing, with no college degree, of saying, ‘I have no skills but somehow I’ll figure out how to make a living and support my family,’ that was less than having a secure job paying hundreds of thousands a year but this weird torment of the decision hanging over you.

I quit because of that decision. Not because of being morally repugnant to me in my mind. I couldn’t deal with the, ‘I should, I shouldn’t, I should, I shouldn’t, I should, I shouldn’t.’ I mean, that’s literally what was in my head for years. Sometimes the answer was ‘I shouldn’t!’ and sometimes it was, ‘I should.’ Then the EPO test comes along and it’s like I shouldn’t because this will clean things up, and then, ‘Wait a minute, everyone’s somehow getting around this test.’ I remember finally learning that if you inject EPO to the vein as opposed to subcutaneously that it cleared much more quickly. So you’ll never get caught! But what if you MISS THE VEIN? How will you know? EPO is like a tiny, nothing little bit of liquid. If you miss the vein, I mean, I’m not a nurse or doctor. You wouldn’t even know you did it. And then boom. Oh shit. So ‘Should I, Shouldn’t I?’ Choo-choo. It was time to get off the crazy train.

I stepped away voluntarily before I was at any risk of getting caught. If WADA decides I need more punishment, OK, I will take my lumps. There has been punishment. Maybe people don’t see that. Go back and see where I was in 2003. It wasn’t so happy.

So you started the junior team in 2004. You knew what pro racing was like. Why would you start a junior team to feed kids into that slaughterhouse?

I started showing up to local races with Prime. And I started to realize ‘This is fun!’ I didn’t know bike racing was fun anymore. I had no idea it was enjoyable for anyone. I’m so happy I did that half-year as a pseudo pro. Because I realized it was fun again. So when I started the junior team I just enjoyed watching them progress and win races. But it didn’t hit me. Peter Stetina and Alex Howes were on the team. It didn’t occur to me that these guys might one day be pro. It occurred to me later on and that’s when Alex and Peter were about to become pros, that’s when I began to become a zealot about anti-doping. It was like ‘Oh my Lord. These kids, I brought them into this, I better damn well do everything I can—I can’t be complicit to the broader confederacy—so I have to start stepping out there and being vocal and doing everything in my power to prevent them from being put in that situation.’

Did you ever sit them down and tell them, plainly, what it was like right then?

Yeah, with some of them. I’m an eternal optimist, so I would also tell them, ‘Don’t worry! By the time you get there this would be fixed.’

Did you have any idea how that was going to happen?

No, but I had the feeling things were going in the right direction. The scandals popping up in 2005, ’06, ’07, it was like, there’s enough pressure that it’ll force change. I was confident watching these 18-19 year old guys that the environment from those scandals, they were going to be the impetus to be different by the time they got there.

You’ve said your experience lets you know your team is clean. How?

Some of that is pure data. I can read blood tests very well. Because I’m not in the position of having to be 99.999 percent sure someone is doping, like anti-doping authorities, I can look at a test and say, ‘Oh, that doesn’t look right.’ And I can act on that. The UCI reviews biopassport data, but I do too.

Have you ever seen something that worried you?

Yes, but the key is context. You’re just looking at the data as the UCI, but the biggest thing I look at ‘How is this guy riding at the time of this test?’ I look at what the rider’s attitude is, where they are in the contract cycle—could they be in a desperate situation right now? What their family situation? How they act around the other riders. All of that data tells you if this a high-risk situation or not. So I’m more involved on a day-to-day basis and that lets you discover if there’s a pathology that’s responsible for certain values. Ultimately what you want is to look at correlation between results and values. And ideally it’s disparate—there’s no correlation at all. That happens a lot. If there’s correlation, that’s a problem.

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