BOB STAPLETON doesn't need to be here, and he doesn't need to be doing this. In 2000, the 50-year-old Californian sold his communications company to the German telecommunications giant T-Mobile for $50bn, only to be approached by the same company s
even years later, and presented with a most unusual challenge.
Stapleton, who with his caramel tan and neatly trimmed goatee is your archetypal Silicon Valley entrepreneur, likes a challenge, and he loves the sport of cycling.
Knowing this, T-Mobile identified him as the man to clean up their team, which by the end of 2006 was costing them £8m a year and dragging their name through the mud. Doping scandals cost them their leader, Jan Ullrich; now it threatened their reputation.
They needed a leader, someone with authority, charisma, and preferably with no previous involvement in the drug-riddled world of professional cycling. Stapleton, they decided, was the man.
Stapleton accepted the challenge wide-eyed – a little too wide-eyed, as it turned out.
No sooner had he arrived at T-Mobile with his broom than the cupboard door swung open and skeletons began tumbling out. His broom struggled to cope with the deluge of allegations concerning the team in the pre-Stapleton days, but the final straw, for the sponsors, was Patrik Sinkewitz's positive test for testosterone, announced mid-way through last year's Tour de France.
When T-Mobile withdrew their backing, Stapleton could have walked away. But he didn't. Instead, he used the reported £8m payoff from the German company to run the team for one more season, using the name of his own company, High Road Sports, until a new backer was found – or rather if, in such a climate of doping and credit crunch, a new backer could be found.
Two days ago, six months ahead of schedule, Stapleton unveiled a new title sponsor, Columbia Sportswear. Yet still the question persists: why is he here?
Surely his enthusiasm has been dented; surely he has questioned whether it is worth the hassle, especially when he could be at home in California, counting his billions.
"Oh yeah," says Stapleton, "you bet. But I made a commitment to these riders, particularly these young guys (among them Britain's Mark Cavendish]. But yeah, I came in (to T-Mobile], tried to do things, it didn't work, and there's a whole world of things to do out there.
"But," he adds with an extravagant shrug of the shoulders, "I didn't want to burn these guys; I didn't want to shut down the team and put a bunch of guys, who'd done nothing wrong, out of a job.
"We've shown this year that we can win (the men and women of Team High Road having registered almost 50 victories], by looking for every possible legal advantage and working it.
"I hadn't planned to look for a sponsor this year, but things have gone so well. Cycling is the most cost-effective way of reaching a big audience in Europe – it's more cost effective than football or Formula One.
"And in terms of audience, the Tour is the third most popular event in the world, after the Olympics and soccer World Cup.
"Any intelligent sponsor is going to want to have assurances that credible action is being taken against doping. An internal anti-doping programme is part of our business plan; but you don't achieve much by being clean and non-competitive. You have to win, too. And I think we are proving you can.
"We're not going to win this Tour de France, but we can create excitement."
The cynic
"I believe nothing I see any more""MY NAME is Philippe Van Holle. I'm a journalist with La Derniere Heure Les Sports in Belgium and I've covered every Tour de France since 1994.
"As far as drugs are concerned, I'm not optimistic any more. I know most athletes, in all sports, are capable of doing anything to reach their goal – that's a fact.
"Last year was bad but the Festina affair, in 1998, was bigger. It was the first time we had such a big drugs scandal and it involved a whole team. In 1998 we were not expecting it. Now we expect it.
"But more spectacular than (Michael] Rasmussen (the Dane expelled from last year's race for missing out-of-competition drugs tests] was Alexandre Vinokourov (the Kazakh caught blood-doping]. Vino was a nice guy; a nice man. You could feel that in his mind he felt forced to do what he did.
"I was pretty optimistic when I heard they had developed a reliable new test for EPO. But that was for two brands of EPO, and it was before the market really opened up. Previously, there were only two or three labs capable of producing EPO. Now, with the markets opening up, there are maybe 15 labs – and still a test for two types, not 15. So no, I'm not optimistic.
"There are (biological] passports now (which monitor a rider's 'normal' blood profile in terms of concentration of red blood cells and other characteristics] and that's good, but here in the Tour, they don't have the information from the passports because ASO (the organisers of the Tour] have fallen out with the UCI (cycling's world governing body].
"Can I believe in this year's Tour de France? No. I don't think it's possible to have a race we believe in, or a winner we believe in.
"I always have doubts now. In all my articles now I am careful. I remember when (Bjarne] Riis (who admitted last year to having used EPO to win the 1996 Tour] won, I wrote how fantastic it was; how he would look in the other riders' eyes and then attack. Wow! It was amazing.
"But since then, no. I won't herald someone as a great champion."
The great champion
"I wish they'd say, 'f*** this old bastard' just once"ASKED on one occasion what he did if he ever felt tired, or found himself struggling, Bernard Hinault shrugged: "I attack – so the others don't know that I am tired."
With his jaw fixed in an angry snarl, and sheer rage in his eyes, Hinault dominated the Tour de France – and countless other races – through the sheer force of his personality, until his final victory of five in 1985.
He raced – as the above quote suggests – with panache; when he wore the yellow jersey of Tour leader he sat at the front of the peloton, not, as most do, in a protective cocoon of team-mates.
"He wanted not just to win, but to dominate; not just to taste victory, but to crush his rivals in the process.
With this Tour starting in Hinault's native Brittany, he has rarely been so much in demand. Or lamented. The Breton farmer, who said that his favourite pastime as a schoolboy was fighting, remains – after a shocking 23 years – the last Frenchman to win the Tour. It is almost as if each successive generation of French cyclists has been inhibited, and felt unworthy of inheriting the mantle of the cyclist known as Le Blaireau – the badger – for his tendency to fight if backed into a corner.
These days, some of Hinault's mystique has disappeared.
He is an ambassador for the Tour, a role that sees him on the podium each day, congratulating the winner and presenting the yellow jersey. But his aura remains. Tanned, and with his familiar face lined and worn, he is still formidable. And a little frightening.
Speaking yesterday at the Start Village in Brest, Hinault posited the theory that his countrymen remain frightened of him. "For me, I always tried to get something from the older riders, by speaking to them," said Hinault.
"Today's (French] riders are scared of me, which I don't understand. I am quite harsh about them because I know your career is very short, and it pains me to see them not showing their full potential or reaching their capacity.
"I'd love it if one of them said to me one of these days, 'F*** this old bastard, I'm going to make him shut his mouth' – and then on the podium they could say, 'You see?' That would be great!"
One other anecdote about Hinault – which perhaps explains why the young riders appear to be scared of him – comes from Paris-Nice in the early 1980s.
Striking workers blocked the road, stopping the race, but Hinault was having none of it. At full pelt he rode into the strikers, sending them scattering, and swinging punches at those that remained standing.
He sustained a fractured rib in the melee. And still managed to finish the race.
The rookie rider
"We're a clean team. We're something you can believe in"AT HIS team presentation on Friday, Adam Hansen, a 27-year-old Australian making his Tour debut, said that he was looking forward to his three-week "holiday" in France. "I'll start in Brest," he explained, deadpan, "and just follow the guys around France; maybe take in a few beaches, mountains… I'm looking forward to it."
Really? "Nah, I am a bit nervous," he admitted. Hansen is unusual. While most Tour riders start young, as a child his sporting passions were rugby and chess. "An unusual combination," he admits, "but I captained my school at both."
Then he turned to basketball, swimming, running, which led him into triathlons, which led him into cycling. From mountain biking he graduated to road racing and turned professional for T-Mobile – now Team Columbia – in 2007.
All of which brings him to his first Tour. The sport's doping problems have dominated recent editions, but Hansen doesn't think he will suffer by riding clean.
"I think we have an advantage on riders who might not be clean," he suggests. "They rely on something, they are dependent on something external to do well. When a rider wins on our team it has a snowball effect on the rest of us; we can all see what's possible."
Hansen's job is to look after his young British team-mate, Mark Cavendish, a specialist sprinter.
"That's my job, to take him to the last kilometre, which does put quite a lot of pressure on me. But Mark's a good guy. If you help him he makes you feel special. He shouts at you in the final kilometres, usually just instructions, but you know when he's ready.
"He never, ever asks us to work if he's not up for it; he only gets us to work when he really believes he can win. That's what makes him a good leader; someone you want to ride for.
"In the mountains it'll be a different story; that's when you could have that thought (that others are doping] at the back of your mind, but you try and suppress that to focus on what you're doing. I think it's really positive now that if a rider tests positive the whole team suffers. That's good.
"Hopefully it puts the right pressure on, and puts the responsibility on teams to do it the clean way."
The full article contains 1868 words and appears in Scotland On Sunday newspaper.
