Rolling thunder, A CYCLING TALE, part dice
Following is Part 10 of “rolling thunder”
Subject to copyright. Please enjoy responsibly.
ROLLING THUNDER (cont’d)
Chapter 20
Shamus lost focus on assisting the investigation once the Classics kicked off. It wasn’t possible to race well with your mind on other things. He felt he was losing ground with Eve, as well, since she was completely engulfed in it now, and he was similarly immersed in trying to win bike races.
When Shamus asked Eve what was taking so long with the investigation, given the large amount of information they’d unearthed from the cache of computer records they’d taken form Patrovski’s hotel room, and the signed confessions they’d obtained from two of his associates, she laughed heartily at his suggestion that the case seemed to be moving slowly. By her experience, the progress was anything but glacial; it was just that there were seemingly thousands of loose ends to tie up before the whole package came forward into the light of day.
Certainly, if they merely wanted to make arrests, Patrovski, Aguillar, and Pagnoli would be on their way to various prisons without further delay. But then the roles they played in the larger scheme of the doping business would be filled overnight by others willing to take their place, and no real progress would have been made in this battle.
Shamus asked what had become of these men, and was further astounded to hear that they continued to operate their businesses, albeit with a new partner.
Eve explained that if the three suddenly went AWOL, their contacts would react first by covering their trails and eliminating evidence linking them to the men, and then they’d resuscitate their operations using different middlemen. If this occurred, Interpol’s work would be substantially hampered, and the network would remain intact. To mitigate this risk, Patrovski, Aguillar, and Pagnoli were each assigned to the custody of Interpol agents who would ensure business-as-usual prevailed until the prosecutors determined they had sufficient evidence to win cases against the targeted parties.
She further explained that the men had substantial motivation to cooperate, as any leniency in their own cases hung on the successful prosecution of the targeted individuals. Therefore, any attempts to warn or guard their colleagues or associates, would be paid for with additional prison time and penalties on their own behalf.
Already the three men felt the sting of their crimes, as their bank accounts had been secured, and even to buy a cappuccino they needed a disbursement from their agent-in-charged. This aspect wouldn’t get any better, no matter the outcome of the case. All of the money the men had accumulated from their activities, they had signed agreements to turn over to their respective country’s government when the case concluded. That had been a non-negotiable term that the prosecutors had laid down. All profits were to be returned. Left in question, was the amount of possible prison time they would face, on top of the financial penalty. Relatively young men put a premium value on avoiding, or at least minimizing time behind bars. Eve assured Shamus that the men thus far were continuing to play their roles.
Shamus grudgingly accepted that Eve’s work took unfathomable amounts of time, and that the apparent bureaucracy was necessary, but it didn’t sit well at all with him that the authorities had co-opted with the criminals to keep delivering drugs to athletes for the time being. Not only was it morally reprehensible, but also it made his day job of chasing these juiced riders just that much more difficult.
They talked often, though usually only for brief periods during which breaks in his riding schedule eclipsed those in her work. Although he missed her physical presence enormously, he was nevertheless comforted more than he would have guessed possible by the knowledge and continuous affirmation that someone was there for him. That she was smart, pretty, exotically French, and dangerous, pleased him all the more. She’d have no problems keeping him safe and happy as they grow old together, he mused to himself.
Eve worked around the clock, and with little care for the day of week, in order to bring things to a successful end as quickly as possible. She had many reasons to conduct herself this way. She knew that cases often swung on timing and momentum. The sooner one investigated a crime, the more fresh was the evidence, and the more available were the resources. Nobody wanted to work a cold case. And when things were working to an investigator’s favor, one had to move quickly before the door of opportunity slammed closed somehow. She’d seen many times how a strong case with good momentum suddenly was sidelined as a result of political conflicts, competition for resources, a new and more newsworthy case capturing the public’s attention, local law enforcement taking actions that unwittingly weakened a case, someone finding out about the existence of informants, and making them disappear, or evidence disappearing, or expiration of time to bring forward the case. The longer it took, the greater chance that information about the investigation leaked, or that someone involved in it finally made a sloppy mistake, endangering the entire affair.
Eve also worked feverishly, because selfishly, she wanted it off her desk and onto the prosecutor’s lap by the time Shamus finished his Tour de France at the end of July, so that they could be together again. She missed him madly, and was only partially comforted by the knowledge that so long as he was on the road, he had little chance of meeting any other girl who might divert his interests.
Finally, and selfishly again, she thought to herself, she wanted to wrap this up because the case had taken years to form, gotten to a promising stage before, then stalled completely until they’d come across Shamus – and now they seemed to be inches from success again, in the biggest case she’d ever worked on. Daily the newspapers rang out about further doping allegations, touching such improbable sports as golf and cricket, and even kayaking and rock climbing. What would be next, she thought, water ballet? Every such article added fuel to the fire under her and Michael Steineger to bring forth their case, and demonstrate to the world that the authorities were moving swiftly and effectively to dismantle the entire industry of athletic doping. That meant getting into the knickers of the people at the top of the food chain, not just bringing middleman merchants up on charges.
She toiled days on the phone with police agencies in dozens of countries that served as the long arm of Interpol, executing the work that needed to be done on their end. Every country had varying laws and regulations, and many had more than one law enforcement agency that might have a role, so each such coordination entailed extensive involvement of Interpol’s lawyers to ensure the right agencies were used in appropriate ways, else the case suffer a setback.
She spent considerable time coordinating with sports authorities, bringing them in to the extent helpful but at the same time being extraordinarily careful not to expose too much of the case. These sports authorities and their contractual arrangements with athletes and teams had a nebulous standing legally, in terms of their role in enforcing anti-doping rules. What they had much more clearly, was a propensity to chatter to the press when they felt self-served, and a corresponding lack of regard for the privacy of the athlete or for the integrity of the legal case, if either got in the way of their own goals. Steineger managed this aspect of the case very closely, so as not to inadvertently flame the fires of publicity seeking bureaucrats among these agencies, or alternatively place one or more in a defensive posture, leading them to damagingly leak information about the investigation, so as to deflect from problems or errors on their own organization’s behalf.
The conference room nearest her office in Paris had now become a data room, hazardously stacked high with ream after ream of paper in meticulously organized files. One match or cigarette could have ignited an inferno, for all the paper the room held. For that reason, a no-smoking policy was not only in place, but nowhere else in Paris was it better enforced. Eve knew each file and each paper. She’d compiled much of it, and read with intense scrutiny all of it. She was supremely confident in her ability to find any document needed out of the hundreds of thousands they’d gathered, in moments. The dark circles under her eyes reflected the immense effort she’d put into preparing as well organized a case as she could conceive of. Staying so busy as she had done, kept her mind off of how much she missed the rest of her life, and especially the part with Shamus that had been put on hold until her work was finished.
Before she could believe it, July rolled around, and the Tour de France was at hand.
Eve allowed herself a break long enough to visit Shamus for an extended weekend before it got underway. She knew he’d be preoccupied with team presentations, press interviews, and simply preparing for the race, so she tempered her expectations about how much, or how little, time they might actually spend together. Any thoughts of carousing and enjoying the nightlife were banished.
Steineger had been supportive in working out arrangements for her to take a short leave, notwithstanding that the staff of the French prosecutor general was deeply involved in reviewing the case in preparation to take it to court. They strongly resisted allowing her to take any break, since nobody knew the files as intimately and encyclopedically as she did. Steineger kept them at bay, convincing them that several months of around the clock work was at risk should Madamoiselle Blancon suffer from a nervous breakdown, which could not be ruled out at this point. As the debate continued, he’d had a car take her to the train station where she was given a piece of luggage packed with Eve’s clothing and other necessities by Steineger’s secretary, and put aboard a train. Once the train had departed for Bruges, Steineger informed the attorneys that it was no longer necessary to argue about whether Madamoiselle Blancon would be allowed a brief holiday, as she’d already been sent away. After some tense moments and a few choice words vented in frustration, the legal types went back to their work and somehow found that they could function in her absence.
The Tour de France habitually – though not always – started in northern France, then wrapped itself in a jagged loop scribbled by child’s hand around the country, sometimes with omitted sections that weren’t ridden over by the racers, but traversed by auto, train or plane, but generally the dots connected in such as way as to lead the riders through Southern France and occasionally Northern Spain to expose them to the rigors of riding up and down the Alps and Pyrenees, and finally back to Paris for finishing laps along the Champs Elysees. This year, the race organizers had received sufficient offers of money to justify jumpstarting the race from outside of the host country, in the picturesque canalled town of Bruges, Belgium. It was like Amsterdam, but without the pothouses and the Heineken cans littering the roads.
Eve had visited there before as a child with her family. The postage stamp sized town was famous for canal boat rides and fine knitted goods and Belgian waffles it sold to tourists. The train ride from Paris took an hour and a half, but it beat driving since she didn’t have to pay attention to the road. Even minutes separated from the tasks she’d buried herself in for so long, she felt disoriented and unable to focus her thoughts. It was as if her brain had focused on one thing so intently, it had difficulty considering anything else. She stared out the window as dark green and brown checkerboard squares of farmland drifted by, resting under the shadows of thick spongy clouds that drifted above, having moved down from farther north at the first moment summer’s strength had faltered in the slightest, and seemingly formed a leaky concrete ceiling threatening to blanket the entirety of Northern Europe, where it would remain virtually impenetrable until Spring finally arrived, and with it, the sun would finally shine through growing cracks in the façade and cause life to emerge from the ground, and people to reemerge from their cozy little homes.
For their own sake, it was a good thing the riders would be heading quickly to south, she thought to herself, lest they be trapped beneath this dispiriting veil.
As the train proceeded north, the late hour of the afternoon turned into the early hour of evening, and the land grew darker and seemingly wetter still, and Eve felt a strange melancholy. Behind her was a job substantially completed, but not fully done, outside was a reminder of the colder, somber months that lie ahead, which she managed to tolerate but just barely, and ahead of her was the sun that rose in her universe, chasing the chill from her soul at the merest sound, or sight, or thought of him.
The train finally pulled into the station at Bruges, and she found her suitcase which fortunately had rollers so she didn’t have to carry it; breaking out of her routine and away from the virtual marathon she’d been running, suddenly she felt the substantial gravity of it all, and tiredness seeped into her bones and her muscles strained to carry her hundred pounds as if they were double that. She wanted to move quickly but found it was all she could do to keep moving, and to keep her eyes from closing. As much as she wanted to see Shamus, it was sleep she wanted even more, and she felt a hot tear run down her face as she became aware of the immense strain her life had been under, and the toll that took on her soul and the risk that it would now eat into the very few days and hours she could count on being with Shamus before he was off again, and before she returned to Paris for lack of any place better to go.
Shamus was there when she disembarked and picked her off the ground and took away her suitcase in the same motion, and she felt his strength and it was like the warm rays of the sun beating back the grayness of winter, for now, and they held each other for a long time without words.
Finally he set her down and they took each other in.
To Shamus, Eve looked beautiful but had aged more than their time apart would account for. She needed good food and sleep, he could tell immediately. He’d made few plans that would get in the way of her needs. Quickly seeing beyond her tired appearance, what he saw was his counterpart, his friend, the moon to his sun, and his smile beamed at her.
Eve’s eyes soaked him in, and she saw a worried look flash across his face. She supposed she knew what that was about. At the same time, she noted that he looked vaguely different, and in a way his body seemed slightly more distorted than she’d remembered. Few other types of professional athletes undertook activities that at the same time shrunk their small chests and shoulders, removing fat and growing little muscle, while engorging the legs with oversized muscles forming inverted triangle from the ankles up, such that one’s center of gravity was somewhere south of the waistline.
All in all, cyclists were made diminutive by their sport, and grew into a form quite contrary from the prototypical big-arms-and-shoulders shaped man, let alone athlete. Once they climbed onto the bike, though, the appropriateness and effectiveness with which their shape fit their job became evident.
His face looked gaunter than she recalled, etched with new lines that had formed when the skin was no longer supported by stores of subcutaneous fat that had been burned worn away by the rigors of thousands of miles he’d already ridden this year. Her first reaction was to want to take him for a good meal. She couldn’t understand how his body could operate effectively when it lacked any physical reserves or insulation from the external environment. These impressions and concerns were fleeting, though; chased away with his smile that melted her heart, and told her she was home.
Shamus had gotten the okay from Philip Olivier, after he’d in turn gotten it from Marcel Trusseau, to depart for Bruges days ahead of the team so that he could spend time with Eve. It had been an easy concession to make, provided he agreed to continue his training programme. Shamus had flown in earlier in the day, secured a hotel room and placed his duffel bag and bike box in it, then loitered about as he awaited Eve’s train. It was Friday, and the tour wouldn’t start for a week and a day, though the team would be arriving on Wednesday and they’d quickly get back to the business of preparing for the world’s most difficult athletic event. That gave Shamus and Eve four full days that were principally theirs, aside from relatively brief training rides he’d have to squeeze in to keep his form. The only other burden during the period pertained to his diet, in which he had to abstain from any alcohol or fried foods, which, in Belgium, took a substantial number of options off the table, including virtually all of the good ones. Fortunately, when they left the train station in a cab back to the hotel, it wasn’t a meal they craved.
Saturday morning, the concrete skies showed substantial cracks that sunlight managed to steal through, and breezes blew leaves along the narrow streets and rippled the surface of the dark water that filled the canals where streets weren’t. Shamus sat in a chair behind the bay window, a tiny cup of coffee he’d cooked in his room resting in his hand, and he watched passersby sauntering along at a weekend pace, the occasional bicycle rider scooting by to whatever destination without any great sense of urgency. Outside, the streets at this sunrise hour were mostly quiet and peaceful, and inside it was much the same. Eve slept and Shamus expected her to do so for a long time. Her body had virtually dissolved into the bed, without structure, as if ligaments had released and bones had resolved. He could barely observe the rise and settling of her chest as she breathed, so little air she bothered.
He finished the dregs of his coffee then silently crept across the room, wishing her to sleep undisturbed but doubting at the same time he could wake her if he wanted to, and hoisted his bicycle off its wheels, grabbed his biking shoes, and gingerly exited the room with special effort to close the door noiselessly.
Down the stairs and out on the street he was confronted by a startling day that was already prettier than it had looked from up above. The temperature was maybe sixty degrees with low humidity and no apparent likelihood of rain, meaning that he’d been able to dress lightly for the outing and faced a very comfortable ride. Two hours was all that was called for to keep the legs limber and ensure fresh blood coursed through countless capillaries feeding his oversized calves, quads and glutes. So close to the start of the Tour, the goal was no longer about building form. At this point, one started the race with the form they’d brought, and hoped to gain a smidge more during the opening weeks, reaching an unsustainable pinnacle of conditioning as the peleton pushed its way up and over gargantuan mountain ranges during the final weeks of the race.
Time and miles passed quickly and he was back at the hotel before he knew it. He didn’t remember pedaling, or sweating, or even what particular set of roads he’d chosen. As soon as his leg had gone over the frame bar and his cleats had latched onto the pedals, his mind had gone off to an entirely new and different place, which centered on him and Eve living a life together, and cycling being something he did in that life, rather than the other way around.
Shamus arrived at the top of the stairs, barely, with a bicycle slung across one shoulder, the room key in one hand, and a breakfast tray he’d salvaged from the hotel’s simple dining room in the other. He’d impressed himself by not allowing the cup of coffee sitting amid the tray to spill as he’d climbed the stairs, especially since his leg muscles burned with each step. Therein lay one of the conundrums of cycling: the more one rode, the larger the leg muscles grew, but somehow this power didn’t adapt to the simple act of walking up stairs, which always stung more than it should have, so cyclists simply avoided doing it.
Not surprisingly, Eve wasn’t awake yet. So Shamus set the tray on the lamp table beside the bed, stood the bike against the far wall, out of the way for now, and rummaged through his duffel for some jeans and other things to wear. Once he’d assembled what he needed, he padded off to the bathroom for a quick shower.
The bathroom was spacious; evidence that he’d bucked up for the room and treated the two of them to a European suite, or roughly the equivalent of a standard room at a Hilton in Des Moines, as opposed to a typical European hotel room which more often resembled a little boy’s bed room and frequently didn’t offer a private bathroom but sent one down the hall to a shared facility. He was happy to have dropped the extra hundred Euros a night for the Honeymoon Suite, and only wished it was a proper honeymoon to make everything perfect.
When he emerged scrubbed and dressed, teeth brushed and hair hidden beneath a baseball cap with his team’s logo emblazoned, Eve was sitting up eating in bed picking at the food he’d brought up. She smiled at him and he smiled back. They still hadn’t talked much since she’d arrived. It hadn’t been necessary. Every emotion they’d cared to share had been communicated and exchanged in ways that words couldn’t surpass.
“Thanks for the food; I hope it was meant for me,” she said.
“It was.”
“Did you already get your ride in?”
“Would you have preferred I waited for you?”
“Not in a million years!” She said. “I needed the sleep very badly.”
“I’m glad you got it. How do you feel?”
“Better than I have in months; since before Paris-Nice, anyway.”
“You certainly look fresher than you did yesterday,” Shamus said.
“You look like you are the one who needs a meal more than me. How can you ride so hard when you are so thin?” She asked.
“You get used to it, I suppose. But once the race starts we can eat whatever we want. Whatever makes us feel good, and the coaches won’t argue about it very much. That’s only a few days off now. How about you, are you taking care of yourself, then?”
“Probably not so well, I suppose. Too many hours on the case. No exercise. Bad food. But it will be over soon as well, and then life will become more normal again, I think.”
“So how’s it going?”
“You want to talk about the case then? I am surprised,” she said, and then pulled back the sheet covering herself, and he got a complete view of her. Again, words weren’t necessary. They would talk later, Shamus thought.
Chapter 21
They finally emerged from the hotel at noon, happy, relaxed, and in love. Thoughts of everything else that cluttered their lives were set aside as they lost themselves in the here and now. Notwithstanding that Shamus would embark on riding perhaps the most important race of his career in a matter of days, having Eve with him to capture his thoughts took away the anxiety and stress he would normally be experiencing days before a big event. Similarly, Eve hadn’t thought about the case since the moment she awoke, and as they walked along she felt light on her feet once again, and wished silently that the moment would last forever.
“So last time I asked you about your case, you made some kind of indecent offer which substantially delayed our plans for the day,” Shamus said.
“We have plans?”
“If we had plans, we would have been delayed, is what I meant to say.”
“So you are asking again?”
“It depends on whether you plan to keep your clothes on if I do.”
“I cannot make any promises,” she said with a coy smile.
“I guess nobody will be harmed, in either case.”
“So I will tell you about the case while I think about taking off my clothes. The prosecutor’s office is in final preparation. It appears we have the information they need to make the cases. The sports authorities are very nervous, as they sense that something will be announced soon but do not know what that is. They are very adamant that we need to tell them, but that is not possible, d’ accord.“
“The rumor mill is very busy, there’s no doubt,” Shamus said. “People are expecting the next Operation Puerto, and the only questions are how many, who’s getting caught this time, and when does the shit hit the fan.”
“Well, unlike Operation Puerto, it appears unlikely that any announcements will be made before the start of the Tour. We are moving as quickly as possible, but the case preparations are very complex and it may be some weeks before they are brought forward. Of course, there have been many important people who are calling for us to make announcements before the race, to get the dirty riders out, and others hope that things will remain quiet until after the race, so that there is no scandal to chase away the sponsors and the advertisers,” Eve explained.
“So will your people hold off until after the Tour to bring these cases, even if they finish their work sooner?”
“No, that’s highly unlikely. Politics aside, we have many governments involved in supporting this investigation and it is already difficult to convince some of the prosecutors in these countries from not pressing charges based on what we’ve learned so far. However, they have agreed to wait as long as is necessary so that we do not endanger other cases that are being made final. If we were to tell them to wait even longer after that, they would decline and you would have not one scandal announced, but a great number of them. So there is agreement for all parties to wait as long as there is legitimate legal and investigative work to finish. Once the attorneys determine this has been done, there will be no way to hold things back.”
“So just like in 2006, the cycling world will be nervous as we launch the Tour,” Shamus said.
“That seems inevitable, I’m afraid.“
“And what about the network of people who are involved in this? I’ve got to think there are people hearing rumors and getting nervous.”
“That is another reason we must finish our work and bring the cases quickly. People and evidence may disappear if too much time passes. We’ve done what we can to keep things intact and not cause any disruptions, but people talk, non?”
“Have your suspects seen any changes in orders so far?”
“Not yet. Riders are still buying these goods as they gain the best form for the season. We think that perhaps once the Tour gets underway they will become more conservative and allow the body to flush away these chemicals, but for now there seems to be few change in habits. Curiously, we have received significant questions from WADA. Not direct inquiries, but pressure they are putting on politically. Their attorneys have asked the courts to seal the investigation records until WADA could review them.”
“Sounds like they’re nervous about your investigation finding something embarrassing, you think?”
“Yes, but they have no legal authority for such requests, so they will just have to wait like everybody else. We cannot have parties meddling in the case before we present it to the courts. Once that is done, they will have plenty of opportunity to ask the judge for whatever accommodations they want, and the judge can decide.“
While Shamus and Eve wandered the streets of Bruges enjoying a rare opportunity to be together nearly devoid of distractions, the doping industry continued to swirl, fueled in small part by the upcoming Tour de France, which served as the peak of the cycling race calendar around the world, and in larger part by the growing discord between the interests of athletes, teams, sponsors, and the doping industry as the debate became more public about what the sports world should do about this problem.
Cycling had for years seemed the most riddled with abusers, precisely because it had gotten out ahead of most other sports in trying, at least half-heartedly, to combat the use of performance enhancing drugs. For years, it seemed as if the only athletes the labs managed to catch, were professional cyclists. In fact, this was the case. However, it reflected primarily that other sports simply weren’t bothering to test their athletes. Even seemingly known drug users were all but given a wink and a nod, provided they agreed not to discuss these matters publicly, which was a far different message than being told not to use the stuff in the first place.
But times were changing.
People now more generally acknowledged that their favorite professional football, basketball, and baseball stars were on the sauce, and had been for a long time. That wasn’t even a matter of debate any more. Fans were debating with moderate enthusiasm whether they actually cared that this was the case, and the median answer seemed to be that anyone on the home team doing so deserved forgiveness, especially if the home team was winning and the athlete in question was performing. But the debate was shifting away from whether these grown men and women should be admonished for employing dangerous chemicals in their training regimens, to the fact that younger and younger athletes were looking to get a head start on the competition so as to get on the right peewee teams so they could play for the right high school which would give them the best chance at getting into the right college, so as to eventually have a shot at making a living at the professional level.
The chatter about slotting youngsters toward particular sports specialties seemed to start between the age of five and ten; after that it was presumed that a child had either gotten on track, or had missed the opportunity to ever do so.
Coaches of impressionable youngsters and their win-at-all-cost parents were among the first to sell out; exchanging a child’s health and welfare for wins and recognition. Middle aged parents sent forth their young children into the realm of competitive sports, often with the all but transparent wish that the child achieve victories the parent never had the talent nor courage to achieve themselves. Parents talked during the week of the value of the teamwork, exercise, and social benefits of their child’s participation in organized sports. It resonated as pure and wholesome as a Sunday sermon. On weekends, though, they expected the tallest trophy on offer.
Coaches were encouraged to model good values, but success was measured in wins and losses. As a result, coaches willing to win at any cost tended to endure and prosper, while others were thanked for being pillars of society, and told to get packing. Coaches understood what they got paid for, and injuries were forgivable, but losing wasn’t.
Successful youth football coaches spent their time drilling kids on the most effective ways to slam their bodies into one another and putting them through exercises to build their muscle mass so they brought the best body armor to these skirmishes. In these choreographed battles, smaller soldiers suffered most. So to that extent, if the challenge involved sending kids lunging head-first into one another, then it was reasonable to build youngsters’ bodies to best prepare them for it. If that were the case, then accelerating this process by means of various pills and powders in their diets was hardly a stretch.
Unwitting parents looked past the damage of the sport, either external or internal, as they lived vicariously off the actions of eager-to-please children who learned not to hesitate to hurt someone or get hurt in return for the bounty of a smile from mom or dad, pacing nervously and shouting incessantly from the sideline, cajoling and coaching out of ignorance and pride.
Other bodies, including schools and entire communities, tacitly echoed with their own support. High school football stadiums rose from humble stands alongside modest striped pastures, to towering facilities with forty thousand seats or more, sometimes exceeding the population of towns that erected them. Paying off the costs for such stadiums required filling seats, which only a consistently winning team did; and somehow a small town with a small school with only a handful of kids found ways to generate teams that beat schools that could select from hundreds of times more kids. Such overachievement didn’t come cheaply, but the cost was modest compared to what was at stake in terms of pride and economics when stadium seats went empty.
By the collegiate level, things got thoroughly more twisted, if that were possible. Elaborate stadiums seating up to sixty thousand patrons willing to pay exhorbitant ticket prices to watch games from lavish sky boxes and spend entire weekends shoveling money around town like drunken sailors with trunks of booty, awaited schools with successful programs. And that was just the tip of the economic addiction. Universities milked the fervor with multi-year multi-billion dollar television contracts for football and basketball programs, stuffing university coffers and easily funding all the other loss-leading sports programs the university cared to offer. Student athletes for these mammoth sports were virtually insulated from the educational system and the demands it would put on their time, which in turn would limit the time they spent on their sport. They graduated uneducated, often permanently injured, and except in one case out of a thousand, inadequate for the world of professional sports.
While Eve and her partner Michael Steineger managed Interpol’s initiative to fully expose the end of the doping industry that was preying on cycling, she coordinated with other colleagues leading similar charges spanning a broad range of professional and amateur sports in virtually every developed nation on the earth.
What she ascertained from glimpses she’d gotten into her colleagues’ efforts, was that the multi-billion dollar industry behind sports performance enhancing drugs was the broadest and fastest growing segment of pharmacology. The only business area where pharmaceutical companies enjoyed comparable growth happened to be a near-cousin to sports doping; it involved producing drugs to cause plants and animals to grow faster, ironically so that people would have more to eat.
On top of that, these areas were anything but competing for resources; within the large pharmas, they were viewed as synergistic efforts, benefiting each other.
Scientists continually crossbred plants and animals and fed them all sorts of natural and manmade substances and observed how the subjects reacted. Sometimes they died or mutated in ways that didn’t produce benefits to mankind. Often nothing happened. Occasionally, some beneficial effect occurred: Cows and pigs grew larger and leaner; mice grew larger and muscled, and able to do exercise for hours at a time and to procreate much more prolifically, and live longer; or plants were produced that were unattractive to harmful insects, or endured drought or flooding, or grew faster and produced substantially more fruit than they would naturally.
Any such new capabilities were continually evaluated for commercial application, and at the same time the companies estimated the financial risks of any adverse effects, if known. If the returns looked right and the lawyers said the legal risks could be managed, a new product was born.
When Interpol had researched the drugs used by athletes, they found a history of drugs that had been derived by medicines that originally had been produced for other purposes, diabetes control, for example, that were then tested on athletes for potential physiological benefits. People were paid to participate in medical trials as human guinea pigs, so researchers could find potential uses for their substances, and also to understand which types of adverse effects might arise through their usage. College students were welcome participants in these trials, since they often needed money and were young enough to believe themselves still impervious to harm or death from a little pill or the mere sting of a needle. After all, many of them did similar things as a form of weekend entertainment.
Thus, in medical facilities in many countries, were small offices with certain test equipment, where people checked in and received sometimes meaningful sums of money for allowing themselves to consume or be injected with veterinary medicines, derivative drugs, manmade chemicals, and all manner of substances extracted from plants and animals.
At the same time, at schools, gyms, and wherever else competitive sports took place, nearby could be found nefarious people selling substances to athletes with the promise of improved performance, but with virtually no quality control, assurance of purity, protection against adverse effects, or even knowledge of safe dosages.
Hundreds of billions of dollars of potential future business hung in the balance of this fight between the authorities and the drug industry. Not only were the pharmaceutical companies hungry for such growth business opportunities, but their efforts were made all the more imperative by quickly approaching expiration of patents on a significant number of drugs, that would then be quickly reverse-engineered by other companies and sold as so-called generic drugs, virtually wiping out overnight the fabulous profit streams they derived from these drugs while sold under legal monopolies.
Interpol investigators cited reports that these companies stood to lose almost seventy billion dollars of revenues – or half of their combined sales - that way over the next five years. Following Merck’s patent expiration on its cholesterol drug, Zocor, the company kept producing and selling the drug, but for eighty percent less money, they noted. Billions of dollars of revenues and profits evaporated by the turning of the page on a calendar, and many more were to follow in short order.
Desperate managers pushed on researchers and marketers to find new sources of revenue to replace those that were certain to evaporate in the near future.
If they couldn’t do that, their companies would shrink and weaken, their stock prices would quickly decline, and they would be faced with resorting to buying each other up for cost efficiencies, and their staffs and research and development budgets would be slashed, further exacerbating the downward spiral. Already, credit ratings agencies were lowering the outlook on over ninety billion dollars of debt owed by the pharmas – historically among the highest rated industries — from Stable to Negative. That drove their borrowing costs up, further pinching their business models and increasing financial strains.
The pharmaceutical companies weren’t denying it, either.
The Chairman of Eli Lilly proclaimed that the industry is doomed if we do not change. As he said that, the knife came down for the first, but certainly not the last, time, and four thousand jobs were cut effective immediately, as the company announced that half of its manufacturing plants would be shut permanently.
The companies cited ever increasing difficulties in finding chemicals to treat diseases, leading to fewer and fewer new drugs, and virtually no pipeline of potential blockbusters to replace name brand ones such as Lipitor, Plavix, Zyprexa, Singulair, and Cozaar, invented and patented decades earlier, and now heading quickly toward generic status and huge price cuts. No longer would the price be all the market could bear. Suddenly it would shrink by ninety percent or more, to merely a small margin over the cost of combining chemicals, packaging them, and shipping them out.
Prescriptions costing consumers hundreds of dollars would suddenly be priced at ten dollars or less.
Illustrating the difficulty in finding the next new thing, during the past five years the pharmas had brought to market forty percent fewer drugs than during a comparable period a decade earlier – despite doubling their R&D funding, as higher and higher failure rates plagued chemistry-based drug research.
Between five and ten thousand compounds were tested for every drug that made it into the market, and the number of promising, unexplored chemical combinations was getting small. Pharmaceutical companies therefore brought forth fewer and fewer drugs, with the Food and Drug Administration approving just eighteen new chemical-based drugs in 2006, down from fifty three in 1996. Moreover, many of those drugs were variations of existing medicines, and didn’t offer the prospect of blockbuster returns.
For the first time in decades, the pharmas were facing life outside the vacuum of their monopolies, and the prospects were grim. Gentlemanly business practices were being thrown off in favor of bare-knuckled fights for survival.
Somehow out of this froth, their attention had increasingly been attracted toward the nascent cottage industry of selling powders and potions to athletes.
When the numbers had been toted up, including everything from back-alley sales of god only knows what, to retail distribution of the same concoctions through GNC chains, gymnasiums and health clubs, pharmacies, health food stores, and every grocery store in the country, the numbers were staggering. Faster growing, were online sales of these products through virtually every health and fitness related website.
Studies funded by the pharmas found a still largely disorganized and unconcentrated group of companies promoting products of dubious quality, often assembled by undergraduate -level chemistry students mixing tubs full of primarily benign substances with a heavy dose of plain old sugar and salt as the main performance enhancing ingredients.
Nonetheless, the markups on these products were phenomenal.
Often the ingredients cost less than shipping them to the store, where they might sell for twenty to fifty dollars. Legally. Without FDA approval or oversight. Without animal or human tests. With little need to ensure a sterile, hygienic production manufacturing process. Without the need for bevies of expensive scientists and expensive university research grants. Without hordes of lawyers to grease the palms of politicians and bureaucrats to buy ones way through the regulatory approval process. Without the exorbitant marketing costs to convince doctors to write prescriptions and to convince patients to say no to generic alternatives consisting of largely the same materials. And without limitation on how vigorously they could be marketed.
It presented an unimaginably stark contrast to their historical business model.
Whereas a potential blockbuster drug might take a decade or more to develop and test, billions of dollars to escort through years of FDA trials and billions more to get into the minds of physicians and consumers, and then risked actually being found to be ineffective or somehow dangerous to one’s health and briskly yanked from the shelves forever — here was a segment where products were vastly simpler to create in limitless combinations that could be put to market in days and aggressively and far less expensively marketed, largely on the word of mouth of former athletes who through paucity and lack of sophistication demanded far less money for such endorsements than hungry doctors compelled to pay off medical school debts and large mortgages.
Almost overnight, a space-race began as competing pharmas sought to cut the market into segments and stake their claims, supplanting amateurish home-brew operators who might mix fountain of youth potions in one batch, and sports recovery powders in the next, hardly bothering to rinse the equipment between operations.
Eve’s bosses had briefed her and her colleagues that their field agents were hearing increased chatter about a large investigation underway. They didn’t perceive that doping-related activity was actually being substantially curtailed, yet, but people were nervous, and everybody on the right side of the law was encouraged to be especially careful.
On the other side of the divide, among those who were experiencing angst was CT’s general manager, Marcel Trusseau, who had paid good money to have Patrovski disappear, and it seemed he had, but then he’d inexplicably reappeared within days. More worrying, was that he seemed to be acting differently in a way that alarmed Trusseau.
Patrovski was still doing his business, but the aggressiveness of the man seemed to be gone. Trusseau had always bristled at the man’s arrogance and greed, but at least he was consistently that way. Now, he was placid, almost mechanical about what he did. Something had changed in the man. Trusseau wanted to believe that Patrovski had been appropriately shaken by his little sojourn, but he was paranoid by nature and didn’t trust obvious answers. Had something or someone else gotten to Patrovski, he wondered.
Trusseau had called Dellacorte when he’d heard that Patrovski was back in business. That hadn’t been their agreement, and Trusseau wanted some answers, along with his money back.
Dellacorte dodged the call for as long as possible, then finally took it and explained that his associates had simply failed in their assignment, and failed miserably. Somehow Patrovski had been successfully taken to a permanent resting place, then a few days later he emerged and the Hungarians he’d contracted the work to were in jail in some village outside Budapest, charged with attempted bank robbery. He’d seen screw-ups before, but nothing like this. Of course he would be wiring back Trusseau’s money.
He asked Trusseau if he wanted the work done again, for free this time. Trusseau had thought about that possibility, but decided otherwise for a number of reasons. First, kidnapping someone twice would raise red flags sky-high with the authorities, and that kind of attention he didn’t need. Secondly, Patrovski was behaving himself and behaving less threateningly these days. That was a good thing, presumably. The fact that this was completely inconsistent with his ten years of dealing with the man stopped him from being able to relax though. Lastly, there was already significant risk that the bunglers now cooped up in the Hungarian jail would begin singing in exchange for leniency, and that would quickly trace back to Dellacorte, which would bring the affair entirely too close to himself, so from here on Trusseau wanted as little to do with the man as possible.
I need a vacation, Trusseau thought to himself. Or perhaps a new vocation.
Chapter 22
Over the ensuing days, Bruges was transformed from a pleasant Western European tourist attraction into a cycling mecca, swamped with bikes and riders and fans and media, and everything they needed to bring with them. Recreational vehicles flowed into town only to learn that the streets were too narrow for them to maneuver, and they clogged intersections and roundabouts and caused fender benders trying to figure out how to extricate themselves from it all. Team busses maneuvered more professionally, sticking to boulevards that offered easy ingress and egress, but nevertheless they blockaded hotel parking areas, where space was always at a premium anyway.
Colorful banners festooned street lamps and patio rails promoting favorite riders or teams. Shops and restaurants lengthened their business hours in attempt to cope with the mass of people seeking to eat, drink and shop their way through town. Police loitered more visibly, but their crime fighting entailed little more than assisting drunken tourists up from wherever they’d fallen, and ensuring they went nowhere near any automobile. Cyclists, pros and fans alike, cruised the town’s streets and byways on their expensive machines, living la vida Europa.
The weather complied as best it could. Bruges experienced weather that was heavily influenced by the Northern Atlantic ocean, which ran cold always, but not nearly as cold is it would be if the Gulf Stream stopped circulating warmer water from the equator up along the northern European coastline. The town was roughly on the same latitude as Toronto, Canada, meaning that it experienced long, dark, winters but also exquisitely long, bright and temperate summers. When there weren’t interminable rains, it seemed that every plant in nature sprung forth to grab what limited sliver of sunlight was afforded, and the place radiated beauty.
The media machine staked out its place, with vans and cameras and electrical lines and satellite dishes strung about, and a great litter of signs hung wherever possible with the news services’ logo, to provide a self-serving backdrop for any story transmitted from the little town. And the stories began to flow seemingly as fast or faster than they actually occurred. Where news was sparse, articles and TV segments discussed the Tour from the vantage of all that was wrong with the sport, and who was likely to win got seemingly less airtime than who was likely to get busted.
If they were to be believed, all but the youngest, freshest racers were highly suspect. Shamus saw the headlines each day and hated them for their cynicism and exploitative nature; he hated worse that they happened to be more accurate than wrong, and when he looked at them what he saw was only the reflection of himself and the racers of his vintage or older, because they were the face of the problem.
Racing authorities tried to put a delicate spin on any quotes offered; focusing on the positives of the sport, but hesitating to take the position that the doping mess had been all cleaned up. Taking that position was a fool’s errand, ensuring embarrassment and discredit as soon as the next scandal was announced, and the headlines all trumpeted predictions of an imminent and massive scandal.
Shamus wondered where they got their information.
He got busy again when the team arrived, with ceremonies to attend, hands to be shaken, and autographs and bodily fluid samples to be given. His precious time with Eve was all but over. She didn’t return to Paris, but planned to stay for the start of the race. Somehow the lawyers amassed back at Interpol had determined they actually could locate and read files without her waiting on them hand and foot.
In no time, it seemed that the topic of cycling, doping, and investigations dominated conversations.
Shamus’ encounters with teammates quickly turned to conversations about rumored investigations and who might be doing what, who might be caught at it, and, without explicitly saying so, how much risk CT riders would face if such investigation came forward. Riders donned their bravest race-faces as masks against fear and uncertainty. It didn’t work. Edginess reigned. Nervous laughter, boisterousness, and friendly cajoling one could count on in the face of embarking on the most important race of one’s career, was lacking.
Three days before the start of the Tour, a downward spiral of breaking news began when the director of a WADA-accredited doping laboratory in Lausanne, Switzerland, told the Belgian newspaper Het Laatste Nieuws that widespread doping had tainted the prior year’s Tour de France. His lab had determined that almost fifty of the hundred and eighty nine – or more than one out of five – riders had benefited from blood transfusions or EPO. The lab findings reflected on test results that had been found positive, but not to sufficient levels as to meet the criteria for removing a rider from the race. It was like having alcohol in the blood, but not enough to be arrested for driving under the influence.
In addition, the lab found indications for the use of testosterone and human growth hormone. He went on to forecast that as soon as a fool-proof test were available for growth hormone, eighty percent of the peloton would be found to be taking it – roughly in line with the historical usage of EPO and blood doping.
Le Monde quickly picked up the story, embellished it, incorporated quotes seemingly from passersby with inflammatory viewpoints, and the Tour became mired once again in controversy before the riders had even mounted up.
Shamus read the articles, and realized that the twenty three days of hard riding ahead of them already sported a cloud of suspicion that would have many news people portraying the race as relatively an easy feat, once someone considered the benefits the riders got from doping.
In fact, nothing about it would be easy, regardless of whether one imbibed or not. To the contrary, if essentially all riders were gaining the benefits of these doping products, they’d all ride perhaps a bit harder but none would have a particular advantage over the others. Therefore, if one weren’t doping, they still had to ride the pace of those who were getting an artificial boost, and that would make the entire affair all the more painful and difficult.
The next day, the mood sunk further with the announcement that, based on the testimony of a German rider who had earlier in the season confessed to doping, the Freiburg University Clinic was raided along with the homes of doctors Andreas Lothar and Heinrich Schmid, as investigators continued to look into allegations of organized doping practices on Team T-Mobile.
The doctors were accused of having provided banned substances to several sportsmen, including but not limited to cyclists. The university clinic was one of the most reputed in the country, specializing in sports medicine. The two doctors, who were also on contract to serve as team doctors for T-Mobile, were fired by the clinic following the revelations.
The article went on to describe that investigators were looking for a blood bank allegedly established in the Clinic’s basement, along with documents concerning the storage of blood bags. In Germany, blood doping was illegal for both those who received it, as well as those who conducted it. Looking to shut the gate more firmly against such scandals, Germany implemented prison sentences of up to ten years for those found guilty of supplying doping products.
Noted in the story, though less prominently, was that experts on money laundering and tax evasion were also included in the search. The team doctors were said to have profited significantly from doping practices on the team.
The German newspaper Badische Zeitung wasted no time piling on with its own slant, which focused on reports that there was recently a very much elevated level of activity in the clinic involving men frequently carrying suitcases out of the clinic’s rooms; presumably toting away blood bags and other potentially incriminating items in anticipation of a possible raid.
Shamus wondered to himself how they might have gotten wind such a raid was in the works.
Once the spill gates opened, the flood ensued. Leon Van Bon, a Tour de France stage winner and Dutch national champion, uttered aloud that the reason team Rabobank wasn’t renewing his contract, was that he belonged to the contaminated generation. Whether it was that, or just lack of interest in a rider who’d hit the semi-official retirement age of thirty five, would never be known, but both were factors in the world of pro cycling that worked against many of the current participants.
At the same time, the legal case of disgraced rider Andrey Kashechkin, who tested positive for blood doping shortly after the previous Tour, continued, with his contention being that doping controls violated basic human rights.
A Belgian court was hearing the case, which hinged on whether it should not be legal for sports officials to collect blood samples from athletes, let alone conduct drug tests. Kashechkin’s lawyers based the argument on article 8 of the Universal Declaration on Human Rights, which said that only public authorities can intrude in people’s private lives, and sports authorities were not public authorities.
If they lost, Kashechkin vowed to appeal until reaching the European Court of Human Rights. Bookmakers gave the case a fifty/fifty chance. If Kashechkin did win in the end, then sports, and certainly not limited to cycling, were set for chaos, as each country’s government would be required to set up individual laws and testing programs and then to administer those independently. It would be a lawyer’s dream come true, and might add a decade onto the timeline by which sports would finally become cleaned up.
Shamus foresaw at least a year or more of mudslinging from this case before a final verdict might be heard, with the sport of cycling sitting centrally between the parties, and undoubtedly collecting most of the mud that was to be thrown.
When Shamus thought of how riders fell into this nasty business, he recalled Jorg Jaksche, a German rider who confessed that, at the beginning I was a little bit sad entering the game of doping. But in time I got used to it, especially because everything got all positive around me. I went fast, everyone liked me because I was successful, it was all positive. So I didn’t have a bad conscience.
He’d begun using drugs at the tender age of nineteen, at the urging of his team manager.
Former pro and once Tour de France stage winner Bo Hamburger earned the distinction of being the first rider caught using EPO after the UCI began testing for it in 2001. The Danish Doping Board cleared him when a backup sample came up negative. Years later, when Hamburger admitted to the drug use, he threw into question the quality of testing, when two tests on the same sample had given opposite results, and the second test clearly had been wrong.
It was a little easier to look at oneself in the mirror when you knew others did the same. So I did it. If I didn’t, Hamburger said later. It would have been impossible to keep pace with the peloton because so many other riders were doping.
Another rider/confessed drug user, Patrik Sinkewitz, shortly before the start of the Tour de France, smeared testosterone gel on his upper arm during training camp. He thought at the time, it can’t hurt.
His underestimation was profound.
Not only did he get fired from team T-Mobile, but German public broadcasting of the Tour was cancelled and, before the dust settled, T-Mobile pulled out of its sponsorship contract and a team of riders and support staff was left nervously wondering if they were going to be employed any further.
Asked in an interview with Der Spiegel, Sinkewitz explained he’d had doubts about his form at the time. “The crazy thing is, that I actually didn’t have any pressure on me. Everyone was satisfied with me. Except for me. I wanted to be better.”
Days after he’d committed the act, he and his teammates returned from a training ride, only to find Doping Controls waiting for them. A soigneur and the directeur sportif accompanied them. Sinkewitz recounted later that he hadn’t been worried, though. He assumed the amount he’d used had been too low to be picked up in a test.
Later he explained, “I never had the feeling of doing something wrong. Taking something in order to improve my performance was simply a part of my life.”
When Sinkewitz had turned pro with the Italian team Mapei, there had been no doping on the team. However, he’d found things different when he’d moved to team QuickStep. There it was understood that doping was a fact of life in the sport, and they weren’t doing anything differently than anyone else.
When asked if his team manager knew about what was going on, Sinkewitz found it hard to believe that he hadn’t. There are things that nobody speaks about but which are nevertheless made clear, he’d said.
Sinkewitz had had reason to be extra cautious before all this happened. The day before the prior Tour de France, his team captain, Jan Ullrich had been suspended on suspicion of being a client of the notorious Doctor Eufemiano Fuentes, who maintained a well-organized practice for athletic blood doping. However, the point must have been lost on Sinkewitz, who, on the evening of the first stage of the Tour, drove ninety kilometres from Strasbourg, France, to Freiburg, Germany, for his own transfusion. It wasn’t a lonesome journey. At least five other T-Mobile riders made the same clandestine trek that night.
Shamus knew that these days Sinkewitz sat home alone. His contacts with the sport were terminated from one day to the next, he’d found, as if he didn’t exist anymore.
“Now, I have lost my job and have nothing except for my house. Now I could use help, but nobody is there for me. When you are successful, everyone congratulates you, of course, but to find out what it is like when there is no more success, that is something else. It’s like having the carpet pulled out from under you.”
Categories: Book, Doping, System6, Tour de France, Tour of California
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as before, this segment is great. Please keep the rest coming.
Thanks