Countdown to the Tour de France: Jonathan Vaughters

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“The only thing that’s going to reduce that swelling isa cortisone injection which, as you know, is proscribed,” theteam doctor announced. “Take it and you’ll testpositive.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Vaughters was gutted.

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

He returned to his native Colorado with his wife, Alisa, and sonCharlie and applied his considerable intellect to the business ofselling real estate. He wrote wine columns and antique furniturereviews for specialist magazines and dabbled in stocks and shares.The transition to normal life was seamless. Almost everything hetouched turned to gold. And then he did something that completelydefied logic. He began floating the notion of an anti-dopingcycling team that would compete in the Tour de France.

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

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

“You used the word ‘sad’,” I observe.

“Yeah,” he replies.

“Not anger?”

“No.”

“There was no element of anger at all?”

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

“No resentment?” I press.

He sighs.

“ . . . At the injustice of it all?”

“There was some, of course,” he replies,dispassionately. “The wasp sting really brought to a head alot of the conflict I had going on inside of me. It really broughthome the fact that, ‘Okay, maybe there just isn’tjustice’.”

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

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

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

“No, not in the US,” he replies.

“Not at all?”

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

“What about when you joined the US Postal Service team in1998?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“My perception is that you doped.”

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

“I want a ‘yes’ or a ‘no’.”

“I know you want a ‘yes’ or a‘no’.”

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

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

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

“I’m not asking you to walk away from it,” hesays. “I can see that you are trying to establish abackground and that’s fine but what I’m saying is thatI’m just not going to talk about it and that’s it. Youcan take that however you want.”

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

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

His father, Jim, was the attorney. His mother, Donna, was a speechpathology professor. A small, wiry, boy, it wasn’t aconventional childhood. His bedtime stories were Thomas Jeffersonquotes from the American Bill of Rights and his most vividchildhood memories were of watching his father in court.

“The one time my dad would be passionate was in front of ajury,” he says. “Sometimes we wouldn’t have ababysitter and he would take me with him and I’d sit there,listening as he set out his case in a very nonchalant way:‘Well, if you could explain that to me please because Idon’t understand’. It was never confrontational, butyou could see him leading the witness down this path where they hadno other option but to answer truthfully.

“Every fourth of July, he would sit me down and force me intoreading the constitution of the United States and the Bill ofRights. That quote from Thomas Jefferson — ‘It’sbetter to have five guilty men go free than one innocent man injail’ — was ground into me. He believed, althoughimperfect, that the legal system of the United States was one ofthe milestones of mankind.”

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

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

Vaughters never envisaged a career in sport. He was hopelesslyuncoordinated with any shape of ball but developed a talent forwheels in his teens - go-karts first, and then bicycles. Thestrategy of racing fascinated him. He had been blessed with greatlungs and a mountain climber’s frame and was soon making aname for himself.

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

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

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

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

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

“That was a massive performance,” I suggest.

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

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

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

He returned home to Denver and was out walking with Charlie in thepark one afternoon when he happened upon a small junior race nearDenver Zoo. “I remember standing there, watching these kidshave fun racing their bikes and I don’t know, it justreminded me of why I loved the sport.” He decided to race forone last season with a small domestic team that included DannyPate, the former under23 world time trial champion. One night, theyshared a room together and got chatting about the season Pate hadspent in Italy and why he was never going back. “It was theusual stuff,” Vaughters says. “He didn’t feelcomfortable . . . the team weren’t helpful . . . but thebiggest thing he said was, ‘It just became apparent to methat a lot of guys were doping’.

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

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

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

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

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

The second season was more ambitious. In March 2005, Vaughterstravelled to the Tour of Normandy with Doug Ellis, a cycling-madphilanthropist from New York who had expressed an interest in theteam. Ellis was smitten. “What do we need to make thisbigger?” he asked.

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

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

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

“Why?” Ellis asked. “What’s yourhesitation?”

Vaughters explained the culture of doping in the sport and themethods that he would employ to change it. They would subject theirriders to the most stringent testing regime the sport had everseen. “Doug, at the end of the day it may not work,”Vaughters insisted. “And I don’t want to blast through15 or 20 million dollars, so I’m warning you, rightnow.”

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

The challenge has been easier than they imagined. And a lot morefun as well. On Saturday, Danny Pate, a clean professional cyclistracing for the cleanest professional team in cycling, will starthis first Tour de France.

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

Who is Jonny Vaughters?

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

He became better known for his bad luck - crashing out of the Tourin 1999 and 2000. In 2001 a wasp sting on his eye during a trainingride caused huge swelling. To repair his vision, Vaughters requireda cortisone injection. Having this would have risked a failed drugstest and he withdrew

He announced his retirement in 2003, and with $50,000 of his ownmoney started a development squad for young American riders. He isnow sporting director of Team Garmin-Chipotle, which through theAgency for Sporting Ethics submits its riders to almost 20 timesthe number of drugs tests their rivals undergo

Paul Kimmage and the Tour

Paul Kimmage competed three times in the Tour de France in the1980s, and in 1990 wrote Rough Ride, his account of life in aprofessional cycling team, which would go on to win the WilliamHill Sports Book of the Year award He has been named SportsInterviewer of the Year for the past four years. His interview withformer Tour de France winner Greg LeMond was included in thesubmission which won him the award last year. To read more of hisinterviews, please visit www.timesonline.co.uk/kimmage