The ePO ePOch is Over. The Festina fiasco came down to a few rogue European nations. Le Tour’s lab coat brigade has had nothing

to do but twiddle its thumbs for the past two events. Australia remains a shining light in the fight against performance-enhancing drugs.

Right? As the world’s premier roadies descend on Geelong for the World Championships and our leading track stars head for the Commonwealth Games in Delhi, can cycling finally look itself in the mirror? Or is the sport as tainted as ever, with the cheats merely three steps ahead of the testers? Can we believe anything that comes out of the mouths of cyclists? Is the house of cards about to come tumbling down once again?

The star witness for the sport’s prosecution is one of the most ridiculed and discredited athletes in the world. Four years ago in the French Alps, Floyd Landis turned in arguably the most astonishing solo performance in the history of cycling to win the Tour de France – then proceeded to turn himself and his sport into laughing stocks.

The Wall Street Journal recently published a series of emails in which Landis detailed one of the most intricately coordinated cheating conspiracies imaginable. He admitted to years of doping and accused Lance Armstrong of systematic EPO use, with a proclivity for blood transfusions, strippers and cocaine, and a disdain for speed limits, stop signs and the truth. If you believe his latest allegations, and many do, then it’s time to tear off that Livestrong wristband.

The problem with Landis, which in }

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CyCling thrives in australia – the t wo-wheeled world arriving this month proves it. but Can it esCape its dark

past? there are sCores to set tle first.

by Jonathan horn

BadBlood

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many ways personifies the problems with the sport itself, is that he’s not the most reliable of witnesses. He has a tendency to lie. In fact he wrote an entire book that, if his own latest testimony is anything to go by, was completely fabricated. He lied in court. He lied to financial donors to the quaintly named Floyd Fairness Fund as he tried to rescue his reputation. He lied on Larry King Live. He lied to his Mennonite family. And he lied to himself. When Armstrong said, “It’s our word against his word – I like our word,” he very neatly summed up the case for the defence.

When it comes to professional cycling, everything invariably comes back to Armstrong, that prickly, shrewd, indefatigable, domineering, altogether unprecedented and essentially unknowable Texan. And they’re coming for him. In the wake of Landis’ allegations, he’s under siege. It’s not just pesky French reporters and internet forum trolls any more – it’s heavy hitters from the Bay Area Laboratory Co-operative (BALCO) investigation team, the guys who sent Marion Jones to prison. Armstrong, who has quite reasonably been compared to Muhammad Ali in terms of influence, inspiration and significance, is now officially a “person of interest”.

Armstrong has always raised more questions than he’s answered. Why have so many of his former team-mates tested positive and/or fallen seriously ill with ailments associated with doping? In what way do his financial contributions to the UCI muddy the waters? How has a man who is tested with such regularity managed to evade positive tests?

On the flipside, why would a man who was subjected to repeated bouts of chemotherapy then go and take EPO, a drug that can turn the blood of a super-fit man into gluggy glue and kill him within a week? As Armstrong himself has said, “If you consider my situation – a guy who comes back from, you know, a death sentence – why would I then enter a sport and dope myself up and risk my life again? That’s crazy. No way.”

dr Michael ashenden has heard it all before. The Australian is one of the world’s foremost sports scientists and anti-doping

campaigners. When reminded of Lance Armstrong’s exalted status in world sport, he simply shakes his head. “Look, there’s compelling evidence that he was doping,” he tells Inside Sport. “If you’re one of the believers who’s been taken in by the spin, be very careful about what you read and what you believe. Particularly if it comes from Armstrong himself or his very sophisticated PR network.”

Ashenden’s the man who analysed Armstrong’s urine samples from the 1999 Tour de France and is on

the record as saying, “I have no doubt in my mind that he took EPO during the ’99 Tour.” He’s been at the coalface in the fight against EPO and has pretty much seen it all when it comes to what cyclists get up to and how they manage to avoid detection. But the specifics of Floyd Landis’ allegations floored even him. “What was news to me was the fact that the cyclists, at least according to Landis, would use EPO during a Tour to mask the fact that they’d had blood transfusions,” he says. “It’s sophisticated and cynical beyond belief.”

Ashenden says the Landis bombshell simply underlines how the significant gains in sports science over the past decade hasn’t been matched by the requisite support of

cycling’s governing bodies: “In 2000, the science was well short of the mark. In terms of endurance sport, it was open slather when it came to doping. There was simply no scientific way to gather the evidence. Ten years later, we now have the tools – they’re just not being used effectively. It’s the application that’s falling short. If these guys

are transfusing at 9pm, we are powerless to test them until 6am the next morning,

by which time it’s out of their system. Obviously the rules and regulations – and the system itself – needs to be more nimble.”

All the tabloid talk of track marks, trade-offs, transfusions and tainted trainers begs the question: to what

extent are Australian athletes involved in all of this? Richie

Porte, the young Aussie bolter at this year’s Giro d’Italia,

most recently trotted out the company line that

Australian sportspeople,

journalists and fans have run with for years: “I think the sport is only getting cleaner and Australians are really coming into their own with that happening. We come from a different culture.”

Ashenden says that’s tripe. “The notion that drugs aren’t a problem in Australian sport is misfounded. We’re very quick to dismiss allegations pertaining to Australian athletes. I hear the same thing when I travel and work overseas. The Germans, the Americans, the Spaniards – they all believe it’s other countries who are doing all the doping. Is there a drug problem in Australian sport? Yes. Is it as bad as some other countries? Probably not. But we’re not cultural beacons by any stretch. Look at the difference between the public reaction when full vials are found with the Chinese swim team compared to when 13 empty ones are found with the Australian track cycling team. It’s laughable.”

The vials he refers to were discovered in December 2003, in Room 121 of the South Australian AIS training facility. The occupant of the room was Mark French, a relative newcomer to the sport, though already a multiple junior world champion. He’d just turned 19. French admitted to injecting vitamin supplements, which was frowned upon, but not illegal. However, he strenuously denied any knowledge of the 13 vials of EquiGen, which is typically used to treat horses, but is also favoured by bodybuilders and power athletes.

The crux of the case concerned “group injecting sessions”, which French insisted were commonplace at the facility. He described a typical injecting session to 60 Minutes’ Tara Brown: “They come at eight, they do it and you sit around and talk, have a few beers as mates and that’s it.” Shane Kelly, Sean Eadie, Jobie Dajka and Graeme Brown were all named. To a man, all of these “mates” that he identified, including his best friend Dajka, employed the Sergeant Shultz defence. No one knew anything. French was left holding the bucket.

The discovery of that “sharps bucket” of French’s – by a cleaner – led to allegations in parliament of “shooting galleries”, crippling bans, an investigation by a retired QC, alcoholism, severe depression, punch-ups and, eventually, a funeral. And it still casts a dark shadow over cycling in Australia.

The andersOn rePOrt, conducted by a retired justice of the WA Supreme Court on behalf of the Australian Sports

Commission and Cycling Australia, was supposed to herald a new era of transparency in doping investigation: no more sweeping under the carpet, no more secret boys’ business. But the outcome – Robert Anderson himself admitted it suffered from massive time constraints – was profoundly unsatisfying. Rather than reveal a doping culture, it simply pointed the finger at a 19-year-old rookie. }

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Is that El Diablo chasing Ullrich [L], Armstrong [M] and Landis, or their conscience?

A young Mark French, well before the Anderson Report “debacle”.

Can CyCling finally look

aT iTself in The mirror?

or is The sporT as

TainTed as ever?

Can CyCling finally look

at itself in the mirror?

or is the sport as

tainted as ever?

Mark French copped the full brunt. “Either he tells falsehoods, or he has a problem with the English language,” Anderson concluded. (In fact to this day French has a manner which can seem blunt, surly and defensive in regular conversation.) Nor did Anderson take a shine to the bearded Sean Eadie, one of the elder statesmen of the team and the man who French insists schooled him in the art of self-injecting: “He was taciturn to a fault, answering many of the questions that were put to him with bare and abrupt denials, raising the suspicion that he had something to hide.”

Conversely, Shane Kelly, who was 32 years old, was the highest-profile member of the team and had considerable media experience. He’d recently been awarded the Order of Australia. Anderson was suitably impressed. “I have absolutely no hesitation in accepting the evidence of Shane Kelly in all respects,” he concluded. “I found him to be a most impressive young man.”

I meet with Mark French in a bayside suburb of Melbourne, where he works as a personal trainer. Now 25, he recently married his long-term partner, Jacqueline, and is about to become a father for the first time. He no longer competes, even at an amateur level, but still sports that unmistakable sprinter’s physique – stocky, powerful, short in the torso, thick in the legs. Not surprisingly, he still hasn’t forgotten Anderson and the entire AIS shemozzle. “The whole thing was a whitewash,” French says. “It was basically him [Anderson] trying to pin me. I was the youngest, the most expendable. I always told the truth and wouldn’t answer his questions any differently today. I wasn’t required to participate – I was asked to and I did so. In my eyes, I know I was clean. But I felt like I was hung out to dry.”

Initially rubbed out for two years, French was told he’d never represent his country again. He plunged into depression, drank heavily and vowed he’d never so much as look at a bike again. “I was suicidal. I was seeing a

clinical psychologist every day. I never left the house. I wouldn’t read the papers.”

On one of the few occasions he did set foot outside his door, he was king hit by a silent assailant in a South Melbourne bar. During an evening, people would sidle up to him and call him a cheat, a disgrace, unAustralian. One radio accusation that he was a “dirty, stinking, dobbing cyclist” resulted in a successful lawsuit several years later, but he says, “At the time, it put me back in my hole again, back to the worst-imaginable depression.”

It took until 2005 for the Court of Arbitration for Sport to overturn the original decision, citing a lack of evidence. “It wasn’t until after the decision got handed down with the appeal that I started enjoying life,” French said at the time.

French started again. The AIS Chaplain helped facilitate a series of face-to-face meetings with those he’d implicated and bridges were mended, however tenuously. But after the 2008 Olympics, where he narrowly missed out on a bronze medal, there was silence. “Since I raced in Beijing, I’ve never gotten one email or phone call,” he says.

mark French’s best Mate at the AIS was a spiky-haired, baby-faced, freakishly talented kid with a funny

name – Jobie Dajka. Judge Robert Anderson QC referred to them as Zig and Zag, such was their mateship. “If you saw one, you saw the other,” he wrote. Dajka was a World and Commonwealth champion and was tipped to collect a swag of medals in Athens. But his evidence didn’t impress Anderson, particularly when he quizzed him on his association with a veterinarian (following an anonymous tip-off). “Mr Dajka’s response to this line of questioning concerned me,” Anderson wrote. “He was visibly shaken by it and became defensive. I do not believe for one moment that he did not know the name of the trainer of his greyhound or the name of the vet who treated it. His offer to ‘find out’ }

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one radio aCCusaTion was ThaT frenCh was a “dirTy, sTinking, doBBing CyClisT”.

Veteran Sean Eadie dismissed French’s suggestions of “group injecting sessions”.

The highs were high for Jobie

Dajka, and the lows fatal.

One radiO accusatiOn was that French was a “dirty, stinking, dObbing cyclist”.

was false. He was playing for time, I think.”His “playing for time” and apparently

recalcitrant approach ultimately saw him suspended and sent home from the pre-Olympics training camp at the 11th hour. Within weeks, there was a new superstar on the scene: the media latched onto Ryan Bayley’s propensity to polish off buckets of KFC prior to hurling around the track at breakneck speed. Dajka, with the Olympic rings freshly tattooed on his shoulder, sat at home and saw Bayley feted on the stage with his two gold medals. And began to unravel.

The next few years were ugly. Dajka trashed his parents’ house and threatened to kill both them and himself. He was convicted for assaulting head track coach Martin Barras and copped a three-year ban. He was reportedly drinking up to six litres of wine a day, topped off with Valium and anti-depressant chasers. As he told The Adelaide Advertiser, “I definitely need help. I can’t keep getting on the booze. I’ve got to straighten my life out.”

He did his best, undertaking full-time work selling audio-visual equipment and, later on, used cars. After Beijing, when he had apparently beaten the bottle and lost his excess weight, there was talk he was primed for an unlikely comeback. But in April last year, Dajka killed himself. His girlfriend found him on a Saturday afternoon, sitting upright on his couch, still in his golf gear. His father, Stan, lashed out at cycling’s powers that be, who he was adamant had driven his son to despair. “Executives from Cycling Australia are not welcome at the request of the Dajka family,” the funeral notice read. His father told mourners: “I hope the guilt torments them forever, as it has done for us.”

“Jobie was obviously the greatest tragedy

of the whole thing,” says French now. “I know his family still blames it all on what happened – the fact that he became an outcast and was kept at arm’s length. It just made me even angrier when he passed away.”

For Gary Neiwand, who had himself tried to commit suicide several times and was a mentor of sorts to the troubled Dajka, the death hit particularly hard. “If I’m to look back then, I have to say I am to blame in some way for the downfall that led to his death,” he says. “I was pitted against him for positions and I had to get inside his head to beat him. I had been to the same place that Jobie was within his head. When he died, I kept calling his phone to hear his voice. I called his phone for a while after that just to hear him.”

The liFe OF an Australian track cyclist has always been a tough gig – an all-consuming, yet for the most part, anonymous, world of raw

power, unwritten rules, vitamin injections in the butt, bunk beds, Spartan living and

strict hierarchies. It’s a system where friend would vie with friend, man with boy. A system where, according to Jobie Dajka, the juniors would “cop it” from the senior riders “until breaking point”.

“It’s all very nice to see us on the TV,” said Sean Eadie in an interview with The Australian, “which is wonderful for us and for the country, but they don’t see the riders five years after they stop. The highs are high, but the lows are terribly low and lonely.”

Mark French says that monetary pressures in particular give some insight into why a young athlete would stoop to drugs. “The financial disadvantages of being a pro in Australia are enormous. I can’t think of any Aussie track cyclist, even now, who could go and buy a new car or put a deposit on a house. They really struggle.” It seems a world away from the big money of the pro team tour in Europe. We’ll be watching both worlds this month, as the greatest road riders descend on Geelong for the World Championships, while our most talented track riders chase gold in Delhi.

In terms of the talents and physiques required, the media coverage and the financial rewards on offer, they’re ostensibly as contrasting sporting pursuits as you can get. But they share more in common than a frame and two wheels. They’re both, almost more than any other sport, a complete enigma to those who watch and even administer them. They’re both shrouded in secrecy and their waters are muddied by old feuds, competing interests, high stakes, shadowy doctors and assorted lurk merchants. Whether we’re talking about Lance Armstrong, one of the athletes of the century, or Harry Handlebar in his dorm room at the AIS, we can try, but we will rarely understand them. n

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aCCording To dajka, The

juniors would “Cop iT” from The

senior riders “unTil

Breaking poinT”.

The “shooting gallery” saga ended very differently for Jobie Dajka [L], Mark French [M] and Ryan Bayley.

According to dAjkA, the

juniors would “cop it” from the

senior riders “until

breAking point”.