CSC Riis & Basso : July Observer Sport Monthly :



limerickman

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Jan 5, 2004
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This was obviously written before the latest drug scandal but it was published in todays Observer Newspaper by Matt Rendall

Perhaps some members are still interested in reading it.

Matt Rendell & Susanne Horsdal
Sunday July 2, 2006
The Observer

Jutland, last December: a band of painfully thin figures are boarding match-race yachts lashed alongside. They have been awake, outdoors, for 60 hours now, led by a short, fit man with dark eyes and a military moustache - Bjarne Sloth 'BS' Christiansen, 28 years with Nato's elite forces. He speaks quietly, he doesn't need to bark: these aren't virgin recruits, but hard men, riders on the world's number-one cycling team, CSC (named after their sponsors, the business consultancy). Among them is Italy's Ivan Basso, second in the 2005 Tour de France, the man Lance Armstrong, the recently retired winner of the past seven Tours, has designated his rightful heir.

But the sails hang slack in the mist. 'It's always windy in Denmark? Where is the wind when you need it?' Basso jokes as we pass. In the end, the yacht race is cancelled, but Bjarne Riis, Team CSC's director, is happy: the new signings have been integrated into the group and the principles of teamwork, communication, loyalty, commitment and respect have been instilled in the riders.

This philosophy and the annual camp to engrain it in the riders may be unique in professional sport. They certainly are in cycling. Lance Armstrong used to bond his riders by taking them to a lap-dancing joint in Austin, Texas. The redneck approach worked for him and Riis's methods work for CSC, which is now the sport's leading team by a huge margin. Basso dominated May's Giro D'Italia, winning three high mountain stages. Riis claims even Armstrong would have struggled to stay on Basso's wheel. A repeat performance this month will win him the rare double of the Tour of Italy and Tour de France, or the so-called Giro- Tour, an achievement Armstrong never managed.

The 2006 Tour de France, which started yesterday, marks a watershed in the race's 103-year history. After a seven-year domination during which he became that rarest of things in cycling, a household name across the globe, the complex and controversial Armstrong has retired. His absence leaves a power vacuum, something the Tour has faced many times before. Winning formulas tend to produce repeat victories: since 1957, five riders have won at least five Tours each, stars such as Eddy Merckx and Bernard Hinault. If Laurent Fignon and Greg Le Mond hadn't been contemporaries during the 1980s, one or other would have done the same - and LeMond might still have achieved the distinction but for a shooting accident that nearly killed him. The only active rider who knows what it feels like to win the Tour is Jan Ullrich, but the 1997 champion is in the twilight of his career. Basso, second to Armstrong a year ago, is the logical race favourite. If he can ride in July as he did in May, the Tour could see another five-year period of dominance.

Up close, Basso's film-star looks fail to obscure an understated but firm self-belief. The man who hopes to succeed Armstrong attributes his achievements to Riis: 'The person I owe most to, outside my family, is Bjarne,' he says. 'He treats me like...' The sentence is unfinished, but the sentiments are clear. 'He puts the same love into working with me as he did when he was riding for victory. I've never seen any other director spend eight hours on a Vespa with a rider.' Hardly surprising: spending the day on a moped beside his team leader can't be comfortable. But Riis doesn't begrudge a minute, because Basso, he says, is a unique talent. 'He is the best. He's a dream. He's fantastic. I mean, he has the qualities it takes: the physique, the willpower, the talent. And he's serious, very serious, very focused.'

Riis himself may have been one of the least talented Tour winners in years, but he was one of the hardest-working. Certainly, his weren't the finest cycling genes around. Fignon, his leader for three years at the team sponsored by Super U, later Castorama, had those. In 1983, the bespectacled Parisian won the Tour at his first attempt, aged 22, then retained it. Yet Fignon may be best remembered as a Tour loser. In 1989, he lost to Le Mond by just eight seconds. That was Riis's first Tour; he finished 95th and he could have regarded Fignon's and LeMond's gifts only with envy. But his years as Fignon's domestique - a cyclist whose job is simply to help his team leader win, at the cost of his own performance - made him one of the most knowledgeable tacticians in cycling. 'My riders can't cheat me,' he says, 'because I've been there. I know exactly what it takes to get dropped on a climb, catch up again, do some more work, and get dropped on the next climb.'

From 1989 , thanks to what can only have been near-pathological dedication, Riis transformed himself into a winner. In 1996, few commentators looked beyond the superlative Miguel Indurain to take the yellow jersey. The Spaniard, with eight-litre, flotation-tank lungs and an industrial pump of a heart that beat just 28 times a minute when at rest, had won the past five Tours and was regarded as invincible by everyone. Everyone but Riis, now leader of a German team sponsored by communications giant Telekom. The night before the race began, he told his team-mates of his intention to defeat the Spaniard. Their reaction? Incredulity.

Three weeks later, Riis, his self-belief rewarded, rode into Paris the champion. Indurain had finally cracked and the Dane, through performances that riders with superior physical gifts couldn't match, claimed victory. Effortlessness played no part in his style: after time trials, he would cling to the railings, eyes bulging, gasping for breath. The Danish Prime Minister described the feat as the greatest in his nation's sporting history.

The following year, Riis suffered a bacterial infection and, in the privacy of a tunnel during a mountain stage, he gave his German team-mate Jan Ullrich the nod to attack. Ullrich made a dramatic exit from the darkness, alone now, and rode away to victory. Riis helped him through the rest of the race and still finished seventh. In June 1999, he fell and damaged an elbow while tightening a strap on his shoe, before a stage in the Tour de Suisse. The injury kept him out of the Tour and he retired in 2000, after a career of great achievement, but also of frustration. Today, his experience as water carrier - the French themselves say porteur d'eau, rather than domestique - worker and champion has made him the greatest team director in cycling and this month he's hoping for more Tour de France success - and at the expense of his former team-mate, Ullrich.

Five months later, we meet Riis and Basso again, this time in a hotel just north of Liege. Nowhere is cycling followed more passionately than in Belgium. The CSC vehicles parked outside the window gleam in their 'bald eagle' paint jobs. The branding says much about the team. When, in 1993, Riis won an Alpine stage in the Tour de France, a Danish newspaper dubbed him 'the Eagle of Herning'. It was a deliberately naff nickname, not least because Herning, Riis's hometown, stands on the flattest part of a famously fl at nation. The eagle tag, then, was a tease, emphasising limitations, not prowess, in the mountains. But Riis subverted the affront and adopted it, and today the branding on the cars suggests that the team is, in part, an extension of Riis's personality. Certainly, as a coach, he demands a degree of intimacy that some might find uncomfortable .

'Coaching means being close to my riders, analysing them, supporting them, no matter what,' he says. 'But they have to be honest and open. They have to tell me everything. If there's a problem and I don't know about it, I can't help. If they make a mistake, I have to be the first to know, because if I am, I can help. If not, we have a problem, they have a problem.'

Riis's articulacy is a pleasant surprise: as a rider, he was notoriously taciturn. Gary Imlach, then presenting Channel Four's cycling coverage, spent years trying to wring words out of him. 'During the 1996 Tour I must have interviewed Riis after a dozen stages and got only a marginally greater number of words out of him. If I'd had a row with the producer he'd get even by sending me down to the finish line to interview Bjarne. He'd take bets on whether I'd get beyond "Yes" or "No". A full sentence on tape was a victory for me.'

What Riis has gained in eloquence, he has lost in physical presence. Years after giving up the self-emaciation of the professional cyclist, his face remains gaunt. Behind the bird-of-prey eyes, a large, impassive brain is housed in a great bald cupola of a skull. 'I've been a bike rider all my life. I can do nothing else. And that's not good enough,' he says. 'My role is to motivate my riders: to analyse them and coach them to be as good as possible. I want to make a difference, be the best. It's important. When I know I'm doing something special, it gives me a good feeling. Then I know I'm not just a bike rider.' At the start of 2003, Riis was close to signing his former team-mate Jan Ullrich, but the match was never made, presumably because a big deal with a German sponsor fell through. With Riis's guidance, Ullrich might have posed Lance Armstrong a greater challenge. Instead Ullrich pursued his career elsewhere and Riis approached Basso.

Italy has a strong cycling tradition, with stars such as Fausto Coppi, the first man to complete the Giro-Tour double, in 1949, and the late Marco Pantani, the last man to win both races, in 1998.
The road-racers' union, the Cyclistes Professionels Associes, is headed by the 1984 Giro winner, Francesco Moser.
But Basso, a former world under-23 champion, was underachieving, failing to add to that tradition, when Riis brought him to CSC in 2003. Basso recalls: 'I started to work with Bjarne and everybody can see how I race now, how I move in the group, attack, time-trial.' Perhaps the only thing missing in Basso's armoury is the kind of naked aggression that drove Armstrong. Riis defends him. 'What kept Armstrong going was the will to power; he wanted to control the world, so to speak. OK, you can say Ivan is too nice, but he's still a good bike rider. If you are a strong bike rider, it doesn't hurt if you are a nice guy, too. That's the beauty of it. If we were all the same, life would be grey!'

Basso is the outstanding favourite for the Tour de France, a status that leaves him bemused. 'The newspapers seem to think I'm like Lance at the Tour: I only have to turn up and I'll win. But I'm not Lance, I'm Basso. I am where I am now because of small improvements over many years. I don't believe in transformation overnight. I believe in lots of work and small gains.'

The philosophy of small steps comes from Riis. 'I know what it's like to be a leader who gets the support he needs and I know what it's like not to get th at support ,' he reflects. 'I've seen many teams, with many cultures, and I want to create something different, trying to avoid the mistakes I made.'

If this is a veiled reference to the heavy doping of the 1990s, he isn't saying. Such quantities of contraband drugs were being transported around Europe by cycling teams that doping nearly destroyed the Tour de France.

Three days before the 1998 race, French customs officers on the Belgian border stopped a car in the colours of the Festina team. They soon learned that the driver, a 53-year-old named ***** Voet, had been driving without a licence. They searched the vehicle; what they found was to transform the relationship between the sport and the public. There were 82 vials of human growth hormone, 60 capsules of epitestosterone, 248 vials of physiological serum, eight pre-filled syringes containing hepatitis-A vaccine, two boxes of 30 tablets to lower the amount of fat in the blood, four further doses of growth hormone, four ampoules of a drug that increases the rate at which corticoid hormones are secreted by the adrenal gland, and two vials of amphetamine. There were also 234 doses of recombinant human erythropoietin, or EPO, the blood booster that threatened to take over world sport.

Investigations across Europe uncovered EPO use by athletes in every imaginable sport, from skiing to football. In Italy, police found evidence that Riis may have been among riders treated with EPO in 1994 and 1995 by medical researchers under Professor Francesco Conconi at the University of Ferrara. Files seized by police officers contain blood test results for Riis during those years. His red blood-cell count leaps from a base level of 41 per cent to a staggering 56.3 per cent. Debilitating illness could have explained the increase, but Riis was one of the fittest men alive, winning races that required extraordinary physical resilience.

The alternative explanation was EPO treatment. By 1996, Riis was being coached by another controversial figure: Dr Luigi Cecchini, a former motor-racing pilot and the son of a millionaire shirt manufacturer, who had specialized as a sports scientist under Conconi. Later, Riis moved into team management and took Cecchini with him.

EPO use was not unusual: the files show that 19 of his team-mates and dozens more champions - Marco Pantani, the 1998 Giro-Tour double winner who died in 2004 , among them - had suspect blood values. Much of the professional cycling milieu is suspected to have been treated with EPO in the mid- 1990s, though the sport didn't ban it until 2000.

In 1999, the bad publicity caused by these allegations led sponsors to pressure Riis into selling his shares in Professional Cycling Denmark, the company behind the leading Danish team at the time, Jack & Jones. It was nearly the end of his career in cycling. But in 2000 Memory Card took over as chief sponsor and the recently retired Riis was brought into the team staff . At the end of the year, Riis took over the team and their management company completely and in 2001 CSC became the chief sponsor.

It took a few more years before Riis's new team began to get results. That in itself brought new suspicion. In the 2005 book Drømmeholdet - historien om CSC ('The Dream Team - the Story of CSC') by the Danish sports journalist Lars Werge, Riis divulges the briefing he gave his team at the start of 2005: 'Towards the end of our training camp, I assembled the riders and the staff and told them that they'd have to be prepared to be met with a lot of questions, because we'd win a lot of races that year. Because I knew, after the effort, the focus and the will that everybody on the team had put in all winter, we'd be a long way ahead of the others. That's not liked in cycling. That's why I knew we risked being met with more or less hidden accusations of secret weapons. My answer to that was quite simple: "Tell them they're right! We have a secret: a discipline in the group that's totally unknown in cycling. And we have an enormous will to make a difference. That's our secret ".'

However, until the middle of last season, Ivan Basso, too, had a private relationship with Cecchini. That relationship could yet come back to haunt him.
Italian police investigators believe Cecchini had an exchange programme with a Spanish doctor named Eufemiano Fuentes, each treating the other's clients in their respective countries. On 23 May this year, Spanish police searched a flat owned by Fuentes and found approximately 1,000 doses of anabolic steroids and hormones and 200 bags of blood, and blood transfusion equipment. Fuentes was one of four suspects later arrested.

In April, Riis told L'Equipe: 'Cecchini's still my friend, but we don't need him any more. Some of my riders go to see him individually, I know it and I want to know it, which is good. But I don't pay him. We haven't stopped our co-operation because of what is said about him, but because nowadays many riders from other teams see him as well.'

If the ongoing investigations extend to Cecchini, they could yet drag Riis and Basso into controversy.
Reports that Basso visited Riis's old doping doctor Francesco Conconi for power-testing in the weeks before the Tour of Italy and his astonishing supremacy at the Giro begin to seem more than a little suspicious.
Basso is caught in a peculiarly contemporary sporting paradox: the better his results, the greater the suspicion, despite the fact that he has never failed a drugs test.
Only mediocrity will silence his critics. Armstrong had an inspirational recovery from cancer behind him, counterbalancing the negative publicity of doping suspicions. Riis and Basso have learnt to operate, as Armstrong had to, in that equivocal space occupied by most international sport today, wedged between unsubstantiated accusations and denials lacking credibility.

Be that as it may, if Basso achieves the Giro- Tour double - something Armstrong never even attempted - he will make history. It won't necessarily make him any happier, though. 'I'm doing what I always dreamed about as a little boy. In my primary school exercise books, I wrote, "I want to be a professional cyclist when I'm grown up. I want to ride the Giro d'Italia like Moser, I want to ride the Tour like Hinault". And that's what I'm doing. That's why I'm so happy. I do the job I love.' And Basso wants Riis to be part of his career until it ends. 'I'm 28. My aim is to ride until I'm at least 35. Each year I feel it's possible to improve, to go faster, but we need to work. I honestly don't think I'm at 100 per cent yet. So I've got seven more years to win, I hope, a lot. Bjarne has the same faith and believes in the same project.'

After extending their sponsorship contract with CSC until 2008, the team's budget has reportedly doubled to about €13 m (£8.9m) a year. With Riis's brain, Basso's talent and the back-up that that kind of money buys, the end of the Armstrong era could signal the start of the CSC years.
 
Very good article. I thought it was just me that thought maybe Riis was just a little too shady.. He has been linked to the EPO scene by others for years.
Basso is a great rider, but he simply looked too good at the last 2 Giro's. But then I do not understand the Giro and how it is won. Maybe a superior climber can win it easily.
 

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