Cycling: Riding dirty

Chris Jenner's achievements in cycling have not been aided by performancing enhancing drugs like many of his competitors. Photo / Getty Images

It is eight years since Chris Jenner rode the Tour de France, five since he retired. His life may have moved on but cycling is in the blood and so his words pour forth, bumping elbows.

Jenner is one of eight New Zealanders to have contested the Tour, one of the world's great sports events, which begins its 96th edition this weekend.

After closing the book on life as a professional cyclist, Jenner and his wife Christele moved from France to New Caledonia, back to where they had first met - she, the pretty local girl, he, the slim young bike racer from New Zealand.

A video and DVD business puts bread on the table. Their children - nine-year-old Anais, and five-year-old Lucas - are healthy and happy.

The weather is warm and, yes, Jenner has time to talk. We speak of how a 7-year-old kid who loved to ride his BMX around Upper Hutt grew into a young man whose talent, determination and ambition took him to the top echelon of road cycling.

We speak of the hierarchy he discovered, about the secret and about the choice faced by those who rise to the top of road cycling.

Two things prompted me to find Jenner. It was Olympic Week and Jenner had represented New Zealand in the road race in Sydney in 2000, but there was also the public lecture given by Graeme Steel, head of New Zealand's anti-doping body, Drug Free Sport New Zealand.

Steel spoke about the myths of drugs in sport. One myth he sought to explode was that athletes cannot win at international level without doping.

As evidence, Steel offered the examples of Hamish Carter in triathlon, Sarah Ulmer in track cycling, and Barbara Kendall in boardsailing all Olympic champions, all athletes Steel is as sure as he can be are genuine.

But there are sports Steel hesitates to say can be conquered clean. He mentions track sprinting (athletics), cross-country skiing and, Jenner's sport, road cycling.

The other reason to speak to Jenner this week was a conversation we had in 2001. Back then he was contracted to a team sponsored by French bank, Credit Agricole.

He'd recently taken up French nationality in the hope it would improve his chance of making his team's nine-man Tour squad. (The team favoured French riders for its national tour, something that counted against its Kiwi).

Jenner made the cut, finished the tour and made a little history along the way.

What stuck in the mind from that interview was Jenner's comment that his haematocrit (a measure of the red cells in the blood) had never exceeded 42. That figure is about average for a fit, healthy young male, and that was the problem.

"What are you doing with a haematocrit like that racing against some of these people?"

Jenner sighed at the question and explained that he would arrive at some races, look around to see who had turned up to race and realise that 30th place would be like a win for him.

For the fact is, Jenner's entry into the top rank of road cycling (in 1998, the year of the Festina scandal) coincided with its wildest period of drug abuse.

The synthetic form of erythropoietin (EPO) was top of illicit shopping lists that included steroids, growth hormone and stimulants. Synthetic EPO was developed to treat certain types of anaemia.

By boosting the kidneys' production of red blood cells it improves oxygen-carrying capacity. That last fact did not escape the notice of the sports community for long.

But there was no test at all for EPO until 2001 (even now it can be detected only for a short period) and for many it was carte blanche. Administrators imposed a "health limit" whereby riders whose haematocrit exceeded 50 per cent were stood down.

Many learned to work the system, ramping their red cell count with EPO and infusing saline to mask the abuse. Taking a blood thinner reduced the risks, such as heart failure and stroke, that come with thickened blood.

Results could be dramatic. The Dane Bjarne Riis - who confessed a decade after he "won" the 1996 Tour - by his own admission rode the tour clean in only three of his nine participations. His lowest place while doped on EPO and growth hormone was 14th; his highest place riding clean was 95th.

"It sometimes felt as though you were racing a mini against the V6s", Jenner explains.

He tried not to dwell on it when he was a racer because doing so was destructive to morale and without morale professional cycling is no place to be. But it was difficult to ignore.

When he retired in October 2004, a month short of his 30th birthday, Jenner told a French cycling magazine he had "lost motivation because everything is not rosy in cycling".

Hindsight gives a clearer view. Rankings from the month Jenner retired are instructive - half the world's top 20 riders have since been exposed.

"You can look back and say that 'maybe if I had done the same as them I would be [up there] and making millions," says Jenner. "But how long would I have to live? Nobody really knows the side effects of these drugs. What is going to happen to these people in the next 10 or 15 years?"

Jenner mentions Laurent Fignon, a two-time winner of the Tour during the 1980s, who revealed last month that he has advanced intestinal cancer and says he does not rule out a link to the doping products he used.

"I can look back," says Jenner, "and say I achieved what I did clean and that I have no regrets. Who knows, I may get cancer in 10 years or so anyway, but at least I didn't push it by opening that door."

It helped, he says, that he married young and was a father at 25. That can provide balance and mitigate against risk-taking and self-absorption - though the unfairness gets to everyone in the peloton.

Jenner was a respected cyclist, what the French call an equiper, a team rider. Not that he didn't get his opportunities - he won two French Cup races - but in the Tour de France his job was to sacrifice himself for the team, to ride in the wind to shelter his leaders, to chase dangerous breakaways, fetch food and drink.

The 2001 Tour was a success for Credit Agricole and Jenner. The team held the yellow jersey of the Tour leader for a week.

Credit Agricole won two stages: one individual and the teams time trial in which each squad rides together against the clock and rival teams. No New Zealander has won an individual stage, but Jenner has the next best thing.

For all its scandal, Jenner says he would have felt his career incomplete had he not ridden the Tour.

"When people learn you were a professional cyclist racing in Europe, the next question is always 'have you done the Tour de France?' If you answer 'no', that's the end of the conversation. No one asks whether you did Paris-Roubaix, Tour of Flanders, all those gruelling classics."

Jenner had the versatility to ride them all but it was the Tour that prompted fans to travel from New Zealand to cheer him, a journey some will make this month to support Julian Dean and Hayden Roulston.

"It just adds something to your career. Every day you are doing interviews, signing autographs non-stop. It's three weeks of excitement."

When Jenner began his professional career, anti-doping was under-funded and unsophisticated and consequently few were caught through drug testing. But the game has changed.

Better tests, targeted testing, the whereabouts programme (requiring athletes to detail where testers can find them each day), the biological passport (which aims to establish natural baselines for each athlete against which their future samples can be compared for signs of abuse) and the prospect of new tests having been secretly developed provide an improved deterrent as well as detection method.

Dutch cyclist Thomas Dekker was this week dropped from the Lotto team's squad after it was announced he had fallen foul of the biological passport.

His haematological profile demonstrated "convincing evidence" of doping with EPO, a conclusion said to be supported by re-examination of an out-of-competition sample taken in December 2007.

NEW Zealand runner Nick Willis may benefit from the secret development of a test for another drug.

The sample given by Bahrain's Rashid Ramzi who won the 1500 metres at the Beijing Olympics tested positive to a new generation of EPO called CERA. The fact that a test existed for the substance was kept secret.

If Ramzi's B sample confirms the A sample result (samples are split into A and B containers when taken), he will probably be stripped of his medal and banned and Willis promoted to the silver medal position.

Improvements in detecting doping have helped Olympic champion Valerie Vili. She could not have won in the 1970s or 1980s, when her event, the shot put, was ruined by anabolic steroids. Though she continues to improve, the Manukau athlete is unlikely ever to beat the record (22.63 metres) set 22 years ago by a Russian.

Vili's winning throw in Beijing was 20.56 metres. You have to go back to 1971 before that distance would have made the world record book.

Steel is sure there were doped athletes among Vili's beaten rivals at Beijing.

Improved detection has made doping with steroids in the old crude ways very risky. The trend is now for to micro-dosing, which is not thought to produce such a dramatic effect.

Steel is too wise to claim the battle against doping can ever be won but he is sure it can never be abandoned. It is not so much, he says, about determining whether a specific athlete is doped, but about sport as we know it. Remove the controls and the floodgates open. What parent would then want their child to pursue a career in international sport?

KIWIS WHO CONTESTED THE TOUR DE FRANCE

Harry Watson (1928), Tino Tabak, Paul Jesson (1979), Eric Mackenzie (1982, 1983, 1985, 1986), Stephen Swart (1987, 1994, 1995), Nathan Dahlberg (1988, 1989), Chris Jenner (2001), Julian Dean (2004, 2006, 2007, 2008). Hayden Roulston makes his debut this year.