9
‘Our riders can’t have been using EPO’
—Professor Joseph Keul to Jürgen Kindervater
Twenty-two years after one of its strangest days, the Tour de France takes me back to one of its unlikeliest cult locations at the midway point of one of its most curious editions.
Gare de Corrèze is a train station with no obvious reason to exist, lost in ‘La France Profonde’, encircled by oak woods and cattle farms, its catchment area a smattering of gabled houses with large gardens. There is no nearby church or central square, no pulse of village life – just a road leading to a busy roundabout that serves as the nucleus of whatever community exists here.
Who knows why, in 1998, the Société du Tour de France decided to locate the finish line of a time trial in this no man’s land two hours east of Bordeaux? And who would have predicted what would have occurred in a dime-a-dozen cafe overlooking that same roundabout?
In July 1998, the Festina scandal was said to have laid bare cycling’s long-festering doping plague. In 2020, it is a real pandemic threatening humanity, not only cycling, and reducing the sport’s biggest celebration event to a zombified September cortège through populations fearing for their lives.
Dominique Espinasse, the owner of Le Domino, would not usually need to consult a calendar to know it was Tour time. Usually, he can tell it’s July by the steady stream of journalists or Lycra-clad ‘dark tourists’ – cycling fans who want to know, want to see where one of the bleakest chapters in the sport’s recent history played out. Whenever they arrive, Espinasse laboriously explains – as he does to me now from behind the perspex shield over his bar – that the cafe didn’t belong to him then, that he bought it a few years later from Gilberte ‘Guillou’ Boulegue, from whom it took its name at the time, ‘Chez Guillou’. If they ask, which they always do, he’ll point to what used to be a small back room where Jean-Marie Leblanc confirmed to Richard Virenque that he and his Festina teammates were no longer welcome at the 1998 Tour. Espinasse will then notice their disappointment when all they see now is a pizza oven. He’ll smile apologetically and confirm that there are no photos on the wall because Madame Boulegue took them when she left – even the ones of Virenque when he returned a few months later for an aperitif that probably felt like an exorcism.
No one talks about who pulled on the yellow jersey later that same afternoon. And Espinasse wouldn’t be able to tell you that it was Jan Ullrich.
Telekom’s Head of Communications, Jürgen Kindervater, spent that second weekend of the 1998 Tour vacillating between triumphalism and concern. Triumphalism because Ullrich’s path to a second consecutive victory now looked gloriously unobstructed. After the last of the Pyrenean stages, Kindervater asked the whole Telekom team to sign the plaster cast wrapped around the left hand he had injured before travelling to France. It would make a great a souvenir if, as most expected, Ullrich held on for a second consecutive Tour win.
But for that to happen the Tour needed to make it to Paris, which was no foregone conclusion. Behind them, Festina had left a maelstrom of recrimination and suspicion. On the day of Ullrich’s TT win, newspapers and TV networks from all over the world published quotes from Gérald Gremion, the former doctor of a Swiss professional team, who had said in interview that 99 per cent of riders were doping. Within days, that claim appeared to have been further corroborated by a raid on the Dutch TVM team and the seizure of 104 ampoules of EPO.
Publicly, Kindervater was dismissive – telling the Süddeutsche Zeitung, ‘Now all of the rats of coming out of their holes’ – but he was rattled enough to pick up the phone and call a doctor whose opinion he did respect, Joseph Keul. The director of the sports medicine department at the University of Freiburg, Keul was also nominally Telekom’s head doctor, though much less hands-on than Lothar Heinrich and Andreas Schmid. In their conversations, Keul confirmed what Kindervater already thought: Gremion was well wide of the mark. As Keul had told Der Spiegel when they published the similarly sweeping allegations about drug use in the peloton by the former pro Jörg Paffrath in 1997, EPO was neither dangerous nor particularly useful.
Later, in an email, Keul also explained to Kindervater how he knew that no one at Telekom was taking EPO. ‘Our data on Telekom riders show haematocrit scores of 45%–50%,’ the professor wrote. ‘These are the same numbers we saw in blood tests between 1980 and 1990, when no EPO was available.’
Nevertheless, on the weekend of Festina’s expulsion, Keul and Kindervater began working on a plan. Despite various attempts, numerous pilots and research projects, the world of sport had thus far failed to produce a valid method of EPO detection – and so Keul and Kindervater would do it themselves, or at least try to contribute. Keul came up with a list of suggestions about this and other ways to combat doping and put them in a two-page letter to Kindervater, dated 29 July, three days before the end of the Tour. Professor Keul had a further ‘happy announcement’ for Kindervater, he wrote: ‘Since the last time we spoke I’ve given five TV and nine radio interviews in which I was able to make clear that our Telekom team is under our control and doesn’t take doping products – and that it would be impossible under the terms of their Telekom contract.’
It was assurances like this by men like Keul that emboldened Kindervater and his colleagues to take out their ‘Well done, clean performance, boys!’ advert in the German papers the day after the Tour reached Paris. Kindervater liked one of Keul’s proposals in particular – that Telekom create and lead a group of team sponsors in research that would finally result in an EPO test being approved. Keul suggested calling it Dopingfreier Sport – ‘Doping-free Sport’. Kindervater was so enamoured with the idea that, even with no other teams or sponsors signed up, he was soon agreeing to commit 450,000 deutsche marks a year for three years. The money would be spent, at Keul’s discretion, on research grants, extra testing for the Telekom riders and twice-yearly conferences for doctors, coaches and even journalists.
Most in the media saw Dopingfreier Sport as a noble endeavour. Or, if they didn’t, wouldn’t let on. Kindervater was, after all, a powerful man – according to the 2003 book Die Stille Macht, Lobbyismus in Deutschland, ‘one of the most powerful in Germany’, given that Telekom’s marketing budget was the biggest in the land. His list of achievements was extensive, with the team’s success over the previous three year’s typifying his Midas touch. It had been a band of underperforming minnows when Kindervater and Telekom decided to invest, in 1991. Six years later Ullrich’s Tour victory had put the corporate logo on German TV screens for a total of sixty-seven hours in a single month.
That branding – the capital T and its magenta colour – was Kindervater’s crowning glory and is still, a quarter of a century on, among the most recognizable visual identities in the corporate world. Its mastermind had barely even seen a bike race on TV before 1991, though became a distant – he says ‘dispassionate’ – observer of the team’s fortunes, or more often misfortunes, in their first few seasons. ‘I’d go to the team presentation but Jan Ullrich was just another name. Bölts, Kummer, Ullrich . . . I knew they were great athletes but that was it.’
Since 1996, however, Kindervater had been a regular visitor to the Tour – a discreet, calming presence behind his thin-framed oval glasses and under his neat thatch of fine white hair. As he tells me now, ‘the cycling team had changed the image of the company’, so it was also natural that Kindervater had cosied up. As he did, nothing had shaken the faith that he had placed in Professor Keul and the Uniklinik in Freiburg back when the team was launched. ‘In the Uniklinik Freiburg we had a medical institution which, as far as we were concerned, was second to none in Germany. With Professor Keul, the Uniklinik had treated the Davis Cup team, the German Olympic team, the German cross-country skiing team . . . We had total confidence because there was nothing better as far as we knew. For me, the Uniklinik was like the Bundesgericht – above everything.’
Keul and the Uniklinik could certainly boast a distinguished pedigree, not that it was entirely untainted. It also would not have taken a cynic to point out that Germany had often been in the vanguard of drug development and experimentation, in sport and beyond, with noble and ignoble outcomes. A chemist from Ludwigsburg, Felix Hoffman, was after all credited with synthesizing both aspirin and heroin within the space of a fortnight shortly before the turn of the twentieth century. Drug consumption had then exploded in the aftermath of the First World War, partly due to tariffs imposed on imported ‘remedies’ like coffee, vanilla and pepper by the Treaty of Versailles. By the 1920s, Germany was producing more morphine than any other country on earth, 80 per cent of its cocaine and 98 per cent of its heroin – which Bayer marketed as a wonder-tonic for children and an effective treatment for over forty conditions, including insanity and nymphomania.
At one point in the Second World War, Wehrmacht generals believed – and wrote in internal memos, according to Norman Ohler’s Blitzed – that a drug and not a missile or the Luftwaffe would ultimately defeat the Allies and facilitate their ‘Final Solution’. Their little miracle was a pill called Pervitin, a form of methamphetamine. German soldiers knew it as Panzerschokolade or ‘Tank chocolate’. It had fuelled the invasion of Poland and felt like a cure for tiredness.
Experiments to see whether Pervitin had the same effect on athletes took place in 1954 . . . at the Uniklinik in Freiburg. The trials suggested Panzerschokolade could indeed improve performances by 23 per cent. It would allegedly propel the West German football team to victory in that year’s World Cup, according to a study by researchers at Berlin’s Humboldt University in 2013.
In 1954, Joseph Keul was a promising 1,500-metre runner and medicine undergraduate whose success in the sporting arena would eventually come as a doctor, not an athlete. He began working for the German Olympic team in 1960 and became its head doctor twenty years later. Athletes loved him, critics rounded on him – even well before Telekom took the decision to entrust their cycling team’s medical care to Keul and Freiburg in 1991.
Over several months between 1976 and 1977 in particular, his was a familiar face in West German newspapers and on television, as questions about the growing influence of drugs on elite sport were suddenly brought into focus by the Montreal Olympics. Keul’s public stance was clear . . . yet somehow still ambivalent: anabolic steroids like the ones thought to have played at least a role in East German athletes’ success in Canada should not be recommended, not least because they were banned. Equally, Keul could not say in good conscience that they were ‘dangerous’. He also argued in a radio debate in October 1976 that there was a difference between performance enhancement with steroids and ‘performance stabilization’ – for example, ‘restoring’ testosterone levels depleted by training. In 1977, Keul would argue that blood transfusions could not be considered doping, either – not because they were not yet banned, but because they had no effect on athletes’ performances.
Times would change, science evolve . . . but some of Keul’s claims as well as his ethics remained confusing. At the 1988 Winter Olympics in Calgary, ‘Erythropoietin’ was an obscure-sounding, unspellable hormone still several years from notoriety. But there was already something familiar about the way in which the professor dismissed the drug’s looming threat. ‘It’s not dangerous if used correctly,’ he told the German news agency DPA.
Three years later, Team Telekom saw the light of day within months of a book by the former discus thrower Brigitte Berendonk accusing Keul of not only doping athletes with steroids but also lying about their dangerous side effects. In a meeting, the vice president of the German Sports Federation (DSB), Manfred von Richthofen, told the head of the German Olympic Committee that Keul must be fired – ‘and was more or less politely shown the door myself,’ Von Richthofen later reported.
Thus, Joseph Keul retained his status as the éminence grise of sports medicine in Germany. He was also the chief guarantor of Telekom riders’ health and, more than ever thanks to Dopingfreier Sport after the 1998 Tour, their sporting credibility.
‘We just wanted to be as active as possible in fighting doping,’ Jürgen Kindervater assures me. ‘We knew Dr Keul’s story and we also got him to explain. When the DDR was dominating international sport, the West German Home Office started to look at how it could compete. From there they started looking at which substances could be used that weren’t on the banned list. That’s what Keul always told us. And we were assured that forbidden substances had never been used . . . I can’t believe that Keul wanted to deceive us.’
What no one disputed at the end of the 1998 Tour de France was that professional cycling needed a new moral compass. New weapons in the war on drugs. A new spirit of fair play, transparency and honesty.
In short, it needed the essence of the motto carved in large gold letters above the University of Freiburg’s red-brick collegiate building, the same words that Jesus had addressed to the Jews in a verse of the New Testament: ‘DIE WAHRHEIT WIRD EUCH FREI MACHEN’ – ‘The truth will set you free.’