Skyfall #1: 'Living a lie' - exposing the dark underbelly of British cycling's golden age
In the summer of 2012, Team Sky reiterated that they were the cleanest cycling team in the world, with no employees who had any doping history. That was far from true.
The 2024 Tour de France ended on Sunday with a third win in five years for Tadej Pogačar of UAE Team Emirates, and cycling will be prominent again when the Olympic Games begin on Friday in Paris.
The story I’m going to tell you over the next week is rooted in the summer when the Olympics were last staged in Europe - at London 2012 - and a summer when the Tour de France was won by a British rider for the first time - Bradley Wiggins of Team Sky.
It’s an extraordinary story that has taken 12 years to come to fruition but isn’t solely about the past.
It took five years of investigation between 2012 and 2017 for me to accumulate sufficient evidence to convince my newspaper’s lawyers to let us publish. But then, despite that evidence, the story was ‘spiked’ (killed, prevented from being published) because of internal politics.
I’m no longer constrained by that and I’ll get into the details around it in the coming days. But to give you a general idea of where this story is heading: Great Britain went from absolutely nowhere to No1 in the world in both Grand Tour cycling (via Team Sky) and in Olympic cycling (via Team GB) between the turn of the Millennium and 2012.
The most obvious way you could explain this transformation was money: Lottery funding poured into numerous sports, not least track cycling, and transformed them. And in professional cycling, Team Sky were funded by the broadcaster Sky from 2010 to 2018. They pumped huge amounts of money into Team Sky in an attempt to become beloved by their consumers.
In the end, Sky walked away from cycling, not believing it was worth the continued investment. Team Sky had also become toxic, in terms of reputation, due to a string of controversies.
If money was a big factor that led to British cycling success, including Team Sky (and it was, via paying the biggest salaries to the best riders, and having the best equipment and sports science), then another way you might attribute that transformation was … drugs. As in, banned, performance-enhancing drugs, or at least a depth of knowledge and history of drug use within staff ranks.
By 2012 and Team Sky’s first Tour de France win, Team Sky was proclaiming itself to be the ‘cleanest’ team in the history of Grand Tour cycling but in reality a culture of doping was ingrained in many of its riders, coaches and support staff; just as the majority of pro teams were staffed by people steeped in a culture of doping.
The big difference with Team Sky is that they weren’t being honest about it.
David Brailsford, (later Sir Dave, and now Sir Dave of Manchester United), almost certainly under the instruction of senior Sky executives, had a big idea after the 2012 TdF victory: he should reassert that Team Sky was the cleanest team in cycling.
He insisted that every member of staff - riders, coaches, mechanics, everyone - should be interviewed, and asked to state they had zero experience or knowledge of doping in their careers.
Anyone who declared any “doping past” would be helped to move on with their careers, or sacked, in other words, albeit with great references and whatever assistance could be provided to get another job.
Anyone who signed a piece of paper saying they had zero “doping past” would be free to continue with Team Sky. Some employees with doping pasts - riders, coaches, support staff - declared their doping pasts and left; and more employees with doping pasts simply lied and said they had always been clean, and carried on in their jobs.
But let’s start with the apparently glorious summer of sport in 2012 for Great Britain, and Team GB, with Team Sky’s Bradley Wiggins winning the TDF and then ringing the bell at the London Games opening ceremony. He went on to win gold for Team GB in the London 2012 time trial, in a home Games in which Team GB won 65 medals, comprised of 29 golds, 18 silvers and 18 bronzes.
It would later transpire that London 2012 was perhaps the dirtiest Olympics ever (notwithstanding various Olympics when East Germany cleaned up due to state-sponsored doping), and that Team GB had done whatever they could to win, pushing ethical boundaries in the process.
It was in the wake of London 2012, and as we awaited the findings of a United States Anti-Doping Agency (USADA) investigation into Lance Armstrong, that I conducted an interview with Tyler Hamilton. He was a former team-mate of Armstrong at US Postal, and had just written a book (which became a multi award-winning book), ‘The Secret Race’, detailing the industrial level of doping within professional tour cycling.
I did the interview with Hamilton on Thursday 4 October 2012 and it was published on Sunday 7 October.
One intriguing part of the interview with Hamilton was not used in the article because it had possible legal implications and needed further checking.
Hamilton had won an Olympic gold medal in Athens in 2004 in the men’s time trial, at a time when he was using drugs, and he talked to me about handing back his gold medal years later.
He told me he had been surprised that the cyclists who originally finished in second, third and fourth place had willingly accepted upgrades to gold, silver and bronze respectively. They were, like Hamilton and most cyclists of that era, also drug users, and Hamilton knew this from first-hand experience.
He had known these three riders well: Viatcheslav Ekimov of Russia (who moved from silver to gold when Hamilton admitted to doping), Bobby Julich of the USA (bronze to silver) and Michael Rogers of Australia (fourth to bronze).
Having ridden with and against these cyclists for years, and in the case of Ekimov having been a team-mate at US Postal (with Lance Armstrong), Hamilton might reasonably be expected to know about any drug use by them. In fact he implicated Ekimov.
During police raids on team buses during the so-called “Festina affair” at the 1998 Tour de France, Hamilton said in his book that “teams were frantically flushing thousands of dollars worth of pharmaceuticals down the toilets of buses, RVs, and hotels.
“I remember Ekimov joking that that he was thinking about diving into the Postal team’s RV toilet and pulling it out.”
In his interview with me, Hamilton indicated all three had drug pasts. Of the trio’s decision to accept the Olympic upgrades in summer 2012, he said: “Ekimov obviously hasn’t looked in the mirror recently. Same with Bobby Julich. Same with Michael Rogers. Now they can live the lie - not me.”
Hamilton said their backgrounds were worth looking into. None of them had ever failed drugs tests or had public drug pasts. Ekimov was a triple Olympic gold medalist and is now a former manager of a Russian cycling team, Katusha.
The world governing body of cycling, the UCI, denied Katusha entry to 2013 World Tour due to multiple “ethical violations” related to doping, including the appointment of Ekimov.
At the time I interviewed Hamilton, Julich was a coach with Team Sky, and Michael Rogers was a Team Sky rider.
While the suggestion of these doping pasts could not be used in the article on 7 October 2012, it was worth exploring further. Team Sky was of particular interest given they had just won their first Tour de France.
The issue of drugs in cycling then exploded in spectacular fashion on Wednesday 10 October 2012 when USADA published the findings of a long investigation into US Postal and Lance Armstrong.
You can still access the hundreds of documents and videos that together offered definitive proof of a long-standing and industrial scale doping programme at US Postal. That cache of materials is here. It really is worth your time to go and look at it if you’ve not seen it before.
USADA’s CEO Travis Tygart said: “The evidence shows beyond any doubt that the US Postal Service Pro Cycling Team ran the most sophisticated, professionalized and successful doping program that sport has ever seen.
“The evidence of the US Postal Service Pro Cycling Team-run scheme is overwhelming and is in excess of 1,000 pages, and includes sworn testimony from 26 people, including 15 riders with knowledge of the US Postal Service Team and its participants’ doping activities.
“The evidence also includes direct documentary evidence including financial payments, emails, scientific data and laboratory test results that further prove the use, possession and distribution of performance enhancing drugs by Lance Armstrong and confirm the disappointing truth about the deceptive activities of the USPS Team, a team that received tens of millions of American taxpayer dollars in funding.”
One of the British angles amid the mass of evidence was the revelation that Michael Barry, a Canadian rider who had just left Team Sky, had admitted to a previously unknown drugs past.
As I started digging into the histories of various Team Sky employees, it became clear that a number of past or contemporary staff in Autumn 2012 had doping pasts, and an in-depth knowledge of doping that they theoretically might still be using at Team Sky.
I was told that Geert Leinders, a Belgian doctor who worked with Team Sky in 2011 and 2012, had a past steeped in performance-enhancing drugs and had previously run a doping programme at the Dutch Rabobank team. Much later this all turned out to be true and Leinders ending up being banned for life in 2015.
I was curious about how Team Sky would react to the news that Michael Barry had been a doper, and armed with Hamilton’s tip, I wanted to know what they knew about the possible doping pasts of Bobby Julich and Michael Rogers, still employed by them.
Rogers was mentioned in the USADA files as having worked at various Tenerife camps with the notorious doping doctor Dr Michele Ferrari. All the other riders named in the USADA files who had been on those camps had subsequently been implicated in and/or banned for drug use, including Yaroslav Popovych, Andry Kashechkin, Alexandre Vinokourov, Paolo Savoldelli and Eddy Mazzoleni.
In the run-up to the weekend of 13-14 October 2012, I asked Team Sky various questions about Barry, Leinders, Julich and Rogers.
The supposedly cleanest team in global cycling was starting to look suspiciously dirty. To paraphrase Oscar Wilde: “To have one member of staff with a doping history, Mr Brailsford, may be regarded as a misfortune. To have four or more looks like carelessness.”
On Friday 12 October, Team Sky claimed in a statement to me: “We have had no doubts about Michael being clean during his time at Team Sky. We are a clean team and we have shown that you can win clean.”
The guy had just admitted to being a doper and here was Team Sky, oblivious to this fact before USADA told them, stating unequivocally he was clean during his time with them.
They added: “Dr. Leinders worked with Team Sky on a freelance basis and his contract has now ended … We had no doubts about his work with us or his approach.
“Before employing him we also made checks, gathered references and he was interviewed by [psychiatrist] Dr. Steve Peters.”
Errrrm. Peters worked extensively with British Cycling and Team Sky, and as it transpired, he wasn’t effective at rooting out dopers, as Leinders’ life ban and various other incidents would show. We’ll come back to one other notorious episode involving Peters later in the series.
I also asked Team Sky about Julich and Rogers. Specifically I asked the following questions.
Could Michael Rogers and / or Team Sky please answer the following:
1: Has Michael Rogers ever taken performance-enhancing drugs?
2: Did Team Sky specifically ask him this question before hiring him?
3: Is Michael Rogers happy with the re-allocation of the 2004 Olympic medals?
And could Bobby Julich and / or Team Sky please answer the following:
1: Has Bobby Julich ever taken performance-enhancing drugs?
2: Did Team Sky specifically ask him this question before hiring him?
3: Is Bobby Julich happy with the re-allocation of the 2004 Olympic medals?
I did not receive replies to these questions.
I wrote a story for the MoS that ran on Sunday 14 October, a story now informed by multiple sources telling me about numerous people inside Team Sky lying about their doping pasts. I mentioned Michael Barry’s shock inclusion in the USADA files, and Michael Rogers being mentioned in those files, and I wrote about suspicions over Geert Leinders.
I also wrote: "A prominent insider with intimate knowledge of the doping era has also told The Mail on Sunday that a fourth person from Team Sky - a current senior employee - has opted to 'live a lie' in regards to his doping past.”
I did not mention his name, because I was still waiting to see if he would respond to my questions, but this was a reference to Bobby Julich.
Bobby Julich would subsequently, on Thursday 25 October, admit to a doping past and leave Team Sky. Subsequent to that, in late October 2012, two other senior Team Sky staff also departed. That was Sean Yates and Steven de Jongh, albeit without explicit reasons of previous drug use being cited. That meant five Team Sky employees were either implicated in USADA’s report or left Team Sky in the wake of it: Barry, Leinders, Julich, Yates and De Jongh.
Yet it was the reaction to the “living a lie” story that put rocket boosters under my wider investigation into cheats at Team Sky.
No fewer than three people, independent of each other but all long-standing insiders in pro cycling, contacted me to tell me they believed they knew the person I had referenced as “living a lie.”
I had meant Julich, but these three sources all came up with another name, the same name, who was another extremely senior figure in cycling and at Team Sky.
What follows is what these three people told me about the person in question, whose own career is detailed below.