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Looking back and looking ahead - Part II

Published: Oct. 27, 2008
Vaughters
Vaughters
Photo: Casey B. Gibson

In part 1 of a two-part interview with Jonathan Vaughters, the Garmin-Chipotle team manager discussed new rider acquisitions and the team’s reason for going ProTour in 2009. Here, in part 2, Vaughters discusses Tom Danielson's status with the team, his disappointment at losing Taylor Phinney and his perspective on the AFLD’s testing at this year’s Tour de France.

VeloNews: Talking about the long-term plan for the team, I know Taylor Phinney was someone you’d envisioned bringing up through an under-23 development team. You have to be disappointed to see him sitting beside Lance Armstrong as part of a Trek U23 development team that will managed by Axel Merckx.

Jonathan Vaughters: We’re still doing the U23 team, and we just signed Danny Summerhill back, as well as Kirk Carlson, the national champion. We’ve got all the guys we want, except for Taylor. We are still going to do the development team, and it’s going to be great program as it always has been.

VN: Can you tell us the name of the team?

JV: No, that is still up in the air. But no matter what, the funding is there, one way or another. I’m not sure just yet what we are going to name it.

VN: I thought you’d signed a contract with Taylor for 2009.

JV: No, there was no contract. And I shouldn’t get into the specifics of all that.

VN: Well, what can you tell us about it? Can you talk about the conversations you had with Taylor about this?

JV: Taylor has never talked to me about it. He never actually called me or told me he was leaving.

VN: So how did you find about it?

JV: I think Davis [Phinney] called Doug [Ellis], and told Doug that he wasn’t going to return.

VN: It has to have been unexpected, and disappointing considering he is a prodigy and he came up through your program.

JV: I don’t know what to say. Taylor is a good kid. He was given a choice. I’m sure Lance will do a good job with the team. Cycling is a free-agent sport and it always has been. If you let stuff like that upset you, you’re going to be upset quite a bit. It’s a 100-percent free-agency sport, so you just have to go with it.

Our team — what we are about, what we do, how we treat young riders, how we’ve successfully brought young riders into sort of the ProTour ranks — I think it’s pretty established. Everyone knows our philosophy, everyone knows how we deal with people, how we deal with the riders and the effort that he put into them. And we just have to continue to do that. Sometimes our culture isn’t going to be attractive to every young rider out there. We’ve just got to keep them moving along with what we are doing. There will be teams that seem cooler to other people, and that’s fine. Argyle isn’t cool to everybody.

But, you get things like this, and then you get things like Svein taking a medal at worlds five days later. A completely unknown rider to the European cycling circle almost became world time trial champion. I think that we have a proven track record of choosing and developing talent. And the riders we have on the U23 team are going to be winning racing, plus or minus Taylor. It’s a bummer but life goes on.

VN: I’ve been hearing Tom Danielson’s name a lot lately, and I’ve been hearing that his relationship with the team is not good. A lot of people were surprised he wasn’t selected for the Tour team, and his results this year were clearly not up to those of years past. He’s on a two-year contract, so he’s back with the team next year — what is your relationship like?

JV: It not that bad, Tom is just re-finding himself as part of a team. I think he’s always been an individualist in his riding style, and he’s re-finding himself as a rider. He is a part of our team. He is one of 27 riders next year. I like Tom, and I think Tom likes me. Everything is fine. I think he’s had to adapt from being the Great White Hope to being one of the guys in the trenches. At the Tour of Missouri, if you saw how good of a job he did for Christian, as far as being one of the guys in the trenches, I think that was a prime example of Tom Danielson at his best. And I expect we will see a lot more of that.

VN: What are your thoughts on the news about the AFLD going back and re-testing suspicious urine samples and finding Kohl, Schumacher and Piepoli positive for Continuous Erythropoietin Receptor Activator [CERA] at the Tour de France?

JV: I knew that the AFLD would be extremely thorough; they made that very clear to us before the start of the Tour. And they have been. And that’s great. I see it as silly that people say the AFLD did a better job than the UCI and so on and so forth. Those anti-doping agencies work in conjunction with each other much more than people know on the outside. Anti-doping is not a PR stunt. It’s sort of a labor of love by some very scientific-minded people, and some people that work together under the umbrella of WADA to get it done.

VN: So if the UCI had conducted the anti-doping testing at the Tour instead of the AFLD, we would have had the same results?

JV: When the UCI does testing at the Tour de France, they use AFLD to execute that testing. The only difference is that at the Tour this year, ASO was paying the AFLD to do the testing, whereas before it was ASO and the UCI paying the AFLD to conduct the testing on behalf of the UCI. What happens in the lab isn’t any different. You look at the samples that were re-tested, they had to ship them back from Lausanne. Well that’s a UCI laboratory, that’s the main IOC laboratory. If the UCI and the AFLD were in a contrarian position, the UCI wouldn’t have shipped those samples back to the AFLD to have them tested.

The AFLD and the UCI work together behind the scenes, even if they disagree in public. They are working together on this stuff. It might not appear that way from the exterior, but it was a situation where the AFLD was contracted directly by ASO to do the testing at the Tour. But at the end of the day, those CERA tests are WADA-certified tests, and they are not performing those tests until WADA gives the green light. WADA is sort of the end-all, be-all. WADA has to approve what the UCI does, what the AFLD does. That is who is running the endgame on all this, is WADA. I think the AFLD and the UCI and WADA work together more than some people know. They are all working for the same purpose.

VN: What about the fact that this Tour was believed to be cleaner than years past, and there were a total of seven positives? What does that say about the state of doping in the peloton?

JV: It’s sad that it has dragged out so long, and again cycling in the mud, and the King of the Mountains down, and the guy who won two time trials down. But hopefully… I think this is the first time they have showed efficacy of retroactive testing — that they can store samples, and they can test samples months or maybe even years later, and that those results are going to be accurate. So just because you think you’ve gotten away with a drug that is currently undetectable, they can test for that years down the line, and come back and nail you. I think that is a massive deterrent and a really positive development. Because now you can’t say, oh, I have some drugs that no one knows about it. Three or four years from now, they’re going to know about it, and in another 18 months after that they will have a test for it, and they can go back and test it. I think now that that precedent has been set for retroactive testing, it’s going to be one of the greatest developments in anti-doping and a really strong deterrent for anything — even autologous transfusions.

People think autologous transfusions are undetectable, it’s just your own blood, but there will be the technology some day to figure out how autologous transfusions work. Whether it’s one month or five years from now, I think it’s now become irrelevant. Same thing with gene doping, and all these things people are talking about in the future, whether or not they are undetectable now, today, is irrelevant because they can test for it five years from now. They can go back and nail you five years later, and you can have a career ruined, and sponsors suing you retroactively for fraud. The consequences are huge.

VN: Maybe, but these guys are still able to earn top-dollar salaries while they’re cheating. Look at Ivan Basso, he had to sit out two seasons and had to pay a $15,000 fine to Italian authorities for his involvement in Operaćion Puerto, but before he was caught he was one of the highest-paid riders in the sport. It seems like there will always be riders willing to roll the dice and take top-dollar salaries and endorsements for as long as they can get it.

JV: Yeah, but those aren’t athletes. That outlying one or two percent of people with true sociopathic behavior, that exists across the board in society. You can’t convince people with mental pathologies to be logical. Perhaps Basso isn’t a good example. Maybe he made a lot of money, but he eventually copped to it, and I believe he feels badly about it. I wouldn’t even classify Kohl in that category, because I think there is some genuine remorse there. When I am referring to sociopaths, I’m talking about the guys who are in complete denial that they have done anything wrong.

The various anti-doping movements are going to eventually convince 98 percent of the athletes that this isn’t worth it, because they are logical human beings. They are athletes that are trying to be competitive and win for the love of their sport, and yes, of course they also make money. But I think the job of everyone is to convince those with a moral compass that doping is definitively the wrong way and that 99 times out of 100 people are not going to get away with it, and that you are going to be competing on as fair of a playing field that exists as possible. The battle line in doping is to make sure those morally grounded people, the ones want to do right thing, are never sucked in. If they never feel pressured to dope, then we’ve essentially won the fight against doping.

The key point with anti-doping is that no one, no good kid with a sense of ethics, is ever forced or persuaded into doping because he feels he'll lose his job or he'll be doomed to mediocrity if he doesn’t dope. That’s the key. Most of the peloton fits into this. The hardcore guys that want to cheat no matter what... That don’t think they did anything wrong or any feel remorse about it. Those guys are going to be pretty hard to convince. But there aren’t too many and with effective controls, their choices can be contained as opposed to dragging a whole bunch of others, who'd prefer not to dope, with them.

There’s always going to be that one or two percent that will never feel remorse for their actions. There’s nothing you can do about the idiot stealing money from the cash register at 7-Eleven or whatever it is. That is just stupidity and sociopathic behavior and that exists in all realms of society. To me, as long as dopers are limited to that little outlying group of weirdos, than the mission is, for the most part, being accomplished. And even that group will eventually pay for it.

VN: So the team is having its camp again in Boulder in November, with a team presentation at week’s end — will it be similar to last year, as more of a meet-and-greet than real training?

JV: We’re still doing our team presentation event. It’s going to be a fundraiser for the Children’s Hospital of Denver. It’s a $25 general admission, and we hope to pack the house. We’ll be showing a 10-minute preview of a film that will be premiering at the Sundance Film Festival, it’s a year-long documentary on our team. I am looking forward to the preview, I think it’s going to be pretty darn cool. Of course we’ll be introducing guys like Wiggo and Svein, and we’ll still be doing auctions. We’ll be a little more interactive with the team than last year, a little less formal, a little more hanging with the boys.

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