Jonathan Vaughters has long been front and center as a forthright and articulate voice in the realm of bicycle racing, as a racer and former teammate of Lance Armstrong, as a writer and as a team director. Followers of the sport lost a superb writer when he chose to become a team director rather than a journalist. He still pens an occasional article and finally got around to writing the book that has been gestating within him for years, proving he could still make it as a writer.
He’d long ago made a full confession of his drug-taking, so that’s not the major thrust of his book, though he early on states one of his intents in writing the book is to acknowledge his culpability to the drug culture in the era of EPO and document what he has done since to make amends.
Deep into the book he fesses up that his true motivation in finally writing the book was an attempt to save his second marriage to a sommelier in 2012, hoping to impress her with his ability to write and self-reflect, and that he had abilities beyond running a bicycle racing team. He failed to win her back, as the book may have just enforced those qualities in him she found distasteful. His arrogance shines forth, as does his self-confessed grumpiness and his propensity to hold a grudge. Armstrong, unsurprisingly, is his foremost object of ire, but Dave Brailsford is a close second.
He writes that he can never forgive Brailsford for strong-arming him out of Bradley Wiggins after the 2009 Tour. Wiggins had finished fourth in that year’s Tour, subsequently elevated to third after Armstrong’s confession, and was under contract to Vaughters’ Garmin team. Brailsford was just starting the British Sky team and was desperate to pry Wiggins, as the British rider with the best potential to win The Tour, from Vaughters.
Vaughters didn’t think it could possibly happen, as he claims Wiggins regularly ridiculed Brailsford, often with a mocking imitation of him on the team bus. But Brailsford wasn’t to be denied, manipulating Vaughters into giving him up. Vaughters devotes a full chapter of the book to the saga and seizes upon any opportunity to take a pot shot at Brailsford, mocking his ”cheap, poorly-fitted Sky-emblazoned Sky polo shirt” and his “jovial, nice-guy act.”
Armstrong too is subject to barb after barb, though he parcels out a compliment here and there. He asserts that Armstrong was quite vocal as late as 1995 against EPO, but had no choice, like the rest of the peloton, to resort to it if he wished to be competitive. He surprisingly surmises that Armstrong rode the 2009 Tour clean in his comeback, though he was stripped of his third place finish. Despite the great rift between them, he concludes his book with the words “Maybe someday we will let it all go. Maybe.”
He has it in too for his star David Millar that he initially built his team around. He calls him a “turncoat” wanting to abandon ship and join up with his fellow Brit Brailsford when he started up Sky, actively recruiting teammates to go with him until Brailsford declared he didn’t want any drug-tainted riders, which Millar was, having served a two-year ban. Vaughters gives himself another of the many pats-on-the-back that fill the book, writing, “I’m a forgiving guy and David was a dammed talented rider, so we didn’t leave him out in the cold.”
He doesn’t mention, though, that he controversially left Millar off the team roster for The Tour de France in Miller’s retirement year, which devastated Millar. But he does reveal that Millar and nice-guy Christian Vande Velde had conspired to have Vaughters removed from his leadership role with the team he founded, going to the team’s financial benefactor and long-time copartner, Doug Ellis of Wall Street, with their grievances. That is a bombshell revelation that Vaughters just drops in without any more detail, not even saying if Ellis caused him to modify his ways.
The book is very uneven in what Vaughters chooses to write about. A mere sentence is given to the team’s greatest achievement, Ryder Hesjedal winning the 2012 Giro d’Italia. Dan Martin’s two wins of Monuments, among the team’s other top wins, are totally ignored. Nor is a peep given to his sudden dismissal of team director Matt White in 2010 for sending one of the team’s riders to a doctor known to deal in banned drugs. White has as strong a personality as Vaughters and is a rival with Vaughters for media attention as the very successful and well-spoken director of the Australia Mitchelton-Scott team. He could have heaped plenty of abuse, real or contrived, on White, but prefers to utterly ignore him.
When Vaughters has something kind to say about someone, it often comes with an opportunity to launch into one of his enemies. He calls Travis Tygart, the man behind the investigation that brought down Armstrong, “a good guy...a genuine and sincere human being...a feeling I’ve never felt for a single second with Johan and Lance.”
He greatly respects Roger Legeay, the director of the Crédit Agricole team, who wouldn’t let him have a shot of cortisone after he was stung by a bee in the 2001 Tour that caused his eye to swell so severely that he had to quit The Race, a fate he suffered in the four Tours he rode beginning with the first in 1999 riding as a teammate of Armstrong in the first of his seven wins. At the time he was furious, but now calls it “the most honorable action I’ve seen in sports, life or business in my many years on this earth.” In his acknowledgements he wrote of Legeay, “You taught me that making the right choice sometimes really sucks. But even if it sucks, it is still right. Thanks, boss. You are forever my boss.”
Despite the breadth of his vocabulary and polish as a writer, not needing a ghost writer as do most athletes when it comes to writing their autobiography, Vaughters does not shy from the colorful vernacular of the jock culture often resorting to profanity to make a point, perhaps another of his detriments in the eye of his wife.
When he goes to Europe and faces much stronger competition than in America, he is no longer in a class of his own when it comes to climbing. He adds emphasis to the quality of the riders writing, “In Europe even the very worst climbers were really fucking good.” When offered a testosterone shot when he was utterly exhausted he thought it was “absolutely fucking wonderful.” One never knows when he’ll pull the f-word out of his pocket, or the s-word, making him seem more down to earth than his effete veneer supposes. Of Marc Madiot, the vociferous boss of the French FDJ team, he commented, “Holy shit, that boy can go off.”
In 2009 when he attended his first meeting of team directors with the titans of the sport he truly respected he called it a “reunion of men coming together to smell their own farts and marvel at the bouquet of self-importance.” He had enough respect from them that they voted him president of their association, which he at first took to be a high honor, but then realized it was a chore none of the others really wanted. Nonetheless, it gave him a position of prominence in the sport at the age of 36 with the potential some day of heading the UIC.
He knows the inner-workings of the sport as well as anyone and does offer insights not found elsewhere. He is particularly perplexed by the contradictions of the sport where riders are continually torn between between selflessness and selfishness. They are encouraged to sacrifice themselves for the good of a teammate, but he who triumphs gets all the accolades and hefty salary.
As much as he is enamored with the sport, he laments, “Cycling is always heartache.” And adds in italics, “Always.” In his early days at a training camp in Colorado Springs he had to drink “absurd amounts of coffee...just to survive from one day to the next without crying.” That’s the first of nearly a dozen instances of tears he cites, though most are of others—his mother for his drug-taking, his first girl friend when she struggled to help him take blood samples for his lactate monitor, his wife when she told him she couldn’t take him any longer. The most dramatic case of tears were those of Floyd Landis when Vaughters called him after he’d been stripped of his Tour title. “He answered on the first ring,” Vaughters wrote, “crying so much he couldn’t even talk.”
Among the many attributes of his book is that he respects his readers, presuming they know the sport, sparing him from having to explain its basics, as all too many of these books do. In his very first race in Europe he is devastated by finishing last by a humiliating margin. Even more humiliating is the only rider lagging behind is a Belgian riding for the ONCE team coming off a knee injury who he didn’t know. He eventually learns he is Johan Bruyneel without further identifying him, knowing his readers ought to know he went on to be Armstrong’s director and his as well for a couple of years.
Though he might not have won back his wife with this book, which includes an affirmation of what may have been her perception of him, “a deeply flawed human,” he does offer a book of considerable insight and intelligence that ought to please any connoisseur of the sport. May there be another.
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