Tour de France Champion
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Joined: 20-10-2006
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PHg wrote:
THE PELOTON BRIEF
A rider making a stand for clean riding would be heralded as a hero, you'd think... Micula Dematteis tells Daniel Friebe how he found out the hard way that isn't necessarily so
By the end of the 2007 Tour de France, Candido Cannavò, former director of La Gazzetta dello Sport, had seen enough. "I asked people in cycling for the name of a single rider you could swear by and no one could give me one", Cannavò wrote in his Monday column "Make Me Understand", the exasperation practically dripping from the page.
Everyone in Italy reads La Gazzetta. Well, that's an exaggeration, but it is Italy's favourite paper, if not quite its biggest in terms of copies sold. It's also a fixture in every pro cyclist's breakfast routine, be it at home or at the bar where they take their morning cappuccino. They're narcissists, after all; they scan the cycling pages for their name or picture and, if they find neither, look for the mention of a mate. Miculà Dematteis is no different. Well, actually, he is.
Dematteis read Cannavò's plea and felt accused. He won't have been alone, but he was the only one to do something about it. The following day, the Tenax rider returned home from training and switched on his laptop. He wrote about his life, his love of cycling and, most importantly, he wrote in considerable detail about why he, at least, was one rider who Cannavò could sleep easy about. He signed off provocatively – "I can't vouch for the other riders" – and pressed the Send button. He presumed that was the end of it.
It might have been, had his words not resonated so loudly and so eloquently in the corridors of La Gazzetta. So loudly, in fact, that 36 hours after Dematteis had finished writing, his letter was splashed across an entire page of the newspaper. When a Gazzetta journalist had called him the previous evening to forewarn him, Dematteis assumed he meant that a few lines had been shoehorned in somewhere on the readers' letters page.
What he'd underestimated was just how long Cannavò and the Italian tifosi had been waiting for this. For someone to dispense with the platitudes – the "I've passed every tests" and the "Cyclists are the most tested athletes in the world" – and to say precisely what Dematteis was saying now. To say this: "I've never used doping products. Never. I have a doctor, yes. One from the National Health Service, who I go to when I've got the flu or a sore throat".
SIX MONTHS LATER, Dematteis is no longer under any illusions. That letter, which he'd intended as "just something private, between Candido Cannavò and me", has changed his life, and not necessarily for the better.
"I was pleased when, as well as the hundreds of messages the Gazzetta got on their website, a woman wrote in to say that I was doing it all for self-publicity, and Cannavò replied to say that she was wrong", Dematteis explains. "He said he hoped that riders like Paolo Bettini or Damiano Cunego would now take my lead and commit themselves like I had, but no one else did. After that, the only consequences were personal ones, for me.
"Three days after the article was in the paper, I was racing the Giro dell'Appennino and riders I'd known for years were going out of their way to avoid eye contact, ignoring me completely. I think that maybe they didn't like that last sentence, where I said I couldn't vouch for anyone else. But I really don't know what they're doing 24 hours a day. Anyway, frankly, if people didn't approve of what I wrote and thought I was a cretin, I'd have preferred if they'd said that to my face.
"The only one who came to see me was Roberto Petito, who I'd ridden with at Tenax the previous year", he continues. "He said it was great that a young rider had spoken up like that. He meant that I was taking a risk because I've only been a pro for two years and I'm not established. He was right – things have changed for me since that day. I mean, the first month, there was a bit of a fuss, but then things started to go a bit awry with the team as well. They sort of forgot about me after that. I'm not saying that I've become a persona non grata, but there are certainly people who didn't like what I said".
One change in Dematteis's career path can be seen with the naked eye. When we meet him in February to test-ride the climb to Pratonevoso, which will be one of the highlights of this year's Tour de France, Dematteis is wearing a generic red jacket, as the riding contract he's just signed is so fresh that he doesn't even have his new team's kit yet. He's just grateful that his new employers, a French-based feeder squad to Saunier Duval, have given him a bike to ride; when his Tenax bosses called in October demanding that he bring back his team issue Pinarello, Dematteis initially pointed out that he was under contract and therefore within his rights to keep it until December 31, but later relented. He spent most of the winter training on a Specialized he'd been given by his grandfather 10 years ago, but which had been rotting in his cousin's garage for almost as long.
The 24 year old is no stranger to sacrifice. He comes from a beautiful but remote Alpine valley, the Val Varaita, and modest, rural roots. His father restores old houses and his mother breeds a rare kind of mountain pony. When his phone calls to pro team managers kept going unreturned last autumn, he helped out his mum, and briefly considered that it might become a permanent career.
His love of cycling was passed on by his paternal grandfather, an engineer with a passion for the mountains. In the 1950s Luigi Dematteis took part in an expedition to cross the Alps from east to west. Only he and the legendary Alpine explorer Walter Bonatti made it. Nearly 50 years later, when Miculà was 12, Luigi took him to France to spend four days riding across the Massif Central, pedalling from dawn till dusk and sleeping two nights in hostels and two nights on a stable floor.
Dematteis believes that experiences like this forged his character. First as a member of Italy's top amateur team, Zalf-Désirée-Fior, and then when he turned pro at Tenax in 2006, he soon became aware of fundamental differences between his ethos and that of many of his team-mates.
"My attitude towards doping was never any secret in the teams I've ridden for. I would always speak up in team meetings and I won't deny that there were riders who would give me funny looks", he says. "Those guys think and act differently. Logically, when that fundamental clash of cultures exists, you can't really strike up a rapport with someone. I respect every individual's right to live their life as they want, but I won't approve of or support someone who cheats, and it's hard for me to be their friend. I also won't tolerate those people involving me in their rubbish".
By "rubbish", Dematteis means nasty surprises like the one he once got when, on the second night of a stage race in Germany, he opened up his hotel mini bar to find the can of iced tea he was craving sandwiched in amongst his room-mate's doping products. He thinks that the doping population has thinned considerably, but, when it's not dirty looks from team-mates, he sees enough riders transform their bodies and performances within the space of a couple of weeks to believe there are still a few chancers out there. "You don't need a dope test to tell you who's not playing by the book. I can see it a mile away, and so can everyone else in the peloton", he says.
"In my opinion we have to work on educating young people", he goes on to stress. "Cycling and sport and society are all linked, and it's society that's sick. These days, society revolves around time and money and nothing else. The average cyclist is also culturally fairly closed-minded. He rides his bike because he hopes to earn a lot of money and one day have enough to buy a Ferrari or a Porsche. He wants to look cool, successful, attractive. You only have to look at a programme like [reality TV show] Big Brother. They're the values you see in a programme like that.
"In Italy, if you're 18 and your parents haven't bought you a car to drive as soon as you pass your test, you're no one. My parents had an old rust-bucket of a Fiat Panda that finally gave up the ghost when I was 17 or 18. We were just lucky that I'd put away a couple of thousand euros and I could buy them another secondhand Panda. And that was just fine by me".
It would be quite a social commentary if the working-class values that were once professional cycling's lifeblood had been subverted to the extent Dematteis suggests, and that conclusion is hard to avoid. "At races in 2006 and 2007, I either realised that I could get a decent result – I told my team-mates and I took responsibility – or I worked for someone who thought he could get a result", he reflects. "We were told at the start of the season to ride as a team, so that seemed logical. In reality you do our job, you fetch bottles, you pull on the front, then they tell you at the end of the year, "OK, but you never finished a race in the top five". Meanwhile, others are skulking around at the back, pretending to be tired, only to then finish in the top 20 and get a pat on the back from the directeurs sportifs. And in lots of cases those were the guys who got their contract renewed at the end of the year".
We relay Dematteis's comments to Fabio Bordonali, the man who signed him for Tenax late in 2005 and then opted not to keep him when the team became LPR Brakes and signed Danilo Di Luca and Paolo Savoldelli at the end of the 2007 season. For the record, Dematteis's best results in that two-year period included a 15th place overall in the 2006 Regio Tour, 15th in the 2007 Milan-Turin and 17th in the 2007 Eroica. Not brilliant for a guy who finished fourth in the 2004 Baby Giro d'Italia ahead of Riccardo Riccò, but not bad either.
"I really like Miculà as a person, I think he's a good athlete and I think he deserves a few more years to figure out whether his future's in professional cycling. But I also had to make a choice based on what I thought the team needed", Bordonali says. "Ultimately, Miculà was quite fortunate to get an opportunity to ride with a team like mine for two years. A lot of young riders never get that chance. He was fortunate that, in my teams, I never confine young riders to the role of domestique all the time; I always encourage them to take their chance.
"As for the letter, he wrote it entirely of his own initiative but I welcomed it", he continues. "It was about time that someone pointed out that cyclists aren't just a bunch of dopers, and that there's a lot of sacrifice and passion that goes into their work. I don't remember hearing Miculà talk about his stance on doping in front of the rest of the team, but if he did, I'm sure no one would have told him he was talking rubbish. As for me, I quit racing 15 years ago because I didn't want to get involved with any of that... No, Miculà 's letter had zero impact on the decision not to renew his contract".
THE 2008 SEASON has started well for Dematteis. After several near misses and a series of mechanical mishaps, he scored his first win for new team Saunier Duval-Bike Club Vallauris in the Grand Prix de Carqueiranne on the first weekend in March. Clear in a group of seven, he attacked 600m from a finish line positioned at the top of a steep climb and won by 20 seconds.
He hopes that performances like this might earn him a place in Saunier Duval's ProTour team by the end of the season. Speaking to us in mid-March, the Spanish team's manager, Mauro Gianetti, doesn't rule out that possibility, but admits that any promotion is more likely to come in 2009. "We have satellite teams in France, Italy and Switzerland, and it's not just Miculà we're watching", Gianetti cautions.
Dematteis is realistic enough to know that, at 24, his time and opportunities are running out. A year from now, "pro cyclist" may no longer be his job description. "But I'll always ride my bike", he smiles. "I might do some races with my old club or some gran fondos, but just for fun, to get to the top of a climb and stop for a bit of bread and salami, then get to the finish line before they start to pack away".
As for work, he shouldn't have too many problems; not only did he finish school, but he finished it a year early by successfully cramming the final two years into one.
What he'll never know is how much that now infamous letter has altered his destiny. Bordonali says that it had "zero impact" on his decision not to renew Dematteis's contract; some of us can't help feeling that, with cycling needing heroes like never before, maybe he should have been kept on.
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Good article from Procycling, good rider. Too bad he got fucked over by Bordonali. |
