Speaking to Casinos En Ligne, British ex-Tour de France rider Alex Dowsett talks about safety in cycling following the death of Gino Mader, his love for his idol Lance Armstrong and how his cheating scandal impacted this and whether riots across France are
Question: Do you miss not being on the Tour now that you have retired?
Alex Dowsett: “I didn’t finish in ‘15, but did in ‘19. It was so hard, I got through it. I vowed never to go back because it is so difficult. I went there as a spectator in 2021 and saw how big it is. I worked hard and I was a very good cyclist.
“But it was a real privilege to be on the start and finish line of such a huge event. I then thought I would go back to the chaos!”
Q: How hard is it?
AD: “It is the mental toll as much as the physical toll. The physical toll compared with other Grand tours is wound up by one or two pet cent, which may not sound much but enough. It’s mainly because the stakes are a bit higher for everyone because it is *the* tour. For the main teams it is the peak race of the season.
“It is the one that secures the sponsorships, it is the reason Pro teams exist. Cycling as a sport may not want to have an event that is so powerful, but it does. It is like Wimbledon in tennis, it is the ultimate one. That ups the ante. Every team talks about their A team. There is no-one being carried, no-one there as an experiment to see how they do and how they could cope. Everyone who is there has earned their place.”
Q: What about the mental stress?
AD: “The mental challenge is the high stress. You have got to be on it all the time. There is no part of the race where it calms down to the point where you can just ride, so to speak, having a chat. That is almost non-existent in the Tour.
“It is a catch 22 – the risk of crashing is a lot higher on the Tour because everyone wants to be in the position where they don’t crash. Being in that position, it increases the risk because 150-160 riders are trying to be in exactly the same place at exactly the same time, and there is only so much road.
Q: How do you approach it?
AD: “You have to break it down into chunks, individual stages. I used to say even after two stages, right that’s the start, out of the way then we would be a quarter of the way, a third of the way, half way, into single digits of stages, or you might get the longest stage and once you’ve finished you can say that’s the longest stage out of the way. It is a significant thing to be able to tell yourself.
“It might be the hilliest day gets out of the way, or a day you weren’t particularly looking forward to is out of the way. Or you can break it down into days of the week; this is the last Tuesday we are going to race. These are real mind games to get yourself through it.
“When you are working your way up through the ranks you do stage races, under 18, do a three stage race, under 23 an eight day stage. But there is nothing that exists between that and a 21 stage Grand Tour. There’s no 15 day race. It is a massive jump. The only way you can prepare for a Tour de France is to ride a Giro or a Vuelta, which is the same number of stages.”
Q: What toll does it take on the body?
AD: “If you are losing weight you are not fuelling properly. In marathon running, you are fuelling for a one off over three to four hours. In the Tour you are fuelling for five hours in the saddle for almost 21 days consecutively.
“There is nothing like it on earth. I won two stages on the Giro in my career, which as a rider is career defining. If a boxer wins a particularly important bout, he can celebrate that for a month. If you win a stage of the Tour that is career defining and can never be taken away from you.
“But you are in bed by 9pm, maybe a glass of champagne to celebrate, then a massive bowl of rice and pasta shoved under your nose to eat. Then you’re back to bed ready for the start line the next day ready to do it all again.”
Q: Why did you retire?
AD: “I felt I had achieved everything that I was physically capable of. I squeezed everything out of myself that I could. I worked so hard, I made sure there was no stone left unturned. If I needed to invest financially I did with my partner without hesitation.
“I just didn’t think there was anymore to come. I was proud of what I achieved and nothing more. I couldn’t stop what I had done. That’s ok. I am 34, I might be old in cycling terms but not in real world terms. I have a little girl and I want to spend more time with her. I am very at peace with my decision.”
Q: Yates brothers – 1 and 2 in first stage. A great start for them?
AD: “Yes, it’s a terrific start for the Yates brothers. It was two brothers going to the line, racing both with each other and against each other. I was really happy that none of the team’s directors on Adam’s or Simon’s team gave any orders; just let the two guys race. You couldn’t have had a fairer fight than that. It was a great call to let them race.
“I am sure they won’t mind me saying so, but Adam and Simon are notorious for not being seen when it is game time. When they are training, getting ready for a race they disappear socially to focus on what they need to, which is winning a bike race. I got emotional watching them both.”
Q: Pogacar or Vingegaard?
AD: “From what we’ve seen so far they both look very good. It may sound silly to say, they both have to get to the finish. They both have to avoid all the crashes, avoid picking up a common cold, getting sick, having injuries. That is part of the game with the Tour. It is the ultimate aim to finish first, but first you have to finish.
“It is like an economy, energy saving not just for the two stand out favourites. On day one both teams seemed to be trying to show the other how strong they were. The only people who profit from that is everyone else who gets a nice ride to the finish line with the main two doing all the work. You wonder even if Pogacar or Vingegaard don’t crack, their teams might. If one does that leaves them exposed and the team that hasn’t cracked can capitalise. But it would be difficult to look past them.”
Q: We’ve lost Mas and Carapaz already and Gino Mader died in the Tour de Suisse. How dangerous is the sport?
AD: “You have got two types of crashes. The first week of the Tour, historically, is like the Hunger Games. You have just to get through it.
“The first week has been notorious for crashes. Untraditional, hillier, early stages have reduced the number of crashes. If you put a little fatigue in everyone’s legs early on there is a slight easing off of the eagerness to be at the front all the time. Even though we have lost Mas and Carapaz the number of crashes is down.
“The second type of crashes are the descents. You are racing, pushing your body and your bike to the limit – one mistake and something really terrible can happen. Like we saw with Gino the consequences can be absolutely tragic.”
Q: Anything you’d like to be put in place to try to stop this happening again?
AD: “It was not a freak accident. At the end of the day we descend mountain sides all the time. One of the most iconic shots from last year was Tom Pidcock’s utterly mind-blowing descent on the Alpe d’huez stage that he won. You could look at it two ways – one it is a total masterclass in descending, the other is, look how close to the edge he is and what are the consequences of that edge.
“You can’t stop people racing but you can start trying to prepare to save them if something goes wrong – whether that’s barriers or netting in strategic places. The Tour de Suisse is known as the high-speed race. I raced it many times. It was a really nice race but it was very fast. Every year it’s like that, well over 60 mph top speed.
“Those downhills in Switzerland I am often asked what your top speed was and I was doing 73 mph.
“People would find that shocking and it is, and that was with the whole peloton, all 170 riders. We’ve all got maps on our Garmin head units to show what corners are coming up. Rather like a rally co-driver. If you’ve got one downhill to win the race, you say, ‘Right this is it. And a small mistake can win or lose the race but also a small mistake can be a dice with death. If you finish a race at the top of a climb that becomes a different beast and is a different mentality.
I’d like to think everyone has had a good think about when to take risks and when it is not necessary.
Q: Thoughts on people throwing tacks on to the road to puncture bikes?
AD: “It is ridiculous. Some people are never happy. Maybe they might not be able to get to their local shops because there is a bike race in the way. But they’ve got the biggest sporting events on the planet race in the world going past their front door, maybe go and enjoy it!”
Q: Are the Paris riots at the back of people’s minds, do you think?
AD: “You trust that the race officials are making the right decisions for the riders both on and off the bike. Contingency plans to ensure the safety of the race. I was assistant race director for the London Women’s Classic race. It is eye opening to see a professionally run race through the eyes of the organisers, to see the length they go to and how something can come out of nowhere and blindside the race.
“You can have all the processes in the world to try to predict things that could happen. The good thing about everything going on in France is that it is a known quantity. They can be more alert, there is more predictability with it.”
Q: It’s been a golden era for British cycling over the past 15 years – with Cavendish, Wiggins, and Froome. Can you rank them?
AD: “*Laughs* That’s like asking me to try and rank my friends! You can’t compare. Wiggins has won one Tour de France but is one of the most versatile riders there’s ever been on the planet. World and Olympic double, multiple medals on the track in multiple disciplines; the range of what he has won in cycling is vast.
“Cavendish, who is one win away from the greatest number of stage wins in history, is just phenomenal. And Froome, who has won all three Grand Tours, and the Tour de France four times. You can’t compare. It probably comes down to what you as an individual fan likes. If you’re a fan of the sprint stages then you are going to say Cavendish, if you’re fan of cycling per say you might say Wiggins and if you are a fan of the Tour de France, you might say Froome.
“Only Froome has not had the recognition he deserves. Cavendish and Wiggins have won Sports Personality of the Year. Wiggins is a household name. It is Froomey who hasn’t been taken to people’s hearts, not by the British public and not by cycling.”
Q: Why is that?
AD: “I was in a cycling café in London when Geraint Thomas was winning his Tour de France in 2018. It was the moment the Dutch rider, Tom Dumoulin, dropped Chris Froome. Nothing happened between Thomas and Dumoulin; the only thing that happened was Froomey got dropped. The whole café cheered and I thought that was so sad.
“This is a guy who might not have been born in Great Britain and have the quintessential British accent, he lives in Monaco so perhaps people don’t like that. But he has got the same passport as the rest of us through all the correct means somehow people don’t like him. I am proud to be British but I was not then. I was ashamed.”
Q: Is the sport that much cleaner now? It seems to be.
AD: “It shocks people when I tell them the testing procedures that every single professional rider has to go through from the age of 18. I would have to submit online, extensive information on where I slept every night, where I was every single hour of every single day 365 days of the year.
“If a relative dies and you have to go somewhere else for the night all of a sudden, you have to tell them. If you don’t and they come to test you and you are not there, that is not a good enough excuse. You get a strike and if you get three strikes in a year you may as well have taken drugs and tested positive because it is as bad.
“Cycling is one of the most tested sports on the planet now. I urge people to think that if cheating in sport doesn’t make the news, it doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.
“If you don’t hear about a footballer testing positive, does that mean there are no drugs or does that mean there is no testing? A lot of sports prefer to turn a blind eye to everything. They look at cycling and think, look how bad it is going to make us (if we do have lots of positive tests).
“It is a shame that cycling is synonymous with it. The number of times I’ve met people, for instance an accountant and they say, ‘Oh you’re into cycling are you? Not on the old drugs are you?’ People don’t understand what an insult that is.
“You are tarnishing an individual and there’s a stigma that is attached. That is so insulting. I trained 25-30 hours a week for 11 months a year and for someone to reduce your entire life’s work to cheating with an offhand comment, when your doorbell rings at 6am for someone to come and watch you pee into a cup and stick a needle into your arm to take some blood, pretty much monthly.
“I was on a phone call once pre-Olympic and Commonwealth Games when you have to go through extra anti-doping education. These are people who test every sport. They asked if we’d ever been tested. There were four of us on the call including Chris Froome. Three of us said yeah now and again. Froomey said this was in March, April, May, that he had had 73 tests in that time. This was in 2016.
“Pogacar said they turn up at 6am and again at 8pm. Because if you wanted to try and catch someone you need to be unpredictable. Pogacar was tested, and they came again at 6pm. He told them he’d already been tested. They said, yes I know, golden opportunity if you’d wanted to for you to be up to no good because you’d assume we wouldn’t be coming back. That’s not suggesting anything by the way! Don’t get me wrong, this is a good thing. I don’t know if that level of testing exists in other sports.
Q: How did you feel when you were racing?
AD: “I always raced with the opinion that everyone I was riding against was clean.”
Q: You were in Lance Armstrong’s under-23 development team in 2010. How do you feel about him now?
AD: “Yes that was when Lance Armstrong was a hero to many of us and there was no hint of what was to transpire.
“I was pretty devastated when I found out he’d cheated. For a lot of my generation he had been the hero. For me in particular, I am a hemophiliac, his under-23 team helped to launch me into a professional career.
“Being a hemophiliac, I felt it was something I had overcome to achieve what I achieved. He came back from cancer to achieve great things, he was a source of inspiration. When the drugs thing came out it was pretty heartbreaking. It was more so given the level of bullying and manipulation, and utilising his charity to strong arm his way. That was pretty upsetting.”
Q: Enhanced drugs Olympics. What do you think of that idea?
AD: “You wouldn’t catch me watching it!”
Q: There are rumours of Saudi Arabia coming into cycling. What are your thoughts on that?
AD: “There are two ways of looking at that. Cycling is quite a broken model in terms of return on investment on sponsorship. It is very fragile.
“The sport would love more sponsors. Cycling is lucky to have sponsors because a lot of the time the sponsors are there, not hoping for an ROI, but because they love cycling. While that is great, it is not a sustainable business model.
“That is why there are a lot of sponsors in cycling, which different people might deem to be undesirable; there’s a UAE funded team, an Israel and Bahrain funded team; the Australian team have Saudi sponsorship, even Ineos with fracking and the industries which they are in.
Q: Where do you draw the line? Formula 1 is sponsored by a petro-chemical company. They used to be all cigarettes.
AD: “At this point in time, the sponsorship model is too fragile for the sport to be particularly fussy at this point.
“It would be wonderful if it were different and if cycling got to a point where it could be fussy and there was enough interest so that they could also be picky. But it is not there.”
Q: INEOS – how are they seen as a cycling team?
AD: “One at the forefront and one of the best. They were the earliest adopters of marginal gains. They achieved a lot of success. Other teams have also adopted them and caught up. I don’t know the inner workings of Ineos, I must stress that. But from the outside it looks like Ineos needs to revert to the team that was willing to rewrite the rule book on how fast to go on a bicycle.
“That is what UAE and Jumbo are doing at the moment and they are the two leading teams.
“I don’t know enough about his ventures to say what impact he could have at Manchester United (if he bought them).”
Q: Netflix documentary – Unchained – is that positive?
AD: “On the basis that Unchained comes after Drive to Survive, it won’t have the same transformative effect. But it will do cycling an awful lot of good. A lot of people have watched it, and people said they didn’t realise quite what it takes. It has done a great job in educating how tough the sport is to the world.
Q: How do you transition from pro sport to a new life?
AD: “I have a book coming out in the autumn, and I’ve put a lot of my thought processes into that. It’s called ‘Bloody Minded’, published by Bloomsbury.
“I had a certain amount of imposter syndrome when I took part in the Tour de France. I looked around at all of these mind-blowingly good riders, wondering what the hell I was doing there.
“Then I look back at my career and know I won this and I won that, that whole process going through that stuff and getting it down on paper made me think I worked far harder than I thought I did. I always felt I wasn’t good enough.”
But I ticked every box and crossed every tee. Never missed a day’s training unless I was really ill.
Q: Describe your Hemophilia?
AD: “I was born at a lucky time when haemophiliacs could be far more able than previously. That is largely down to advances in medication. My NHS doctors were supportive of being a cyclist when I was 14. Then from that it has become a role model story. It’s the fact in a reasonably dangerous sport and my team doesn’t treat me any different to anyone else.”
