Four Dopers That Prove the 2000s Were a Hive of Villainy

Back in the mid-2000s, you couldn’t throw an insulated motorcycle pannier bag over the French border without hitting a cycling team eager to be embroiled in a Cronenbergesque body-horror scandal.

There are enough examples to fill a low-budget anthology series with more bursting blood bags and fewer believable plotlines than American Horror Story. Here are just four people who navigated the post-Armstrong era with a lack of grace.

Stefan Schumacher

CERA was a wonder drug that made it easy to get started winning bike races, and even easier to get your team’s sponsorship cancelled. Its key selling point to professional cyclists was that no test existed that could detect the use of the drug, which turned out to be a selling point so patently untrue that the cyclists caught using it could’ve taken their drug dealers to small claims court.

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Germany was losing interest in cycling. Marco Pantani had aged their young darling Jan Ullrich by about 40 years in two hours of racing to win the 1998 Tour de France, and then Lance Armstrong had shown up the East German so effectively as a lumbering brute with a buzzcut that cycling fans were having to check the TV listings to work out if they were watching the Tour de France or a Cold War-era Rocky movie.

Enter Gerolsteiner, the least enticingly-named bottled water company this side of Detroit. Their team burst onto the Classics scene with a motley crew of strange-faced nobodies who had apparently become gold-tier climbers and classics riders overnight. The few riders on their roster that we had already heard of were behaving equally strangely, bleaching their hair and telling the world they were Argentinian. Maybe there was something in the water.

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Stefan Schumacher was just one of these multi-talented misfits, and boy was he a sight to behold. He was what a circumcised penis thinks the rest of its body looks like: bald and unsightly with uncomfortable bulges in the least appealing places. His position on the bike looked like someone trying to ride a borrowed recumbent face-first. And he had a habit of putting his sunglasses on the back of his head as he climbed, sitting so perfectly above a skin crease that it gave the impression he had a second grotesque face on the back of his head when viewed from behind.

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Schumacher wasn’t exactly known to be squeaky clean. He was caught using amphetamines in 2005 and 2007, and won the 2006 ENECO Tour ahead of George Hincapie using a novel tactic called “knocking the American to the ground as he’s about to outsprint you.” It all came to a head at an eventful 2008 Tour de France, where he won two stages, wore the yellow jersey, and tested retroactively positive for CERA. He spent most of the next month sobbing on camera and protesting his innocence to the Court for Arbitration of Sport in a voice that sounded like a hound from a Hanna-Barbera cartoon, before reluctantly accepting his two year ban. And then he immediately tested positive for CERA again when his Olympics samples came in. The only thing left to do was cry and protest all over again. Good work Stefan, very cool.

Riccardo Ricco

In the mid-2000s, and perhaps more generally in cycling, there were few climbers as exiting as Riccardo Ricco. There’s nothing like a big personality in sports, and personality is something Ricco had in spades. “Personality” being the kind way of saying that he was a raving dickhead crybaby whose entire existence in the pro peloton was akin to a terrifyingly seminal 1960s psychological experiment.

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Ricco attacked with vigor on the steepest slopes and climbed in the drops. And when met with suspicion, he’d simply respond that he was trying to emulate his hero Marco Pantani. If you think it’s a bit on the nose to respond to accusations of doping by declaring a disgraced doper is your personal hero, then please understand that it’s still barely more than a nudge and wink compared to the rest of Ricco’s behavior during his short-lived time at the top of the sport. This is a guy who counted his knuckles, realized he had the exact right amount for an I LOVE EPO tattoo, then decided that would be too subtle.

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During the 2008 Tour de France, he got advance warning that he’d been picked for doping control. Subscribing to his lifelong philosophy of “I can’t get in trouble for anything I say or do unless there’s a positive test,” he ran from drug testers in busy traffic. In the grand scheme of plans to evade a piss test, this is about as effective as claiming you don’t know how to urinate. The testers decided Ricky Ricco should be on a daily testing schedule for the remainder of the Tour de France, and he put out a positive in the very first one.

Intriguingly, getting caught was only the start of the drama for Ricco. After a hot minute of pretending he was only taking vitamins, and a substantially longer period of saying provocative things, his girlfriend and the mother of his child tested positive for EPO. Ricco left her… For doing the same thing he was banned for at the time… While being convincingly implicated in dealing the drugs that got her banned.

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That’s not the end. But the blood transfusion he attempted to administer himself almost was.

His triumphant comeback from his doping ban was spent in hospital with kidney failure because he’d almost killed himself cheating in order to be ready for for it. It took several weeks for him to be let out of the hospital, and like most of us would after recovering from a traumatic incident, he headed straight to McDonalds. Unlike most of us, he went there to buy EPO in the parking lot, and was arrested while claiming it was all a misunderstanding. We really were just one “I thought I was buying a portion of needle-shaped fries” away from a story that the Onion editors would reject as being too unrealistic. With a collective sigh, Italian cycling finally banned him from competition until 2024.

Nowadays, he runs his own ice cream shop selling gelato for dogs. Let me repeat that: this guy decided his next career path should be to make ice cream for dogs, demonstrating the same brilliant judgement that has been a staple of his career. Don’t worry though, he plans to return to racing in 2024, when he’ll be 40.

Ivan Basso

The final years of the Armstrong era weren’t so much about who could unseat him, but who could take his throne once he’d voluntarily retired. After winning the Best Young Rider classification in 2002, an ambitious Ivan Basso joined Mr 60% at Team CSC, where he’d attempt to stake his claim as next in the line of succession.

His stock rose quickly. He was a young Gregory Peck lookalike who could stay with Armstrong in the mountains, and proved it by winning 2004’s first mountain stage to La Mongie on the way to finishing third overall. A year later he effortlessly claimed Jan Ullrich’s “second best to Lance” trophy in 2005. Armstrong retired immediately thereafter, and Basso had truly cemented himself as the American’s successor.

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He started 2006 strong, winning the Giro by 15 minutes with a performance so dominatingly complete that his rivals shrugged him off as an extra terrestrial. All that was left was the Tour de France, and most of the cycling world had already preemptively crowned him as its champion. He spent a month posing for photographs in 2006’s most desirable hooded sweatshirts and sipping espressos from comedically tiny cups. Then, the night before the Tour ‘s prologue, he was expelled from the race for involvement in an anti-doping case in Spain.

Basso claimed his innocence, and appeared vindicated when CONI quickly closed its case against him without charge. But it reopened a few months later, this time with irrefutable evidence that he was a client of doping doctor Eufemiano Fuentes. In the most creative denial of doping since Tyler Hamilton claimed to have a vanishing twin, Basso claimed he never actually doped. He’d just paid thousands of Euros for doping services and stored his blood in case he was ever tempted to dope in the future. When your defense against doping is more or less identical to your mate’s explanation for why he has Grindr on his phone, you know nobody’s going to be convinced. He was banned for two years.

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Basso returned to cycling after his ban, and eventually managed to scrape together a Giro d’Italia overall win by a few seconds ahead of… some people nobody has ever heard of. And while he continued to claim he’d never actually cheated, he’d returned from his ban looking more like a 4th Cat than a once-in-a-generation grand tour champion. Ironically, with his comeback he achieved something none of his 2000s peers succeeded at: convincing cycling fans he was racing clean.

Floyd Landis

The end of the Lance Armstrong era brought about a power vacuum comparable with the collapse of the Soviet Union, and since it happened during the Bush II era, it coincided with a similar rush to seize crude oil for private profit. Armstrong’s power, and the influence of US cyclists on the pro peloton, was waning. The grip on the narrative was loosening. Wild rumors circulated of Lance pouring Floyd Landis’s blood bags down the drain to teach him a lesson, other Americans getting their blood switched during transfusions, and, worst of all, something to do with him dating one of the Olsen twins.

With the sudden exclusion of Basso and Ullrich, Landis was tipped to take Armstrong’s crown in 2006, which would provide the eighth straight American Tour de France win that French fans so desperately craved. His lack of acceptance from cycling fans was an issue, and with a face like a half-eaten apple and a Mennonite upbringing, Landis wasn’t bringing huge amounts of relatable charm even when you discounted his association with the terribly unpopular Lance Armstrong.

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Still, despite somehow arriving late to the race’s prologue, he put himself into the yellow jersey with ease before tactically giving it away to his former teammate Oscar Pereiro on a transition stage so that his team didn’t have to work to defend it.

The plan began to unravel though. Pereiro mysteriously found his lost form and defended his lead. And as soon as Landis regained the maillot jaune, he blew up. He lost ten minutes on Stage 16’s climb to La Toussuire and dropped to 11th overall.

All the wags pointing that Landis’s doping had gone wrong had their own epic blow up when the following stage revealed that Landis’s doping had gone very right. He attacked from the neutralized section wile rival teams played out turgid catenaccio racing waiting for their rivals to do the work. By the time they realized he was going to win, it was too late. He won the stage and put himself into third overall, just 30 seconds behind Pereiro. He took over the race lead on the final time trial, and won the Tour.

About three minutes after he’d walked off with his trophy, the Tour de France moved to strip him of his title. He’d tested positive after his solo stage win as a result of slapping a testosterone patch on his ball sack. And, rumor has it, he graphically removed it at the table over dinner with his team. Sure hope nobody thought that thing was a papadum.

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A vast period of litigation ensued. He set up the Floyd Fairness Fund to pay for his legal assault on the entirety of France, eventually raising over a million dollars from the kind of gullible morons who share conspiracy theories about Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Facebook.

Speaking of people who’d put their hands in a fire if they thought it’d help their favorite cyclist win a complex debate about the efficacy of scientific procedures, the site Trust But Verify sprung up to endlessly examine the minutiae of the case. Wholesomely naive and heavy on the Trust part of the site’s title, it even included a photograph of the owner’s son giving Landis a thumbs up as its header image.

And Floyd did his part too, discrediting some lab scientists, threatening a victim of sexual abuse, and so on. The usual things. To the surprise of a handful of Americans who’d first heard of the Tour de France in 2004, none of this worked.

He later admitted to everything. Now he sells CBD.

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Bonus: The single worst piece of content we ever published on Derailed. (Nah, but we wish this is as bad as it got.)