Team Garmin in Boulder, Colorado

David Millar lies flat out in the hotel parking lot, in the still warm November sun, nursing a hangover and waiting for his teammates. The squad, sponsored by Garmin GPS systems, are in Boulder, Colorado, for their pre-season training camp. More about bonding than real training, the week is nicknamed “booze camp” since it takes place ­during the riders’ short off season and they make the most of this fleeting freedom. They are staying in the four-star ­St Julien Hotel and last night enjoyed a wine tasting that lasted well into the small hours.

This is the last day of the camp, which has been organised into sessions covering everything from new training methods to dealing with the media to schedules and goals for the 2009 season. All week, the 30-odd riders and equal numbers of support staff have taken over the hotel’s spacious lobby. At any time of day, groups of skinny athletes sprawl across sofas with their laptops, talk to sponsors and team managers or huddle in corners being interviewed by reporters.

This morning, they are heading out on a three-hour training ride into the foothills of the Rockies – and the effects of last night are clear as the riders trickle out to the team van to pick up their gear. Millar, one of the team leaders, has been in demand all week. The lanky Brit is known in the press corps for his intelligence and individual style: his customised cycling shoes have Union Jack flags on the heels and later today he will turn out at the team’s official launch in a Vivienne Westwood-designed outfit involving plus-fours and argyle-patterned socks.

David Millar

He is also famous for having confessed to using illegal ­performance-enhancing drugs and serving a two-year professional racing ban – and for the fact that he has talked publicly and extensively about his doping experiences as part of a push to clean up the sport.

This reforming enthusiasm is matched by his boss, team manager Jonathan Vaughters, a former professional who competed against Millar in his racing days and was a teammate of Lance Armstrong. Still racing-thin, 35-year-old Vaughters has a kind of geek-chic cool and used to be nicknamed “the professor”, thanks to his interest in scientific training theories. This morning, he is patiently trying to corral his riders, who are milling around, fiddling with their bikes and stocking up on water and energy drinks. Nothing happens quite on time at training camp, but the group slowly comes together and heads off.

The ride is easy by the standards of professional cyclists, and the team sweat out last night’s excesses as they pedal ­double-file, chatting and joking. We turn off the main road into the hills but the pace remains steady as riders take it in turns to lead. I am sitting in a team car with Vaughters, who is driving; while we talk, he gets a message on his BlackBerry from Senator John Kerry. At the same time, he is keeping an eye on the riders. Wedged in the boot, the FT’s photographer calls ­Millar and his teammate, British Olympic gold medallist ­Bradley ­Wiggins, to the front. They grimace at the effort.

The sporting hall of shame

1. 1988, Ben Johnson, 100m sprinter. Positive for nandrolone, an anabolic steroid. Stripped of the 100m Olympic and world record of 9.79 seconds.

2. 1999, Linford Christie, 100m sprinter. Positive for nandrolone, an anabolic steroid. Two-year ban.

3. 2004, Tyler Hamilton, cyclist, Olympic gold medallist. Positive for blood transfusions. Banned for two years.

4. 2005, Tim Montgomery, sprinter. Two-year ban for using steroid THG, even though he never tested positive. His 2002 world 100m record of 9.78 seconds was nullified.

5. 2006, Floyd Landis, cyclist, winner 2006 Tour de France. Positive for synthetic testosterone. Stripped of his title, returned to competition this week.

6. 2007, Ivan Basso, cyclist, winner 2006 Giro d’Italia. Admitted he had stored blood for possible transfusions. Has just returned to competition after ban.

7. 2007, Bjarne Riis, cyclist, winner 1996 Tour de France. Admitted doping with EPO to win the Tour. No sanctions as it was too long ago.

8. 2007, Alexandre Vinokourov, cyclist. Positive for blood transfusions. Banned for one year by local federation. Now in training for a comeback.

9. 2007, Marion Jones, sprinter. Admitted doping after years of denials. Was stripped of her five medals from the Sydney Olympics, including three golds.

10. 2009, Alex Rodriguez, baseball star. Admitted having used steroids between 2001 and 2003 – including the season he hit his career high of 57 home runs.

For this squad, the sunny November interlude was all too brief. Since new year, many of them have travelled to ­Australia, Qatar and Malaysia for races. Others have holed up in far more serious training camps ahead of their first big test of the season: this week’s Tour of California.

. . .

At eight days in length, the Tour of California race is not quite the Tour de France. The west coast event is, however, the most prestigious US race, and winning here is a huge goal for US outfits such as Team Garmin-Slipstream. But this year’s race is big for more than just team hopes: it also marks Lance Armstrong’s first race on US soil in almost four years.

Armstrong became an inspiration to millions when he survived a battle with testicular cancer and went on to win a record seven Tours de France. The gruelling, three-week race is reckoned to be one of the toughest endurance events in the world. Retired for more than three years, Armstrong – now 37 – is making a comeback, with the aim of raising awareness and funds for cancer research. He remains as big a draw as ever. At his first race in Australia last month, politicians and other public figures rushed to be associated with him and his cause while journalists lined up for interviews. Yet for the cycling world, his return to racing is a mixed blessing. It attracts enormous attention but it has also brought back the old and never proven rumours that Armstrong, the biggest star the sport has ever seen, doped.

Armstrong has denied this repeatedly – successfully suing over the issue – and is reluctant to talk about it now, on the grounds he has nothing new to say. But to dispel the suspicions and put his results beyond question, he’s doing something new this ­season: putting himself through an extra series of tests, far beyond what is required, to prove that he is clean. And that will, inevitably, bring doping – and testing – to the fore.

Drug testing has always been based on the assumption that athletes are innocent until proven guilty. Armstrong is following in the footsteps of a handful of cycling teams, including Garmin, who are acting on the assumption that this no longer applies in sport and are prepared instead to prove themselves innocent. There is certainly a case for the guilty-until-proven-innocent premise. Suspicion of doping is now so high that sceptics deride any outstanding achievement as drug-fuelled even if there are no positive tests because they believe the dopers are at least a step ahead of the scientists. In many cases, the statement “I’ve never tested positive” might be true, but means very little.

What Armstrong and the Garmin team are doing is known scientifically as longitudinal testing. This involves undergoing a lot more testing, at regular intervals, to build up a reliable biological profile of each athlete. This can be used either to produce evidence of sophisticated doping that slips through the net of normal testing or it can, for the first time, show that an athlete is clean.

“Lance knows what he’s supposed to do if he wants to come back and it’s what we are doing. He is almost taking a leaf out of our book,” says Millar. “Nowadays the majority of us, we have to prove our innocence. We can’t take it for granted.”

. . .

Millar knows he is one of the many reasons for public suspicion of professional athletes. He was caught in 2004 as part of an expanding police investigation into his then team. He never tested positive, but a police raid on his Biarritz home uncovered used syringes with traces of erythropoietin, or EPO, a drug developed to help cancer patients by boosting production of red blood cells. Its use in sport was outlawed in 1990. Millar was arrested – in contrast to the UK, doping is a crime in France – and confessed.

Team manager Jonathan Vaughters

Doping is not new; people have always sought ways to produce more for less effort, and the history of doping in ­competitive sport goes back to the ancient Greeks, who used specially prepared herbal potions to improve performance. Nineteenth-century endurance athletes, including cyclists, are known to have turned to strychnine, cocaine and alcohol, among other substances – but doing so wasn’t illegal then. Only as the use of drugs and other performance-enhancers grew did sports federations begin to act, from the late 1920s.

In spite of bans, little changed – mostly because doping tests were only developed in the 1960s. They made their first Olympic appearance in 1968, at the Mexico games. They could not come too soon for cycling; in 1967, Briton Tom Simpson, a world champion and tabloid celebrity, died during a stage of the Tour de France in Provence. He had amphetamines in his blood and reportedly drank brandy before his fatal climb up Mont Ventoux. During the 1970s and 1980s, tests continued to be developed – and a slowly growing number of athletes were caught. Yet, doping only really came to the public’s attention in 1988, when runner Ben Johnson tested positive for anabolic steroids after setting a world record time of 9.79 seconds in the 100m sprint at the Seoul Olympics.

By this time, the focus was switching in many sports from steroids to blood-boosting drugs, particularly EPO. But a reliable test for this was not introduced until the 2000 Sydney Olympics, by which time its use was rife, particularly in cycling. The early 1990s saw a rash of deaths linked to the drug, many of which occurred when cyclists were asleep. This is because EPO, if misused, can thicken the blood beyond what the heart, which slows during rest, is able to deal with.

The full extent of what cyclists were up to was revealed in 1998 with the “Festina affair”, when members of the Tour’s top team (sponsored by watchmaker Festina) were caught systematically doping with EPO and a series of other substances after customs officials discovered a haul of drugs in a team official’s car. Over the following months, the full story came out, from the kitty maintained to buy the drugs to the detailed doping diaries kept by the team’s medical staff. Even the official transporting the drugs was doping: to stay awake while driving, he had taken “pot belge” – a well-known concoction among cyclists that includes cocaine, amphetamines, caffeine and morphine.

The Festina affair led to the formation of the World Anti-Doping Agency (Wada), the international body that co-ordinates and monitors the fight against sports doping. It also triggered a degree of soul-searching in the cycling community.

Cheating is part of cycling lore. Maurice Garin, the first winner of the Tour de France in 1903, was stripped of his title the following year because officials believed he’d caught a train during part of the race. It has featured for so long partly because cycling is one of the hardest sports of all. The early organisers of the Tour wanted to make the race so tough that only a handful would finish. When they added mountain routes – then little more than dirt tracks in remote areas – they were spat at and called “assassins” by the racers.

Although organisers now make sure that no leg of the race is too extreme, cycling still demands a mix of strength and endurance that means the smallest performance gains can make a huge difference. “Cycling is exceptionally vulnerable to doping because it’s like creating human F1 cars,” says Vaughters. “It takes the human body to limits that just aren’t seen in other sports. This means it is very much predisposed because it’s so high-performance.”

Even outside cycling, the scandals have kept coming. In 2003, athletics was jolted by the Balco affair, named after the US laboratory that manufactured a steroid known to users as “the clear” and to scientists as tetrahydrogestrinone, or THG. Those caught included Tim Montgomery, the US sprint star who had his 2002 100m record nullified, and his now ex-wife Marion Jones, winner of five medals (three of them gold) at the Sydney Olympics. Although she never tested positive, Jones confessed in 2007 to lying to a grand jury over the ­matter and was stripped of her titles.

Within cycling, the positive doping tests continue. Most famously, Floyd Landis lost his 2006 Tour title after testing positive during the race; last year’s Tour saw a series of riders caught with a new version of EPO that they had thought to be undetectable. Small wonder trust in cycling and sport more generally is so low.

. . .

The upshot of the permanent suspicion, especially for cycling, is a lot of testing. In Boulder, the entire Garmin team are called back from a beer-fuelled night out in a brewery when officials from the UCI (International Cycling Union), cycling’s governing body, show up unexpectedly for testing.

Preparing for a ride

The riders are used to the testers, whom they nickname, perhaps predictably, the vampires. Each athlete expects to be tested somewhere between 40 and 50 times this year through a combination of visits by the UCI, national cycling federations, race organisers and, most of all, through Garmin’s internal testing programme.

To begin to build up the biological profiles, blood and urine samples are at first taken every few days. This then eases to fortnightly for a few months before slipping to roughly monthly. There will also be tests at races to monitor what happens to the riders’ profile under physical stress. The results are analysed by an independent laboratory and made available to the official anti-doping authorities. The team would be notified of any riders with positive tests or with anomalies that needed investigating. Those riders are then suspended and subjected to further testing. Vaughters would be sacked should anyone on the team test positive, and Garmin can walk away from its sponsorship. In the two years the scheme has run, the tests have thrown up a couple of questionable results, but these were found to have causes other than drugs.

Creating longitudinal profiles is not a simple process. Every­one’s blood volume fluctuates through the day: exercise, and it will be different from when you are lying in bed. Analyses of results have to take account of this, together with other factors such as the altitude that the tests are conducted at (higher altitudes boost red blood cells). That means that the testing is not cheap. The annual cost for each athlete will be approximately $20,000, which, for a top-level team such as Garmin with between 25 and 30 riders, amounts to roughly half-a-million dollars out of their total annual budget of about $8m-$10m. This would be enough to recruit at least a couple of very good riders.

But the tests do have an advantage beyond proving athletes’ innocence. They also give the team extra data on how a rider is performing. Cycling is, at heart, a gritty, working-class European sport where the training methods of 20 or 30 years ago are still revered today. Its expansion into the US and other English-speaking cultures, where its followers are largely ­middle-class and college-educated, has brought a new interest in the science of the sport. Vaughters again draws a comparison with Grand Prix motor racing. “It’s almost like a Formula 1 team because you can see how the car is adapting to the load and the nutritional changes and so on. You wouldn’t be able to see that without consistent testing.” As a result of the monitoring, he has changed riders’ training programmes.

Vaughters believes longitudinal testing could be the key to dramatically cutting doping. Drug-taking becomes a vicious circle because everyone believes everyone else is doing it, and so to win, they must do it too. If it is widely accepted that ­others are winning clean, many athletes will, it is hoped, feel far less pressure to cheat.

Some scientists are sceptical that it can be that simple in practice. Michael Ashenden is an Australian anti-doping expert working with the UCI to develop a “biological passport” based on longitudinal testing. This will, controversially, give the organisation the power to sanction riders because of suspicious changes in their profiles, even without a positive test. Ashenden says the doping trend – or suspected trend – these days is to use a mixture of EPO and blood transfusions, with both at levels low enough not to test positive or be easy to spot on a longitudinal profile.

When we talk, I bring up an oft-quoted point about average speeds on the Tour de France getting slower. It’s a fact touted as proof that there is less doping. Ashenden laughs and shakes his head. Cycling, with its long, successive days in the saddle, is not all about maximum effort all the time, but more the ability to recover from each day’s effort in order to be ready to go again. “Say you’re cycling at 36kph. When you’re on EPO, you’re still cycling at 36, but it feels easier. And when you stop that night, you recover more quickly. Three weeks of the guy next to you flogging his guts out, but you’re just riding along merrily. That doesn’t show up in speeds or statistics.”

To be fair, Ashenden doesn’t think it’s just cycling; his suspicions extend to all sport. “There are very few sports that don’t either have short, intense bursts or an endurance component. Sports all the way from road cycling down to the 100m sprint have been shown to be using blood doping. Everything else more or less falls within those two bounds, so if they’re your bookends and they’re using it, why should you think something in the middle is not?”

When Millar used EPO, it was to get the wins his team were demanding. He had become a young star of the sport when he won a stage in his first Tour de France in 2000 and his presence was often required for the team to be invited to a race. By that point, he was aware of the scale of cheating that was going on because some of the riders were getting flasks of ice delivered to keep their drugs cool. Even after the 1998 ­Festina affair, it was clear that nothing had really changed. “That was when I started to get very resentful,” he says. “But I made it through 2000. By the time it was 2001, I had just given up. I realised nobody cared if I was clean or not.”

Bradley ­Wiggins

Millar is matter-of-fact when talking about his transgressions and it is clear that his comeback after his ban ended in 2006 is a form of redemption, although he says it has gone far beyond that now. He has always been a candid interviewee, but his frankness about his past is still rare in a sport with an unspoken code of silence when it comes to the outside world – a code that has made the doping culture so hard to break. When Millar was caught in 2004, he says it was almost a relief. But for his fans, including fellow cyclist Bradley Wiggins, it was hard to take. “We all looked up to him,” he says. “He was someone who was immensely talented, so it was never really doubted that he wasn’t doing it off just sheer talent and working hard. It was quite shocking at the time because I think you never imagine it to happen to one of your own.”

Wiggins has long been vocal in attacking doping, but he had his own moment with the French police in the 2007 Tour de France when his teammate Cristian Moreni tested positive for testosterone. At the finish of that day’s race, all the team were arrested and questioned by the police. “That was not how sport’s supposed to be,” says Wiggins, with habitual understatement. “It really, for the first time, made me question my involvement in the sport. It was definitely my lowest point.”

. . .

Proving yourself clean is a lot of work but the Garmin team believes it makes business sense. With no gate receipts, teams rely entirely on corporate sponsors and a number of these have left the sport in the wake of doping scandals. Getting Garmin to underwrite the longitudinal testing is likened by Vaughters to the choice a customer makes when they buy an organic banana rather than a regular, cheaper one. “We can actually create a consumer preference if we do this right,” he says. “And if you do that, all of a sudden the massive amount of money that it takes to properly test these athletes makes sense for sponsors as opposed to being seen as a drain.”

The team has won admiration among the jaded sports media for its stance, adding to the publicity value for its backer. The bigger question is whether other sports should adopt a similar approach. Cyclists have long complained that their sport comes up with positive tests because it does much more testing than most others. Recently, athletes including tennis player Rafael Nadal have begun complaining about new Wada rules that mean they now have to provide their exact whereabouts for an hour each day when they are available to be tested – a requirement to which cyclists have long been accustomed. Random, out-of-competition testing is much more effective at catching dopers, but is being resisted by many sports as a violation of athletes’ privacy.

Vaughters is unrepentant about what his riders go through. He has a high profile within the sport and says that since the Tour de France last summer, he has been approached almost daily by those wanting to thank him for introducing the testing. For fans of cycling, made cynical by years of ­scandal, it takes quite a lot for them to believe the sport can clean up. “It’s a privilege to be a professional athlete, it isn’t a right,” says Vaughters. “Because they decided to take on the notoriety and the money and all that goes with it, then there are certain res­ponsibilities. And one of those is proving that you are worthy of being a role model.

“People want a reason to believe. So we just have to give them that.”

Jennifer Hughes is the FT’s financial correspondent and also writes regularly about cycling