Bob Stapleton, center, is the new owner of Team High Road, whose riders include, from left, Adam Hansen of Australia, Edvald Boasson-Hagen of Norway, George Hincapie of the United States and Thomas Lorkuist of Sweden.
Professional cycling has been rocked in the past two years by doping scandals that have sent riders packing in disgrace, stripped champions of titles and removed entire teams from competition.
The Tour de France, the world’s premier cycling race, was shocked further last week when organizers disqualified the Astana team from competing this summer because of past doping issues. That knocked out Alberto Contador, who won last year’s race, and American Levi Leipheimer, who took third.
Enter Bob Stapleton. A former telecommunications executive who now lives in San Luis Obispo and bases his Team High Road here, Stapleton seeks nothing less than to make cycling pure again.
With a mellow personality and slight build, the 49-year-old Stapleton nonetheless burns with a passion to have his team serve as a model for the sport.
Toward that end, he will spend more than $10 million this year to field Team High Road on the professional circuits for both men and women. A significant part of that cost will be a substance-and blood-testing program that Stapleton says exceeds anything ever done in cycling.
“We are a provocative team,” he says. “We aren’t trying to say we are better than everyone else. We are just trying to say, ‘Here is what is required. We have to be credible, the sport has to be credible, and we have to take concrete action, not just talk.’ ”
As the third annual Amgen Tour of California begins today, Stapleton will be cheering on his riders in the weeklong event that takes them from the Bay Area to San Luis Obispo and then to the finish in Los Angeles.
Stapleton was interviewed at the Cliffs Resort in Shell Beach last week as his riders finished preparations.What follows are excerpts of that interview. The full account can be found on www.SanLuisObispo.com . Q:Why should fans still believe in cycling, given everything that has transpired in the past few years?
A: Cycling has been on the forefront of exposing the realities of many professional sports. Performance-enhancing drugs have been part of sports for some time, and this danger to the integrity and values of sport is real and is not just associated with cycling.
Cycling has been in the middle of the fire and cycling needs to address these issues, but unfortunately, they are pervasive in elite, big-money sports.
Q: What is the answer to solving the substance-abuse problem?
A: The fundamental answers are around unity of action – uniform, top-quality, best-science testing that happens across all athletes from whatever teams they are on, from whatever country they are from, whatever their background is. They are all subject to this same, externally done anti-doping test. And there are serious consequences for any failures. …
The second step is creating an environment where new athletes can come into the sport, have all the tools to develop themselves and have the belief they can compete and win clean.…So it is almost a generational change we are trying to accelerate here.
Q: Explain your approach to rider testing.
A: Our team is fundamentally based on the belief in clean and fair sport, and we make that tangible with a very comprehensive anti-doping program that requires all of our athletes to be tested on average 26 times a year. It is random, unannounced tests, and they are the most comprehensive tests we could do. It is done by an independent agency, the Agency for Cycling Ethics, and it is both blood and urine tests. So we are testing for all substances that can realistically be tested for.
And they (the riders) are put in a profile, where we track changes in body chemistry over time, and if there is anything unusual that we see, we investigate that.
Q: Is that more than had been the norm?
A: Enormously more. Anti-doping is normally the job of an anti-doping federation. Some countries have none. In the U.S. is it USADA, the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency. … Some of these athletes are from countries that have almost no organized anti-doping. So then the only time they are tested is if they win.
Q: What do you say to the athlete who feels the pressure of the competitive environment and says, “I need every advantage I can get, and you are taking away advantages from me?”
A: What we are saying is we are going to give you every other possible advantage. You’ve got the best equipment, the best training on and off the bike.…They get the best technology, the best methods and practices, from the broad world of sport. … That is the tradeoff they make. They get everything else they need to succeed, including some confidence they can do it. But they can never, ever, ever dope.
Q: What is the total budget for the team this year?
A: The numbers for the sport in general: The 18 pro tour teams, the most elite teams, have an average annual budget of $10 million to $11 million. Our budget is in that zone. Our financing includes investors who support the team.
I think one of the things people don’t realize is what a complex, moving army this is. Our men’s team is 29 athletes.We’ve got 13 women athletes.…They live in 16 different countries. They race on three different continents. The racing season starts in January and ends in October. So it is a big logistics business in terms of getting athletes to races and having them fit and ready to compete. It has an astonishing amount of moving parts. But that is part of what makes it interesting.
Q: Are you looking to win the Tour of California?
A: We are looking to be very exciting and very competitive. We have good chances in the prologue and we have got good chances in the first few stages. It is going to come down to what happens in the San Jose stage and the time trial in Solvang, which will probably be the deciding stage of the race.
Q: Why is the team called High Road?
A: High Road is a business we started five years ago. It is the ideal of trying to do the right things, trying to pursue a broader goal in life. So it predated our involvement in men’s professional cycling and the anti-doping fight.
As you get older, you focus on how you do things and how to build success and transfer those values to your children and others. So it is more a statement of an ideal than anything else.
Q: You are headquartered here because you live here?
A: Exactly. And I am here because my wife (Tess) is here. There is perfect alignment (he starts laughing). We moved to the Central Coast five or six years ago. I was ending my career in telecommunications. … Ultimately, I wanted to come back to the best of California: Brilliant weather, a more rural lifestyle, but a fun and interesting place that still had a lot of excitement and access to San Francisco and Los Angeles from a business perspective.…This is the perfect place for us to come and spend some time with our kids while their parents are still relevant.
Q: Is SLO County a good place to train?
A: I think it is exceptional. There is something for everybody here. There is lots of climbing — a lot of sharp, steep climbing. There is the ability to go up the coast and get long miles in with lower intensity. And the North County, I think, is really an undiscovered gem for cycling. I think the biggest challenge is just getting around in some cases. … Other towns in the area have done a good job of marketing to cycling. Solvang has obviously become almost a Western regional hub for it. They have done a lot of events there. I think San Luis Obispo and the Central Coast could do the same thing, and probably better.
Q: Do you plan to play a leading role toward that effort?
A: I’d like to support it. We have our plate full, but with a little coordinated civic action, these things are all quite possible. I would like to see some races come in here, and you could do some charity rides out of San Luis Obispo that would be really attractive for people, support the local economy and be a good, healthy activity.
Q: Are you on a crusade for the sport?
A: I don’t want to sound like an idealistic crusader. I have personal ideals. For me, it is a success if 10 or 15 or 20 people out of here go on and become credible leaders in the sport. If we can drive change across the whole sport, that is even better. But I am trying to be pragmatic and realistic about change.
We are a provocative team. We aren’t trying to say we are better than everyone else. We are just trying to say, ‘Here is what is required.We have to be credible, the sport has to be credible, and we have to take concrete action, not just talk.’ So we are trying to be inclusive. … I think we are open to anybody who believes in what we want to do and commits to it. And we are not trying to judge or set ourselves above anybody else.
Print
E-Mail
