::: Looking for a way back in

Alex Zülle has served his time for EPO use, and is now planning a return to the Tour. But the road is proving rockier than he or anybody else imagined.

On stage five of the 1999 Tour of Catalonia, with less than two weeks to go before the Tour de France, Alex Zülle was forced to retire. Severe gastroenteritis had taken its toll and further reduce his already highly limited race prgram by 30 to 25 days in the process. Given that most Tour specialists start the race between 64 to 70 days racing in their legs, will this preparation be sufficient? And has Zülle left it too late? Banesto, perhaps, understandably, is sitting on the fence on this one. The problem is a serious one: an appalling early season means that the team has had to return to the Tour looking for some kind of result in order to justify six months expenditure by the sponsor of the country's second most expensive team. And Zülle is, or was, spearheading its attack on the Tour.

Theoretically, this race was the least important in Banesto's calendar, but now, with such a poor spring and a co-leader like Jose Maria Jimenez seen to be appallingly unreliable and easily demotivated, the Tour has taken on far more significance than originally planned. Just as in the days of Miguel Indurain, in fact. However, should he finally make it to the start, Zülle would be a clear favorite, on paper at least. The bespectacled Swiss rider will be the only one present at the start of the race at Le Puy du Fou to have worn the leader's jersey in all three major stage races. In case of the Tour de France, he led for one stage way back in 1992, and then returned to yellow in 1996 after winning the prologue at s'Hertogenbosch in Holland. Between these two occasions he proved to be a serious thorn in Indurain's campaign for a fifth Tour win in 1995, taking the stage at La Plagne that year and forcing the Spaniard to go on an all-out offensive in the Alps in order to try and limit the time gap. The former house-painter got second overall for his pains, but as people used to say, second behind Indurain was the same as winning. Safely ensconced at Once, Zülle's top priority changed from being the Tour to the Vuelta, a race wich directeur sportif Manolo Saiz has always insisted was more important than the French race for his team. And there the Swiss consolidated his experience in three-week races. He had already finished second behind Tony Rominger in 1993, when only a fall on a rain-soaked road in northern Spain prevented him from taking the race, and three years on, in 1996, his combination of consummate time trailling and competent climbing proved unbeatable.

On the same day that Indurain retired from the race - and it later emerged, from cycling as well - Zülle and his team-mate Laurent Jalabert took the race apart on the Vuelta's most important climb, to the Covadonga Lakes. They finished together at the line having paced each other all the way up. 1997 proved to be a similar story in the Tour of Spain, but Zülle's success in the Tour was more limited. He had crashed badly in 1996 on the stage to Les Arcs and he started the 1997 race with a fractured collarbone and several iron pins still in place after another fall, on that occasion just days earlier in the Tour of Catalunya. It was a test of strength and bravery against constant pain wich increased steadily as his battered body had to put up with being shaken about on a bike for six hours every day. To make matters worse, in a week full of crashes, he also suffered a further two falls. Unsurprisingly, he was unable to fight for very long, and he quit before the race reached the Pyrenees at the end of the first week. The news broke halfway through the Tour that year that Zülle had signed the biggest cycling contract ever in cycling - with Festina. It proved to be a disastrous choice. After two weeks of what, with the benefit of hindsight, looked like suspiciously spectacular success in the 1998 Giro, Zülle cracked under Marco Pantani's constant attacks. He blew up so badly in the Dolomites he even finished one stage in the pitch dark. And as for the Tour that followed...

Almost a year on, Zülle has returned to Spain, where he was always happiest, in a deal wich was concluded in less than 24 hours between his agent, Marc Biver, and Banesto. But he still had four months of his suspension for EPO use to serve, so his bosses dreamed up a program of "virtual racing", whereby he left the team hotel one hour ahead of the peloton in races like the Tour of Murcia and Aragon, to follow the exact route that the event would take. "It saved me from getting bored," he told Cycle Sport just 24 hours before he quit Catalonia, "because at least I was seeing different kinds of countryside while training. And then, in the evenings, I had people to talk to. It was a very strang time, though, and I wouldn't want to go through it again. The problem with that kind of training was that you never had a real race rhythm with changes in speed, and so on. So it was limited for me." But since he started racing again, on May 2 in the GP Gippingen, Zülle's form seems to have become relatively unstable. Always reputed to be a fragile character, while in the grips of his illness, he gives the impression of being unsure about everything - his program, his results and, although at that point he was not prepared to reveal it directly, the Tour itself. Even the high points of this year so far being analysed. After a relatively relaxed Tour of Romandy, asked about the Giro, where he took part for 14 days instead of 10 that were originally planned, you would have thought he would be pleased with what he managed to do on the first high mountain stage where he finished third. Not so. "I think I overdid it that day," he says. "I pushed myself hard, and it was good to have been up there with Pantani and Jimenez, but I didn't manage to recover well."

Perhaps with the Tour looming ever closer, that has been the problem with Zülle's breakneck preparation: he has pushed himself too hard, too soon. "I stayed on in the Giro because the first week of the race was piano, piano. Everybody was scared of what would come afterwards in the high mountains, so it was easy to stay in the bunch. It was f´good for my training." He was even more fed up, when he climbed off the bike in Catalonia - along with Britain's Jeremy Hunt, who abandoned in the same place, but was not down for the Tour - and headed north to the team headquarters in Pamplona for some emergency tests. "I don't even feel like training," he was reported to have said. Not exactly an encouraging situation for someone bought as a potential Tour winner by his squad, and for whom the Vuelta, reserved for co-leader Jimenez, connat provide a solution. There could well be more deep-rooted problems. After 1998, it would seem surprising if he showed much enthusiasm for the Tour, and although he has adopted a line with journalists of approaching the subject obliquely and trying not to give too much away, you can sense a numbness towards the race behind his carefully chosen words. "I am here in cycling to race, and that's all there is to it," is his first, rather predictable comment, but then he adds. "I think a lot of people feel the same way about the Tour as I do." And what way is that? "There are lots of other interesting races, like the Vuelta and the Giro. The Tour is not the be-all and end-all of my year." And then he mutters, "I need to recover." All very optimistic. The test wich were carried out in the Clinica Universidad de Navarra in Pamplona have produced a small ray of light. They failed to show anything more than what was already known to be there - gastroenteritis. Zülle instantly became calmer. "Now I know there's nothing really serious, I can relax a bit", he told the reporters.

However, the pressure from the team has not let up: they are desperate for him to go to the Tour as a seriuos candidate - and it shows. Both directeurs, Jose Luis Jaimerena and Eusebio Unzue, were arguing when we went to press whether "there is still time for Alex to recover before the Tour." But as for the man himself? "I still don't know" was all he would say. And the bright side to all of this? If Zülle does make it, with just one day of racing - at the Swiss National Championships - between now and July 3, one problem at least will have been resolved. "In 1996 I hit my form too early in the Tour because I had raced too much and above all too hard. This time round I want to hit the peek for the first time trail at Metz, If I don that, then I will be en route for where I want to be." But this was what he was thinking before quitting the Tour of Catalunya, and while the pressure on him to do well mounts steadily, he has never been a rider who works well when the heat is on. Nor has he ever been the one leader in a team - at Once he always rode alongside Laurent Jalabert. Should Zülle fail to come up with the goods, though, he will have a hard time leading a major team again. Very much a case of make or break.