LEAVING EARLY

There was no let-up for Ivan Basso on the Tour’s first rest-day – just the shocking announcement that he’d been diagnosed with testicular cancer

Writer: Daniel Friebe

Nine years after striding across a Strasbourg hotel car park, climbing into a car and driving out of the Tour de France in disgrace, Ivan Basso enacted an unsettlingly similar yet altogether different scene in Pau.
 

This time around Basso shook a few last hands, forced another smile, thanked the handful of well-wishers – fans, journalists and the Lampre mechanics working nearby – and took his place in the passenger seat of his friend and agent Giovanni Lombardi’s white SUV. “Ciao, tutti,” were his last words before leaving.
 

Everything in the previous three hours had happened with disorienting speed. First the confirmation from the hospital in Pau that the lump identified the previous evening by the Tour’s own medical staff in an X-ray was indeed a tumour. Then the phonecall to his wife,Micaela, back home in Cassano Magnago in north-west Italy, before announcing the news to his Tinkoff-Saxo team-mates and watching tears well in their eyes. Next, arriving in the conference room at the back of the Mercure hotel, seeing the bemused expressions of the assembled journalists and knowing that the confusion would soon turn to shock after saying the words: “I have testicular cancer.” And, now, leaving the Tour as abruptly as he did in 2006, only to a very different send-off, stalked by different fears.
 

Basso had been an oasis of calm amid the emotion that surrounded him. “Ach, well I think it’s the shock,” Tinkoff-Saxo’s team doctor, Piet De Moor, told us moments after the Italian had gone. De Moor had been at Basso’s side the previous evening on the Tour’s X-ray lorry. The doctors there had shown De Moor and Basso the bright white spot on their print-out, where there should have been nothing but charcoal grey. As De Moor recalled: “It was inside the testicle, not outside, which was a big warning sign. The doctors immediately organised a full body scan and blood tests in a hospital one kilometre from our hotel. They were great.”
 

Directeur sportif Stephen De Jongh heard the news as he prepared to drive the 450km from Plumelec to Pau for a rest day that, as it turned out, would be anything but restorative. “On the journey, of course I could think of nothing else,” De Jongh admitted the following day.
 

“It’s awful,” De Jongh went on, “but I’m absolutely confident he’ll survive this. I think it’d be inappropriate to talk too much about the race. We’re here with a very committed team, trying to win the Tour with Contador, and I think this will bring us together even more and make us even stronger.” 

Most importantly, the specialists who had examined and spoken to Basso at the François Mitterrand Hospital in Pau that morning had been unreservedly optimistic. As De Moor confirmed: “They told us Ivan has a 98-99 per cent chance of a full recovery. In fact, the specialist said that this is about the best cancer you could have.”

AS THEY MADE their way back to the Mercure, Basso had told De Moor about a bitter coincidence: he had also stayed in Pau in the 2004 Tour de France, hours after learning that his mother, Nives, had been diagnosed with stomach and liver cancer. That same day, he had also won his first ever stage of the Grande Boucle at La Mongie. In his post-race press conference, the Italian had revealed that his rival Lance Armstrong had offered his help to guarantee the best possible medical treatment for Nives. Unfortunately, it wasn’t enough to save her: she died the following February.
 

This time, Armstrong received the news not from Basso personally but via Twitter. The pair would exchange emails and text messages about treatments, prognoses and Armstrong possibly visiting Basso in Milan after the former’s controversial One Day Before charity ride in France. “Anybody being diagnosed is a shock,” Armstrong told Procycling on the first day of his French séjour. “No one expects it. And just the way it came about, on the rest day. I mean, lucky for him that he had that accident and felt some pain, then went for the ultrasound.”
 

Among some fans, the news of Basso’s illness had provoked mixed feelings – as would the revelation that Armstrong had offered his support. If few have fully forgiven Armstrong for his offences, many still feel aggrieved, with good reason, about Basso’s failure to adequately account for his dangerous liaisons with Doctor Eufemiano Fuentes. The Italian’s muted mea culpa at the time – that it was only “an attempt to dope” – neither saved him from a two-year doping ban nor restored any glory to the Giro d’Italia that he won by a staggering nine-minute margin in 2006.
 

Those misgivings notwithstanding, most were at least willing to admit that Basso personifies a curious breed of cyclist – the charming delinquent. Basso and Contador had spent 120 of the last 180 days before the Tour together, and such is the bond the pair have formed this season that the Spaniard never really considered not bringing him to the Tour, despite Basso’s lacklustre performance in the Giro d’Italia.
 

“I’m like I was at the Giro: I feel fine when the group’s going at 90 per cent but as soon as they up the pace, I’m cooked,” he’d told us in Abbeville at the Tour, the morning after the crash that may have saved his life. Basso said that after the Giro he had pondered the many possible reasons for his poor form in Italy, from the 45 days he spent at altitude before the race start in Sanremo – “maybe too many” – to the toll of his advancing years. “That could well be it,” he laughed at the suggestion that it was perhaps – unfortunately – just a question of age.
 

Three days later he would discover what may or may not have been the explanation for everything, and initially he wanted to continue riding towards Paris.
 

“You know what bike riders are like,” Piet De Moor told Procycling.
 

On Monday Basso received his diagnosis, on Wednesday surgeons worked to remove the tumour and on Thursday he was back home, “smiling and optimistic”. His first goal, he said, was to be in Paris with his team-mates at their end-of-Tour party.
 

He had set off from Utrecht dreaming that the Tour would end with his friend, Alberto Contador, in yellow, and maybe a long, wistful gaze down the ChampsÉlysées, recalling memories that, for Basso at least, remain untarnished.
 

As it turned out, whatever the result on the road, he would hopefully be celebrating a much more important outcome.