Toby Atkins sipped his morning coffee outside a large countryside villa overlooking the mountains in Sicily. “It was at the end of a gravel track, completely off-grid, no Wi-Fi, poor phone coverage. If you didn’t know where to go, you’d never find it,” he recalls. It was a fine winter’s day in 2015, and having agreed to race for Italian amateur team T-Vb, the Briton had been driven to their training camp eight days earlier in a soigneur’s two door Alfa Romeo. “He turned up an hour late,” says Atkins, “and I had to empty my two suitcases into this tiny sports car, ditch the cases at the airport, and wedge my bike in.”

Those eight days of training went well, and now he was taking a well-earned break. “The team were impressed and said they wanted me as a leader for the season.” But during an informal chat with T-Vb’s manager Mattia Vairoli, Atkins was handed some unidentified pills accompanied by a terse instruction: he would have to take them if he wanted to further improve.

As he finished his espresso on the terrace, Atkins was joined outside by Vairoli. “I got the pills out of my pocket and threw them across the table,” says Atkins. “I said, ‘I know what you’re doing and I’m not going to be part of this.’ He stared back at me for what felt like an eternity. You could see the gears in his mind going over and over, pondering how to respond.

“Eventually he grabbed the pills and said, ‘Come with me.’ He pulled me inside, marched me into the bathroom, slammed the door behind us and locked it. What the f**k is going on? It was like I was in a real-world gangster movie.”

This article was published in Cycling Weekly in January 2024. You can read the full article here.