Swedish rider Fredrik Kessiakoff says that his mistreatment at Astana was the reason his career was cut short. He had a glittering 2012, where he won a Grand Tour stage and beet Fabian Cancellara in a TT, but since then, he has suffered.

After he quit Tour of Austria last summer, he received his second and final letter of warning from Astana, that he had to improve or his contract would not be renewed. The letters arrived by priority mail, and were written on behalf of general manager Alexander Vinokourov.

“I just thought that ‘this can not be true, this is just not happening,’” he told VeloNews. “I was already feeling pretty bad because I couldn’t ride my bike fast, and that was all I wanted in life, to go fast; that was the key to success. Then I had this situation with the team as well. I felt so bad, and my girlfriend did too, so we thought that it’s better that we call them now and tell them we are breaking the contract. We let the money go, because it’s not worth feeling like this; no money in the world is worth feeling this bad.”

He crashed hard at Strade Bianche last year and suffered bad wounds, but Astana didn’t believe him even when the doctor told him he couldn’t race, and sent him to the Volta a Catalunya, where he was sent home on the final stage after the wounds became infected. He had pushed through pain for his team and believed he had done well. Astana thought otherwise.

“Two days go by, and there is a letter in the mail with a personal warning for me. It says that I let down my teammates and the staff at the race. They are wondering if I have trained properly and some other things. Going from thinking that the first email was not very nice, now I didn’t know what to do with myself.”

The Swede performed poorly at his following races and couldn’t help the team, but he couldn’t quit, as he feared another letter.

“The worst thing was that I couldn’t quit. I can’t quit the race, because then I get another letter,” he says. “It was extremely hard mentally. You just had to go there, with fear, and knowing that whatever you do, just finish, because then they can’t say anything. But, sure, I was completely worthless. I was probably run down. Many of my symptoms were hard to explain, when I look back at it. The only thing is that I was extremely worn out, so it was my body’s way of saying that, ‘You have to rest now.’ The smallest thing gave me infections, rashes, fever.”

He trained with the Tour team and couldn’t reach his best level. He raced the Tour de Suisse and strange rashes appeared on his body. At his final race, the Tour of Austria, he kept his hands inside his jersey, as there were flakes of skin falling from his arms and feet. He was sent home and that was when the letter finally arrived.

The 34 year old never turned to doping, unlike his teammates, the Iglinskiy brothers, did. He says he may have found things easier if he did dope, but he remains glad he didn’t.

“Maybe that would have been an easy way to make my problems disappear. Dope and start racing fast, and the team would have been happy. I can see how that situation could appear if you treat a rider this way,” he says. “I’m not defending them, saying that they did the right thing, on the contrary. It’s extremely dangerous, to say that there are no excuses. That’s what the first email said, that there are no excuses not to ride faster and take podium places.”