Racing Hard

by William Fotheringham

There is no test for erythropoietin but the Union Cycliste Internationale carried out blood checks on 53 of the Tour field yesterday. The tests ensure that riders do not have a red cell count so high that it might lead to heart failure; in other words, they ensure that if erithropoetin is being used, it is being done under medical supervision. All the riders passed, as they usually do.

  Virenque and his colleagues did not ride yesterday’s time-trial but, like Banquo at the feast in Macbeth, they were there in spirit. The stage, like all the Tour’s time-trials, was sponsored by Festina, official timekeepers to the race. “Free Festina”, “We want Festina” and “No tour without Festina” said the placards on the backroads through the exquisite Correze countryside.

  As expected, the 1997 winner Jan Ullrich opened his campaign for a second, successive victory by finishing 1min 10sec ahead of American unknown Tyler Hamilton, taking over the race leader’s yellow jersey from young Australian Stuart O’Grady. The German’s main challenger is now set to be French national champion Laurent Jalabert, who finished only 1min 24sec behind. The race now heads for the Pyrenees, but the riders probably have other matters on their minds.

  This piece pretty much sets the tone for how I and other journalists would write about the Tour in the post-Festina years when a major scandal unfolded; drug revelations and their implications first, bare facts about the race second. The fact that this time-trial marked Tyler Hamilton’s emergence is an exquisite little irony in itself. The Tour continued, with daily revelations from the police inquiry – which set the tone for the leaks that would be the hallmark of all French and Italian drugs investigations – and an increasing sense of unrest among the riders.

  Jalabert the reluctant leader as the big family breaks up

  25 July 1998

  The Tour de France likes to consider itself as one large international family, which has united for three weeks each July for the last 95 years to celebrate the country’s greatest annual fete. Yesterday la grande famille du Tour seemed riven after two weeks of unfolding scandal, its members united only in acrimony.

  The scandal could not run deeper. The Tour’s biggest star Richard Virenque spent Thursday night in police cells; he and his nine team-mates were strip searched and interrogated by police investigating the traffic in banned drugs. Virenque’s Festina Watches team, the stars of last year’s race, have spent the last fortnight shopping each other to the police over who provided whom with drugs and on what basis.

  Yesterday, a week after it was revealed the TVM team were the subject of another police investigation, the Tour organisers issued a communique on the matter. It ended: “The dignity, the profound values of sport and morals which the Tour de France bears, and its exemplarity deserve to be respected by everyone.”

  Dignity was in short supply when the riders went on strike yesterday morning [at the start in Tarascon-sur-Ariège]. They were clearly arguing among themselves over whether to race or not. One party, led by the French champion Laurent Jalabert and including Britain’s Olympic bronze medallist Max Sciandri, wanted the stage to be abandoned; Jan Ullrich’s Telekom wanted to race and they were backed by other team managers and the race officials.

  If further evidence of the breakdown of the grande famille were needed, it came when Jalabert’s team manager Manolo Saiz was involved in a scuffle with one of the race officials as the palavering reached deadlock and when police ordered team mechanics to get back in their cars. Later Saiz and Jalabert accused the race organisers of using moral blackmail to make the riders race. [Saiz went on trial in a Spanish court in January 2013 for his alleged role in the Operación Puerto blood doping affair.]

  The paterfamilias of the Tour is the former professional cyclist and journalist Jean-Marie Leblanc, who has aged visibly since the Tour left Dublin. His authority has diminished equally rapidly; yesterday, as he attempted to persuade the riders to move on, he got in his red Fiat and started driving away four times. Eventually he was forced to issue an ultimatum: if they did not start within 10 minutes the stage would be cancelled. These were not the acts of a man who is in control.

  The daily drip-drip of revelations about Festina has shown the “profound sporting and moral values” of the Tour – or parts of it – in stark relief. The team’s manager admits supplying banned drugs on a systematic basis; the riders are said to have been forced to pay a percentage of their bonuses into a secret fund to finance the purchase of the drugs; one rider has been linked to robberies of erythropoietin from a hospital in Poitiers in February. The moral values seem to be those of the jungle.

  There is a terrible inevitability about all this. Two years ago revelations by the former cyclists Gilles Delion and Nicolas Aubier in the newspaper L’Equipe and in a report prepared for the Italian Olympic Committee by Dr Sandro Donati pointed to a vast underground trade in erythropoietin to fuel the needs of professional cyclists. The response of the men who run the sport was to hide their heads in the sand.

  Hein Verbruggen, head of the Union Cycliste Internationale, dismissed the testimony of Delion and Aubier as that of embittered men and effectively called Donati a crank. The Canadian Guy Brisson, who was working to perfect a blood test for erythropoietin received little support and gave up for lack of funding.

  What shocks about the Tour’s drug seizures is the sense of impunity in the milieu. The TVM team had known for a week that they were the subject of an inquiry by French customs, yet banned drugs and masking agents were found in their team hotel as recently as Thursday. Voet, the Festina masseur, clearly felt few inhibitions about transporting his team’s drugs to the Tour in an official car.

  The impression of a world where normal rules do not apply is reinforced by the UCI’s system of blood thickness tests, brought in as their response to the Donati report. The tests, said the UCI, could not stamp out erythropoietin use but would prevent riders dying from its abuse. The clear implication was that the UCI felt powerless to stop the drug being used.

  The prime mover behind yesterday’s protest was the world No 1 and French national champion Laurent Jalabert. The UCI was his main target: “The UCI have turned up at the race 10 days after they should have done and they have brought a whole load of new rules which mean nothing, which are meant only to make them look good in the eyes of the world.” The word he should have used is window-dressing.

  Appropriately yesterday’s protest took place at the location the Tour calls kilometre zero, marked by a 6ft high, phallic inflatable tower next to which a gendarme waves the start flag. After the scandal and the strike the Tour will have to look for a fresh start: “repartir à zero” as the French put it.

  Only the two world wars have stopped the Tour, which General De Gaulle insisted should go ahead after the “events” of 1968 to signal to the world that the country was in a state of normality. Whether it continues this year, and in years to come, seems to lie yet again in the lap of the French government; their police and their inquiries hold the key.

  There were moments in 1998 when it seemed impossible that the Tour would go on, most notably when police swooped at Aix-les-Bains in the final week and the Spanish teams walked out en masse. But it did so and was marked by one of the better wins of the 1990s. Marco Pantani had returned from a horrific injury in 1995 to harass Ullrich mercilessly all the way for a victory which sealed the Italian’s place in the pantheon… for about 10 months.

  Tour de France: Legal eagle’s swoops eclipse superb Pantani

  2 August 1998

  Two personalities have dominated the 1998 Tour de France: the little climber Marco Pantani, who yesterday became the first Italian to win the world’s greatest bike race for 33 years; and the Lille prosecutor Patrick Keil, leader of the investigation into the supply of banned drugs which has dominated the Tour, completely eclipsing Pantani’s remarkable performance.

  Pantani is now one of just seven men who have won the Giro d’Italia and the Tour de France in the same year but Keil and his team have achieved a first in prosecuting a Tour cycl
ist for trafficking in banned drugs. On Friday charges were laid against the Italian Rodolfo Massi, King of the Mountains until the police took him from the race on Wednesday, and winner of a spectacular stage in the Pyrenees. Banned drugs and cash were found in his hotel room. The 32-year-old, in his 12th season as a professional, was released on bail. [The charges were subsequently dropped against the Italian.]

  In three and a half weeks, Keil has produced sensation after sensation. Three cyclists in the world’s leading team, Festina Watches, have admitted publicly that they used the banned blood-boosting hormone erythropoietin. The Festina manager, Bruno Roussel, has admitted that the team were systematically supplied with banned drugs and has been charged. The team’s secret fund to finance drug purchases has been uncovered. The doctor at ONCE, the Spanish squad who include French champion Laurent Jalabert, ranked No 1 in the world, has also been charged with supplying banned drugs.

  Simultaneously Keil’s opposite number in Rheims has charged the manager and doctor of the Dutch TVM team with supplying banned substances. Both investigations began with seizures of banned drugs in team vehicles, from TVM’s lorry in March, and a Festina team car on 8 July. The timing of the Festina seizure can hardly have been coincidental, coming as it did immediately before the Tour, when the investigation would receive maximum media exposure.

  Professional cycling is a small, tight-knit world which has developed its own grey morality in the last 100 years. This is the first time that its values have come up against the black-and-white of any legal system; the impact as the two have collided, with riders detained and stripsearched, team hotels and vehicles searched, has almost ripped this Tour apart.

  Twice the riders have gone on strike, seemingly because they could think of no other response and they have squabbled among themselves as they have struggled to find a common position. The race organisers have looked on in impotence. The show has struggled on, but one team, Festina, have been thrown off and another five teams have quit, including the entire Spanish entry.

  Already, there are signs of change. The organiser, Jean-Marie Leblanc, who vets entries to the race, yesterday stated: “We will look more closely at the morality of the teams. For example, we will not take a team who have had a rider test positive in May. No more teams who have been raided by the police.”

  These steps sound basic; for cycling they are radical advances – this year Festina were allowed to include in their team a rider who was on appeal over a positive test for steroids; last year the organisers permitted the Italian MG–Technogym team to ride in spite of the fact that Italian drug police had seized drugs from their hotel.

  Yesterday, it was raining in the lush fields of Charolais, backdrop to the 52-kilometre time-trial, last act before today’s grand finale on the Champs-Élysées. The finale will not be as grand as usual – only 96 cyclists will make it to the French capital, just over half the number who left Dublin three weeks ago.

  Thanks to an epic win on Monday at Les Deux Alpes, and a fine defensive operation against last year’s winner, Jan Ullrich, the following day at Albertville, Pantani gained so much time in the two Alpine stages that yesterday he really did not have to worry about his closest challengers, Ullrich and the American Bobby Julich. His main concern was a freak crash or puncture.

  As expected, Ullrich was the winner yesterday, taking his tally of stages to three. He was unable to dislodge Pantani but jumped to second overall, cutting the Italian’s victory margin to 3min 31sec and pushing Julich into third place. The Colorado man has the consolation of being the first American to finish on the podium since Greg LeMond won in 1990.

  [Julich later became a directeur sportif at Britain’s Team Sky, but left having admitted the use of banned drugs.]

  The pattern of this Tour has been that the racing has tended to take first place only at weekends, when the French police go off duty. So today Pantani’s lap of honour on the Champs-Élysées will be a joyous affair; the little Italian is universally liked by fans and media for his spectacular attacks in the mountains.

  Tomorrow, however, six TVM riders and their masseur will face questioning in Rheims; more cyclists from the Française des Jeux and Casino squads will be questioned in the near future. The Tour has stuttered to its end; the drug investigations will run and run.

  A year later, the Tour caravan assembled again, reeling from a series of further scandals, most notably Pantani’s ejection from the Giro d’Italia after failing the haematocrit test. That pretty much dispelled the notion that he might have won the 1998 Tour “clean”.

  Last chance to banish the drug pedallers

  28 June 1999

  When it starts on Saturday in the Vendée, this will be the Tour de France of crossed fingers, murmured prayers and nervous glances over Lycra-clad shoulders. For there was no precedent for last year’s disastrous, scandal-stricken Tour – either in the closed world of cycling or the broader world of sport.

  This year’s race has been billed as “the Tour of reconstruction”, but events took on a momentum of their own last year after Willy Voet, the masseur with the Festina team, was stopped by customs police on a quiet back road where France meets Belgium in the suburbs of Lille, on his way to the Tour. This year’s race cannot afford further scandal, but the revelations, police inquiries and confessions have not let up in the intervening 11 months and show no sign of doing so.

  The only shred of credibility left to last year’s Tour came from the victory of the little climber Marco Pantani, the most charismatic cyclist in the peloton. This disappeared when Pantani was expelled from the Tour of Italy earlier this month, for failing a blood test intended to restrict use of the red blood cell boosting hormone erythropoietin (EPO).

  His reputation is now in tatters, after last week’s publication of a report by the Italian Olympic Committee, the CONI. Its findings were gloriously Byzantine and couched in official language. The conclusion was that the available evidence indicated “with extreme probability” that Pantani had taken banned drugs to increase his red cell level. However, it added that there was no hard evidence from a positive drug test, so there should be no further proceedings.

  The report merely interpreted Pantani’s blood test readings during the Giro and other races. It concluded that his readings of haematocrit – the percentage of solid matter, mainly oxygen-carrying red cells, in the blood – were so consistently high, they could not have been achieved without the administration of EPO. It also touched on his habit of measuring his haematocrit level with his own personal centrifuge, and pointed out that his iron level – another indicator of EPO administration – was between five and 50 times the norm for a healthy athlete.

  A new inquiry has since been set up into allegations that Pantani and a team-mate switched blood samples so that he could avoid being caught by a similar blood test at the end of the 1998 Tour of Italy, which he also won. Pantani strenuously denies any involvement with banned substances. “I am a clean rider, my conscience is clear,” he said after his Tour of Italy expulsion. “I have nothing to do with doping and I do not need drugs to win.” Pantani, however, will not start the Tour and, due to inconvenient injuries, neither will the two men who preceded him down the Champs-Élysées in the yellow jersey.

  Jan Ullrich, the winner in 1997 and runner-up in 1996 and 1998, is taking legal action against Der Spiegel after the German news magazine accused him, together with the rest of his Deutsche Telekom team, of the same systematic drug use as that practised at the Festina team. Ullrich, who has not failed any drugs test, has also insisted that he is drug-free. “I have not taken drugs, I do not take drugs and I will not take drugs,” he said recently.

  The 1996 Tour de France winner, Bjarne Riis, was accused of drug taking by a former team masseur in a Danish television programme, and also had his high blood readings revealed in an Italian newspaper. He was questioned for a full day by a magistrate leading one of the eight current inquiries in Italy into drug use in the sport.

  As the man who
provided much of their drugs for 20 years, Voet is perhaps the man who understands best what drives cyclists to use banned substances. His view is that cyclists are addicted to the effects of EPO in particular, because its performance-enhancing properties are so dramatic, and that they cannot kick the habit. “A whole generation of cyclists is shafted,” is his conclusion in his best-selling autobiography, Breaking the Chain.

  As last year’s Tour collapsed into chaos, there were many observers who hoped the participants would realise that their sport and their livelihoods would be in grave danger if they did not change their ways, and quickly. For the past 15 years, the Tour has been the hub of the professional cycling season and if it is damaged beyond repair, the sport will wither.

  The major sponsors of the Tour – Coca-Cola, Crédit Lyonnais, Fiat – have served notice that they will review their backing if this year’s race is hit by further scandal. Team sponsors – notably La Française des Jeux, the French national lottery, and the chemical company Mapei – have let it be known that, for them, the next drug scandal will be the last.

  But evidence of a change of heart in the peloton is patchy at best and limited to France. French team doctors are confident their charges are approaching the sport in a new way, and there are signs that teams in the peloton who are now clean are putting pressure on those of their peers who are clearly not, to change their ways. Younger riders have suddenly begun to appear in the results: older men who were ruling the roost until 1998 have, curiously, slipped away.

  The cyclists have been slow to react, but in France, sponsors, race organisers and the French Cycling Federation have realised they are facing economic oblivion and acted accordingly. Riders now undergo in-depth health checks which alert them to the effects banned drugs have on their long-term well-being: all too predictably, the results of the first checks showed the bulk of French cyclists to be suffering the side effects of erythropoietin and corticosteroids.