Racing Hard

by William Fotheringham

  Ethical conduct charters have been drawn up by teams in an attempt to set definite parameters, removing the ambiguities which in the past meant drug taking was tolerated or swept under the carpet. Cyclists who test positive or who are involved in police inquiries are now suspended from competing until the issue has been settled. A confirmed positive test now results in the sack, whereas in the past it would have been met with sympathy similar to that given to someone caught speeding.

  There are those who say there is now an atmosphere of paranoia over what medicine a cyclist can or cannot take, and there is clearly doubt about where sports medicine ends and doping begins. “We have got to the point where prescribing vitamin C is a problem,” said one cyclist. “My team doctor doesn’t like doing prescriptions for me any more, and, for example, will tell me to go and buy a diarrhoea medicine in the chemists.”

  Some French cyclists are talking about “cyclisme a deux vitesses” – two-speed cycling – by which they mean they are no longer competing on a level playing field because some riders in Spanish, Italian and Dutch teams are artificially assisted and they are not. “We will know at the end of the Tour and perhaps, if the French riders have come nowhere, that will be the time to call it a scandal,” said the former yellow jersey holder Cedric Vasseur, when asked how the phenomenon might affect this year’s Tour.

  [There was not a single French stage win in the 1999 Tour – the first time this had happened for many years.]

  Last week, as the CONI committee was pondering Pantani’s plasma levels, there were uncanny echoes of Voet’s arrest when another Festina team car, driven by a masseur and conveying banned drugs, was stopped by police on the Franco-Belgian border. Compared to the cocktail of heavy-duty hormones – EPO, growth hormone, testosterone – which Voet had been conveying 11 months earlier, the soigneur was carrying a lightweight mix of creatine, which is not banned, and medicines which included cortisone, which is banned. The team promptly sacked him for transporting substances which had not been provided by the team doctor.

  The greatest change can be seen in the Tour’s attitude to its biggest hero of the mid-1990s, Richard Virenque. When Virenque was thrown off last year’s race, together with the rest of Festina, following confirmation from the team manager that he had run a system of drug administration, the race organiser Jean-Marie Leblanc revealed he had met the four-times King of the Mountains, and shared a hug and a tear as “Rico” left the race. Virenque is among the riders who have been excluded from this year’s Tour by the organisers.

  [This article was written a week before the Tour started – Virenque was admitted to the race at the very last moment after the intervention of the Union Cycliste Internationale which ruled the Tour organisers had no legal right to stop him riding.]

  They are taking other measures. All team personnel will be given a general warning about use of drugs by the organisers on Friday, at which they will be reminded that the race’s rules provide for the exclusion of any rider or team who might damage the race’s image – the grounds on which Festina were disqualified last year.

  And on Saturday, before the Tour’s prologue time-trial begins at Le Puy du Fou, every starter will undergo a blood test – and no doubt they will all have Pantani’s fate at the back of their minds. A similar mass test at the Giro put two riders out of the race before it had even begun. The Tour organisers’ attitude is that only world wars have stopped the race, so the fete will go on. At best, it will be three weeks of paranoia. In a worst-case scenario, further police action will result in irreparable damage.

  The 1999 Tour was, of course, Lance Armstrong’s first “victory”; it was also marked by the departure of one of the few riders in cycling at the time who was openly riding “clean” – Christophe Bassons.

  Drug-free Bassons is sent packing

  17 July 1999

  This is a Tour of mixed messages, summed up perfectly by a vignette on the final hill of yesterday’s sumptuous stage through the Massif Central. On one side of the road stood a mad German dressed as the devil, on the other a lunatic Frenchman got up as an angel. The peloton passed between the two: it is impossible to tell which of the riders are on which side in this race.

  It is exactly a month since the Tour organisers announced which cyclists would not be welcome at the race for “ethical reasons”. Yesterday the stage started without the one man who should have been welcomed here, the young Frenchman Christophe Bassons, who is the one rider in the peloton to have taken a high-profile stand against doping.

  Bassons, who rides for the La Française des Jeux team, was, according to a team-mate, made to leave the race on Thursday night by his manager Marc Madiot after the two had an argument when the rider was late for dinner because of media interviews. Madiot appears to have felt that Bassons was not focused on the race and was spending too much time with journalists, which for some people on this Tour is a crime in itself.

  The media attention probably was affecting Bassons’ race but it seems shortsighted not to support him. La Française des Jeux are in danger of losing their sponsor, the French national lottery, which is worried that the team are presenting the wrong image. Madiot has spent a total of five days being questioned by police over drugs; a former member of the team’s management company, Bertrand Lavelot, is under formal investigation by the authorities over the alleged running of a drug-supply ring. Bassons was perhaps the team’s best chance for survival.

  “For a Tour without doping, come back Bassons” read a plaintive placard at the roadside. It was, of course, outnumbered by posters in support of Richard Virenque, the cyclist who was said by the Tour organiser Jean-Marie Leblanc to “crystallise the doping problem”; the organisers did not want him in the race but he was awarded entry by the Union Cycliste Internationale, the world governing body.

  Bassons went to ground yesterday, Virenque was prominent on the podium, putting on the King of the Mountains jersey which he is likely to wear to the finish in Paris. It seems a strange way for cycling to leave its doping problem behind.

  In hindsight, the following piece acclaiming Lance Armstrong’s Tour victory seems bizarre, but the backstory is everything. All those of us who reported on the Armstrong Tour of 1999 had also covered his comeback from cancer; it was impossible to separate the two. Many of us had also known the Texan before his cancer and respected his charisma and openness. This was one of sport’s greatest comebacks. It was also proven, six years later, to be one of the great sporting frauds.

  Armstrong’s giant leap

  24 July 1999

  When Lance Armstrong won his first Tour de France stage at Verdun in 1993 a journalist asked him where he was aiming for, given that his namesake Neil had made it to the moon. The young Texan, already turning heads with his cocksure personality and utterly focused racing style, modestly replied: “Mars”. Two and a half years ago, when Armstrong was diagnosed with testicular cancer which required immediate surgery, France, its Tour, the Champs-Élysées and the yellow jersey might as well all have been on another planet. Yet tomorrow, in a sporting and medical miracle, he is set to ride into Paris as winner of the Tour de France.

  By any standards, even compared with men who have not had cancer, it will be one of the biggest Tour wins in recent years. Armstrong has defeated the time-trial and mountain specialists on their home terrain in crushing style and has exuded confidence, which has extended to his mainly American US Postal Service team. There is every chance that today he will extend his lead to the greatest margin since Bernard Hinault’s 14min 34sec in 1981. He already leads Fernando Escartin by a bigger margin than Miguel Indurain achieved in any of his five Tour wins.

  The journey has been remarkable. No endurance athlete has ever recovered from cancer as advanced as Armstrong’s, including surgery and chemotherapy, and returned to dominate an event as lengthy and demanding as the Tour. Once he left the Saint David hospital in Indianapolis, determined to continue his career as a cyclist, he was in uncharted waters.

 
; “I’m totally confused. I’m going completely into the unknown. A comeback like this has never been attempted. I don’t know, my oncologists don’t know and obviously the sport doesn’t know,” he said when he set up his base in Nice at the end of 1997. Tellingly, he had no idea how much furniture to buy: he had no idea how long he would last in professional cycling. He had announced his cancer to the world in a telephone press conference at the start of October 1996; by the end of the month he was weak from chemotherapy, had lost his hair and bore the scars of surgery to remove lesions from his brain, abdomen and lungs.

  “Initially, in the first two weeks, I thought I might die, but at the point where they discovered the lesions on my brain I was prepared to die.”

  Armstrong’s comeback has always begged one question: why should anyone want to attempt to return to the most demanding endurance sport in the world when they have just cheated death? He has recalled the time he was diagnosed. “I was scared that I was going to die, and I was scared that I would lose my career. I’m not sure what I thought first: “I’ll never race again” or “I’m going to die”. That’s why it makes sense.”

  There were other motivations: the fact that a successful comeback would prove to the cancer community that it was possible to combat the disease has been crucial to Armstrong. In addition, once he was healthy again he was seized with the desire to prove to a sceptical European cycling establishment that he could return to his previous level.

  He is still bitter at the way he was treated by European teams during his illness. The Cofidis squad, who hired him just before his diagnosis, attempted to renegotiate his contract downwards as he lay in hospital. Other teams simply did not want to pay him anything like the salary he earned before he became an invalid.

  “I was talking to Roger Legeay, the manager of Chris Boardman’s team,” Armstrong has recalled. “He told me what I was expecting was “the money of a big rider”. Teams think if I get sick again it will be bad publicity. There is no precedent for what I went through, maybe I’m naive or stupid, but I would have thought that people would want to be part of the story.”

  He is still bitter about the lack of belief in what he has achieved. On Wednesday, replying to the newspaper Le Monde’s story on the fact that minute traces of a corticosteroid had been found in his urine, he said: “This is the story of someone who was not given any chance, everyone said I could not come back. I saw the same mentality when I wanted to find a team, and no one wanted me because they said it was not possible.”

  [With hindsight, the corticosteroid positive was a pointer to the fact that Armstrong was not clean. However, compared to the Festina drugs seizure with its industrial quantities of EPO, or the massive fluctuations in blood levels revealed during the Pantani saga, it felt like relatively small beer at the time.]

  There have been false starts in the past two years as Armstrong became “completely terrified that the illness was coming back”. In March he left the Paris-Nice stage race and was on the point of quitting. Several weeks of monastic seclusion in North Carolina prompted another rethink, and that marked the start of the upward trajectory which has taken him to the verge of victory in this Tour.

  The principal pointer towards his current performance was Armstrong’s fourth place in the Tour of Spain in September last year, after which he reflected that even racing in the Madrid sierra in hail and snow was nothing like as bad as being treated for cancer. He had never climbed mountains with the ease he showed then, but during his illness his physique had changed, with the loss of the broad swimmer’s shoulders which were the product of triathlons he raced in his youth.

  He has another explanation: “I was half dead and was put back together by the best doctors in the world. Perhaps the illness was there for a while and I was training and living with it. Perhaps when I got rid of it, that helped me. You can imagine if you have an advanced form of cancer what it does to your body.”

  He has also pointed out: “To race and suffer, that’s hard. But that’s not being laid out in a hospital bed in Indianapolis with a catheter hanging out of my chest, with platinum pumping into my veins, throwing up for 24 hours straight for five days, taking a two-week break and doing it again. We’ve all heard the expression “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger” and that’s exactly it.”

  Perhaps the same will be true of the world’s greatest bike race. Even after the drug scandals, police inquiries and revelations of the past year, the Tour de France still inspires awe at the physical and mental efforts it demands of its participants, from the yellow jersey to the lanterne rouge.

  Its attraction for its international crowds which, on the evidence of this year’s roadsides, are still as warm as ever in their affections, has always been founded on the fact that most people ride a bike and can have some idea of the physical effort involved. One thing sets this year’s race apart from the 85 that have preceded it: only Armstrong and the rest of the cancer community truly know what it has taken to win.

  As for the bigger picture, the best that can be said is that it was confusing, as it has remained since then. This summary attempts to make a little sense of it all.

  Tour of transition riddled with doubt

  26 July 1999

  There were no strikes, no police raids, no arrests, no positive drug tests and no riders prevented from “working” because of “ill health”. The Tour de France lives off drama, crisis and controversy, but the event billed as “the race of renewal” arrived in Paris relieved that the only drama over the three weeks and 3,250 miles was the Lance Armstrong miracle.

  After last year’s Tour de Farce, this was the Tour of doubt. The contradictions were perfectly illustrated when Richard Virenque rode on to the Champs-Élysées in the wake of Armstrong’s US Postal Service team – tradition demands that the winner’s team-mates lead the race into the heart of Paris – and promptly attacked.

  Virenque won the polka-dot jersey of best climber for the fifth time in six years and is now only one King of the Mountains win away from equalling the joint record-holders, Lucien van Impe and Federico Bahamontes. But the organisers had not wanted him to ride, and he only made it to the start when the Union Cycliste Internationale took fright at the arguments of his lawyers.

  Appropriately the organisation’s vice-president handed him his bouquet at the finish, after which Virenque said he would like to come back and win the race next year. It was hardly the outcome the organisers were expecting; nor would they have wished to see three of the Festina cyclists they threw off the race last year, Virenque, Laurent Dufaux and Alex Zulle, finish in the top eight.

  Zulle and Dufaux were suspended until June 1 this year after admitting the use of erythropoietin in the wake of last year’s Festina scandal. The UCI reduced their bans by one month in the expectation that they would not have sufficient racing to be fit for the start of the Tour. But they finished runner-up and fourth respectively and should thank the governing body for its leniency.

  The Spaniards Fernando Escartin, pushed from second to third overall by Zulle during Saturday’s time-trial, and Angel Casero, fifth, have reason to feel aggrieved but, given the peloton’s unwillingness to discuss drug issues, they are unlikely to comment.

  The doubts in this Tour revolved around the willingness and ability of the UCI to combat the drugs problem, and the extent to which last year’s scandals have encouraged riders to stop taking drugs.

  The race organisers and some of the riders insist they can see changes in the way the racing is done. Others, such as the French Cycling Federation’s medical officer, consider that the peloton is divided into those taking fewer or no drugs – largely French, in the aftermath of last year’s police inquiries – and those set in the old ways.

  The answer to the first question lies in the confused little episodes which did not destroy the credibility of the race as a whole but made one wonder about the coherence of the men who run the sport. The only cyclist to leave the race over doping, the Belgian Ludo Dierckxs
ens, winner of the stage to Saint Etienne, did not actually fail a drug test but merely admitted using a banned substance for therapeutic purposes. Apparently he did not have a prescription, but there was confusion over this.

  There was also confusion over a new test for corticosteroids, which have been widely used in cycling and are now detectable; no one knew whether it was experimental or whether positive tests would carry sanctions. One rider tested positive for a corticosteroid in the first week but apparently he had a medical certificate; questions are now being asked about the large number of cyclists who suffer from asthma and pollen allergies.

  The mix of confusion and paranoia meant that Armstrong’s use of a cream for saddle sores was blown up into a minor scandal. The one rider in the bunch who spoke up about his desire to race without drugs, the young Frenchman Christophe Bassons, received no support from his peers or the race organisers, felt ostracised and quit.

  “Light at the end of the tunnel” was the verdict of the race organiser Jean-Marie Leblanc, who did not specify how bright the light was or how long the tunnel. The French sports minister Marie-George Buffet put it differently: “A Tour of transition.” Renewal will take longer than expected.

  The day after the 1999 Tour ended I drove north with Guardian photographer Tom Jenkins to chart the next step in Armstrong’s triumphant progress through Europe; the idea that the Tour winner would be racing the next day raised eyebrows, but it was firmly in the old tradition.

  Armstrong hits the money trail

  27 July 1999

  On Sunday the Champs-Élysées, on Monday Spoor-straat in [Boxmeer] this little Dutch village just inside the border with Germany. The end of the Tour de France did not mark the start of a period of well-earned rest for its stars, including the winner Lance Armstrong; for the Texan and many of his fellow finishers, it is the beginning of a series of lucrative appearances such as last night’s 25th “Day after the Tour” race.