The Tour de France

by Paul Hansford

  The 1959 Tour saw those guardians of integrity and honesty, sports agents, get involved in a bit of Tour shenanigans (surprising it took them that long). Federico Bahamontes’ victory was unquestionably a deserved one, but it was aided by the involvement of agent Daniel Dousset, who manipulated the French team riders under his control to bring about a favourable result. For some time the race leader was a young rider from a French regional team, Henry Anglade, and when it became obvious that the victor would be either him or Bahamontes, Dousset told his riders to help the Spaniard — his client — win. Everyone’s motivation was money: a Bahamontes win would earn Dousset a 10 per cent bonus and also allow the French team riders to command bigger fees at the post-Tour criteriums. And so it was that legends of the Tour Jacques Anquetil and Louison Bobet ensured a Spaniard would win over a fellow countryman for a little bit of coin.

  No chapter on dirty tricks in the Tour would be complete without a little spot of head butting. The smacking of heads has been an age-old tradition, born out of the necessity of having to have both hands on the handlebars most of the time. As a technique it can be used to create a little space, deter a rider from coming through or just serve as a reminder that you’re there. The best head butt in recent memory has to be Mark Renshaw’s ‘Glasgow kiss’ planted on Julian Dean during the sprint finish on stage 11 in 2010. Leading out teammate Mark Cavendish, the Aussie landed not one, not two, but three blows to Dean’s dome, and then appeared to swerve in front of Tyler Farrar to cut off his line. Cav won the sprint but Renshaw was thrown out of the race, with race official Jean-François Pescheux saying, ‘This is a bike race, not a gladiator’s arena.’

  If only Renshaw was French, eh?

  Doping

  Oprah: Did you ever take banned substances to enhance your cycling performances?

  Armstrong: Yes.

  Oprah: Was one of those substances EPO?

  Armstrong: Yes.

  Oprah: Did you ever blood dope or use blood transfusions to enhance your cycling performance?

  Armstrong: Yes.

  Oprah: Did you ever use any other banned substances such as testosterone, cortisone or human growth hormone?

  Armstrong: Yes.

  Oprah: In all seven of your Tour de France victories, did you ever take banned substances or blood-dope?

  Armstrong: Yes.

  Oprah: When you placed third in 2009, you did not dope?

  Armstrong: The last time I crossed that line was in 2005.

  Oprah: Does that include blood transfusions? No doping or blood transfusions in 2009–2010?

  Armstrong: Absolutely not.

  Although a ton of questions were left unanswered, a millionaire chat-show host from Chicago succeeded where the US federal government, the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA), US Anti-Doping Agency (USADA), the Union Cycliste Internationale (UCI) and a host of journalists had failed. Oprah Winfrey had compelled Lance Armstrong to admit he doped.

  Granted, it wasn’t due to any great journalistic skill on Winfrey’s part — more that Armstrong needed an outlet to confess after the weight of evidence became too much. Besides, Oprah would have just the right amount of outrage and indignation without probing too deeply. Other than the first half-minute where Armstrong publicly admitted for the first time that he had cheated to win the Tour de France, the interview was a predictable confessional from a man few people believe is capable of telling the truth anymore (one newspaper headline said: ‘A convincing thirty-nine seconds, then back to the old Lance’). He dodged almost every direct question thrown his way, wouldn’t name names and didn’t seem to be all that sorry about the situation.

  Still, the confession shocked the world and Lance’s doping became front-page news and a talking point for people who’d never talked about cycling before. Armstrong’s backstory of beating cancer and his charity work with Livestrong made the scandal all the more sensational, crossing over from being a sporting issue to mass-media fodder.

  Armstrong deserves all the punishment and bad press he gets after cheating, lying and strong-arming his way to the top of cycling and making millions of dollars along the way. However, it is important to look at what the USADA called ‘the most sophisticated, professionalised and successful doping program that sport has ever seen’ in its proper context. If viewed as a part of the history of drug taking in the Tour de France, the Lance Armstrong scandal is the inevitable conclusion to a competition mired in doping from its very beginning.

  The Tour de France didn’t create the greatest conditions in which to have a drug-free working environment for its participants. Henri Desgrange’s notions of hard work, perseverance and suffering over thousands of kilometres of racing were at odds with racers riding without ‘help’. With the stages often beginning in the early hours, the uncomfortable and heavy bikes and the astronomical prize money, if ever there was a sport made for performance-enhancing drugs, professional cycling was it.

  Many early riders would keep a stash of pills and potions on hand to help them complete their races, but the general public was unaware of anything untoward. One of the first instances of a rider breaking the code of silence was Henri Pélissier in 1923. Not a fan of Desgrange or his Tour, Pélissier gave an explosive interview to journalist Albert Londres not long after quitting the race in disgust after falling afoul of one of its arcane rules. Grabbing a handful of pills out of his jersey, he said: ‘Look … Cocaine for our eyes, chloroform to rub on our gums, pills for strength. We run on dynamite.’ Londres had the Tour’s first drug scandal fall right into his lap that day and he used the explosive quotes in his article, entitled ‘Les Forçats de la Route’ or ‘The Convicts of the Road’. It highlighted the suffering the riders had to endure over increasingly difficult routes, and was also one of the first times the riders’ drug use had been documented. Readers lapped up the story of self-abuse and suffering but, rather than shaming the race, the revelations only served to increase its popularity.

  Pélissier would later say he was only joking with Londres about the drugs, perhaps realising he had gone a step too far by giving away cycling’s trade secrets. If doping was prevalent at such an early stage in the Tour’s development, the omerta within the peloton was what enabled it to continue. Doping in professional cycling is a bit like Fight Club: The first rule about doping is you don’t talk about doping. The second rule about doping is YOU DON’T TALK ABOUT DOPING. It was the riders’ dirty little secret, a necessary evil to get the job done, and it wasn’t to be discussed in public.

  Some riders broke ranks to talk about drug taking, but the proclamations were often ignored or glossed over by the press and authorities, even if uttered by the sport’s biggest names. When asked if riders took drugs, the great champion Fausto Coppi said, ‘Yes, and those who say otherwise aren’t worth talking to about cycling’; five-time champion Jacques Anquetil told L’Equipe: ‘You’d have to be an imbecile or a hypocrite to imagine that a professional cyclist who rides 235 days a year can hold himself together without stimulants.’ (In fact, Anquetil was the most vocal opponent to mandatory drug tests when they were introduced in 1966, organising a protest and actively avoiding them during his career.) Perhaps the most upsetting of quotes came from Englishman Tom Simpson, who died on the slopes of Mont Ventoux in 1967 with a cocktail of alcohol and amphetamines in his system: ‘If it takes ten to kill you, then I’ll take nine.’

  Reports of riders doped up to the eyeballs were commonplace in the ’50s and ’60s — amphetamine was the drug of choice for the long-distance rider — but it wasn’t until Simpson’s death on that hot day in ’67 that the authorities realised they had to deal with the scourge of drugs in their sport. Testing became an integral part of racing from the late 1960s and riders slowly began to get caught out, which in turn forced them to find drugs
that were less detectable (thus starting the cat-and-mouse game between dopers and testers that continues today).

  One of the main effects of outing the drug cheats was that it shone a spotlight on the darker side of the sport and, in 1977, the Tour de France was thrown into crisis with a series of high-profile drug-test failures. A past and future champion were pinged — Luis Ocaña and Joop Zoetemelk — and on stage 18 no winner was credited after the first- and second-place riders both failed tests (third place Eddy Merckx was on the road to his hotel by the time the decision had been made to award him with the stage win as highest placed ‘clean’ finisher). To top off the Tour’s darkest edition so far, winner Bernard Thévenet, a few months after the race, admitted to taking cortisone; he kept his title but the French public never forgave him for his misdemeanour.

  The 1980s might have seen some of the most exciting Tour riding ever, but it also saw it endure one of its blackest moments. In 1988, race leader Pedro Delgado was found to have the illegal masking agent probenecid in his system with just five days left to race. He managed to dodge expulsion because, although the drug was banned in the Olympics, the UCI had not put it on their list yet. Clearly Delgado was in the wrong, but he resisted urges from the organisers to quit — ‘We all take bottles from the public at the roadside. Why not a “sinister hand”? That is the only explanation’ — and the Tour finished with its first winner on a technicality.

  Performances on the bike reached superhuman levels in the 1990s. The speeds with which the riders were finishing the stages, both along the flat and in the mountains, were increasing, and no amount of improved diet, lighter bikes or aerodynamic clothing could fully explain it. What could explain it was EPO or, to give it its proper name, erythropoietin, a hormone that increases the production of red blood cells, enabling the blood to carry more oxygen to the muscles. Undetectable at that time, and offering a significant boost in performance, it was a doping cyclist’s dream. Unlike previous drugs of choice that would just tell the brain that the legs and lungs weren’t hurting, EPO gave riders wings.

  To say that EPO was rampant in the peloton would be doing a disservice to the professionals who had the fortitude to ride clean but, at the top end of racing, it wasn’t hard to put two and two together as race times got faster and records were smashed. Looking back at what is now known as the ‘EPO era’, from 1996 to 2007, every winner of the Tour was tainted by a positive test, a doping admission or an official sanction at some point in his career.

  The Tour de France had endured some dark days, but nothing could prepare the sport for what took place during the 1998 edition. It started with a roadside customs search on the border between Belgium and France, and ended with more than thirty arrests and the expulsion or withdrawal of more than half a dozen teams from the Tour. It was the Tour’s Lewinsky moment except that, rather than the stain being on just one dress, it was all over the peloton.

  Festina was the number one professional team in ’98, led by Richard Virenque, Alex Zülle and Laurent Dufaux. A few days before the Tour began in Dublin on 8 July, a Festina soigneur named Willy Voet was making his way by car to Ireland when he was stopped by customs officials on a quiet border crossing not far from the cycling mecca of Roubaix. What officials found in Voet’s vehicle was a drug stash that would’ve made Tony Montana blush: a massive selection of doping products including EPO, testosterone, human growth hormones, hepatitis A vaccines, amphetamines and blood thinners. Voet initially claimed the haul was for personal use (!!) but, after police found another drug stash at the Festina warehouse, he admitted he was carrying the drugs on team orders and implicated manager Bruno Roussel and team doctor Eric Rijckaert. Raids on the team hotel followed and arrests were made; the Festina team was thrown out of the Tour on 17 July after Roussel and five riders admitted to doping. Detectives busted other teams’ hotels on a rest day (even hauling one rider out of the shower) and the peloton reacted to the heavy-handed treatment by threatening to walk out en masse — until they realised that there was not a lot of sympathy for them.

  Race organiser Jean-Marie Leblanc watched as his Tour slowly began to unravel, and only a peace deal brokered by 1996 champ Bjarne Riis got the race back on track (oh, the irony of future doping confessor Riis brokering a détente for riders protesting the drug raids!). Marco Pantani’s win was almost forgotten under the sheer weight of doping headlines declaring the death of the Tour de France. The Festina scandal rocked cycling to the core, as there was now indisputable proof that riders were conspiring to cheat by taking drugs. With the sport entering the EPO era, how was cycling going to stop it?

  If the Tour needed a saviour, a feel-good story to distract the naysayers, it found one in the shape of Lance Armstrong, a tough Texan who had battled his way back from cancer to re-join the professional ranks. He took the race by storm in 1999, winning by more than seven minutes from Alex Zülle, but questions were almost immediately asked about how he was able to transform himself from a solid classics competitor into a powerhouse Grand Tour rider.

  As Armstrong grew more dominant, winning Tour after Tour, the questions became more frequent and probing. French newspaper Le Monde wrote a story about Armstrong returning a positive test for corticosteroid (said to be covered up by a back-dated prescription from the team doctor), and in 2005 there was an exposé that claimed a frozen sample from the 1999 Tour that tested positive for EPO could be traced back to the Texan. Armstrong’s counter (that he had never failed a drug test and was a victim of a witch-hunt) was a persuasive one to the uninformed but, with the benefit of hindsight, it’s surprising that only a few good men were searching for the truth.

  The lack of any full-scale investigation says much about the power that Armstrong had within racing: journalists who questioned his methods suddenly found they were no longer accredited to cover the races or that riders wouldn’t speak to them; whistle-blowers such as Betsy Andreu (wife of Lance’s ex-teammate Frankie Andreu who claims she heard Lance admit to taking performance-enhancing drugs when speaking to his cancer doctor) and Emma O’Reilly (who as a US Postal Service soigneur was privy to many of Lance’s inner-circle secrets) were either sued or called liars in the press; and riders who took a stand against doping, such as Christophe Bassons, were ostracised by the peloton and forced into early retirement.

  The American was a hero to millions, especially for his tireless work with his foundation, Livestrong, and his fans reasoned that a man who gave so much hope and strength to cancer sufferers would never destroy that by cheating. But behind the facade of world-class cyclist/philanthropist, there was an egotistical, spiteful bully that the public rarely saw. Armstrong was a master at keeping his guard up, but the one time he revealed his true nature was on the road during stage 18 of the 2004 Tour. It said everything you needed to know about Lance and the world he had created.

  Italian rider Filippo Simeoni had testified against infamous doctor Michele Ferrari and sued Armstrong when he called him a liar ahead of the 2004 Tour so there was already … ahem … bad blood between the two, but as far as a racing rivalry was concerned, Simeoni was barely a blip on the American’s radar. By the time a breakaway formed on stage 18, Armstrong had pretty much sealed his sixth win, and under normal conditions he would have let the riders go and allow some lesser names to fight it out for a prestigious stage victory. However, Simeoni was part of the break. When Armstrong realised this, he stormed up to the front of the group and told the riders that if Simeoni stayed, so would he (effectively ending the group’s chance of grabbing the stage). The Italian was told in no uncertain terms to bugger off back to the peloton by the others and, according to Simeoni, on the ride back to the bunch Armstrong said: ‘You made a mistake to speak against Ferrari, and you made a mistake to take legal action against me. I have money, time and lawyers. I can destroy you.’ Lance had made his point.

  Despite the continued rumours, innuendo and accusations, Armstrong w
ent on to win his seventh Tour de France in 2005 and he retired from cycling as the greatest Tour de France rider ever, at least in terms of victories.

  Meanwhile, the cat-and-mouse game of doping continued. The benefits of EPO had raised the stakes and, judging by the number of riders caught, many were willing to take the risk. Most riders pinged were middle-of-the pack pros looking to make the jump into the elite category, with the notable exceptions of Tyler Hamilton and David Millar, who were both caught in 2004.

  Two years later, an aftershock from Festina hit the sport when an investigation into Spanish doctor Eufemiano Fuentes, dubbed ‘Operación Puerto’, implicated several riders in a blood-doping ring and led to favourites Francisco Mancebo, Jan Ullrich, Ivan Basso and Alexander Vinokourov all pulling out on the eve of the Tour. With the race and riders under a cloud of suspicion for the entire three weeks, after the conclusion of the Tour it was announced that winner Floyd Landis was found to have illegal amounts of testosterone in his system; his positive test went a long way to explaining how, the day after losing eight minutes on stage 16, he could launch a 70-km solo attack to come back to within half a minute of the leaders. Floyd explained the testosterone levels by saying that his body’s metabolism had been affected by his excessive consumption of whisky and beer the night before the big ride but, unless he ended up in the sack with Angelina Jolie and Scarlett Johansson that night, there’s no accounting for such a massive hormonal swing. Landis denied any wrongdoing at the time, and continued to do so over the following eighteen months of legal battles to clear his name.

  The Tour was barely keeping its head above water as the 2007 edition began, but it plumbed new depths when Michael Rasmussen was thrown out of the race while wearing yellow after falling afoul of the whereabouts rule and Vinokourov came up with possibly the worst excuse for failing a drug test: ‘I think it’s a mistake in part due to my crash. I have spoken to the team doctors who had a hypothesis that there was an enormous amount of blood in my thighs, which could have led to my positive test.’ Even for cycling, it was a new low.