Arnold Kemp in Paris Tour de France
It was 9.30pm when the police came for Rodolfo Massi, entering his hotel by a back door. They searched his room and found corticoids in a case. They gave him time to shower and eat before taking him to the police station.
Then they drove him north from Chambery in Savoy to Lille and to the lair of Judge Patrick Keil who, with a little help from his friends, has brought the Tour de France close to oblivion.
On Tuesday Massi, who rides for Casino, had won the right to wear the polka-dot jersey as King of the Mountains. Now the Italian star had set another record: he became the first rider in the 95-year history of the tour to be arrested on suspicion of criminal behaviour.
Massi was placed under judicial examination and locked up. Last Friday, claiming he had been stitched up by a rival settling old scores, he was released on bail. He said the corticoids, in the form of nasal sprays, were for colds.
But the discovery of the drugs, which police said came from Italy, Greece and Holland, changed the direction of the inquiry. Until then riders had been considered as simple victims of doping imposed by team managers, coaches and commercial pressures, but Massi’s examination meant their complicity was now in the firing line.
The next day, the tour crossed into Switzerland. Now on neutral territory the five men in the team sponsored by the Dutch transport insurance group TVM made good their escape from French justice. On Tuesday evening they had been taken from their hotel at Albertville; their blood, urine and hair had been tested for drugs. They were told on Thursday to report to the authorities in Rheims the following Monday. They left for the Netherlands.
They became the seventh team to leave the race. A number of star riders have also quit. The cyclists who finish the tour on the Champs Elyses today will be a tattered fragment of the army that set out from Dublin on 11 July. Of the 21 teams, 14 remain and of the 189 riders, only 96. Back along the grinding route are broken dreams and shattered reputations.
The race that occupies an honoured place in modern French mythology, a byword for courage and endurance, a bonding festival of high summer, has been exposed as a sham founded on hypocrisy and criminal behaviour.
The doctors who run the teams have emerged as sinister “sorcerer’s apprentices” taking ever greater risks with the riders’ health. The sponsors, on whose largesse the race depends and who are rewarded by intensive television coverage, have been left with their names covered in mud.
The judicial authorities were accused of treating the riders “like animals”. The police denied allegations that they conducted internal searches of TVM players being tested at a local hospital. But the police treatment of riders fed anger and even panic in the peloton (pack).
On Wednesday the race was twice stopped and, in a go-slow, riders removed their numbers to invalidate the stage, finishing it in mutinous anonymity hours late. Spectators vented their anger both at the officials, at one point mooning them, and at the riders, whistling and booing them.
Yet Keil and his fellow examining judge, Odile Madrole in Rheims, have been prepared to risk one of the biggest scandals in the history of sport to confront what French Sports Minister Marie-George Buffet last week denounced as “a vast traffic in dope products that puts human lives in danger”.
The story of the putsch against the tour begins last year but the authorities deliberately delayed decisive action until the race started – only when it was in France could they get their hands on the evidence they needed.
It was last year that Buffet declared war on doping in sport and initiated new laws against it. They are still under consideration by the French Parliament but existing statutes are prohibitive enough. At the start of this year, regional conferences were held to raise the authorities’ awareness of the campaign.
In March, customs officers in Rheims intercepted a vehicle belonging to the TMV team and found 104 doses of erythropoetin, or EPO, which enhances performance by promoting red blood cells.
The drug, which can have dangerous side-effects, is believed to have been in use on the tour for about six years. At the time no action was taken by the prosecuting authorities in Rheims.
On July 8, near the French border, Belgian customs officers stopped a car driven by the Belgian Willy Voet, trainer of the team sponsored by the Andorran-based watchmakers, Festina. It had taken an odd route after leaving the Festina headquerters, near Lyons, heading first into Switzerland and then Germany before turning west to head for Dublin and the Irish “prelude” to the tour.
The car had been spotted several days earlier at the French-Swiss border, and aroused further suspicion when it was observed sticking to quiet backroads. It contained 400 doses of drug products, including 250 of EPO and 100 of anabolic steroids.
Two days later the public prosecutor in Lille ordered Judge Keil to begin an inquiry, under the French process of investigative justice which must precede any criminal trial.
As a result of testimony from Voet and from other Festina officials and riders, the team doctor, Eric Ryckaert, a Belgian, was detained. He remains in custody.
Three damning pieces of evidence emerged. Festina coach Bruno Roussel admitted that riders were provided with drug products “under strict medical conditions”. Then Belgian police gave the French authorities computer records seized from Ryckaert in an earlier operation. These apparently detailed the medication given to Festina riders.
Faced with this evidence, five of the nine Festina riders admitted that the team had a “black bank” or slush fund to which they contributed their bonuses to buy drugs – estimated to be at least 10E000 per year per rider and perhaps much more.
On July 17, the tour organisers banned Festina, saying it had departed from required ethical standards. But the evidence being gathered by police on the warrants issued by Keil was now implicating other teams and riders. Massi, who used to ride for Festina, was identified by an old team-mate as being the team’s principal provider of drugs.
On July 23, customs in Rheims reopened its investigation, dormant since March, into TVM. As in Britain, customs officers have wider powers than police, who must act on magistrates’ warrants. A customs raid on the Dutch team’s hotel at Tarascon- sur-Arige found cases of performance- enhancing drugs, and others to mask them.
Cees Priem and team doctor Andrew Mikhailov were taken to Rheims, where Judge Madrole opened a parallel judicial inquiry and issued warrants.
The consequence was the evening raid on the TVM hotel last Tuesday, by about 30 officers, which almost brought the tour to a halt the next day. A policeman who took part in the Albertville raid said he was stunned by the enormity of what they were doing. “We were just about as upset as they were,” he said. “The tour is sacred for us, too. It’s almost iconoclastic to touch it.”
By the end of the week, five other teams had quit. Once, the team of the world number one Laurent Jalabert, returned to Spain in high outrage, denouncing the French judicial system. “Worse than Chile under Pinochet,” said a Spanish newspaper. Drugs had been found in one of Once’s trucks and its doctor was placed under examination and released on bail on Friday.
Some commentators have seen the vents as a sign that the old “complicity” in French society is over. They compare it to the decision to bring to trial former Socialist prime minister Laurent Fabius and two of his Cabinet ministers on charges arising from the deaths of patient who received transfusions of blood carrying the Aids virus in 1985.
Others are less certain about casting a lurid light on a practice that has long been commonplace in the tour and has been tacitly tolerated by the public. Bernard Kouchner, the secretary of state for health, whose father was a tour doctor, said: “We’re all accomplices in this gigantic hypocrisy because everyone knew that doping reigned in the tour.”
Perhaps what has changed attitudes more than anything else is the sense that team doctors are now taking unacceptable risks and applying programmes which administer drugs every day from October, with ever- increasing doses of EPO, testosterone and anabolic steroids.
Buffet said the traffic in doping implied hierarchies of providers, manufacturers and secret funds. “In the search for truth, we must go right to the end,” she said.
After the finish, the International Union of Cyclists began a daunting task of damage limitation. A German member of the Festina team, speaking just after giving evidence to police, said: “The union will have to suspend more than 100 riders after the tour.”
Since fewer than 100 will cross the line, that implies a total wipe-out of professional cycling. A commentator remarked that for many French people, the tour is a rite of passage, like losing their virginity. The race is part of a collectively remembered idyll of adolescent summers. But virginity, once lost, is gone for ever, and innocence too.