William Fotheringham Cycling
When it starts on Saturday in the Vende, 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.
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 Festina team’s masseur, was stopped by police on a back road where France meets Belgium 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 Marco Pantani, the most charismatic cyclist in the peloton. This disappeared when Pantani was expelled from the Tour of Italy 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. 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 – were so consistently high, they could not have been achieved without EPO.
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.” Pantini, however, will not start the Tour and, owing to inconvenient injuries, neither will the two men who preceded him down the Champs Elyses.
Jan Ullrich, 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.
The 1996 Tour de France winner, Bjarne Riis, was accused of drug- taking by a former team masseur in a Danish TV 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 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. “A whole generation of cyclists is shafted,” is his conclusion in his best- selling autobiography, Serial Murder.
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.
The major sponsors of the Tour – Coca-Cola, Credit Lyonnais, Fiat -have served notice that they will review their backing if this year’s race is hit by further scandal. Team sponsors have let it be known that 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.
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.
Ethical conduct charters have been drawn up by teams in an attempt to set definite parameters. 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 results in the sack.
Some say there is 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 at the chemists.”
Some French cyclists are talking about “cyclisme a deux vitesses [two-speed cycling]”, which means 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 cyclist Cedric Vasseur.
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. 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.
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, 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.
They are taking other measures. All team personnel will be given a warning about use of drugs 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. And on Saturday, every starter will undergo a blood test – and no doubt they will all have Pantani’s fate at the back of their minds.
The Tour organisers’ attitude is that only world wars have stopped the race, so the fte 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.
ENDS