Three days before the 1998 Tour de France a little-known team assistant, Willy Voet, was stopped by customs officials on the Franco-Belgian border. What they found in the back of his car stunned the world of professional cycling. This is his story
Willy Voet was born in the Belgian town of Hofstade on July 4 1945. He began bike racing at the age of 15.
Children of the pill: an early introduction to drugs
I was not a bad racer. In my best-ever season, I won nine races. I took about 20 in total and back then I was racing against the best Belgian juniors of my generation: Eddy Merckx, Herman van Springel, Walter Godefroot. Once and once only I beat Van Springel. But we didn’t really mix, because already these riders brought with them reputations as champions of the future. Merckx was winning about 30 races a year. He was already “the” Merckx.
Drug-taking was spoken about only in undertones. It was not until 1962, when I was 18 and had gone up to the seniors, that I took my first pills amphetamines. There was a Sunday race near Brussels, at Evere. I rode down there with Grard, a good friend of mine in the club. My dad followed us on his scooter.
On the way, Grard whispered that he had got hold of some little white pills. “You’ve got good form at the moment, and you’re racing with all the family watching. Try them out.” I wasn’t keen, but let myself be talked into it. Taking them was so simple. One pill half an hour before the start, the other halfway through the race.
I went up to the registration table after I’d taken the first pill. The hairs on my arms were standing up like porcupine quills and shivers were running up and down my body. The magic potion was working already. The second the flag dropped I was off like a bullet. And I wasn’t the only one. I was motoring I was riding so fast that it scared me. I didn’t feel hungry, but I had a raging thirst throughout the whole race, which was a loop of about 120km. And I began to think I was a star! Fuelled by drugs I was able to keep up with guys who were stronger and better than me Willy In’T Ven, Julien Stevens, Georges Pintens, Willy Vekemans, guys who were older than me and on the verge of professional careers; some were to become Merckx’s team-mates. All big names. And me, the novice I was the one telling them to get off their backsides and ride. As soon as they saw my face, they caught on. I must have had that look about me.
I was spitting fire for about 15km. There were six of us in the breakaway, and I felt so strong that I didn’t eat anything to keep my strength up. I didn’t dare take the second pill: I thought I would burst if I did. The high lasted until about two laps from the finish. And then, all of a sudden, it was as if I had been knocked out. I hit the wall I couldn’t see or hear anything. I was left behind by the lead group, but managed to hold on to sixth place. In the changing rooms, Grard asked, “Why didn’t you eat anything during the race? And why didn’t you take the other pill?” Of course, this first try-out hadn’t turned me into a winner, but I had felt as strong as an ox, and amphetamines keep calling you back for one more go. Curiosity was replaced by desire.
Pirate treasure: learning the trade
Voet left school at 18 and got a job as a petrol-pump attendant. His amateur cycling career continued until he was 23. Six years later he began to get involved with cycling and cyclists again, eventually in the late 1970s becoming a freelance soigneur: someone who looks after the cyclists, whether it be a massage, moral support, making up food and in his case, procuring and administering drugs. In 1979 Voet got his first contract, with the Flandria team.
In the late 1970s only amphetamines could be picked up by the dope controls, which had been brought in after Tom Simpson died on the slopes of Mont Ventoux during the 1967 Tour de France. But anabolic agents, steroids and corticoids were common currency. And not just among some of the Flandria team. Of course, the riders didn’t really trust me to start with. It took at least two years to gain their confidence, but I won my spurs courtesy of one of the other soigneurs. I watched in his room as he took all the gear out of his huge suitcase, putting it on a table as if dressing a shop window. Pirate treasure.
He was the one who taught me my profession, showing me many things but concealing many more. I was tolerated back then: admission to this parallel universe was not automatic. When a rider came to his room to ask for a sleeping pill, he would turn the key in the lock. The mystique had to be maintained even if there was nothing to hide.
My apprenticeship was largely based on experience. You had to keep your eyes and ears open, gleaning information from gestures, snatches of conversation, and patiently putting it all back together. It was essential to talk things over with the riders because they knew everything. It defies belief that even today, after a positive drug test, they will swear that they were given drugs without their knowledge. They have always known what they are taking. Probably better than I used to: because they know their own bodies, how they react, what moment to put something in, what drug to take, and what dose.
But it takes time for a soigneur-rider team to fulfil its potential. It’s no coincidence that the best soigneurs look after the best riders. In 1979 I had three or four in my care, including Joaquim Agostinho, who finished third in the Tour de France. To start with, all I did was massage them. My first intravenous injection was totally legal stuff, stuff to help recovery. It was on Janssens. “You’d better get your hand in,” he said. I was white with nerves. “Bang it in, go on, bang it in! Look, that vein’s like a motorway!”
I was trembling. So he took me by the hand and guided the syringe home. It went in like a knife through butter.
So then I went through the full spectrum. Amphetamines injected into the arm or the stomach, corticoids, steroids, anabolic agents, even testosterone injected into the buttock muscles. Daily rituals, nothing out of the ordinary. No one thought of it as fraud, cheating or dangerous. Only amphetamines were forbidden in theory because they were liable to show up in urine tests.
Hide-and-seek: A tube up the bum
It was while serving his apprenticeship as a soigneur that Voet learnt of the many ways drugs were given to riders that would avoid detection or by which urine tests for banned drugs could be circumvented.
You get a rubber tube, which is both flexible and rigid. At one end you fix a small cork, at the other a condom, running about a third of the way up the tube. Finally, just as a precaution, you stick carpet pile, or any short hair, on the part of the tube that isn’t in the condom. In the team car, when the rider comes to change before going to the drug control, you go to stage two: you slip the part of the tube fitted with the condom up the backside, inject clean urine up the tube with a large syringe, cork it and stick it to the skin, following the line of the perineum, as far as the testicles. That’s why the hairs are necessary, to hide the tube in case the doctor running the test decides to lean down. The condom full of urine is held in the anus, which keeps the urine at body temperature, so the doctor won’t be suspicious, as he would be if presented with a flask of cold liquid. This system was never bettered no doctor suspected a thing.
The way of nature
In any list of the subterfuges we used to conceal the drugs, it’s impossible to leave out “fruit bars with eyes”. Even when it was still possible to race on amphetamines and there are still Chargers’ Grands Prix, even today it didn’t seem like a good idea to let everyone see them. So we went through this charade to conceal the little pills, 5mg of Pervitin or Captagon: we stuck them in a fruit bar. We would stick them in like eyes, with a nose on top if the rider wanted three. I’ve known guys take up to 100mg in a race, in which case we stuck on not a face but a whole skeleton! In the morning, in the hotel, when I went from room to room asking who wanted eyes, a nose, even a mouth, in his fruit bar, everyone understood. Doping, in any shape or form, has always been an integral part of the culture of top-level cycling.
I would say that about 60% of all riders were in the grip of drugs. Not always the same people, or the same drugs, mind. There was a constant rotation between the riders who, for example, were coming back after an injury, those who had objectives later in the year and were merely building up their strength, those who were at the end of a racing programme and about to take a rest, and the ones who wanted to win on a particular day. And some were capable of taking on a bigger workload, finishing three major Tours a year without buckling under the strain. That is the way of nature.
New drugs, new risks
In 1993 Voet joined the Festina team and was soon involved in providing a new drug, the red blood cell booster EPO, which the team used on the Tour de France that year, and which was to become the performance-enhancer of choice in cycling. But the new drug was expensive. Human growth hormone, another new drug, was even costlier, so the team instituted a complex system whereby the cost of the drugs for a given year would be deducted from a rider’s prize money, which was added up and paid out at the end of the season.
Even as far back as 1994, cyclist Richard Virenque took an interest in how the EPO and growth hormone operation was proceeding. “Do we have enough? Have you spoken about it with the doctor?” He asked so many questions, especially in the build-up to his principal aim, the Tour de France.
Obviously it was in his interests that the team be as strong as possible to help him win the race, which always slipped from his fingers. Virenque knew perfectly well what he was doing. His infamous “without my knowledge of my own free will” which is what he answered when asked if he took drugs is a scandalous untruth.
The Festina system was kept running resolutely until 1998. The usual time, the usual place … All we had to do was set up the deliveries, twice a year. In February 1994 the first consignment was brought to Gruissan. After that Jol Chabiron [the team’s logistics manager] transported the doses of EPO and growth hormone from Portugal. In France, I picked them up and stored them in my vegetable basket at home.
Because all the riders trusted me, it was agreed I should keep accounts of what each one consumed during the year. Hence my famous notebooks. Day by day I recorded methodically what everyone took in a year planner. At the end of the season I totted up their intake and passed on the end-of-year accounts to Bruno Roussel, the team manager.
To prevent anyone coming across the system unawares I used codes for the drugs: X for a dose of EPO, underlined in red; Z, for growth hormone, underlined in blue or green. At the start of the 1998 season I had to add another P. This code letter was also used in phone conversations or any time when we might be overheard, because it stood for Clenbuterol, a cheap anabolic, which is very hard to get hold of. Chabiron apparently had the necessary contacts. Virenque and Laurent Brochard among others had already been started on it in 1997, the year when Djamolidin Abduzhaparov, three times points winner in the Tour de France, was found positive on the Tour and thrown off the race.
Banned from the market in France, Clenbuterol is one of the most powerful hormones when it comes to developing muscular mass. Beef rearers are well aware of its properties: it can give spectacular muscle growth. To work out its effects precisely, we needed a guinea-pig, but it couldn’t be one of the riders. We found the right man soon enough: me.
In 1996 I took 10 pills over seven days, then urinated into a jar from days five to eight after taking the final pill. The whole works was then sent to a laboratory in Ghent. The Clenbuterol had been eliminated from my system by day eight. For a cyclist, who will get rid of chemicals far more quickly than someone sedentary like me, the period was still shorter. And the effects were felt almost immediately. Three hours after I took the first pill, I began shivering. I had the impression that my lungs were swelling, that I had a new battery somewhere in the system. I felt confident, full of energy, strong as a bull on hormones. The effects lasted for more than a month, effects which we used with good results in the big Tours after that.
The crazy years constant success, spectacular drug-taking
In the mid-1990s Festina went from strength to strength, largely on the back of Virenque’s four wins in the best climber’s prize in the Tour de France, where he finished third in 1997.
The years from 1994 to 1998 were crazy ones for the Festina team: full of success, popularity and results that took us to the top of UCI’s world team points rankings. These were the years of folly. Aside from the new boys and a few other clean riders who were left on the margins we would see the whole spectrum of drug-taking; everyone was at it, whatever team they were in. Even if some went further than others in the arms race.
A winning dose of ‘allez Richard’
The 1997 Tour de France began to take off in earnest for Festina during the individual time-trial stage at Saint Etienne. The day before, Virenque had heard from one of his team-mates that a “time-trial special” drug could bring him salvation. Virenque wanted to know more. The team-mate told him the man to get in touch with was a Spanish soigneur.
That evening Richard told me. I tried to warn him off. With his usual treatment, EPO and growth hormone in particular, he was perfectly well prepared. It only remained for us to inject a mixture of caffeine and Solucamphre at the right time to open up his lungs, which would be done the following day. In addition, because we knew nothing of what this famous “time-trial special” contained, there was a fair chance that it would react badly with his system.
In spite of my warnings, Virenque discussed it with Roussel, who allowed himself to be persuaded. I was given the job of bringing the guy over to the hotel. He had already concocted the potion.
I gave in. I gave Virenque his injection. That day, he rode the time trial of his life, finishing second on the stage to Jan Ullrich.
“God, I felt good! That stuff’s just amazing,” he bubbled. “We must get hold of it.” Of course, his result did have something to do with the magic capsule but there is one thing he doesn’t know, unless he reads this. I had got rid of the fabulous potion and swapped it for one which contained a small amount of glucose. There is no substitute for self-belief.
The end comes on a quiet road outside Calais
On July 8 1998 Voet made his way from Brussels to Calais, where he was to catch the ferry to England before travelling on to Dublin where the Tour was due to begin the following Saturday. In the back were two refrigerated bags containing 234 doses of EPO, 80 flasks of human growth hormone, 160 capsules of male hormone, testosterone, 60 pills called Asaflow, a blood thinner taken to counter the effects of EPO, which can turn the blood to a sludge, and 10 boxes of drips. They had all been stored in Voet’s house for the previous month.
Voet left at 6am, giving himself a small injection of the infamous “Belgian mix”, a cocktail that can include morphine, heroin, cocaine, amphetamine and cortisone, and which he hoped would help keep him awake.
It was about a quarter to seven. I was going down the little French road when I spotted a man standing 100m ahead of me. As I drew nearer, I realised he was a customs officer. It was too late for a U-turn. When I was level with him, the man signalled to me to pull over. It was the first time in more than 30 years’ driving that I had been stopped. It was just my luck.
As I pulled up, I saw the white van parked in the bushes. And then everything happened very quickly. Four customs men got out of the van and surrounded the car. If I was quaking in my boots, it wasn’t because of what I was carrying behind my car seat, but because of the Belgian mix. And not just the little jar that I’d injected from, but another one, which was destined for my friend Laurent Brochard, a senior rider at Festina, who finished fourth in the 1996 Tour de France.
I didn’t even think about the EPO. I grabbed the two flasks and just had time to stuff one into my right trouser pocket. The other one was still in my hand when a customs man appeared at the window and asked if I had anything to declare.
Good question.
I just answered, “Oh, not really, just vitamins for the rider.”
He didn’t even ask me to show my papers, just to open the boot. I hoped I’d be able to slip the flasks into one of the cool bags, but they didn’t take their eyes off me for a second. As I lifted up the boot lid, I threw the pot I was holding into the bushes. The other one was still stuffed in my pocket. I moved one of the boxes of drips, but one of the customs men made a sign at me to show that it was pointless. I thought everything was going fine, that I had no reason to get alarmed, but while this was going on his colleagues had come across the two cool bags behind the passenger seat. They opened them, took out the Tupperware cartons covered in frozen bottles of water and asked me what was in them.
“Erm, I don’t know. Stuff to help the riders recover, I think.”
“Well, if you don’t know, you’re coming with us.”
After Voet’s arrest, the 1998 Tour started as usual, but on arrival on French soil the team manager Roussel and doctor, Erik Rijckaert, were taken into custody. The riders continued to deny that they had used drugs. A few days later, Roussel’s lawyer told the press of his client’s admission to police that Festina operated a comprehensive system of drug taking with the knowledge of the cyclists and the nine riders in the team were thrown off the race. The tour finished with only 14 of the 21 teams still in the race, and fewer than 100 riders of the original 189, with Marco Pantani winning the yellow jersey.
Epilogue
It may perhaps never be proven that doping causes deaths. But the opposite will never be proven either. So I think of all the riders whose hearts just gave up: the Spaniard Vicente Lopez-Carril, dead at 37; the Belgian Marc de Meyer, dead at 32; the Belgian Geert de Walle, dead at 24; the Dutchman Bert Oosterbosch, dead at 32; the Pole Joachim Halupczok, dead at 27; Paul Haghedooren, once champion of Belgium, dead at 38; the Dutchwoman Connie Meijer, dead at 25. I think of these cyclists, whom I knew well, and I think of the others, who may have died with less fanfare as they were out training. Together with them, cycling’s heart has stopped beating. How many more lives must be lost before the sport of cycling faces up to its nemesis and finally comes clean?
This is an edited extract from Breaking the Chain by Willy Voet, published by Yellow Jersey at R132. Calmann-Levy 1999