Chapter 7 - Doping and Cheating

We will get to Lance Armstrong shortly, I promise, but first let us be clear on a few things. Cheating in its many guises, including doping, has been going on since the first Tour de France in 1903, and literally thousands of riders have been involved in some way, shape or form. Doping had become so acceptable by 1930 that Desgrange felt obliged to remind riders in the rule book that year that drugs were not among the items that would be provided by the organisers, and any system that encourages high rewards and low punishments is going to make cheating irresistible to human beings with less-than-saintly morals. So, sooner or later, punishments had to become, well, punishing. Only then could the weeding process really begin. And begin it eventually did, but not before the 1960s, and not really in earnest until the twenty-first century.

Attitudes to doping in particular have changed dramatically over the decades. This really kicked off when riders started to pay a price of up to and including death for abusing their own bodies, one of the most notable being the British rider Tom Simpson, who, as we have seen, collapsed and died on Mont Ventoux in 1967. They only had to check Tom Simpson's pockets to discover the drugs (amphetamines) that had contributed to his untimely death, but in the decades that followed drugs became increasingly sophisticated and increasingly difficult to detect. Those who doped systematically at a team level comfortably won the so-called 'arms race' by staying a couple of steps ahead of those who tried to catch them out. But medical science was always going to catch up sooner or later and lab technicians began to develop more effective tests. By 2005, they could retrospectively tell, from urine samples taken in 1999, that 10 per cent of the riders tested during the 1999 Tour had at that time taken the performanceenhancing drug EPO (erythropoietin) – and the guilty riders in question included you-know-who.

And then something even more dramatic, but much less technical, happened. As the authorities closed in for another attempt at the kill in 2012, the lid suddenly blew off the hitherto sacrosanct omertà of the cycling brotherhood. Doper started outing doper in the hope of securing immunity from prosecution. It was supergrass time. And the level of scandal was to prove so great that it would need Oprah Winfrey to sort it out. But let us first go back to the beginning.

On his way to becoming the first rider to win the Tour five times, Frenchman Jacques Anquetil appeared on television a number of times in the early 1960s to argue that doping was essential for painkilling reasons and that it should therefore be a matter of personal choice for riders. The French president at the time, Charles de Gaulle, famously defended him on the grounds that promoting French success abroad was far more important than the 'irrelevant' subject of doping.

In the second Tour de France in 1904, twelve riders were disqualified for reasons that included jumping on board cars, buses or trains during the night stages that were then a feature of the race. The disqualified riders included the winner, Maurice Garin, who had already won the first-ever Tour the year before. His winning margin in 1903, over the second-shortest course in the history of the race, still stands today as the highest winning margin on record, so it's fairly safe to assume that he travelled in 1903 and 1904 with bus and train timetables in his saddlebag.

There is much evidence that doping was rife throughout the peloton from the very start, but it wasn't actually illegal during the first six decades of the Tour. All the controversy that surrounded it until 1965, when doping became illegal in France, was therefore of a moral nature. But, lest we judge too harshly or too quickly on the morals that prevailed over those six decades, we must recognise that the race organisers over that period showed scant regard for the health or safety of the riders who took part in the Tour de France. Taking 1920 as an example, riders had to complete 5,503 kilometres (3,420 miles) over fifteen stages, with an average stage distance therefore of 367 kilometres (230 miles). The 2012 Tour riders, on much lighter bikes and enjoying all the benefits of twenty-first-century sports science, had to cover a paltry 3,488 kilometres (2,180 miles) over twenty-one stages, with a stage average therefore of 166 kilometres (104 miles). Only twenty-two of the 113 riders who started the race in 1920 were able to finish it. Of the 198 who started in 2012, 153 made it to the end. Little wonder, then, that the earlier riders felt they couldn't even complete the race without drinking brandy, administering chloroform to their gums and rubbing cocaine into their eyes.

Roger and Out

In 1960 the Frenchman Roger Rivière rode over a ravine and broke his back. It was later revealed that he had been unable to apply his brakes because his hands were too numb from the number of painkillers he had taken.

Brains, Muscles, Blood

As the early drugs (ether, strychnine, chloroform, cocaine, amphetamines) stimulated the brain at the same time as deadening the pain, there were downsides. Overexcited riders often launched crazy attacks and used up their energy too soon.

In the 1970s, anabolic steroids (including testosterone) and growth hormones became les drogues du jour and, while they strengthened muscles and reduced recovery times, they too had unfortunate side effects. They could make riders heavy and bloated and could therefore drag them down over a long, hot stage race like the Tour.

Clean riders, therefore, felt able to compete with 'brain' or 'muscle' dopers over a three-week period, but that would all change when the focus switched to blood. By the 1990s EPO was being used to stimulate the kidneys to produce more oxygen-carrying red blood cells and this increased the overall performance of world-class athletes by about 5 per cent, which equates in Tour de France terms to the difference between first place and the middle of the pack, to the difference between glory and relative obscurity. The gap between clean and doping riders widened further from 2000 onwards when illegal blood transfusions before and during races enhanced performance yet further (riders' own blood would be taken and stored until it was needed to top up depleted red blood cells during races).

The Festina Affair

Just before the start of the 1998 Tour, Willy Voet, a soigneur of the Festina team, was discovered by customs officials to have a large stash of illegal doping products and paraphernalia in the boot of his car. The Festina team was kicked out of the Tour and other teams left in disgrace or disgust as the Tour progressed – only ninety-six out of 189 starters finished the race that year. A succession of police raids, confessions and trials over the next couple of years led to the inevitable conclusion that systematic doping at a team level was prevalent throughout the peloton. Stricter testing measures were put in place, but individual and team results continued to improve and eyebrows continued to be raised.

Not for the Faint-hearted

Before the effects of EPO were fully understood and managed, it is thought that up to a dozen professional cyclists died when their hearts stopped under the strain of trying to pump their EPO-thickened blood.

The Unlevel Level Playing Field

It was often argued by dopers that everybody else was taking the same performance-enhancing drugs at the same time, so what's the problem with a level playing field of dopers? The problem is that different human bodies react differently to the same latest doping methods, so having the physiology that just happens to react most favourably to the drogue du moment is not quite the same thing as being the best rider of your generation. And then there's always the added complication of having some riders who are determined at all costs not to cheat. Inconvenient, that.

A 'Passing' Acquaintance

The Belgian rider Michel Pollentier was caught trying to fool the testers in 1978 when he attempted to provide a sample from a condom filled with someone else's urine. I'm not sure how close a friend you have to be to loan somebody your urine, but certainly more than just a 'passing' acquaintance, I would have thought.

It's Much Easier when You're on Drugs

It isn't, you know. It's hard enough to ride pan y agua (Spanish for 'bread and water' i.e. 'clean'), but it's even harder to ride full of chemicals and freshly toppedup blood. This is because doped riders have constant opportunities to ride through higher and higher levels of pain. When you can taste blood in your mouth, when your muscles are screaming and when your heart feels like it's about to explode, the drugs and the fresh blood will allow you to keep going, but only if you're hard enough to take the extra pain that comes with it. Professional cyclists have very high thresholds of pain. Doping professional cyclists need to develop higher thresholds still. The drugs work, but they hurt.

The anti-doping authorities continued to enjoy some success in the first decade of the new century. They stripped American Floyd Landis of the 2006 title after he tested positive for testosterone, and they suspended a number of big-name riders that same year after a drugs bust linked them to the dodgy Spanish doctor Eufamiano Fuentes. The following year they kicked out one of the race favourites, the Kazakh Alexandre Vinokourov (after he was found to have been blooddoping), and the wearer at the time of the yellow jersey, the Dane Michael Rasmussen (after he was found to have lied about his whereabouts when he missed earlier doping tests). They introduced individual 'biological passports' in 2008, so that blood test results could subsequently be measured against a rider's base blood levels. They stripped the Spaniard Alberto Contador of the 2010 title after he tested positive for the performance-enhancing drug clenbuterol. By 2010, half the winners of the Tour since 1980 had either admitted doping or tested positive.

The Tour's 'Ashes'

In 2007, sickened by the Tour's most recent doping scandals, the newspaper France Soir devoted its entire front page to a mock obituary, stating that the Tour had sadly died, at the age of 104, as a result of a long illness. The paper went on to say that the funeral would be held in a strictly private circle. This was a parody of the 1882 article in The Sporting Times (after Australia had beaten England at the Oval for the first time), which announced the death of English cricket and advised that the body would be cremated and the ashes taken to Australia, hence the need ever since to regain/retain 'the Ashes'.

Throughout the years that followed the Festina affair, one man had continued to rack up a record-breaking number of titles, had continued to test negative, and had continued to pour scorn on the detractors who wouldn't believe he was clean. That man was Lance Armstrong, an iconic sporting superhero for the new century. Or not.

If you wanted to say some kind things about Lance Armstrong, you could point out that he showed great bravery in recovering from life-threatening cancer, that he raised millions of dollars for his Livestrong charity, that he inspired a generation of American kids to try that bit harder, and that he seems to be at least a bit sorry now for what he did. And, anyway, isn't he just one of dozens of loveable rogues who have been driven to win at all costs? Jacques Anquetil took drugs and remains revered, cycling fans still think fondly of Tom Simpson, Alberto Contador remains a hero, at least within Spain, and you can't help but laugh at that cheeky Maurice Garin for jumping on trains in the middle of a night-time stage.

So why is Lance Armstrong so reviled in comparison with other drug-takers and cheats? Is it because he won more times than any other rider by foul means, and got richer than any other rider as a result? Is it because so many people knew he was a cheat all along but just couldn't prove it? Is it because he bullied, ridiculed and sued so many of his detractors on the way up that there now is a long queue of people waiting to kick him even harder on the way down? Is it because the testimonies of eleven former teammates to the United States Anti-Doping Agency (USADA) and, in particular, Tyler Hamilton's 2012 book The Secret Race, have laid bare the extent of his cheating in such gory detail? Is it because he gave such a maudlin, unconvincing performance throughout the 2012 Oprah Winfrey interview? It is, of course, for all of those reasons. But what did he actually do?

By his own admission, he enhanced his Tour de France performances through the use of EPO, cortisone, testosterone, human growth hormones, steroids and blood transfusions. He went to extraordinary lengths to avoid detection and became an expert on the 'glow time' of the illegal substances he used ('glow time' is the number of hours that substances can be detected in the body after they have been taken, during which time the cyclist needs to avoid a meeting with a dope tester). He coerced many of his fellow riders on the US Postal and Discovery Channel teams to take the same illegal substances he took himself. He publicly vilified those who dared to accuse him of cheating, including Sunday Times journalist David Walsh and Betsy Andreu, the wife of former teammate, Frankie Andreu. He reportedly bullied clean riders to keep their mouths shut and sold out fellow riders to the doping authorities if they dared to perform better on the same performance-enhancing drugs he himself was taking. Sympathy is going to be hard to find on the way down.

Let Down by a Generation

We must remember still that doping within professional cycling has been a widespread problem for a very long time. Tyler Hamilton has referred to the 'dark period of cycling that we all went through'. When Bradley Wiggins was asked whether he felt let down by Lance Armstrong, he replied that he didn't, because so many cyclists were doing it back then: 'Rather than feel let down by him, I think that whole generation let us down.'

The problem still hasn't gone away. The Luxembourger Frank Schleck was kicked out of the 2012 Tour after showing positive for the illegal diuretic xipamide, illegal because it acts as a masking agent, i.e. it dilutes urine to the extent that other substances don't show up. But testing has become more effective and the number of positive tests is reducing. Only 2 per cent of lab tests in 2011 discovered newly formed red blood cells, i.e. signs of EPO use or blood transfusions. The figure in 2001 had been 11 per cent. The winning time up l'Alpe d'Huez in 2011 was 41 minutes 21 seconds. That same time in 2001 would have earned you fortieth place for the climb. And the sport's governing body, the UCI (Union Cycliste Internationale) looks as if it might finally be falling into line with the stricter regimes of the world and Olympic anti-doping agencies.

The Brailsford Effect

Perhaps even more significant for the future well-being of the sport is the proof positive provided by Dave Brailsford and his team in recent times that clean success can be achieved through hard work, nth degree planning and incremental improvements across the board. At the 2008 Beijing Games, Brailsford led the most dominant Olympic performance ever seen by a single team, and it was, furthermore, a team from one of the great backwaters of cycling, i.e. Great Britain. That was track cycling, so he had yet to prove that the same could be achieved in the world of road racing. So he took charge of the Sky Procycling team and did it all over again, sweeping up first and second spots on the podium in the 2012 Tour de France, along with a total of six stage wins by three different riders.