At the time of Induráin’s heyday, sad and disturbing stories began to be heard, though they barely made it into the news pages. Between 1987 and 1992, seven young Swedish athletes who competed in orienteering – a mixture of cross-country running and walking – died mysteriously, and as many as twenty young Belgian and Dutch cyclists also, all of them dying from inexplicable nocturnal heart attacks. These seemingly healthy young men had gone to bed and been found dead, with no obvious explanation. Little understood at the time, those sorrowful events announced the arrival of what would prove to be by far the darkest age in the history of the Tour, of bike racing, indeed of all competitive sport.
Fast forward to 2013, when the Tour de France celebrates its hundredth running, and look at what has happened in the previous two decades. Despite his denials of any wrongdoing, there have been suspicions aired about Induráin, although nothing was ever proved and he retains his Tour wins in his palmarès. But then the disaster unfolded. Another Tour winner was accused of using performance-enhancing drugs, and convicted of using recreational drugs. The 1998 ‘Tour de Farce’ began with an outrageous scandal which took the lid off doping rife throughout the sport. That year’s winner was ejected from the Giro ten months later for a suspect blood count and less than five years after that he was found dead of a cocaine overdose.
Then, for the first time ever, a man who had stood on the podium on the Champs-Élysées wearing the winner’s yellow jersey was subsequently disqualified and stripped of title and jersey. One more Tour winner was likewise disqualified after his victory in Paris. Another winner, stricken by conscience, voluntarily confessed to doping and returned his yellow jersey. And finally, after years of suspicion and bluster and litigation, the first man ever to win the Tour seven times, seemingly the greatest hero cycling had ever known, confessed that he had been doping throughout his career, not least while winning all his Tours. He had already been stripped of his titles and banned from the sport for life. What was more, he was not replaced by the runner-up as is usual, since it was generally reckoned that, taking all riders who had occupied the twenty-one places on the podium, first, second and third, in each of those seven Tours, there was only one name that was above suspicion. It seemed that the wonderful race could not sink any lower.
When we have come to terms with this baroque catalogue of doping, denial, cheating and disgrace, it presents a difficult problem for a chronicler of the Tour; a narrative, intellectual and ethical problem. The race can be described in the usual way, stage by stage and year by year, relating brilliant performances on the great climbs and startlingly fast times. But in truth what we are dealing with might be called ‘virtual bike racing’. It was all an illusion. The whole sport was corrupt and rotten from the inside. The statistics and palmarès were there as usual, but they were meaningless. Many if not most of the stars of these years were winning by illicit means, and making it worse by pertinacious mendacity.
Our story might be told as if in some avant-garde novel, where there are two alternative narratives. The official version took place on the parcours, with sprints and climbs, jerseys and podiums. Another version took place in hotel rooms and riders’ houses and at many and unofficial rendezvous between rider and ‘sports doctor’.
But first a closer look at the background to this dismal story. As we have seen, cyclists have used artificial stimulants from the beginning: alcohol before the Great War, cocaine between the wars, amphetamines for more than twenty-five years after the Second World War. This was an open secret, with Simpson’s pockets (and body) full of pills when he died, and Coppi and Anquetil not so much admitting as boasting in retirement that they had used la bomba, while the efforts of the Tour authorities and the UCI to clamp down on doping were often hypocritical and ignominious.
And yet none of these stimulants were in a strict sense ‘performance enhancing’. Drink, coke and bomba make the user feel better, for a time, and they can dull the senses, amphetamines in particular, so that pain is easier to endure. But no athlete ever hit a ball harder, ran 1500 metres quicker, bowled or pitched more fiercely or rode a bike faster because of those stimulants. However, some time in the 1970s a new generation of drugs arrived which were different in kind rather than degree: steroids, testosterone and finally erythropoietin, EPO for short.
These are different for several reasons. None of the earlier stimulants was natural; the human frame in its normal state doesn’t contain alcohol, cocaine or amphetamine. Years ago, Captain Ryan Price, the racehorse trainer, won a big hurdle race at Newbury only for his horse to be disqualified for ‘non-normal nutrients’. Price protested angrily that his horse manufactured this substance naturally as part of its metabolism, at which the late Jeffrey Bernard wondered out loud why his metabolism couldn’t manufacture its own alcohol, which would make life so much cheaper and simpler.
Be that as it may, the new generation of sports drugs known as steroids and EPO actually are ‘normal’, in the sense that they are synthetic versions of natural metabolic products, without which we wouldn’t be alive and breathing. Several consequences follow from the ability to replicate these products. Artificial EPO is very hard to detect, just because, unlike alcohol or amphetamines, it’s a replica of something that should be there anyway. It is highly dangerous – those young cyclists were using EPO before anyone realized quite how dangerous. EPO enhances the red blood cells, but by thickening the blood it makes it harder for it to circulate, whereupon the heart may not be able to cope and stop dead in an all-too-exact sense.
At any rate, quite when a cyclist first used EPO while riding in the Tour de France will never be known, but it may safely be supposed that it was no later than the early 1990s. It would be unfair to suppose that every rider over the next two decades was guilty unless proved innocent, but it would be very naive to doubt that doping was rife in the peloton throughout this period, and those doubters who were bullied and derided as cynical detractors have been entirely vindicated, as we shall see.
After nine years without a victory, the mood of French cycling was nervy in 1995, and a little sour, and possibly the mood of France also. Mitterand’s long and ultimately sordid presidency ended, and he was succeeded by the conservative Jacques Chirac, not yet as assertive and self-confident as he had become by early 2003, but already consciously shouldering the mantle of de Gaulle. Sporting expressions of Gaullism weren’t so easy to come by. France was the best of the northern-hemisphere countries in this year’s rugby World Cup but still third behind South Africa and New Zealand, and although the French football team won a record 10–0 victory, this might have been more impressive if the opponents hadn’t been Azerbaijan. There were some French achievements in cycling, with Jeannie Longo returning to her best to win two gold medals in the World Championships. And this was ‘l’année Jalabert’, with the hugely popular ‘Ja Ja’ heading the UCI classification after he had won Paris–Nice, Milan–San Remo and the Vuelta, as well as taking the green jersey in the Tour, in which he wore the yellow jersey early on and led his ONCE team to victory in the team classification. All the same, when the yellow jersey really mattered, on the last day, he could come no higher than fourth. The new president of the Tour’s parent company was the great skier Jean-Claude Killy, but even that seemed only to emphasize that French success was nowadays more likely on the piste than the parcours.
After a Prologue in St-Brieuc won by Jacky Durand, the race had left Brittany for Normandy and crossed the new Pont de Normandie over the Seine estuary on the way from Alençon to Le Havre. The lead passed from Durand to Jalabert to Gotti to Riis to Bruyneel, who won the Charleroi–Liège stage in his native Belgium, before Induráin flexed his muscles in the Ardennes. On the Huy–Seraing time trial he struck. They were riding in a heatwave, with the temperature touching 34°C (93°F), but a scorching pace was set by the Danish rider Bjarne Riis. With only five kilometres to go to the line, Induráin learned that he was five seconds behind Riis.
But nobody could have matched Induráin that day, as he hit an average speed of 50.4 k.p.h. for the 54 kilometres, to win the stage and take the GC lead, which he held for two weeks more through the Alps and the Pyrenees and round back to Paris, winning the remaining time trial at Lac de Vassivière on the penultimate day to be on the safe side. In this way Induráin rode what had become the standard winning Tour of recent times: choose an advantageous point to take the lead, take it and then hold it. It’s held carefully rather than dashingly, which means by methodical teamwork, the domestiques riding in hard and disciplined fashion to protect their leader, and their leader’s lead. Induráin himself said: ‘My plan was to build a gap between me and my main rivals, including the best climbers.’
He also emphasized the importance of working with the team, insisting that there is no point in being aggressive or abusive: ‘I never shout or scream at my team-mates. You achieve more by having several good friends around you,’ as indeed he did. It may have taken some of the suspense and the glamour out of the Tour, but it worked.
There were sadder stories in the course of this race, and one tragedy. The decent and admirable Chris Boardman crashed badly in the rain and abandoned in the Prologue: ‘It was dark and I couldn’t see where the slippery patches were on the road. I was pushing it a bit too hard, doing about 80 k.p.h. downhill, when the back wheel slipped away,’ whereupon he slid into the barriers and was then hit by a team car. But his woes were trivial compared with what happened eighteen days later in the Pyrenees on the St-Girons–Cauterets stage. Fabio Casartelli was an outstanding roadman, who had won the gold medal at the 1992 Barcelona Olympics. He hadn’t completed his first Tour in 1994, but was riding well in his second when he crested the Col de Portet d’Aspet. Descending at full speed he crashed violently, flew off his bike and went head first into a rock, splitting his skull open.
His monument at the place he died, the Stèle Casartelli, is more elegant than Simpson’s on Mont Ventoux, a modestly modernistic, well-designed and carefully polished stone which lists his achievements and mourns his passing. The next day, despite some riders who thought it an improper precedent, his Motorola team-mates were allowed to take the lead as the field approached Pau, where his room-mate Andrea Peron rode across the line first in tribute to the third Tour rider to pay the ultimate price.
Apart from Induráin, several men were prominent in the 1995 Tour, some of whom would soon be prominent for less admirable reasons. Pantani took two stages in the Alps and ended as best young rider, Virenque won the climber’s jersey alongside Jalabert’s green. In 1989, his first year as a pro, Jalabert had ridden in the Kellogg’s Tour of Britain as a more than competent domestique, returning the next year to ride in the race and lead for a couple of days. He had ridden in, and completed, the Tour in 1991 and 1992, abandoned in 1993 and then been knocked out of the 1994 race by the horrific pile-up at Armentières at the end of the first stage. In 1995 he bounced back to ride the best of many good races in the Tour before he retired in 2002 amid a great wave of emotion that swept round the country. He was by then at the peak of his form, and a most unusual all-rounder, sprinter, climber and time-triallist. On that Huy–Seraing stage he was caught by Induráin, a still greater time-triallist, but where most riders would have accepted defeat, Jalabert thought, ‘Why not try and hang on?’ and did so for many miles before Induráin finally dropped him.
Then on the climb to l’Alpe d’Huez, riding in the green sprinter’s jersey as he had been for days past, Jalabert was passed by Pantani, who went on to win the stage, and by Virenque, who was wearing the mountain-man’s red-peas jersey. Again, instead of gracefully conceding, Jalabert fought back to catch and drop Virenque. As an awestruck Cycling Weekly said, ‘Riders in the green jersey are not supposed to do this to polka-dots on l’Alpe d’Huez!’ And then again, on the quatorze juillet, Jalabert not only won the road stage from St-Étienne to Mende, with the help of his ONCE team (whose Alberto Leanizbarrutia once said that ‘Ja Ja’ was the cleverest of all strategists), he left Induráin, helpless for once, six minutes down on the day. There was one more portent in 1995: by winning the antepenultimate stage to Limoges, a second stage win to follow his first in 1993, Lance Armstrong ominously announced his arrival.
By contrast, 1996 was very much not Jalabert’s year, nor Induráin’s either. After a Prologue in ’s-Hertogenbosch (where Hieronymus came from) won by Zülle, the lead was taken by Frédéric Moncassin, a French stalwart of the peloton, and then by the French champion Stéphane Heulot, who was still wearing the yellow jersey when he abandoned on the seventh, Chambéry–Les Arcs stage won by Leblanc. There in the Alps two riders began to emerge from the field. Berzin won the Bourg-St-Maurice–Val-d’Isère stage and Riis, third the previous year, the next stage to Sestrières (which was much abbreviated from 189.5 to 46 kilometres after snow had closed the Iseran and Galibier) and took the lead. Others fell by the wayside. Jalabert was taken ill and also abandoned, while Induráin was showing unheard-of signs of flagging.
By the Pyrenees it was more than that. In his very own country, the stage to Pamplona, he slumped, and showed real courage to finish the race at all, let alone make it to eleventh place. The previous day, Riis won the stage to Hautacam and now had the Tour in his grasp. He kept it there until the finish, when he became the first Danish rider to win. He was a journeyman rider, whose seventh Tour this was, having abandoned twice while in the first five, in 1993 and 1995. He seemed a lucky winner, an impression confirmed when he only finished seventh and eleventh in the next two years. Or was ‘lucky’ the right word? To some seasoned observers, Riis’s victory was not just puzzling but inexplicable, at any rate in honest or normal terms, and 1996 may have been the year when vague suspicions about the methods to which cyclists were resorting began to harden into something stronger. As it would prove, the worst suspicions were well founded when in 2007 Riis, after years of struggling with his conscience, dramatically announced that he had been doping when he won the Tour, and returned his yellow jersey.
In Rouen on 5 July, the 1997 Tour began happily with a Prologue win for Boardman, before Mario Cipollini won the next two stages and took the lead. As the race headed south-west by way of Vire and Plumelec, Cédric Vasseur took over the yellow jersey at Le Châtre in Berry, dead south of Paris, after a 147-kilometre solo escape, and held it for five days. The race was now developing into a team duel, again between Festina and Telekom. Riis was Telekom’s leader, but if anything his team-mate Jan Ullrich was looking better. On the Luchon–Andorra stage there were five climbs. On the fourth Ullrich was itching to attack, but first dropped back to ask his team manager Walter Godefroot what he should do. Godefroot didn’t hesitate, and told him to go for it; Riis would understand.
Ullrich escaped at the foot of the fifth and last climb to Arcalis. Only Virenque, destined to finish with his fifth consecutive red-peas jersey, could live with him as the others were dropped, before Ullrich dropped him too, reaching the line a minute clear of him and Pantani. For Ullrich to win on only his second Tour seemed a feat, or perhaps a tribute to training methods in his native country. He was now a citizen of the Federal German Republic, but by birth and upbringing he was an ‘Osti’ or East German, and had benefited from the way in which that unlovely country had hand-picked promising athletes in all fields, treated them and their victories, notably at the Olympics, as a matter of national prestige, and given them every possible advantage, not least copious quantities of steroids when needed.
Whether or not that was true of Ullrich, he certainly didn’t always confine himself to legal stimulants. Ein guter Kerl, a good bloke, to the adoring German public, Ullrich had the reputation in the peloton of being a big baby. He was both a fierce climber and a dashing time-triallist, with a flair for winning big races, at least sometimes. But he suffered from constant problems with his weight, often putting on very many kilos in the off-season, which seemed to testify less to any special metabolic difficulty than plain lack of self-discipline. His intermittent will to win was matched by a lack of real mental fortitude, so that his career was punctuated with tantrums and feuds. And his appetite for money, as well as food, drink and even on occasion recreational drugs, would have made him an unloved team-mate even when managers wanted him.
Maybe he should have retired after he stepped down from the podium on 27 July 1997. Maybe Virenque and Pantani, the second and third, should have done. Maybe every rider in the Tour should have done. Maybe the Tour de France should have ended there and then. If Ullrich knew his country’s greatest writer, he might later have thought of his glorious day in the Champs-Élysées as that moment Goethe speaks of which, once lost, eternity will never give back.
After his third place, it was Pantani’s turn to win in 1998. In another highly elastic definition of ‘France’, the Tour began in Dublin. I was in Ireland to watch the race in its second, rather tepid stage across Leinster and Munster from Enniscorthy to Cork won by Jan Svoroda (who was, more than usually confusingly, even in this time of the shaking of nations, a citizen of Czechoslovakia, then of Slovakia, then of the Czech Republic). There weren’t many serious French contenders, but then the attention of sporting France was otherwise engaged. In the spring the French rugby team had won a back-to-back Grand Slam, which included (how are the mighty fallen!) a 51–0 trouncing of Wales, and in July the country was gripped by the World Cup, staged in France, and won by the home team when Brazil were beaten 3–0 in the final, to give France her first ever victory in the tournament and confirm the magnificent Zinédine Zidane as one of the country’s greatest ever heroes.
An ironical Providence decided that the Prologue, this year of all years, would be won once more by Boardman, one of the purest spirits in sport, who never touched any illicit substance. He might have been thought a prig by some of his colleagues; he himself simply said that, ‘My own reasons for not taking drugs are ultimately more practical than moral. Why should I risk it?’ He didn’t want to damage his health, not for any victories, and the medical record of cycling, with the low life expectancy of cyclists, suggests that he was right. Too many others, maybe more driven than Boardman, maybe greedier, maybe with a greater will to win (if all those can be separated), were prepared to take any risk in the pursuit of success, even the ultimate risk that this might shorten their lives. Then Boardman had another fall on the second stage and had to abandon, for good as it turned out. Not long afterwards he left cycling to undergo treatment requiring medication at the hands of his doctors, prompting the wonderful deadpan Guardian headline: ‘Chris Boardman retires to take drugs.’
The yellow jersey subsequently passed to Zabel, Bo Hamburger of Denmark, Stuart O’Grady of Australia, Laurent Desbiens of France and Ullrich, as the race, having crossed to Roscoff after its Irish sojourn, ran through Brittany and the west. There were two convenient detours. On the fifth stage from Cholet to Châteauroux the field rode through the village of Neuilly-les-Abiers, birthplace of the director-general of the Tour, Jean-Marie Leblanc, and two days later it finished in Corrèze, where Monsieur and Madame Jacques Chirac, the president of the republic and his wife, were happily present.
In the Alps there was a gallant last stand from Ullrich, riding over the Col de la Madeleine, to win the Vizille–Abertville stage. But the race had been decided the day before when Pantani took the stage from Grenoble to Les Deux Alpes to seize the lead. He then held it for the next week to win in Paris from Ullrich and the American Bobby Julich. Zabel took the green jersey, of course, and two Frenchmen picked up prizes, Christophe Rinero the Mountains and Durand for combativité, and Ullrich was still best young rider.
This is how the eighty-fourth Tour de France was decided as a bike race; and to relate all of that is reminiscent of the lame joke, ‘But how did you enjoy the play, Mrs Lincoln?’ Everything else about the 1998 Tour had been overshadowed by what happened three days before it began, and the repercussions of that. Festina was a Spanish watchmaking company, registered in Andorra, which had gone into the Tour with a splash, collecting a talented and thus pricey team to sponsor, among them the French pin-up Virenque, with Bruno Roussel as directeur sportif and Willy Voet, a Belgian, as team soigneur. Although press people, as well as fans, drive their own cars when they follow the Tour, all the officials with teams as well as with the race itself drive logo-festooned cars laid on by sponsors, Fiat for some years.
On 7 July the Festina Fiat was picked up in Paris by Voet. He was meant to go to Calais, cross the Channel and then drive across England to catch another ferry to Ireland and the start of the race, but he first set off for Belgium, and was returning thence from Dronkaert, to Neuville-en-Ferrain in France on 8 July. On a country road, where traffic was very rarely stopped, he expected to go straight through. Maybe because its gaudy sponsors’ devices caught their eye, maybe for no particular reason, the frontier guards flagged him down and asked to look inside. What they found changed cycling history. The Festina car was an enormous mobile pharmacy, containing just about every possible illicit performance-enhancing drug, from faintly démodé growth hormones to the tout ce qu’il y à de chic EPO.
The news of this discovery wasn’t released until two days later, when there followed an epic of obfuscation and evasion. Just before the race began, Roussel tried to disown Voet: ‘We know nothing about this. End of statement.’ The director of the Tour was scarcely more impressive. It had happened hundreds of kilometres away, Leblanc said with heroic disingenuousness. ‘If it’s a doping case, it’s not directly connected to a rider and not directly connected to this race.’ He would be eating those words before long, and so would Voet, who had, in this case with sublime chutzpah, initially insisted that all these medicaments were for his own personal use only.
By the third day of the race in Cholet, with the French police throwing their weight around and also leaking like sieves, it was public knowledge that Voet had admitted the drugs were for his riders. A shocked Miguel Rodriguez, boss of Festina, said that if anything was proved his company would immediately cancel its sponsorship, while Roger Legeay, who was both coach of the GAN team and head of the French professional cyclists’ league, said a little obviously that the Tour couldn’t have the affair ‘hanging over us. This must be resolved quickly.’ Resolved it was, but not quickly. Roussel was arrested, as was the Festina team doctor, Eric Ryckaert, another Belgian, while everyone else shuddered with embarrassment and confusion. Bernard Thévenet, now a television commentator, may have taken the prize for meiosis when he said that ‘It’s a very delicate matter’, while Johnny Weltz, directeur sportif of US Postal, made his own contribution to the blindingly obvious: ‘It’s hard to figure out what’s the real story.’
Before the Tour was a week old, enough of the real story was known for the whole Festina team to be expelled, Virenque, Zülle and all. They threatened a kind of anti-strike – they would ride anyway – until Leblanc told them not to be silly, and Virenque departed with a defiant ‘Vive le Tour de France 1998!’ Rodolfo Massi went more quietly when he was ejected from the race at Luchon after he had actually just won the stage and was wearing the red-peas jersey. Many other riders were angry, not at what Festina had done but at what was being done to them, and there was talk of a protest in solidarity as there had been with Delgado ten years before. But the riders mercifully thought better of it.
At least they did until the seventeenth stage, when the field stopped twice, the riders tore off their numbers to make it impossible for the stage to be officially controlled and six teams withdrew: all of this not so much in solidarity as in protest at what they called the intolerably heavy-handed conduct of the police. There was even a kindling of sympathy outside the peloton after the TVM team had been rounded up in a sudden night raid on their hotel and taken to hospital for blood, urine and hair tests. ‘They treated us like criminals, like animals,’ Jeroen Blijlevens said, complaining that his roommate Bart Voskamp had been hauled out of the shower. After that, the flics were persuaded to conduct their enquiries with a gentler hand, and the riders were persuaded not to call off the Tour in mid-race for the first time in its history, as had looked on the cards for a moment. It may have been just as well that the riders and teams keenest on the most drastic forms of protest, such as Jalabert and ONCE, had already quit. US Postal by contrast took the opportunity to burnish its self-created straight-arrow reputation by saying that they must remain ‘for the glory of the sport’.
There was not a very satisfactory conclusion to l’affaire Festina, and little light was shed when the two prime suspects later published books with conflicting versions. Voet’s wonderfully bumptious and evasive Breaking the Chain: Drugs and Cycling – The True Story with its implausible sub-title had been preceded by Virenque’s Ma Verité, likewise one of the most ill-named books of the age, unless the title were intended ironically: What is truth? asked jesting Virenque, and did not stay for an answer. After a long period of denial, in both the legal and psychological senses, Virenque cracked under cross-examination in a courtroom and came clean, or at least a little cleaner. What both men finally said in effect was that they had done it, and that everyone was at it: drugs were rife throughout the game. And it had to be admitted that, whatever else Voet said, when he blithely recounted Virenque’s preparation for a time trial in the 1997 Tour – ‘Given his regular treatments of EPO and especially growth hormones, he was as ready as he would ever be. All he needed was a well-timed injection of caffeine, plus Solucamphre’ – it had a ring of truth.
A cloud of suspicion had formed over the whole race, and would not lift. Quite how many riders out of the 189 who had set off that year had been illicitly fuelled will never be known. ‘Say it ain’t so, Joe,’ the heart-broken little boy called out to ‘Shoeless’ Joe Jackson, accused of throwing the 1919 World Series for the Chicago White Sox. No one said that now to the Tour riders; everyone knew it was so.