2 JULY 1990

PUBLICITY STUNT THAT BECAME A NATIONAL OBSESSION

Jacques Goddet

The Tour de France is a phenomenon which has become a part of our civilisation. It was born in 1903, at the beginning of this century of progress, to promote the daily sports paper L’Auto, set up to rival another sports publication, Velo.

L’Auto’s director was Henri Desgrange; sport was his gospel. He was a sportsman himself, holding a 100-km tricycle record which, given the virtual disappearance of that machine, will probably stand for ever. The paper’s administrator, Victor Goddet, was a man of organisation and figures.

The former, the journalist, was my spiritual father. The latter, the financier, was my natural father. Today the idea of the Tour de France seems ingenious. At the time, though, its creation met with misunderstanding, even hostility.

Country people could not accept that their age-old customs were being violated. Scythes to the fore, they threatened the disturbing, bare-legged characters who came on their peculiar machines to upset animal life, scattering terrified chickens and ducks.

What is more, unlike today, the riders were out on their own. Stages were of between 300 and 500 km in length and random checks were carried out at night in the depth of the countryside. There was cheating and conflict, relegation down the race standings and protest. Yet the idea must have been a good one because, in spite of everything, the Tour de France survived. Interest snowballed when M Desgrange boldly decided that his heroes should be sent into the mountains.

The adventure began cautiously with the Ballon d’Alsace in 1905. Five years later the race moved into the Pyrenees where many frightened riders dreaded a close encounter with a wolf. The race’s great cols became known as the ‘judges de paix’ [justices of the peace], the competitors as the ‘giants de la route’ [giants of the road]. A whole mythical vocabulary grew up around the race.

Over the years the Tour has become a giant, living entity – a powerful financial operation with considerable media influence, increased by the arrival of television. Indeed, television and the Tour were made for each other. In return, because of the large crowds it generates, there is a heavy contribution to the Tour stage stopovers, sponsors, companies equipping the riders, and so on. All have benefited from being seen on television screens worldwide.

Coca-Cola now sponsor the race leader’s yellow jersey. But why a yellow jersey? It was only in 1919, 16 years after the Tour’s creation, that the race’s organiser, M Desgrange, took up a suggestion to dress the event’s overall leader in a distinctive jersey. The father of the Tour chose yellow simply because the newspaper he managed was printed on yellow paper and had earned its popularity with that colour.

The Tour de France’s influence extends to the authorities and political and social life of the country. Traditionally held from the end of June through to the end of July, the race comes as a kind of truce. It appeases quarrels; ensures that controversies are forgotten. Politicians await the race to call a break, the government for some breathing space.

The Tour can certainly be a para-political instrument, as my own experience tells. I am not just referring to the appearance out in the field of government or parliamentary personalities, not averse to getting into the line of the cameras to congratulate a stage winner. Rather, I allude to the battle I had to wage during the German occupation of the 1940s to prevent the holding of the Tour de France. Both occupiers and the Vichy authorities, keen to prove to the world that France was living happily under the Nazi boot, wanted the Tour to go ahead. I was alone in charge, Henri Desgrange having died in 1940. Involved in the Resistance, my position was to succeed in refusing the provisions, fuel and vehicles offered to me, resist the pressures and oppose, in every way I could, the holding of the race. In the end others got together a substitute which did not survive.

 

 

3 JULY 1990

PIED PIPER ON A MOPED HELPS GREAT RACE TO BEAT PROTESTERS’ BLOCKADE

Phil Liggett in Nantes

The Tour de France, which operates on a budget of £10 million, had one of its more bizarre days yesterday when the 198 riders and support vehicles were obliged to follow a man on his moped on a three-mile detour along country lanes.

The richest race in the world, which brings France to a halt wherever it goes, disappointed thousands of spectators in the town of Ste Gemme, when it took extreme action to beat a road blockade that had threatened to stop the race during the stage between Poitiers and Nantes. Burning tyres, trees and manure had been placed across the route before the town, which had been shut down to watch the riders snatch their food packs after 53 miles, but an unknown group of protesters, thought to number about 30, had been thwarted by the Frenchman who volunteered to pilot the race through the lanes.

The Tour, which was also disrupted on Sunday morning by the farmers’ union Paysan, when they demonstrated about the price of mutton, had received advance warnings for yesterday’s protests on the 148-mile third stage. Jean-Marie Leblanc, the race director, said: ‘We had heard of four likely points on the course and we had drawn up secret detours, but the fifth place was a surprise to us.’ The race itself was unaffected on the three-mile detour as the field had regrouped after a particularly fast start. The riders saw the occasion as a source of amusement.

 

 

23 JULY 1990

PURISTS PUZZLE OVER ENIGMATIC CHAMPION

VICTORIOUS RIDER REFUSES TO SACRIFICE ALL

Phil Liggett in Paris

If Greg LeMond had not possessed a great wish to become an acrobatic skier, then he would almost certainly never have discovered the bicycle which, at 29 years of age, has made him the richest cyclist in the world. He is an enigma the Latin Europeans will never fully understand because, instead of just being a cyclist, he is a family man who loves many facets of life. Above all, he hates to train.

LeMond believes the Tour de France is his by right and, if he had not been near death after being injured in a shooting accident which lost him two years of a short career, he could have been rivalling Jacques Anquetil, Eddy Merckx and Bernard Hinault, all of whom have won the race five times.

LeMond is not a complex character, unless one is French, in which case understanding a man who plays golf, fishes, eats Mexican food and hunts when he should be training, leaves a bad taste among those who concentrate 12 months a year on preparing for a race they are unlikely to win.

The American, who lives in Kortrijk, Belgium, during the season, turned to cycling by accident after attending a ski school in Nevada for potential ‘hot dog’ skiers. He was advised the best training in the summer was cycling and with Bob, his father, he watched a bicycle race. From then he developed a burning desire to win the Tour de France.

Last winter, having won both the Tour and the World Championship for the second time each, LeMond signed a contract with the French children’s clothing manufacturer Z for a record £3.2 million over three years, wiping away in one deal the cloth-cap image the sport had engendered from its 100 years of development around the villages of Italy, France and Belgium.

After signing the deal, LeMond gave cause for concern in March when he started the season poorly prepared. At one point he even hinted at retirement after finishing many minutes behind in every race. Roger Legeay, his team manager, sent him back to his American home in Wayzata, on the edge of Lake Minnetonka in Minnesota, with instructions just to train and rest. LeMond’s poor condition, mainly as a result of the dinner round as a celebrity after being the first cyclist to be voted America’s top sportsman of 1989, led Merckx to predict that he would not finish the Tour of Italy and would not even start the Tour de France.

LeMond’s talent for the sport was first sighted in Europe by Cyrille Guimard, a Frenchman who had trained Hinault to Tour victory, and after hearing of the American’s junior world title in 1979 he watched him in an international race in France. Riding for an American international team, LeMond joined in a breakaway and punctured without the team car behind.

He threw his bicycle into a hedge, saying he was retiring, but was asked by his team manager to continue for the sake of the team. He picked up his bike and again threw it away, watched by Guimard. ‘I like you,’ Guimard told him. ‘You have a character, but don’t you ever do something like that again in front of me when you are a professional.’

Hinault and Guimard, neither of whom spoke English, went to the United States, wore Stetsons and rode horses with LeMond before coming back with a deal for him to turn professional. But, in 1985, the rookie became as good as Hinault the teacher, and a rift developed which broke up their winning partnership.

LeMond shows no animosity towards his brother-in-law, who accidentally shot him in the back when hunting in California in 1987, weeks before he should have defended his first Tour title of 1986. LeMond’s life was saved almost by chance. A rough ride over hard ground took him to the entry to the private area behind his house, where the radio calls for help were intercepted by a police helicopter. The police decided to land for LeMond rather than attend a traffic accident. Had they chosen the accident LeMond would probably have died.

Today LeMond rides with some of the 200 pellets still in the walls of his heart, but when you watch him fiercely defend and attack, driven on by the belief that the Tour de France is his until he retires, his strong will to live marries naturally with his strong will to win.

 

 

30 JULY 1990

TOUR DE FORCE

Sir,

The Tour de France seems to have gone without any of the disgraceful scenes which have marred other sporting events. The fact that the riders represented trade teams instead of national teams no doubt had much to do with the sporting atmosphere. Is there a lesson to be learnt?

E.L. Parsons

Twickenham

 

 

10 AUGUST 1990

CYCLING ENTENTE

Sir,

Now that Phil Liggett has confirmed that cycling has climbed from 30th to tenth in sporting popularity, may I offer the following as worthy of contemplation by followers of some other sports. I refer to the sincere internationalism that is innate among road racing fans – each encouraging their favourite but still clapping in genuine admiration of the other contenders.

With the crowds for the Tour of Britain now rivalling those on the Tour de France, the practice of chalking their heroes’ name and national colours on the road prior to the riders’ arrival is now common on both sides of the Channel. I have never heard of the need to segregate fans. In fact supporters co-operate by sharing the chalk!

Alan Stuart

Wokingham, Berks

 

 

24 JULY 1991

THE HILLS ARE ALIVE WITH SALUTES TO ‘SINGING’ INDURAIN

Ian Ridley

Eighteen days and 17 stages into the Tour de France and almost 80 hours of riding can be undone by 45 minutes of what is probably the most punishing test in sport. Alpe d’Huez makes or breaks champions.

Last night it looked to have done both as Greg LeMond, last year’s winner, trailed in almost two minutes behind Miguel Indurain, potentially this year’s. It will have done much to reinforce Alpe d’Huez’s reputation as the most intimidating tranche of the Tour.

Its intensity and drama are why more than 500,000 people line the mountain road, enduring hours of discomfort and traffic jams to get claustrophobically close to this breed apart for just a few minutes. The stage from Gap, although previously mountainous enough, begins in reality only 15 km from the finish, at the foot of the Alp. The bunch, the peloton, were content to let Frenchman Thierry Bourguignon enjoy his day in the sun through his home area, his name painted everywhere en route. It did seem to beef up Bourguignon.

Then, after a descent for the skilled and brave into Bourg d’Oisans – great climbers can lose time descending if they lack the ability to look beyond the immediate bend – the real climbing began. A left turn out of the village and the extent of the task becomes apparent. Just the sight of winding roads almost vertically above can break the spirit. The lesser riders will be calculating how much time they can afford to lose on the leaders without being eliminated.

Television scarcely conveys the extent of the task: 21 bends rising 1,100 metres at one-in-12 over the 15 km. With only the mind racing ahead, the first three or four are said to be the worst. There are second-hand cars that wouldn’t make it that far. It is not just the height but the heat. A rider is likely to lose six or seven pounds during the ordeal. Most of it is body fluid and, dangerously, he has time to consume only about a litre of water as replacement. Several have collapsed but none has died. Yet.

Bend 15 – they are counted down – can bring more demoralising moments for those weakening: the sight of the leaders a few bends up and the noise of the accompanying cheers. For the domestiques, the drones to the team leader’s queen bee, the worst thing of all can be hearing the result. That can happen three kilometres from the finish, cruelly at the first glimpse of the summit, at the bend where the cemetery d’Huez can seem to wink at a rider. But by two kilometres he knows he has made it and relief, emotional and physical, is at hand. The one final twist is yet another hairpin bend 200 metres from the finish, followed by an uphill sprint to the line.

The tortuous nature of the experience is matched only by the extent to which spectators will go to witness it all. Thousands of them cycle the mountains in the morning for the hell of it, though at scarcely the same speed as the professionals. By 8 a.m., with the race due through at 4.30 p.m., Bourg d’Oisans is jammed with traffic. By 9 a.m. the road up the Alp is closed. Those who have located prime positions on the mountain or in Alpe d’Huez itself have been camped there for several days. It is a little like Christmas lunch: hours to cook, minutes to eat.

From Italy, Spain, Holland, the fans come. And, yes, Britain, even though only the Scot, Robert Millar, remains since the last Englishman, Sean Yates, baled out the previous day. Some wear the football shirts of Liverpool, Everton and Wolverhampton Wanderers; many more wear the cycling attire of such as Port Sunlight Wheelers, Tyneside Vagabonds and Letchworth Velo Club.

Five coaches have disgorged a large group of Brits intending to cycle up from Bourg. The man from Middlesex Road Club is most concerned about losing his false teeth. There may be much to amuse in the chic ski resort of Alpe d’Huez but, lower down, there is only camaraderie to occupy the time. That and the thought of Eddy Merckx riding out for pleasure with his son Axel, a junior champion.

It is on the ascent that painting the road with the name of one’s favourite has mostly got out of hand. Only some environmentally conscious people, such as those who etched ‘Vinny Smith’ on the melting Tarmac, use water soluble paint. There were no words exhorting Djamolidine Abdoujaparov, the Soviet rider from Tashkent who does not speak Russian. The heat must have rendered the effort too much.

That was until dark clouds enveloped the Alp and the heavens opened. It mattered not for the leader at the end of a remarkable day. He may well be nicknamed ‘Singing’ Indurain.

 

 

27 JULY 1991

INTROVERT INDURAIN STEPS OUT OF DELGADO’S GIANT SHADOW

Ian Ridley

For a man who lives in Pamplona, it has taken Miguel Indurain a long time to learn to run with the bulls. Tomorrow in Paris should see him crowned as winner of the Tour de France, finally ready to assume the role of champion, toughness in heart and mind now matching that of his talented body.

In this sporting year of the Quiet Man, Indurain joins the list that takes in Michael Stich and Ian Baker-Finch. Actually the Spaniard is more José Maria Olazábal to Pedro Delgado’s Severiano Ballesteros. Delgado, winner of the Tour three years ago, is the dashing, attacking darling of a nation. Until now, he has cast a giant shadow over Indurain. There have even been suggestions that Indurain was content to remain in darkness, unwilling because of his quiet nature to cross the divide from what golfers call the comfort zone to that possibly scary place where a major champion exists.

Indurain has hitherto dedicated himself to working for Delgado in the Banesto team. Last year, for example, he paced him to the base of Alpe d’Huez, drawing the sting from challengers. He lost 11 m 55 s on the stage to the winner by sacrificing his own ambitions. He eventually finished 12 m and 47 s down on champion Greg LeMond.

That was the best performance of a career that was not delivering its promise, at least in the Tour. The Spanish amateur champion of 1983, who turned professional two years later, did not finish his first two Tours, then finished 97th and 47th in his next two. Stage wins in the Pyrenees in 1989 and 1990, when he finished 17th and tenth overall, and two victories in the Paris-Nice classic, served notice of his prowess. Victory in the Tour of Vaucluse and second place in the Tour of Spain this year proved his growing maturity.

Indurain made the Tour de France sit up in its saddle this year when, more commonly known for his climbing, he won the 73-km time trial from Argentan to Alençon in the first week.

The Banesto team said before the Tour that the race would decide who was the team leader between Indurain and Delgado. But Indurain, it seemed, had already decided. Fittingly, he took over the yellow jersey as the race briefly entered Spain. Delgado, who had said that he would not forget Indurain’s past efforts on his behalf, now rode in support. With Jean-François ‘Jeff’ Bernard also riding excellently alongside, Indurain has had the best protective team.

‘He has been very careful with his goals and stuck to the planning of his career,’ says Stephen Hodge, the Australian who rides for the Spanish Once team. ‘Everyone has seen his huge potential for a long time. Now the mental toughness has come with experience. He is extremely modest and a really incredible athlete. He has a huge physiological capacity for work, probably because he is extremely tall and heavy.’ At 6 ft 5 in and 12 st 2 lb, Indurain is unusually big for a top cyclist. They more often resemble emaciated greyhounds. ‘He is very friendly, very relaxed and very well respected among the riders,’ adds Hodge. ‘Delgado is still the mega-star in Spain, but Miguel is approaching him, even if he is a little different in character.’

That difference in character worries the Spanish press slightly. They have gathered in France this week to acclaim him – 70 journalists are here already, with more descending on Paris now – but he is not very communicative. The joke goes that he nods in response to questions from radio interviewers. His trainer, François Lafarge, said: ‘He has many things to say but he can’t express them.’

Indurain has declared, though, that he would like to be successful enough to retire in three or four years. He turned 27 during the Tour, on the verge of his peak, so he might be able to do so. Indurain may never be another Ballesteros, but, after tomorrow, Indurain in Spain will never again be plain.

 

 

29 JULY 1991

INDURAIN COMPLETES PROCESSION TO VICTORY

Phil Liggett in Paris

After a week of domination, Miguel Indurain became only the fourth Spaniard to win the Tour de France when it ended its 2,400-mile journey on the Champs-Elysées. Farmer’s son Indurain, 27, follows in the wheel tracks of Federico Bahamontes (1959), Luis Ocaña (1973) and Pedro Delgado (1988). Indurain, from Villava near Pamplona in northern Spain, shepherded his former team leader, Delgado, to victory three years ago, but this time the roles were reversed.

Both riders were discovered by their current Banesto team director, José-Miguel Echávarri. ‘I owe Echávarri a lot,’ Indurain said. ‘He moulded my career both as an apprentice and a professional. He pushed me when I needed it.’

Echávarri said of Indurain: ‘I saw what natural talent he had, but it’s important not to look for immediate results. You can wear out a rider prematurely.’ Consequently, Echávarri was cautious and only permitted him to emerge as team leader this year. ‘Before, he was not ready for the responsibilities,’ he said. ‘It was the same with Pedro. We waited till he was mature enough. It was no problem for Pedro to work for Miguel as team leader. It’s a question of loyalty.’

Referring to his replacement of Delgado as the top Spanish rider, Indurain said: ‘I think he prefers to be deposed by me than by someone he doesn’t like. But I don’t suppose he is completely happy about it because it is cruel.’

Indurain was expertly guided through the mountains by his Banesto team – so much so that he said after the finish in Paris: ‘To be honest, I didn’t have to go deep into my reserves to win this Tour.’

Greg LeMond, winner for the past two years, but this time collapsing on the second day in the Pyrenees after earlier leading, finished seventh – his worst position in six Tours de France. The American, sometimes in tears in the mountains, resisted the easy alternative of giving up and showed his tenacity. LeMond said: ‘I’ve always come into the Tour de France believing I can’t lose. I put all the pressure on myself this year, so there’s no one else to blame. When you’re bad in the Tour, then you appreciate what it’s like when you’re good, and just how good you have to be.’

 

 

29 JUNE 1992

FRENCH STAY FAITHFUL TO THE ORIGINAL HOLIDAY ATTRACTION

THE CONTINUING ALLURE OF THE TOUR DE FRANCE

Samuel Abt

Jean-Marie Leblanc is just joking – or is he? – when he explains that the Tour de France, the world’s most prestigious bicycle race, owes its immense popularity with the French to one of those small accidents of history.

When the race began in 1903, July arbitrarily became the month of its setting. ‘July makes all the difference,’ says Leblanc, who directs the race. ‘July is vacation for so many people,’ notwithstanding the foreigners’ impression that France shuts down for August. ‘No, no,’ Leblanc explains. ‘Paris shuts for August. For most of the rest of France July is vacation. So that gives us so many more spectators, more television coverage, more sponsors and more reporters. And that translates into more interest by the great riders and the great teams.’

As theories go, Leblanc’s makes as much sense as any. The Tour de France has only two rivals, the Giro d’Italia and the Vuelta a España, and neither really competes in terms of interest, let alone financial reward. Perhaps that is because both are held long before the sun is hot enough to lure holiday-makers to the mountains, seas and plains that the Tour de France passes by. The Vuelta runs from late April to mid-May and the Giro from late May to mid-June.

From 15 to 20 million spectators are expected to line the race’s roads for three weeks, starting on Saturday, while a global audience estimated at several hundred million will watch on television.

By today’s standards, the one-column headline at the top of page one of L’Auto on 19 January 1903, was a minimal display: ‘Le Tour de France,’ it announced. Underneath, in small type: ‘The greatest bicycling test in the world – a month-long race – Paris-Lyon-Marseille-Toulouse-Bordeaux-Nantes-Paris – 20,000 francs in prizes – Leaving June 1. Arriving in Paris, July 5, at the Parc des Princes.’

The impressive total of 20,000 francs, then worth $100,000, would be roughly equal in buying power now to 3.2 million francs. The 1992 Tour will award ten million francs in overall prizes.

The announcement caused ‘an enormous emotion in the sports world’, L’Auto reported the next day in a front page article signed by the paper’s chief cycling correspondent, Geo Lefevre. ‘Naturally, champions of the road now in Paris paraded into our offices, enthusiastic about the idea and thrilled by such a manna of prizes,’ Lefevre continued.

To read L’Auto nearly 90 years later, even discounting the self-promotion, it is easy to see why the idea of the race was a sensation. Sportsmen in cities to be visited sent letters celebrating the news. On the other hand, the organiser reported on 25 January, many cities complained that the Tour would miss them. ‘Perpignan, in a tearful letter, insists that it isn’t far from the projected route,’ L’Auto wrote. Albi, Cahors and Auch, ‘with a touching unanimity’, protested that they had not been included. So did Cognac, Niort and Limoges.

By May, though, barely more than a dozen riders had signed up. Without 50 riders there would be no Tour de France the paper warned. Realising that few men wanted to be away for 35 days, the organisers decided to reduce the length to three weeks, the same time-span still used. Because of the organisational work still to be completed, the race was pushed back to a 1 July start. Et voilà!

There are other theories, of course, to explain why the Tour is the centre of the French summer. One, much beloved by foreigners, is that the French love sports, especially when played by somebody else. They also love a spectacle and a free outing, which the Tour offers daily. Then, as the sociologist Richard Holt observed in the book Sport and Society in Modern France: ‘To a country obsessed with a fear of demographic decline, economic failure and military defeat, the Tour de France offered a comforting image of Frenchmen as tenacious, strong and swift.’

Part of the truth is that, because of its age, the Tour, and bicycle racing in general, have their roots deep into the French soil. In Paris, the preference in sports has moved upmarket to tennis from bicycle racing which, with its emphasis on struggle and sacrifices, was an ideal sport for a country rebuilding after the Second World War. Now the mood in Paris has turned against sacrifice and suffering.

Despite their names, Paris-Roubaix, Paris-Nice, Paris-Camembert, and a handful of other races prefixed with ‘Paris’, start far outside the capital. Traffic problems, officials explain, but the true reason is indifference.

Outside Paris, where there is little obligation to be modern, where things chic and new are distrusted, fans still flock to races to play their own small roles. If the day is hot and a climb long and tiring, people will hold out a bottle of water to a cyclist. Pushes, even unsolicited ones, may be illegal and yet officials will often look away when a fan helps a faltering climber by shoving him uphill. In the time before a race starts, fans will circulate among the pack, seeking autographs from their favourites, posing for photographers alongside this rider or that, wishing good luck.

In the countryside, la France profond, vanishing France, where the old prejudices live on, the Tour de France is still paramount. Boulogne sur Gesse in the French southwest is one of those places. Boulogne is a small town (1,600 population by generous count) founded by an order of monks in the 13th century. Between then and now not much appears to have happened there, according to tourist literature. The biggest day ever arrived on 23 March 1814, when the British army under the Duke of Wellington camped there overnight on its way to fight Napoleon.

In seven centuries, Boulogne sur Gesse has produced only two persons judged noteworthy by the same tourist literature: Emmanuel Peres de la Gesse, a minor figure in the French Revolution, who advanced to become a baron of the empire, and Jacques Moujica, who won the marathon Bordeaux-Paris bicycle race in 1949. That same year he finished second in Paris-Brussels and third in Paris-Roubaix. A year later at the age of 24 he was killed in a car crash while travelling to a bicycle criterium after the Tour de France.

Moujica is buried in Boulogne sur Gesse, which mourns him still. When the Tour de France whizzed through the town two years ago on a stage from Blagnac to Luz Ardiden in the Pyrenees, journalists with the race were invited to a late breakfast/early lunch (‘brunch’ is a Paris word) in Boulogne and served bowls of hearty stew and beakers of heartier wine.

The reception hall, a market most other days, was decorated with posters celebrating Moujica and his feats. Scrapbooks covered display cases, as did some of his Mercier team jerseys. Townspeople sat on wooden benches with the journalists and talked about Moujica and that glorious Bordeaux-Paris race as if he had won it earlier in the season.

The mayor spoke, too. He discussed the decline of rural France, where agriculture is imperilled by rising costs and falling subsidies, and quoted Talleyrand as having said: ‘Industry can only weaken the national morality: France must remain agricultural.’ Everybody applauded, even the farmers, who wanted to talk bicycle racing, that elegant sport.

 

 

5 JULY 1992

TERRORIST BOMB FAILS TO HALT TOUR DE FRANCE

Phil Liggett

The incendiary device which destroyed three Channel 4 television cars and four other vehicles in the early hours of yesterday morning has placed the Tour de France on red alert as the 2,500-mile race began in the Spanish resort of San Sebastian.

Assumed by official sources to be the work of the Basque separatist movement, ETA, the seven cars set on fire in the small border town of Fuenterrabia, 12 miles outside San Sebastian, followed the burning of two cars near the official start line in the city on Friday evening.

The burning of three of the five British television company’s vehicles happened at 2 a.m. yesterday outside the Hotel San Nicolas. The alarm was raised by a Dutch holidaymaker when a Renault Espace, rented by Channel 4 and registered in France, burst into flames. The fire quickly spread to a row of six vehicles, including the Citroën rented by me and Paul Sherwen, the Channel 4 commentary team on the race.

We saw the flames engulf first the Espace and then our car and it quickly spread to four private vehicles. Police indicated to us that the terrorists had chosen the vehicles because two of them had French plates. More than £1,700 of my personal effects were destroyed and my clothes for the television programme were also lost.

Police took the remaining two vehicles into a guarded pound in the town, where they will stay each evening until the race leaves Spain. The 14-man team reporting the race were given two cars by the organising committee for temporary use.

It is the first time the Tour de France has attempted a start in Spain and though the organisers had received a number of threats, it had been generally felt that the Basque movement would not disrupt the race after the Société du Tour de France agreed to give them a high profile by signing the route and all facilities in the Euskara (Basque) language. The political wing of ETA, the Herri Batasuna movement, had promised the race full support, but they could not account for extremist views.

On Friday, a man was arrested after being injured during the throwing of an incendiary device in which a French television car was destroyed in a car park near to where yesterday’s Prologue time trial finished.

 

 

20 JULY 1992

A MASS WALKOUT HANDED ROGER LAPEBIE VICTORY IN 1937

William Fotheringham

A saboteur with a hacksaw did his best to wreck Roger Lapébie’s chances of winning the Tour de France by sawing through the handlebars of his bike. The handlebars collapsed as Lapébie warmed up the next day but the Frenchman later arrived triumphant in Paris – with new handlebars.

The incident was typical of the acrimonious Tour of 1937, raced at a time when life was so hard for the riders they were nicknamed ‘convicts of the road’. Lapébie, the oldest surviving winner of the Tour, is, at 81, small and birdlike and does not look his age. His face is deeply tanned and lean from the long hours he still puts in on his bike from his home near Bordeaux. With Gino Bartali, he is one of only two pre-War winners still alive.

The 1937 Tour reached a crisis when the entire Belgian team pulled out due to what they saw as favouritism by the French race judges. The cycling reference book, Gotha, describes the events:

‘The decision taken by the race judges, after the Belgians’ win in the team time trial, to suppress several of these stages, annoyed them in the first place. When Roger Lapébie, who had been caught taking pushes in the Pyrenees and was seen taking pace behind a car, was then only fined 90 seconds, the tension mounted. The French, who had threatened to walk out after Lapébie was penalised, claimed that the Belgian team had been helped by an individual rider [against the rules]. The 15-second penalty given to the Belgians was considered insufficient by one camp, and an injustice by the other.’

The last straw for the Belgians came when a level-crossing barrier went down just as their leader, Sylvère Maes, was returning to the bunch after a puncture. Added to hostility from the general public, the incident led the Belgians to retire en masse with four days remaining.

Lapébie, who in 1934 had picked up five stage wins and third place overall, had only five team-mates left by the rest day in Geneva and decided to restrict himself to going for stages. ‘I wasn’t sure I was able to win so I wanted to make money,’ he said. ‘After the Alps I won the stage from Briançon to Digne, and got close to the lead. Bartali was in the yellow jersey but he fell on that stage and abandoned the next day. The Belgian team were really strong, with Maes and Vervaecke, and were most likely to win. There were five Belgians in other teams which meant they had 15 men to control the race.’

The most important stage, according to Lapébie, was the 280-km leg from Luchon to Pau. ‘It was decisive. I was either going to do OK or lose.’ Then, as he was warming up before the start, his handlebars broke. ‘They had been sawed part way through. It was a bit suspicious. It was sawed through by someone close to the Belgians,’ Lapébie maintains.

Lapébie suffered time penalties on the stage because his new bars had no bottle cages on them and, against the rules, drinks were handed to him. He was also involved in a brush with race officials about whether the crowds had been pushing him. A dip in a roadside spring inspired Lapébie to go on and catch the leaders and take second place.

The next stage, Pau-Bordeaux, proved the end of the Belgian challenge. ‘Maes punctured, all the team waited for him, and some of the other Belgians. I attacked with the Swiss team. There was a bit of complicité and I had friends in the bunch. Maes lost a minute.’

Then the Belgians left the race, led by their leader, Karl Stayer, director of a Belgian paper. ‘He did the selection, was a journalist, director and a big boss, and he didn’t like his team to be beaten by five little Frenchmen, so they took the train from Bordeaux, and I arrived in Paris the winner,’ said Lapébie.

Conditions endured by Tour fields of old were distinctly rough and ready compared to those enjoyed by today’s riders. The roads, he says, were épouvantable – atrocious. ‘There were pot-holes, which we used to call birds’ nests, pebbles, dust, gravel. In those days we were given 25 pairs of shorts and 25 jerseys and changed our socks every day because of the dust and the dirt.

‘We got lots of saddle sores because of the dirt and the cow dung – it was easy to get infected.’ Ninety-eight men started the 1937 race; only 36 finished. The diet is one thing that has not changed a great deal. ‘We ate lots of fresh vegetables, rice, fish and a lot of red meat, which we ate rare. As a result of that, in 1934 I became a vegetarian because the meat polluted our bodies and gave us boils.’

Lapébie may have been the first vegetarian winner of the Tour as well. He puts his continuing good health down to his diet, plus the fact that he has never drunk alcohol or smoked. During the race there were no isotonic drinks, no special foods. ‘We drank tea and coffee, that was our form of doping. I used to take two bottles of very strong coffee with lots of sugar. We used to eat sugar and rice cake.’

What Lapébie calls ‘old wives’ remedies’ were used to look after the riders. ‘We took very hot baths, with three or four kilogrammes of sea salt and two or three litres of vinegar after a cold, rainy stage. After the bath we would have a very good, very hard massage, using a lot of seaweed. The soigneur [masseur] would wipe our legs with cotton, then we would put on long johns.’

Mustard plasters were another remedy, doubtless for their power to concentrate heat in parts of the body. ‘American or English were best. We’d buy packets of three or four dozen in Paris and put them on our legs all night if they were painful.’

Bikes were solid, according to Lapébie, with very few light components. The bottle cage might be aluminium, but this relatively lightweight metal was avoided for bars and stem because they tended to break. In 1934 and 1935 lighter materials were used more and more. ‘We started experimenting with light stuff like dural rims and bikes progressed every year.’ Lapébie was the first man to win the race using a derailleur gear, which revolutionised gear-changing, as 1937 was the first year they were permitted.

For Lapébie, 1937 was his moment of glory. The following year he did not start the Tour. He was not invited, following a disagreement with race founder Henri Desgrange. In 1939 a knee injury sustained in the Bordeaux-Paris race brought a premature end to an eventful career.

 

 

25 JULY 1992

QUIET ACHIEVER YATES AT FINAL STAGE OF HIS CAREER

Ian Ridley

Barring accidents and illness, unlikely at this stage of the race, he should make it to Paris tomorrow having consolidated his position in the most gruelling Tour de France most riders can remember. No, not Miguel Indurain, but Sean Yates.

Yates is – and this is his description – a ‘little’ rider, a domestique, whose job is to nurse along, when needed, the team leader, in his case, Andy Hampsten of Motorola. This could be the last time though, says the 32-year-old from Forest Row in Sussex, and the passing of his unspectacular but worthy career in the race deserves recognition.

Yates is listed among the ‘other placings’ in the results, even if he is well known to the British cycling fraternity, of whom there are many with Le Tour, including a marvellous mad pair who came by tandem to Blois from Alençon yesterday.

But though he is poles apart from Indurain, the British professional champion is still a part – and he did, remarkably, win a stage four years ago – and in demand. ‘I came to the decision that I was never going to be a big leader so I thought I would make the most of my talents and be a good domestique,’ he says. ‘I can only compete with the best guys when I’m screaming warm, which is about three times a year. But if you can get a good reputation as a team man you are always guaranteed a job.’

And he has a good reputation for durability and unselfishness. Nine Tours – and this should be the seventh finish – testify to him never being short of work. He is thus also well qualified to assess this year’s event, the toughest he and many more have known, he says, the pace draining as much from riders as if they had also ridden the Pyrenees. The event, too, has gone from circus to zoo. ‘It is the only race that everyone watches,’ he says. ‘It’s just so big, almost too big. It feels much more of a strain than it has ever done. You can’t relax for a minute. At the départ you used to be able to have a cup of coffee with people. Now there are millions milling around. It’s just chaos.’

It pains him, he says, having to ignore people sometimes because otherwise he might never even start. ‘Everyone is clambering around you, and I’m just a little rider, so you know what it’s like for Indurain.’

The racing has been so fast – the pattern of modern cycling, he says – because without many riders capable of winning the race, teams often opt to try to win stages for the glory and publicity, thus the attacking is frequent. Another factor has been the Tour’s progress through so many countries this year. ‘When you are in Spain, the Spanish riders go much harder,’ he says. ‘When you are in Belgium, the Belgians; then in Holland, the Dutch; and in Germany, the Germans.’ You tell him that we therefore await the Tour coming to England when the Channel Tunnel opens, and he smiles.

The variation in weather has, too, proved punishing, and accounted for so many dropping out – 68 of the 198 starters. ‘It puts more strain on the immune system. Some have got food poisoning due to general fatigue.’

Yates himself has not felt close to abandoning this year, even though he was suffering from bronchitis during the Alps, the legacy of which is a dry cough which punctuates his conversation as we speak after yesterday’s sizzling time trial. ‘At first I couldn’t breathe. I thought I was going to drop,’ he says of the mountain stages. ‘But I was lucky up Alpe d’Huez. I got in with a good crowd,’ he adds, sounding like someone-made-good looking back on his teens.

The climb’s well in the past; yesterday was more to his taste as he raced with no opportunity to take in the beauty bordering the banks of the Loire from Tours to Blois in the 18th-fastest time, beating riders such as Pascal Lino, a former yellow jersey wearer, and Hampsten.

It was a stirring, storming performance to end on, even if it lifted him only two places to 82nd overall, and end he intends it to be. He acknowledges, though, that he does not yet know how he will cope with the ‘emptiness’ that a season without the Tour de France evokes. ‘When you aren’t there you wish you were,’ says the man who once had to pull out a week from the end with an infection. ‘But when you are going up an Alp you wish you were at home watching it on TV.’

Tomorrow he will wish to be nowhere except the Champs-Elysées. If, that is, he can just avoid his fate of this Saturday last year: a crash which ripped open an arm and cruelly caused his only other withdrawal. ‘Still,’ he says, ‘I can’t complain. It’s a good life.’

 

 

12 JULY 1993

ARMSTRONG SHOWS MATURITY IN HIS MODEST DESIRES

Phil Liggett in Verdun

Lance Armstrong, 21, who was thought by many observers to be too young to ride the 2,700-mile Tour de France, saluted the large crowd in Verdun yesterday after he won the 114-mile eighth stage from Châlons-sur-Marne. The Texan, a former triathlete and a professional only since the Olympic Games last year, delivered a finishing sprint that left the rest of an experienced front group watching from the wings.

Armstrong said: ‘I came to the Tour for two reasons: to learn and to win a stage, and I’ve achieved both.’ Since the race began more than a week ago in western France, Armstrong has been viewed as a rider who should have stayed at home for one more year, but his maturity, both physically and mentally, has shown through in these opening 900 miles.

Armstrong, America’s road-race champion, takes each day as it comes. If he finds the mountains, which start with the Alps this week, too hard he will be pulled out of the race in a manner similar to Swiss star Alex Zulle a year ago. Yesterday, Zulle’s hopes of Tour victory took a severe setback when he was knocked off by a spectator as the race passed the Douaumont memorial to the fallen of the First World War. Last night his team were confident he would start the race today despite bruising and cuts to his right elbow and left thigh and severe bruising to his back.

 

 

26 JULY 1993

INDURAIN IS A CLASS APART WITH THIRD VICTORY IN A ROW

Phil Liggett in Paris

Miguel Indurain, of Spain, duly rode on the Champs-Elysées in warm sunshine yesterday afternoon to claim his third Tour de France victory in succession. He also became the first rider to win both the Tours of Italy and France in successive years.

Indurain’s final margin, after leading the race for two weeks, was 4 m 59 s, 27 seconds better than last year, when he beat Italians Claudio Chiappucci and Gianni Bugno. This time he had found much harder opposition from Tony Rominger, who was the runner-up.

Dublin’s Stephen Roche, who along with Sean Kelly has been one of Ireland’s most successful riders since turning professional in 1981, said ‘au revoir’ to the Tour de France when he finished 13th. ‘It has been a fantastic period of my life, but I will not be going back on my decision to retire, although many people have asked me to reconsider,’ Roche said.

Roche, 33, was the first Irishman to win the Tour de France during a magical 1987 season when he won the Tour of Italy and, six weeks after the French race, added the world crown. On that occasion, having won the previous two big Tours, he rode all day to try to help Sean Kelly win the world title for the first time. With a mile to go, Kelly missed a split in the leading group and Roche raced to his first, and only, world championship. He had achieved the cycling equivalent of the Triple Crown, a feat which had been accomplished only once before, in 1974 by Eddy Merckx.

Roche, whose career was punctuated by injury and contractual disputes, has worked hard this season to leave the sport on a high note with a string of excellent performances. He finished ninth in this year’s Tour of Italy and his 13th place in the Tour de France will assure him he looks back with fondness over his final season.

 

 

28 JUNE 1994

TOUR TROUBLE

Sir,

Has anybody considered the residents of Kent whose lives will be severely disrupted by the invasion of the Tour de France on July 6? The roads forming the route of the race through Kent and Sussex will be closed, even to residents, for at least four hours.

More important, the route cannot be crossed during the closure, which will effectively isolate the north from the south of the county. Kentish Men of Newenden wishing to connect with Men of Kent in Maidstone are diverted 12 miles via the A21 and Tonbridge.

What effect will this sort of thing have on businesses, such as haulage contractors, for whom mobility is the very essence? Surely it is not worth this upset just to bring a bit of extra trade to the pubs and similar establishments along the route?

Lionel Macpherson-Strutt

Tonbridge, Kent

 

 

30 JUNE 1994

THE TOUR SET FOR BUMPER CROWDS

Sir,

Mr Macpherson-Strutt (Letter, June 28) complains that our roads will be closed for some four hours to allow the Tour de France to pass – a small price to see one of the world’s great sporting events.

Certainly cycling is not as popular as football or cricket, but I will eat my bike if Tour enthusiasts give the police any problems, either by drinking or by hooliganism.

And, as I told a local complainer, if the sight of 200 superbly fit young men, speeding through our village, inspires only one of the local lads to take up the sport, it will be well worth it.

Mrs Pat Hill

Ashford, Kent

 

 

4 JULY 1994

BOARDMAN KEEPS YELLOW JERSEY AS SPRINTERS CRASH

Phil Liggett in Armentières

Chris Boardman, the Olympic champion, was thoroughly blooded into the tough world of professional racing in the Tour de France yesterday. He had to survive a long and hot opening stage from Lille to Armentières as race leader and a spectacular crash at the finish where the world’s fastest sprinters collided with a policeman in the last 50 metres.

The accident happened at 40 mph when Belgian champion Wilfried Nelissen, with the complete field of 189 riders hot on his heels, hit a policeman who was standing on the race-side of the barriers taking a photograph. Then top Frenchman Laurent Jalabert somersaulted over the scene, quickly followed by Italian Fabiano Fontinelli, Russian Alexander Gontchenkov and another Belgian sprinter, Johan Capiot.

It was a grim end to a stage which saw Boardman gain another British record by holding the yellow jersey for two days since winning the opening Prologue time trial in record time in Lille on Saturday. Previously, Tom Simpson wore it for a day in 1962. Boardman, 25, who finished 29th, was warmly received by the French crowds here after the 145-mile stage, but breathed a sigh of relief as he avoided the chaos which reigned as the leaders fell in sight of the line.

The stage was won by Djamolidine Abdoujaparov, the great Uzbek sprinter so often involved in controversial finishes. Yesterday he was totally absolved from blame as he swerved clear of the crashing riders to his right.

Jalabert, a winner of seven stages of this year’s Tour of Spain, and fellow sprinter Nelissen, recent winner of the Belgian championship and an early leader of the Tour last year, were taken to hospital immediately. Jalabert suffered broken bones in his face and severe concussion, while Nelissen, who only recently started racing again after breaking his collarbone in an event in Belgium, underwent a brain scan last night.

Fontinelli walked across the line 20 minutes after the crash in a daze and was also taken to hospital, though all the fallen riders were given a finishing position in the hope that they would be able to line up today. The policeman, later criticised by Tour organisers, was also taken to hospital with rib and elbow injuries.

Abdoujaparov said: ‘I don’t know how the accident happened because it was a very wide road. But in any case, a sprint is always dangerous because the non-sprinters mix it with sprinters and don’t know what to do. I don’t know how the policeman got there but I know he shouldn’t have been on the course.’

 

 

7 JULY 1994

TWO WORLDS PASS IN WHIRR

TEA AND BUNTING GREET CYCLING’S CREAM IN SUSSEX COUNTRYSIDE

Michael Calvin

Cream teas were being served in the village hall, where the Women’s Institute prepared a chairobics demonstration for the unconverted. Dame Vera Lynn, Ditchling’s most celebrated resident, had a suitable song for the occasion.

There will always be an England. Whether the Tour de France, which has crossed the Channel for the first time in 20 years, can be integrated successfully into a different culture remains to be seen. But yesterday, with the rain clouds scudding over the South Downs and Sussex self-consciously adopting the strangled vowels and tortured syntax of Franglais, two worlds collided with remarkably little fall-out.

The Tour, a symbol of national identity to rank with Wimbledon, the Super Bowl and a Test match at Sabina Park, is, true to Gallic tradition, self-obsessed, self-important, self-promoting.

Since its very name has its price, and we are supposed to celebrate the Channel Tunnel, Le Tour en Angleterre is a commercial proposition. Francisco Cabello, the unheralded Spaniard who won the first of two English stages, covering 128 miles from Dover Castle to Brighton seafront, is not complaining.

Ditchling, a dot on the Tour’s landscape, is a quintessential English village, bequeathed in King Alfred’s will to a cousin in the year 880. It remained in royal ownership until Anne of Cleves forfeited it on the insistence of Henry VIII. It conforms to the chocolate box clichés of half-timbered cottages and carefully tended privet hedges. Sport, staged formally once a year to coincide with England’s oldest gooseberry show, extends little beyond village cricket. It has an air of timelessness. The village museum tells of a challenge match for 50 guineas between villagers and Eleven Gentlemen of Brighton on 8 July 1818.

Hilary Bourne, the museum’s curator, is a bright-eyed 85-year-old. She can still point out the patch of grass at the crossroads where she played marbles, the only game in town, before the First World War. She has a collection of wooden golf clubs, battered skittles and square slack-string tennis rackets that saw service in genteel games on the green. But cycling, and the spectacle of her birthplace being over-run by Lycra-clad visitors from another planet, was beyond her comprehension. ‘It’s all so strange, something quite new to us,’ she said, gesturing towards the High Street, decked out in balloons and bunting. ‘This race has upset all our lives, really.’

Yet, just as in France, when Le Tour caravan passes through, the enterprise culture was at work. Villagers sipped Pimm’s and sold maps of Pooh’s Forest. They distributed crisp, dry local white wine and dispensed cured ham.

The village was en fête, even if local police banned enthusiasts from emulating their French counterparts by daubing the name of their heroes across the road. Fanatics were restricted to a single act of homage, messages of support scrawled on plywood tacked to a telegraph pole outside the Emmanuel Chapel. ‘Vamos, Oliveiro Rincon, allez Laurent Dufaux’ they read. ‘Forza El Diablo, Claudio Chiappucci. Go Sean Yates.’

The most fortunate spectators sat sedately on white plastic chairs, teetering on home-made scaffolding. Others lined the narrow streets, six deep, for more than three hours before the peloton swept by. Few knew quite what they were waiting for. The driver of Sussex police van No 1837, who descended the High Street with an impromptu chant of ‘Ooh ah, Cantona’ over the intercom, offered no clues. The bunting, a red, white and blue signal that the entente had rarely been more cordiale, was nearly brought down by a giant cornflake packet in the pre-race convoy. Everyone waved wildly for TV cameramen clinging uneasily to the pillion seats of over-powered motorcycles.

The wait was long, the stoicism peculiarly British. Suddenly, in an all too brief blur, two riders were through. The crowd were not to know it but Cabello had passed among them. A three-man breakaway emerged two minutes later. Then, some 90 seconds behind them, the peloton surged in, covering the width of the road. In the strange silence that followed an initial cheer, all one could hear was the metallic whirr of lightweight wheels.

Within seconds they had gone, towards Ditchling Beacon, the toughest climb of the stage. Families had gathered there to picnic, just as they do on Alpine climbs and in Pyrenean passes.

‘Ditchling will seem such a tame place tomorrow,’ reflected one woman as she headed the 50 yards towards the village hall.

‘Yes,’ concurred her companion, ‘but it will be such a nice place, won’t it?’

 

 

9 JULY 1994

YATES JUMPS INTO LEAD WITH SUCCESS ON LONGEST DAY

Phil Liggett in Rennes

After Chris Boardman, the first leader, followed by two outstandingly successful days in Great Britain, the French (not to mention the British) were unprepared for another surprise turn of events yesterday when Sean Yates, the only other British rider in the Tour de France, became the new leader by a single second.

Not since 1962 has a British rider led the event and Yates emulated his team rival Boardman when he finished sixth on the longest stage of 170 miles from Cherbourg to Rennes to become the second home leader in the race’s opening week.

Ironically, the only time a British rider has not led the Tour, which began last Saturday in Lille, has been during the two days spent in Britain. Italian Flavio Vanzella was the leader then, and yesterday he slipped back to fifth, but only six seconds behind.

Yates, 34, said: ‘The day had to come when the Italian GB-MG team would crack, so we just waited and watched, and when we attacked we went flat out.’ His move came about 12 miles from the end after almost seven hours’ riding, and the group of seven riders, including Motorola team-mate Frankie Andreu, quickly gained over a minute.

‘When the lead went up to one minute and 20 seconds, I realised I had a chance of the jersey, but I really didn’t want to think about it,’ added Yates, as he waited to be presented with his first maillot jaune in his 11th Tour.

The long haul south from Normandy to Rennes proved too much for former world champion and triple Tour winner Greg LeMond, who almost certainly said ‘au revoir’ to the race which has made him a pedalling millionaire. LeMond gave up after 119 miles with no excuses, other than saying he was feeling terrible and could not explain it. ‘This isn’t the way I wanted to go,’ he said. ‘I gave it everything in the time trial [to help Chris Boardman, on whose team he rides] and perhaps I did too much.’

 

 

25 JULY 1994

INDURAIN JOINS TOUR GREATS WITH POWER AND PANACHE

Phil Liggett in Paris

Miguel Indurain shook hands with his seven surviving Banesto team-mates as he cruised down the Champs-Elysées to win the Tour de France for the fourth successive year yesterday. His reward of £250,000 was the biggest prize in the history of the sport. The 30-year-old Spaniard recorded his biggest victory margin yet – 5 m 39 s – over runner-up Piotr Ugrumov from Latvia with third-placed Italian Marco Pantani, in his first Tour, more than seven minutes behind.

Indurain’s triumph equals the record of four consecutive Tour de France victories set by Frenchman Jacques Anquetil (1961–4) and Belgian legend Eddy Merckx (1969–72). His aim next year will be to join those two, and Bernard Hinault, the last French winner of the Tour in 1985, on the record number of five victories.

Yesterday’s final stage of the 2,500-mile race, 110 miles from EuroDisney to Paris, gave the 117 survivors the chance to relax. They even stopped en masse when a downpour began as they passed under a motorway bridge.

Indurain has shown that a new record of six wins remains a realistic target, though the quiet man from Pamplona, whose salary is said to be more than £2 million per year, has a more immediate target. He said: ‘We will have to see about winning a fifth Tour de France. For the moment I’ll take a week’s rest and test to see if I am ready to try to break the world one-hour record.’

Until this year Indurain has always crushed his rivals in the individual time trial and he was surprised at this year’s start when he lost the opening Prologue time trial in Lille to Chris Boardman. Conscious of poor press after his Tour of Italy defeat, Indurain told a friend afterwards that he had wanted to lead the French race from start to finish – something never achieved in post-War years.

In the end, he turned his attention to just two stages, and in 47 miles he destroyed the field with frightening displays of power which led to speculation that he would win by more than ten minutes in Paris. Spain’s greatest rider is not a man of great colour but he realises a fifth consecutive win next year would make him one of the race’s immortals. That, surely, will arouse some excitement within him.

 

 

14 JULY 1995

SCIANDRI JOINS ELITE BAND OF BRITISH WINNERS

Phil Liggett in St Etienne

Max Sciandri, born in Derby, but a permanent resident of Italy, gave Britain its first road-race stage win in the Tour de France since Robert Millar in 1984 when he sprinted clear of Colombian climber Hernán Buenahora at the end of the 11th stage, from Bourg d’Oisans to St Etienne yesterday.

Sciandri, who was granted a British racing licence this year because he holds a British passport, became only the seventh Briton to win a stage, following in the wheel tracks of Brian Robinson, Michael Wright, Barry Hoban, Millar, Sean Yates and Chris Boardman.

‘This win is neither English nor Italian, it is Sciandri’s win,’ he said last night after finishing almost six minutes ahead of the main race leaders. ‘But I would like to dedicate this win to my British supporters who were shouting my name, and not Sean Yates’s, along the road. I’d like to thank them for that.’

Sciandri, who won the Tour of Britain in 1992 and a stage of the Tour of Italy last year, wants to ride in the World Championship, but despite a series of outstanding results, he has been consistently left out of the Italian team. He feels that is because he is regarded as more British than Italian.

Yesterday, the main contenders took a rare chance to relax, not reacting when a small bunch of lower-placed riders attacked. Sciandri joined in the move by eight men after 35 miles and was then the only rider able to sustain the attack on Buenahora on the climb of the Col de l’Oeillon with 26 miles left. He said: ‘I had a very comfortable ride during the two days to the mountains, so I planned to start attacking from today as I wanted a stage win. I knew when I was with the Colombian that I was going well.’

 

 

19 JULY 1995

ITALIAN DIES AFTER CRASH IN PYRENEES

Phil Liggett in Cauterets

Fabio Casartelli, the Olympic road race champion, died yesterday in the Tour de France when he crashed on the descent of the Pyrenean mountain, the Col de Portet d’Aspet. The Italian, 24, was the first rider to die in the race since Britain’s Tom Simpson on Mont Ventoux in 1967.

Casartelli crashed into a concrete post while negotiating a left-hand bend on the 55 mph descent of the 4,000-foot mountain, the first of six crossed during the 126-mile 15th stage from St Girons to Cauterets. Six riders fell, including Frenchman Dante Rezze, who plunged into a ravine off the edge of the unguarded road. Rezze was pulled back with the aid of straps and taken to hospital with a broken thigh bone, while Germany’s Dirk Baldinger suffered a fractured hip bone.

Casartelli, who married last year and had a six-month-old baby, was riding his second Tour after joining the American Motorola team at the start of this season. The team left the finish in tears but decided to continue in the race after a meeting last night.

The race medical services arrived at the scene within minutes of the crash, and while Rezze and Baldinger were taken to St Gaudens hospital by road, Casartelli was flown by helicopter to Tarbes. During the flight he suffered three cardiac arrests and died later in the afternoon while the race was progressing towards Cauterets. Most riders did not know of the tragedy until the finish.

Last night, Gary L Tooker, the vice-president of Motorola, said from the United States: ‘We tend to forget a rider’s bravery in the face of the danger they encounter every day. He was an outstanding athlete and a courageous competitor.’

The Italian is the fourth rider to die since the race began in 1903. In 1910 Adolphe Hélière drowned while swimming during the race’s rest day, and Francesco Cepeda, of Spain, died in hospital in 1935 after crashing in the Alps.

 

 

20 JULY 1995

RIDERS SUSPEND COMPETITION

Phil Liggett in Pau

Fabio Casartelli, the Italian Olympic champion who died on the Tour de France on Tuesday, was remembered yesterday by the 117 survivors of the three-week event when they suspended competitive racing for the day. The riders took almost eight hours to ride the 153-mile stage from Tarbes to Pau before allowing the six riders on Casartelli’s American Motorola team to finish alone.

It was the greatest show of respect the race has seen. Race organisers decided to give all the riders the same time as Italian Andrea Peron, a close colleague of Casartelli, who led the field across the winning line. Peron, who lives in the Como area near Casartelli, was on the same Olympic team in 1992 in Barcelona. He won a silver medal in the team time trial, while Casartelli took gold in the road race.

After a minute’s silence before the start in the morning, the riders told Jean-Marie Leblanc, the race director, that the day’s prizes would be donated to the young rider’s family. The race organisation doubled the amount, making £60,000 in all.

Stephen Hodge, the Australian rider for Festina, said: ‘We all thought of Fabio today. It was our way of saying goodbye.’ Casartelli, who will be buried in Italy today, was riding his second Tour having turned professional in 1993. The Motorola team have agreed that their prize money will also go to Casartelli’s family.

 

 

22 JULY 1995

ARMSTRONG FINDS INSPIRATION

Phil Liggett in Limoges

Lance Armstrong, the captain of the American Motorola team, looked to the skies and saluted with both arms as he won the 103-mile 18th stage of the Tour de France from Montpon-Ménestérol to Limoges yesterday. Three days after the death of his team-mate Fabio Casartelli, Armstrong broke clear of the leading group of 12 descending the Cote de Villeneuve with about 20 miles to go, and was never caught.

The Texan, who broke down in tears after finishing, said: ‘All I could think about on the ride was poor Fabio. He motivated me all the way today.’ This was Armstrong’s second stage win in three years and he is about to finish his first Tour when the race ends in Paris tomorrow.

 

 

24 JULY 1995

INDURAIN HAS TIME TO SPARE AS HE PEDALS HOME TO RECORD

Phil Liggett in Paris

Miguel Indurain duly took his place in the record books on the Champs-Elysées yesterday when, in glorious sunshine, he finished the 2,300-mile Tour de France as winner for a fifth successive year. Before a crowd estimated at 300,000 the Spaniard allowed the rest to make the running during the eight laps of the finishing circuit, observing from the back of the 115 survivors as Djamolidine Abdoujaparov snatched the stage win after 97 miles through the Chevreuse from Ste Geneviève des Bois.

Indurain, who led home the only complete team of nine, wins £300,000 and the team will have netted nearer to £1 million from prizes along the route. He becomes only the fourth member of the ‘five’ club, joining Jacques Anquetil (France) who won in 1957 and 1961–64, Eddy Merckx (Belgium) the winner from 1969–72 and again in 1974, and another Frenchman, Bernard Hinault (1978, ’79, ’81, ’82 and ’85).

As with all his victories, Indurain has won the race by his domination in the time trials and, since his first win in 1991, he has won ten races against the clock, but none of the massed-start road-race stages. On Saturday, he removed any doubt of a fifth win when he led throughout the 29-mile time trial around Lac de Vassivière, near Limoges.

Of all the five-times winners, Indurain is the most liked by his rivals, who are conscious of the way he tries not to humiliate them in defeat. His wins are always calculated, and this is probably why he has never seen the need to win in the road races. This year, after taking the lead in Belgium in the time trial there, he only reacted in the mountains when those nearest to him threatened his lead. He did just enough to reduce their time gains and keep his yellow jersey, but he never took away their moment of achievement, which was winning the stage.

It is impossible not to like the quiet man from outside Pamplona because he does nothing to create offence. He only gives interviews in Spanish, although he understands French, as he is afraid he will be misquoted in anything but his native tongue.

 

 

9 OCTOBER 1996

ARMSTRONG DETERMINED TO OVERCOME CANCER

Phil Liggett

Lance Armstrong, who in 1993 became the youngest professional world champion since Eddy Merckx, and this year was the first American to win a traditional classic race, has testicular cancer. The condition has spread into his abdomen and lungs but Armstrong puts his chances of a complete cure at between 60 and 85 per cent.

Armstrong, 25, recently signed a contract with the new French professional team Cofidis, thought to be worth almost £1 million per year. He decided to make his condition public after an emergency operation last Thursday for the removal of a testicle. He said: ‘Last Wednesday I was diagnosed with testicular cancer. Before seeing my doctor I had been experiencing swelling and coughing up some blood.’

The Texan, without doubt the finest rider in the United States since the retirement of Greg LeMond, has enjoyed an exceptional season which has seen him climb to fourth place in both the World Cup series and the world rankings. He will undergo intense chemotherapy for nine weeks from his home in Austin. ‘My condition is seen to be advanced,’ said Armstrong, who had complained of saddle soreness and enlargement of a testicle.

Last week he talked to his team doctor Jim Ochowicz as he suspected a hernia, but a professional consultation later revealed the cancer. He said: ‘I have been assured that there is no reason why I cannot make a full and complete recovery. I want everyone to know that I intend to beat it and to ride again.’ Doctors have told him he can ride his bicycle whenever he wishes while undergoing chemotherapy, as soon as the operation scars heal.

Captain of the Motorola team, Armstrong has won two stages of the Tour de France, but he says his most emotional win was in Limoges last year following the death a few days earlier of team-mate Fabio Casartelli, who was killed during a descent in the Pyrenees.

 

 

16 JUNE 1997

MEMORIAL BRINGS HONOUR TO BRITISH KING OF THE ROAD

Sarah Edworthy

Just over a kilometre from the summit of Mont Ventoux, the 6,720-foot extinct volcano that dominates Provence, a simple marble memorial marks the spot where Tom Simpson, Britain’s greatest road-racing cyclist, collapsed and died among the glaring white rocks on 13 July 1967.

Although it is 30 years since his death at 29, on the 13th stage of the Tour de France, that monument is still an active shrine. Two-wheeled pilgrims drape it in cycling paraphernalia – hats, inner tubes, water bottles and brake blocks – inspired by the man who died a victim of his desperate ambition to prove that a Briton could win the Tour de France. The mayor from the nearby town of Bédoin regularly has to send up his workforce to tidy up the site.

There is also a stone in Belgium, where Simpson chose to live to facilitate a professional career that was unique for a boy from a north Nottinghamshire pit village.

In a well attended ceremony yesterday before the annual Tom Simpson Memorial Grand Prix, his family and friends watched with pride as a stone, cut in half and faced with a silhouette of a cyclist like the one on the Ventoux, was unveiled in his home village in front of the recreation ground around whose grass tracks Simpson once raced. A Union Flag was pulled off by Simpson’s widow Helen, who later married his friend and rival Barry Hoban. It carries a simple message: ‘In memory of a Harworth cyclist.’

The Abraham Lincoln log-cabin-to-president theme is something his family want local children to relate to. ‘It’s about an ordinary person who achieved great things, a story about a person who really tried and made mistakes and wasn’t perfect but did a lot of good and made people happy,’ explained his nephew Chris Sidwells.

Why has it taken so long for Simpson’s homeland to commemorate him? And why the understatement? Those who can recall one of the bleakest days in British sport will have an inkling, but a generation has grown up curious about why this great hero of his time has ‘not been remembered perhaps as he should be’, as Sidwells delicately puts it.

Simpson was a remarkable athlete who burst into the headlines when at 18 he knocked out the reigning world champion in the quarter-finals of the national 4,000 metres pursuit championships and went on to take the silver medal. From there he was selected to ride in the 1956 Melbourne Olympics, where he won bronze, and later silver at the 1958 Commonwealth Games.

In 1959 he embarked on a professional career that included wins in cycling’s great monuments, the Tour of Flanders, Bordeaux-Paris, Milan-San Remo, Tour of Lombardy and Paris-Nice races. In 1962 he wore the yellow jersey for one stage of the Tour de France and in 1965, having won the world professional road race championship, he became world champion.

He also had charisma that shone beyond the handlebars. In 1965 Simpson was voted BBC Sports Personality of the Year (when Graham Hill and Bobby Moore were in the running) and won the Sports Writers’ Association and Daily Express awards – a triple equalled only by the Princess Royal – for his achievements in a sport which in Britain had never generated extensive media interest.

He was a great character – ‘Mr Tom’ or ‘Major Thompson’ the French dubbed him for his patriotic pride and tendency to wear bowler hats and City suits – and his personality and determination beam even from the yellowing press cuttings of his family scrapbooks. ‘He was exotic,’ Sidwells states simply, recalling anecdotes such as the time his uncle picked up his mother and him in a white Mercedes, put them in the back and drove up to visit family in the North-East wearing a chauffeur’s cap.

He assembled a famous collection of hats, and his family have a host of stories which illustrate his personality. There was the time he rode from Harworth to London on his bike, typically overambitious, to get fitted for his Olympic uniform and had to stop at Grantham on the way back and catch a train. And the time the nation feared a Communist kidnapping when Simpson failed to return from a cycling trip to Bulgaria in time to be best man at his brother’s wedding; he had simply been such a success behind the Iron Curtain that he had been invited to stay an extra week.

However, the poignancy of losing this boy from the land of black mining hills to that cruel white, strength-sapping French mountain was immediately overshadowed by the fact that amphetamines were found in his blood. But his is not a drugs story and it serves no purpose to see it as such, except in as much as it explains his family’s determined wish to re-establish his true importance within the history of British sport.

‘It’s a feeling I’ve always had that what he did for that race has to be judged against the background of what was happening in cycling in those days,’ says Sidwells. ‘There’s no doubt that he saw the Tour de France slipping away from him in the year he thought was now or never and, as it’s been put, sought help from outside the rules. My opinion was that he felt he’d gone too far and done too much towards his ambitions to see other people gaining from doing this. He saw it as hell but he justified it to himself that others were doing it.

‘Many people have done far more and paid less. It’s something that has been picked on more than his successes and it has led to him being a little bit forgotten in this country. He would have been 60 this year and we felt it was time to bring out his story to people. He was a hero. Everybody is vulnerable; he made mistakes and he paid a terrible price.’

On 13 July, Simpson’s daughter, Joanne, will return with Sidwells to Mont Ventoux, to ride up the same route as a continuation of this memorial. His 14-year-old grandson Thomas will also be riding the last two or three kilometres.

The family have returned often to the Ventoux. ‘It’s such a long way away, though. It will be nice to have a memorial here,’ said Sidwells. ‘When he died it felt like some sort of light went out in Harworth.’

 

 

7 JULY 1997

LIFT-OFF FOR BOARDMAN’S TOUR DE FRANCE

Sport on Television by Giles Smith

The opening stages of the Tour de France had a little competition for our enthusiasm and amazement this weekend. Given that the United States could land a probe on Mars, just how impressed were we meant to be at the prospect of a bunch of blokes taking three weeks to get from Rouen to Paris by bike?

Nevertheless, Channel 4 were out there as usual, ready to play Ground Control and assemble the first of their nightly half-hour bulletins on the state of the mission. And good for them. Mars may have its fascination, but so, too, does France, where the landscape is altogether more interesting, the climate a touch more hospitable and the food a definite improvement.

On location for lift-off was the city centre of Rouen where, on Saturday evening, the Prologue time trial took place to establish the race order for the first leg. This business had apparently been going on all day but, through a piece of inter-departmental planning of which NASA would have been proud, we arrive bang on time to catch the British interest, Chris Boardman, as he levered himself out of the starter’s hut and, without so much as a hand-signal, set off on his 8½-minute sprint.

It was clear immediately, even to those of us who would claim no expertise as professional cyclists, that Boardman was about to log a time to be reckoned with. After all, he was successfully holding in his wake two motorbikes, dangerously overloaded with cameramen, a police car with flashing lights and several other bicycles attached to the roof of a bright red Fiat.

But what, exactly, was he riding? A black, tubular construction, with a pair of garden shears where the handlebars ought to have been. It looked like a spare prop from Batman and Robin. It also condemned Boardman to a riding position in which his backside was at least four feet above the level of his head. Our commentator, Phil Liggett, who also excitedly alerted us to the bike’s electric gearshift, gave us an intelligent paraphrase of the ergonomic benefits accruing to Boardman from riding with his nose just above the front mudguard. It gave him ‘great penetration from the air’, apparently, which sounded a lot more enjoyable than it looked.

That Boardman’s machine actually qualified as a bicycle we only had Liggett’s word. That and the fact that the judges had not moved to disqualify it in advance, which, we were told, had happened to one of the other riders. Frustratingly, we were not given the reasons for the ban. In a world in which electric gearshifts get the nod it was hard to imagine what, exactly, would tip a bike over the limits. Perhaps the jet engines had infringed Rouen’s noise-pollution regulations.

Anyway, Boardman stormed through to take the yellow jersey despite a late challenge from the police car, which seemed to be finishing strongly but, sadly, had to brake sharply to avoid the various officials and spectators in the road beyond the finish line. In a touching closing ceremony, our man waved aloft a gold trophy in the shape of a Coca-Cola bottle, and just in case those of us at home weren’t getting the sponsor’s message loudly enough, an aide hustled a red plastic Coca-Cola bottle into his other hand so he could wave that, too.

 

 

28 JULY 1997

NEW KING ULLRICH POISED FOR LONG REIGN

Phil Liggett in Paris

Jan Ullrich, 23, became the first German winner of the 2,500-mile Tour de France yesterday when it ended on the Champs-Elysées in warm sunshine and before a crowd estimated at 300,000.

Ullrich, who led for 11 days, is the youngest winner since Laurent Fignon in 1984 and also had the biggest margin – 9 m 9 s over Frenchman Richard Virenque – since the same year. He collects the £250,000 first prize and could be the man to beat for the next seven years. He has already predicted he will retire at 30.

The man from Rostock was riding only his second Tour after finishing second to the Dane Bjarne Riis last year. His German Telekom team scooped the major share of the million-pound prize money – as they did last year – by winning the team prize, and Ullrich’s countryman, Erik Zabel, who won three stages, was way ahead in the green jersey points classification.

Ullrich, who lives in Merdingen, near the French border, is probably the last product of the East German athletics machine. He was sent, aged 12, to join the Dynamo cycling school after tests showed he had the best heart and lung capacity of all youngsters of his age. At nine he won his first race almost by accident when his elder brother took him to watch an event. A vacancy created by a sick rider gave Ullrich the opportunity to ride, and he won without difficulty.

Yesterday the fight had all gone from the other 138 competitors as they allowed Ullrich to enjoy the ride from Disneyland to Paris without the pressure he had absorbed with great maturity since taking the lead in the Pyrenees. The riders had been chatting, laughing and even drinking Champagne during the relaxed final day as there was virtually nothing except the stage win to be settled.

Ullrich’s future is assured, but the same cannot be said for Riis, who started as team leader and with the unwavering support of Ullrich, only to fade to a distant seventh, almost half an hour behind.

‘It is hard for Germans to understand why a Dane was leading the team and they would rather a German be the chief,’ said Ullrich. ‘But having said that, if Riis hadn’t won last year, Telekom might not have maintained their sponsorship. Last year I’d have been hard pressed to be recognised by my postman. Now the team media centre has to field all the calls and I get some pretty odd requests!’ he added.

In Saturday’s time trial, Riis let his frustration show in public for the first time. He fell off after signing in for the start at Disneyland and then arrived 20 seconds late for his departure. In the next ten miles he was stopped by a puncture and released all of his pent-up emotion by throwing the £7,000 bicycle across the grass.

There were unedifying parts of the Tour, with five riders kicked out. The sixth stage was probably the race’s low point, when stage winner Zabel was declassified for butting Frenchman Dominique Nazon. Belgian champion Tom Steels was thrown out for hurling his water bottle at Frédéric Moncassin in the final sprint and a crazy day culminated in three-times green jersey winner Djamolidine Abdoujaparov joining Steels after the ‘Tashkent Express’ failed a dope test.

 

 

11 JULY 1998

BUSINESS BLOOMING ALONG IRELAND’S HIGHWAYS AS TOUR COMES TO TOWN

Martin Johnson

If there is any substance to the apocryphal Irish story about lost foreign travellers, some time over the next few days a mud-splattered cyclist wearing a yellow jersey will pull up outside Flaherty’s Bar and say: ‘Excusez-moi, do you know the way to the Champs-Elysées?’ And, for once, the traditional response will not seem quite so Irish. ‘Well, if I were you, I wouldn’t start from here.’

However, starting from Ireland is indeed the plan for the world’s biggest cycling event, the Tour de France. It gets under way in earnest in Dublin tomorrow, continuing on Monday down in the south-east, before the huge entourage – which stretches for 40 miles and takes two hours to pass – is loaded on to a fleet of ferries and transported to France. The last time an armada of this size set sail for the French coast, they called it D-Day.

This is always assuming that the entire invasion is still not wandering around Dublin airport trying to work out the arrivals hall notice which says: ‘Exit. No Entry’, although the locals are equally confused by giant banners draped across the roads, saying things like: ‘Bienvenue à Kilkenny’.

On the face of it, Ireland is an incongruous starting point for the world’s most brutal cycle race, although Irish hospitality is such that in terms of feeling half-dead the morning after, it’s probably the ideal venue for a rider to acclimatise for the three weeks of torture that lie ahead. It was something of an eyebrow-raiser to discover that the pubs have all been granted extensions for the Tour, which, from previous experience, can only mean that Ireland has reinvented the 25-hour day.

There are historical connections with the Tour starting in Ireland, Monday’s Enniscorthy to Cork stage commemorating the 200th anniversary of the French landing here to help out the Irish – given their mutual dislike of the English – with the 1798 Rebellion. And it is down in the south-east that you get the real flavour of an Irish welcome which is costing the taxpayer £2 million, albeit for an expected return in tourism spin-offs of £25 million.

Halfway between Enniscorthy and Cork lies the small Tipperary town of Carrick-on-Suir, birthplace of one of the legends of Irish cycling, Sean Kelly. The peloton will be hurtling through the streets here on Monday afternoon, and it is not so much the spectators who will be holding their breath as the cyclists themselves, trying hard not to choke to death from inhaling the paint fumes.

There is not a wall or a building that has not been freshly emulsioned in Carrick over the past fortnight, a complete no-go area for the superstitious, as it is impossible to walk ten yards without passing underneath a ladder. In the Main Street is the Tour de France Information Centre, although it is not half as incongruous as the shop next door, which deals exclusively in the sale of Christmas puddings.

Inside Gerry’s Bar (which inevitably had a paint-splattered ladder propped up against one of the lounge windows) Gerry was chuckling over the town’s transformation. ‘I came here ten years ago, and had never even seen so much as a single paint brush until this week.’ He pointed across the street to the local hardware store. ‘I don’t know how much this race is going to bring in with tourism, but it won’t be half the amount yer man is raking in over there.’

It wasn’t so much the painting that Gerry minded, as the hanging baskets. ‘We have to make the town look nice for the cameras, but jeez, all this watering is a total pain.’ Mind you, compared with Enniscorthy, which has planted 10,000 flowers in French colours, Carrick is a horticultural desert, although it does have the edge in being more pedestrian friendly, having vaporised every last square inch of chewing gum from the pavements.

Most of the road between Enniscorthy and Cork has been resurfaced, while at the same time remaining largely impassable because of the invasion of council hedgerow-trimming machinery. Any cyclist leaving the road on this stage of the Tour will be comforted to know that he will be picking himself out of the neatest hedge on the entire 3,000 km.

There has also, needless to say, been an avalanche of local press coverage, with the Enniscorthy Echo leading the way. ‘Tour Fever Grips Town!’ was this week’s front page headline, though judging by the other top stories – ‘Train Was Late – But Nobody Cared’ and ‘Sheep Decline Heading For Decline’ – Enniscorthy’s definition of a fever is most people’s idea of a runny nose.

In purely cycling terms, one item attracting attention is the sad absence of a single Irish cyclist in the 1998 rider line-up, a far cry from the days when the Dublin traffic ground to a halt because of car drivers dashing into bars to find out how the likes of Stephen Roche and Sean Kelly were doing on that day’s stage.

 

 

14 JULY 1998

BOARDMAN HITS WALL TO CRASH OUT OF TOUR

Phil Liggett in Cork

Chris Boardman, the leader of the Tour de France since its start on Saturday, saw his race end abruptly yesterday after he touched the back wheel of a team-mate and crashed into a wall near Youghal during the second stage from Enniscorthy to Cork.

It was a sad end to Boardman’s short reign in the 2,400-mile race, and after lying stunned in the road for some minutes, he was taken to Cork University Hospital with head injuries and a suspected broken cheekbone. Doctors said that there were no breaks, though he would be detained overnight. He was placed in the ambulance wearing a neck brace and had cuts to his face, while his left arm was strapped across his chest.

The accident happened as the race sprung to life 900 metres before the time bonus sprint in Youghal. As the riders strung out, Boardman appeared to touch wheels and catapult out of the pack, falling heavily. The Wirral professional, who also crashed out of the race in pouring rain at St Brieuc in 1995 during the Prologue time trial – he won this year’s version in Dublin on Saturday – is the 13th leader of the race to give up since it began in 1903. He also gave up the Tour last year on the 13th stage.

 

 

25 JULY 1998

FEAR AND LOATHING IN FRANCE

THE TOUR STAGGERS ON AMID MYRIAD ALLEGATIONS OF DRUG ABUSE BY SOME OF THE LEADING TEAMS

Paul Hayward

Around four o’clock this afternoon, France’s most sacred sporting institution is scheduled to honk and swish its way into the Provence town of Carpentras at the end of another 121-mile pageant. Most summers, they would rest a night before making the gruelling climb to the summit of Mont Ventoux, the ‘Giant of Provence’, past the roadside memorial to Britain’s Tommy Simpson, whose amphetamine-fuelled heart gave up on him on 13 July 1967, as he made his own frantic ascent to sport’s dark peak. Like mourners with a guilty secret, the riders of the 1998 Tour de France will pass another way.

They will pass the way in turmoil: a vast convoy of rage and recrimination that may not make it to the Champs-Elysées at the end of the race tomorrow week. Yesterday TVM were also threatened with expulsion after drugs were found in the hotel where they were staying and three Festina riders admitted to police that they had used banned substances to help them race. As sport’s most spectacular drugs controversy found new ways to erupt, the remaining riders staged a two-hour strike before the start of the 12th stage, saying they would no longer be ‘treated like cattle’.

As the morning papers hit the breakfast tables of the 20 surviving teams, the following declaration roared out from the pages of Le Monde: ‘Who from now on could rejoice at seeing the rest of a compromised pack enter Paris, who would then be able to applaud the winner of a race without faith or law?’ Thirty-one years after Simpson became sport’s most famous casualty at the age of 29, drug abuse has advanced way beyond the desperate snorts of amphetamines by which Simpson tried to climb a viciously testing mountain. A sepia casualty from yesterday has become today’s Technicolor nightmare.

Cut to 18 days ago, when football’s World Cup was still at the semi-final stage: a 53-year-old masseur with the Festina racing team embarked on a roundabout route to Ireland. Willy Voet left the headquarters of the Tour Society in Evry, near Paris, and drove through Switzerland, Germany and Belgium before going on towards Calais en route to Dublin, where this year’s Le Grand Boucle was scheduled to start the following day. Voet never made it. At around 8 a.m. at Neuville-en-Ferrain on the Franco-Belgian border – close to the cycling-mad town of Roubaix – customs officers opened the boot of his car and found 235 doses of erythropoietin (EPO), 82 shots of growth hormones, a packet of anabolic steroids, 60 doses of testosterone, eight vaccines for hepatitis A, masking agents and syringes.

It was like a scene from Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, without the comic edge. Voet’s suitcase, say many in France, may yet come to be remembered as an undersized coffin for the Tour de France.

Any sport with a contestant called Bo Hamburger is plainly not for wimps and waifs. The world’s greatest cycle race is supposed to be the ultimate sporting test of human endurance, a celebration of the noble art of cycling, an homage to the French countryside, and a great emotional loop which tightens around the heart of France. They pass over snow-dusted Alpine ranges and through sunflower and lavender fields, chocolate-box villages and arid plains. Anyone who has seen a professional cycle race in motion is instantly sold on its charms. The Tour is biblical in intensity, sport beyond the edge of what should be possible. But if the current prognosis is right, we are seeing a 20th-century lunacy exposed. Is the Tour de France an event that can’t be done, never mind won, without performance-enhancing drugs?

The innocent, the wiry warriors who have fought the roads of France unassisted these past 95 years, will rise up in protest. Yet the scale of what is happening to this merciless trial of physical and mental strength leads many to believe that the wheels are about to cease turning. Or maybe this is a seminal moment in sport for a different reason. The public, as much as cycling, could end up on trial in Lille. Will they continue to sign up to a sport they believe to be incurably corrupt, cramming the lanes of France to catch a glimpse of a passing pharmacy? Will they conclude that the war on drugs in sport, as in society, is unwinnable and that everybody should be allowed to take whatever they want, with the devil – and the broom-wagon – taking the hindmost?

A fortnight after they won the World Cup, the French should be returning to more traditional summer pleasures: marvelling at the stamina and bravery of the performers and enjoying the gastronomic and aesthetic delights of a country still gulping down the glory of capturing la Coupe du Monde. Should be. But from the moment daylight broke into the boot of Voet’s Fiat, the Tour de France has been in a sort of toxic shock. There are those who believe that athletics will now be dragged into the ensuing investigation. At the end of the century, a reckoning may be upon us, started by a Customs check that shone a light on not just a narcotic stockpile but the moral legitimacy of a sport.

The peloton who will miss Simpson’s memorial, and instead set off from Valreas to Grenoble tomorrow, is missing a few familiar faces. All nine Festina riders were taken into custody by French police on Thursday as part of the ever-widening inquiry into the contents of Voet’s car. The authorities also swooped on the team’s business manager, Joel Chaberon, and two other officials. Chaberon and three riders were later released.

These are no bit-part players on the Tour’s great snaking express of 21 teams from seven countries. Richard Virenque was runner-up in last year’s Tour; Laurent Brochard is the world champion; Alex Zulle is one of cycling’s leading pros, and Laurent Dufaux (fourth in the 1996 Tour) the winner of this year’s Tour of Romandie. Bruno Roussel, the Festina director, and Erik Ryckaert, the team doctor, are behind bars in Lille after being charged by Judge Patrick Keil under France’s 1989 anti-drugs laws.

It gets worse: the Dutch TVM team may be next. In March, French customs found 104 syringes primed with EPO in a car driven by two TVM mechanics. EPO boosts the red blood-cell count and enables the bloodstream to transport more oxygen around the system. The TVM case has resurfaced with potentially devastating results. On Thursday, the Tour’s rest day, police detained Cees Priem, the TVM manager, their Russian doctor and a mechanic for questioning. Laurent Roux, their leading rider, has denied that drugs are used by the TVM team. Meanwhile, Belgian police say they also want to interview Festina officials after finding documents and data at the home of Ryckaert which allegedly show that EPO is being used by Festina.

Riders, doctors, a masseur, mechanics and team managers have all been dragged into the maelstrom. When criminal charges are heard after the riders rattle up the Champs-Elysées on 2 August (assuming they do), an event that has woven its way into French culture since 1903, and a sport that harnesses man and machine without violating nature, could disappear under a mudslide of disclosures and revelations. Even the Tour’s famous omerta may not withstand the possible prosecution of large swathes of the Festina team, who were expelled from the race amid high drama eight days ago, with Virenque, who had shaken hands with the wife of Jacques Chirac days earlier, sobbing in front of the cameras in a French café. In a statement issued through his solicitor just hours before Festina’s expulsion, Roussel admitted: ‘A concerted system for supplying cyclists with drugs was organised between management, doctors, the masseur and the riders in the Festina team.’

Drugs in cycling are not new. In his book Rough Ride, winner of the William Hill Sports Book of the Year Award for 1990, Paul Kimmage describes the suffocating vow of silence which binds riders to the cause. Those who break the omerta, he reveals, are said to have ‘craché dans la soupe’ (spat in the soup). Kimmage tells the story of the Frenchman, Didier Garcia, who reached the top at 19 and came under intense peer pressure to start taking amphetamines and corticoids. He consumed so much ‘speed’ before races that he needed Valium to sleep when they were over. In Kimmage’s words, Garcia saw a rider ‘go berserk at three o’clock in the morning. He smashed his room to pieces, broke the toilet bowl and was unapproachable for 15 minutes.’ Garcia quit and found a job in a hospital on £700 a month.

‘To survive,’ writes Kimmage, ‘I was forced, against my will, to take drugs. It happened three times. I was never caught. If I had been caught, I would have been branded – as all drug-takers are branded – a cheat. Isn’t that ridiculous? A cheat, “an unfair player”. I was never a cheat. I WAS A VICTIM. A victim of a corrupt system, a system that actually promotes drug-taking in sport.

‘Before all this [his own career], I was too young and innocent. I looked into the sweaty faces of the stars through the TV screen and photographs and saw only glory. And now what do I see? I see dilated pupils and unnatural spots. I study not what they eat but what they swallow. Where once I applauded muscle, now I question its fabrication.’

The testing procedures, Kimmage alleges, were inadequate or non-existent. Team managers always seemed to know when the testers would swoop. EPO, which, in the words of one former rider, can turn blood ‘to jam’, and is potentially lethal if misused, is easily the most prevalent designer drug in cycling. Worse, it is undetectable.

Privately, some cyclists are saying that the problem is just as bad, if not worse, in track and field, and that outsiders cannot begin to understand the pressure that is exerted on young recruits to join the gang. The mantra is: others are, so you have to. And Kimmage’s revelations raise the question of how much the race organisers know about it and how hard they are trying to stamp it out. A low number of positive tests does not mean that there is low usage. It can mean that the substances are undetectable, that the riders find out in advance when and where the testers will strike, or even that officialdom is looking the other way.

The evidence of the last fortnight suggests, at the very least, that the Tour’s organisers have taken a less than robust stance on what appears to be an endemic problem and a serious threat to health. After Voet’s arrest, Jean-Claude Killy, president of the Tour’s commercial arm, dismissed the emerging Festina scandal as ‘a sideshow’ (Voet, hilariously, tried to convince police in Lille that the drugs were entirely for his own consumption, which, if true, would have turned him into King Kong). Even after Roussel and Ryckaert had been arrested, Jean-Marie Leblanc, the race director, declared: ‘I think the Tour will quickly emerge from this dirty story. This business is incidental and has nothing to do with the race itself.’

But others are having their say. Gilles Delion, a former great French hope, repeated his claim that he was driven out of the sport after denouncing the widespread use of EPO. ‘They had no choice, but the damage is terrible,’ he said. ‘To be caught out by a test these days, you’ve got to be a total idiot.’ Lionel Jospin, the French Prime Minister, urged ‘transparency’ on the cycling world. The sports minister, Marie-George Buffet, declared: ‘The biggest hypocrisy would be to believe that this is only happening in cycling in July.’ Then, last weekend, the Belgian national champion, Alain van den Bossche, claimed that he had used EPO for a year with the Dutch TVM team. The team manager, taken away for questioning in the Pyrenees on Thursday, had said that Van den Bossche must have acted alone, and that the 104 vials in the back of the TVM mechanics’ car had been planted.

Gilbert Collard, Virenque’s lawyer, has issued a statement, saying: ‘I completely contest this decision to ban Festina from the Tour. There is no proof of doping; all the tests were negative and I have doubts about the testing procedure.’ But Virenque’s denial was lost in a swirl of new admissions from the Festina officials behind bars. Ryckaert’s lawyer told reporters that ‘Festina’s riders were forced to put part of their prize-money into a fund which was used to buy doping products’. These ‘products’, said Ryckaert, were stocked at the team headquarters near Lyon. And of the many ironies that present themselves in this saga, one will endure to the final inch of the race. The logo that appears in the bottom of our television screens says: ‘Festina.’ They are the official time-keepers for the Tour de France.

Cycling in Europe is regarded as a vital component of civilised life. It is part of the fabric of France, Germany, Spain, Italy and the Low Countries. The Tour de France was always one of the greatest of all sporting events – anywhere – and until now the incidences of proven drug abuse have not dimmed its astonishing popularity. But this is something different. The strike by riders at Tarasccon-sur-Ariège yesterday suggests that even they are buckling under the moral strain. If Kimmage is right, many of them are caught between callous team regimes, their own ambition, and the increasing proximity of the long arm of the law, which threatens to sweep away the whole Tour de France.

Soon we will find out whether it is drugs, rather than bicycles, that the sport has really been peddling. Simpson’s shrine has been wreathed in flowers and mementos since he expired through drug-induced heat exhaustion. Mont Ventoux, appropriately, is an extinct volcano, but for cycling it might be about to blow.

 

 

31 JULY 1998

TRAGIC SPECTACLE OF AN EPIC EVENT BEING TORN TO PIECES

Phil Liggett

For 26 years I have followed every day of the Tour de France. I have seen cyclists die, as in the case of Italy’s Fabio Casartelli. I have seen my car reduced to a spade-load of debris after Basque separatists blew it up near San Sebastian in 1992. And, above all, I have seen brave riders crawl across the finish, so that they can go through the same pain the next day.

So the events of the past three weeks will be remembered by me and many others as one of the great sadnesses in sport this decade. The Tour’s history, as colourful as the riders themselves, is full of stories of human endurance, as man has persuaded his body to achieve feats which most would believe could never even be attempted.

Since the Tour started in 1903, and the early days of marathon stages, when riders would sleep on the roadside and secret controls were set up to stop cheats missing out the mountains, the event has entered the folklore of not just France, but the world.

During July, Tour fever is epidemic. A million spectators a day is quite normal and 1,000 media men are seen bizarrely charging around back roads in an attempt to beat the riders to the line. Television is live to 100 countries and all they want to see and talk about is the race’s maillot jaune.

The Tour is no longer just a sporting event, it is part of the fabric of French culture. Yet the doping scandals and the way they have been handled these past few days have made many ask if the French themselves are trying to destroy their own heritage.

Make no mistake, some cyclists – but not all – take drugs and so do athletes, swimmers, footballers and any other sportsmen who are chasing a big cash reward.

Just now, the race is throwing up a clutch of young riders, such as the Australians Robbie McEwen and Stuart O’Grady, and the rider who is currently second, Bobby Julich. I know these guys well, and I believe they are clean, living through hateful times which, as McEwen hopes, ‘will change soon’.

Jean-Marie Leblanc is a sad-looking race director, walking around this week with a frown on his face and the drooping eyes of a bloodhound. Despite friends in high places – after all, he is the only man to get the Champs-Elysées closed for anything except the Bastille Day parade – he sees his race as being under threat from the scandals which, so far, have had nothing directly to do with this event.

When the riders went on strike on Wednesday, after the TVM team had been taken to a hospital in police custody to give compulsory blood, urine and DNA tests, he launched an impassioned appeal to the riders ‘as friends’ and to the 20 team managers not to stop but continue in the race whatever happens. More arrests are likely today when the race returns to France, but at what stage will the police or examining judges admit why they are subjecting the riders and the race to a series of high-profile raids without apparent result?

The public continue to watch the event in massive numbers and they mainly support the riders, but if some are cheats, they must be weeded out and severely punished. In modern times, when medical knowledge seems as important as riding ability, there are always the suspicions which surround teams or riders who pay doctors a lot of money to be with them. It is a fact that those teams or individuals who have private doctors tend also to be the best performers. With the arrest of Dr Erik Ryckaert from Festina, and with the confessions which followed last week, these doctors have to fight now to regain credibility.

The International Cycling Union, the sport’s governing body, have become transparent during this race and have yet to face the biggest scandal to hit the sport for many, many years. UCI president Hein Verbruggen did appear briefly to say: ‘We don’t know how many take dope. It could be as many as 40 per cent.’

When the latest round of arrests came, Verbruggen was on holiday in India. It is a week since the Festina riders admitted taking dope, yet there has been no announcement of long-term suspensions from the headquarters in Lausanne. In fact, some of the team are already planning their next races. The pain continues.

 

 

3 AUGUST 1998

SWASHBUCKLING PANTANI PLUNDERS RARE DOUBLE

Phil Liggett in Paris

Marco Pantani was crowned champion of the Tour de France on the Champs-Elysées yesterday, carrying off the £200,000 winner’s prize to an enormous cheer from one of the largest crowds to watch the finish for some years. For a moment there was no thought of the drug-taking revelations which have marred the race.

Pantani, who had survived the setback of a puncture in the final stage, was welcomed on to the winner’s podium by the last Italian winner, Felice Gimondi, who triumphed in 1965. He had also become only the seventh rider to win the Tour de France and the Giro d’Italia in the same season.

With the final places decided in Saturday’s time trial, won by Jan Ullrich but not by enough to catch Pantani, the pressure yesterday was off. Yet this amazing race delivered one last surprise when Pantani suffered a puncture on the third lap of ten on the Champs-Elysées.

At the time it was raining heavily, with thunderclaps sounding for the last act of a race that refused to go away quietly. Pantani changed his back wheel and his team fell back one by one to pace him back to the pack. It was a moment when his 3 m 21 s winning margin over Ullrich seemed fragile, but he showed no panic and he slowly caught up.

Despite the problems of the Tour, the atmosphere on the road from Melun to Paris had the ambience of any previous race, with the riders pedalling towards the Champs-Elysées at a leisurely pace and with a smile and a wave to the public who, despite the scandals, still clearly adore the occasion.

Pantani, wearing a headscarf which brought a reality to his nickname of ‘The Pirate’, sipped Champagne with Andrea Tafi, the Italian champion. Pantani’s six surviving team members had dyed their hair yellow overnight, while he, being bald, settled for a colour change to his goatee beard.

His achievement is all the more remarkable considering his recovery from two serious injuries. In 1995 Pantani, who looks likely to switch from Mercatone Uno to the more powerful Mapei team next season on a basic annual salary of £1.2 million, was out on a training run for the Tour of Italy when a driver ignored a red light and smashed into him. The accident cost Pantani three days in hospital and a ride in the Giro, and he had not fully recovered for the Tour de France. Yet he won two stages, beating Indurain up Alpe d’Huez and four days later taking the Guzet-Neige stage after a 42-km breakaway.

No sooner had he performed those Tour de France heroics than he encountered another Italian driver. Hurtling down a hill at 50 mph in the Milan-Turin race, he rounded a bend and hit a Jeep being driven towards him. He suffered a double open fracture of his left leg and the injury took a year out of his career.

In October, when he saw the route of this year’s Tour de France, he maintained he would ride for stage wins, as the mountain stages were not difficult enough for him to gain time. In reality, he not only won two stages, but on a wet and cold day on the way to Les Deux Alpes he destroyed the field.

He attacked with such ferocity in the Alps that he left no one in a position to win the Tour. Pantani’s victory that day, which ended with him nine minutes ahead of Ullrich, who would manage only 25th place, brought back memories of the old days when riders won by minutes. Ullrich was left behind by a puncture just before the last climb to Les Deux Alpes, then broke down mentally as his overall lead evaporated.

Many believed Ullrich, who won easily last year, would not start the next day, but not only did he reappear, but he attacked to such an extent that only Pantani could hold him. Ullrich was the Tour loser, but remains a great champion who will almost certainly win this race again.

 

 

10 AUGUST 1998

FRENCH FARCE

Sir,

As the founder of the British Professional and Independent Cycling Association in 1956 and their secretary for some years, it was my job to report on the death of Tommy Simpson who died on the slopes of Mont Ventoux in the 1967 Tour de France.

We thought, at that time, that this tragedy would expose and eliminate drug use by cyclists. Now, 31 years on, drug use has almost destroyed the Tour de France.

The world controlling body for cycling (UCI) have proved ineffective in putting their house in order regarding the problem.

To save the Tour de France and eliminate the numbers of people who would gain from the successes of ‘doped’ winners, it is essential to reintroduce – eliminating trade teams at one fell swoop – national and regional teams.

They would be regulated by the controlling body for the nation concerned. Therefore, riders would be under greater scrutiny by those officials, and by their team-mates who would not necessarily be in the same team for normal competition.

Dave Orford

BPICA National Secretary, 1956–62

 

 

21 JULY 1999

SWEPT ALONG BY TOUR DE FORCE

Andrew Baker

It is hard, from a distance, to understand why the Tour de France has such a powerful hold on the people of the country through which it travels. Hard to understand from televised snatches why people should bake on a mountainside for a glimpse of their toiling heroes, or swing from lamp-posts for a better view of the peloton flashing by.

But we do not often see the carnival that accompanies the Tour, smell the local specialities sizzling by the wayside, or taste the wine dispensed by one and all to one and all. The Tour is a travelling party, the highlight of the year in every village on the route. That is why last year’s drugs busts and strikes caused national trauma, why talk of a blighted future causes such gloom today.

The party passed yesterday through the town of St Lary-Soulan, which snuggles in a valley in the Pyrenees and marked the start of the final climb on yesterday’s stage. It must be a woeful landmark for the riders: from St Lary to the finish in Piau-Engaly is all uphill.

This is Richard Virenque country, in the heart of the mountains that France’s fallen hero considers his own. Mired in drug-related controversy, shoe-horned into the race against the wishes of the organisers, Virenque is attempting in the Pyrenees to earn back his place in the hearts of the nation the only way he knows – by conquering the climbs.

The crowd at St Lary-Soulan were not there to support Virenque. In 1997 the road would have been splattered with his name and the roadside plastered with ‘Allez Richard!’ banners. Yesterday the roads were pristine and the only placard was a message popular wherever television cameras congregate: ‘Salut Maman!’ This year’s Tour is not about partisan fervour. Virenque races in the polka-dot jersey of the King of the Mountains but he has become the Prince of Doubt. A Frenchman has yet to win a stage and the event is led by an American who has been exchanging grumbles with the French media since the race began.

The Tour’s preceding commercial caravan is like a high-speed version of London’s Lord Mayor’s Show, a cavalcade of outlandish floats dispensing music, propaganda and goodies from the various sponsors of the Tour and the teams. The spectators goggled at an extraordinary series of giant, mobile plastic mountains to Mammon. It was like a surreal version of The Generation Game conveyor belt: a space shuttle, a coffee grinder, a cheese, a mobile telephone, a dead wolf in a cooking pot, a vacuum cleaner, a watch, a sheep, a tube of pâté… all accompanied by grinning bimbos hurling T-shirts, stickers, hats and sweets into the ravenous crowd.

Such was the frenzy that you would think the inhabitants of St Lary-Soulan had never seen a promotional leaflet before. A man fell almost under the wheels of a van while he tried to grab a T-shirt, gendarmes struggled to restrain children crazy for lapel pins and a woman took a nasty blow from a flying mint.

The commotion had barely settled when a helicopter appeared overhead to herald the arrival of the stage leader. A hush fell over the crowd, then a great cheer broke as the slight green figure of Fernando Escartín swept into view. Two breaths and a wiggle of the hips later he was disappearing up the hill and the wait began again for his pursuers.

Alex Zulle passed through and then (to a slight escalation in cheering) Virenque, soon followed by Lance Armstrong in a group of six. But the greeting given to the leaders was not measurably more enthusiastic than that accorded to the peloton some 20 minutes later.

When the Tour passes through it is not winners that matter but those who take part, including the spectators.

 

 

26 JULY 1999

ARMSTRONG SEALS THE SWEETEST VICTORY OF THEM ALL

Phil Liggett in Paris

Lance Armstrong, the American who has led the 2,400-mile Tour de France for the past two weeks, was confirmed as its winner yesterday when the race arrived on the Champs-Elysées on a glorious summer’s day. His final margin was a crushing 7 m 37 s over Switzerland’s Alex Zulle, while the best Frenchman was Richard Virenque in eighth place.

Armstrong’s win is worth £250,000, which he is likely to give to his team, as is the tradition among Tour winners, but he can expect to earn well in excess of £1 million next season. Immediately after the Tour he will ride circuit races in Holland and France, believed to be worth £60,000, and on Wednesday he flies to America, to be greeted by President Clinton in the White House on Friday.

Following the drug scandals of 1998 this was, as the organisers had hoped, a Tour of Redemption. But with reduced crowds in the mountains and still an air of suspicion on the riders’ performances, many remain to be convinced. Certainly, there were sceptics in the French media. Le Monde and L’Equipe both worked hard to discredit Armstrong’s victory, refusing to accept that a man once dying of cancer could win the race without resorting to drugs, and yesterday L’Equipe confirmed that, for the first time, the winner of the Tour had refused to grant them a final interview.

Armstrong said: ‘What has happened to me is a miracle. Just because the French have had their worst Tour since 1926, they are wrong to take it out on me.’ French disappointment centred on the failure to win even a single stage; their last overall winner was Bernard Hinault, as far back as 1985.

In winning the fourth stage, Armstrong joined the five-time winners of the Tour – Eddy Merckx, Bernard Hinault and Miguel Indurain – as the only riders to have won all the time-trial stages in a single Tour.

Zulle, a rider of undoubted class whose image was tarnished after he admitted to using the blood-booster EPO during the last Tour – when his Festina team were thrown off the race – is one of the few suspect riders to have made a successful return. His Tour started well with a second place in the Prologue time trial. But he lost all hope of victory when he crashed on the Passage du Gois on the third day, losing six minutes. Zulle was forced to accept he ‘had no answer’ to Armstrong in either the mountains or the time trials.

Back in October 1996, when he told the world that he was fighting testicular cancer which had spread to his lungs and brain, Armstrong’s doctors gave him little chance of survival. He endured five-day sessions of chemotherapy and underwent a series of operations to remove a testicle, golf-ball sized tumours from his lungs and two lesions from his brain. Yesterday, he admitted: ‘When I drove away from the doctors, I thought I was going to die.’