[CR]RE: questions about racing in the 30's

(Example: Bike Shops)

Date: Sat, 30 Jul 2005 10:26:02 -0800
From: "Chuck Schmidt" <chuckschmidt@earthlink.net>
To: classicrendezvous@bikelist.org
Subject: [CR]RE: questions about racing in the 30's
References: <000001c594c8$b9946f50$3e606c51@nonefpfvwek4mv>


Marc Garcia asked:
> Also, there was a reference to doping in the 30's.
> What substance was used to "dope?"

THE NEW YORKER AUGUST 21 & 28, 2000 pp. 94-103

THE HARDEST TEST

Drugs and the Tour de France. BY JULIAN BARNES

In the first week of July, as the Tour de France meandered joustingly down the flat western side of the country, I visited a small cycling museum in the mid-Wales spa town of Llandrindod Wells. Halfway around this testament to curatorial obsession, among the velocipedes and the 1896 Crypto Front Wheel Drivers, the passionate arrangements of cable clips and repair-outfit tins, there is a small display window containing the vestimentary leavings of the British cyclist Tom Simpson. A grubby white jersey with zippered neck, maker's emblem (Le Coq Sportif), big Union Jacks on each shoulder, and discolored glue bands across the thorax indicating the removal of perhaps a sponsor's name, perhaps the colored stripes awarded for some previous triumph. Black trunks with "PEUGEOT" embroidered in surprisingly delicate white stitchwork across the left thigh. Chamois-palmed string-backed cycling gloves with big white press buttons at the back of the wrist, and the fingers mittenishly cut off at the first joint. This is what Simpson had been wearing on July 13, 1967, during the thirteenth stage of the Tour, when he collapsed on Mont Ventoux, the highest of the Provençal Alps. Thirty-three years to the day of his death, the 2000 Tour was due to climb the mountain again.

Back in 1962, Simpson had been the first British rider ever to wear the race leader's yellow jersey (only three other Britons have acquired it since); he had been World Champion in 1965, and in 1967 had already won Paris-Nice, the early-season classic flatteringly known as the Race to the Sun. He was a strong, gutsy cyclist, popular with fellow-riders, the press, and the public. He also played up cheerfully to the Englishman's image, posing emblematically with bowler hat and furled umbrella. A memorial to him near the summit of Mont Ventoux lists his achievements as "Olympic Medallist, World Champion, British Sporting Ambassador," and the last of these three is no sentimental piety. If sport increasingly becomes a focus for brain-dead chauvinism, it also, at its best, acts as a solvent, transcending national identity and raising the sport, and the sportsperson, above such concerns. Simpson was one of those transplanted stars who won over a foreign public, and his martyrish suffering on a French mountain added to the myth. His name is still widely remembered in France--more so, probably, than in Britain.

Mont Ventoux, which rises to just over nineteen hundred metres, doesn't appear especially sharp-sided or rebarbative from a distance. For those on foot, it is comparatively welcoming: Petrarch climbed it with his brother and two servants in 1336, and a local hiking firm offers nighttime ascents for the reasonably fit with a promise of spectacular sunrises. For the Tour rider, it is another matter. Other mountains in the race may be higher or steeper but seem more friendly, or more functional--or at least more routine, being climbed more often. The Ventoux is a one-off. Its appearance is perpetually wintry: the top few hundred metres are covered with a whitish scree, giving the illusion of a snowbound summit even in high summer. A few amateur botanists may scour its slopes for polar flora (the Spitzbergen saxifrage, the Greenland poppy), but there is little other recreational activity on offer here. The Ventoux is just a bleak and hulking mountain with an observatory at the top. There is no reason for going up it except that the Tour planners order you to go up it. Cyclists fear and hate the place, while the fact that the Tour, which follows a different route every year, makes the ascent only once every five years or so increases its mystique, builds its broodingness. The American Lance Armstrong called the Tour de France "a contest in purposeless suffering" in his autobiography, "It's Not About the Bike"; the climb of Mont Ventoux epitomizes this implacably.

When the tree line runs out, there is nothing up there but you and the weather, which is violent and capricious. The story goes that on the day Simpson died a thermometer in a café halfway up the mountain exploded when registering fifty-four degrees centigrade (officially, the temperature was in the nineties Fahrenheit). But there is one thing cyclists fear as much as heat: wind. One task of the support riders in a team is to protect their leader from the wind; they cluster around him on windy stretches like worker bees protecting the queen. (This abnegation is also self-interested, for in the Tour the monarch is also a cash crop, his prize money being divided among the team at the race's end.) But on the mountains, where the weaker fall away, the top riders am often left to themselves, unprotected. And the Ventoux, where the mistral mixes with the tramontane, is officially the windiest place on earth: in February, 1967, the world gusting record was set there, at three hundred and twenty kilometres per hour. Popular etymology derives Ventoux from _vent,_ "wind," making it Windy Mountain; appropriate but erroneous. The proper etymology--_vinturi,_ from the Ligurian root _ven,_ meaning mountain--is duller but perhaps truer. Mount Mountain: a place to make bikers feel they're climbing not one peak but two; a place to give bikers double vision.

As I drove toward the mountain the day before the Tour climbed it, there was cloud hanging over its summit, but otherwise the day felt clear, if breezy. This changed quickly on the upper slopes. Cloud covered the top fifteen hundred feet or so; visibility dropped to a few yards; the wind rose. By the side of the road, hardy fans who had arrived early to claim their places were double-chocking the wheels of their camper vans and piling stones halfway up the rims for extra security. The Simpson memorial--the profile of a crouched rider set on a granite slab--is placed a kilometre and a half from the summit on the eastern side. It has a handsome simplicity subverted by the clutter of heartfelt junk laid on the steps in front of it. Some mourners have simply added a large white stone from the nearby slope; but more have overlaid the site with a jumble of cycling castoffs--water bottles, logoed caps, T-shirts, energy bars, a saddle, a couple of tires, a symbolic broken wheel. It is part Jewish grave, part the tumultuous altar of some popular if dubious Catholic saint. All this was difficult to take in because the cold and the wind were pulling so much water into my eyes. It felt locally strange to be attempting some vague act of homage while being barely able to stand; more largely strange in that the winds--gusting at more than a hundred and fifty kilometres per hour that day--seemed to have absolutely no effect in dispersing the cloud. After a few minutes, I got back into the car and drove down the mountain to Bédoin, where I found that the bones of my fingers and toes still ached from the cold. I craved a whiskey. An hour or so later, snow fell on the summit.

When Petrarch set out on his ascent, he encountered, like any modern journalist, a quotable peasant who just happened to have climbed the mountain himself fifty years previously. However, the fellow "had got for his pains nothing except fatigue and regret, and clothes and body torn by the rocks and briars. No one, so far as he or his companions knew, had ever tried the ascent before or after him." Petrarch's brother headed for the summit by the most direct, and therefore hardest, route; while the poet, being wilier or lazier, kept trying to find an easier way. Each time the trail would prove false, and this shameful halfheartedness brought Ovid to mind. "To wish is little: we must long with the utmost eagerness to gain our end." For Petrarch, the excursion up the Ventoux turned out to be a metaphor of the spiritual journey: it is uphill all the way, and there are no shortcuts.

But bikers, like hikers, are always looking for shortcuts. Next to the Simpson display window in Llandrindod Wells, I saw a publicity photograph of Mrs. Billie Dovey, a prewar cycling belle promoted as "the Rudge-Whitworth 'Keep Fit Girl.'" This smiling, bespectacled icon pedals toward us in sepia innocence, an advertisement for comradely physical improvement, the healthy life, _mens sana in corpore sano._ But, as in most sports, the higher and the more professional you go, the less Corinthian it becomes. Various factors led to Simpson's death on July 13, 1967: the heat, the mountain, the lack of support (he was riding with a weak national team), the pressure on a rider approaching thirty to win the Tour before his time passed. But a prime cause of Simpson's death on Mont Ventoux was the use of amphetamines, which helped his body ignore sense, and made his last words a dying plea to be put back on his bike. Traces of amphetamines were found in Simpson's body and among his kit. Speed kills, the moralists asserted. But Simpson's case was hardly egregious. Amphetamines--famously used to keep bomber crews alert on long missions--were widely consumed by cyclists in the postwar years. Their explosive effect caused them to be nicknamed _la bomba_ in Italian, _la bombe_ in French, and the somewhat more sinister _atoom_ in Dutch. In the late fifties, the legendary Italian rider Fausto Coppi was asked on French radio if all riders took _la bomba._ "Yes," he replied, "and those who claim the opposite aren't worth talking to about cycling." "So did you take _la bomba?_" the interviewer continued. "Yes, whenever it was necessary." "And when was it necessary?" "Practically all the time." The five-time Tour winner Jacques Anquetil told the French sports daily _L'Équipe_ in the year Simpson died, "You'd have to be an imbecile or a hypocrite to imagine that a professional cyclist who rides 235 days a year can hold himself together without stimulants."

Benjo Maso, the Dutch sociologist and historian of cycling, enlightened and depressed me about the prehistory of drug use. In the early days, this meant mainly strychnine, cocaine, and morphine, though there were also folksier pick-me-ups, like bull's blood and the crushed testicles of wild animals. An Englishman named Linton died from his exertions in the Bordeaux-Paris race of 1896; his death was generally attributed to the use of drugs, probably morphine. In the nineteen-twenties, riders used "incredible amounts of booze." Maso cited another Bordeaux-Paris race (the event called for herculean stamina, being run in a single stretch, right through the night), in which the allowance per man in one team was a bottle of eau-de-vie, some port, some white wine, and some champagne. These alcoholic habits continued; there are photos of Tour de France riders refuelling in bars and cafés. At Bédoin, where the Ventoux climb begins, Simpson is said to have complicated his body by stopping off with other riders for a drink, rumor has served him with a whiskey and a pastis. This may sound foolishly self-defeating now, but at the time Tour regulations permitted the riders' support staff to give them liquid only at certain intervals; moreover, there was a general belief among the _peloton_ (the main bunch of riders) that alcohol taken during the course of an event did you no harm, since it was quickly sweated out. Athletes and alcohol: I remembered that Captain Webb, the first person to swim the English Channel, in 1875, had washed his breakfast down that day with claret, and sustained himself on the way to Calais with brandy and "strong old ale." Has it always been going on, I asked Maso. "Well, they had breath tests for alcohol in the ancient Olympic games," he replied.

This all seems less shocking when you look at the terrain and remember that the riders have to cover three thousand six hundred and thirty kilometres in three weeks, with only two rest days. The Tour de France is easily the most punishing endurance event in the athletic world. A triathlon, by comparison, is a fun run. (Armstrong was a triathlete before becoming a professional cyclist.) The British rider David Millar, a Tour débutant this year, summed up a day that for him had consisted of eight and a half hours in the saddle, followed by a two-hour traffic jam to get to a hotel where the restaurant had closed and he was unable even to get a massage: "Sadomasochism," he said. If driving down the Ventoux to Bédoin leaves you croaking for a whiskey, you'd certainly need one if asked to cycle up it; even the Rudge-Whitworth Keep Fit Girl might take a snifter. The nearest equivalent to her on the Tour de France was perhaps Gino Bartali, Coppi's great rival, who won the race twice, in 1938 and 1948. "I didn't need drugs," he once said. "Faith in the Madonna kept me from feeling fatigue and pain." But such Petrarchianism was rare; for many riders miracles existed only in capsule form. With amphetamines, there was even a certain rough justice: they helped get you up the mountain one day but exacted their price the next. Both Coppi and Simpson were among riders known for their _défaillances,_ their days of weakness; though doubtless climbing the Ventoux without chemical help would leave you pretty tired the next day anyway.

Such speedy, boozy days now seem almost innocent; and they were innocent in that Coppi's use of _la bomba_ didn't contravene cycling regulations of the day--amphetamines were declared illegal only in the mid-sixties. The quantum leap came when drugs designed to stimulate were replaced--or, in real terms, joined--by drugs designed to fortify, notably growth hormones and EPO (erythropoietin), the synthetic version of a naturally occurring hormone which is often prescribed for dialysis and chemotherapy patients. Instead of helping suppress pain and giving you the illusion that you were stronger than you actually were, the new drugs really did make you stronger. In addition, Maso explained, "There are no bad days, as with amphetamines." From the early to the mid-nineties, EPO became the drug of choice among many professional cyclists. Its function is to raise the red-blood-cell count, which sends more oxygen to the tissues, thus increasing your endurance and your powers of recovery. If there are two riders of equal ability, the one taking EPO will beat the one who remains clean; it is as simple as that. EPO was banned in 1990, even though its actual presence could not be proved; only its suspicious consequences were detectable.

There is a downside, of course. Bike riders, like other top athletes, are so fit that their heart rate is preternaturally low; EPO thickens the blood, making it harder to pump around the body, and also more liable to clot. In the early days of EPO, there were a number of mysterious deaths--usually from a heart attack, usually in the middle of the night--of otherwise healthy cyclists. The assumption was that their heart rate had dropped during sleep and became simply insufficient to pump the blood. To counter this, EPO takers were said to get up in the middle of the night to exercise. Some also used a kind of thoracic alarm clock, which woke them when their heart rate dropped too low.

If you want to put a date on the final loss of innocence (ours, not that of the inner cycling world), you could do worse than suggest July 8, 1998--a century on from Linton's win in Bordeaux-Paris. Willy Voet, a Belgian _soigneur,_ was stopped by customs officers at the French border. _Soigneur_ means healer, and the job traditionally consists of giving massages and overseeing the day-to-day fitness of the riders. Voet worked for the Festina team. (In the Tour, teams are named after their sponsors--hence, for example, Deutsche Telekom, Rabobank, U.S. Postal Service, and the improbable Farm Frites.) He was on his way to join the start of that year's race and transporting, in two refrigerated bags, "234 doses of EPO, 80 phials of growth hormones, 160 capsules of testosterone, and 60 capsules of Asaflow, an aspirin-based product which fluidifies the blood." (The International Cycling Union currently restricts more than a hundred substances, and Tour doctors test three or four riders each day.) During a subsequent three-year ban, Voet wrote his memoirs, "Massacre à la Chaîne," where he sets out dispassionately, and with rather unconvincing remorse, the drugs he administered: amphetamines, corticoids, growth hormones (clenbuterol, creatine, nandrolone), and, of course, EPO. Voet explains that each drug has a specific function for the various parts of a stage race: thus, sprinters would take trinitrin five or six kilometres before the finish to help them launch their final attack. _La bomba_ has given way to _"le pot belge"_ (the Belgian mixture), whose typical contents might be: amphetamines, antalgics, caffeine, cocaine, heroin, and sometimes corticoids. This is a world in which the phrase "caffeine injection" refers not to a double espresso but to something with a needle on the end which helps you get through a time trial in the mountains. Voet describes how the _soigneur_ is constantly tinkering and adjusting, in full collusion with his charge. (Here the notion that riders are sometimes slipped wicked substances without their knowledge is thoroughly mocked.) He reports that Richard Virenque, the highly popular French leader of the Festina team, was worried about his preparation for a time-trial stage during the 1997 Tour de France. But Voet himself wasn't worried: "Given his regular treatments of EPO and especially growth hormones, he was as ready as he would ever be. All he needed was a well-timed injection of caffeine, plus Solucamphre (to open his bronchial tubes)."

In this world, the dunces and losers are those who rely on their clean physiques. Voet cites the case of Charly Mottet, a top French rider of the eighties and nineties, who came to the RMO team, where amazement was expressed that "the bloke was clean." Mottet had, in many people's view, the talent to win the Tour, but Voet recognized that he lacked "the wherewithal to make it happen." In other words, he refused the tempting pharmacopoeia. Mottet was known for his weakness over the final third of the Tour, and the _soigneur's_ conclusion is as sad as it is hypocritical: "Yes indeed, Charly never had the career that he deserved."

Voet's disclosures after his arrest led to a police raid on the Festina team in their hotel, and the riders' ejection from the Tour on Day Seven. Six other teams quit in protest--though their departures were open to alternative explanation. One by one, various members of the Festina team admitted illegal drug use, though Virenque protested his innocence from the start and continues to do so. The only note of unintentional comedy that year came during a judicial hearing in Lille, when the judge put it to him that "you must have known what was going on because you were the leader." Virenque, in a panicky mishearing, replied, "Me a dealer? No, I am not a dealer." (The two English words are used in French.) Whereupon Virenque's lawyer interjected, "No, Richard, the judge said _leader._ It's not an offense to be a leader."

In racing terms, EPO led to what was christened "the two-speed Tour"--those using it and those not. It also produced a blurring of the traditional distinction between endurance men and climbers. All of a sudden, riders of quite chunky body profile were motoring up hills previously the preserve of the quail-bodied climber. In retrospect, various heroic exploits now seem more dubious.

Voet explains the mechanics and use of EPO. The _soigneur_ takes a blood sample from a rider, puts it in a portable centrifuge, and obtains a reading of the hematocrit, or red-blood-cell level in percentage terms. An average man might have a level of forty-four per cent, which would fluctuate with exertion, dehydration, blood loss, altitude, and other conditions. A _soigneur_ would therefore monitor his charges in the runup to a big race and administer EPO if the blood needed boosting: he would also adjust accordingly throughout the event. In 1997, the International Cycling Union fixed the legal limit at fifty per cent. But since _soigneurs_ would examine their riders' blood daily, only bad calibration would make you fail an official test.

The 2000 Tour was largely decided on the Pyrenean climb to Hautacam, on Monday, July 10th. After five hours of cycling, a hundred and ninety-one kilometres, and two high mountain passes, Lance Armstrong, the 1999 winner, climbed the final fourteen kilometres at such a pace as to put all his main rivals at least four minutes behind him in the over-all classification. Virenque was one of those overtaken in Armstrong's exhilarating attack: "He came upon us like an airplane." During last year's win, Armstrong had faced some skepticism from the French press. How could a promising, aggressive, but often unthinking rider, after receiving treatment for testicular cancer, which had already metastasized into the lungs and brain, return and not only ride the Tour but actually win it? Renewed determination, a body outline refashioned by chemotherapy, a greater acceptance of suffering, and a wiser tactical approach--these were not sufficient answers for some. Perhaps the cancer drugs had inadvertently beneficial side effects? (Ironically, Armstrong's doctors had at one point prescribed EPO.)

Armstrong spent much of last year reiterating "I'm clean" at press conferences, and felt that journalists deliberately misconstrued him when he spoke French. He is a lean, prickly, single-minded character, whose stance before the microphone implies that tact is for girls; he is after victory, not popularity. This approach did little to wash away doubt. Daniel Baal, the president of the French Cycling Federation, told the London Sunday _Times_ after Hautacam, "I would love to know what is happening today....I do not know if we must speak of a new method [of doping] or of a new substance. The controls have had some impact, I saw many riders in difficulty on the climbs and that was good. But then must I have enthusiasm for how the race is being won?" Baal's problem is simply this: to know what he has seen.

Despite what might seem to outsiders a vast moral taint, the Tour remains extremely popular in France. This is the more surprising given that the last French victory, by Bernard Hinault, came fifteen years ago. Since then, the race has been won by two Americans, two Spaniards, an Irishman, a Dane, a German, and an Italian. (Imagine the hyperbolically named World Series becoming such a foreign preserve for so long: how would the networks, and the average American fan, react?) In 1999, not a single stage was won by the French; this year, they managed just two out of twenty-one. Such robust zeal for the victories of others confirms the suspicion that the French sports fan tends to be as much a devotee of the sport itself as of the team or of the nation, to be more of a purist than his Anglo-Saxon equivalent.

Purist does not, however, mean moralist. Footage of French police thundering into cyclists' hotel rooms in mid-Tour may delight editorialists, but it offends many domestic cycling fans. The name of Richard Virenque was painted on the tarmac of the Ventoux climb as often this year as any other. (For that matter, when members of the Festina team returned to competition after their 1998 disgrace, and appeared in the Vuelta, the Tour of Spain, they were greeted with applause from Spanish fans.) There is an instinctive French anti-authoritarianism that causes many to side unflinchingly with their heroes against the judiciary, the gendarmerie, and opportunistic politicians. But cycling is also different in one key respect. In other sports, fans go to a stadium, where there are entrance fees, tacky souvenirs, overpriced food, a general marshalling and corralling, and a professional exploitation of the fan's emotions. With the Tour de France, the heroes come to you, to your village, your town, or arrange a rendezvous on the slopes of some spectacular mountain. The Tour is free, you choose where you watch it from, bring your own picnic, and the marketing hard sell consists of little more than a van offering official Tour T-shirts at sixty francs a throw just before the race arrives. Then you get to see your heroes' grimacing faces from merely a few feet away; every seat is a ringside seat. These aspects make the Tour unique, and still rightly cherished by the French.

Some play it as a _jour de fête,_ part of a communal thrill in small village or country byway; the more hard core will spend a couple of buffeted nights on the Ventoux in an ad-hoc trailer park, suffering the wind and cold in fellow-feeling with the riders; the fan who wants to know what is actually happening will follow the five TV feed from helicopter and motorbike cameras. Satellite dishes clamped to many of the camper vans indicate that methods two and three are often combined, but most go for one and three. So on July 13th--by which time the wind had dropped, and the temperature at the top of Mont Ventoux had risen to a generous six degrees centigrade--I headed for Saint-Didier, a small village east of Carpentras. The _peloton_ would reach here after half an hour's riding, at some time between 12:27 P.M., if the riders were averaging thirty-eight kph, and 12:39 P.M., if they were dawdling along at thirty-four kph. Their route, down a plane-lined alley toward a handsome 1756 belfry gate, was marked out by chunky red-and-white barriers. The curbside tables at the Bar du Siècle had been bagged early; outside Coiffure Salon Martine the eponymous hairdresser and her friends sat in white plastic chairs sipping white wine; there was minimalist bunting in the trees and a group of tots with _tricolores_ painted on their cheeks being inducted into the mystery of the Tour. A couple of policemen were genially ignored as they tried to stop the crowd leaning too far into the road.

First comes the publicity caravan and the team cars, bikes mounted on their roofs, spare wheels rotating idly; then a ten-minute warning of the race's approach, and the approaching clatter of the TV helicopter. Then, at 12:35 P.M.--indicating a slowish tempo--it goes like this: two riders suddenly appear round the bend and are past, _whoosh,_ before you can turn your head--thirty seconds--three main groups--_whoosh whoosh whoosh_--three small groups--a few dropped riders--the very last one a member of the Cofidis team, because by now your eyes have adjusted--you also note he has ginger hair--then _whoosh_ he is gone--and a swift two minutes are concluded with the blaring horns of the final race cars. I had expected it to go quickly, but in trying to take in everything I had seen virtually nothing. I hadn't recognized a single rider, because I hadn't specifically looked out for Armstrong or Virenque or Marco Pantani, the 1998 winner. They were in amongst the lean and gaudy figures going faster than I was prepared for. Only when they clustered in groups did I recognize team colors: the pink of Telekom, the blue-and-white of Banesto, and the Spanish omelette colors of Mapei. Still, I had seen almost nothing from just a few feet away, and in a spirit of benign fellow-feeling. That was the point of the _jour de fête._ Then I drove off to find a television while Coiffure Salon Martine reopened and the Bar du Siècle clattered on with more drinks.

Two and a half hours later, after making a long loop without ever losing sight of the Ventoux, the race reached Bédoin, where Simpson may have had his last drink. The remnants of an early escape were chased down; Armstrong sent his U.S. Postal team mates Tyler Hamilton and Kevin Livingston to the front, a fierce pace was set, and what the French call _la grande lessive_ (the big wash--or, perhaps, the great rinse) began, as rider after rider was slowly dropped. With ten kilometres left, the cleansing had reduced the leading group to six (Armstrong, the second-placed Jan Ullrich, of Germany, and Virenque among them), with Pantani--a tiny, bald, earringed Italian climber--hanging off the back. They passed Danish flags painted on the road, though the Danes had little to cheer this year; then another national enclave marked "BELGIUM DYNAMITE" and blazoned with the name of the Belgian sprinter Tom Steels, who had dropped out earlier in the day and didn't get to read his name; there were signs for Polti and Rabobank, Pantani and Virenque. The crowds gradually thickened as the mountain exerted its mute thrall.

The previous time Armstrong had ridden up Mont Ventoux, in the Dauphiné Libéré, earlier in the year, he had cracked, and lost over a minute to Tyler Hamilton. The experience had left him apprehensive. This time, however, he watched as others cracked. At Hautacam, he had produced a great attacking ride; here, for most of the ascent, he showed how enthralling a great defensive ride can be. He stayed with his main rivals for the yellow jersey, keeping a steady pace, showing no weakness, and implicitly telling them, You want to win this thing? Then you'll have to attack me. And none of them were strong enough to do so--except an intermittently revitalized Pantani, who had started the day more than ten minutes behind Armstrong. The race leader allowed him to climb ahead, carried on monitoring Ullrich and Virenque, and then, with three thousand metres to go, left his defensive posture and raced across to Pantani, taking a full half minute out of Ullrich and Virenque in the process. He passed the Simpson memorial without so much as a nod. Alongside Pantani, he kept telling him, _"Plus vite! Plus vite!"_ and the two rode to the summit together, where in the last few feet Armstrong eased to give Pantani the day's victory. It was a _geste de seigneur,_ French commentators agreed. To the rest of the field, Armstrong's ride up the Ventoux simply said, I'm the boss. They believed it; and, apart from a bad afternoon on the Tour's final mountain, five days later, he rode as boss to Paris and final victory.

Pantani won another stage before retiring from the race, perhaps to concentrate on his forthcoming criminal trial in Forlì, in central Italy, for the use of banned substances back in 1995. The final mountain stage was won by Virenque, who himself faces the judiciary in Lille this autumn, charged with "complicity to supply, incite the use of, and administer drugs"; also with "complicity in their import, possession, supply, transport, and acquisition." How many of those who went up the Ventoux last month were taking something fortifying yet legal, or illegal yet undetectable, or illegal yet detectable yet worth taking the risk for? The evidence is always contradictory. Riders who are notoriously clean, like the Englishman Chris Boardman, a world-class time trialist regularly defeated by the mountains, never seem to notice anything going on. Whereas the whistleblowers, the drug takers, and the drug givers offer a picture in which everyone is doing it and only the naive or the ridiculously principled abstain. Benjo Maso once asked a French rider from the seventies named Lecroq what percentage of riders took drugs in his day. "One hundred and twenty per cent," he replied, meaning that the masseurs, _soigneurs,_ mechanics, and support staff would be doing so as well. Voet confirmed this social overflowing of the drug habit, but his own estimate was that sixty per cent of the _peloton_ are users.

That was then, of course. This year is different--which is always the argument. On the eve of the 2000 tour, the International Cycling Union announced that a test for EPO had finally been found, if not yet perfected. Urine samples would be taken from riders, and frozen until the test was ready. With this threat of retrospective justice in place, officialdom prayed for a cleaner Tour. Except that three riders were thrown off for overheated hematocrit levels on the very first day. Except that several top riders cited in Voet's book as taking all the drugs he administered were still riding--and riding well--in this year's Tour. The results of the tests for EPO may not be known for some time, but the first drug news to come through is unsettling: thirty-eight of ninety-six urine samples taken this year contained corticosteroids and salbutamol, which are on the restricted list.

The world portrayed by Voet is enclosed, secretive, furiously competitive, and not too bothered about moral questions. Chris Boardman told the Sunday _Times,_ "My own reasons for not taking drugs are ultimately more practical than moral. Why should I risk it?" To which the seductive answer comes: Because with this new drug it isn't a risk, you're ahead of the game in both senses. Voet describes Virenque approaching a hospital biologist and trying to get some synthetic hemoglobin (which oxygenates the blood without raising the hematocrit level); according to one source, it is already being deployed widely in Italian sport. Voet also derides the notion that a test for EPO will clean up the Tour: "EPO is already being supplanted by other forms of doping, both cellular and molecular." During Voet's last weeks at Festina, the team doctor was busy studying the sporting application of the cancer drug interleukin. It would be ironic indeed if Armstrong, medical victim and sporting hero to many, had inadvertently redirected attention from laboratories to hospitals.

Does it matter, finally, if a leader swaps consonants and becomes a dealer? Cyclists use bike technology to beat one another; they use performance labs and wind tunnels to discover the best aerodynamic positions; they are "computer slaves," as Armstrong puts it. The U.S. Postal team riders have two-way radio contact and wear heart monitors so that their team director can tell them to adjust their pedalling accordingly. Would it matter if they also used drug technology to acquire that additional edge?

It matters, I think, for three reasons. Sentimentally, we want there still to be some connection, however thinned, between the world of the Rudge-Whitworth Keep Fit Girl and that of the professional cyclist. Morally, we are still Petrarchians, and recognize that certain shortcuts are wrong. Sport's history is bleakened when we remember those defeated by East German women swimmers in the days of Communism, or by certain American athletes whose body profiles thickened alarmingly in close-season training. In cycling's case, we need only quote Voet's epitaph for Charly Mottet: "Yes indeed, Charly never had the career that he deserved." Finally, and practically, it matters because the complex relationship between spectator and athlete, fandom's _pot belge_ of explosive emotions, depends at bottom on truth and trust. The Tour de France may be an example of "purposeless suffering"; it is also, as Armstrong says, "the most gallant athletic endeavor in the world." Whether we are the puzzled president of the French Cycling Federation on Hautacam, or Martine of Coiffure Salon Martine sitting by the roadside in Saint-Didier waiting for two minutes of lurid Lycra to pass, what we need and what we want is simply this: to know what we have seen.

THE NEW YORKER
AUGUST 21 & 28, 2000
pp. 94-103