Something to Declare: Essays on France and French Culture (13 page)

There is a down-side, 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 had become simply insufficient to pump the blood. To counter this, some EPO-takers got up in the middle of the night and did exercises. Some even used a kind of thoracic alarm clock, which woke them when their heart rate fell 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 8 July 1998—a century on from Linton's morphine-fuelled win in Bordeaux-Paris. Willy Voet,
soigneur
to the Festina team, was stopped by customs officers at the Franco-Belgian border.
Soigneur
means healer, and the job traditionally consists of giving massages and overseeing the day-to-day fitness of the riders. Voet was on his way to join the start of that year's Tour and was found to be 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.” During a subsequent three-year ban, Voet published a memoir in which he set out dispassionately, and with rather unconvincing remorse, the drugs he administered: amphetamines, corti-coids, growth hormones (clenbuterol, creatine, nandrolone), and of course EPO. Voet explains that each drug has a specific function for the different parts of a stage race: thus, sprinters would take Trinitrine five or six kilometres before the finish to help them launch their final attack.
La bomba
has given way to
le pot Belge
(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. 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.) Voet describes Richard Virenque, the highly popular French leader of the Festina team, fretting about his preparation for a time-trial stage during the 1997 Tour de France. But Voet knew that everything was under control: “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 Solu-camphre (to open his bronchial tubes).”

In this world, the dunces and losers are those who pit their cleaner physiques against the smarter cheats. Voet cites the case of Charly Mottet, a top French rider of the Eighties and Nineties. When he joined the RMO team, they discovered to their amazement 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, and its ejection from the Tour in mid-race. Six other teams quit in protest—though their departures were open to alternative explanation. One by one, Festina riders admitted illegal drug use, though Virenque adamantly protested his innocence from the start. 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 same two English words are used in French.) Whereupon Virenque's lawyer interjected, “No, Richard, the judge said
leader.
It's not an offence to be a leader.”

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 haematocrit, or red-blood cell, level in percentage terms. An average man might have a level of 44 per cent, which would fluctuate with exertion, dehydration, blood loss, altitude, and other conditions. The
soigneur
would therefore monitor his charges in the run-up 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 50 per cent. But since
soigneurs
would examine their riders' blood daily, only foolish overenthusiasm or bad calibration would make you fail an official test.

In racing terms, EPO led to what was christened “the two-speed
peloton”
—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. Recent Tour history cannot be rewritten, but needs to be annotated with Voet's casual asides—for instance, that such-and-such a rider, famous for such-and-such an exploit, was known in
the peloton
as Mr. 60 Per Cent.

The 2000 Tour was largely decided on the Pyrenean climb to Hautacam, on Monday, 10 July. After five hours of cycling, 191 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 overall classification. Virenque was one of those overtaken in Armstrong's exhilarating attack: “He came upon us like an aeroplane.” During that previous year's win, Armstrong had faced some scepticism 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 given him EPO (which, as the synthetic version of a naturally occurring hormone, is often prescribed for dialysis and chemotherapy patients).

Armstrong spent much of 1999 reiterating “I'm clean” at press conferences, and felt that journalists deliberately misconstrued him when he spoke French. His revenge in 2000 was to speak only English and let the French press get on with it. 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, said 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 was simply this: to know what he had seen.

Despite what might appear 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. In 1999, not a single stage was won by a Frenchman; in 2000, 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 nation, to be more of a purist than his Anglo-Saxon equivalent.

This is probably non-demonstrable, but here is my own evidence. In 1993 the French soccer team was on course for the finals of the next year's World Cup. All it required was one point—a mere draw—out of its final two qualifying matches, against Israel and Bulgaria. Astonishingly, the team lost to Israel. I watched the deciding game against Bulgaria on television in a French provincial hotel in the company of two off-duty waiters. At first, all went well: France took the lead. Then Bulgaria equalized—still, all was well enough, for time was running out. At the death, against the run of play and most versions of justice, Bulgaria scored a winning goal. In Britain, this might have led to domestic violence, or the torching of any nearby Bulgarian car or restaurant, if one could be found. There, one deeply despondent French waiter said to another, “It was a pretty goal.”

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 Ven-toux climb as often this year as any other. There is an instinctive French anti-authoritarianism that causes many to side unflinchingly with their heroes against the judiciary, the gendarmerie, and suddenly outraged 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 live TV feed from helicopter and motorbike cameras. The 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 13 July—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 Car-pentras. The main bunch would reach here after half an hour's riding, at some time between 12:27, if they were averaging thirty-eight kph, and 12:39, if they were dawdling along at thirty-four kph. Their route, down a plane-lined alley towards a handsome 1756 belfry gate, was marked out by chunky red-and-white barriers. The kerbside 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 peloton
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 edging 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 arrival, and the approaching clatter of the TV helicopter. Then, at 12:35—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 colours: the pink of Telekom, the blue-and-white of Banesto, and the Spanish-omelette colours of Mapei. Still, I had at least 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 had his last drink. The remnants of an early escape were chased down; Armstrong sent his U.S. Postal Teammates Tyler Hamilton and Kevin Livingston to the front, a discouraging 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, and Virenque among them), with Pantani—the tiny, bald, ear-ringed 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 own name; there were signs for Polti and Rabobank, Pantani and Virenque. The crowds gradually thickened as the mountain exerted its mute thrall.