Something to Declare: Essays on France and French Culture (14 page)

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 was 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 3,000 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 at Forlì, in central Italy, for the use of banned substances back in 1995. The final mountain stage was won by Virenque, soon to be up before the beak at Lille, 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 I had watched who went up the Ventoux 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 Chris Board-man, a world-class time-trialist regularly defeated by the mountains, never seem to notice anything going on. Whereas the whistle blowers, the drug-takers, and the drug-givers offer a picture in which everyone is doing it and only the naïve or the ridiculously principled abstain. Benjo Maso remembered a French rider from the Seventies called Dominique Lecroq being asked on French television 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
were users.

The world portrayed by Voet is enclosed, secretive, furiously competitive, and not too bothered about moral questions. Chris Boardman says, “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'll be ahead of the game in both senses. Voet describes Virenque approaching a hospital biologist and trying to get some synthetic haemoglobin (which oxygenates the blood without raising the haematocrit level); according to one source, it is already being deployed widely in Italian sport. Voet also derides the notion that a foolproof 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 steroidal shot-putters, testos-teronic East German women swimmers, or American sprinters 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 endeavour 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.

*
Edith Wharton thought there were two candidates for the title “the sublimest object in Provence”: the Pont du Gard and Mont Ventoux. For her, the Pont du Gard finished (a close) second.

*
The most popular stimulant was the innocently named “American coffee”: caffeine in combination with strychnine, cocaine, ether, and nitroglycerine.

*
There was an Italian rider of the postwar years called Brambilla, who was famous for his masochism. When riding badly, he used to hit himself round the head with his cycle pump, and deny himself water. In 1947 he lost the Tour on the very last day. In response, he punished his bike, by burying it at the bottom of his garden: a deed he was not allowed to forget. “Is it true?” André Brulé asked him, as the riders were rolling out one day in a subsequent Tour. “Why did you do that?” “The bike had wooden rims,” Brambilla replied sarcastically, “and I wanted to grow some poplars in my garden.” “Lucky you didn't plant your water bottle as well,” said Brulé, “or you'd have grown a pharmacy.”

In the antepenultimate chapter of
Tender Is the Night
Dick Diver watches the Tour pass in the South of France. In the late Twenties the race evidently went more slowly, as he is able to distinguish expressions on the faces of the riders. After they have passed, Fitzgerald pertinently has Diver notice “a light truck [which] carried the dupes of accident and defeat.” This is the “broom waggon,” which sweeps up those who, like Diver, are forced to abandon a gruelling competition.

*
On the second day of his trial Virenque finally admitted his drug-taking, while still deploying the evasions of metaphor: “It was like a train going away from me and, if I didn't get on it, I would be left behind. It was not cheating. I wanted to remain in the family.”

*
Shortly after this piece appeared, I received a letter from the Honorary Life Vice-President of The Fellowship of Cyling Old-Timers pointing out that Mrs. Billie Dovey was both still alive and an active member of the club. As yet, no Fellowship of Old EPO-takers exists. Meanwhile, the court at Forlì gave Marco Pantani a three-month suspended sentence for a thwocking 60.1% haematocrit level; the conviction was overturned when a higher court in Bologna decided that doping “is not seen by the law as fraud.” Chris Boardman retired from competition. From the start of his career the Englishman had suffered from a naturally low level of testosterone, which caused a condition similar to osteoporosis. The cycling authorities would not allow him to boost the level and continue in the sport. The
Guardian
announced the news with the wry headline: “Boardman quitting to take drugs.”

In 2001, Lance Armstrong won his third successive Tour de France (and spoke French to journalists again); and Tom Simpson's memorabilia were moved to a museum in his home village of Harworth, Nottinghamshire.

(7)
The Pouncer

Georges Simenon with all his needs (the maid is off camera), 1930s

In his book on the Lucan affair,
Trail of Havoc,
Patrick Marnham made one of the most vivid calculations in modern British biography. Lucan, he explained, was a very unadventurous eater. In his days as a house player at the Clermont Club, his taste ran to nothing but smoked salmon and lamb cutlets. The latter were grilled during the cold months, and served
en gelée
in warmer times. The biographer therefore estimated: “If Lord Lucan ate four lamb cutlets a day, for four days a week, for forty weeks a year, for eleven years, and if there are seven cutlets in a sheep, then he would have despatched 1,006 sheep.”

Marnham has been schooled to write well about Georges Sime-non: he has forensic, journalistic, and francophonic expertise. But an additional qualification must be a small numerological kink. Figures stud Simenon's life as pungently as cloves in an orange. The 400-plus books he wrote; the 55 cinema and 279 television films made from them; the 500 million copies sold in 55 languages; the 1,000,000 francs he took one Sunday morning in cash, in a suitcase, to buy back from Fayard the subsidiary rights to his first 19 Maigrets. He moved house 33 times; when separated from his eldest son he wrote him 133 letters in three weeks; when interviewing for a bilingual secretary he got through 180 candidates in a single afternoon. Then there is his famous estimate of having bedded 10,000 women. Even in laundry he was not modest: at his Swiss retreat there were six washing machines in continuous operation. This blizzard of numbers also invites us to make our own lamb-cutlet calculation: if Marnham was commissioned to write his biography shortly after Simenon's death, and if it took two years to complete, and if biography is half research and half writing, and if research is half reading and half interviewing, then in order to have read all the Belgian's books Marnham must have despatched them at a rate of more than two a day.

Writers are dangerous. They are also, frequently, not very nice. When they become famous, they can be not very nice in the manner of other famous people—vain, tyrannical, inflexible, and so on. But they can also be not very nice in a way specific to writers: by exploiting the one skill which sets them apart from others, by making clear that it is they who fix the official version of events. Those who live close to writers sooner or later inevitably strike against this discouraging truth:

Whatever happens,
They have got
The typewriter
And we have not.

Among Simenon's published works are a psychopathic number of autobiographical texts: twenty-seven in all. There is no obvious justification for leaving more words of autobiography than Chateaubriand: Simenon was little concerned with public events, foreign travel, or the society around him. These
Dictées
are made up instead of relentless self-explanation, guilty confession, and cocky boasting—the testimony of a man incapable of being bored so long as he remains the topic of conversation. Though cast as restless seekings after truth, they amount to an obsessive seizing of the historical record from those around him. To rub it in, Simenon also endowed a vast archive of professional papers in his native city of Liège.

The human race, Simenon told his mother in 1934, is divided into the
fesseurs
and
the fessées:
the spankers and the spankees. He added that it was his intention to be
un fesseur.
What the novelist had not yet discovered when he proposed his theory is that this division can exist within the same person, either running concurrently or, as in Simenon's case, consecutively. His life falls into two clear parts: the rise and rise of the super-spanker, followed by the slow decline of the spankee. You could make a moral tale out of it if you wished, and it is to Marnham's credit that he declines to do so. In this he is following Simenon's own example. One of the distinctions of the fiction, especially of the
romans durs,
is to show sympathetic understanding for driven, obsessed, morally affectless characters who inflict and sustain often terrible damage. The refusal to moralize makes them less distant, less safely other. Simenon in one of his more engaging moments said of himself: “Maybe I am not completely crazy, but I am a psychopath.” Calling in the ethical police doesn't particularly help understand psychopaths.