DRUG SCANDALS DAMPEN CYCLING'S TOP EVENT

PARIS -- The Tour de France, one of Europe's legendary sporting events,
will draw 180 of the finest bicycle riders in the world Saturday to a theme
park in western France. From there, they will embark on the Tour's annual
three-week race to Paris.

In a typical year, an estimated 15 million people line the race route and
another 160 million worldwide watch on television. And in a typical year,
Daniel Baal would be among the most interested spectators. Baal is the
president of the French Cycling Federation and a vice president of the
International Cycling Union, which governs the sport worldwide. But Baal
said he had been unable to watch a bicycle race this season.

"I'm not able to believe any longer in the sport," he said, citing the
repeated drug scandals that have rocked elite cycling over the past year.
"I haven't seen a race yet. I can't watch a fake spectacle."

An air of profound pessimism hangs over the sport, and it hangs heavier
than usual with the Tour de France about to begin, for it was during last
year's race that the depths of cycling's drug problem were laid bare. Since
then, cycling, which for Europe has been a cultural treasure as well as a
formidable commercial enterprise, has suffered a collapse in credibility so
great that many of its riders, organizers and sponsors fear for its future.

Last year's Tour de France champion, Marco Pantani of Italy, was thrown out
of the Tour of Italy early last month because of suspected drug use, and
two weeks later four cyclists failed blood tests during the Tour of
Switzerland. Perhaps most dispiriting, 11 riders in last month's Tour of
Italy amateur race, which is used as a kind of prep race for young
cyclists, also failed blood tests that indicate drug use.

As a consequence, nearly a dozen commercial sponsors of cycling teams and
races across Europe have formally expressed concern that the sport is in
peril, and two, Coca-Cola and the French bank CrE9dit Lyonnais, have
threatened to end their millions of dollars in financing.

Meanwhile, criminal investigations aimed at cracking continentwide drug
rings go on in France, and earlier this year the No. 1 book on France's
list of best-selling nonfiction was a tell-all book by Willy Voet, a former
employee of France's top cycling team, that details how riders bought
drugs, cheated on drug tests and undermined the notion of pure competition
in one of Europe's revered sports.

"The people in cycling took everybody for fools and treated them like fools
- -- the journalists and the fans," said Voet, the former masseur for the
Festina team who was caught by the French authorities last year in
possession of banned drugs days before the start of the Tour.

The problem of performance-enhancing drug use has plagued virtually all
sports in recent years. Football, track and field and swimming, to name
three, have been bedeviled by steroid use, and the International Olympic
Committee has identified drug use as the single greatest threat to
international athletics.

But the kind of grim declarations voiced by Voet have echoed with unique
regularity and resonance throughout the world of cycling -- a sport that
annually offers millions of dollars in prize money and tens of millions of
dollars in endorsement deals and commercial sponsorship. Riders talk with
anger and despair, occasionally with contrition. Organizers, fans and
sponsors talk with cynicism and urgency.

"Every day it's something new," said Bobby Julich, the American rider who
finished third in last year's Tour de France. "It's pretty hard to stay
serious and motivate yourself for the Tour." Of the recent disclosure that
young riders in the amateur division of the Tour of Italy had failed drug
tests, Julich said: "They are 21, 22, 18 even. That breaks your heart. It
does, it really does."

Jean-Marie Leblanc, the director of the Tour, agreed that the sport's state
of crisis was real and deep. And just this week, Leblanc said, it got
worse. Leblanc had tried to bar four French riders and a Dutch team from
the Tour because of concerns about drugs, but because of a rules
technicality, he was ordered by the world cycling federation to permit
Richard Virenque, a former Festina rider, to compete. Leblanc had said that
Virenque's "name and image are the incarnation of doping."

"We have been prevented from completing our attempt to restore the image of
the Tour," Leblanc said of the decision by the International Cycling Union.
Of the sport's condition generally, he added, "Our significance has
cracked, just like the public's trust in us."

Rising Sophistication, and Justification

For decades, cycling, a grueling, glamorous sport in Europe, has been
wrestling with drug use and abuse.

In 1967, Tommy Simpson, a British cyclist, died while competing in the Tour
de France, his death ultimately linked to his use of amphetamines.
Succeeding years brought additional embarrassments: in 1969, the Belgian
star Eddy Merckx was suspended while leading the Tour of Italy for using
amphetamines; in 1978, Michel Pollentier, another Belgian, was suspended
while leading the Tour de France after he was caught concealing a clean
urine sample to trick testers, and in 1988, Pedro Delgado of Spain won the
Tour de France despite having tested positive for using a masking agent, a
substance designed to hide drug use, but one that was not then banned by
the Tour.

But starting in the early 1990's, riders and cycling officials say, the
sport's top competitors began to experiment with drugs that were more
effective and more difficult to detect, chief among them erythropoietin, or
EPO.

Originally developed to treat kidney disorders, EPO increases the number of
red blood corpuscles that carry oxygen to weary muscles. Because EPO is a
synthetic version of a hormone that exists naturally in the body, it is
hard to detect, even more so because riders, facing testing, have injected
themselves with saline solution to dilute their blood and mask their EPO use.

"We've always had doping products in our sport, but there is a lot of
voodoo in these products, and cheaters either believed in them or they
didn't," said Hein Verbruggen, the president of the International Cycling
Union. "But EPO is highly effective. It really increases capacity
considerably, and the sad thing is that many athletes in our sport have
felt forced to use it because it is so effective."

Alex Zulle is one of them.

"As a rider, you feel tied into the system," Zulle, one of the six riders
for Festina who confessed to EPO use during the 1998 Tour de France, told
reporters last year. "It's like being on the highway. The law says there's
a speed limit of 65, but everyone is driving 70 or faster. Why should I be
the one who obeys the speed limit?"

Others think the rationale for widespread cheating is more
straightforwardly cynical.

"What they're all addicted to is making cycling -- this painful, brutal
sport -- easy," Voet, the former Festina employee, said in an interview.
The Tour de France, for instance, covers more than 2,000 miles, many of
them in the Alps.

Baal, the French Cycling Federation official, agreed. "I feel insulted by
these riders who climb long hills with their mouths closed, not even
breathing hard," he said.

And so the episodes have kept coming, sometimes revealing individual
duplicity, sometimes revealing the extraordinary dimensions of the drug
problem in the sport.

Last month, with two stages remaining in the Tour of Italy, Marco Pantani,
who had won last year's Tour de France after weeks of drug raids, police
interrogations and rider protests, was comfortably in the lead. Pantani,
whose income from salary and sponsorship deals tops $3 million annually and
who for many represented what might still be engaging about the sport,
failed a blood test. The level of red blood cells in his system indicated
EPO use. While Pantani denied using EPO, the sport absorbed another hit to
its integrity.

The blows, though, have been bigger.

Last May, a Paris narcotics squad questioned two professional cyclists --
one of them the rising Belgian star Frank Vandenbroucke -- in its
investigation of a supply network for performance-enhancing drugs. The
authorities said the network was orchestrated by two Frenchmen: Bernard
Sainz, a homeopathic practitioner who has treated many riders and is
suspected of practicing medicine without a license, and Bertrand Lavelot, a
lawyer who often represented teams and riders, sometimes in doping cases.
Vandenbroucke and the other rider have been suspended from their team,
pending an investigation, and Sainz and Lavelot are in custody, maintaining
their innocence.

Gilles Smadja, an aide to the French Sports Minister, Marie-George Buffet,
said the investigation of Sainz and the riders was a first attempt to take
on what authorities believe is a lucrative market in illicit drugs for
sports. "We have gone from the stage where doping was essentially
rudimentary and individual to the stage where it is now very well organized
with distribution networks and traffickers and established points of
supply," Smadja said. "Doping brings in more money than crack in this
country."

Officials Fear Public Reaction

The environment of fear, anger and suspicion has been toxic. The police in
France have been extremely aggressive in detaining, searching and
questioning riders. And some cyclists call the testing officials employed
by the cycling organizations "the vampires."

"Bicycle riders have become easy prey," said Laurent Jalabert of France,
who competes for the Spanish team Once, but who is refusing to race in the
Tour de France this year.

"We are cyclists," Pantani said recently of all the testing, "not blood
donors."

Days later, he failed a blood test.

Before the 1998 Tour scandal -- only 96 of the 198 riders who started the
race finished after the suspensions and protest withdrawals -- cycling was
arguably the sport second in popularity behind soccer in several Western
European countries.

The major commercial sponsors, who are centered in France, Spain, Italy,
Belgium, the Netherlands and Switzerland, spend $4 million to $6 million
annually to assemble teams of about 20 men. The teams compete for purses
great and small, with the Tour de France's $2 million total the biggest
payday.

But the cycling circuit has always functioned as a great advertising
gambit, and so sponsors financed the sport as a way of gaining exposure for
products and services ranging from vacuum cleaners to insurance. According
to cycling officials, the total spent on road racing sponsorship annually
is roughly $250 million.

Among the central worries then is whether that kind of financing will
diminish if the drug scandals persist. Though no major sponsors have
withdrawn, several are reconsidering their participation.

For instance, Coca-Cola, which pays about $3.5 million annually to be an
official partner of the Tour de France, has indicated that its future
involvement depends on how the 1999 race unfolds. Earlier this month, 10
team sponsors sent an open letter to the International Cycling Union
emphasizing that the sport was "in danger" and asking for stricter medical
inspections.

Organizers of the top races, fearful that equivocation on the drug problem
by riders, officials or sponsors will sap public confidence even further,
are closely monitoring attendance figures and television ratings. The
indicators have been mixed.

According to the newspaper Le Figaro, France Television's viewer share for
its Tour coverage shrank from 9 percent to 7.4 percent last year as the
police raids frequently overshadowed the daily stages. This spring, as drug
episodes continued to claim the sport's top riders, crowds were thin at a
handful of events. Still, the Tour of Italy drew crowds as big as ever.

"We don't have the right any longer to trick the fans who continue to show
us affection and support," Leblanc, the director of the Tour de France, said.

Officials with one sponsor of the Tour de France, CrE9dit Lyonnais, said
they were gratified that Leblanc had tried to bar riders from this year's
race who had been implicated in drug use. But the action was decried in
some other parts of Europe, including Spain and the Netherlands, for coming
before the legal proceedings against the riders had been concluded.

For now, the cycling circuit and its badly tarnished crown jewel, the Tour
de France, will unfold under considerable pressure. Every competitor will
have his blood tested before the race begins, and there will be frequent
testing of the leaders and random testing of other racers throughout the
event. Leblanc, a former professional rider, has made it clear that he will
resign if this year's race becomes another fiasco.

New Methods but Mixed Hopes

If the scope and regularity of the drug scandals have forced a healthy
self-examination of the world of cycling, they have also underscored how
difficult finding a way out of the morass might be. One of the things that
recent revelations have made clear is how clever riders and their
assistants can be in defeating detection.

Until 1997, cyclists were subject to urine tests only, and during the Tour
de France, daily tests were given to two race leaders and two other riders
selected at random. During the last decade, the Tour reported only one
positive test. And despite riders agreeing to more detailed blood testing
in 1997, EPO use evidently continued unabated.

Voet, in his book, argues that cheating was routine. He writes of planting
clean urine samples in bathrooms where drug tests were to take place. He
also claims that some cyclists passed tests by inserting condoms full of
clean urine into their anuses -- condoms attached to plastic tubes taped to
their scrotums so they could feign urinating.

Not surprisingly, Voet, who remains under investigation by the French
authorities, is not optimistic about a cleaner future for the sport. "The
thieves have left the scene of the crime; they already have shifted to
something else," he said, saying that EPO and other standard cheating drugs
were being improved upon. "Now, it's synthetic hemoglobin or interleukin or
products which augment the oxygen level in muscles without raising the red
blood cell count."

Verbruggen, the president of the International Cycling Union, shares the
worry. "In the near future, we will have genetic manipulation," he said.
"There is a role for governments here."

The French have been the most aggressive in going after drugs. In March, a
doping law was passed in France that established maximum prison terms of
seven years for trafficking in banned performance-enhancing substances and
instituted fines of up to a million francs ($160,000). Under the new law,
the police have been given wider powers to search and investigate.

Marie-George Buffet, the sports minister who assumed her post in 1997, is
behind the French forcefulness. The annual antidoping budget in France has
increased by more than 50 percent this year to $4.02 million, and Buffet
has asked for $18.1 million for next year.

"It will be a long fight," Buffet said. "A problem like doping is never
solved only by passing a law."

For the moment, no other European nation has comparable penalties against
trafficking in sports drugs. Last month, though, the ministers or
secretaries in charge of sports in the 15 member nations of the European
Union held an initial meeting in which they discussed ways of unifying
their widely divergent antidoping legislation. And Giovanna Melandri, the
minister who oversees sports in Italy, is proposing a law similar to
France's in her country's Parliament. "The reason we are looking at it
seriously is that we do believe it has become a serious social problem,"
Melandri said.

For now, though, there are questions about how committed the sport's riders
and officials are to ending drug use. The international federation's tests
for EPO use measure a rider's red blood cell count against what would be
regarded as normal for a fit athlete. But many people have complained that
the test is too lenient and allows for a degree of calculated cheating,
riders using just enough EPO to have their red blood cell count approach,
but not exceed, the limit.

Many believe, as a result, that the greatest hope for an effective system
to counteract doping lies with the model the French are developing.

The French Cycling Federation requires its riders to take four annual
medical tests. The idea is to establish a detailed and carefully monitored
portrait of a competitor's biological characteristics from an early age,
against which officials might document any irregularities suggesting doping.

Meanwhile, with the Tour de France starting Saturday, everyone in cycling
is holding his breath. And the riders understand they face a long stretch
of suspicion, fair or not.

"It's a very bad situation for cyclists," said Johan Bruyneel, a Belgian
who is the sports director for the United States Postal Service team that
competes in Europe. "Everywhere we go, people look at us almost as if we're
criminals."