CYCLE OF THE DRUG PEDALLERS GOES THE FULL TOUR

Unfortunately, cyclist's use of drugs is hardly hot news
The Sue Mott Interview

THE Tour de Farce. The biggest drug festival since Woodstock. The greatest
pharmaceutical road show since Jimi Hendrix went on tour. This used to be a
cycle race, one of the most evocative, romantic, compelling, demanding
sports shows on earth. They put the winner in a yellow jersey. Now all we
can seek a surgical gown.

The initial shock has been replaced by initial fatigue. EPO for
Erythropoietin, the synthetic blood booster, after 400 phials of the stuff
were found in a car blonging to the French team Festina. TVM, the Dutch
team, similarly implicated after drugs and masking agent were found in a
hotel room. HGH, the human growth hormone, which allied to amphetamines,
testosterone, corticosteroids, caffeine, aspirin and valium have been
apparently making the alpine climb and descents for years alongside, inside
and up the backsides of the riders - the artificial 'domestiques' of the
Tour. RIP - since we are talking initials - professional cycle racing.

What gall the cyclists have to go on strike against the media coverage. The
media themselves could go on strike at the necessity of covering certain
so-called sportsmen whose substance abuse has now been exposed as cynical,
endemic and systematic.

How could it have reached this parlous state? EPO needs to be stored between
two and eight degrees Celsius. Did nobody notice half the team cars racing
around with mini-fridges? Perhaps the just thought that was the Moet
cooling. Why weren't we warned?

The short answer is we were Possibly by a number of mysteriously premature
deaths among the ranks of the professionals and certainly by Paul Kimmage,
an Irishman who rode in the Tour de France, before becoming disillusioned,
exhausted and a journalist, not necessarily in that order.

He was the whistle-blower. No body listened. In his book 'Rough Ride', first
published in 1990, he rode straight at the target. He quoted a secret
dossier to the Italian Olympic Committee following a investigation into the
doping in cycling. "The abuse has spiralled out of control. In some rates
they are now climbing at speeds they used to reach on the flat! And why?
Because the majority are pumped to the gills with shit like EPO, HGH and
testosterone."

He charted his own experience of the Tour. The spirit-racking pain and
exhaustion of the climbs, the ferocious temptation to succumb to chemical
help, the bitter knowledge that everyone was doing it. "It's a bit like the
arms race," he wrote. "Laurent's got an intercontinental missile in his arse
today. Il'd better get one or I'll be blitzed."

By great irony, Kimmage and his wife were in Bordeaux this apocalyptic week
in the history of the Tour de France. On holiday, not as interested
spectators in the death of a sport's innocence.

"I'm shocked at the scale of it but I think overall the best thing that
could have happened," he said. "They've done the minimum in terms of
measures to combat the EPO abuse. This will force them to do the maximum.
They can't run from it, can't hide from it, can't ignore it this time."

Which is what the authorities did before. Kimmage's book was never published
in French. He became an isolated outburst, easily sidelined and dismissed as
a guy who didn't make it as a top line pro. "Habitually they blamed it - any
talk of drug abuse - on smaller riders with chips on their shoulders. And
they got away with that for the very good reason that the champions didn't
make a stand themselves.

"You didn't find any of the big champions coming out and saying: 'Yes, this
has been going on for a long time'. The whole sport is paralysed by a law of
silence. A secret code."

It was the secret code of the peloton that Kimmage broke away from and he
was regarded with all the affection the average Godfather bestows on a Mafia
grass. They branded him as having 'crache dans la soupe' - 'spat in the
soup' - and many old friends became new enemies overnight.

"I went back to the Tour as a journalist two months after the book was
published in 1990. A man I regarded as my best friend, Thierry Claveriolat -
although you find out who your real fiends are times like that - he pretty
much spat in my face. I was taken aback by the venom and animosity towards
me. Naively I had counted on his friendship, on his saying: 'Yeah, Paul's
right. It's happening.'

"Basically a lot of the French riders who could read the book just thought:
'Paul's done the dirty on us', whereas a lot of the English-speaking
riders - with the exception of Stephen Roche - said: 'well done'. The
exception proves the rule that the truth hurts. Roche, the former Tour de
France champion, Kimmage had counted as a friend. "He was my idol. I
absolutely idolised him when I was 17. But the book was published and his
reaction was extraordinary. I don't believe he ever read it. It was just a
knee-jerk reaction to his fear that people would be exposed to the thought
that he had won the Tour on drugs.

"But I had said specifically - I said it on Irish television - that my book
wasn't about pointing the finger. I didn't know who was and wasn't. And the
people doing drugs weren't all black. The people not doing drugs weren't all
white. It's much more complex than that. The riders were and are absolutely
victims of the system. In the end, Stephen went on a radio programme and
said: 'He's a failed cyclist and a bitter little man', and I couldn't
forgive him for that."

All this going on, all this descent into vindictive human conflict, drugs
being uncovered, men being arrested, lawyers issuing statements, the whole
sport being plunged into tainted chaos, and still the wheels keep on
churning. But, tellingly, Kimmage thinks they are turning more slowly.

"The fact that the Justice Ministry were involved, the police were involved;
that has just terrified them. I can see, just looking at the times of the
stages, the result of the scandal. I think it's a great thing really."

And what are the cheering spectators on? Unless they shriek in delirium when
picking up their prescriptions from Boots the chemist there is hardly much
justification in their joy. There is scarcely a single news channel in
Europe not running an hourly bulletin on the Tour, like a hospital providing
news on a seriously sickening patient. Except, of course, the Tour's drugs
are not supplied by the National Health Service.

"In my time," said Kimmage, "and I'm sure I speak for all the riders then,
it wasn't the systematic thing it seems to be now when teams say: "Right,
we'll take so much from your prize money to administer the drugs.' In my
time, it was very much a case of cortisone treatment or hormone treatment,
but in private. You went to your masseur or the team doctor and it was
available to you. Now it's almost like the old East German state system.

"What annoys me intensely is what Bruno Roussel, the Festina team director;
said in his defence. 'We're doing this because of the pressures we're under
because of the physical demands of the race.' That's crap. It's absolute
bollocks. The public don't know whether the peloton's climbing the mountain
at 8mph or 5mph. It's not like the 100 metres where everything is relative
to the last race and the world record.

"On the Tour de France, no two routes are the same. If nobody took so much
as a cup of coffee to ride that race you could do it. Absolutely no danger
you could do it. You would just do it slower. It would still be the same
spectacle. It's an epic event. It doesn't deserve the people it has running
it. It doesn't deserve to be smeared the way it has been this week."

Kimmage speaks with a passion, and as importantly, from the perspective of
impurity. After nine stages of his first Tour in 1986, he was a crawling,
aching, miserable agonised, shame-faced semi-human. Then he realised he had
14 more stages to go. He took a B12 injection. "I dropped my shorts and
abandoned my virginity without a second thought. I fought off guilt waves
flowing from my brain. This wasn't doping; it was just getting even with the
others."

Now exposure has got even with them and it is for the administering doctors
that Kimmage reserves his most burning hostility. "What I'd like to do now
is get a big bonfire, OK? And get every sports doctor there is and put them
on the bonfire because these are the people that have effectively ruined
sport.

"What is their job? Their job is to help the athlete perform to the absolute
maximum with a list of doping products. what makes them successful people is
the fact their athletes are performing. They've ruined it. Absolutely ruined
it."

With cynical quaintness the perpetrators of the 1998 Tour de France were
continuing the race this weekend. As if anyone but the most gullible, most
ghoulish or their mothers will meet them on the Champs Elysees. It is
desperately harsh on any competitor who has sought to pedal the journey on
his own lung and soul power but this year's race has been sullied beyond
salvation.

"I'd be lying if I didn't say there was a certain level of satisfaction for
me in this," said Kimmage. "But obviously my main hope is that they do
something about it now. My chief hope is that they save the sport I love.
And I do love it."

If not, the untainted Chris Boardman had the right idea at the very start.
He wore the yellow jersey on day one in Dublin and then rode straight into a
wall. The perfect metaphor.

Checked-by: "Rolf Ernst"