The day Le Tour stood still
Posted on 29. Jul, 2010 in Bike Racing
Twelve years ago today, on July 29, 1998, the peloton refused to race stage 17 of the Tour de France. What started as the Festina Affair had engulfed TVM and other teams. A complete shutdown of the Tour de France seemed like a real possibility.
During the stage to Aix-les-Bains, Laurent Jalabert and the ONCE team dropped out, followed by Banesto and Riso Scotti. Jean-Marie LeBlanc pleaded with the riders to continue. When they eventually finished the stage, the police tossed more hotels and more teams went home. Know one knew for sure if the Tour would even make it all the way to Paris, which it eventually did with about half the field remaining.
So, what were the riders actually protesting?
“They treated us like criminals, like animals,” said one of the Dutch team’s members, Jeroen Blijlevens. “They took Bart out of the shower, made us sign some papers and took us away,” he continued, referring to his roommate, Bart Voskamp. The riders were held more than four hours for the tests and released half an hour after midnight.
Blijlevens’ lament was the common theme. Bjarne Riis added, “The riders are not against the investigations, but they are against the way they are being treated. We have some dignity.” Of course, the subtext was clear.
There had been doping in cycling for as long as anyone could remember. The team-sanctioned programs “exposed” by the Festina Affair were so pervasive and so well organized that they couldn’t have existed without a lot of people looking the other way for a long time. Even TVM had gone on with business as usual for four months after French police had found “a huge quantity of illegal performance-enhancing drugs” in a team car.
And then the political winds changed, and guys couldn’t even have dinner after a 204km mountain stage before they were arrested and forced to provide blood, urine, and hair samples. The riders chafed at the hypocrisy, and that’s why they protested. At least, that’s how it seems to me.
Where are we now?
12 years and one Puerto later, conventional wisdom would have us believe that Festina-like team doping programs are a thing of a past. Most people in the sport seem to think that when riders dope, they do so as individuals. And reports have indicated “an overall lowering of the performance level in the Tour compared to the last 2 decades.”
Let’s say it’s all true. It’s also true that riders today generally accept as a necessary inconvenience a level of constant surveillance and testing that would have been shocking in 1998. Does that mean they’ve have gained the “dignity” they sought back then? It’s hard to argue that they have, although a more accurate statement might be that they’ve come to feel differently about their rights and the sacrifices they’re willing to make.
Postscript
On July 29, 1998, I was getting my ass kicked by some of world’s best juniors at the Tour de l’Abitibi in Quebec. I spent that week riding for a composite team sponsored by the local cycling club in the host town of Amos. All the riders stayed at the high school, sleeping on mattresses on the floor, one team to a classroom. In the evening, we crowded around a television in the school’s student lounge to watch the nightly 30-minute Tour de France recap on ESPN. Some of the top riders must have recognized that a wrench had been thrown into their future career plans.
I had no idea what to think.
