Pubdate: Sun, 26 Jul 1998 Source: Scotland On Sunday Contact: 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 The initial shock has been replaced by initial fatigue.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"