A Pharmacy on Wheels - The Tour De France Doping Scandal
by John Hoberman
Professor of Germanic Studies
University of Texas at Austin
In 1957 the celebrated Parisian man-of-letters Roland Barthes
published a short and clever essay called "The Tour de France as
Epic." Barthes saw the Tour as a profoundly symbolic (and therefore
enormously appealing) ordeal which, for the duration of the race,
creates a caste of heroes and villains that for sheer theatrical effect
are second to none. Indeed, the sheer intensity of the riders' suffering
imposes on them a martyrdom that brings them into contact with the
supernatural forces that make their extraordinary performances possible.
"Jump," says Barthes, is the mysterious burst of energy that
seems to come from nowhere, "a veritable electric influx which
erratically possesses certain racers beloved of the gods and then causes
them to accomplish superhuman feats." But "jump" also has
"a hideous parody, which is called doping : to dope the racer is as
criminal, as sacrilegious as trying to imitate God; it is stealing from
God the privilege of the spark." And God, he adds, will have His
revenge on the dopers (1).
One can only imagine what this suave connoisseur of popular culture
would have had to say about the surreal disaster of the 1998 Tour if he
were alive today. He certainly would not have been offended by the
hypertrophic commercialism that plasters the riders with logos and
squeezes every last franc out of every possible contributor, including
the villages that pay up to $100,000 apiece for the privilege of having
the show pass through their town squares. After all, the Tour became a
rolling advertising caravan back in 1930 when its founder realized that
he could cover his costs by combining the sporting event with commercial
promotions. (2) The more interesting question is how Barthes would have
reacted to the definitive outing of the Tour as a virtual pharmacy on
wheels. For Barthes, as for the rest of us, the crucial question is:
what (if anything) did he know, and did he really care that men were
stealing the high-performance spark from their Creator?
The Tour debacle has finally made it acceptable to say in public and
without provocation what many have known for a long time, namely, that
long-distance cycling has been the most consistently drug-soaked sport
of the twentieth century. Even prior to the establishment of the
Tour in 1903, the six-day bicycle races of the 1890s were de facto
experiments investigating the physiology of stress as well as the
substances that might alleviate exhaustion. The advent of cycling as a
mass recreational and competitive sport during the 1890s came at the end
of a century that had seen many experiments designed to measure the
effects of (sometimes fatal) stress on animals, and in this sense the
six-day riders were continuing the work of experimental physiologists
who were interested in finding out just how much abuse the animal or
human organsm could take. Stress, trauma, and death -- the extreme
outcomes of sportive exertion -- had been studied by many physiologists
before doctors began to wonder about the medical consequences of extreme
athletic effort. Today the emotional distance that separates the
sporting public from the physiological ordeals of its heroes confirms
that the high-performance athlete is widely understood to be an
experimental subject whose sufferings are a natural part of the drama of
sport. (3)
The history of modern doping begins with the cycling craze of the
1890s. Here, for example, is a description of what went on during the
six-day races that lasted from Monday morning to Saturday night: "
The riders' black coffee was "boosted" with extra caffeine and
peppermint, and as the race progressed the mixture was spiked with
increasing doses of cocaine and strychnine. Brandy was also frequently
added to cups of tea. Following the sprint sequences of the race,
nitroglycerine capsules were often given to the cyclists to ease
breathing difficulties. The individual 6-day races were eventually
replaced by two-man races, but the doping continued unabated. Since
drugs such as heroin or cocaine were widely taken in these tournaments
without supervision, it was perhaps likely that fatalities would
occur." (4) It is, therefore, not surprising that when the
pioneering French sports physician Philippe Tissié performed the first
scientific doping experiments in 1894, his test subject was a racing
cyclist whose performances could be timed and who could be primed with
measured doses of alcohol or any other potential stimulant. (5)
This is the early phase of the historical background against which
this year's Tour scandal must be understood. As one unblinkered observer
put it at the height of the furor: "For as long as the Tour has
existed, since 1903, its participants have been doping themselves. No
dope, no hope. The Tour, in fact, is only possible because -- not
despite the fact -- there is doping. For 60 years this was allowed. For
the past 30 years it has been officially prohibited. Yet the fact
remains: great cyclists have been doping themselves, then as now."
(6) This is essential knowledge for understanding why the riders reacted
as they did to the unprecedented crackdown presided over by a Communist
(female) health minister in the cabinet of the socialist prime minister
Lionel Jospin. They were dumbfounded precisely because everyone
involved, including the press, had been playing the game for so long in
the interest of doing business as usual. And why does it matter that the
health minister ("Joan of Arc") is a Communist? Because the
only politicians in Europe who want to deploy the long arm of the law
against doping, whether in France, Italy or Germany, are leftists or
Greens who do not share the sportive nationalism of their conservative
countrymen -- the patriots who have always been willing to look the
other way in the interest of keeping up with foreigners who just might
be using drugs.
Caught wholly offguard and confronted by packs of insatiable
reporters, the riders improvised furiously at their impromptu press
conferences, groping for verbal formulas that would avoid outright lying
while expressing their outraged sense of having been violated and
betrayed by people and circumstances that had spun out of control. The
Tour director joined his disoriented charges in the desperate attempt to
lay down a verbal smokescreen that might fend off the humiliating
concessions and confessions that were now only days away. "It is a
question of credibility and ethics, the Tour must remain clean,"
said Jean-Marie Leblanc, general director of the Société du Tour de
France and former Tour rider, with Orwellian cynicism. "Ten days
from now in the Pyrenees," he said two days later, "there will
be as many spectators as ever. The admirable performances and victories
will prevail over everything else." (7) Leblanc's riders, however,
did not resort to such Olympic-style platitudes about maintaining a
nonexistent integrity or the ineluctable triumph of great sport.
"The hypocrites have got to shut up and look in the mirror,"
snarled Richard Virenque, who made more than one threat about
litigation. "We were thrown out of the Tour for no reason
whatsoever. You will be hearing from us very soon." (8) "I am
completely satisfied with what I can achieve with my own physical
ability," said the sincere and slippery Udo Bölts. (9) "I do
not want to represent a country that treats riders like dirt. To hear
people say that bicycle racing is the most corrupt sport is
pitiful," said the disillusioned Frenchman Stéphane Barthe.
(10) None of the riders confessed to doping -- until some of them
fell into the hands of the black-uniformed CRS police who were about to
make doping history of their own.
On 30 July Jean-Marie Leblanc commented on the results of these
encounters: "The riders have been traumatized by the conditions in
which some of them were interrogated." (11) At least a dozen
riders, including the four members of the TVM team who were extracted
naked and dripping from the showers, found themselves in a kind of
extralegal hell that was simply unprecedented in the history of sport.
For there is no question but that some riders were subjected to police
measures that are sometimes carelessly referred to nowadays as
"Gestapo tactics." One account of such an experience was
offered by a Swiss member of the Festina team, Alex Zülle: "In the
beginning the officials in Lyons were friendly. But on Thursday evening
the horror show began. I was put in an isolation cell and had to strip
naked. I had to give up my belt, shoes, even my glasses. They inspected
every body cavity, including my rear end. The night was bad, the bed was
dirty and it stank. The next morning they confronted me with the
compromising documents they had found. The said that they were used to
seeing hardened criminals in the chair I was sitting on. But is that
what we are? I wanted out of this hellhole, so I confessed." (12)
"We're being treated like cattle," complained Laurent
Jalabert, and for a white Frenchman this was a novel experience. (13)
There are other residents of France, however, who are more familiar with
this style of police work. So on your next visit to Paris, dear reader,
ask the first North African streetsweeper you meet whether he finds the
Tour-busting behavior of the black-garbed CRS militia unusual. The
chances are pretty good that he has friends or relatives with similar
tales to tell.
While there is a strong case to be made that only state intervention
can save sport from its drug addiction, this sort of intervention
served that cause badly. It is true that, with few exceptions, it does a
society no good to ignore its own laws, and the French antidoping law
that was passed in 1965 achieved little if anything that came to the
attention of the outside world. Similarly, the Tour coexisted all too
comfortably with the antidoping law of 1989 for almost a decade until
1998, when a dismssed and disaffected Festina employee decided to pay
back his former bosses by exposing their internal drug trafficking.
While there is good reason to argue that it was time to enforce the law,
it is also necessary to answer Alex Zülle's anguished question: Was it
right to treat him and other drugged riders as though they were hardened
criminals? Surely it was not, if only because the sudden (and brutal)
enforcement of a dormant law suggests bad faith on the part of the state
and the civil society it represents. Better candidates for the isolation
cell would have been Jean-Marie Leblanc or the Olympic skiing champion
Jean-Claude Killy, president of the Société du Tour de France. The
alternative was to reproduce in the world of cycling what happens year
in and year out in the world of track and field that is administered by
the International Amateur Athletics Federation (IAAF) and by the
International Olympic Committee (IOC). While the athletes are subjected
to drug tests of less than certain validity, top officials of little or
no integrity are leading la dolce vita around the world. According to
Prof. Helmut Digel, the reformist president of the German Track and
Field Federation (DLV), the people responsible for the doping crisis in
Olympic sport are "those officials who have permitted parts of the
high-performance sportsworld to take on the characteristics of an
immoral subculture." "In this subculture," he continues,
"which is populated by people who feel right at home in the foyers
of luxury hotels, in VIP lounges, in first-class restaurants, and in the
offices of many marketing agencies, doping is treated as a minor
indiscretion." (14) This is the self-absorbed and rhetoric-bloated
leisure class with which Digel has been trying to coordinate doping
control over the past five years, and it has been a frustrating
experience.
So who is it who goes to jail (or into the doping doghouse) for the
federation opportunists who travel the world collecting phony
decorations and fawning smiles from politicians looking for a chance to
land the next world championship? It is people like Alex Zülle, and
that is why we should listen to what they have to say about the doping
scandals in which they play the most vulnerable roles. Here, for
example, is Alex Zülle on ethical niceties and the nitty-gritty of
making a living: "I've been in this business for a long time. I
know what goes on. And not just me, everyone knows. The riders, the team
leaders, the organizers, the officials, the journalists. As a rider you
feel tied into this system. 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? So I had two
alternatives: either fit in and go along with the others or go back to
being a house painter. And who in my situation would have done
that?" And here is Alex Zülle on how lying becomes a habit:
"When you don't tell the truth right away in this sort of
situation, then it becomes more than a white lie. It's not really a
matter of your personal self-interest. On the Festina team we had a good
team spirit, and nobody wants to wind up being the traitor. You stick
together in a very, very difficult situation and you want to hold
together as a group. And it's not something that only concerns the
riders making big money, you're talking about family men who are making
a living." (15) If the men who work the silver mines high up in the
Peruvian Andes can chew coca leaves to make it through their workshifts,
then why shouldn't the athletic coolie on a bicycle take the drugs he
needs to survival his ordeal? That is the logic of a sport that is less
a community than it is a labor camp.
For many years the standard line of the federation bureaucrats
responsible for doping control was that outside intervention, alias
"state interference" in the affairs of sport, was unnecessary.
Now it appears that a least some members of the sportsworld's ruling
class are beginning to take a different view of the matter. "Sport
cannot possibly solve this problem by itself," said Walther
Tröger, president of the German National Olympic Committee and a member
of the IOC. "State agencies must also help." (16) More
significant than the views of this aging apparatchik are those of Hans
Wilhelm Gäb, the Opel executive who is in charge of distributing
$30,000,000 a year in sports sponsorship money in Germany. "When
doping becomes an obvious problem," he said during the Tour mess,
"it is clear that effective controls are lacking and there is no
credible threat. Only when doping is punished as a dishonest and
criminal offence is there a chance for a new beginning and that
guarantee of equal opportunity which enables sport to survive."
Translation: state intervention is indispensable if sport is to retain
its social and commercial value. Gäb's long interview in Germany's most
important newsweekly is among the most significant reactions to the Tour
fiasco precisely because he is a major player among the sponsors who
make the whole circus possible, and as sponsors go Gäb is in a class by
himself as a critic of the establishment he both needs and finances.
"Hundreds of thousands of completely undoped people pursue cycling
as honest competition and as a fitness hobby," he said. "So we
are talking about a small elite of officials, organizers and riders who
discredit sport in general and who are obviously unable to clean up
their own operation." Nor are the riders blameless: "The
cheating has long been a part of the system. When the wall of silence
came down, the riders got upset, not about the doping, but rather about
the investigative methods and the reporting about what was going
on." Part of Gäb's proposed solution, believe it or not, is that
professional sport be run more like ... a business: "Sometimes I
wish that sport had control-and-review systems comparable to those of
big corporations." (17)
The hole in Gäb's argument is the optimistic assumption that
corporate sponsors are going to insist on drug-free athletes whether or
not they are winners. "The sponsor," he claims, "promises
money for high performance; he does not encourage cheating. And he does
not assume that people are aiming at producing performances by means of
illicit methods." And: "Unprincipled high-performance slaves
do nothing positive for the sponsors who pay them; they are worth
nothing to us." (18) This is fine rhetoric, but it does not accord
with reality in two important ways. First, sponsors want to finance
winners who, they hope, will not be caught doping; Gäb's suggestion
that there are high principles involved is not borne out by any evidence
I am aware of. Second, Gäb overestimates the risk to corporations of
sponsoring doped athletes. "Whoever tolerates doping," he
warned, "ruins the image of his company." Alas, that is not
the way it works in the real world. Festina actually reported "that
the scandal had a positive effect on sales of its watches and that it
would pay the team's $5 million expenses again next year." (19)
Call it the Howard Stern principle, but the sad fact is that public
grossness and the sheer entertainment value it provides have been
associated at times with increased revenues flowing back to the sewer
from which the grossness emerged. Indeed, two weeks into the scandal not
one corporate sponsor had dumped its Tour team despite the carnage in
the newspapers, a collective corporate decision that will not be lost on
other potential investors in the sports carnival.
There were, in fact, two types of corporate response to the Tour
scandal. A spokesman for Deutsche Telekom, the German communications
giant that sponsors one of the Tour's two strongest teams, offered
copious assurances that the company was planning to help finance
research on new detection methods for synthetic erythropoeitin (EPO),
the red blood cell producing hormone that is presumably the most abused
and most dangerous drug on the Tour. Neither of the German scientists
scheduled to benefit from this corporate largesse had ever heard of the
plan, but that would eventually be taken care of. To dampen any
suspicions that Telekom riders were taking human growth hormone, the
spokesman pointed rather naively to the fact that the sports physician
looking after Telekom's riders was none other than Dr. Joseph Keul, a
longtime physician to the West German Olympic team and accomplished
publicity-seeker who for many years has been notorious for being soft on
doping. (20) According to Keul, EPO is safe when used properly and
offers a practical replacement for altitude training. (21) This did not
prevent Telekom from announcing that Keul would be meeting with the
Association of German Cyclists (BDR) after the concluson of the Tour to
work on new methods for detecting EPO. "Professor Keul," the
spokesman noted encouragingly, "already has a list of
suggestions." (22)
How Deutsche Telekom reconciles its employment of Keul with its
announced intention of driving EPO out of the sport is hard to figure,
unless one accepts the premise that all the fuss about EPO detection may
have been a public relations maneuver. Telekom announced even before the
end of the Tour that the doping scandal would have no effect on its team
sponsorship and that it intended to honor the existing contract that
expires in 2001. In fact, the most striking aspect of corporate response
to the Tour scandal was the almost eerie calm with which it was greeted
by the sponsors. Whether this unconcern was due to ignorance or sheer
cynicism was not always clear, as is evident in the following
declaration. "We take for granted that our team receives the best
athletic and medical care," said the chairman of the German Bank in
Spain, a co-sponsor of the Spanish Once team. "And for that reason
the doping issue does not affect us." The publicist of a brewery
said that he wanted to "look very carefully at whether doping is a
general problem in cycling" -- a riddle that anyone willing to read
a newspaper had already solved. Another businessman said that he would
deal with the doping publicity by adopting a "creative
approach" that he appeared to assume was ready to hand. (23) In
short, it was easy to get the impression that the sponsors had seen the
alleged enemy, and they were anything but alarmed. It was as if they had
adopted as their motto the down-and-dirty realism of the Tour rider Theo
de Rooy: "If you think that sports in general can be or must be the
purest form of entertainment while the whole world is rotten -- that's
utopia." (24)
The sad thing about the Tour's sudden disgrace is that the ordeal it
requires is, beyond a doubt, a venue for shared heroism. For as Hans
Wilhelm Gäb pointed out, the solidarity of these drug-assisted riders
expressed "the ethos of a group that in the last analysis becomes a
conspiratorial community, not through doping, but through a shared
adventure in a type of extreme sport. Even the riders who do not dope
have up to now accepted the rules of this business. That is why they do
not criticize other riders but rather sympathize with the ones who are
thrown out." (25) While the ethical dangers of this kind of
male-bonding are well known, its profound appeal cannot be denied.
"Who still believes," one disillusioned sportswriter asked,
"in the beautiful fairy tale about the heroic struggle against 4000
kilometers of highway?" As a matter of fact, the appeal of the
heroic myth is much stronger than this credulous skeptic seems to think.
For the surreal chaos of the 1998 Tour should not be mistaken for a
permanent condition.
There is, in fact, a case to be made for quietly ignoring the
virtually universal doping that goes on in this "extreme
sport," an argument that accepts and even embraces the medically
extreme and potentially fatal character of the ordeal itself. It is an
argument that is (from its own perspective) properly contemptuous of
medical humanitarianism and fastidious concerns about sportsmanship in
the traditional (and here outmoded) sense of the term. This argument was
boldly launched into the midst of the Tour madness by the German
journalist, physician, and cycling fan Hans Halter, who presented it
with the precisely correct doses of principled defiance and ironic
pathos that this philosophy of "sport" requires. "No one
can seriously expect," Halter wrote, "that these extreme
athletes, tortured by tropical heat and freezing cold, by rain and
storm, should renounce all of the palliatives that are available to
them." (26) Indeed, no one can, for those who accept the ordeal
must concede to the martyrs at least a measure of relief. What the Tour
scandal tells us is that modern society does not even know how to begin
to draw the line.
References
(1) Roland Barthes, "The Tour de France as Epic" [1957],
in The Eiffel Tower and Other Mythologies (New York: Hill and Wang,
1979): 83.
(2) "Dunkle Schatten auf der Tour," Süddeutsche Zeitung,
25/26 July 1998. The Süddeutsche Zeitung (Munich) will be referred to
hereafter as SZ.
(3) See John Hoberman, Mortal Engines: The Science of Performance and
the Dehumanization of Sport (New York: Free Press, 1992): 13.
(4) Tom Donohoe and Neil Johnson, Foul Play: Drug Abuse in Sports
(Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986): 3.
(5) Mortal Engines, 126.
(6) Hans Halter, "Alles verstehen, alles verzeihen," Der
Spiegel, 3 August 1998, 97.
(7) "Ein Sprengsatz bedroht die ganze Tour," SZ, July 13,
1998; "Voet belastet Festina," SZ, July 15 1998.
(8) "Sechs neue Festnahmen bei Festina und TVM," SZ, July
24, 1998.
(9) "Ich hatte Tränen in den Augen," SZ, 1/2 August 1998.
(10) "Riders Are Still Critical of the French Police and Courts
for Their Role in Drug Affair," New York Times, 11 October 1998.
(11) "Weiterrollen oder ausreißen," SZ, 31 July 1998.
(12) "Hier sitzen nur Schwerverbrecher," SZ, 27 July 1998.
(13) "Ausblenden und Gesundbeten," Der Spiegel, 27 July
1998, 104.
(14) "Sondersitzung des IOC," SZ, 1/2 August 1998.
(15) "Hier sitzen nur Schwerverbrecher," SZ, 27 July 1998.
(16) "Olympischer Sport gefährdet," SZ, 25/26 July 1998.
(17) "Sklaven nützen uns nichts," Der Spiegel, 3 Augst
1998, 94-95.
(18) Ibid.
(19) "Riders Are Still Critical of the French Police and Courts
for Their Role in Drug Affair," New York Times, 11 October 1998.
(20) On Keul's relationship to doping, see Mortal Engines, 245, 246,
252, 256, 261.
(21) "Ausblenden und Gesundbeten," Der Spiegel, 27 July
1998, 105.
(22) "Weiter viel Freude," SZ, 31 July 1998.
(23) "Ausblenden und Gesundbeten," Der Spiegel, 27 July
1998, 106.
(24) "Riders Are Still Critical of the French Police and Courts
for Their Role in Drug Affair," New York Times, 11 October 1998.
(25) "Sklaven nützen uns nichts," Der Spiegel, 3 Augst
1998, 94-95.
(26) Hans Halter, "Alles verstehen, alles verzeihen," Der
Spiegel, 3 August 1998, 97.
