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oxygen levels of top cyclists, all of whom he believed to be dopers. During
the 1999 Tour, the harder Bassons worked, the more his blood oxygen levels
dropped and the weaker his body became. All the while his fellow cyclists
seemed to maintain and increase their strength regardless of their training
regimens. Bassons continued to slip to the bottom of the standings as the
race entered its second week. “It’s the world turned upside down,” lamented
Bassons, but “I will not retreat from any sacrifi ce.”55 In an interview with
L’Humanité, Bassons explained the evolution of his competitive worldview during his early career. As it became evident to him that only drugged cyclists won races, Bassons quit training to win and began to train to race as well as he possibly could without drugs. Bassons developed a two- tiered understanding
of race results — one set of standings for doped cyclists and another for drug-free ones — and felt that he competed at the top of the rankings of drug- free cyclists. “I’m satisfi ed with my fi nishes in the standings” of drug- free riders, he explained, even though journalists “never noticed my ‘podium fi nishes’
( places d’honneur)” before the 1999 Tour.56
On July 16, before the beginning of mountainous stage 12, Bassons aban-
doned the race. The dejected rider claimed he “cracked” due to “nervous
exhaustion” caused by his persecution at the hands of his coach, teammates,
and other cyclists, including race leader Lance Armstrong. To punish him for
his crusading, the peloton ostracized Bassons. “I felt rejected by the peloton.
Many riders made it absolutely clear to me that they did not appreciate my
presence in the Tour.” His coach and teammates urged him to stop talking
about doping. “It’s best for everyone that he go home,” explained race leader
Armstrong to the press. Armstrong mentioned that he had expressed this
sentiment directly to Bassons during an earlier stage. Le Monde anointed Bassons the martyr saint of the Tour and proclaimed, “No fl owers or crowns. . . .
[Not a single word] of sympathy for the young man who fell on the battlefi eld
of honesty and truth, a concept which is still chivalrous.”57
In the fi nal days of the Tour, the accusations of Bassons and the French
press appeared to be confi rmed when Le Monde, citing a leaked, secret drug test report by the UCI, announced that Armstrong had tested positive for
banned steroids after the fi rst stage of the Tour. The story became an inter-
national scandal that was reported in dozens of newspapers in Britain and
North America.58 After a bilious news cycle during which Armstrong threat-
ened to sue Le Monde for defamation and made the unusual request that the UCI release its test results to the public, the world learned that an authorized cortisone cream for treating saddle sores had been detected in Armstrong’s
drug test and that Le Monde had misinterpreted the result as a positive ste-
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roid detection. Armstrong rode to Paris and took his spot atop the podium
on July 25.
4. 2009: Lance in France Encore
In 2009, following seven consecutive Tour victories and a three- year retire-
ment, Lance Armstrong returned to professional cycling and announced his
intention to compete once again in the world’s greatest cycling race. Arm-
strong returned as doping scandals continued to swirl around him and
around France’s national bicycle race. After Armstrong’s 2005 retirement, Le Monde, former teammates and associates, and others accused the Texan of doping. In the most humiliating incident since the Festina Affair, the winner
of the 2006 Tour, American Floyd Landis, was disqualifi ed after the event’s
conclusion due to a positive drug test. During the last mountain stage, Landis
had embarked on a superhuman, 130- kilometer solo breakaway that erased
a seemingly insurmountable eight- minute time defi cit. Landis captured the
yellow jersey and defended it to Paris. Testing after the stage indicated that
drugs had fueled his unbelievable breakaway. In the 2007 Tour, team Astana,
sponsored by the government of Kazakhstan, withdrew after team leader Al-
exandre Vinokourov tested positive for a blood transfusion. Later, the Rabo-
bank team sent home its star rider and the Tour’s overall leader, Michael Ras-
mussen. The Dutch rider was about to be sanctioned by the UCI for having
lied about his whereabouts and hidden from offi cials to evade blood tests
before the start of the race. In 2008, organizers refused to invite team Astana, whose ranks included Alberto Contador and Levi Leipheimer, the fi rst- and
third- place fi nishers from the previous year. The Tour embarked from the
London prologue in 2009 with few of the race favorites in the peloton.
French commentators feared that Armstrong’s 2009 comeback heralded
the return of the turn- of- the- millennium scandals. Former Amaury Sports
Organization head Patrice Clerc declared that the race organizers had “missed
the turn” and were “lowering their guard” and “reopening a troubled page
in the history of cycling” by inviting the tainted former champion to com-
pete. Clerc compared Armstrong’s steadfast professions of innocence to
Nixon’s refusal to admit guilt in the Watergate scandal. “That attitude is very American,” concluded Clerc, who asserted that “perjury is far worse than the
crime” of doping. Le Monde, which demonized Armstrong during his run of Tour victories, complained that the Texan’s comeback heralded the return of
“that generation who climbed with their mouths shut. Never really caught,
but always suspect.”59
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Armstrong ignored the doping issue as much as possible, despite the inva-
sive nature of the new testing regimens instituted on the professional circuit
since his retirement. To fi ght drug use, professional cycling implemented a
“biological passport” system in which each rider submitted himself to thor-
ough testing to establish a baseline body chemistry profi le. Medical person-
nel performed blood, urine, and hair sample tests on many riders during
the Tour and compared the test results to the baseline profi le to determine
if body chemistry had been altered in unnatural ways. On the morning of
stage 11, UCI offi cials woke Armstrong’s Astana team at 6 a.m. to perform
anti- doping tests, provoking Armstrong to “tweet” in protest to his millions
of Twitter followers.
Despite the unwelcomed distractions, Armstrong performed well in the
Tour, especially for a thirty- seven- year- old athlete returning from a three-
year retirement. The Astana group hired Armstrong even though Alberto
Contador, acknowledged by most as the best Grand Tour rider in the world
at the time, remained under contract with the team. The rivalry between the
two Tour winners for leadership of the team and the Tour overshadowed the
outcomes of the early stages. Contador’s dominant, mountaintop victory at
Verbier, Switzerland, at stage 15 sealed the Spaniard’s overall race lead and
ended the leadership controversy. With Contador holding an unassailable
lead, Armstrong displayed his mettle during the race’s penultimate stage by
climbing away from several rivals
and placed fi fth on the grueling climb up
Mont Ventoux. His performance secured third place overall in the Tour.
Armstrong’s return and surprising successes sparked commentaries by
national political fi gures on doping and the state of the Tour. The tone and
content of the commentaries refl ected the gulf of opinion on the issue that
separated the French left and right. Marie- George Buffet, national secretary
of the French Communist Party and former minister of sport, declared that
Armstrong’s return is “not a good thing for cycling” and that “no one is
duped by this character.” Buffet urged cycling offi cials to renounce the path
of “willful ignorance, silence . . . and the rule of money” and enact more
stringent anti- doping measures.60 Meanwhile, French President Nicholas
Sarkozy, who followed the fi nal kilometers of stage 17 in the Tour director’s
car, proclaimed that Armstrong’s participation was an “extraordinary life les-
son” in how to fi ght cancer. Sarkozy declared “the Tour is a victim of doping
and is not guilty” of the misdeeds perpetrated by “cheaters.”61
Former Tour champion Greg LeMond joined the chorus of French voices
denouncing cycling’s doping culture. During the race, LeMond published a
series of commentaries in the French press in which he admonished racers to
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191
ner Alberto Contador’s astounding climbing prowess. LeMond’s critiques
recalled similar ones voiced by Christophe Bassons ten years earlier. “For
the last two decades, the most talented of riders has had no chance of placing
in the top fi ve of the Tour without resorting to doping,” explained LeMond,
who asserted that no “magic wand” of extra training or diet could possibly
account for the incredible climbing performances of riders like Contador in
recent years.62
Despite the specter of doping that lingered, new science appeared to jus-
tify the emerging, new- model “French school” of drug- free cycling. Midway
through the Tour, a preliminary report on cyclist drug use written by French
and Swiss sociologists and funded by the World Anti- Doping Agency was
released and concluded that the younger generation of cyclists in France em-
braced different attitudes toward doping than did older veterans. “Never has
a sport changed its culture so rapidly,” concluded report coauthor Chris-
tophe Brissonneau.63 The fi nal version of the report, released in December
2009, argued that France’s unique, highly structured cyclist training and
promotion system was an “ideal” model for fi ghting drug use in cycling.
The French system had been refocused after the 1998 Festina scandal and
encouraged younger riders to embrace drug- free training and recuperation
methods. In nations with relatively unstructured cycling programs, such
as Switzerland, doping culture remained entrenched, and younger cyclists,
left unsupervised, experimented more frequently with illegal performance-
enhancing substances.64
French audiences do not appear to have regained their faith in their “na-
tional bicycle race.” According to polls conducted by the daily newspaper
Sud- Ouest in 2010, only 44 percent of French surveyed “love” the Tour de France, compared to 59 percent in 1964. Meanwhile, the large majority of
those surveyed no longer watched the Tour on television, many because they
were “disgusted” by drug scandals. Among those who watched the race on
television, nearly three times as many people (28 percent) responded that
they did so to take in images of the beautiful countryside rather than to
see the competition (10 percent). Young people seemed to be abandoning
the Tour; the survey found that 66 percent of race fans were men of at least
65 years of age.65
The challenges posed to sporting “Frenchness” by doping in cycling epit-
omize the diffi cult transition of France’s national bicycle race into the new
millennium. In addition to current doping scandals, revelations about the
drug habits of retired and deceased heroes undermine the Tour’s myths and
legends. In the early years of the new millennium, the international cycling
public witnessed the suicide of 1998 Tour winner Marco Pantani by drug
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overdose and postretirement doping admissions by 1996 champion Bjarne
Riis and six- time Tour sprinting champion Erik Zabel. In 2006, Spanish au-
thorities launched “Operation Puerto,” a major doping prosecution that im-
plicated Tour winners Jan Ullrich, Marco Pantani, and Alberto Contador, as
well as other top contenders. Doping charges swirled around Lance Arm-
strong for years after his retirement, and the retired racer admitted in 2013 to doping for most of his career. It is unclear when or if the Tour will succeed in recapturing its luster and revered place in French and global sporting culture.
5. The Struggle for a Drug- Free Tour
The dramatic dialogues and narratives generated during the Tour in recent
years illustrate how the event engendered new kinds of heroes and villains.
drug- free, like Christophe Bassons. The new villains were those who, even as
they performed dramatic feats of athletic panache, doped to win. The drug
scandals on the eve of the new millennium humiliated the cycling commu-
nity, disgraced the Tour, and undermined the event’s prestige. As Le Monde
concluded after the 1999 race, the public had “lost confi dence” in cycling,
which closed ranks “like Roman legions threatened with attack” in the face
of public scrutiny over drug use, debasing and threatening the sport’s heroic
and mythic foundations. This fi fteen- year process culminated in 2013 with
Armstrong’s admission of guilt and fi nal disgrace. Yet the drug controversies
provided the Tour with new opportunities to reinvent itself and reinvigorate
its standing in the public eye at home and abroad. Transparency was the key
to resurrecting the Tour’s legend and its aura of mythic heroism: “Opinion
demands to know the exact conditions in which its heroes affect their ex-
ploits. . . . [Without truth, the public’s] vengeance could be fearsome.”66
In the new millennium amid ongoing scandal, the Tour has strived to
reposition itself as the world’s preeminent, archetypal drug- free sporting
event. Key to the Tour’s renaissance strategy has been the dramatic expansion
of drug testing throughout the sport. This approach has been championed
by the courts, governments, and cycling community in France and around
the world. Despite the public embarrassments that have resulted, all of cy-
cling’s stakeholders hoped that in the long run more drug testing would yield
a cleaner sport and rebuild public confi dence in the Tour and the exploits of
cycling’s heroes and champions. In the years immediately after the 1998 Fes-
tina debacle, the Tour attempted to ignore or suppress controversy. Thereaf-
ter, the Tour’s strategy has been to penalize dopers and lionize clean racers regardless of the i
mpact of such a strategy on the outcome of the race. In 2008,
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193
the Tour invited unheralded, second- division team Slipstream to compete in
the Tour solely because of its stringent, self- imposed drug testing regime. The team’s roster featured David Millar, a Scottish time trial specialist who gained redemption from a doping ban by returning to the sport as a vocal advocate
of drug- free riding. “Slipstream is an American team whose philosophy of
anti- doping pleases us,” explained Tour Director Christian Prudhomme.67
These strategies were an important component of the overall process of
redefi ning cycling heroism in the age of doping. The canon of self- sacrifi ce as a noble sporting quality remained embedded in the Tour’s athletic ethos since
the Tour’s early decades. The patron saint of self- sacrifi ce in the Tour’s lexicon of mythology remains René Vietto. Vietto competed as a junior member of
the French national team in his fi rst Tour in 1934 and found himself in con-
tention for the race lead while climbing over the Pyrenees during the Tour’s
closing stages. The French team leader, 1931 Tour winner Antonin Magne,
broke down behind Vietto twice on consecutive stages. On both days, rather
than continue on to possibly claim the yellow jersey, Vietto stopped, doubled
back over the mountains he was climbing, and gave up parts of his bike to
Magne. Thanks to Vietto’s great sacrifi ce, Magne won the Tour title in Paris.
The iconic photograph of Vietto seated on a wall next to his disassembled
bike, weeping after his selfl ess act, epitomized the ideal of self- sacrifi ce and remains an integral component of the Tour’s legend.68 In the doping era,
however, the defi nition of sacrifi ce has broadened to include sacrifi cing one’s chances of winning in the name of clean racing. Although French Tour athletes were no longer counted among the top contenders for the Tour, they
were lauded in the French press as champions of drug- free athleticism and
their declining results vis- à- vis riders of other nations were praised as evidence of their courage and honor.69
Afterword
Doping and the Tour on the World Stage
The topic of France’s relative ascent or decline on the global sporting stage
has fascinated French commentators. Recently, the French national soccer