SPECTATOR SPORT
Dope and glory
Simon Barnes
THE TOUR de France is just a bike race, in the way that Test match cricket at Lord's is just a bat and ball game. Imagine learn- ing that the MCC had been used for 200 years as a front for the procuring of under- age boys. Such a revelation could hardly fail to affect the way in which the nation looked on itself. The scandal of the Tour de France is roughly on a par with such a revelation.
Vast quantities of performance-enhanc- ing drugs have been found, top teams have been implicated, police have extorted tear- ful confessions of prolonged and careful drug-taking from its stars, more and more confessions have been heard and there is still the feeling that all that has been exposed is the iceberg's tip.
'I regret lying and disappointing my fans, but there was nothing I could do.' So said Alex Zulle, runner-up in the tour in 1995. 'I had good results without doping, but pres- sure from my sponsors forced me to jump the gun.'
The Tour de France is about the soul of France. We don't really appreciate stage racing in this country: it is a business of complex tactics, deals, fraught alliances, cataclysmic effort. It is an annual three- week mania of total obsession.
It is as if Lord's cricket ground was sent on a parade around all the loveliest parts of England. The Tour is a celebration of the Frenchness of France, France as it sees itself — rural, tamed, diverse, united. It is also a celebration of the human spirit, because it is so frightening a physical and mental ordeal.
The riders threatened to go on strike last week in protest at the media which kept writing about the drugs; the actual racing had become a mere side issue. This was illogical of the riders, drugs obviously being the bigger story. But for the riders, rising to incomprehensible efforts on a daily basis — that is what the Tour de France is all about — it was an appalling insult. They were out there killing themselves, and all they got was a few paragraphs alongside a lot of stuff about erythropoietin.
The point is that drug-taking is not an individual matter, it is a team ethic. Drug- taking is institutionalised. The riders are not so much cheats as victims. If you want to compete, you take drugs. And as the scandal erupted, so the cries to halt the Tour rang out. It is the sort of thing that happens, but huge sporting occasions are like avalanches: you don't stop that amount of money for a trivial matter like morality.
The massive drug-taking hardly comes as a shock: what is surprising is the way so much has been discovered and made pub- lic. It leaves you wondering if, or perhaps when, track and field athletics will go through a similar explosion of soul-baring.
It's not a matter of trying to win by cheat- ing. It works the other way round. Every- body else is doing it; how can I dare to give everyone else an advantage? Got to be in it to win it, as the American coach said. With performance-enhancing drugs, dope is not about the winning but the taking part. Dieu est toujours pour les gros bataillons. Dope is one of sport's big battalions; money is another. The two have forged an alliance that looks unshakable. Vive le sport!
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