French Revolutions

supposed to be on I
transferred a couple of handfuls of hot dried apricots from jersey pocket to
drooling chops, then exhausted my daily innuendo allowance by choking on the
tyre man’s banana. It didn’t help. My slowly pistoning knees, focus of most of
my head-hung visual attention, began to look blurred and distant; my skull
pulsed and swelled to helmet-cracking proportions. I was already in
twenty-seven but still pawed feebly at the gears, like an addicted laboratory
rat clicking a deactivated cocaine button in its cage. And try as I might I
could not banish a conviction that my increasingly ragged inhalations and
exhalations had adopted the precise rhythm — and after a while the tune — of
the theme to The Wombles.
    Finally, just where the road got
tired of faffing about and turned directly up towards the summit, I saw what
could only be a fully-fledged mirage: a bulging wallet on the tarmac. As I
blearily dismounted for further investigation, it suddenly darted off violently
into the hot pine undergrowth. The sight of two chortling boys reeling the
wallet towards them by the fishing line threaded through it briefly distilled
dazed confusion to simple slapstick humiliation. But endeavouring to
reciprocate the merriment, I felt my face twisting uncontrollably into a
vicious, drunken sneer, and listened in helpless horror as a terrible, demonic
growl leaked from that sagging mouth. Swaying slightly on my feet, I watched
the boys scampering away in noisy panic through the fir cones and dimly
contemplated a terrible truth. It wasn’t the heat or the bonk or the chronic
fatigue that had left both body and brain so incoherently mired. It was the
drugs.
    Every time a cyclist fails the
‘naughty wee-wee’ test, there is a frenzy of hand-wringing recrimination and a
chorus of heartfelt pleas for the sport to return to its amateur ideals. ‘It
was never like this in the old days,’ people say. And they’re right: it was
worse. I have before me an article from the July 2000 edition of History
Today which reveals a sport riven with substance abuse almost from its
inception; addicted, in fact, from birth. In 1896, Britain’s Arthur Linton won
the marathon Bordeaux-Paris race (the next Brit to do so was Tom Simpson) in
record time. Two months later his exhausted body belatedly succumbed, and the
obituary in Cyclers' News makes interesting reading for anyone who has
compared the behaviour of people before and after an extended visit to the
toilets in a Soho nightspot: ‘I saw him at Tours, halfway through the race...
he came in with glassy eyes and tottering limbs, and in a high state of nervous
excitement. I then heard him swear — a very rare occurrence with him... At
Orleans, Choppy [Linton’s trainer] looked after a wreck — a corpse, as Choppy
called him, yet he had sufficient energy, heart, pluck, call it what you will,
to gain 18 minutes on the last 45 miles of hilly road.’
    Call it what you will? OK, how about
heroin, trimethyl and strychnine. ‘Choppy’ Warburton — and let’s face it,
that’s a name to have any prosecution lawyer rubbing his hands — was later
banned from English tracks, and there seems no doubt that he drugged Linton up
to his walrus ’tache. Doping wasn’t illegal and in the early days was barely
covered up: cocaine flakes were dropped on to cyclists’ tongues as they
pedalled past, or drunk with coffee, or mixed with cocoa butter and rubbed into
their legs. The Belgians went for ether-soaked sugar cubes, and the French
dabbled with digitalis. Heroin and cocaine ‘speedballs’ were almost standard.
And if you think strychnine is unlikely (it apparently has anaesthetic
qualities in low doses), then contemplate the desperate frenzy of
experimentation that led to some riders clearing their airways with a quick nip
of nitro-glycerine.
    In 1924, Henri Pelissier, the
previous year’s winner, abandoned the Tour in a huff after the organisers tried
to penalise him for discarding a jersey in contravention of another of those
mindlessly draconian stipulations. ‘You have no idea what the Tour de France
is,’ he ranted at a journalist later that day. ‘But do you want to see how we
keep going?’ In high strop Henri emptied a bag of bottles and ampoules out on
to the table: ‘Cocaine for the eyes; chloroform for the gums. You want to see
the pills, too? Under the mud our flesh is as white as a sheet... our eyes are
swimming, and every night we dance like St Vitus instead of