French Revolutions

sleeping.’
    If this was a scandal, it quickly
blew over. During the war, soldiers on all sides were given amphetamines — 72
million tablets in total — and after it cyclists were quick to see the value of
a drug that stifled fatigue and pain under a mental blanket of aggression and
stamina. Gino Bartali, winner in 1938 and 1948, died the week before I’d left
and the obituaries had been unanimous: Bartali was very probably the last
untainted champion. (History won’t be too hard on him for the three daily
cigarettes prescribed by his doctor to augment a dangerously low heart beat.
Bartali’s only other stimulant was ‘faith in the Madonna’.)
    His great rivalry with Fausto Coppi
was underscored with a conviction that Coppi was doped; Gino searched Fausto’s
room for pills, and once drove 150 kilometres through the night to pick up a
suspicious bidon he had seen his nemesis discard during a race. The subsequent
analysis turned up nothing racier than bicarbonate of soda, but Coppi himself
was later outstandingly candid on the issue. Interviewed on French radio near
the end of his career, he casually remarked that all riders took la bomba (Italian
road-slang for amphetamines) and that those who claimed otherwise knew nothing
of the sport. Did Coppi himself succumb? ‘Yes, when it was necessary.’ And when
was it necessary? ‘Almost always.’ Jacques Anquetil, five times Tour winner in
the Sixties, was even more forthright. ‘Only an imbecile imagines that a
professional cyclist who rides 235 days a year can hold himself together
without stimulants.’ Coppi was Simpson’s hero; Anquetil the leading rider of
his era. Tom’s choice wasn’t whether to take speed, it was just how much and
what brand.
    In today’s witch-hunt atmosphere such
alarming frankness is unusual, but not unknown. ‘Let’s not be hypocrites. You
just don’t do that on fizzy mineral water and salad.’ Hearing the Tour’s
rigours thus encapsulated by a spokesman for one of its chief sponsors, Crédit Lyonnais, I knew I was going to be in trouble. That was a month before I left, and anticipating
that two decades of fetid sloth might not be undone by a couple of spinning
sessions and the odd jog, I’d consequently spent some time covertly researching
the Tour’s extensive pharmacological hall of shame.
    Up until the Seventies, the emphasis
was on drugs that made you believe you were capable of great things;
although, as Paul Kimmage states, it is still common to charge up with
amphetamines at local races without drug controls, the modern breed of naughty
rider looks to more sophisticated medications which as well as being more
difficult to detect actually do make him capable of great things. Human
growth hormone (HGH) builds lean muscle and reduces body fat; the infamous EPO
boosts the blood’s capacity to carry oxygen and is said, in almost meaninglessly
crass terms, to improve performance by 15 per cent.
    That was the kind of stuff I wanted.
I remember taking a doomed cat to the vet’s and being sent away with a
cancer-crusted X-ray, an apologetic smile and some mysterious pills that would
make old Kurt ‘feel better in himself’ during the swansong of his ninth life.
This, I supposed, was the effect of amphetamines, from simple ones such as
alcohol to the more full-on pinprick-pupilled jaw-grinders of youth-culture
lore: to make you ‘feel better in yourself’. But this wasn’t enough. I needed
to be better than myself.
    Three main drawbacks, none of them
particularly surprising, soon suggested themselves. Supplies of EPO and HGH
were almost impossible to track down, and ludicrously expensive if by some chance
you managed to do so. Then there were the side effects. EPO thickened the
blood, and when inexpertly administered did so to the point where the heart
laboured to extrude the crimson slurry through its ventricles. A professional
cyclist’s heart beats at a slower rate than any other man’s — often down to 30
beats a minute at rest when they’re in full training — and herein lies the
danger. In the early days of EPO misuse, half a dozen Dutch and Belgian
cyclists went to bed and never got up, their soporific hearts clogged; when
sleep was recognised as a danger period, EPO-takers started setting their
alarms to go off twice a night so they could get up to exercise and get the old
tickers ticking faster.
    That sounded almost as bad as dying
in your sleep; worse, in fact. So I just said no to EPO. As far as