The Crooked Path to Victory

Drugs and Cheating in Professional Bicycle Racing. Les Woodland. Cycle Publishing 2003. 192 pages paperback. £9.85. ISBN 1-892495-40-6.

An exposé of of this type would not have been published a generation ago. It still runs counter to the mores of pro cycling, which remain insular, and suspicious of those who speak out. In this resourceful, well-indexed look at life in the peloton, Les Woodland has assembled scores of stories at once amusing, enlightening, surprising, sometimes tragic.

Endurance events like six-day racing, (Bordeaux - Paris) date from the late 19th Century. The extremes of human endurance and suffering demanded by the punters spawned trainers like ‘Choppy' Warburton (whose protégés seemed to soar briefly and die prematurely), and brought the Church in to remonstrate on the riders' behalf.

Some trickery has become cycling folklore. Benoni Beheyt's victory over team leader Rik van Looy in the 1963 world road championship continues to inflame tiny bar-rooms in rural Belgium. Engaged in the Madrid Six (where one rider from each team had to be on the track at all times) Tom Simpson's lookalike mechanic, suitably disguised, took his place on the track during one of the quiet night sessions while Simpson slept – until the track manager discovered the ruse.

Criterium-fixing is endemic and drugging institutionalised. Strychnine was the first performance-enhancing drug. Later the stars used amphetamines laced with painkillers. Sleeping pills helped them sleep. Roger Rivière's career-ending crash in the 1960 Tour de France was the result of drug misuse.

Dr Pierre Dumas, who took control of the Tour de France medical service in the early fifties, was astounded at the volume of drug taking, and was instrumental in introducing testing. But it was the Belgian government in 1965 that imposed drug controls, not the UCI. Advance warning produced few few positives, no-notice testing gave depressingly high results. Tom Simpson's death was a watershed: more exacting dope tests were introduced, but nothing really changed, as Jacques Goddet revealed many years later. Woodland questions whether tighter controls and more qualified medical support have made any difference: modern racers are exposed to more insidious remedies and their cynical purveyors are more brazen.

The Festina affair in 1998 brought the whole sordid business into the open again. Despite the apparently open trials a degree of mystery and conspiracy still surrounds the case: Festina directeur Bruno Roussel claimed a plot orchestrated from within the sport itself.

Every generation has its share of cheats and charlatans. They may possess strong limbs and stout lungs, wear bespoke suits, boast gilded certificates on the walls of smart consulting rooms. Their backgrounds might be totally different: the subsistence farm, the leafy suburb, the medical school but there is a common thread. It might be simply the need to survive in a harsh profession or perhaps make money from gullible racers, demanding sponsors or to fool the public. The fact is, cheating and doping have always been part of cycling and are unlikely to go away.

Gordon Daniels