Willy Voet: the complete reversal of values

Breaking the Chain: Willy Voet. Yellow Jersey Press (Random House) 2001. 132 pages paperback, Ł10. ISBN 0-224-06056-2

Let's understand just why the Festina affair happened. If the drugs 'sportsmen' use to enhance performance were harmless, then we'd all take them every day, just as we eat cornflakes. The ones that are harmless don't work, and the ones that work are dangerous. They're banned because they damage health and threaten life. That means it's illegal to use them, and to do so is to cheat. It's equally illegal to try to 'win' a time-trial tucked in behind a lorry, or to take shortcuts. If you're known to be 'winning' by cheating, then everyone else will be tempted to do the same. People like Willy Voet have never understood this, and still don't.

Voet introduces us to a world not unlike that of the Kray brothers, with a complete reversal of all the values that we more-or-less honest people live by, the world of the criminal mentality. Here the honest are regarded with contempt, as fools or knaves who may actually object to your illegal practices. Those attempting to stamp out drug abuse are villains and liars. Actually to catch someone is in itself 'unfair'. The worst thing you can do is 'spit in the soup' by telling what you know (the treatment of Christophe Bassons, led by Lance Armstrong, is a stain upon the sport, and upon the American, that should not be forgotten). Voet shoots up with a mixture of amphetamines, caffeine, cocaine, heroin, painkillers and corticosteroids (the notorious 'Belgian mix') merely to drive the car. But it would be wrong to call him 'immoral': that requires a sense of right and wrong. I have no doubt in understanding that Willy Voet and his fellows genuinely see nothing wrong in what they're doing – it's the norm, it's what you do.

And that's why we believe him. Why would he lie? He wasn't ashamed of what he was doing, and every word has the ring of truth. And it's all so petty, so fiddling: Voet bartered drugs for team clothing he stole from individual riders' kitbags and replaced from stock later, like stealing underwear from your neighbour's washing-line in the middle of the night.

Yet along with the amoral, cynical stance of this man with no sense of truth, honour or fairness, runs a vein of sentimentality that is truly nauseating. He's spent years hiding drugs in rectal tubes and condoms, is caught with a flask of Belgian mix in his underpants. Yet the full body search (rubber gloves and vaseline) horrifies him. 'What had I done,' he cries, 'that they should treat me like this?'

Well, Willy, you conspired to cheat and lie, to peddle dangerous drugs, to defraud the public, and to poison an entire sport. That's what you did. But you still don't get it, do you? So when he weeps with self-pity in his cell and blubbers over his wife we feel, not pity but contempt: this man's not just bent, he's gutless.

Voet makes it quite clear that drug use does not make for a level playing field: individuals respond differently. He allowed himself to be used as the team guinea-pig to test the effects of clenbuterol, the crude anabolic hormone used by beef farmers. Here we realise that he's not really the team's 'masseur', he's just the gofer, a man who would do anything he was told for his wages: self-inject clenbuterol, drive all over Europe high on amphetamines collecting drugs, keep EPO in his fridge next to the margarine, inject his riders with unknown substances; and finally would refuse to obey the rules, the omertá. If he's going down, then he'll take people with him.

Paradoxically, because we believe his stories about riders, managers, soigneurs, occasions and events, we equally believe him when he assures us that Charly Mottet never used drugs ('he'd have won the Tour if he had'); that Gilles Delion (won a classic without using drugs!), Bassons and others are genuinely clean; that Bruno Roussel was an innocent unwillingly suckered into the massive scam; that de Gribaldy wouldn't countenance drugs, and the management and riders had to do it behind his back. We already knew, of course, that when riders like Richard Virenque say 'I'm clean', they mean either 'I'm using something undetectable' or 'I haven't been caught yet'.

There is a view in cycling that the riders are all innocents; the villains are the sports scientists, the team doctors, the drug manufacturers – let them all be sent to jail. This is dangerous and foolish nonsense: it's true that they're relatively young – men in their twenties and thirties; but they're old enough to take responsibility for their own actions, to know that there is a choice they can make. Presumably they don't avoid opening a bank account on the grounds that they're too young to be trusted with money. Virenque, Hervé, Brochard, Zülle, Dufaux and all the others not only knew what they were taking, but had their own centrifuges (at Ł300 a throw) to test their own haematocrit.

Yet compared with some of the more sinister, back-street purveyors of drug cocktails, Voet seems almost like a protector of the young and foolish. The innocent Virenque asked Voet to inject him with an unknown substance obtained from 'a mate' before the 1997 Tour time-trial at St-Etienne. According to Voet he injected the rider, who turned in the time-trial of his life, and never told him that the syringe was full of nothing but glucose. Maybe all any of them needs is carbohydrate.

EPO's only part of it, of course. No drug is ever abandoned – they just add on the new ones. Any rider might at the same time be taking EPO, testosterone, amphetamine and (a big favourite) corticosteroids, plus blood thinners – frequently administered by bungling amateurs who were shown how to do it much as one heroin addict passes on his 'skills' to another.

Reading this book is a lot like staring in horrified fascination at a microscope slide showing the progress of some particularly revolting disease. This is partly owed to an excellent translation by William Fotheringham, which reads like real, original English. If you buy a copy you'll at least be contributing to the royalties of a man who can write his mother tongue. Any other proceeds should go to the families of those who died to prove that unregulated abuse of drugs is highly dangerous, that they should be banned, and that the Willy Voets of the world should be kicked out of the sports they disgrace.

Ramin Minovi