Tour De France: Only going back to basics can halt Tour's destruction

On the wall of a bar in the Spanish village where I live there is a signed postcard of one of the 141 survivors of this year's Tour. It is of Juan Miguel Mercado, the only local rider taking part this year. Any customers watching the Tour broadcasts on the bar's television this year would have had a hard time spotting "Juanmi". A mountain specialist, he put in a couple of attacks on the lower slopes of the Tour's toughest single climb, the Col du Galibier, and that was it. Roll on 2008.

Was such a low-key performance surprising? Hardly. As rider after rider has indicated of themselves off the record, Mercado's overwhelming desire in cycling's blue riband event has been to get it over with and go home. Just like in 1998 - when the accumulation of doping crises turned the Tour into a colourless, pleasureless shadow of itself - his personal tipping point had been reached long before Paris loomed into view.

Related articles

• Tour De France: Contador holds on to earn unlikely but hollow victory
• The Third Leader: Vive le Tour!
• Search the news archive for more stories

Win or lose, though, back home Mercado remains a local hero. When he goes out training it is as part of a group of amateur riders which assembles each day under the church tower at 10am. At the annual criterium he hands out the prizes to the next generation of riders, many dreaming of riding in the Tour one day. Or at least they were until cycling hit the self-destruct button.

Mercado and pros like him are the last survivors of the days when cycling truly was, as it used to boast, a "sport of the people". That was before the boom years kicked off in the early 1990s, when the ensuing influx of money turned doping from a fringe activity into something so systematic that, come 2007, it has all but wrecked the sport.

At the same time, it is hardly coincidental that the so-called professionalisation of the sport caused by vastly increased budgets means that leading riders have become increasingly isolated, surrounded by an ever-growing plethora of PR officers, team doctors, security guards (sometimes armed), and other back-up personnel.

"These guys are looked upon as heroes to some young guys - but for me they're not the heroes of the Tour de France, they never were," says Britain's Bradley Wiggins, who left the race when one of his Cofidis team-mates tested positive. "I spent a lot of time in the group finishing an hour down most days and that's where the heroes are for me. Guys like Geraint Thomas, 21 years old - for the last two weeks I've watched him drag himself through the Alps and the Pyrenees on nothing but bread and water - not the guys on the million-Euro contracts who are being done for blood transfusions and things like that."

But it is only very recently that the gap between the Thomases of this world and the top riders has started to widen. Less than 20 years ago, the five-times Tour winner Miguel Indurain would be found chatting to journalists at the start each day - as Wiggins does - so much so he would often begin racing late.

Fast forward to 2007 and when this year's Spanish winner, Alberto Contador, had one of his limited conversations with the press last week, his team's PR man said afterwards he was worried Contador scratched his head too often - it apparently made his answers look unconvincing. As for journalists asking another team, Astana, "too many questions" about doping in one press conference, the solution was even more drastic: the team would not comment on them at all.

Given the proportions of the crisis enveloping the sport, worrying about head-scratching sounds like arguing over which first-class berth to take in the Titanic after the iceberg had struck. As for clamping down on doping questions, it immediately raises the suspicion that they cannot be asked because cycling does not have the answers. In Astana's case, given that their leader Alexander Vinokourov tested positive for blood doping last week, they certainly did not.

On the contrary, if ever there was a year when riders needed to be more accessible, more willing to answer questions about doping, to be seen as more human and not superstars, it was 2007.

But no. Instead, riders on the Tour, and other races, remained largely isolated in their fortress-like team buses at each start, often until literally seconds before the starting bell rang. Conversations with the big names were also almost invariably stilted, two-minute affairs, overseen by increasingly paranoid press officers. As the scandals multiplied and interest in the race itself withered, faces hardened, answers grew shorter.

It is time, surely, after this disastrous Tour, that rather than spending money on non-vital personnel or equipment, sponsors need to redirect their budget into more burning issues, such as keeping scientific tabs on their riders all year round and simultaneously ensuring that they are visible and accessible.

"The future of this sport is one where we have to get back to basics," argues the T-Mobile team-manager, Bob Stapleton. "One where personal contact and availability are the norm, not the exception. Cycling is already a huge drama. What it needs is across-the-board, round-the-year action on drugs. Further division [as is happening between the Tour and cycling's governing body, the UCI] will do us no good."

Squads like T-Mobile, CSC and Cofidis have already introduced stringent, independent anti-doping programmes - in CSC's case, so strict that they claim a rider is tested more times in four months than a footballer over their entire career. But all three of these teams have been badly burnt by doping affairs in the past. As Wiggins and Stapleton argue, such programmes need to become automatic and universal, a sine qua non for entrance into races like the Tour.

"If there's a one per cent suspicion or doubt that a team is involved in any way in a drugs ring or doping or working with certain doctors, then they shouldn't be invited to the Tour de France - as simple as that." Wiggins says. "They shouldn't even be given a racing licence until they can prove that they are, through stringent testing procedures, not involved in any wrong-doing."

His remarks have been echoed by Pat McQuaid, the president of the UCI. "Teams should be more responsible for their riders." he said.

Yet even with stronger measures, some still slip through the net - in Cofidis's case the Italian Cristian Moreni, in T-Mobile's the German Patrik Sinkewitz, both of whom returned positive tests for testosterone this summer. There can be only one answer: invest more, and more effectively, in stopping the cheats.

As for the huge credibility gap caused by this year's scandals, the Tour is also talking up the idea of national squads for 2008, with possibly as few as 100, rigorously checked, riders.

Rather than filthy lucre, pure, honest patriotism would fuel the event. Yet as Stapleton points out: "How many countries racing the Tour actually have anti-doping agencies that you could use for testing?" Increased accessibility, more systematic testing, national squads - for a tarnished sport, no solution is easy. Or as Stapleton puts it: "The process of change will be a very painful one." But it has to happen, before the postcards of the Mercados of this world disappear from the public eye for good.

Alasdair Fotheringham writes for www.cyclingweekly.co.uk