Allez le Tour

It's the world's most popular live sporting event, and as Gallic as Camembert and the Eiffel Tower. But the reputation of the Tour de France lies in tatters after a year of revelations which have shamed a nation and brought the race to its knees

once rode in the Tour de France for a day. Admittedly, I was squashed into a bright orange truck, belonging to the French ministry of roads and tourism, consuming nothing more stimulating than Camembert sandwiches and Coca-Cola.

We were the lead vehicle in a 60-mile carnival procession of 400 cars (including giant strawberries-on-wheels, huge mobile watches and ambulatory cheeses). Bringing up the rear, there were 190 bicycles.

The truck bowled along at up to 60mph down the country lanes of Normandy and Brittany, hedged on either side by contented, munching people. Our job was to check the readiness of the road for the world's most popular live sporting event (15 million spectators over three weeks, all watching for free).

Each village was a festival of drinking and sausage-grilling. Children, in school groups, lined the road screeching with joy. The entire population of old people's homes sat grinning in rows in their wheelchairs.

They waited for hours, in great reverence, for 190 of the fittest young men in the world to hum past on their flimsy cycles like a swarm of candy- coloured bees.

France is an ethnically disparate and very large country, bound together by language, flag, bureaucracy and, for three weeks every July, by the Tour de France. The Tour amounts to an annual celebration of France - and especially the richness and variety of small-town, rural France, from the endless green hills and plains of the north, to the sheer mountain passes of the Alps and Pyrenees.

The Tour is also a great sporting event, probably the greatest endurance sporting test in the world: equivalent to running 19 marathons in three weeks. Unfortunately, it has also become synonymous with institutionalised cheating, lying and hypocrisy.

The 1999 Tour, the 86th, starts today from Puy-du-Fou in the Vendee, south of Brittany. It is impossible to be excited by that fact. Like many people, inside and outside cycling, I believe that this year's race should have been abandoned before a pedal turned.

This year's Tour is, supposedly, "clean": it is operating under new rules of ethical purity which bar any rider, or any team, formally accused of taking drugs, whether the accusation is fully proven or not. However, the Tour cannot separate itself from the wider sport (and multimillion- pound industry) which it, to a large extent, created.

The sport of road-race cycling (and it may not be the only one) is like an alcoholic, refusing to accept that it has a problem, as long as it drinks in secrecy. That fact was shamefully proved once again this week when the sport's governing body - the International Cycling Union (ICU) - forced the 1999 Tour to accept Richard Virenque, France's most popular rider.

The baby-faced Virenque, runner-up in the 1997 Tour, five times King of the Mountains, faces possible criminal charges of drug-taking and drug- trafficking. Despite his denials, French judicial investigators say they have documentary evidence that he has been doping himself for years. The Tour said last month that he was "not welcome". The ICU insisted on Tuesday that he must ride. The Tour gave way. So much for ethical purity.

Since 8 July last year, the flimsy veil of secrecy which disguised drug- taking in cycling has been snatched away. More than 50 people have been placed under formal investigation for illegal drug-trafficking and use in France, including a score of the world's top riders, officials of four teams, a lawyer specialising in defending cyclists on drugs charges and a quack doctor (and alleged drug peddlar) known to his Lycra- clad "patients" as Dr Mabuse ("Doctor-abuse-me").

It all began with a chance encounter - or maybe not so chance - at a village called Dronckaert ("drunkard" in Flemish) on the Franco-Belgian border last year. Willy Voet, 54, the Belgian trainer of the Festina team (leader, Richard Virenque), was stopped by French customs while on his way to Dublin, the starting point of last year's race. It is alleged that the French government, determined to create a test case, had been watching Mr Voet's movements for months.

Inside the official Festina team car, the officers found 235 doses of erythropoietin (EPO), an artificial hormone which boosts the red blood cells (and therefore endurance) but can thicken the blood to fatal levels if not controlled properly. They also found 82 doses of a muscle-strengthening hormone called Sauratropine; 60 doses of Pantestone, a derivative of testosterone, which boosts body strength but can cause cancer; and sundry pain-deadening corticoids and energy-fuelling amphetamines. All are banned by the international cycling union. All are illegal in France, unless prescribed by a doctor.

Mr Voet, a friendly, balding family man, with 30 years in the sport, was himself high as a kite on an amphetamine-based concoction called "Belgian pot". As he explained later to the investigating judge, drugs have become so much part of the way of life in cycling that everyone takes them, including the trainers and managers. It is a gruelling drive from Belgium to Dublin...

His confessions, and those of his boss, the Festina team manager, led to the most aggressive judicial investigation of drugs in cycling ever mounted in France. Famous cyclists - including Virenque - were arrested and roughly questioned when the 1998 Tour finally reached its homeland. In protest, several teams left the race; the remainder sat down in the road and refused, initially, to pedal on.

Mr Voet himself wrote a confessional book - Massacre a la Chaine (Chain Massacre) - which has been top of the non-fiction bestseller lists in France for the last six weeks. The book is a moving and spirited account of his 30 years of lying and cheating on behalf of some of the biggest names in cycling (many of them names never previously directly connected to drug-taking). According to Mr Voet, 90 per cent of professional cyclists take banned drugs.

Commercialism and cheating are not new to the Tour. It was invented in 1903 as a way of promoting a sports magazine. It was almost abandoned the following year after 12 riders, including the winner, were found to have fixed their stage victories. In the early years, most of the riders were farm boys, for whom a bicycle represented escape to the modern world; even now most French professional riders come from rural backgrounds.

The pre-war Tour was a leisurely affair, averaging around 25 kilometres an hour: pictures from the period show riders with cigarettes drooping from their mouths. Precisely when they started to take more stimulating drugs is not clear but financial rewards, and performances, began to improve dramatically in the 1960s. (The average speed had, by then, risen to 37kph; it is now over 40kph.)

When the British rider Tom Simpson died on an Alpine pass in 1967, aged 30, amphetamines were already rife - and not yet illegal. Each year since then, the rewards have become greater and so have the physical demands on the riders.

The Tour is shorter overall, compared to pre-war, but far tougher, with longer stages, more steep climbs and more sponsored sprints packed into each day's racing. In that sense, everyone - the sponsors, tour organisers and even the fans - have become hooked on drugs. No one truly wanted to see the Tour roll backwards and be reduced to a pre-war stroll again.

Does any of it matter? If they are all cheating, why not let them get on with it? The singer Johnny Hallyday, almost as ancient a French institution as the Tour de France, confessed two years ago that he was taking cocaine before every performance. No one arrested him.

There are several answers to that argument. Cycling is a sport, not just a spectacle. It must be a fair competition of physical strength and skill or it is a sham. Johnny Hallyday has a choice: young cyclists do not. If they want to succeed, they have to take drugs.

Willy Voet, after 30 years in the training-and-doping business, points out that some bodies absorb drugs better - and more copiously - than others. Many talented young cyclists fail because others - less talented - respond better to drugs.

Others die. At the end of his book, Willy Voet cites Vicente Lopez-Carril (dead at 37); Marc Demeyer (dead at 32); Geert Van de Walle (dead at 24); Bert Oosterbosch (dead at 32); Joaquim Halupczok (dead at 26); Johannes Draaijer (dead at 27). Several of the great, post-war champions have also died young: Jacques Anquetil at 53; Fausto Coppi at 41.

Drugs have also reduced the beauty of the sport. Several old champions argue that the dope-driven obsession with speed and endurance has eroded the cerebral and tactical side of cycling: it has become much more a brutal question of power.

In theory, this year's Tour is clean. In reality, it is a test between a few who genuinely do not take drugs and a majority who have not been caught yet. And Richard Virenque.

The Tour de France dominates the cycling landscape like the World Cup dominates soccer. After last year's humiliation, the Tour's organisers had it in their power to slam the brakes on. They could have - and they considered - cancelling this year's Tour to try to persuade the sport to recover its chemically addled senses.

For whatever reasons - commercial, sentimental - they decided to go ahead. More is the pity.