The editor of the New York Sun, John B. Bogart, in spiking an account of a boring everyday occurrence written by an optimistic trainee reporter, once defined what should get into print. "When a dog bites a man, that is not news,” he said, “because it happens so often. But if a man bites a dog, that is news."
Doping in the Tour de France, which starts in Brest on 5 July, would have met Bogart’s definition of a non-news story and what is more, most French people seem to agree with him. In a recent survey, more said they watch the Tour on television for the scenery than for the sport. Nine out of ten believed the Tour had been ruined by doping; almost as many said they no longer believed in the results, while seven out of ten thought all the leading cyclists took drugs. Recent events only reinforce such scepticism. The 2006 winner, Floyd Landis, was stripped of his title for failing a dope test. In 2007 race leader Michael Rasmussen was sent home for deliberately evading tests and the organisers have excluded the Astana team from this year’s race because of their consistently bad doping record.
A drug-free tour would make news in itself but a book published last month, ‘Tempêtes sur le Tour’ (‘Storms over the Tour’) suggests this is unlikely. Its author, Pierre Ballester, claims that in the last twenty years, 85% of the winners and 60% of the riders finishing in the top ten have got round the anti-doping checks on one way or another.
Ballester is careful not to name names, perhaps in the light of what happened in 2004 after he and co-author David Walsh came out with L.A. Confidential, about multiple Tour winner Lance Armstrong. This carefully avoided suggesting that Armstrong had taken performance-enhancing drugs but when Walsh went further in The Sunday Times, the newspaper was sued. At first sight anyone might safely conclude from Ballester’s latest statistics that Armstrong is therefore the only winner in the last two decades not to have taken drugs. However, his allegation that 85% of Tour winners were guilty of malpractice in that period accounts for 17 out of 20 winners and Armstrong alone won seven successive races between 1999 and 2005. Let us hope Monsieur Ballester knows a good libel lawyer.
www.letour.fr
From our July 2008 e-newsletter
