What Eddie the Eagle once was to ski-jumping, that is, a competitor so far off the pace that he became a personality based upon his heroic failure, Wim Vansevenant is to the Tour de France.
The 35-year-old Belgian rider finished last for the second successive year, earning the prize for being the ‘Lanterne Rouge’ (named after the red light on the back of a train), of riders that went from London to Paris the hard way. If Wim wins the Lanterne Rouge again next year, that would be a record for the Tour, giving him a unique place in cycling history.
Wim finished almost four hours behind the winner after the 20 stages but as one Radio France commentator said, ‘at least we know he doesn’t take drugs’. He was the only rider considered worthy of mention by the French national daily, Libération, which announced La Mort du Tour (Death of the Tour) in a front page headline and said it would no longer publish race results. The newspaper said the results of the Tour should appear only in medical journals for doctors trying to evaluate the efficacy of new medicines, a reference to the decade of drug scandals that have hit France’s most prestigious sporting event and reached new intensity this year with the exclusion of Michael Rasmussen, the race leader from Denmark.
Even though almost half the sample interviewed by the French Sunday paper, Journal du Dimanche, believed it was impossible to win a stage on the Tour, or any other major cycling event, without recourse to drugs, there is not the slightest risk that the 2008 Tour will be cancelled. Viewing figures actually increased because of the controversy, with 52% of the French population tuning in. The Tour is, as President Nicolas Sarkozy put it, ‘one of the symbols of the French identity’, albeit a race that no French rider has won for 22 years.
Whether Sarkozy can dissuade some of the major sponsors from pulling out remains to be seen. Between them they paid 158 million Euros this year to put the 21 teams on the road, and already Adidas, T-Mobile and Skoda are likely to give up all cycling sponsorship. Audi and even the French Crédit Agricole bank are expected to cut their ties with the Tour.
With fewer and smaller teams likely to compete next year, it should be easier to administer and enforce doping controls. Consistently testing each of the 189 riders who began the 2007 race would have been hugely expensive and impractical. But even the most stringent future checks cannot detect performance-enhancing methods used ahead of the Tour that increase the quantity of substances found naturally in the body, because they are absorbed and return to innocuous levels by the time the race starts. Only random testing of riders in training is a sufficient deterrent, which was why the mystery of Rasmussen’s whereabouts in the months before the Tour, when he missed four out-of-competition doping controls, triggered his ignominious departure.
Tour de France 2007
