Now, as much as ever, the UCI (cycling’s governing body) is
under huge pressure to do something about the sport’s extremely poor record in
relation to performance enhancing drugs. Cycling is often singled out as the
sport with the worst offences in this regard. In 1997 the organisation
introduced new measures in the form of the “blood module” to further enhance
the already relatively thorough testing regime to which professional cyclists
were subject. Cheating had become so
sophisticated that a new, dynamic programme was required in order to build up a
picture of substances present in an athlete’s body and how they change over time.
Everyone is unique and so a single assessment is not always an effective or
fair way to test. If, however, there are extraordinary increases in the
presence of certain substances over periods of time, research has shown that
they could not have occurred naturally and, therefore, must be due to synthetic
means. The system allows the compilation of data in relation to an individual
cyclist over time and is called a biological passport.
It is important to understand the historical context if the
reasons for cycling’s poor record regarding drug related cheating are to be
fully understood. Unlike cycling, many sports with which we are perhaps more
familiar, including rugby, tennis, rowing, cricket, athletics and football,
were, in the main, established and codified as amateur pursuits in the
Victorian age. In the UK at least, not only were life circumstances a barrier
to competition, often rules meant that professionals were kept apart from
“gentlemen” and only the latter were allowed to compete in the grandest events.
Cycling has never been so.
The earliest major cycling events were gruelling ordeals
over huge and seemingly impossible distances by those who very often had very
little else available to them. Those who rode the earliest Tour de France were
not an elite group of gentlemen. They rode only five stages but the shortest of
these was 176 miles; and longest was 290 miles. Their bicycles had only one
gear and solid tyres. Cheating was widespread from the earliest days. Maurice
Garin, winner of the first Tour was disqualified from the second edition on the
grounds that he took a train for some of journey. He wasn’t the only one. These
cycling events were founded and run for commercial gain e.g. in order to sell
newspapers or promote a town’s industry. The rules they imposed on competitors
were not designed to ensure fair play and sportsmanship. The owners of these
events were commercial enterprises who were not concerned with the sort of
lofty moral ambitions on the minds of The Football Association as they sat in The
Freemasons'
Tavern on Great Queen
Street, establishing the rules of Association Football. The culture
of cycling is steeped in the brutal exploitation of competitors for profit.
From the earliest days, cyclists wore shirts bearing the
names of sponsors and performed incredible acts of endurance and strength for
the benefit of the sport’s financiers. Reasonably successful cyclists earned
far more than their contemporaries who worked in fields or mines but they were,
in a sense, prisoners of their teams, competing constantly in a kind of
travelling circus. This why 1923 Tour winner Henri Pelissier labelled himself
and the others in the peloton “convicts of the road”. Pelissier was open about
the substances he and others felt were necessary in order survive the racing
schedule: cocaine for the eyes and chloroform for the gums. These substances
were not banned and so performance enhancement and the culture that goes with
it developed as part of the sport as it matured. By the time Fausto Coppi had
risen from poverty to perhaps the greatest cyclist of all time and
Campionissimo his attitude to drugs was very clear. When asked if he had used
them he replied “Whenever it was necessary”.
Asked how often that was, he offered “Almost all the time.” Coppi was
not unique in this respect. The first five times winner of the Tour de France,
Jacques Anquetil, was more belligerent on the subject. On one occasion he simply
refused to take a drug test on the grounds that the officials had asked him too
late. His reply to a television interviewer insistent on finding out more about
his use of drugs was “Leave me in peace; everybody takes dope.” It’s fairly
certain then, that both Coppi’s and Jacques Anquetil’s Hour records were
achieved with the use of performance enhancing substances.
Eager to show that the Chopper vs The Hour record, whatever
it turns out to be, is achieved fairly, I asked Patrick Kavanagh, Chairman of British
Cycling’s Central Region, to find out from the UCI if I could obtain a
biological passport. He was extremely helpful but after several exchanges had
to inform me as follows:
“I am advised that you will not be able to obtain a UCI
biological passport, the view from British Cycling is that this is not a competitive
event and more a Guinness book of record event.”
It seems then, that the Chopper vs The Hour record is
outside the restrictions of the UCI’s anti-doping programme and that
I am allowed to take anything I like to assist me. On the basis, however, that
I don’t want anybody to question the integrity of my attempt, I’ll stick with
Tizer and simply say “Ah well, at least I tried”.
