Biological Passport

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”.