ABSTRACT
In Chapter 5, we suggested that the use of performance-enhancing drugs by athletes could not be adequately understood if – and this is a characteristic of much of the public and policy discussion of the subject – attention is focused exclusively on the drug-using athletes. It was suggested, instead, that the illicit use of drugs by athletes was premised upon a network of cooperative relationships between those who were described as ‘innovating’ athletes and ‘entrepreneurial’ doctors. It would, however, be misleading to suggest that doctors are the only people, other than the athletes themselves, who are involved in drug use, for it is clear that the network of people involved in fostering the use of drugs in sport, and in concealing their use, is considerably more complex and extensive and that, in particular, it often involves many people in addition to athletes and doctors. The central object of this chapter is to examine in some detail the pattern
of drug use in professional cycling and to explore the network of relationships of those – not just the cyclists themselves and the team doctors, but also team managers, masseurs and others – involved in drug use in professional cycling. This case study, together with the case study of drug use in professional football (soccer) in the next chapter, will be of considerable value in helping us to understand why the pattern of drug use varies markedly from one sport to another. Drug use in professional cycling has a long history. The revelations
about drug use in the 1998 Tour de France – to be examined later – publicly revealed the extent of drug use in cycling, but long before that Tour there was already an abundance of data to indicate that drug use in cycling was widespread. What Richard Williams, writing in The Guardian (1 August 1998) has described as cycling’s ‘intimate association with drugs’ can be traced back a long way, for cycling was one of the sports in which the use of performance-enhancing drugs became common from a relatively early date. As we noted in Chapter 2, in the late nineteenth century riders in the six-day races used a mixture of heroin and cocaine to increase endurance. In 1924, the Pélissier brothers, in a famous interview with the investigative journalist Albert Londres, described the physical demands which the Tour de France made on the riders and the drugs
which they used. The interview took place on the evening of a Tour stage on 27 June 1924:
‘Do you want to see what we run on? Look.’ From his bag [Henri] took out a phial: ‘That’s cocaine for the eyes, that’s chloroform for the gums.’ ‘That,’ said Ville, also emptying his musette, is a cream to warm up my knees.’ ‘And the pills, do you want to see the pills? Look, here are the pills.’ They each took out three boxes. ‘In short,’ said Francis, ‘we run on “dynamite”.’
