French Revolutions Read online

  Finally, just where the road got tired of faffing about and turned directly up towards the summit, I saw what could only be a fully-fledged mirage: a bulging wallet on the tarmac. As I blearily dismounted for further investigation, it suddenly darted off violently into the hot pine undergrowth. The sight of two chortling boys reeling the wallet towards them by the fishing line threaded through it briefly distilled dazed confusion to simple slapstick humiliation. But endeavouring to reciprocate the merriment, I felt my face twisting uncontrollably into a vicious, drunken sneer, and listened in helpless horror as a terrible, demonic growl leaked from that sagging mouth. Swaying slightly on my feet, I watched the boys scampering away in noisy panic through the fir cones and dimly contemplated a terrible truth. It wasn’t the heat or the bonk or the chronic fatigue that had left both body and brain so incoherently mired. It was the drugs.

  Every time a cyclist fails the ‘naughty wee-wee’ test, there is a frenzy of hand-wringing recrimination and a chorus of heartfelt pleas for the sport to return to its amateur ideals. ‘It was never like this in the old days,’ people say. And they’re right: it was worse. I have before me an article from the July 2000 edition of History Today which reveals a sport riven with substance abuse almost from its inception; addicted, in fact, from birth. In 1896, Britain’s Arthur Linton won the marathon Bordeaux-Paris race (the next Brit to do so was Tom Simpson) in record time. Two months later his exhausted body belatedly succumbed, and the obituary in Cyclers’ News makes interesting reading for anyone who has compared the behaviour of people before and after an extended visit to the toilets in a Soho nightspot: ‘I saw him at Tours, halfway through the race … he came in with glassy eyes and tottering limbs, and in a high state of nervous excitement. I then heard him swear – a very rare occurrence with him … At Orleans, Choppy [Linton’s trainer] looked after a wreck – a corpse, as Choppy called him, yet he had sufficient energy, heart, pluck, call it what you will, to gain 18 minutes on the last 45 miles of hilly road.’

  Call it what you will? OK, how about heroin, trimethyl and strychnine. ‘Choppy’ Warburton – and let’s face it, that’s a name to have any prosecution lawyer rubbing his hands – was later banned from English tracks, and there seems no doubt that he drugged Linton up to his walrus ’tache. Doping wasn’t illegal and in the early days was barely covered up: cocaine flakes were dropped on to cyclists’ tongues as they pedalled past, or drunk with coffee, or mixed with cocoa butter and rubbed into their legs. The Belgians went for ether-soaked sugar cubes, and the French dabbled with digitalis. Heroin and cocaine ‘speedballs’ were almost standard. And if you think strychnine is unlikely (it apparently has anaesthetic qualities in low doses), then contemplate the desperate frenzy of experimentation that led to some riders clearing their airways with a quick nip of nitro-glycerine.

  In 1924, Henri Pélissier, the previous year’s winner, abandoned the Tour in a huff after the organisers tried to penalise him for discarding a jersey in contravention of another of those mindlessly draconian stipulations. ‘You have no idea what the Tour de France is,’ he ranted at a journalist later that day. ‘But do you want to see how we keep going?’ In high strop Henri emptied a bag of bottles and ampoules out on to the table: ‘Cocaine for the eyes; chloroform for the gums. You want to see the pills, too? Under the mud our flesh is as white as a sheet … our eyes are swimming, and every night we dance like St Vitus instead of sleeping.’

  If this was a scandal, it quickly blew over. During the war, soldiers on all sides were given amphetamines – 72 million tablets in total – and after it cyclists were quick to see the value of a drug that stifled fatigue and pain under a mental blanket of aggression and stamina. Gino Bartali, winner in 1938 and 1948, died the week before I’d left and the obituaries had been unanimous: Bartali was very probably the last untainted champion. (History won’t be too hard on him for the three daily cigarettes prescribed by his doctor to augment a dangerously low heart beat. Bartali’s only other stimulant was ‘faith in the Madonna’.)

  His great rivalry with Fausto Coppi was underscored with a conviction that Coppi was doped; Gino searched Fausto’s room for pills, and once drove 150 kilometres through the night to pick up a suspicious bidon he had seen his nemesis discard during a race. The subsequent analysis turned up nothing racier than bicarbonate of soda, but Coppi himself was later outstandingly candid on the issue. Interviewed on French radio near the end of his career, he casually remarked that all riders took la bomba (Italian road-slang for amphetamines) and that those who claimed otherwise knew nothing of the sport. Did Coppi himself succumb? ‘Yes, when it was necessary.’ And when was it necessary? ‘Almost always.’ Jacques Anquetil, five times Tour winner in the Sixties, was even more forthright. ‘Only an imbecile imagines that a professional cyclist who rides 235 days a year can hold himself together without stimulants.’ Coppi was Simpson’s hero; Anquetil the leading rider of his era. Tom’s choice wasn’t whether to take speed, it was just how much and what brand.

  In today’s witch-hunt atmosphere such alarming frankness is unusual, but not unknown. ‘Let’s not be hypocrites. You just don’t do that on fizzy mineral water and salad.’ Hearing the Tour’s rigours thus encapsulated by a spokesman for one of its chief sponsors, Crédit Lyonnais, I knew I was going to be in trouble. That was a month before I left, and anticipating that two decades of fetid sloth might not be undone by a couple of spinning sessions and the odd jog, I’d consequently spent some time covertly researching the Tour’s extensive pharmacological hall of shame.

  Up until the Seventies, the emphasis was on drugs that made you believe you were capable of great things; although, as Paul Kimmage states, it is still common to charge up with amphetamines at local races without drug controls, the modern breed of naughty rider looks to more sophisticated medications which as well as being more difficult to detect actually do make him capable of great things. Human growth hormone (HGH) builds lean muscle and reduces body fat; the infamous EPO boosts the blood’s capacity to carry oxygen and is said, in almost meaninglessly crass terms, to improve performance by 15 per cent.

  That was the kind of stuff I wanted. I remember taking a doomed cat to the vet’s and being sent away with a cancer-crusted X-ray, an apologetic smile and some mysterious pills that would make old Kurt ‘feel better in himself’ during the swansong of his ninth life. This, I supposed, was the effect of amphetamines, from simple ones such as alcohol to the more full-on pinprick-pupilled jaw-grinders of youth-culture lore: to make you ‘feel better in yourself’. But this wasn’t enough. I needed to be better than myself.

  Three main drawbacks, none of them particularly surprising, soon suggested themselves. Supplies of EPO and HGH were almost impossible to track down, and ludicrously expensive if by some chance you managed to do so. Then there were the side effects. EPO thickened the blood, and when inexpertly administered did so to the point where the heart laboured to extrude the crimson slurry through its ventricles. A professional cyclist’s heart beats at a slower rate than any other man’s – often down to 30 beats a minute at rest when they’re in full training – and herein lies the danger. In the early days of EPO misuse, half a dozen Dutch and Belgian cyclists went to bed and never got up, their soporific hearts clogged; when sleep was recognised as a danger period, EPO-takers started setting their alarms to go off twice a night so they could get up to exercise and get the old tickers ticking faster.

  That sounded almost as bad as dying in your sleep; worse, in fact. So I just said no to EPO. As far as HGH goes, I need only point out that side effects include excessive growth of bones in the hands, feet and face, and that I just typed that sentence with my nose and chin.

  It took a bit of homework to find my drug of choice, one that married a subtle psychological boost to a physiologically galvanising punt up the arse. Ephedrine has been around since ancient China, a herbal infusion that increased heart rate and therefore stamina. It was first synthesised in the Twenties, becoming popular as a treatment for
asthma and hay fever, a drug that broadened the airways and so enhanced oxygen intake. These factors, coupled with the increased heart rate and stimulated release of pain-blocking neurotransmitters, inevitably though rather belatedly – attracted sportsmen. By the Seventies it was a popular – and illegal – pick-me-up; when Maradona was thrown out of the 1994 World Cup, ephedrine was the drug he tested positive for (though not the one, I hoped, that inspired the now-notorious display of camera-eating mania).

  Ephedrine; hay fever pills. It sounded good – innocuous yet effective. I can’t remember where I copied the following quote from, but as my preparatory training petered forlornly away it had developed into a mantra: ‘It is the unrealistic pressure to perform day after day that lies at the heart of the drugs issue, which is not an excuse for it, just an explanation of why it might happen.’ It would happen. And here I was, striding up to the pharmacy counter of Sainsbury’s to make it happen.

  ‘Hay fever,’ I said to the white-coated young chemist, following it with a sniff whose alarmingly theatrical quality caused her to look sharply up from her prescriptions. ‘Drug-pills … remedies. Remedies for my hay fever.’

  It was a bad start. She eyed me keenly, then glanced behind her at the relevant products. ‘Which do you normally use?’

  I’d been prepared for this. ‘Over the years? The lot.’ Then I gave a world-weary, guttural sigh intended to summarise a life blighted by flora-related nasal congestion.

  She started to read out names from the shelf and I followed her sequence. ‘Clarityn? Beconase? Piriton …?’

  ‘Yep.’ Feeling the need to drum up some authenticity, I carried on with the next product along. ‘And Acumed.’

  She swivelled. ‘That’s a pain-relief patch for rheumatic conditions.’

  ‘No wonder it didn’t work!’

  Unwilling to brave the cold-eyed inquisitors of Boots – I once went in to buy some Calpol for my son’s flu and came out red-faced and empty-handed, feeling like a thwarted solvent-abuser – I’d hoped a supermarket chemist would be a pushover. The wrongheadedness of this assumption was now apparent, and with a queue building up behind me I cut to the quick. Slowly.

  ‘The doctor recommended ones with effer … effer-something,’ I announced with demonstrably counterfeit vagueness.

  ‘Ephedrine?’ she replied carefully.

  ‘… Yeah. That’s the stuff.’

  ‘And who is your doctor?’

  Oh dear. There was some muttering from behind. ‘I didn’t say my doctor. I said the doctor. A doctor. My wife’s father. Sort of like a doctor-in-law.’

  Look, I felt like saying, I don’t want to sell this to kids out of an ice-cream van or slip it in policewomen’s drinks. I just want to cycle up some hills feeling better in myself.

  ‘Are you allergic to hydroxybenzoic acid?’

  ‘I wouldn’t have thought so.’

  ‘Any history of high-blood pressure?’

  A confident shake of the head. This was getting better; I was going to get my drugs.

  She raised her voice very slightly. ‘Are you taking hypnotics or medication for depression?’

  ‘Not yet.’

  Tuts from the rear; tetchy superciliousness from ahead. The chemist turned, plucked at the shelf and reluctantly slid a packet of Haymine across the counter like a suspicious bookmaker handing over winnings.

  I palmed them, smiled, then piped up, ‘Oh yeah – and three packets of ProPlus.’

  I’d actually dabbled with Haymine up the Aubisque, but with the panniers on, half a tab hadn’t made any perceivable difference. This time it would be more systematic. (ProPlus, for anyone without experience of student last-minute revision practices, is a caffeine tablet with the lusty kick of a treble espresso.) I’d fumbled one Haymine tab into my sweat-mired gob halfway up that first col; just beyond Bédoin, when my speed slowed to single-digit kilometres an hour and the suddenly monstrous peak of Ventoux appeared fleetingly through the lavender, I’d topped this up with another two and a couple of ProPlus. Slapping myself much too hard on the cheek, I remounted and tried to forget all the stuff about not operating machinery if affected.

  In every important respect I was in another world. A sign leered over at me from a side turning: élevage des sangliers. I’d read enough Asterix to know that sanglier was wild boar, but if élève was school pupil, then didn’t élevage mean education? What the fuck kind of weird pig-teaching shit was going on down there? And the next sign didn’t help: ‘Patrick Troughton’. What? Patrick Troughton? The dead Doctor Who? This I had to see. I wobbled listlessly off down the indicated switchback path and found myself facing a modest warehouse emblazoned with a name that after running a finger beneath the letters and mouthing each in turn I eventually conceded might, in fact, be Parquets Traditionels.

  The idea had been that the drugs would work together, turbocharging my lungs, twin-sparking my heart, hot-wiring invincibility into my brain. But as the first painted names slipped slowly beneath my wheels and I forced myself up in the saddle like an old man rising from a disabled toilet there was a clashing bodily discord, a chemical castration. My heart seemed to have filled most of my upper half, throbbing through the forearms, flicking at the back of the throat, battering the inside of my skull with the frenzied irregular staccato of popping corn. I was breathing as if I’d just learned how to do it, and every time my legs pushed down on the pedals it was like pressing a huge bruise. I dropped back to the saddle and for the first time it started giving me grief, forcing me to shift about from buttock to bollock in a futile quest for perineal comfort.

  Riders were now streaking down, a sickening swish of air-billowed clothing, a speeding fragment of a ‘bonjour’ or a ‘hiya’ caught by my hot ears. With bike and body rolling agonisingly from side to side I came up to a fat hairpin. There was something painted on it. In English. ‘Hey – only 11k to go!’ I’d been on the ring road of hysteria, and this propelled me up the main drag. Eleven fucking kilometres? Eleven? It had been 22 at Bédoin. When he was only halfway up, he was neither up nor down. Not just a body blow, a mighty rabbit punch in the perineum. I’ll see your year in Provence and raise you a bloody lifetime. Why had that stupid good Samaritan been there to fix my puncture? If I’d yelled the chorus from ‘Fame’ or eaten my watch or hissed at him like a cornered stoat he’d have legged it straight back into his garage and I wouldn’t have to be here now.

  The revised arrangement with my family had been to meet at the summit at 7; it was now 6.15. I shouldn’t, I couldn’t, let them see me like this. As a great coal-sack of fatigue settled heavily down on the back of my neck I scrabbled a rigid claw into my bar-bag: one last Haymine, one last ProPlus. Cry God for Tommy, England and St George. I took my helmet off and immediately felt less mad; reeling my brain back in from the brink I taught myself to live with the jiving pine trees and paisley-haloed tunnel vision.

  Tutting indulgently at the sundry distortions of reality around me, I got into a rhythm and began to make better progress, not quite redoubling my efforts perhaps but certainly requartering them. An incentive system was established, a series of little sticks and carrots: if I get to that next corner I’ll lower my jersey neck-zip; if I get to the next I’ll have a sip of fluid; if I don’t get to the one after I’ll grab a fistful of raisin slurry from my jersey pocket and cram it into my parched, protesting gullet.

  Fascinatingly, it worked. As the road weaved relentlessly through the thinning spruce trees, a heavily cambered uphill slalom that just went on and on, I even caught the Americans, down to two now, a few pounds lighter no doubt but notably redder. There was no spare breath for gloating or greeting, but the one in front went with me as I nosed past, and for a ridiculous minute we were shoulder to shoulder, both feigning nonchalance. ‘Marty,’ pleaded his now distant colleague in a cracked rasp, and with a thwarted huff Marty dropped back.

  The boarded-up café known as le Chalet-Reynard was mankind’s final stand before the summit; a dead squirrel in the car park
did for the animal kingdom, and the plants didn’t last much longer. When the last sickly little Christmas trees gave up the ghost just round the corner, all that lay above me was a bald and soulless slagheap of concrete-coloured rubble, the road zigzagging crudely up to a drab, antenna-topped weather station as if drawn by a giant’s clumsy finger. Four miles to climb 1,700 feet.

  Ahead the tarmac was liberally decorated with heroes past and present, as if even the spectators knew that from here on in the riders would need all the help they could get. Soundbites from pre-Tour press conferences gone by tolled out in my still slightly fermented brain: ‘There’s nothing there … you can’t breathe … it’s like the moon.’ I had been playing about with ZR’s twenty-seven gears, but twenty-six of them were now irrelevant.

  I’m still not sure why it hadn’t occurred to me before, but it was only when I winced agonisingly round that first corner and suddenly found myself being punched backwards by a hurricane screaming rudely in my face that I deduced the name ‘Ventoux’ might in some way be connected to wind. The Windy Mountain. Though this in fact turned out to be completely wrong – the name actually derives from vinturi, Ligurian for mountain – I did learn later that Ventoux is the world’s windiest place, the mistral having howled over its summit at a record 320 k.p.h. just a few months before Tom’s last stand. Forehead pressed to the handlebars, I somehow forced my unsteady legs to the next corner, where a huge gust suddenly shoved me in the back so violently that I all but freewheeled up to the one after.