The Tour de France's first doping scandal, 100 years on
By Simon Smale
Topic: Road Cycle Racing
Henri Pélissier was celebrated after winning the Tour de France in 1923. ( Getty Images: Roger Viollet )
The Tour de France is a race that has always been intrinsically linked with its past.
The race drips with its own sense of self, with its history dictating everything from its route to its idiosyncratic quirks.
This year's 111th edition is no different.
For the first time since 1903, Paris will play no role in the route, a by-product of the imminent Olympic Games.
That wasn't an issue in 1924, incidentally, when the Grande Arrivée into the Parc des Princes velodrome in Paris clashed with the final day of the swimming, tennis and boxing, and came slap-bang in the middle of the gymnastics.
But times change and now, a century on, the sporting and cultural behemoth that is the Olympic Games takes precedent.
So, the Tour was forced to change things up — and looked no further than into its extensive back-catalogue for alternative inspiration.
They settled on honouring the Tour's first Italian champion, Ottavio Bottecchia, with a Grand Départ in Florence, Italy for the first time.
Ottavio Bottecchia won the first of his two Tours de France in 1924, but was dead three years later. ( Getty Images )
The race will have three stages in Italy before the race crosses into southern France .
That 1924 victory was the first of two consecutive Tours de France wins Bottecchia achieved before his mysterious death in 1927 — but that's another story.
Bottecchia was, by all accounts, the strongest in the race, but his passage towards victory was no doubt aided, in part, by the acrimonious exit of defending champion Henri Pélissier, to whom Bottecchia finished second in 1923.
Pélissier was one of the great French cyclists either side of World War I, winning a total of 10 Tour d France stages, split before and after the conflict as well as claiming victories in Milan-San Remo, Paris-Brussels, Bordeaux-Paris and Paris-Tours.
He also won Paris–Roubaix twice and the Tour of Lombardy three times to round off an impressive and imposing resume.
Aside from being a terrific rider, the cantankerous Parisian was also a firm believer in getting a fair go for his fellow riders.
He frequently butted heads with Tour de France founder, Henri Desgrange over the spartan conditions the race director imposed on the competitors, both on the Tour and at other races throughout the calendar.
The 'calvary' of early Tours de France
Henri Desgrange founded newspaper, l'Auto, which evolved into current publication, l'Equipe, and created the Tour de France in 1903 to help circulation. ( Getty Images: Albert Harlingue/Roger Viollet )
Tours de France have always been extreme tests of endurance.
This year's race covers 3,499.2km with almost 53,000m of elevation gain.
Overall, riders will expect to be racing for a total of 80 or so hours over the course of the three-week, 21-stage race.
That's nothing compared to 1924, though.
A century ago, riders completed a whopping 5,425km shared across just 15 stages — Pélissier complained later that the race was like "a calvary," only the way to the cross only had 14 stations — the Tour had 15.
"You have no idea what the Tour de France is," he added, speaking to French journalist Albert Londres, whose reports in le Petit Parisien newspaper created a sensation when they were published.
The shortest of those 15 stages was a mountainous 275km from Nice to Briançon in the Alps — 44km longer than the lengthiest stage on this year's route. The longest was a barely conceivable 482km from Les Sables-d'Olonne to Bayonne which took 19 hours and 40 minutes to complete.
Bottecchia's total winning time was a shade over 222 hours, or just over nine days in the saddle.
Ottavio Bottecchia (second in this picture) won his second Tour de France in 1925. ( Getty Images: Topical Press Agency )
But it wasn't just the distances.
A stickler for observing archaic and antagonistic rules, Desgrange demanded that every rider finished with the same equipment that they started each stage with.
That meant any punctured tyres needed to be carried with them and any extra jackets or jumpers that were being worn at the start of the stage — which often started in the cold, early hours of the morning before sunrise, before riding through the heat of a French summer's day — had to be worn at the finish.
"We don't only have to work like donkeys, we have to freeze or suffocate as well," Pélissier said.
"Apparently that's an important part of the sport."
After an instance where Pélissier was docked time for losing one of his jerseys, he said he went to find Desgrange, who told him that he could not throw away anything provided by the race organisers.
Pélissier's argument that the race had not provided him the jerseys — Pélissier, unlike other riders, had arranged his own sponsorship — adding that he would quit the race in protest.
He eventually did so, taking his brother Francis and another rider, Maurice Ville with him.
It was on that day that he ran into Londres in a cafe next to the station in the small Normandy village of Coutances.
Les Forçats de la Route
Albert Londres is one of the great French investigative reporters of the early 20th century. ( Getty Images: Keystone-France/Gamma-Keystone )
Over a bowl of chocolate, the subsequent interview blew the lid off some of the more unsavoury aspects of the Tour that has cast a lengthy shadow over the entire sport ever since.
In that cafe, the two Pélissier brothers and Ville outlined what exactly the riders had to consume to get through those monstrous stages.
Spoiler alert, it wasn't bowls of chocolate.
"Do you want to see how we walk?" writes Londres, describing Henri Pélissier taking a vial out of his bag.
"This is the cocaine for the eyes, this is the chloroform for the gums," Henri Pélissier said.
Ville now emptied his bag on the table, revealing an ointment that "warms the knees".
All three riders then revealed the three boxes of pills they had with them.
It was Francis Pélissier that said the most explosive line.
"In short, we ride on dynamite," he said.
The story of that Tour de France was immortalised in Londres' reporting, a book which he titled: Les Forçats de la Route, the convicts of the road, in which he also revealed that the riders said that, instead of sleeping, they danced a jig in their rooms at night and suffered with "draining" diarrhoea.
All three backtracked from the comments, suggesting they were overplaying things for a man in Londres who was not a cycling journalist per se — his typical beat was foreign affairs and the exposing of the horrors of colonialism.
Henri Pélissier detailed the cocktail of drugs that got him through the Tour de France. ( Getty Images: Branger/Roger Viollet )
But even accounting for that, there were no repercussions from the startling admissions revealed in the book.
Why? Well, what the Pélissier's and Ville admitted to was far from against the rules.
In fact, French law only prohibited the use of stimulants in sport in 1965, over 40 years later.
In part, that was a reaction to the death of 24-year-old Danish rider Knud Enemark Jensen, who collapsed during a time trial at the 1960 Olympic Games in Rome.
Despite the ban on stimulants, doping cases in the Tour have followed with alarming regularity.
Whether it was Tom Simpson's horrendous drug-addled death on the slopes of Mont Ventoux in 1967, right through to the seismic Festina affair of 1998 and then the subsequent seven lost Lance Armstrong years.
The most recent case that directly impacted the Tour featured Nairo Quintana and his Arkéa-Samsic squad .
Quintana was disqualified from his sixth place finish in 2022 after testing positive for Tramadol — a substance banned by the UCI but not on the WADA list.
And still it continues.
Just this week, Italian rider Andrea Piccolo was sacked by EF Education-EasyPost Pro Cycling after the 23-year-old was stopped by Italian authorities on suspicion of transporting human growth hormone into Italy.
Piccolo was not scheduled to race the Tour, but did compete in the Giro d'Italia earlier this year.
Drugs have been a part of the Tour de France for over a century, leaving every subsequent winner to face questions over the legitimacy of their triumphs, even if the optimist hopes that sports science and the extraordinary levels of scrutiny placed upon the leading riders today means what we've seen is fully legal.
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