Of 189 riders who started the Tour de France in 1998, only 96 finished the race at the Champs-Élysées. It was dubbed the so-called "Festina Affair", after the disqualified Festina team.
Cycling has a long history of doping, deceit, and flagrant cheating. 1999 marked the beginning of Armstrong's web of lies, bullying, and ruthless control over the Tour de France.
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Of 189 riders who started the Tour de France in 1998, only 96 finished the race at the Champs-Élysées. It was dubbed the so-called "Festina Affair", after the disqualified Festina team.
Cycling has a long history of doping, deceit, and flagrant cheating. 1999 marked the beginning of Armstrong's web of lies, bullying, and ruthless control over the Tour de France.
Donate to The Luke Alfred Show on Patreon.
Get my book: Vuvuzela Dawn: 25 Sporting Stories that Shaped a New Nation.
Get full written episodes of the show a day early on Substack.
Check out The Luke Alfred Show on YouTube and Facebook.
IN 1988, having just turned professional, a promising young Italian cyclist fractured his leg. The cyclist’s name was Rodolfo Massi. He was 23 at the time and on the cusp – or so he believed – of a long and hopefully successful professional cycling career.
Yet the fracture was so complicated that when he eventually returned to the saddle, he discovered that his recently broken leg was slightly longer than the other one. It led to slight imbalances in his pedalling rhythm and that bothered him.
Massi complained that he was never again quite the cyclist he once was. And so, of course, he was never the cyclist he had once hoped to become. From a young age, he became stranded in a very subtle cycling limbo, good enough to compete but never really good enough to get appreciably better. Pedal as he might, he just went round and round. It was a netherworld he never rode out of.
Rodolfo Massi’s resume is revealing. It is full of details about his tenth place on the Tour of Tuscany, his seventh overall on the Tour of Trentino; there’s a third here and the occasional first there, but nothing that lights up the page. In 1990, in one of his fitful appearances in the Tour de France, he finished 156th overall.
You might have thought that Massi would earn a nickname for his deformity. Or, to phrase it more charitably, the fact that with one leg slightly longer than the other, he was a little unusual. After all, he complained about his long leg quite a bit.
He might have been called the “Hobbler of the Apennines”, for example, or simply “hop-along” or “shorty” or “daddy long-legs”. There might have been something witty in, well, a slightly close-to-the bone way, something to indicate that although he was never going to be the best-of-the-best, he was still admired and respected in the European cycling community.
Except, Massi was legging it in a different direction. His nickname became “the pharmacist”. Rather than developing his resume and finishing on the podium in races, Massi developed a lucrative second job as a drug merchant. If you were a rider in Italy or Spain or Belgium and found that you needed something vaguely illicit or even prohibited, you knocked on Massi’s hotel room door late at night. You smuggled him a message. The pharmacist was only too pleased to pass something across the counter, so to speak.
Massi didn’t seem to be too bothered to hide the fact that he moonlighted as a merchant because French police found a large amount of corticosteroids in Massi’s Chambéry hotel room while he was riding for the Casino team in the 1998 Tour de France. Corticosteroids are anti-inflammatories, a synthetic version of hormones, and at the time they were found in the pharmacist’s hotel room they were on a list of prohibited substances.
The French police were looking through Massi’s luggage in late July – it was near the end of that year’s tour, a Tour in which the pharmacist had done unusually well – because three weeks before, on the other side of France, customs police had stopped a car on a back road.
The road was close to the France-Belgium border and the car was driven by Willy Voet, who was a caretaker, masseur and trainer for the Festina cycling team, then the number one team in the world.
Rather than containing, say, camping equipment or groceries or, even, recreational bicycles, Voet’s car contained anabolic steroids in capsule form, vials of the drug called EPO, syringes and other prohibited substances. EPO stimulates the production of red blood cells, which carry oxygen to the muscles.
All the available literature suggests that EPO became ubiquitous in the Tour de France around 1995. The New Zealand cyclist, Stephen Swart, has signed and affidavit saying that while he and Lance Armstrong were on the Motorola team in 1995, for example, Armstrong suggested on a training ride that the team better get with the EPO program.
The consumption of the drug on Tour even gave rise to a phrase. Injecting EPO beneath the skin was referred to as “loading the cannon.”
The Tour has always been associated with stimulants and amphetamines, anything to give the cyclist an edge. In 1966 the Tour riders nearly rebelled because they were so aghast at having to piss into a test tube or bottle so their urine sample could be analysed.
By 1995, everyone began to cotton-on to the performance-enhancing effects of EPO. Cyclists have a terrible fear of being left behind, on the mountains as well as every other aspect of their professional life. This was no different. “If he’s doing it, I better do it, too,” became the unacknowledged mantra.
It was surprising to the customs police that when questioned, Voet claimed that all of the junk was for personal use. Privately the police must have rolled their eyes because if Voet was to be believed, they were dealing with the Lance Armstrong of dopers.
Not to be deterred with making cheesy comparisons, the police quickly realised that they needed to search Festina’s headquarters in Meyzieu, close to Lyon.
In the Festina headquarters they found a dossier. The dossier told an interesting yarn. It was a story about which Festina riders were to be administered with what cocktail of prohibited drugs – it wasn’t only EPO – and when.
A couple of days after Voet’s arrest, the 1998 Tour de France was scheduled to start. As luck would have it, it was to start in Dublin, so the Festina riders weren’t immediately available for questioning by the French police because they were in Ireland. When they were back on French soil, they were apprehended and taken in for questioning.
Festina’s sporting director, Bruno Roussel, meanwhile fervently denied any knowledge of the drugs in Voet’s car crossing the border. He said that he didn’t know anything about the dossier found in Festina’s offices either.
It must have been a difficult couple of weeks for Roussel, however, because in the middle of the month Festina’s sporting director changed his tune. In a court in Lille, close to where Voet’s car was searched at the border crossing, he admitted to full knowledge of Festina’s doping programme.
A day later Festina were expelled from the 1998 Tour de France, which is a little like Manchester City being expelled from the Champions League for Fair Play violations. The events – and the events which followed – became known as the “Festina Affair”, which wasn’t the best long-running advert in the world for Festina’s sale of upmarket watches and jewelry.
Voet seems to have mentioned Rodolfo Massi’s name only as an afterthought while being interrogated by police. Massi, after all, wasn’t a Festina rider. He rode for Casino, the team sponsored by the French mass-market retailer and supermarket chain.
At the time he was brought in for questioning, Massi was in the midst of his best Tour ever. He even won a stage in the Pyrenees. He was seventh overall when he was apprehended, only 12 minutes behind the then-leader and eventual winner of the 1998 Tour, Marco Pantani.
Being seventh didn’t earn him any special privileges. He was transferred from close to the Swiss border where he was arrested, to the public prosecutor’s office in Lille. His pre-trial detention period was extended. Casino, meanwhile, put pressure on the team to continue racing in the Tour, an instruction they didn’t take kindly to. The pharmacist, after being only 12 minutes behind the leader, fell back in the peloton. He didn’t complete the 1998 Tour.
With the 1998 Tour heating up under the gaze of police and media scrutiny, matters came to the boil. The cyclists themselves, although many of them were dopers, resented being considered guilty until proven innocent. They were also angry at often being instructed to continue racing by their sponsors when their teams were under suspicion.
They also thought the police methods were heavy-handed. They were accused of behaving like “Nazis.”. At one point, the director of the Tour, Jean-Marie LeBlanc had to plead with the peloton to keep on racing.
Reading through the literature it’s amazing to see how quickly teammates and colleagues disassociated themselves from the pharmacist. Speaking just inside the Swiss border shortly after Massi had been taken into custody, Bjarne Riis [B-jarne Rees], referred to Massi as “a trader” on French television. Vincent Lavenu, the team director of Casino, Massi’s team, said of the Italian: “He is our biggest problem – his teammates don’t even defend him.”
This seems a little rich in retrospect, given that Lavenu didn’t bother to defend him either and was himself later arrested, but by that stage the rats were scrambling. After all, loyalty had its price. In the second hour of interrogation in a police cell in Lille, you might give up your mother if you thought that it might improve your chances of getting back on your bike.
Casino and Festina weren’t the only teams implicated in the 1998 Tour scandal. It has subsequently been revealed that Voet wasn’t only transporting drugs across the Belgian-French border for his mates on the Festina team. He was transporting EPO for other teams as well, most likely the Dutch team TVM-Farm Frites.
TVM-Farm Frites – that’s quite a mouthful, isn’t it? In March of that year, three months before the official start of that year’s Tour, a TVM van had been apprehended close to where Voet was pulled over.
In it police found all kinds of interesting things, including 104 vials of EPO. The truck drivers were questioned and released. The police said – cleverly we now see – that they had more important matters to be concerned with. It was a gambit calculated to give the impression that cycling and its internal peccadilloes was rather beneath their crime-fighting brief.
Except that it wasn’t. Which might account for why Voet was driving along a back road when he was apprehended. The literature is vague here, suggesting that perhaps Voet was apprehended at a border crossing given that he was pulled over by customs officers.
But there are no crossings in this part of Belgium and France. Voet was being watched. And the customs police knew exactly what they were doing after the TVM-Farm Frites truck had been pulled over in the spring.
Shortly after the pharmacist was apprehended, the entire TVM team quit the Tour before the team folded completely two years later. Five other teams failed to complete the event too. Of 189 riders who started the Tour in Dublin, only 96 finished the race at the Champs-Élysées.
In the weeks after the race, discarded syringes and vials of this and that were found by farmers whose fields lined the race route. Interesting things tuned up in the refuse bins of Tour hotels. One can only imagine what shit the French sewerage system had to deal with.
Where was Armstrong in all of this I hear you asking? Very good question. In October 1996 Armstrong was diagnosed with testicular, lung and brain cancer. Doctors gave him only a 20% chance of survival but, with the help of chemotherapy, he fought through.
He raced little in 1997 but the following year he won in Luxembourg and placed fourth in the Tour of Spain. He didn’t attempt the Tour de France, although after the Tour of Spain he was persuaded to start training for the following year’s edition of the Tour.
His team, US Postal, did, however, compete in and finish the 1998 event. Although US Postal weren’t implicated in the doping scandal that Festina and Casino were, subsequent investigations by several federal agencies revealed bizarre amounts of US Postal drugs flushed down toilets and dumped out of camper vans.
I personally find it comforting to know that the money that you would have paid as a consumer to send your mother in San Diego a Christmas parcel was put to such creative and thoughtful use.
George Hincapie, a colleague of Armstrong’s, later confessed that drugs were tossed into the Irish Sea on a ferry crossing from Ireland to France as the Tour reached the French mainland. This was after its early dalliance with the thin roads, fair maidens and four-leaf clovers of merry Ireland.
The 1999 Tour de France was dubbed “The Tour of Renewal”, and you can bet your bottom dollar that there was some chic Parisian agency who charged a pretty penny for that one.
Shortly before the 1999 tour prologue, Armstrong and the rest of the US Postal Team had to undergo the traditional pre-race medical. On the way to the medical, Armstrong noticed syringe mark bruises on his arm. He asked Emma O’Reilly, the Irish masseuse, cook, cleaner and general team dogsbody, to disguise the bruises, suggesting base or foundation. She said that wouldn’t do. According to David Walsh in his book, “Seven Deadly Sins”, she used concealer. It was not the last thing O’Reilly would be asked to conceal.
In the midst of all her cleaning, cooking and driving, O’Reilly kept a diary. The diary became on object of concern for Johan Bruyneel, US Postal’s Belgian sporting director. Bruyneel stole it and spread rumours to other members of the team and support staff about what O’Reilly had been writing. Eventually the hostility directed at her by Bruyneel became too much. She resigned six months after the 1999 Tour, taking her diary with her.
O’Reilly – and her diary – became a key source for Walsh, the London Sunday Times journalist who had long been suspicious of Armstrong, but could never fully pin his suspicions down. Investigative journalists are only as good as people on the inside and O’Reilly was the classic insider. When she agreed to talk to Walsh he couldn’t believe his luck.
After aiming to compete in the 1999 Tour the previous year, Armstrong won the 3630 kilometre-long “Tour of Renewal” handsomely by seven minutes and 32 seconds. In so doing he became the first American riding for an American-backed team to do so, and the first American rider since Greg LeMond’s unaided clean win ten years before. Armstrong went on to win six other Tours, making it seven consecutive Tour victories between 1999 and 2005.
What strikes me most about Armstrong is not what an incredible athlete he was – he was initially a triathlete, remember – but what a merciless bully he turned out to be. I don’t find stories about the drug cocktails, the blood transfusions, the infusion of human growth hormone and the EPO gobbling anything but strange – but what really upsets me is how the Tour under Armstrong was allowed to become a cult.
The Tour organisers in the post-Festina Affair aftermath were understandably keen to see the Tour get back in the saddle. They were keen to see the Tour on the straight and narrow. But in so doing, they inadvertently created a monster, and that monster was Armstrong.
How does one understand the pernicious, orchestrated bullying of riders such as Christophe Bassons, for example? Bassons, remember, was the rider who raised concerns about the average speeds in the peloton on the 1999 Tour. He also spoke out about doping and broke the code of silence occasionally in his column for La Parisiene.
On the 1999 Tour, the Armstrong comeback Tour, in other words, Bassons was frozen out by not only Armstrong, but the entire peloton. Sometimes they intentionally rode slowly, allowing Bassons to sprint into the distance. On other occasions nearly 200 riders gazed intently at him, literally staring him down into humiliation and insignificance.
Once during the 1999 Tour, Armstrong pedalled up to him, got in close and put his hand on Basson’s shoulder. Armstrong asked why Bassons was saying negative things about the sport. Basson’s replied that he wanted the sport to be clean for the stars of the future.
Armstrong told him that Basson had no right to be a pro cyclist and should leave the Tour, what he was doing was bad for everyone; that he should fuck off, in fact. “I was depressed for six months,” Bassons has subsequently said. “I was crying all the time. I was really in a bad way.”
A day or two later, after a virtually sleepless night, Bassons handed in his race jersey with number 152 on it and left the Tour. He was roundly criticised by race director Jean-Marie LeBlanc. His teammates refused to share their winnings with him.
After having been a pariah on the Tour of Renewal, he continued to be ostracised and criticised away from it. Riding in an event two years later called Four Days of Dunkirk, two fellow competitors tried to ride him into a ditch.
He did, however, receive support from an unexpected quarter. The French Minister of Sport, Jean-Marie Buffet wrote to him. She said: “What a strange role-reversal. Rather than fighting against doping they’re fighting against its opponent.”
Why, I asked myself, was Bassons such a threat to the Armstrong cult? Bassons wasn’t going to win the Tour, after all. My answer is that Bassons was a threat because he was an ever-present reminder. He was a reminder that good persists in a culture of evil.
Despite all this, Armstrong was no comic book villain. O’Reilly, for one, retained a real fondness for him. When you think about it, her feelings are entirely appropriate. Their relationship was peculiarly intimate. Armstrong spent hours on her massage table.
They shared a sense of humour. She has written that she particularly enjoyed Armstrong’s lack of political correctness. She had a nice line in droll Irish humour herself. She once complained, for example, that although Bruyneel earned a good salary as director at US Postal, he was a conspicuously crap dresser. She and Armstrong could make each other laugh.
He asked her to do things that were sometimes strange and sometimes wildly incriminating. She felt compelled to speak out and share her secrets and diary with Walsh but in the end it was Armstrong she felt closer to, arguing that their relationship had always been a human one. About Walsh she was not so sure. She wrote that Walsh betrayed her but the sorry truth of her courage was that first she betrayed herself.
Such betrayals pale before the sport of cycling’s obsessive betrayal of itself. Nowadays there is talk of hidden motors in bikes and bikes that are changed four, five and six times a race. The doping has become more sophisticated and the masking agents for that doping more sophisticated still. Very few riders appear to be clean but, ahead of the release of a documentary film about him scheduled for before Christmas here in South Africa, LeMond is one of those few.
Bruyneel disagrees. He says that LeMond always raced for French teams because there were no American ones competing on the Tour in the 1980s. “And you know the French,” he says. “They were the Kings of Cortizone.”
A year after the “Festina Affair” twenty-five years ago, came the “Tour of Renewal.” It appeared to offer the sport a new beginning, a new ride, a fresh start. With the benefit of hindsight we now know that the “Tour of Renewal” was really just an exercise in collective wish-fulfilment, which further supports the idea that the Tour under Armstrong became a cult. Nothing, really, was renewed at all, just the sport’s long commitment to being dirty.