The Bicycle Book by Bella Bathurst

Author:Bella Bathurst
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers

Lance Armstrong.

Either way, everything in racing always seems to come back to Armstrong. He fascinates and he polarises. The French hate him (‘We don’t hate him,’ the French protest when you ask, ‘but he’s always so … (insert long list of insults)’), the racing community seem to admire him without liking him, and even his fellow countrymen find his ultra-ultra-alpha need to beat absolutely everything a bit puzzling. Things shifted a bit when he came third in the 2009 Tour, but in the past the main charges against him have been that he is arrogant, that he is not an all-rounder and that he broke cycling’s unwritten rules: that there should be a minimum standard of discomfort for everyone, that amateurishness is something to be cherished and that it’s not just the British who can do exceptional heroism in the face of pointless adversity. Here, after all, is a man who thinks losing and dying are the same thing. Worst of all is that he is not only not French, not even European, but – boo, hiss – a Texan, and proud of it.

It was bad enough that Armstrong beat the pants off even Eddy Merckx’s Tour record, but that he should do so without having paid due obeisance to the gods of history made it far worse. Certainly, it was his misfortune that his dominance of the Tour coincided with the Iraq war, the (Texan) Bush presidency and the lowest period in Franco-American relations for decades. It did not help that Armstrong could not be dismissed as a mindless jock. If racing is chess, then Armstrong was a Grandmaster. He represents the best and the worst of America all wrapped up in one highly articulate package, and through his story you can trace every itch of friction between Old Europe and New World.

In practice, the main battleground for France v. Armstrong is over doping. The acres of published print on his skills and achievements are equalled by an often virulent series of allegations that at various stages of his career he took performance-enhancing drugs. Armstrong has always denied the allegations – the only drugs he’s ever confessed to taking were the various anti-cancer medications and cortisone for saddle-sores – but it hasn’t made the accusers go away. Given the foam-flecked nature of some of the allegations, it may seem strange to say they aren’t necessarily personal. Though they target him as the biggest of the beasts they’d like to bring down, much of the argument is not with Armstrong himself but with the era he was racing in. As his accusers see it, in the late nineties and early noughties, doping was as obligatory in racing as Lycra or mountains; if you didn’t dope, you didn’t ride. EPO’s early technical hitches (life-threatening blood clots, sudden deaths of otherwise prime athletes) had been if not corrected then at least improved, and it still remains awkward to detect.

The riders themselves confirm this. Those who have confessed to doping say that the external pressure to do so was almost irresistible.

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