Austria, Graz Criterium: 1. Erik Zabel (Ger) Telekom-ARD 55 points 2. Florian Wiesinger (Aut) Elite 33 3. Biagio Conte (Ita) Scrigno 33 Germany, Freiburg, Night Criterium, 76 kms: 1. Rolf Sörensen (Den) Rabobank 2. Enrico Cassani (Ita) Team Polti 1.30 3. Ellis Rastelli (Ita) Brescialat 4. Michael Rich (Ger) Seaco Cannondale France, Callac Criterium, 120 kms: 1. Jacky Durand (Fra) Casino 2.41.23 2. Christophe Rinero (Fra) Cofidis 0.01 3. Stephane Heulot (Fra) La Francaise des Jeux 4. Jean-Cyril Robin (Fra) US Postal Service 0.12 5. Stuart O'Grady (Aus) GAN 0.20 Belgium, Ichtegem Criterium, 100 kms: 1. Mario Cipollini (Ita) Saeco 2.28.00 2. Jens Heppner (Ger) Telekom 3. Wim Feys (Bel) Lotto-Mobistar 8. Tom Steels (Bel) Mapei-Bricobi 27 riders started Netherlands, Stiphout Profronde, 100 kms: 1. Bart Voskamp (Ned) TVM 2.17.10 2. Michael Boogerd (Ned) Rabobank 3. Jan Svorada (Cze) Mapei-Bricobi 4. Max Van Heeswijk (Ned) Rabobank 5. Steven De Jongh (Ned) TVM
* And today it has been reported that French police found a bag "containing bottles and bloody syringes" near to a hotel in Voreppe. So what is so special about that? Well the hotel was where 4 of the Tour teams - GAN, Casino, Saeco and Kelme - stayed (July 25-26). The police have told the press that a person was observed dumping the bag in a field 100 metres from the hotel.
* There is a question as to whether the Spanish teams will compete in the Tour of the Netherlands later this month. The teams would normally drive up through France but are now refusing to drive in France. The Spaniards have already pulled the women's team out of the Tour de France Feminin and no men's teams will race in France for the indefinite future.
* Jan Ullrich has told a Sport's Exposition audience in Munich that he nearly quit the Tour de France because of the accumulation of scandals associated with drugs. He said: "At one moment, I wanted to book a ticket back home. But I decided to concentrate on the race."
* Richard Virenque, Laurent Brochard and the other Festina team riders who were expelled from the Tour have now stated they have lost money from the action by Jean-Marie Leblanc even though it is very difficult to quantify the loss of earnings. Virenque told the press today that he will be "requesting damages from the Society of the Tour de France". Laurent Brochard has already said on Tuesday that he will seeking damages. They have told the press that it will be claimed in civil courts that the damages incurred as a result of this scandal were born by the individual riders rather than the Tour de France.
They are basing their calculations on the previous year's earnings by the team in the Tour. It is reported that in 1997, Festina made 2.38 million francs which were shared among 9 riders (around 250,000 francs each - "a small gold-mine") as a result of participating in the Tour. Up until the time they were expelled this year, the team had earned 52,650 francs.
They further argue that the post-Criterium binge represents another major source of bonus income for the riders. Already one such event, the Criterium Castelle-Chinon has been cancelled. But the contracts for the top riders tend to be signed before the Tour the year before. So the loss of earnings from this source will show up in 1999 rather than in the current year. The French press report that already several race organisers are reducing their outlays for such events in 1999.
Virenque, reportedly gets around 80-100,000 francs per criterium appearance, while less lights (like Pascal Herve) might get about 1/4 of this.
Finally, Virenque claims that significant losses will come from the failure of sponsorship and advertising contracts. Many companies pay the wages of the riders with Festina merely an intermediary and principal sponsor. It is claimed that there will be losses - as yet unknown - from these sources. Already, Biofamilia, a Swiss firm which specialises in healthy breakfast cereals and other biological health products has cancelled its contract with Alex Zulle. Another arrangement that Virenque had to talk on TV during the Tour was withdrawn by a French company.
* The UCI has decided to start testing for drugs during training and make them world-wide from 1999. The Chairman of the German Cycling Federation, Manfred Böhmer announced this on Tuesday night. He said a Swedish institute will do the controls. Böhmer told the press that: "Professional teams will be able to have team docters that have special licences. We will also invoke quality controls on the soigneurs (masseurs)." The tests will be possible in any country at any time. So riders will not be able to hide away, say in Australia, and escape the testing routines. It was also announced that the time between the announcing of names of riders to be bloodtested and the actual testing will be reduced from 20 minutes to 10 minutes.
When the Tour de France ends Sunday, few will have noticed Bobby Julich recorded the best overall result for a U.S. rider since Greg LeMond won his third title in 1990. Julich, a Coloradan who rides for a French team, stood second going into the penultimate stage of a race in which the only results of importance have been recorded on police blotters and court dockets.
For nearly the entire three weeks of competition, the significance of the 85th Tour de France has grown even as the placements in the standings have been devalued.
For this Tour was the trumpet at the battle of Jericho, leading to a complete breach in the wall of silence about performance-enhancing drug use for only the second time in memory. The other came from the 1989 testimony of Canadian sprinter Ben Johnson at a Canadian hearing called after he lost his 1988 Olympic 100-meter gold medal for a positive drug test.
"This is bigger than Ben Johnson," said Penn State professor Charles Yesalis, author of The Steroids Game. "The whole public relations tapestry covering the NCAA and the NFL and the Olympics is coming unwoven right before your eyes. The public is starting to realize drug testing lives between a facade and a farce that has been held up with misinformation and lies."
The admissions of doping by several Tour riders, centered mainly on the blood booster erythropoietin (EPO), provoked the interview in which International Olympic Committee President Juan Antonio Samaranch made the seemingly outrageous statement that some performance-enhancing drugs no longer should be banned if they do not harm an athlete's health. That sparked a debate that could further catalyze efforts to make some sense of doping control, often catch-as-catch-can, in the arenas of international cycling and Olympic sports.
"The impact of this is enormous," said Don Catlin, a member of the IOC medical commission. "A premier event (the Tour) has been dismembered right on the IOC's doorstep. Added to the Perth affair (in which Australian customs officials found drugs in a Chinese swimmer's bag) and with the Sydney Olympics coming up, this has created a great risk for success of future events that must be addressed."
The underlying issue involved, not surprisingly, may be money. Some sponsors--like Festina, the watch company whose cycling team was thrown out of the Tour when one of its masseurs was stopped with a carful of EPO and human growth hormone (hgH)--may stop investing in sports because they don't want to risk the shame of positive drug tests. Other sponsors may insist the testing be watered down to eliminate that risk, and some wonder if that was the implication of Samaranch's words.
The Tour de France scandal has included ugly scenes of police raids on athletes' hotel rooms and riders being strip-searched, held in detention and interrogated like common criminals. The riders retaliated with withdrawals and strikes.
The whole affair owed only to vigilant customs officials, presumably acting on tips. Testing caught no one. Doping controls have nabbed few users because of enormous gaps in testing and the creative minds of doctors and athletes in finding ways to beat the system. The consistent increase in Tour de France average speeds over the past decade and the stunning number of fast performances in distance running since 1994 both have suggested artificial enhancement of performance.
"The good thing about President Samaranch's remarks being blown up the way they have is they have caused a lot of discussion," said the IOC's Fekrou Kidane, a special assistant to Samaranch.
Australian swimmer Kierin Perkins, a double gold medalist at the 1992 Olympics, said, "I can only pray and hope that . . . (Samaranch) was talking about maybe streamlining the IOC's list of banned drugs a little bit. I think the crux of the issue really is that we have a situation where the banned list is a very long, complex list and there probably are a lot of drugs on the list which in reality aren't performance-enhancing in a lot of sports."
But those tut-tutting about how the latest drug news only makes it clear that the Olympic ideals are rife with hypocrisy refuse to turn the same jaundiced eye on the NFL, Major League Baseball or big-time collegiate sports. All those home runs and those 6-foot, 7-inch, 280-pound, fat-free linemen aren't coming from better nutrition, weight training and allowable pharmaceuticals.
Athletes like Cardinals slugger Mark McGuire and world sprint champion Maurice Greene use products, including creatine, that are apparently performance-enhancing, available in any nutritional supplements store and not banned by international sports bodies.
They are not like EPO, blamed by inference rather than hard evidence for the deaths of several Dutch cyclists in the 1980s. EPO, used medically for kidney patients, increases the number of oxygen-carrying red blood cells, which would aid athletes in endurance sports. The positive drug test of 1996 Olympic shot-put winner Randy Barnes, confirmed last week, involves a steroid found in DHEA, which is banned by the IOC but sold in nutritional supplement stores.
They have a nuclear explosion going on under their noses, and they are going after an athlete at the end of his career for using something on which there is no credible evidence that it is a performance-enhancing drug," Yesalis said of the Barnes case.
Some wonder if there is any difference between using those products and using the actual steroids or EPO, if the drug protocols were overseen by physicians the way they are in cases when these drugs are prescribed for their medical purposes.
The EPO situation is even more complicated. Several sports bodies test for indication of elevated hemocrit (percentage of red blood cells) levels. But the allowable level, 50 percent, is such that many athletes with lower percentages might take EPO to reach 50 percent and others - including runners raised at high altitude in Kenya or cyclists from Bolivia - could have a natural level that would automatically ban them.
"It is highly questionable whether an ethical physician would prescribe a legal (in the sense of medicine, not athletic competition) drug for an athlete to enhance performance on the basis that therapeutic doses would `not cause harm,'" said Larry Mandarino, an associate professor at the University of Texas Health Science Center. "In these sorts of medical ethics questions, we often talk about risk/benefit ratio. There are no prescription drugs that do not have adverse side effects. Since the athletes who might use these drugs presumably have no medical indication for their use, any dose poses a potential health risk, with no medical benefit. Mr. Samaranch does not know what he is talking about, or he was quoted incorrectly."
IOC spokeswoman Michele Verdier said last week Samaranch was "not going to clarify" or change his comments. To Australian Sports Minister Andrew Thomson, who said he was "gobsmacked" (stunned) if Samaranch's views had been correctly reported, the IOC president responded, "There is no change in the policy of the International Olympic Committee."
After the trial balloon was deflated by angry responses from athletes and sport officials, Samaranch called for a world doping congress in January.
The way things stand now, even the trumpeter's breath that sounded the battle of Jericho could bring down the doping control house of cards.