Cycling is promoted as being the healthiest sport there is. Yet consider how much medicine - legal medicine - is used in this sport. Consider how races today have become pharmacies on wheels. The French newspaper
Le Journal du Dimanche revealed in July 2004 that eleven non-French teams starting that year's Tour had requested permission from the Agence Française de Sécurité Sanitaire des Aliments to import medicines - lotions, potions, needles and pills - many of which have no obvious application within cycling. On average, these teams were each importing more than eighty different substances. One team imported one hundred fifty-five substances.
Commenting on the volume and type of legal drugs being imported, Gérard Guillaume, doctor to the fdjeux.com team said:
The cyclist's pathology is hypochondria: falls, skin irritations, digestive, pulmonary or muscular complaints. That necessitates around thirty products, no more. You can add to that a couple of medicines in case of an emergency, like a heart attack, but no more. Nothing justifies such an arsenal of products.
Nothing justifies such an arsenal of products? Well, maybe nothing except a Therapeutic Use Exemption. The AFLD revealed that, at the 2008 Tour de France, seventy-six of the one hundred eighty riders who took the line in Brittany needed TUEs in order to be able to ride.
Walsh and Ballester, in
LA Confidentiel, procured the drugs manifest of one team from the 2000 Tour. It listed one hundred twenty-six products. Six hundred and eighty-four individual packages were detailed, which the authors calculated to amount to seven thousand four hundred and twenty-two individual doses. The 2001 manifest for the same team, which the authors also procured, covered one hundred and nineteen different products. Seven hundred and ninety packages were detailed, which the authors calculated to amount to eight thousand, three hundred and thirty-four doses. This is for a team of nine riders in a twenty-one day race. Do the math on the daily doses yourself.
Walsh and Ballester were minded to recall a comment from Daniel Delegove, the presiding judge at the Festina trial in 2000. Looking at the all the evidence he had heard about the use of drugs in cycling, Delegove declared: "These are not racers, they are cycling test tubes."
The authors also turned to Jean-Pierre de Mondenard, the author of the
Dictionnaire du Dopage:
The main purpose of medication is to combat disease. Once medication is given to enhance performance, a doping system develops. Originally, sport had its virtues, but sport organised by man has eliminated them.