Ian O’Riordan: Tour de France at crossroads with tough choices

You know what Robert Johnson sang about people seen standing at the crossroads, and the choices that they face. At this time of year, every weekend, you can see groups of cyclists standing at the crossroads at Johnnie Fox’s, and one of the choices they face is suitably devilish.

Most will have come over the twisting shoulder of Three Rock Mountain, from Barnacullia (“top of the woods”), shifting right at Cannon’s Corner, through the leafy shade of Taylor’s Folly, then down the panoramic descent into Glencullen.

It’s here they pause, standing over their bikes: turn left, it’s a near direct descent, back into Kilternan; turn right, it’s a gentle spin up towards Cruagh Woods; go straight, onto Barrack Road, and they soon face the Devil’s Elbow, it’s breakneck 20 per cent gradient, which immediately ramps back up again and then funnels into Glencree.

The temptation, for the majority, is impossible to resist, so they go straight, inviting that devil’s punishment. For better or for worse, this choice towards suffering is the default direction of even the common cyclist. And why despite all its faults and misgivings of recent times there is still no greater expression of the sport than the Tour de France.

Only every year now, it seems, the Tour is standing at the crossroads. When the 103rd edition of the race sets off on Saturday from the rocky shadows of Mont-Saint-Michel it will once again try to escape the shadow of doping, and not just the pills and needles. And for each person who will tell you the Tour is moving in a cleaner direction, there is another to tell you otherwise, simply because of the default position of the race and indeed the riders.

Usual promise

There is the usual promise of this year’s race being “different”. Just this week, the UCI, the governing of world cycling, signed an agreement with the US Anti-Doping Agency, and that’s definitely a move in the right direction. Four years ago, they were at war over Lance Armstrong’s doping revelations and, by working together, that’s one less crack in the system.

The UCI has also announced a major crackdown on mechanical doping, considered every bit as dirty as the pills and needles. For a few years now, rumours have been circulating of certain elite riders hiding small motors inside their bike’s seat tube, capable of delivering around 200 watts of additional pedalling power. Then, earlier this year, the rumours were proven true, at least in the case of the young Belgian rider Femke Van den Driescche, when the UCI found one such motor hidden inside her bike, after the under-23 race at the World Cyclo-Cross Championships in Zolder.

More worryingly were reports that mechanical doping had already moved on to more sophisticated levels, the extra wattage created via an electromagnetic force inside the carbon fibre wheel rims, albeit costing €200,000. During the 2015 Tour, the UCI carried out 25 visual tests for mechanical doping. Over the next three weeks, using new thermal camera technology, they’ll conduct around 3,000 tests, that’s pretty much foolproof.

Testing positive

No matter what the UCI does, not everyone will be convinced about the direction from which the three race favourites have come: Chris Froome, his major improvement under the so-called marginal gains of Team Sky; Nairo Quintana, his pre-race training in the anti-doping wasteland of Colombia; Alberto Contador, his still visible scar of losing the 2010 Tour title after testing positive for clenbuterol.

Perhaps things are cleaner now, given the direction last year’s race took. In winning back his title, Froome covered the 21 stages and 3,360km in an average speed of 39.60 kph, the slowest since 2010 – or the record average speed of 41.65kpm which Armstrong clocked to win the 2005 Tour.

That, by the way, was when Armstrong stood on the podium alongside Jan Ullrich and Ivan Basso, calling on the sceptics to “believe in these athletes” – only a year later, before the 2006 Tour, both Ullrich and Basso were disqualified after being caught up in Operación Puerto, while Armstrong himself would later be erased completely.

One of the arguments the Tour organisers make in favour of their race is that it’s somewhat less punishing than it used to be. In 1987, for example, our own Stephen Roche rode 4,231km, across 25 stages, to win the Tour, which included three individual time trails, plus 10 mountain stages. This year, the 198 riders will be almost halfway through before their first time trial and possibly decisive mountain stage, and even the big Alpine stages are shorter, more dynamic, than the monstrously long treks of the 1990s.

Still, this year’s Tour will come to another familiar crossroads on stage 12, Bastille Day, when it sets off from the Mediterranean town of Montpellier and covers 184km to the summit of Mont Ventoux. At 1,909m, the highest and loneliest peak in Provençal France, it can, depending on the time of year, be among the hottest or windiest places on earth. They don’t call it Bald Mountain for nothing, and in ways Ventoux represents everything that is wrong about the past sufferings of the Tour.

There is a chapter in The Rider, that enduring cycling classic by Tim Krabbé, which suggests the Tour changed forever in 1958, the year they first finished a stage on the summit of Ventoux. Charly Gaul won the 21.5km race to the top, then had to be removed by ambulance. The Frenchman went on to win the Tour, although Krabbe describes Gaul as the first Rider of the Apocalypse.

Nine years later, in 1967, Tom Simpson rode himself to death on Ventoux, succumbing to the heat and a body full of amphetamines 1.5km from the summit. In 2000, Armstrong raced Marco Pantani to the top of Ventoux, the image of them crossing the line together now indelibly associated with the Tour’s darkest hours.

Inviting this year’s race back up Ventoux may be suitably devilish, the turn towards suffering all cyclists willingly embrace, but it revisiting such a monumental mountain to the Tour’s past, what choice do the riders face?