Close to 100 cyclists will ride up the Champs-Elysees tomorrow but the finish will not be the apotheosis foreseen by Tour de France organisers. After the loss of five more teams and the reigning world champion, Laurent Jalabert, on Wednesday, it took a prosecutor's promise of no further drug searches to salvage what was left of the mangled competition.
As the race nears completion, four people from the TVM, ONCE and Casino teams are incarcerated. Two full-blown judiciary investigations have started after drug seizures, and others are likely to follow. Only 14 of the original 21 teams - 96 of 189 cyclists - remain. The others were either excluded after confessions of drug use or stopped in anger at their treatment by police and judges.
After the thrill of the World Cup victory, the tour was bound to fall flat. Public interest never approached the feverish heights created by the football championship. This week, as cyclists were rounded up for more doping tests, Paris Match trumpeted the Saint-Tropez romance between the French goalkeeper Fabien Barthez and top model Linda Evangelista. It was a cruel comparison.
"I saw athletes exalted as heroes in the World Cup," the French cyclist, Stephane Barthe, complained. "No one mentioned blood tests [for them]. And we're treated like less than nothing."
One argument used by the cyclists and loyal fans is that cycling is so difficult that they deserve to win, and why all the fuss about a little doping?
Javier Mauleon, of the Spanish team ONCE, which withdrew from the race on Wednesday hours before doping substances were seized in their hotel, said: "You can't ride 35,000 km a year solely on spaghetti. You have to take things."
The French law of June 28th, 1989, punishes team trainers and doctors much more severely than athletes. Those who administer or facilitate the use of drugs "with the goal of artificially modifying the capacity of athletes" risk up to 10 years in prison and 500,000 francs (£59,523) in fines.
The law prescribes no criminal penalties for athletes who use drugs. At worst, they risk being banned from competition.
President Jacque Chirac and Prime Minister Lionel Jospin sniffed trouble from the start of the competition. The first arrest, of the Dutch Festina masseur, Mr Willy Voet, took place three days before the tour began.
On the strength of the enduring "World Cup effect", both French leaders continue to rise in opinion polls. After they competed to be identified with the World Cup, their absence from the blighted cycling race was noticeable. Mr Chirac appeared only once, when the tour passed through his home region of Correze, where his wife, Bernadette, is a local councillor.
Mr Chirac's crusade against drugs has long embittered France's relations with The Netherlands. Yet in mid-tour crisis, the President quietly slipped off to Mauritius on holiday; not unlike the president of the International Cycling Union, whom cyclists reproached for continuing his vacation in India. Or Mr Jean-Claude Killy, the president of the Societe du Tour de France, who went back to Paris when all hell broke loose in the French Alps on Wednesday. No one, it seemed, wanted to be associated with the tour's failure.
In a strange reversal of traditional roles, it was the French centre-right which showed most sympathy for the cyclists - and the left who demanded the eradication of doping. The conservative daily Le Figaro compared the police and judges to "a pack who sniff the sweat of exhausted game".
A front-page cartoon suggested the government would do better to pursue drug-dealers in immigrant suburbs. "Everything is happening as if someone had wanted to reform the tour manu militari, or settle accounts," a Figaro editorial said. "All this at the risk of destroying a race that the entire world envied."
By contrast, the Communist newspaper L'Humanite criticised the cycling teams. "When a sports director regrets that an athlete can be arrested like the lowliest citizen, he's living in the past," it said. "Those days are over. It is time for a merciless battle against doping."
The left-wing daily Liberation denounced the hypocrisy of the cyclists who "are much more indignant at the police searches than they are about doping, as if the real problem was the annoyance of judicial investigations rather than the widespread but hidden use of prohibited substances".
A former centre-right foreign minister, Mr Herve de Charette, blamed the Communist Minister of Sport, Ms Marie-George Buffet, and the Socialist Justice Minister, Ms Elisabeth Guigou, for wrecking the tour, claiming they had mounted an operation of "general intimidation" and treated international athletes "like vulgar petty criminals".
Had it not been for the new, combative "clean hands" attitude of French judges and the anti-doping campaign started by Ms Buffet last year, the tour would probably have taken place normally, doping and all. "What happened was the collision of two different worlds - the sports world and the judiciary world," said Gerard Holtz, a top French television commentator.
"The sports world is concentrated on the contest, on the finish line. The judiciary and police see only the investigation. They have witnesses to hand and they want to move quickly."
Mr Holtz believes this botched tour could save professional cycling. "Once you take the lid off the pot, you have to look at everything inside it, not slam the lid back on. Cycling, like a certain number of other sports, was sick from doping. It's essential that it be cured."
A new law drafted by Ms Buffet was approved by the Senate in March and will go to the National Assembly in November. It will punish trafficking in doping products more severely, but user athletes will still escape criminal sanctions. "The cyclists are above all victims, the instruments of a system," said Ms Buffet.
"They're at the end of the chain. Those responsible are the ones who produce doping products, who order them and provide them to the athletes."
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