Few events in recent times have undermined the spirit of sport as much as the 1998 Tour de France, which came to a shameful conclusion in Paris yesterday. When 189 cyclists set out in Dublin three weeks ago on one of the world's great sporting spectacles, no one could have imagined that 21 days later cycling and its outstanding exponents would be embroiled in arguably the most shocking drug-related sports event ever.
The Tour de France has always had a special cachet in sport. Through its 85-year history it has captured the imagination of the sporting public because of the almost super-human demands placed on the riders to complete a 3,000 kilometre race in three weeks. The cavalcades and razzmatazz of the Tour may draw the curious on to the streets but the unique attraction of the race is in watching extraordinary athletes vie with each other as they complete gruelling stages in the Alps and Pyrennes, which take riders to the outer limit of human endeavour.
Although the Tour and cycling have been at the centre of drugs scandals over the last 30 years, most supporters believed that it was only the unscrupulous few who indulged in taking performance-enhancing products. The almost daily arrests and drug revelations of the past three weeks have exposed the sheer scale of the doping problem in cycling, and sport in general. Riders and team officials on the Tour have undermined the ethics of sport by blithely claiming that their offences didn't merit the thorough investigations by French and Belgian police in their efforts to uncover the depth of the problem.
The efforts to protect cycling and its cash-rich premier event were bad enough in themselves: but worse was to follow when the most powerful man in sport, International Olympic Committee president, Juan Antonio Samaranch, gave the nod to drug cheats to continue their malevolent practices by declaring that some performance-enhancing drugs - those which do not harm health - could be removed from proscribed lists. Samaranch's extraordinary comments could not have come at a more difficult time for sport and gave further credence to suspicions that the Olympic movement and many of its constituent bodies have sold out to commercial interests.
Multimillion pound sponsorship and television deals, which fuel the Olympics and international events such as the Tour de France , are now sacrosanct. Taking a lead from their masters, many sportsmen and women are also caught up in this gold rush and show no hesitation in availing of any illegal advantage. The traditional notion of governing bodies being mere custodians of their sport and the athletes being role models for future generations has been cast aside.
It has been argued that this year's Tour de France will become a defining moment for cycling and that the recent drug revelations will act as a spur to clean up sport. Only the gullible will believe this. Until the potentially powerful alliance of sponsors and sporting bodies decide that it will withdraw support from drug-tainted events and athletes, it is almost certain sport will continue to be blighted by scandals on the scale of the 1998 Tour de France.