1998 Tour
I bought a bunch of videos of old tours a while ago but have never gotten around to watching them. Over the last couple of days (in between bouts of coding) I watched the 1998 Tour de France.
Wow.
I mean, I’ve always heard of “The Festina Affair” but didn’t realized just how close the Tour came to being canceled. The race finished with only half the starting field. Several of the teams just packed up and went home, and I really can’t blame them. The treatment of the riders by the constabulary was pretty heavy handed, especially considering no one in the entire 1998 race ever tested positive.
The retrospective view from 10 years later makes you wonder, though. Considering Virenque, Riis, Museeuw, and a host of others actually were doping, and even more are still suspected.
Still, innocent until proven guilty and all that. What the police did was dead wrong and the riders were right to strike. While doping must be stopped, there are ways to do it and ways not to do it. This was not the way.
