The Tour De France likes to consider itself as one large international family, which has united for three weeks each July for the last 95 years to celebrate the country's greatest annual fete. Yesterday, la grande famille du Tour seemed riven after two weeks of unfolding scandal, its members united only in acrimony.
The scandal could not run deeper. The Tour's biggest star Richard Virenque spent Thursday night in police cells; he and his nine team-mates were stripsearched and interrogated by police investigating the traffic in banned drugs. Yesterday, Alex Zulle and Laurent Dufaux admitted their part in the drug taking. Yesterday, a week after it was revealed the TVM team were the subject of another police investigation, the Tour organisers issued a communique on the matter. It ended: "The dignity, the profound values of sport and morals which the Tour de France bears, and its exemplarity deserve to be respected by everyone."
Dignity was in short supply when the riders went on strike yesterday morning. They were clearly arguing among themselves over whether to race or not. One party, led by the French champion Laurent Jalabert, wanted the stage to be abandoned; Jan Ullrich's Telekom wanted to race.
If further evidence of the breakdown of the grande famille were needed, it came when Jalabert's team manager Manolo Saiz was involved in a scuffle with one of the race officials as the palavering reached deadlock. The paterfamilias of the Tour is the former professional cyclist and journalist Jean-Marie Leblanc, who has aged visibly since the Tour left Dublin. His authority has diminished equally rapidly; yesterday, as he attempted to persuade the riders to move on, he got in his red Fiat and started driving away four times. Eventually he was forced to issue an ultimatum: if they did not start within 10 minutes the stage would be cancelled. These were not the acts of a man who is in control.
The daily drip-drip of revelations about Festina has shown the "profound sporting and moral values" of the Tour - or parts of it - in stark relief. The team's manager admits supplying banned drugs on a systematic basis; the riders are said to have been forced to pay a percentage of their bonuses into a secret fund to finance the purchase of the drugs; one rider has been linked to robberies of erythropoietin from a hospital in Poitiers in February. The values seem to be those of the jungle.
There is a terrible inevitability about all this. Two years ago a report prepared for the Italian Olympic Committee by Dr Sandro Donati pointed to a vast underground trade in erythropoietin to fuel the needs of professional cyclists. The response of the men who run the sport was to hide their heads in the sand.
What shocks about the Tour's drug seizures is the sense of impunity in the milieu. The TVM team had known for a week that they were the subject of an inquiry by French customs, yet banned drugs and masking agents were found in their team hotel on Thursday.
The impression of a world where normal rules do not apply is reinforced by the UCI's system of blood thickness tests, brought in as their response to the Donati report. The tests, said the UCI, could not stamp out erythropoietin use, but would prevent riders dying from its abuse. The clear implication was that the UCI felt powerless to stop the drug's use.
The prime mover behind yesterday's protest was the French national champion Laurent Jalabert. The UCI was his main target: "The UCI have turned up at the race 10 days after they should have done and they have brought a whole load of new rules which mean nothing, which are meant only to make them look good in the eyes of the world." The word he should have used is window-dressing.
