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The End Of The Road: The Festina Affair And The Tour That Almost Wrecked CyclingStock informationGeneral Fields
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DescriptionThe Tour de France is always one of the sporting calendar's most spectacular and dramatic events. But the 1998 Tour provided drama like no other. As the opening stages in Ireland unfolded, the Festina team's soigneur Willy Voet was arrested on the French-Belgian border with a car-load of drugs. Raid after police raid followed, with arrest after arrest hammering the Tour. In protest, there were riders' strikes and go-slows, with several squads withdrawing en masse andone expelled. By the time the Tour reached Paris, just 96 of the 189 starters remained. And of those 189 starters, more than a quarter were later reported to have doped. The 1998 'Tour de Farce's' status as one of the most scandal-struck sporting events in history was confirmed. Voet's arrest was just the beginning of sport's biggest mass doping controversy - what became known as the Festina affair. It all but destroyed professional cycling as the credibility of the entire sport was called into question and the cycling family began to split apart. And yet, ironically, the 1998 Tour was also one of the best races in years. Promotion infoThe first detailed account of the Festina affair, which ripped apart the 1998 Tour de France and irrevocably changed cycling ReviewsThis book provides a fascinating insight into how low a professional team will go to achieve their goal www.cambridge-news.co.uk [A] thoroughly researched book www.cambridge-news.co.uk So much more than an account of a single Tour: one of the most thorough explanations of the drug taking culture in cycling Road.cc Author descriptionAlasdair Fotheringham is a freelance journalist, and was the cycling correspondent for the Independent and the Independent on Sunday from 2001 to 2016. He has covered 24 Tours de France and 20 Tours of Spain, the Olympics in 2008 and 2012 and numerous other major bike races. He is also a regular contributor to Cyclingnews and ProCycling. His previous books are The Eagle of Toledo, a biography of Spain's first Tour de France winner Federico Martin Bahamontes, and Reckless: The Life and Times of Luis Ocana. |