Never in the history of the Tour was media
scrutiny as intense as in 1999. After the disasters of the previous year, media
presence increased dramatically, with many of the newcomers seemingly more
interested in picking over the bones of a corpse than in reporting the racing.
In the end, the Tour emerged largely unscathed, but it was a close run thing.
At the announcement of teams three weeks before the race, Jean Marie Leblanc
banned several riders and teams, most notably TVM and Richard Virenque, but intervention by
the UCI saw Virenque re-instated, having not been given the mandatory one
month's warning. Not for the first time, one was left wondering just who the
UCI were representing. Certainly their action seemed more like political point
scoring against the Société du Tour de France than a concerted effort to clean
up the sport. Earlier, the UCI had shortened the bans of those Festina riders
who had admitted taking EPO by one month on the grounds that in any case they
wouldn't be fit enough to ride the Tour. Thus at the start, of the eight
Festina riders from last year's squad still active professionals, seven were on
the start line at Le Puy de Fou, and three of those - Zülle, Dufaux
and Virenque - were to play major roles in the race.
Lance Armstrong in the 1999 tour in the leader's yellow jersey.
None of which should take away from the
fact that the Tour did survive largely intact, and much of that was due to the
presence of one man: Lance Armstrong.
When Armstrong won the prologue and then held the yellow jersey to July 4th, US
Independance Day, the sport had a feelgood story for once. Here was the man who
had not only survived cancer, but recovered to the extent that he was leading
the World's greatest bike race. Subsequently the lead went as the sprinters
took every stage in the first week - with Mario Cipollini winning four stages in
a row, the first time such a feat had occurred since 1930.
But if few pundits believed that Armstrong would have much further impact on
the race, Armstrong himself had - excuse the pun - a clinical self-belief. An
innocuous causeway on the stage to St Nazaire caused several of his rivals to
lose six minutes - most notably Zülle, 1998 King of the Mountains Christophe Rinero and double Giro winner Ivan Gotti. Then at the first long time
trial, Armstrong rewrote the expected script: not only did he win the time
trial, but caught World Time Trial Champion Abraham
Olano in the process. Only Zülle stayed anywhere close in contention. Skip
ahead to Sestrières, and the reborn Maillot Jaune was away again, winning by 30
seconds once again in front of Zülle. At l'Alpe d'Huez, Telekom's de facto
leader Giuseppe Guerini survived an
over-exhuberant fan to win, but Armstrong was in close attendance. In the
Pyrenees, Armstrong showed a touch of weakness, but even a grandstanding attack
by Fernando Escartin was really only
scrabbling for second overall: Armstrong still had six minutes in hand. The
final time trial just confirmed the domination, leaving Armstrong to ride to
Paris with the second biggest margin this decade.
So the Tour had an undeniably
"clean" winner, though his domination was not the unnatural
performance that certain sections of the French press tried to accuse him of.
Take away the stage over the Passage de Gois, and his lead over Zülle is a
rather more mundane-looking 1½ minutes. And the Tour threw up several other
imponderables. There were no French stage winners for the first time since 1926. The transition stages saw breaks of minor riders gain
huge leads each day, with the big stars seemingly content to have four days
off. Yet for all the drug-free culture, the average speed was over 40kmh for
the first time ever. Even allowing for the easier route this year (and arguably
it was in fact a harder route than some of those in the seventies and
eighties), one is left with questions. If a drug-free peloton could ride so
fast, what was the point of taking EPO in the past? And if EPO does have an
effect, was 1999 really a drug-free peloton?