Tour of Italy 2024 | Dopes, culprits and victims

The Giro d’Italia, now in its 107th year, never misses the opportunity to celebrate its legend and its icons. On Sunday, the “Carovana Rosa” takes the road to Oropa and therefore invokes Marco Pantani. On the slopes leading to the sanctuary of the Black Madonna, the martyr climber signed an unmissable feat in 1999, “one of the most beautiful of the Pirate’s short but electrifying career“, according to the chronicle of RCS, organizer of the event.

At the top of his art, Pantani could only ignite the climb of Oropa (11.8km at 6.2%). The Romagnol was a potential legend, the author of the Giro-Tour double the previous year thanks to his irresistible flights. On the eve of this 15th stage, he had taken back the Maglia Rosa and was preparing to make it shine brightly in front of the fans who had acquired his glory. A chain problem stopped him at the foot of the climb… The twist of fate magnified the Pirate’s flight, who went up and left more than forty runners behind to win at the summit.

Bright sunshine over Italy: the Pirata shone in Rosa… Lightning struck a week later, on the eve of the expected triumph in Milan. The Giro started again from Madonna di Campiglio, where Pantani had claimed a fourth stage victory in three weeks. By evening, he had also ensured, using a centrifuge, that his hematocrit (the volume of red blood cells in the blood) was below 50% (an arbitrary standard imposed by the anti-doping authorities to limit the use of EPO, undetectable).

The Pirate was even more “dejected” when in the early morning, his control showed 52% and led to his resounding exclusion from the Corsa Rosa (won by Ivan Gotti, who would find himself in the anti-doping turmoil a few months later). Pantani will always deny it. He will get up again, win again, without regaining all his former glory, and will deteriorate until a sordid death, on February 14, 2004, in a hotel room in Rimini.

It is widely established that Pantani doped throughout his career. The Italian was guilty, like the dozens of athletes caught by the anti-doping patrol each year and like those, even more numerous, who wander through gray areas, even downright obscure ones, without stumbling. We can also think that Pantani was a victim, morally, and very concretely: a prosecutor gathered a certain number of testimonies according to which the Camorra falsified control to save the stakes involved in bets against the Pirate, but the facts were prescribed according to the revelations of La Gazzetta dello Sport in 2016.

During Pantani’s time as today, the means of the fight against doping remain limited: 46 million dollars in 2022 for WADA (World Anti-Doping Agency), 11 million euros for the AFLD (the French agency). The members of the Association of International Federations of Summer Olympic Sports (athletics, cycling, swimming, but also football, tennis, rugby, etc.) announce for their part that they have devoted 51.4 million dollars to it in 2022. The jackpot in The game is rather in the billions.

The fight is unbalanced and the rules uncertain. The pinned champions multiply the excuses to justify an unfortunate blood result. Some people talk about their dog’s or their mother-in-law’s medication. Others claim alcohol abuse on the eve of the test… Chris Froome mobilized an armada of legal and scientific experts to have his consumption of salbutamol accepted at the 2017 Vuelta. In the same situation, Diego Ulissi was judged guilty of “neglect“, with a nine-month suspension at stake.

According to anti-doping regulations, the athlete is automatically guilty when a prohibited substance is detected in his body. It’s the “principle of individual responsibility“. Paul Pogba will never be exonerated, he can only hope for a reduction in his suspension by claiming his ingenuity after his four-year suspension for a positive test for testosterone which he attributes to a contaminated supplement. The same goes for for localization obligations: the “casualness” by Pierre-Ambroise Bosse is worthless compared to Adams software.

It is therefore up to the athlete to guarantee his integrity, a heavy responsibility inherited from past scandals. It is not always obvious. East German champions have turned against their dopers and the system to which they were victims. In team sports, individual innocence is drowned in the group. When he is the only one, the athlete still has to face his coaches and managers. And, invariably, the rare challenges to questionable protocols are stifled by the authority of doctors, whose invasive presence is rarely a sign of good health for a discipline.

With what individual guilt should we burden Kamila Valieva, suspended for four years in January, after two years of proceedings? At 15, the Russian skater’s body was full of drugs prescribed by those around her, until she was caught by a positive test for trimetazidine, the substance today at the heart of the scandal linked to the participation of 23 Chinese swimmers during the last Olympic Games.

Valieva’s abnormal result was notified to her the day after her victory in the team event at the Beijing 2022 Games and she was able to participate in the individual event by virtue of her age: the Court of Arbitration for Sport considered that the code World Anti-Doping did not allow provisional sanctioning of a minor. After the controversy, the young skater made many mistakes on the ice and left the rink in tears. His case today fuels the opposition between the United States, WADA’s main financiers, and Russia, which denounces a “hybrid war unleashed by the West against the Russian Federation“. Very high stakes for an athlete who celebrated her 18th birthday at the end of April.

Older, his compatriots Yulia and Vitaly Stepanov became whistleblowers by denouncing Russian systemic doping in 2014, which earned them a life of exile. A few years earlier, a Spanish sportsman had collaborated with the police of his country to bring down the network of Doctor Eufemiano Fuentes, an investigation which resulted in the infamous Operacion Puerto, whose shadow falls on the Olympic Games, the Tour of France, La Liga…

The whistleblower was one of the unfortunates faced with the doping lottery: his natural hematocrit was already approaching 50%, which prevented his doper from force-feeding him EPO. Fuentes prescribed him a placebo effect at a high price, without much impact on his performance… But he was suspended for his mistakes. And when he returned, the community marginalized this language which had become looser. Doping had made him a culprit, a man who could be manipulated and a victim.