On this day in 1965, the sport of cycling banned performance drugs. Why, in those far-off, innocent, pre-Lance Armstrong times, had they need of such measures? Because everyone in the Tour de France was off their bollocks on speed, apparently.
According to Richard Davenport-Hines’ excellent The Pursuit of Oblivion, “19th century competitive cyclists had used strychnine, coca, cocaine and morphine”, but “after 1945, amphetamines became ubiquitous in cycling.”
Before it was prohibited, cyclists would happily discuss it in interviews.
Coppi’s rival Gino Bartali apparently didn’t agree, winning the Tour in 1938 and 1948 with only the help of The Blessed Virgin Mary:
I didn’t need drugs: faith in the Madonna kept me from feeling fatigue and pain.
Five-times winner Jacques Anquetil was admirably frank on the matter in 1967:
You’d have to be an imbecile or a hypocrite to imagine that a professional cyclist who rides 235 days a year can hold himself together without stimulants.
Perhaps the most remarkable dedication to both the sport and the artificial assistance was English cyclist Tom Simpson, who had heart failure while pedalling up Mont Ventoux, having “taken amphetamine and methylamphetamine (and perhaps drunk pastis in the nearby town of Bédoin)”.
Davenport-Hines continues, sadly:
The drugs left him with so little sense that he had passed beyond the limits of his strength, and was dying of exhaustion.
His last words “were a plea to be put back on his bike”.
On a slightly cheerier sporting note, on this day in 1809, Robert Barclay Allardice began a famed and successful feat of pedestrianism: walking 1000 miles in 1000 hours for 1000 guineas.
Barclay had a wager with (friend of Lord Byron’s) Sir James Webster-Wedderburn, but — according to Peter Radford’s ‘The Celebrated Captain Barclay’ — it was rumoured that side bets would take his winnings to 16,000 guineas.
“At the time”, Radford says,
a farm labourer or artisan earned on average about a guinea a week … Barclay had originally wagered over twenty years’ income, but now stood to take home the equivalent of nearly 320 years’ income.
The plan was to do exactly what it said on the tin:
walk one mile every hour of every day and every night — without a break — Sundays included, for 1,000 hours. That is just nine hours short of six weeks.
He did this at Newmarket, by walking up a half-mile course which had been marked out, then turning and walking back. He rested, ate, and drank, too, but for about 14 minutes every hour (at the start; 20-odd later on), he walked.
On 3 June, the London Chronicle said “a task equally difficult was never performed”, and by 4 July, the Edinburgh Advertiser declared that “as he proceeds, the hopes of accomplishing it become even more feeble”.
Two days after that, the Edinburgh Evening Courant contradicted such doom-mongering.
He is confident of succeeding, and he declared on Sunday, he would die on the road rather than give in.
And, as the Times reported on 14 July, he did it
This Gentleman yesterday completed his arduous pedestrian undertaking, to walk a thousand miles in a thousand successive hours, at the rate of a mile in each and every hour. Ile had until four o’clock, p. m. to finish his task, but he performed his last mile in the quarter of an hour after three, with perfect ease and great spirit, amidst an immense concourse of spectators. For the last two days, he appeared in higher spirits, and performed his mile with apparently more ease, and in shorter time, than he had done for some days past.
Radford says “his face looked drawn from six weeks of minimal, broken sleep and incessant physical effort … he had been in great pain and had lost a lot of weight, and his efforts had come close to breaking him”. Still, he was better off then Webster-Wedderburn.
He had lost big, and not just money. In Peter Radford’s words:
He was only 26 years old and friends referred to him as ‘Bold Webster’. He was good with horses but perhaps less good with people, and is also remembered for once, foolishly, describing his beautiful young wife, Lady Frances, as ‘very like Christ’, which provoked scornful laughter from Lord Byron, to whom she had made a suggestion during a game of billiards that was not Christ-like at all. Later, she went on to have an affair with the Duke of Wellington, who was so enamoured with her he actually found time to write to her from the battlefield at Waterloo. Bold Webster, sadly, had less judgement than boldness and now the whole world knew that he had misjudged Captain Barclay too.
(Yes, I feel I may have to look up Lady Frances and see if she, too, has a story I can tell here…)
Perhaps most remarkably, Barclay did the whole thing dressed as he is in that picture above, including the hat and the stout shoes. Mind you, when Emma Sharp became the first woman to do it in 1864, she looked like this:
These are remarkable achievements, of course, but I’m afraid I must now inform you of an unpleasant truth. Pedestrianism eventually became racewalking — perhaps the only sport more reprehensible than golf.
