Doping at The Tour de France - 1990s: The Era of EPO

1990s: The Era of EPO

When other drugs became detectable, riders began achieving the effects of transfusion more effectively by using erythropoietin, known as EPO, a drug to increase red-cell production in anaemia sufferers. EPO became widespread, as a flurry of exposures and confessions revealed in 2006 and 2007. "When I saw riders with fat arses climbing cols like aeroplanes, I understood what was happening", said the Colombian rider, Luis Herrera.

EPO's problem for testers was that like testosterone and, before that, cortisone, they couldn't distinguish it from what the body produced naturally. For the first time, said Jean-Pierre de Mondenard, authorities had to settle not for the presence of a drug but its presence in unusual quantities. Testers set a haematocrit limit of 50 per cent and "rested" riders who exceeded it. Bjarne Riis, the Danish rider who won the Tour in 1996, was known as "Mr 60 per cent" among riders. On 25 May 2007, he admitted he had used EPO from 1993 to 1998, including 1996 when he won the Tour.

Cynicism set in among both riders and officials. Jacques Goddet, organiser of the Tour from 1936 to 1987, said in 1999:

I brought controls to the Tour in the wake of Tom Simpson's death in 1967 - and the riders went on strike. After the discoveries made, I feel real resentment towards the medical and scientific powers who deceived us for 30 years. The controls are almost always negative, which means that the labs have been making serious mistakes, mistakes that have only served to speed up the growth of this evil. The controls we developed after Simpson's death were a lie, covered up by the highest scientific and medical authorities, and I condemn them.