Tour De France
Pierre Dumas came to the 1952 Tour de France when the original doctor pulled out. Dumas was a judoka rather than a cyclist and had none of the preconceptions established in cycling. He discovered a world in which
| “ | "there were soigneurs, fakirs, who came from the six-days. Their value was in the contents of their case. Riders took anything they were given, even bee stings and toad extract." | ” |
He spoke of
| “ | "medicine from the heart of Africa... healers laying on hands or giving out irradiating balms, feet plunged into unbelievable mixtures which could lead to eczema, so-called magnetised diets and everything else you could imagine. In 1953 and 1954 (Tours de France) it was all magic, medicine and sorcery. After that, they started reading Vidal ." | ” |
In the 1955 Tour de France, Dumas attended the French rider Jean Mallejac when he collapsed in the Tour de France on Mont Ventoux. Ten kilometres from the summit, said the historian of the Tour de France, Jacques Augendre, Mallejac was: "Streaming with sweat, haggard and comatose, he was zigzagging and the road wasn't wide enough for him... He was already no longer in the real world, still less in the world of cyclists and the Tour de France." Mallejac collapsed, one foot still in a pedal, the other pedalling in the air. He was "completely unconscious, his face the colour of a corpse, a freezing sweat ran on his forehead." He was hauled to the side of the road and Dumas summoned. Georges Pahnoud of the Télégramme de Brest reported:
He had to force jaws apart to try to make him drink and it was a quarter of an hour later, after he had received an injection of Solcamphor and been given oxygen, that Mallejac regained consciousness. Taken by ambulance, he hadn't however completely recovered. He fought, he gesticulated, he shouted, demanded his bike, wanted to get out.
Mallejac insisted for the rest of his life that he had been given a drugged bottle from a soigneur, whom he didn't name, and said that while his other belongings had reached the hospital intact, the bottle had been emptied and couldn't be analysed. That evening Dumas said:
| “ | "I'm prepared to call for a charge of attempted murder." | ” |
The French team manager, Marcel Bidot, was cited to an inquiry by the Council of Europe as saying:
"Three-quarters of riders were doped. I am well placed to know that since I visited their rooms each evening during the Tour. I always left frightened after these visits."
Read more about this topic: Pierre Dumas
Famous quotes containing the words tour and/or france:
“Do you know I believe that [William Jennings] Bryan will force his nomination on the Democrats again. I believe he will either do this by advocating Prohibition, or else he will run on a Prohibition platform independent of the Democrats. But you will see that the year before the election he will organize a mammoth lecture tour and will make Prohibition the leading note of every address.”
—William Howard Taft (1857–1930)
“The best of America drifts to Paris. The American in Paris is the best American. It is more fun for an intelligent person to live in an intelligent country. France has the only two things toward which we drift as we grow older—intelligence and good manners.”
—F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940)