Drip, drip of drug revelations continues

The Chinese are no longer demonised as the only bad guys. Officials in France such as Parisian mayor Jean Tiberi, who has attended the last two Tour de France finishes but will not be in Paris tomorrow, are running for cover, while members of the International Olympic Committee (IOC) continue to back-pedal from president Juan Antonio Samaranch's gaff about making certain drugs legitimate. With more cheats being uncloaked on a daily basis and the Dutch government yesterday announcing that they will carry out an investigation into the handling of the Tour's drugs scandals by the French police, it seems now that this long fortnight is only the beginning.

Consider the case of Marcel Wust. One of the disgraced Festina team members thrown out of the Tour last week, he simply skipped to Spain to win a one-day race yesterday.

Germany's Wust prevailed in a sprint to win the 188.4 km Getxo one-day race in Spain. It was the first victory for a Festina team rider since the squad was expelled from the Tour last week. The team were ejected after the performance-enhancing drug EPO was found in a car driven by the team's masseur. Several members subsequently admitted to using illegal drugs.

Six other teams have now withdrawn from the Tour as the judicial investigation into drug use has continued. Yesterday the blighted Tour lost the Dutch TVM team, its seventh casualty.

TVM squad members will now be interviewed by police in Reims on Monday in connection with ongoing inquiries. The team's five remaining riders - Sergei Ivanov, Sergei Outschakov, Steven de Jongh, Servais Knaven and Bart Voskamp - withdrew before the start of yesterday's stage.

TVM team director Guido Van Calster issued a statement on behalf of the riders saying the team had been exhausted by the events of recent weeks. "We are not mentally or physically capable of finishing the Tour," the statement said. "It was decision taken by the riders alone."

Only 14 of the 21 teams that started the disgraced Tour and only 87 riders - less than half the original field - remained at the start of yesterday's stage.

Reacting to the TVM team's grievances, Dutch Sports Minister Erica Terpstra, who has made public her support for the retired team, wants to determine whether France's legal system has acted fully within its powers.

Her initiative comes 48 hours after a joint statement by the Dutch and Belgian Cycling Federations questioning whether the French authorities had followed "certain procedures that we consider crucial in the fight against doping".

Meanwhile, it was also confirmed yesterday that the police made a seizure of suspicious substances at the World Junior athletics championships in France. On Thursday, three members of the Chinese delegation were questioned by police after the seizure of unspecified products. However, an IAAF spokesman said he was not aware of these developments and added that it was unlikely there would be an immediate announcement on the tests. One reason for the delay is that the laboratory is also analysing products seized from teams in the Tour de France. "It's unlikely that there will be any results for at least 15 days," the IAAF spokesman said.

The fight against drugs is also exercising the minds of the IOC, who announced yesterday that it will hold a special executive committee meeting on August 20th to discuss how best to deal with the problem. The IOC stated that its president, Samaranch, had convened a meeting with a single item on the agenda: the fight against doping in sport.

The IOC executive committee will also discuss the organisation of an international conference against drugs in sport in Lausanne in January 1999, a move some people view as a cosmetic exercise.

Earlier this week the ageing president was subjected to vitriolic criticism when he admitted to Spanish newspaper El Mundo that it may now be time to permit certain drugs if they are proven to be unharmful to athletes.

"Doping at the moment is every product that first can damage the health of a sportsman and, secondly, artificially improve his performance. If it only produces the latter, which improves the performance but does not affect the health, then that, for me, is not doping" said Samaranch.

The pronouncement came in the wake of four Chinese swimmers being banned from all competition for two years after testing positive for a banned diuretic at the World Championships in January.

He called for the list of banned substances to be "reduced drastically" and argued that the problem was being dealt with effectively. "For example, there were 60 odd games in the World Cup and some 300 of the players passed through doping controls, but not one tested positive," he said of procedures that are now widely regarded as ineffective.

His comments were greeted with incredulity by other sports officials. Australian Sports Minister Andrew Thomson said it was appalling that Australia's efforts to fight doping at the 2000 Sydney Olympics had been undermined.

"It's the most extraordinary thing anyone has ever said in elite sport," Thomson said.