Festina, currently the best team in the Tour de France, are in danger of being thrown out of the race. Yesterday it emerged that the team masseur Willy Voet has alleged to police that he was acting under team orders when he was arrested on the Franco-Belgian border with a car full of banned drugs.
He claimed that he had collected the drugs - alleged to include anabolic steroids, the blood-booster erythropoietin, human growth hormone and masking agents - from the team's logistics base in Lyon and that his task had been to convey them to the team at the Tour start in Dublin. He said it was not the first commission of this kind that he had carried out.
Last night Festina issued a statement accusing the press of publishing information which could not be verified and was currently sub judice.
They stated their intention of taking legal action to protect their image and formally denied that one of their masseurs had been ordered to obtain banned substances.
But the race's director-general Jean-Marie Leblanc said it might be only a matter of time before Festina were sent home. "I am waiting to receive something official either from the police or the Ministry of Justice saying that, yes, Festina have done something seriously bad, which will allow me to make a decision and take some measures. All I have is newspaper reports." At the start yesterday, the Festina directeur sportif, Bruno Roussel, a genial man more like a primary school headmaster than a cycling team manager, had the look of a man whose world was crumbling around him, and he refused to comment. A few yards away his nine riders, four of whom were placed in the top 20 yesterday morning, were standing on the sign-on podium to be hailed as the best team in the Tour.
Their leader, Richard Virenque, was also presented with what seems to be one of Roscoff's highest civic honours, a ceremonial red onion. Apart from the drugs furore, it was Bastille Day business as usual, with vast crowds watching the riders pass granite tors and bone-white sands. In common with British sportsmen, French cyclists rarely deliver when the nation expects it of them, and one of three home men in the winning escape, Xavier Jan, duly threw away his chance of glory by finishing second to Jan Ullrich's domestique Jens Heppner, while the Dane Bo Hamburger took over the maillot jaune from Heppner and Ullrich's team-mate Erik Zabel. Given that Telekom do not want to have to waste energy retaining the race lead just yet, this was the perfect result for them.
One of Festina's Frenchmen, Pascal Herve, was part of the nine-man breakaway group which led for most of the high-speed run southwards to Lorient, and from which Jan and Heppner escaped in the final kilometres.
Herve, like the other four Frenchmen riding the Tour for Festina, has copied Virenque and dyed his hair grey. This is actually a gesture of laddish solidarity rather than a reflection of the fact that, at present, his team have a good deal to be worried about.
