Top 100 momentsNo. 67
Festina, in a car
French customs stop a Festina soigneur. The Tour de France’s EPO years spill onto the road. Cycling’s omertà gets a police report.
July 1998. A Festina team car is searched. Doping products, later a soigneur’s confession, arrests, a peloton that rides slowly in protest. Marco Pantani still wins the Tour. The story is not the yellow jersey. It is the pharmacy.
The Festina affair does not clean the sport overnight. It makes the denials look childish. Later Lance Armstrong, later USADA, later a generation of asterisks — the road goes through that customs stop.
The Tour had always had cheats. 1998 is when the cheat becomes the plot, and the mountains are scenery.