Cycling: 'Bad Blood' - Reviewed

Bad Blood: The Secret Life of the Tour de France by Jeremy Whittle

Eye-opening without actually saying anything that wasn't widely suspected. This is the book that has turned me into a cycling nut. Whittle chronicles the downward spiral professional cycling has been on since the 1980s. Yet, it isn't sensationalist and it doesn't leave the reader hating the sport.

Certainly, it is hard not to hate some of the people involved, but the over-riding (pun) feeling is that doping is not black and white, and many cases, like David Millar's, are shown to be in the grey.

Whittle doesn't defend those who choose to dope, but he does explain their actions, some of which turn out to be utterly deplorable and others entirely understandable.

The author hasn't always been a cycling fan - he had to be converted, and it is this outsider's viewpoint that makes this book so readable.

Lance Armstrong is discussed in great detail and one is left with one immovable question: how on earth did he never fail a drugs test? Well, you might respond, he never took drugs! Simple! Even if Whittle is careful to never suggest that Armstrong doped, every other team member did and Armstrong is linked to so many dodgy doctors and team managers that one cannot help but wonder. It was all so institutionalised that the idea of anyone being able to resist is frankly laughable. But then again, if anyone could have, it would have been Lance.

A fascinating story that runs through the book is the feud between Armstrong and David Walsh of the Sunday Times, who is convinced to the point of dangerous obsession that Armstrong has doped and will risk nearly everything to try and expose the Texan. Whittle is balanced yet appropriately cynical, and not just about Armstrong.

David Millar is clearly author's friend and so Millar's story is told differently to the other reprobates. I have since begun reading Millar's autobiography, written with the help of Whittle.

Through all of the sludgy, thick, EPO, the double-crossing of team-mates and drug testers and the double-popping of amphetamines and sleeping pills, how am I left with a new interest in a sport that seems so ruined and with which so many have become disillusioned? Partly, it is because Whittle offers hope, that things are improving. But more than that, it is his descriptions of the traditions of cycling that run through the peloton, it is the camaraderie between cyclists that stems from the sheer difficulty of their livelihood (and it is their livelihood, something that the reader is never allowed to forget) and the respect amongst them that such toughness engenders.

And then, of course, such vomit-inducing suffering is set against the European continent: the Alps, the Pyrenées, the Spanish plains, the Provencal villages where the most exciting day of the year is when the Tour passes through. There's an undeniable romance to it all which provokes the same feeling that the Heineken Cup does in me - the colour, the pageantry, the excitement, the exoticism, and not a hint of parochialism in sight.