Riders will be driven to the very limits

of endurance by their managers and organizers

Both are keen to create the kind of spectacle

that will encourage interest from TV

and investment from sponsors

Teams encourage riders to use performance enhancers

The French Left, during the inter-war years, denounced

the criminal exploitation of the "pedal workers"

by the "sports profiteers"

They linked their attack to a general critique

of overwork, speed-ups and exploitation

by French capitalism on all workers

The remarkable thing about this

is how little has changed today

Sport, Capitalism & Exploitation

The Tour is a race apart and professional cyclists, in particular, have long felt exploited by the extreme expectations of their sport The team managers, harassed by commercial pressures, feel doping is justifiable. And in some ways, why shouldn’t they?

The Tour de France doesn't inhabit a sporting Utopia that is free of the temptations of everyday life.

In that sense, the old-fashioned values of sport that we grew up with — the value of fair play, the importance of being an honourable winner and a good loser — have long been irrelevant.

What is unforgivable is the way in which riders are blamed for taking drugs. Who do you think provides them with those drugs? Who pushes the riders to extremes of endurance?

Never forget, these athletes are hardened professionals, competing in what Lance Armstrong himself called "the biggest, baddest race on earth." The stakes are high and winning, wherever the Tour convoy finds itself, is big business. Particularly, the team sponsors and a handful of riders.

Doping Scandal: Blaming the Riders

The Tour de France is mired in controversy, and by controversy I mean doping shitstorms.

In two years, the Tour went from having an American six-time, cancer-surviving, positive-drug-test free champion in Lance Armstrong to last year having “winner” Floyd Landis still disputed by his positive tests for elevated testosterone, to this year's catastrophe.

Only four days from the finish of the three-week, 2,500 mile race, and just after the deciding day in the Pyrenees, race leader, Dane Michael Rasmussen, was booted today for mysteriously disappearing during testing days this spring.

And earlier this week another favorite failed a drug test, which revealed he had had a blood transfusion before a stage he ended up winning.

Tour de France: Chain Gang Convicts of the Road

There is an obvious conflict between sporting excellence and commercial interests which has been central to the tour since its inception.

The Tour de France was born out of a circulation war between two French cycling magazines at the start of the 20th century.

The first Grande Boucle took place in 1903 with participants expected to ride 2,428 km between 1 July and 19 July. The distances covered immediately generated interest in the event but also led to criticism that the sponsors were exploiting working class athletes for their own gain.

Analogies were drawn between the dehumanising, overly regulated life of the tour cyclist and that of the modern factory worker.

In 1924 the defending champion, Henri Pelissier, quit the tour in protest at the distance of the race and the petty rules riders were meant to adhere to.

Campaigning journalist Albert Londres took up the case, recounting the effects the race had on the cyclists — the illnesses, the weight loss and the drugs they used to put up with the pain.

He described the race as a "tour of suffering" and the cyclists as the "forçat de la route" (the convict, or chain gang labourers, of the road).

Pelissier wrote to the Communist Party paper L'Humanité saying that he accepted the "excessive fatigue, suffering, pain" of his profession but he and his fellow racers wanted to be "treated as men, not dogs".

L'Humanité kept up the pressure during the inter-war years, denouncing the criminal exploitation of the "pedal workers" by the "sports profiteers".

They linked their attack to a general critique of overwork, speed-ups and exploitation by French capitalism on all workers.

Common injury

The remarkable thing about this is how little has changed. Today the tour pulls in phenomenal sums of money — it is worth more than the total income of all the other European races put together.

London mayor Ken Livingstone had to pay £3 million to entice the tour to start in London this year.

Yet only a tiny proportion of this will go to the 400 or so professional cyclists on the European circuit.

The lowest paid earn as little as £20,000 a year; most earn between £40,000 and £65,000. It is only the top team leaders who can command contracts worth hundreds of thousands of pounds.

Seasons are relatively long (about six months of hard racing) but careers are short and injury is common. On average there are five injuries a week during the season, which means each rider has a one in four chance of injury.

In fact, the injury rate is so high that most firms will not provide health cover for tour cyclists.

And the injuries are usually serious. Riders travel at high speed, with little protection. When they crash, their bodies hurtle into metal machines and onto road surfaces.

Flesh is ripped and burned, and bones are broken — yet riders are under intense pressure to get back on the bike and continue on.

The pain, suffering and demands placed on participants have one other notable outcome. Professional cycling is, and always has been, racked by drug use.

The teams demand quick recoveries and improved performances. Failure means contracts will not be renewed.

Therefore, the teams encourage riders to do what is necessary — and this means using all types of performance enhancers.

When individuals are caught they are abandoned as "cheats". Yet there is no doubt they are the victims of a callous system of exploiting the modern day "forçat de la route".

Socialist Review