When the Tour peloton protested against doping controls

Testing without precedent in the Tour

The previous year, France had passed a law against the use of stimulants in sport. At the 1966 Tour, doping controls were carried out as part of the race for the first time. Riders were selected for tests after stage 8, and five positive tests were subsequently reported.

To a modern reader, testing may seem self-evident. It did not to the riders. Medical assistance, stimulants and painkillers had long formed part of professional cycling’s closed everyday world. The boundary between treatment, habit and performance enhancement was unclear, and riders regarded testing as an intervention introduced without consulting them.

A peloton on foot

The following day, the peloton stopped after the start. Jacques Anquetil is linked with the leadership of the protest in later accounts, but the action was collective: the riders wished to object to the form of the tests and the authorities’ access to their working lives. After a brief demonstration, they remounted and completed the stage.

The stoppage does not show that every rider wanted unrestricted doping. It shows how little common understanding there was of the rules and legitimacy of testing.

Before Simpson

The protest is sometimes told as a prelude to Tom Simpson’s death the following year. The chronology matters. The anti-doping law, the first Tour tests and the riders’ protest all came before his death on Mont Ventoux in 1967. Simpson’s death gave the debate new gravity, but it did not create testing.

The early system was also far removed from today’s. Testing methods were limited, rules varied, and rights and procedures were not fully developed. Authorities, race organisers, doctors and riders all had to work out what a control should be.

An industrial dispute on the road

From the perspective of later decades, it is tempting to see only an embarrassing defence of doping. But the protest also concerns power. Professional riders had few formal ways to influence safety, race schedules and health regulations. When the peloton stopped, it used the most visible means available.

That does not make the use of stimulants in the period any less serious. It merely explains why a health regulation could be perceived as outside control long before riders saw it as protection. In Bordeaux, those two understandings faced one another in the middle of the road.