In April 1989, nine months after Canadian sprinter Ben Johnson was stripped of his 100-meter gold medal at the 1988 Summer Olympics in Seoul, Korea, an elite U.S. track-and-field athlete named Diane Williams presented herself before a Senate Judiciary Committee in Washington. Johnson’s steroid bust had created a media maelstrom, and it was now tearing the roof off a secret athletic society of drug users.
At her Senate hearing, Williams told what would become a ubiquitous tale of steroid abuse among female track athletes at both the amateur and Olympic levels. The influx of the male sex hormone testosterone in Williams’ system had masculinized her features. At the peak of her drug abuse, Williams no longer menstruated. She sprouted facial hair and her clitoris grew to “embarrassing proportions.”
Ghastly testimony followed from other athletes and coaches, insinuating that steroid use was rampant among athletes of all levels, male and female. After the hearings, a bill drafted by Sen. Joseph Biden Jr., D-Del., classified anabolic steroids as Schedule III substances. It placed them in the same legal league as amphetamines and made their use subject to radically stricter punishment. The chemicals responsible for some of the most Herculean feats in sports such as track and field, football, bodybuilding, wrestling and cycling were finally outlawed. President George Bush signed the bill, and history was made.
But today, 10 years later, nothing has changed. The drugs have saturated sports and seeped into high school gyms, turning records at all levels of sport synthetic. In the last decade, as many as 80 professional cyclists died from the reckless abuse of the performance-enhancing drug EPO. And as more and more links are established between anabolic steroids and heart and liver diseases, the recent deaths of athletes like Florence Griffith Joyner and Walter Payton have come under suspicion.
Because of the steroid backlash of the late 1980s, there has been an increase in drug testing in most sports. But experts like Terence Todd, a professor of kinesiology at the University of Texas at Austin who was also a champion weight lifter in the mid-’60s, point out that today there are also many more drugs. Drugs that were used by athletes in the ’50s and ’60s would be considered placebos in today’s pharmacy of performance enhancers.
Strength athletes such as offensive linemen and bodybuilders are pumping themselves with dosages up to 20 times greater than what doctors recommend for legitimate steroid candidates such as AIDS and cancer patients and children with growth-dysfunction diseases. Endurance athletes, particularly professional cyclists, use drugs that mask the presence of illegal blood-doping chemicals in their systems, effectively immunizing themselves against the possibility of testing positive.
Most disconcerting of all, however, is the fact that the fastest-growing group of steroid users in the United States is not professional athletes, but everyday body-conscious people looking for the social accolades that come with having a comic-book-hero physique. According to a study conducted by Dr. Charles Yesalis, a professor at Penn State University and an expert on anabolic steroids, 33 percent of steroid users take the drugs solely for cosmetic effects.
This group includes entertainers such as pro wrestlers (Jesse Ventura has a steroid-laden past) and actors like Sylvester Stallone and former Mr. Universe Arnold Schwarzenegger. Schwarzenegger, ironically, was nominated to chair President George Bush’s Council on Physical Fitness shortly after Bush signed Sen. Biden’s crackdown bill on steroids.
Short of a major cultural overhaul, it is very difficult to alter the American perception of the perfect body, says Alan Klein, a sociology professor at Northeastern University. In 1993 Klein authored “Little Big Men,” an examination of the bizarre subculture of professional bodybuilding. To research the book he spent years entrenched in the bowels of Los Angeles’ most hardcore gyms. He considers bodybuilders to be extremists with a body-image obsession. Psychological dysfunction occurs at the highest levels of bodybuilding, he says, and the same forces are at work in the minds of average steroid users in search of aesthetic perfection.
“Bodybuilding is a social pose,” says Klein. “There’s nothing athletic about it.” The granite physiques of those who strut through prestigious competitions like Mr. America and Mr. Olympia are carved from chemicals. Cycling through various combinations of anabolic steroids results in the grotesque muscle separation and the taut, vein-mapped skin displayed on stage.
Professional bodybuilding is perhaps the only sport in which steroid use is unavoidable. “You’d have to be a fool to go up on stage without [steroids],” says Klein.
Recently, a minor upheaval in the bodybuilding community resulted in a cluster of natural bodybuilding competitions and magazines. But, according to Klein, “Nobody is going to look at the cover of a natural bodybuilding magazine and say, ‘Gosh damn, I’d rather look like him than Lee Haney.’” (Haney is a bodybuilding legend who won the Mr. Olympia title eight times.) Whether people are fascinated by its freak-show quality or they legitimately admire its hulking physiques, the world of steroid-manufactured muscle fosters an urge for emulation. “I understand the appeal of the look of power to a pimply-faced post-adolescent teenager,” says Klein.
Experts say steroid users do not understand the potentially horrific risks associated with anabolic steroid abuse. Steroids are not physically addictive, but they can create a mental dependency. For the most religious steroid users, especially pro bodybuilders, Klein says, it is impossible to quit “without suffering major psychological consequences.” Bodybuilders like Steve Mihalik, a former world-class competitor, have reported feeling suicidal and having the sensation of melting away, as the body readjusts to its normal levels by dissolving pounds of muscle.
Steroids can also flick switches in the user’s mind, altering personalities and inciting overly aggressive behavior, commonly called “‘roid rage.” Diane Williams says she was sexually voracious during her steroid cycles; professor Todd says that steroids can act as a triggering mechanism for violent behavior. Last year, a Sports Illustrated article reported on the unusual number of bodybuilders behind bars for homicide: Bertil Fox, a former Mr. Universe, is incarcerated for the murders of his girlfriend and his girlfriend’s mother. California bodybuilder John Riccardi awaits execution for a double homicide. Another California muscleman, Gordon Kimbrough, is serving 27 years to life for the murder of his fiancie. A female strength prodigy, Sally McNeil, is serving a life sentence for the murder of her bodybuilder husband. The list continues; while Todd cautions against classifying all bodybuilders as pathologically prone, no other sport comes close to paralleling bodybuilding’s criminal record.
The physical effects of steroid abuse can be equally devastating. Immediate effects in men can include shrinking of the testes and severe acne. Since anabolic steroids boost testosterone levels, women manifest their effects to startling degrees. Women are virilized; their voices can deepen, menstruation becomes irregular or nonexistent, they can experience male-pattern baldness and risk sterility.
In either sex, however, the organs most susceptible to steroid abuse are the heart and liver. Former NFL lineman Steve Courson developed cardiomyopathy — a condition that enlarges the heart and causes it to weaken — toward the end of his eight-year football career in 1985. Throughout his stint in the NFL, Courson, who has two Super Bowl rings, was injecting and ingesting massive quantities of steroids. Doctors cannot confirm that his condition, which is terminal without transplantation, is linked to steroid use. Courson maintains that rampant steroid use was condoned by the NFL and that his ailment is no coincidence. He sued the league for full disability benefits, but in June the courts denied his claim. He is now appealing the decision.
Eric Marciano, the writer, director and producer of “Artificial Athletes: The Dangers of Steroids,” an educational video highly touted by the FBI, classifies Courson’s NFL era (which lasted from the mid-’70s to the mid-’80s) as football’s “golden age of steroids” — an era that also included Hall-of-Fame running back Walter Payton.
Like Florence Griffith Joyner’s mysterious demise in 1998, Payton’s death from bile-duct cancer this month will never conclusively be pegged on steroids. Evelyn Ashford, apparently one of the few track stars to compete chemical-free, won the Olympic 100-meter gold in 1984. Pat Connolly, a former Olympian who coached Ashford, suggests that Payton’s recent passing has to be regarded as suspicious. “For every person who knows about steroids or has used them,” she says, “the first thought that passed through our minds when we heard of Walter’s liver problem was that it might be steroid-related.”
Connolly is among the few sports insiders who have taken an adamant stand against steroids in sports. She testified alongside Williams and Ashford at the Senate hearings in 1989, and she took considerable flak for her respectful but blunt remembrance published in the New York Times after FloJo’s death. She wrote that “Florence’s face changed … her muscles bulged as if she had been born with a barbell in her crib … It was difficult not to wonder if she was taking some kind of performance enhancing drugs.”
Connolly maintains that the key to steroid eradication lies in early education. Studies conducted by Dr. Yesalis indicate that 38 percent of steroid users are introduced to the drugs before the age of 15 and that the number of high school males who have used anabolic steroids sometime in their lives is approximately 375,000, or an astounding one in 15. Most encounter steroids from peers or through the Internet, where a mind-boggling array of sites can easily furnish an illicit home pharmacy of performance-enhancing drugs.
Unfortunately, there is very little organized activism against the abuse of steroids. The only recognized prevention efforts are a Portland, Ore., program called ATLAS (Adolescent Training and Learning to Avoid Steroids), which has made considerable headway in the Pacific Northwest, and Marciano’s educational video. Teenagers and amateur fitness fanatics have otherwise been left to their own decision-making devices — something Todd sees as a bad omen.
He refers to two independent sociological surveys of recreational but competitive runners and bodybuilders. Each group of approximately 100 athletes was given what he calls a most “Faustian bargain”: The athletes could take a magic substance that would transform them into uncontested world champions. The athletes could live at world-record levels for a year, but at the end of that year, they would die. According to Todd, when asked if they would be willing to make that bargain, slightly over half answered yes. Obviously, says Todd, the possibility of a little extra acne or the long-term chance of a weakened heart is not going to curb steroid abuse. “If even the certainty of death isn’t always a deterrent,” he says, “what can we expect to stop it?”
Every year at Thanksgiving, John Nickles travels with his family to the Big Island of Hawaii. And every year, as the beaches fill with languid tourists and umbrellaed drinks, Nickles jumps in the ocean and swims. In 1996, he found himself more than half a mile off the island’s coast. Arms wheeling, body undulating with the current, he suddenly looked up with consternation and started to dry-heave. Later, he shrugged it off. “I got seasick,” he said.
When he recovered, Nickles churned through the last 2.5 miles of his 6.2-mile swim, emerging in first place with a new course record of two hours, 19 minutes, 57 seconds. He then ran up on the beach, climbed on to his bike and raced 90 miles. The next day he rode 174.1 miles, and the day after that he ran back-to-back marathons (52.4 miles).
Nickles isn’t crazy. He’s an ultraman: a new breed of athlete that is stretching the bounds of human endurance to its snapping point. The Hawaii Ultraman, now recognized as the sport’s world championship (other events include Ultraman Canada, to be held in British Columbia on July 31-Aug. 2), is perhaps the world’s most grueling professional endurance race. It is not, however, the only one. Dozens of Herculean contests span the globe, and a daunting percentage of them are in the United States. The Badwater ultra-marathon in California’s Death Valley pushes runners through 135 miles and 8,600 vertical feet of torturous terrain; and the RAAM (Race Across America) bicycle race challenges participants to traverse the country coast to coast as quickly as possible. The record, set by Rob Kish in 1992, is a mind-boggling eight days, three hours and 11 minutes, and racers have been known to rig up bungee-cord contraptions that keep their heads upright once their neck muscles have given out.
American athletes tend to be an obsessed bunch, but the trend toward endurance extremes has sounded alarms in the medical community. In the short term, common consequences of prolonged, strenuous exercise include tendonitis, stress fractures and chronic fatigue syndrome. But research is beginning to show that by racing ever farther and longer, athletes may also be putting themselves at risk for a host of chronic diseases, even cancer.
There’s some irony in the suggestion that exercise should come with a health warning, but according to Liz Applegate, Ph.D., a nutrition professor at UC Davis and the author of “Eat Your Way to a Healthy Heart: Chocolate and 99 Other Foods to Help Your Heart” (Prentice Hall Press), the news that extreme athletes may be compromising their health shouldn’t be too surprising. “People can do it,” Applegate says, acknowledging the feats of athletes like Mark Allen — a greyhound of a triathlete who has captured the Hawaii Ironman six times — “but the body wasn’t meant to do it.”
The physical demands professional ultra-athletes put on their systems are tremendous. Their lifestyles are built fastidiously around repetitive, exhaustive exercise and they sequester themselves into regimented cycles of training, eating and sleeping. “Realistically, a professional ultra-distance athlete doesn’t have a job,” says Applegate. She estimates that ultra-athletes can burn as many as 5,000 to 6,000 calories a day (the average person burns 1,600 to 2,200 calories). Ultra-athletes might be capable of approximating their physical ideals, but maintaining superhuman athletic prowess is a biological impossibility.
“There are a bazillion stories of athletes who have developed chronic fatigue syndrome,” says Applegate, singling out overtraining as the most common ailment among the ultra-athlete set. Like a car pegged at 8,000 rpm, the human body can run at maximum for only so long. And when it cracks, it spirals into a state of fatigue and viral vulnerability. “Some athletes have a cold for four weeks,” Applegate says. “They think, ‘I’m in good shape. I’ll shake it off.’ Well, they’re not in good shape. They don’t realize that this amount of exercise is a huge stress on the body and could compromise their ability to fight off something as simple as a cold.”
For now, events like the Hawaii Ultraman are overwhelmingly dominated by men (“Women may have more sense,” quips Applegate); the 35-strong starting list for last year’s Ultraman contained just three female participants. But women may be more susceptible to the ravages of prolonged ultra-athletics than men. Prentice Steffen, the physician of the Mercury professional cycling team, estimates that more than 75 percent of female endurance athletes experience irregular menstruation. “It’s almost an automatic thing when women exercise too much,” he says, adding that because of this, female endurance athletes run a higher risk of contracting bone-mineral diseases like osteoporosis later in life.
Neither gender, however, is immune to two of the most significant consequences of a lifetime of ultra-endurance. One, foot-strike hemolysis, affects distance-obsessed runners. With each stride, a runner is literally rupturing red blood cells, which over time could lead to a strain of anemia.
The other, termed oxidative stress — an insidious process that attacks the body at a molecular level — has piqued considerable alarm among sports doctors. Oxygen is the human body’s life force, but it also generates unstable molecules called free radicals. According to Applegate, free radicals corrupt healthy cells, mangling them by stealing electrons and potentially turning them cancerous. Natural antioxidants like vitamins C and E (which are prevalent in fruits and vegetables) combat oxidative damage, and are abundant in most healthy eating habits. Exercise, however, increases the body’s oxygen intake. Under moderate strain, the body’s biology can easily adapt, activating its stores of antioxidants and extinguishing “oxygen fires,” as Applegate calls them.
Ultra-endurance athletes, though, have bounded into extreme physical terrain, and the distance and intensity they demand of their systems has crossed dangerous biological lines. At maxed-out exertion levels, an athlete is gulping monstrous levels of oxygen and is turbulently circulating it with a heart rate approaching 200 beats per minute. According to Applegate, when an athlete repeatedly pushes him or herself through prolonged exhaustive training sessions, the body can no longer keep up. “Now you’ve got a three-alarm fire going on,” she says. “And your body can’t put it out.”
It is currently impossible to establish a definitive link between extreme athletics and cancer. The ultra-marathon trend is too recent for a study, and, unlike a pack-a-day smoker who develops lung cancer, it is impossible to positively identify an athlete’s cancer as exercise-induced. Molecular tests, however, have proven the damaging effects of oxidative damage, and Steffen doesn’t dismiss the theoretical possibility that cancers in athletes like Lance Armstrong — an American cyclist who developed testicular cancer in October, 1996, but has since recovered and returned to competition (he won the 1999 Tour de France bicycle race on July 25) — could have had their genesis in over-exercise.
To squelch an oxidative inferno, it would seem that ultra-athletes need
only scale back the scope and intensity of their training. The problem,
however, is that ultra-endurance is not just a sport. It can also be an
addiction. When Nickles describes his experience at the Hawaii Ultraman,
his sentences are punctuated with words like “honor” and “respect.” He
speaks adamantly about the “spirit” and “camaraderie” of the race, and he
admits that his very existence centers on the pursuit of peak
ultra-endurance fitness. His athletic goal, he says, is four-fold: “Win
Ultraman, do RAAM, a 100-mile running race and swim the English Channel.”
“These are not laid-back people,” Applegate says. A high percentage of
ultra-endurance athletes are obsessive compulsive, according to Applegate, who contends
that they use the challenge of mega-distance as an avenue where they can
pursue and control their worlds.
Doctors also stress that athletes don’t have to be ultra-marathoners to
suffer the effects of overtraining. Carlton, a cyclist and runner who
declined to use his last name, spent years defining his self worth through
exercise. More than a day or two of rest could produce depression and the
illusion of acute muscular atrophy. At 19, he had reached what he took to
be an athletic pinnacle. He was training relentlessly during the week and
racing on the weekends. After a few weeks of mediocre workouts and general fatigue, he went to the doctor for a check up. At 6 feet tall, he weighed just under 140 pounds, and was told that he “needed to eat more red meat.”
“I was anemic and chronically fatigued,” he says.
Carlton, however, has a fairly common athletic profile; his workout habits
are on a par with many exercise-conscious Americans. Ultra-endurance
athletes undertake training regimens that are exponentially more demanding than Carlton’s toughest week. So if his system could be ravaged by overtraining, how could an ultra-athlete’s lifestyle ever be classified as
healthy?
“It’s not healthy,” Steffen says. The human body, however, has amazing
regenerative powers, and Steffen maintains that even if athletes compete at
ultra-endurance levels for 10 years, they still have the bulk of their
lives left for repair. “It’s as if you smoked for 10 years in your 20s or
30s and then stop,” he says. “By the time you reach your 40s and 50s, it’s
as if you never smoked. It’s the same for extreme athletics.”
Ultra-athletes, unfortunately, don’t always stop. Of the 35 participants at
last year’s Hawaii Ultraman, 29 were over 30, and 16 were over 40.
According to Nickles, who is 35, ultra events have become the domain of the
older athlete. When triathletes and other endurance athletes are no longer
competitive in traditionally-distanced events, they often up the ante by
going ultra. Nickles likens his own ultra obsession to an athletic
biological clock. “I can hear it ticking,” he says. “I know I only have so
many years left to be in this kind of shape.”
Growing evidence, however, suggests that an athlete in the throes of an
ultra-distance addiction is accelerating the aging process, and Steffen
contends that ultra-athletes need to become proponents of moderation.
“Anything in the extreme is not good,” he says, lumping exercise with
traditional vices like smoking and drinking. “The body and its joints only
have a certain lifetime,” he continues. “They’re using up too much too soon.”
In May of last year, Mauro Gianetti showed up at the Tour of Romandie
bicycle race revving for a win. The Swiss cyclist never got the chance. He
collapsed during the race and was rushed to the hospital in a near-comatose
state. For two weeks Gianetti festered in intensive care, his body
fluttering on the verge of multiple-organ shutdown.
Gianetti allegedly injected himself with an experimental drug called PFC
(perfluorocarbon metabolites), a blood substitute reserved for trauma
victims who have lost massive quantities of blood. He wanted it because PFC
absorbs 20 percent more oxygen than organic blood, supercharging an athlete with an aerobic engine that can stave off fatigue — and win races.
This is how sick the sport of cycling has become. Gianetti survived, and he
is racing professionally in 1999. His sport, however, may be on its deathbed. It is wracked with allegations of systematic drug use, and disenchanted
fans are now acutely aware that the superhuman efforts of the athletes are
often exactly that.
Despite Gianetti’s extreme antics, his story is inconsequential when viewed
against the backdrop of cycling’s drug past. Ever since 1967, when an
amphetamine-pumped Tom Simpson collapsed and died at the Tour de France, the sport has been doping itself to the gills. Two-time tour winner Bernard Thevenet went to the hospital with a steroid-rotted liver in 1977, and in 1991 the entire Dutch PDM team withdrew from the Tour de France, ostensibly suffering the effects of over-doped blood.
More recently, the scope of cycling’s drug habit has ballooned to
cataclysmic levels. According to Jean-Francois Quinet, whose book on drugs
and cycling, “Les Secrets du Dossier Festina” (“The Secrets of the Festina
Affair”), debuted in France last week, close to 100 percent of the riders in
recent Tours de France were using illegal substances. Their drug of choice
was EPO (erythropoietin, which acts like the synthetically produced PFC but
is a naturally occurring substance). Quinet estimates that because of EPO,
as many as 80 riders died in the 1980s and ’90s, their doped-up blood
coagulated to stone.
In 1998, the sport finally imploded. During the opening week of last year’s
Tour de France, a routine police traffic stop exposed 250 vials of EPO
and other performance-enhancing substances in a car belonging to the French Festina squad. The aftermath of the drug scandal — the biggest in terms of penetration in one sport — has outraged fans and spurred a worldwide demand for detox.
But while the public is just now realizing that many of its cycling idols are
chemically charged, none of this was news to those inside the cycling
community. For decades, a code of silence kept the drug issue under wraps.
According to Paul Kimmage, a former professional racer who is now a
journalist at Ireland’s Sunday Independent, drug use in cycling has always
been condoned. Race organizers and national cycling federations didn’t want to see their sport tarnished and they turned a blind eye. As new ways of riding faster and farther were developed, more and more riders injected their way to the top. The remaining clean teams had little choice; they had to follow suit to remain competitive.
The code of silence was impenetrable, even from the inside. In 1990,
Kimmage published “Rough Ride,” a tell-all book that exposed cycling’s
secrets. By coming clean, Kimmage had grand visions of being a catalyst for
sweeping change. Instead, he was blacklisted by his former teammates and
coaches, his book was lambasted as the “rantings of a failed cyclist” and
he was accused of searching for notoriety through scandal. “I was very
naive,” he says.
Kimmage’s book barely rippled the cycling community. The UCI, the governing body of professional cycling, did nothing, and the cancer — as Kimmage calls it — grew until the 1998 Tour de France debacle.
The price of silence, especially in the last decade, has been dear. Since EPO
was first biologically manufactured for distribution in 1989 by Amgen, a
California biotechnology firm, the drug has been a godsend for people
suffering from kidney disease (healthy kidneys produce the hormone
naturally). The drug takes over for diseased kidneys, stimulating the body’s
production of oxygen-rich red blood cells.
Injected into an endurance athlete, though, the substance allows superhuman aerobic thresholds, turning mediocre finishers into world-record contenders. A 1990 Swedish study on EPO estimated the performance-enhancing quotient of the drug to be around 10 percent — the equivalent of starting a 100-meter race 10 meters in.
But without medical controls, the strain EPO abuse puts on an athlete’s heart
is horrific. Oversaturated with oxygen-carrying red blood cells, blood can become like
molasses, clogging the heart until the blood stops flowing. Most EPO-related
deaths occurred in Holland and Belgium in the early 1990s, when athletes
experimented recklessly with the substance on their own. With EPO sludging
through their veins, riders were able to pull off epic feats on their bikes.
At night, however, when their pulse rates slowed, their hearts labored to
keep the circulation going, leaving them vulnerable to heart attacks and
strokes.
When cycling doctors jumped into the fray and covertly started
to tinker with EPO dosing, the risk of cardiac arrest was
greatly reduced. Dr. Michele Ferrari, an Italian who was the chemical
architect behind some of cycling’s most notorious teams, once told the
French sports daily L’Equipe that with proper supervision
EPO is “no more dangerous than orange juice.” The long-term effects of
EPO, however, have yet to be determined, and Ferrari’s statement is an
insult to the 80-odd riders who may have died as guinea pigs so that the sport could
learn how to cheat better.
Cycling’s drug infestation was long assumed to have stopped with the
non-champions, the riders who needed extra oomph to match the leaders of
the pack. Police interrogations after the Tour de France scandal, however,
prove that drugs have saturated every tier of the sport. “I have used EPO
for about four years,” Alex Zulle, a Swiss rider who is currently ranked
sixth in the world, told police after being embroiled in the Festina
affair. Zulle’s admission also included the abuse of human growth hormone
(HGH), a widespread substance that builds Herculean muscular strength and
endurance. “I wanted so badly to win the Tour de France,” he said by way of
explanation.
As the scandal continues to mushroom, severe sanctions are being
levied. French magistrate Patrick Keil is heading a massive judicial inquiry
into the Tour de France affair. Police are relentlessly hounding suspect
teams and riders at races. And in February, Olympic delegates convened at
the World Conference on Doping in Sport in Lausanne, Switzerland. There
they pledged $25 million toward eliminating drugs from all sports in time
for the 2000 Summer Games in Sydney, Australia.
The anti-drug alarms that are sounding now are the same ones that rang in
1990, when Kimmage wrote “Rough Ride.” In the first four months of 1999
alone, two books have been published on the subject: Quinet’s
study of the Festina affair and a confessional written by Erwann Mentheour,
a disillusioned 25-year-old ex-pro who took every drug in the book before
quitting the sport in September 1997. The cycling press, too, has been
uncharacteristically rabid in recent months, pumping out scathing articles
that herald the sport’s demise.
Kimmage is relieved that reparations are finally being made, but he labels
the current barrage of drug stories in the press as hypocritical. The code of
silence may have been adopted by riders and coaches, he says, but it was
perpetuated by the media. “The journalists were actually part of it,” he
says. “They were complicit in the cover-up.”
The rebuttal from cycling’s news corps is that it was powerless to
act. “Journalism having its limits,” wrote Alain Giraudo in France’s Le
Monde, “it had to come down to police intervention.”
Kimmage, however, suggests that journalists were lackadaisical when faced
with reporting drug issues. A cycling journalist’s bread and butter is access
to racers, he says. Ask too many loaded questions and you’re out. “In order
to write good pieces, you’ve got to get close [to the riders],” he explains.
“And in order to get close, you’ve got to generate trust. By writing the
reality of the sport, [journalists] lose their contacts; and that is
something the press has been slow to come to terms with.”
Since the 1998 Tour de France fiasco, the spread of blame has been
malignant. Riders have turned on each other; coaches claim that team
doctors worked behind their backs; and they all berate the national cycling
federations. Kimmage, however, resists singling out any one group; in the
end, they all played a role in maintaining the sport’s silence. The
important thing now, he says, is to fix it.
Whether the sport can be fixed, however, is debatable. It has festered in a
drug stew for decades, and the 1999 cycling season (which starts in
earnest this month with the spring classics and culminates in July with
the Tour de France) will be do-or-die. For now, sponsors have not pulled
their dollars, but it remains to be seen if the sport’s fan base can stay
intact. An undercurrent of skepticism has seeped into the sport, and the consensus is that professional cyclists are guilty until
proved innocent.
Says Samuel Abt, the longtime cycling correspondent for the New York Times: “I’ve always said that if I ever thought that what I was watching was
primarily influenced by drugs, then why in God’s name am I covering it? I
kind of feel that way now.”
In the sweltering heat of a summer in southern France, sangria flows, the gypsy kings sing and bulls rule the streets. Every town sponsors its own annual “fjte,” and big bulls are the guests of honor. In Nnmes and Arles they are paraded and taunted in Roman arenas, until either the bull or the toreador is put down. And in neighboring villages they jam around the streets in “controlled” situations as the young and often inebriated try to catch them by the horns.
My French host brother pulled me into this dubious sporting affair when I was lodged at his home during a semester-abroad program in Nnmes. Our group of globe-trotters, all from the University of California at Santa Cruz, was made up of people with names like Rain and Hope. Several held vigils for the victims of pbti, and we all played hacky-sack during our breaks from French class, our Tevas slapping at the little air-borne ball.
The program both ended and culminated with the Feria, a week of revelry that erupts in Nnmes in early June and draws hoards from Paris and the Spanish border. At night the bars spew onto the sidewalks to accommodate bands and raucous crowds, and during the day games involving bulls fill the streets.
My French brother was a bull fanatic. Like most of his modern-day brethren, he despised the “artful” killing condoned by the corrida, but would eagerly chase a bull through the streets, smack it on the ass and then try to avoid getting skewered by its horns.
The non-corrida-bound bovines lead a tranquil life, he explained to me. They spend their days dinking around the wetlands of the nearby Camargue and are hustled in for a week of good-natured torment before being returned to pasture. According to him, my French experience would be for naught if I didn’t run with (or from) a bull. Naturally, I agreed, and on day No. 3 of the Feria, we were ready to play.
A 300-meter circuit had been roped off in the ancient maze of Nîmes’
downtown, and at every feasible outlet a barricade or flatbed truck had been
stationed to create a tight, isolated ring into which the bulls would soon be
added.
We idled with the throngs on the safe side of the fence as a few sangria-laden
men paced about on the course. Suddenly, a gunshot was fired from the trailer that
housed the beasts, the crowd cheered and a lone bull loped down the ramp. As is traditional, this one would get things going and the French cowboys
monitoring the festivities would send out more at varying intervals, until a
total of six would be churning through the streets.
The lead-off bull looked around and deftly swatted a fly with its tail before
a man screamed and leapt at its head, grabbing for its horns. The bull,
startled, skipped to its right and charged down the road as spectators flung
flour in its eyes to piss it off.
I wasn’t particularly wooed by the sight of drunken men in bermudas and old
Adidas with no socks whooping after a frightened bull, but my brother
apparently was, and, as three more bulls were added to the mix, we squeezed
through the fence.
An important thing to remember when you’re bull-chasing is that if a bull is brought
to a standstill and you’re not part of the lucky bunch restraining it by the
horns and tail, you should run. Run as if your life depends on it. Because once the bull breaks free, it will charge in a
terrified rage in whatever direction it is pointed, shattering store windows
and denting fire hydrants. A liquor-lubricated woman had already been mowed down on the first day of the Feria, caught by a bucking horn that had cut her femur
in three.
My brother and I waited in giddy terror. Unbeknownst to us, the lead-off bull,
now thoroughly exhausted, had been halted on the far side of the course. So,
as we fled from the three bulls slipping around the corner to our right, we
immediately encountered Old Lead-off himself charging in a deranged panic from the left.
We slammed ourselves into a narrow doorway and the bulls and their lunatic
stalkers streamed past. My brother, his eyes shining with the frothy vigor of
a rabid man, hollered something and ran into the street to join the masses,
his bermudas billowing about his legs.
I just ran. I found the spot we had entered from and tried to exit, but got pushed back in by a
very uncouth individual. The bulls were coming. I tried again, got pushed back
in again, and huddled back into the tiny refuge provided by the doorway.
This time two perplexed bulls stopped right in front of me, their harried,
puffing breaths adding to the sweat leaking from my palms. “Nice bulls,” I
said as they looked from right to left and then back at me. I peeked at them,
and just before their would-be captors swarmed onto the scene, they gave me
what I interpreted to be a pleading look and bolted in opposite directions.
I sidled back to the fence, beat past Mr. Uncouth and tried to shove him out
on the course. He whimpered and I let him go, then sprawled myself out in a much
larger and safer doorway, wondering just what the hell I had been thinking in
the first place.
Eventually my brother rolled in, all gritty and happy. He gushed about
how my greatest of French experiences was now complete and how proud he was to be my host brother. I told him to shut up and forced him into the nearest
sangria-serving bodega, where he, of course, would be buying.
jan vermeer’s “The Astronomer” has an unsightly scar on its backside. If you were to pull the famed painting from its hook in the Louvre’s Richelieu wing, you would see the spot where a black swastika once marked it as a prized possession of the Nazi regime. So were countless works by the likes of Picasso, Renoir and Rodin, all of them stolen by the Nazis from French museums and private art collectors during World War II.
Almost as unsightly was what happened to those paintings after the war — this time at the hands of the French government. While “The Astronomer” found its way back to its original owner (it was legitimately donated to the Louvre in 1982), thousands of other paintings and treasured art possessions were kept away from war victims and their heirs by French museum authorities.
Hector Feliciano, a Paris-based Puerto-Rican journalist, ranks France right alongside Switzerland as a covert hoarder of Nazi war loot. He comes to that conclusion in “The Lost Museum: The Nazi Conspiracy to Steal the World’s Greatest Works Of Art” (Basic Books), a seven-year investigation that has left a red-faced French government scrambling to explain just how so many stolen works of art have yet to be returned to their rightful owners 52 years after the end of the war.
The art in question was looted by the Nazis during World War II. In addition to paintings hanging on French museum walls, approximately one-third of the 203 known private art collections in the country were also looted. Most of the private collectors’ art was included in a 61,257-work bundle returned to the French government after the war with apologies from Germany. But the task of matching each work with its proper owner seems to have been too tedious for the French government to contemplate. Nothing was done until Feliciano began his investigation in 1989.
Working at the time as a cultural writer for the Washington Post, Feliciano stumbled across a puzzling statistic that claimed that 20 percent of the art returned to France by the Germans was still considered “missing.” He was told by the Louvre that an inventory of the stolen works was “still in progress,” a questionable claim considering that nearly 50 years had passed and that the obsessive-compulsive Nazis had left meticulous catalogs detailing each work’s history and artistic value.
After several failed attempts at conferring with the museum’s curator and legal department — and being dismissed as an insignificant meddler — Feliciano set about matching the stolen art with its original owners himself. It proved not to be nearly as difficult as the French authorities claimed. Art, being of such personal and financial worth, almost always leaves a detailed paper trail documenting who bought what, when and where. Through countless interviews and visits to archive rooms around the world, Feliciano turned up thousands of paintings — Manets, Monets, Cezannes, a Pieta by Michelangelo, the Van Eyck brothers’ Ghent Altarpiece — that the French government had publicly labeled as still “stolen.”
Feliciano’s investigative account was first published in French as “Le Musie Disparu” in 1995. With the American version hitting U.S. bookstores this month, the French government has moved with unaccustomed swiftness to make amends. Three interlinked expositions running until mid-May at the Louvre, Orsay Museum and the Centre Georges Pompidou are serving as open invitations to those who wish to reclaim their long-lost art treasures.
While Feliciano agrees that the French government is finally coming to terms with the stolen art scandal, he remains suspicious of its motives. “If anything, these expositions are a high-profile PR job,” he says. “Heirs are not going to come forward because they do not know that the art exists, or that it belongs to them.” Feliciano believes that, if the government were to make a sincere effort to locate the rightful owners, the museums would start where he left off. “They have the documents,” he insists. “It is not the individual’s job to find the museum, it is the museum’s job to find the individual.”
Understandably skeptical about what will happen once the temporary expositions have finished their run, Feliciano plans to be a perpetual thorn in the museums’ side. “Art is not like a shoe,” he says. “For many people, regaining a lost work is the equivalent of regaining the soul of someone who perished in the war. It is often the only good aspect in an otherwise dark portion of history. It’s a way to say, finally, ‘Ah! The war is over.’”
