I’ll Climb That Hill In My Own Way: (Dis)Locating The Naturalized Body In Professional Cycling’s Banned Erythropoietin Use Between 1990-2010 (3/6)
Part Three: Case Study. The body, with all its gendered and racialized associations, became the concept through which cycling as a sport and France as a state realigned their notions of the natural, the medical, and the illicit.
Introduction | Background: Drug Testing and Gender Segregation | Case Study: The Transformation of the Natural Body in Cycling’s Epo Era | “Natural” is Discourse | The Discourses Surrounding Banned Performance-enhancing Techniques Perpetuate Gendered and Raced Narratives of Natural Difference | Conclusion | Bibliography
Case study: the transformation of the natural body in cycling’s EPO era
Cycling is a sport often associated with sophisticated performance enhancing techniques that are banned by governing bodies and local state laws, and since the 1990s (Weaving 2008; Mignon 2003; Maso 2005; Eichner 2007). As such, it is the focal site of complex discussions around illicit performance enhancement, natural bodies, and the extent to which the state can intervene on bodies. Because the history of drug use in professional cycling is not static, but rather one with many varied discursive shifts (Maso 2005, p. 146; Mignon 2003, p. 232), we can use it to understand the changing connotations of artifice and nature that reflect perceptions of the natural body. The transfiguration and modernization of blood-doping techniques, the transformation of cycling sporting narratives, and the reconstruction of European law occurred between 1990 and 2010, and this paper will analyze them with a close focus on the 1998 “Festina Affair,” which made cycling’s erythropoietin use public and led to the introduction of new laws affecting the body. This study will highlight that medicalized performance-enhancing techniques have been used to provoke discursive shifts in the perception of “natural,” especially in how it relates to bodies. Cycling is a particularly useful case study because it brings together many separate narratives of technological, medical, and social interventions.
Before diving into the case study, it is necessary to acknowledge that the “natural” body is a shifting discursive object subjected to a meandering series of regulations in the name of sporting fairness. Concerns about improper bodily usage and external technological intervention are common in many sports. The Fosbury Flop is a ubiquitous, efficient, and easily-taught high-jump technique pioneered by Dick Fosbury in 1968, who discovered he could reach greater heights by jumping backward over the high-jump pole rather than the then-conventional sideways method. However, its invention was the site of debate. Athletes, coaches, and the sport’s governing body were concerned by whether the athlete was using their body in a “natural” way (van Hilvoorde et al. 2007, pp. 179-180). The technique also raised fears that the necessity of landing pads in backwards jumping meant some athletes were receiving technological assistance (ibid., p. 181). Yet it may have been the technology itself that changed the way bodies were used in the sport. While it was true that some jumping techniques benefited more from this technology, it was the risk compensation allowed by the introduction of soft landing pits that scripted Fosbury’s new approach to jumping (van Hilvoorde et al. 2007; Bernstein 2009; Davis 1990). The cultural conditions that allowed the Fosbury Flop to be permitted came as a result of shifting systems of meaning surrounding what it meant to use the body naturally in high jumping and which artificial interventions could be accepted as part of the sport (van Hilvoorde et al. 2007, pp. 179-181). This insight into high-jumping allows us to consider that dependence on technology is a negotiable intervention capable of becoming naturalized and separated from an artifice that is historically associated with the unfair.
A similar process of negotiation occurred with the introduction of klapskates in the speed skating events at the 1998 Winter Olympics. Klapskates are hinged in such a way that ice friction is massively reduced during the skater’s movement (Houdijk et al., 2001) and plantar flexion of the foot is improved to provide greater contact with the ice (van Hilvoorde et al. 2007, p. 182). The technological innovation was met with controversy because the skates improved performance while fundamentally changing the physical actions used in the sport (van Hilvoorde et al. 2007). This new approach to the sport changed the way athletes in speed skating utilized their bodies, in turn producing the perception that natural talent and the process of physical training had become devalued by technology. “The distinction between a natural, human performance on the one hand and technology on the other was created as a result of moral discomfort” (van Hilvoorde et al. 2007, p. 185).
Cycling, too, had its klapskate moment. The invention and proliferation of the derailleur, which allowed riders to change gears and freewheel without pedaling, was met with the same concerns about technology devaluing “natural” human performance. Henri Desgrange, professional cyclist and editor of L’Auto newspaper, made his resistance to artifice intruding on bicycle racing clear in an editorial the year before he founded the Tour de France:
“I still feel that variable gears are only for people over 45. Isn’t it better to triumph by the strength of your muscles than by the artifice of a derailleur? We are getting soft. As for me, give me a fixed gear!” (Henri Desgrange, L’Auto in 1902, quoted in Edwards and Leonard 2009)
The privileging of the “natural” in sports is inherent to the functioning of sports as a site of fair competition. Sports are predicated on the sporting arena being perceived as a site of fairness (van Hilvoorde et al. 2007, p. 175). This means that sporting events must construct an equal grounding for their competitors: athletes must compete on the same track, leap the same hurdles, and be subjected to the same rules. It is from this position that the “natural” inequality of individual competitors is made visible, and the best athlete can be identified (van Hilvoorde et al. 2007, p. 175). That the equality of the sporting event is artificial does not matter, only that the inequality it demonstrates is perceived as natural. In short, inequality must be individualized and centered on the body rather than systemic, and this provides the basis for the physical biological difference upon which sports operate and of which they serve as proof. The natural is a site of negotiation, and its oppositional artifice is not a literal technological fiction but a shorthand for the intervention that redefines the nature of the obstacle sport is trying to overcome (van Hilvoorde et al. 2007, p. 175).
It should be clear that certain interventions are disruptive to the sporting narrative of natural physical difference. Technological or medical means of improving one’s performance run the risk of undermining the premise of fairness upon which the sporting competition is built, and therefore render void the illusion of innate natural inequality produced by the sporting feat. One may question whether such interventions cannot change meaning if they are only as artificial as the equality they serve to disrupt; the answer is that they do. Klapskates eventually became integrated into speed skating, and the use of performance-enhancing drugs in cycling gradually became stigmatized throughout the 20th century.
The history of illicit performance enhancement in cycling is not static, but rather one with many varied discursive shifts that reflect perceptions of the natural body. Products used in a rider’s “preparation” included “pills and cocaine” (Maso 2005, p. 142), amphetamines (ibid.; Voet 2002 p. 9), “cocaine for the eyes” (Mignon 2003, p. 230), “chloroform for the gums” (ibid.), strychnine (Mignon 2003, p. 231), anabolic steroids and growth hormones (Maso 2005, p. 143), a cocktail of “amphetamines, caffeine, cocaine, heroin, painkillers and sometimes corticosteroids” (Voet 2002, p. 9), and “Easter Egg” testosterone balls (Voet 2002, p. 13). The use of these products was not considered a doping issue, but rather something considered part of the competition (Maso 2005, p.141; Mignon 2003, pp. 232-233) necessary for the “convict-laborers of the road” (Mignon 2003, p. 230) to complete their work: “Christ had only 14 stations of the cross. We have 15. We suffer from start to finish. Do you want to see what we run on? […] We run on dynamite.” (Henri Pelissier, quoted in Mignon 2003, p. 230)
It was in the 1920s that the meanings attached to performance enhancement first began to transform. Drug use would remain permitted in cycling, but became explicitly separated from what was considered a normal requirement: Tour de France organizers would pay for “normal medical care” but the “cost of ‘stimulants, tonics, and doping’ had to be paid by the riders themselves” (Maso 2005, p.142). Yet, for many years, it was the perceived necessity of performance-enhancing substances that served as evidence of the spectacle of the competition (Mignon 2003; Maso 2005). Cycling was a mediasport (Brookes 2002) that existed more in grandiose newspaper reports than on the road (Maso 2005; Wille 2003). Until broadcast technology caught up, neither fans nor journalists could watch an entire race from point-to-point (Maso 2005; Wille 2003), and cycle sport was a fictive process that regaled its fandom with stories of Homeric efforts of superhumans overcoming insurmountable obstacles (Maso 2005, p. 141). That such heroes required illicit performance-enhancing techniques in order to overcome such obstacles was not surprising to fans, and served only to verify the significance of the feat.
Many substances used in a cyclist’s preparation were banned later in the 20th century. The utilization of performance-enhancing techniques became separated from the “larger than life” (Maso 2005, p. 141) conceptualization of the sport that had allowed race organizers, journalists, and fans to turn a blind eye to what was considered necessary medical intervention. The first doping inspections took place on June 28, 1966, combining medical and the state regulatory apparatuses: two physicians visited riders, accompanied by the police. During these meetings, the physicians not only collected urine for testing (Maso 2005, p.146), but also conducted “hasty medical examinations” (Maso 2005, p. 145) as though the effect of the drug would be visible on the body. In the eyes of the Tour de France, the media, doctors, and the French police, drug use was now a public health issue. These controls functioned as a state-sponsored examination of the body, enforced by police, with the intention of by ensuring the bodies permitted to compete fitted within the state’s definition of natural.
The 1990s saw a new era of performance enhancement (Eichner 2007; Mignon 2003) that abruptly progressed beyond the crude “home-made” (Mignon 2003, p. 232) methods that had been consistently used during the sport’s first 100 years. The “reversal of curiosity towards applied research” (Mignon 2003, p. 233) that began in the 1960s led to the introduction of the sophisticated blood-booster erythropoietin in 1987 (Maso 2005; Eichner 2007), and its use immediately became systematic and medicalized (Mignon 2003, pp. 232-233; Eichner 2007; Maso 2005). There is a consensus that the practice was so prevalent at the start of the 1990s (Eichner 2007; Maso 2005, p. 145; Mignon 2003) that it was impossible to be a professional cyclist without agreeing to a team’s “medical preparation” program (Kimmage 1998, pp. 233-236).
This period led to many contested narratives of what constituted an authentic athletic performance, with naturalized ideas of the body acting as the basis for new rules in cycling. The evolving narratives of banned performance enhancement in cycling illustrate that medicalized performance-enhancing techniques in cycling are not inevitably oppositional to the “natural”. Rather, they can be used to provoke discursive shifts in the perception of what is permitted to be natural.
The transformation of narratives surrounding drug use and the natural body in cycling has been a framing for the theoretical groundwork that will be undertaken in the rest of this paper. While there is a risk of diluting this framing by delving too deeply into the mechanisms of the Tour de France, it is important to discuss two further factors before we move on. The first is the Festina Affair, a high-profile doping scandal at the Tour de France that led to new anti-doping laws and a shift in narratives surrounding drug use in cycling. The second is the way in which tests for erythropoietin were conducted.
The Festina Affair began in a layby in Belgium the day before the 1998 Tour de France. Willy Voet, the masseur for the Festina cycling team, was stopped at a police border control targeting Tour de France vehicles with his team’s supply of erythropoietin in his car and a mixture of heroin, cocaine, and amphetamines in his bloodstream (Voet 2001). The unprecedented border checks were “a coup de force” (Mignon 2003, p. 238) by France’s new Communist Party government, which intended to create “an affair obliging people to break the law of silence” (ibid.). The Tour de France was owned by a subsidiary of the Amaury Group publishing house (Mignon 2003; Wille 2003), which was locked in a dispute with a printers’ union that funded the Communist Party (Mignon 2003, pp. 238-239). While it is unlikely that the Festina Affair was entirely an act of malicious political retribution, the scenario at least indicates an ideological stake in ending the state’s policy of overlooking the Tour de France’s illicit activities. The Affair’s intent was to bring cycling’s use of medicalized performance enhancements into the public eye, and it kickstarted an immediate series of legislative processes and police raids on the hotels of teams competing in the race. Of the 189 riders who started the race, only 96 finished.
The Festina Affair is an enlightening illustration precisely because it makes visible the extent to which performance-enhancing techniques are a domain in which meaning is produced, as well as the extent to which these meanings are malleable. With changing politics in France, banned performance-enhancing techniques became a necessary shorthand for broader cultural meanings with wide-reaching sociopolitical impact, and this came to a head in 1998 with conceptions of the natural body at the center. The Festina Affair provides a fascinating insight into the ways in which concepts of ‘the natural” pervade from society into sport and are then reintegrated from sport back into society.
The Festina Affair created a new lexicon of state medical intervention and policing of appropriate body modification in the name of performance enhancement. Understanding the resulting transformation of discourses surrounding the Tour de France as a sporting contest is also useful in identifying the privileging of a concept of “natural” that is assumed to be inherently good. We can therefore locate how such discursive shifts in the seemingly benign sporting concept of the natural body can physically affect lived experience: medicalized performance enhancement acted as a proxy for the state to act on bodies as a result of complex interactions surrounding a political dispute that pitted local unions against a globalizing corporation. A series of medical, sporting, and political moments evolved to produce a naturalized body that appears inevitable rather than contingent on the negotiation of all these factors.
A year after the Festina Affair, the winner of the 1998 Tour de France, Marco Pantani, was eliminated from the Giro d’Italia (Tour of Italy) and banned from competing in the sport for failing a “health check.” Although functioning as a doping control, this test did not have the technology to successfully detect the presence of artificial erythropoietin in the body. Rather, the test indicated the possibility of the banned drug’s use by measuring blood hematocrit levels, separating blood and plasma in a centrifuge to determine whether the sample contained more than 50% red blood cells (Voet 2001, pp. 5-6), a number determined to be the maximum limit of what a body could produce naturally (ibid; Eichner 2007). The test was easily circumvented (Voet 2001, pp. 5-6) and was therefore inefficient at reducing erythropoietin use, but its intent in separating bodies into categories of natural and unnatural, and pathologizing the latter as unfair, is remarkable in a sport that until just a few years before had reveled both in the grimaces of its competitors and in the lengths its competitors would go to in order to compete. Pantani could not be banned for using drugs. Instead, he was removed from the race and suspended for racing because his body did not meet the sport’s definition of natural.
The “natural” body, with all its qualifiers and complex history of gendered and racial differentiators upon which social policy has been constructed, was a privileged object from the moment the potential to identify the use of erythropoietin became a possibility. As such, the body, with all its gendered and racialized associations, became the concept through which cycling as a sport and France as a state realigned their notions of the natural, the medical, and the illicit.
Introduction | Background: Drug Testing and Gender Segregation | Case Study: The Transformation of the Natural Body in Cycling’s Epo Era | “Natural” is Discourse | The Discourses Surrounding Banned Performance-enhancing Techniques Perpetuate Gendered and Raced Narratives of Natural Difference | Conclusion | Bibliography