Cancer And Custard

From The Times

August 7, 2007

Custard man offers Tour cheats plenty to chew over

Matt Dickinson

Do they expect us to ride on mineral water alone?” Jacques Anquetil, five times a winner of the Tour de France, asked almost 50 years ago. Professional cyclists since have cited the extraordinary physical demands of the Tour as an excuse for popping pills, injecting EPO or borrowing a limb-full of someone else’s rhesus negative.

To which Dave Granger replies “absolute bollocks”, and he should know. He recently completed every yard of the Tour’s 2,205 miles on nothing more performance-enhancing than custard and rice pudding. This time last week, Granger was choking up as he rode the final straight down the Champs Elysées in Paris. It was a year to the day since he had been told he was suffering from throat cancer. A man is entitled to get emotional in the circumstances.

Only three months earlier, he had been ingesting his daily supply of calories via a tube and by the time he set out on the Tour, the damage to his throat caused by surgery and radiotherapy meant that mashed potato moistened with gravy was as much solid as he could manage. Even that was a challenge after a day in the saddle, his throat dehydrated by crawling up the Alps and the Pyrenees.

As part of the group led by Geoff Thomas, the former England footballer raising funds to fight leukaemia, Granger, 50, covered every mile, stopping for occasional food breaks. He paused only once on the horrendous climbs when he was so parched that it was painful to gulp in the hot, still air. “I can’t produce saliva at the moment because of the after-effects of the treatment and I’d run out of liquids,” he said. “The support car was nowhere near, so I was burning up. I stopped to have a quick splash out of a mountain stream.”

His heroic tale is not a plea for next year’s peloton to be forced to ride the entire route on custard, although it would be fun to see them try. And it would fit neatly with the yellow-jersey colour scheme. But with 51 weeks to contemplate how to drag one of sport’s greatest events from its latest doping-induced crisis, Granger’s achievement rubbishes the idea espoused by many cyclists and by several respected race commentators that shortening the route — as the Tour organisers did in response to the 1998 doping crisis — will make it cleaner.

It is not the length of the course but the desperation to win, or just to compete, that is driving the cheats to carry out DIY transfusions. Granger has proven that the Tour can be ridden on custard. It is just a slower version than the one raced on amphetamines.

Testing, more testing and then testing again is the only way to cleanse the Tour. And after the testing must come sanctions that equate to more than a career sabbatical. The standard two-year exclusion does not begin to act as a deterrent, a fact recently noted by Lord Coe when he called for four-year suspensions in cases of blatant dishonesty. Even four years may be regarded as lenient.

Coe balked at the idea of the criminalisation of doped athletes — the practice in France and Italy — but professional cycling is in such dire need of an overhaul that the intervention of the police should be welcomed. Granger and his group were sharing an hotel in Lescar with the Cofidis team when the police arrived in search of packets of blood and syringes. “The support staff couldn’t get access to the hotel,” Granger said. “It was like a crime scene.”

Many would argue that a crime scene was precisely what it was. How about a new offence of sporting fraud, given the millions of pounds these cheats are trying to swindle?

In the hotel was Bradley Wiggins, the British Olympian and member of the Cofidis team, who briefly thought about quitting the sport in his disgust at being thrown out of the Tour because of a team-mate’s cheating. Wiggins chatted to Granger.

“He was gutted about what was happening to him and the sport,” Granger said, but conversation between Olympic medal-winner and cabinet-maker from Worcestershire also reminded both men of the Tour’s ability to inspire.

As Wiggins went home in a bitter fury, Granger continued on his journey to Paris. “I always loved the Tour de France and as a kid I used to pretend I was Eddy Merckx when I was on my bike,” he said. “Coming into Paris after everything I had been through, I just felt so alive. I am welling up just talking about it.”

In the absence of a hero from the 2007 Tour, here is a nomination for Granger, the man who did it on custard. Sadly, his diet is unlikely to catch on among the professionals, unless someone discovers that rice pudding can act as a masking agent for erythropoietin.