Drugs have been rife throughout the history of the tour. 5-time winner Anquetil openly admitted taking drugs. Merckx failed a drug test at the 1969 Tour of Italy (he disputes this), but won the Tour de France a few months later. When Pedro Delgado tested positive for Promenicide in 1988 the peloton stood by him and the organisers took no action. This drug, beyond question a performance-enhancing drug had not yet been included on the list of banned substances. A golden opportunity was missed when Tom Simpson died on Mont Ventoux in 1967 to clean up this drugs cancer, but in the eyes of the French vive le Tour and turn a blind eye to our heroes while J'accuse Armstrong.
from Le Tour: A History of the Tour de France (Geoffrey Wheatcroft)p209/210.
And the very amphetamines that helped kill Simpson, after they helped him ride, helped bomber aircrew keep going on long missions, not only, as was well known, in the Second World War, but also today, as we learned at the inquiry into how American aircraft had come to bomb Canadian soldiers in Afghanistan.
Later that day in 2002, after the race had finished, and when the top of Mont Ventoux was clogged up in one of the vast traffic jams wilfully created when there is an arrivee en altitude, thousands of vehicles queueing for one narrow road downhill, I was flagged down by a young man with cameras, a confrere as it turned out. There was no press facilities up there, and even mobiles didn't seem to work on the peak, so that this amiable chap needed to descend to the foot of the mountain to transmit pics to his paper in Marseille as urgently as I needed to get to a telephone and ring the Daily Mail in London. We talked about the day,and I compared the way the crowd had booed Armstrong yet again - 'Dope!'- with the way the same crowd had actually cheered Virenque, the self-confessed culprit of the great 1988 drugs scandal. My companion was indignant at the idea that Virenque should be singled out: 'They're all at it, the whole lot. Tous!'
And it was that emphatic 'Tous! All of them!' that was still ringing in my ears when I returned the next morning, on a rest day, to look at Simpson's shrine without the crowds. Sporting ambassador? Certainly he was. Sporting hero? Surely, in the full Shakespearian sense of a brave man undone by his folly or misjudgement. We who write about the Tour and Tom Simpson should nothing extenuate, nor set down aught in malice, and every cyclist should visit the Stele Simpson on Mont Ventoux: such a sublime spot, and such a touching monument to a man who loved his sport not wisely but too well.