Whenever the subject of performance-enhancing drugs arises, I am drawn to something the American memoirist and poet Robin Magowan wrote in the late 1970s. “As sports fans we prefer to dream about angels on wheels, somehow immune to the uppers and downers of our own pill-popping society.” Alas, if you followed the build-up to Anthony Joshua’s fight at the O2 arena last night, there were no angels.
The 1910 Tour has given rise to no end of nonsense, not least the claim that Octave Lapize called the race organisers assassins as he crossed the Col d’Aubisuqe an hour behind schedule + 15 minutes behind a nobody.
The story of Alphonse Steinès night on the Tourmalet and the telegram he subsequently sent to Henri Desgrange has gone down in legend. Remarkably, there was no telegram, and much of what is said about Steinès’s night on the mountain is a fiction.