Forgive me if I am being a bit nostalgic — maybe it’s just my age. Or maybe it’s what I do best now. Probably it has something to do with a slew of cycling media, actual and rumored, taking us back in time to the… if not good old days, certainly some very charismatic ones. Those late-20th Century days.
I launched myself back into the Jan Ullrich story last month, which is my own choosing/fault, although in part because we have been promised a new documentary which will finally clear up his mysterious story, though of course that seems to have disappeared once again. Oh, and over the past weekend my wife and I went to see The Last Rider, a spectacular replay of the 1989 Tour de France and the … well, more on that in a minute. I did feel some pangs of annoyance coming out of there and into this year’s Tour, which started in the Basque Country and briefly included an appearance by Miguel Indurain, whose exploits are still celebrated as if there was nothing going on behind the scenes in cycling until after he left.
But mostly I feel prompted by anniversaries, and 25 years ago we watched one of the craziest Tours de France ever, loaded with the very best and absolute worst kind of (non-crash-related) drama imaginable. It was a charisma clash of the titans, and to this day the spectre of doping only partially peels back the emotion this race generated in Italy (and maybe parts of Germany too). The role of doping, however, dominated the events day-to-day, as the world was forced to really look at the influence of performance-enhancing substances for the first time, and the riders had to face the resulting backlash from within and without, for the first time as well.
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Three things happened coming into the 1998 Tour de France that shook the sport in a major way. One was the rapid rise of Jan Ullrich, who had graduated a year earlier from super-talented understudy to Bjarne Riis to dominant maillot jaune, poised to rewrite the record books. The next major event was the crystalizing of Marco Pantani’s career as a grand tour rider. Prior to 1998, he had two third place finishes at the Tour (including the previous edition) and was runner-up in the 1994 Giro d’Italia, but then suffered a pair of training accidents, the second one which wiped out almost all of his 1996 season and threatened to derail his promising career entirely. His rebound at the ‘97 Tour reawakened the excitement, which then went through the roof as he won the 1998…
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