It's 26 in the morning, the 8th of July, 1998. Quiet back road called Shemen Trunkard. Kind of lane that only exists to slip across the border from Belgium to France without anybody really noticing. Team car pulls up to a routine custom check. Behind the wheel is a 53y old man, Belgian swanura named Willie Bite. He's on his way to the tour to France. Boot of his car has not yet been opened. When it is, the customs officers will find 234 doses of EPO, oils of human growth hormone, testosterone, vetamines, syringes, close to 400 doses of doping products in total, sorted, labeled, packed into the team car 3 days before the biggest bike race on earth rolls out of Dublin. Team car belonged to Fina, the number one ranked cycling team in the world. Their leader was Richard Veron, the most loved cyclist in France. A man who got more fan mail during the tour to France than anybody else on earth. This is what made this story different from every other doping story that went before it. This wasn't one rider with a secret. By the end of the month, it would be a team, a doctor, a director, Sportif, and an entire sport in turmoil. I've got one question. Everyone remembers the car. Almost nobody remembers what happened next or why this team out of them all was the one that got caught. So, I went back in painstaking detail through all this properly. And what really happened is stranger and harder than the aversion that you think you know. Let me take you back to that car. Willie Voit wasn't a doctor. He was a swanurer. So if you don't know a swanur, that's the person who carries the bags. They give the massages. They hand out bottles during the day. They looked after riders like their family. He'd been Richard Veron's personal Swanur for years going back before Fina, back to the old RMO team. He knew everything about Richard. And on that morning of the 8th of July, he was doing what he'd done countless times before, moving the team's medical supplies across a border. Here's the part that gets left out of the usual telling of this conversation. That customs stop. It wasn't a freak accident in a calm sky. France in 1998 was already on a war footing with doping. The country's minister was a tough communist politician called Marray George Buffet and her government had spent months going after doping cases, dealers, traffickers, EPO, growth hormone, the works. The previous winter there had been a doping scandal around a group of riders in Grenobyl. The rumor mill in cycling was in full spin at this point. French customs and police officers were primed and they were looking they were looking for these dopen cases. The rest of the sport well they were carrying on as if the old rules still applied. France had quietly changed the rules. So when the officers at that new V on Ferin pulled in Voit's car and they opened the boot, what they found wasn't a stash. It was an inventory. EPO, etroin, that's the blood booster that lifts your endurance and it can kill you if it's not managed properly. Season a human growth hormone. Pantes, a testosterone product. The lot sorted by Ryder. Voice was taken into custody in Le. At first, you know, he, as every criminal, I'm sure, would say, it's for personal use, but nobody believed him for one second. Like, who carries that much EPO for headache? I don't know. And within days under questioning, he buckled. White stopped protecting anyone. The drugs weren't his. They belonged to the team and he'd been moving them on the team's instructions for years. That confession is the moment the whole thing spills over. Because Voy didn't just admit his own part in it. What he described was a systematic way of doping professional cyclists. To understand why that mattered, you have to understand who Fistina were. Fina, yes, we all know them as a watch brand and they sponsored the strongest cycling team in the world. In 1998, they were ranked world number one team. Alex Zuul, he was a grand tour contender. He'd won the Vela, Lauron Dufo, Kristoff Moro, and at the front of it all, Richard Veron. It's hard to overstate what Veron meant to France. He wasn't the best stage racer in the world, and he knew it. But what he had was panache, marketability. You know those long doomed beautiful mountain stages? He was always in those attacks. The polka dot jersey, the boyish grin. He'd won that King of the Mountains title at the Tour of France. Four years running, been third overall. He'd been second on GC. France didn't just admire him. France adored him. They were infatuated with him. During one tour to France, he received nearly 600 letters in three weeks. This is more than large chunks of the Pelaton combined. So when the country that worships you reads that your team car is full of EPO, well the country's in denial. It doesn't want to believe it.
And it happened again. Another raid on TVM. More anger from the riders. Another strike. And this time, as they crept along to protest, the riders tore the numbers off their jerseys. Lauron Jalabar, national French champion, one of the biggest names in the sport, climbed off his bike and he went home. And his entire once team followed him. Their sporting director, Manuel Sees, was incandescent. The French, he said, were going to kill cycling. By the time this the race actually rolled into Paris, where it concluded, seven teams were gone. Seven teams left the tour of France. Fina, TVM with Ance, Benesto, Kelme, Vitalico, Sergus, and Riso, Scotty walking out behind them. The tour has started with 189 riders, 96 finished. If you're trying to hit 60 grams of carbohydrates per hour, this makes it a lot lot easier. Fueling used to be the bit that I'd overthink the most. Mixing different things, trying to track carbs, and after a couple of hours, everything just felt way way too sweet. This is the new for endurance 2:1 fueling line. I've been using it recently and it's probably the simplest setup I've come across since I started cycling. Every serving is 30 grams of carbohydrates. So, it's basically one gel and one bottle and you're at 60 grams of carbs per hour. There's no real thinking needed while you're riding. I'll just sip the drink steadily and I'll take a gel when I need it. Same ratio across everything. So, it all just fits together really nicely. The other thing I noticed straight away is how light it is. It's not overly sweet. So on longer sessions, it's just easier to keep taking on without getting that heavy, sickly feeling. And price-wise, it's actually insanely cheap. 79 cents for a gel and 30 cents for a drink serving. Both giving you 30 grams of carbohydrates, which is pretty hard to beat anywhere on the market. It's a brand new line, gels and drinks for now with more coming. And it's slotted straight into my training without much thought. If you're looking for a simpler way to fuel your sessions, go to forend insurance.com and check out the 2:1 line from for insurance. I'll link that in the show notes below, too. The people pulled into the police stations. They were held in sales for days and in some cases weeks. They were overwhelmingly team staff, the Swanuros, the doctors, the managers. Willie Voit sat in custody. TVM's manager, the doctor, and a Swanur were all locked up. The writers, by and large, they were questioned and then they were released. It was the people who carried the bags and who ran the medical programs who spent that summer in the cell. The man who won it all, Marco Pantani. In a tour falling apart around them, Pantani did something extraordinary. A long solo attack over the call to Gibier in the freezing rain, which we all still reminisce about. Pulling minutes out of big German Yan Olic and seizing the race overall classification for a sport desperate for something. Desperate for something to hold on to. Pantani in yellow in Paris. It was kind of a reprieve, a mercy, a champion, a story that wasn't about a police van. But hold on to that thought for a second because we're going to come back to it. The legal reckoning took longer. In October 2000, more than two years after that car was stopped, the Fina trial opened in Le. 10 people stood charged. Vice Rousel, the team doctor, the riders. And this is where the most famous piece of the entire affair gets misremembered. You've probably heard the phrase alinsu demon plea gray roughly without my knowledge of my own free will. A contradiction in terms and it became a national joke in France shorthand for a guilty man's hopeless excuse. Almost everyone believes that Veron said it. He actually didn't say it. What Veron actually said in that French courtroom to the presiding judge was, "We juded." After two years of flat denial, he finally admitted it while still insisting he hadn't done it knowingly. The phrase everyone quotes was written by a satirical puppet show, mocking exactly that defense. It was such a perfect summary of his evasion that it followed him for the rest of his career. When the verdict landed in December 2000, it was the team staff who were convicted. Voit, Rousel, and three other employees each handed a suspended prison sentence. Veron was acquitted of the criminal charge against him. He'd finally admitted in open court to doping, and a French court found him guilty of nothing. Willie Voit left cycling not long after, and he went to drive a bus, I believe. But before he did, he wrote a fascinating book worth getting yourself a present of called Breaking the Chain, laying out every detail of how doping really worked inside cycling. And in it, he said something worth holding on to. Of the entire Fina team, he named just three riders he believed had ridden clean. Paneagua, bread and water. One of them was a quiet young Frenchman, Kristoff Bassons.
Remember that name because of what happened to him later. He was the one at the center of this Armstrong thing which we'll touch on. The year after the fair in 1999, Bassons rode the tour as a open outspoken anti-doping voice writing a newspaper column for a French newspaper from inside the race and he was saying plainly to anyone that would listen that nothing in the Pelaton had really changed. He didn't last. He was frozen out by the other riders, left isolated in the bunch, and confronted on the road by the man on his way to winning the tour, who made it plain there was no place for him in the Pelaton. Who can forget that Armstrong zippit expression within a couple of years Kristoff Basson, one of the honest men in Willie Voit's account, was out of professional cycling altogether. So that's what happened. The harder question is what actually changed? Well, on paper, I have to say plenty changed. The Festina affair genuinely frightened the people who run the sport. In February 1999, the International Olympic Committee, the IOC, called the first World Conference on Doping in Sport in Lasagna. Out of it came something that still governs every elite athlete on Earth. The World Anti-Doping Agency, WADA, was created that November. France passed tough new anti-doping laws of its own and was pushed through by Mari George Buffet. If you've ever wondered why Watada exists, a large part of the honest answer is that a swanure took a wrong turn at a Belgian border. That's the official legacy, the cleanup, the reform. But here's what really happened. And it's the part that the documentary skip. Fina didn't get caught because they were the dirtiest team in cycling. They got caught because they were a French team racing into France parked within reach of the French police in the one summer that the French state had decided to go to war on doping. The drugs weren't unusual. The jurisdiction was the teams that happened to sit outside that reach. The ones whose cars, doctors, and sworn never got pulled over on a French back road. They rode on. Of 21 teams that started the tour, only two reached Paris with every one of their nine riders still in the race. One of them was an American team called US Postal. Look at the timeline. The Festina Tour was 1998. The next year, a writer came back from cancer and he won the tour to France and he began the most dominant run the race has ever seen. We all know how that one ended. Excuse the brief interruption, folks. This episode is brought to you by Bickmo Cycle Insurance. That's right, the folks who make sure your ridiculously expensive hobby doesn't bankrupt you if things go sideways. Let's be real, your bike is probably worth more than your sofa, maybe even more than your car if we're totally honest. And if it gets nicked, dented, or accidentally reversed over, it's only money. That phrase is just not going to cut it. So, enter BCMO. BikMo protects you and your bike. And yes, your borderline obsessive attachment to it from theft, accidental damage, race day disasters, and even baggage claim shenanigans. Your helmet, GPS, and other kit, they're all covered, too. And if you've got more than one bike, of course you do. You get 50% off each extra bike on the same policy covered replaced back riding. So whether you're smashing sprints, you're grinding climbs, or you're just enjoying a Saturday spin with the lads, ride safe. Bikmo's got your back. Protect your ride before it's too late. Head to bitmo.com and get covered. That's bmmo.com. Flexible policies. Cancel anytime. Check the terms in your policy docs. The era to follow Fistina, it wasn't cleaner. It was just better organized. It was better funded. And it was far better at making sure there was never a car to get stopped crossing a border. And then there's our beloved Marco Pantani, the winner, the mercy, the story that wasn't about a police van. In 2004, a French laboratory quietly retested 60 surviving urine samples from the 1998 tour to France using detection methods that finally worked for EPO. 44 of them came back positive. Those results stayed buried until 2013 when a French Senate inquiry published them. Among the positive samples was the one given by the man who went on to win that race, Marco Pentani. The Fina affair is remembered as the scandal to force cycling to clean itself up. What it actually did was lay bare how deeply the rot already ran and to build the agency that still polices world sport. The racing carried on regardless. quieter about it, harder to catch for another 15 years. Willie Voit got stopped at 20 to 6 in the morning on a road most people watching this will never drive down. That is very nearly the only reason any of us know that any of this happened at