Tour De France: Boardman: `Make risk greater than reward'

WATCHING the squirrels play in the garden around him, the sound of his children not far distant, Chris Boardman voices a thought which in the week before the start of the 85th Tour de France would have seemed a heresy. "It's sad to say it and I never believed I would, but I'm very glad to be out of the whole thing," he says.

Boardman's unscheduled collision with a piece of Irish brickwork in the closing kilometres of the second stage cost him his yellow jersey, a broken wrist and a chunk of pride, but at least he was absent while his sport was strip-searched by the French drug squad. When Nicolas Aubier, a member of the Gan team in Boardman's first season as a professional, claimed that 99 out of the top 100 riders in the peloton had probably taken drugs, Boardman was the exception. No one who has followed the career of the Englishman from its humble roots on the roads of the Wirral through to victory in the 1992 Olympics, to two world hour records and three Prologue wins in the Tour would seriously doubt that, in the clinical parlance now dominating cycling, he is a "clean" rider. But even Boardman feels tainted by the open season of rumour and allegation prompted by the sordid revelations of the last three weeks. Everyone who has ever turned a wheel is now deemed guilty.

"I don't want to sound holier than thou about it, but it's been really disappointing that you've followed the ethics of sport, yet when the mud starts to fly, you get implicated anyway. I don't know how widespread drug-taking in cycling is. It's not something you talk about over a coffee and croissant in the morning. I've been surprised by some of the riders who have confessed to taking drugs and angry at the implications that because they are every other rider is too. If I don't know what happens in other teams, how can they know?

"In my four years as a professional, no one has ever offered me anything. I've always made it clear that I'm not into that. We have discussed the issue as a team and agreed that any sort of illegal drug-taking would not be tolerated. We signed a separate contract to that effect." Two members of the team who did test positive for steroids were new recruits who took the drug while working for another team. Even so, the team director, Roger Legeay, ended their contracts at the end of the season. No less than journalists, riders exist on a diet of suspicion.

"We all can look at the performances of other teams and other riders and speculate. I always found it strange that riders who I could beat by five minutes in a time trial in every other race suddenly beat me by five minutes in the Tour. But there was no proof. Maybe they just timed their training better than I did. I've always found it difficult to maintain my form through three weeks, but that might be my physiology.

"I can see the temptation to take drugs. Many pro cyclists start riding their bike for fun, then they find they have a choice: ride your bike and have a chance of making thousands of pounds or go to work on the farm or in the factory with your brothers. And if you take this, you can do it. They're just normal guys, with normal lives and normal families. For me, the rewards are just not great enough. Imagine my kids at school if I was found positive.

"I've always said that I would go in there and be the best I could be and if that's not good enough, that's too bad."

Boardman estimates he has been drug-tested about 20 times this season. On the whole, he believes the system of control is efficient in detecting artificial stimulants. The problems, he says, come when riders systematically tamper with hormonal or red blood cell levels through the drug EPO.

"Then you're into serious science and detection is much harder. If the Festina team weren't caught, the system is obviously not as efficient as it should be, but it's very easy to say `tighten drug controls'. How? Perhaps giving a blood sample instead of a urine sample at the end of a stage, something like that, might help.

"You've got to make the risks greater than the rewards. If sponsors said to teams `any sign of trouble and we're pulling out', that would ease the pressure, and the governing body has to administer harsher penalties." Boardman is now back in training again after his crash and aiming for the Tour of Spain next month. Quite what sort of sport he will return to is another matter.

"The Tour is big enough to handle one scandal like this, but maybe not another. If it continued in the same way for another year, sponsors would pull out, the next generation of riders would go elsewhere and I - and a lot of riders - would pack it in."