Chris Boardman
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That’s the one.
And the lads got busted with the PED’s in the hotel in Enniscorthy. Festina I think it was
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I got married that weekend
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Murphy Floods?
The 200th anniversary of the '98 rebellion. France won the Euros on the Sunday. TdF stage went off on the Monday. I’d finished my Junior Cert the Thursday before it I think.
No, Treacys I think
If not the hotel, they were busted going home out of Rosslare. Enniscorthy Gardai made the discovery or got the tip off though.
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Clare v Waterford reply on the Sunday iirc
I always thought Willy Voet was busted at the French Belgian border as he was on his way over.
Talk about this was already rife on the Saturday of the prologue in Dublin or even the day before it.
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Think it ran for a week before Festina were kicked out.
The shit really hit the fan when they got back to France. I watched a lot of that Tour on Eurosport. David Duffield’s commentary was very funny, the denial that ran through it all. Phil Liggett too. So and so didn’t start the stage this morning “as he’s assisting police with their enquiries”. Phrased like cyclists had just popped out of the office to the shop for a roll and would be back in a few minutes. I think there was a sit down protest at one stage, ie. a protest by the riders at getting busted for doping.
I didn’t read Rough Ride until 1999 but Kimmage had already had reams of articles in the Sindo about doping and lads dying of heart attacks while they slept and I’d watched the previous few Tours in absolutely no doubt that EPO was rife. The only surprise was how it all blew up so publicly so suddenly. You assumed that the Tour was too big to fail. And I suppose after that year that did indeed prove the case.
The PDM affair of 1991 was the first hint that something big was up as regards doping. I was probably too young to understand it fully at that stage but you knew something was seriously off. I recall reading a brief story in the corner of the paper that spring about a Belgian footballer dying after an experiment to take blood out of him, oxygenate it and then put it back in.
For at least a decade after Ben Johnson the fraud was perpetrated on the public that only an odd one cheated and they generally only did it because they weren’t good enough. The 1998 Tour put the kibosh on that notion in the public’s mind. But time has proven the public don’t really care that much if at all and that’s what pisses off Kimmage so much. You can understand why he feels so strongly having lived it but you can understand too why the public don’t care, they’re faced with news about wars, pandemics, terrorism, murders etc. on top of the struggle to live so athletes taking drugs all seems fairly irrelevant by comparison, “give us our entertainment to take our mind off all the shit”.
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Didn’t the great Jan Ullrich have an extraordinary meltdown that year gifting the yellow jersey to Pantani?
I was a big Ullrich fan in the early 2000’s with his incredible pink T Mobile kit.
I was walking down by the Broadstone that night after being in the Bohemian after the World Cup final and a little oul’ fella going the opposite way shouts at me “A French wan is just after offerin’ me a blow job”.
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Wtf
I had you down as older than myself 
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Is Reeling in the Years the new Angelus?
Ullrich looked certain to win again, he’d won in '97. Pantani obliterated him in the last big Alpine stage in pissing wind and rain. Took about 8 minutes or more out of him.
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I used to spend about 5 hours a day watching it from 2003 to 2012.
Team Sky ruined it.
Nothing better than spending a scorching summer day instead watching 4 hours of a mountain stage
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Was cyclings biggest mistake that they made a half hearted attempt to clean up the sport?
When you think of how many footballers there are in the World and the amount of money you can make from it, there should probably be what, at least 2 or 3 players a year caught in the EPL alone. But absolutely nothing. Rio got caught that time, but sure it hardly dented his career and that was just a bit of stupidity really.
The Tourmalet, Dutch Corner on Alp D’huez and Mont Venteox are some of the greatest spectacles in World Sport.
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It was ruined well before that. Some of the Indurain tours were snoozefests, '94 and '95 in particular. Then Armstrong.
The Tours after that which had exciting stages were all freak shows. Riis in 1996, the Pantani stage in '98, the 2006 one where Landis won and then was stripped of it, Ricco on Hautacam in '08.
'89 was the pinnacle. It will never, ever, ever get better than that ever again.
Michael Thomas and the time trial where LeMond beat Fignon were arguably the two greatest finishes ever in sport, they happened within two months of each other. That Tour kept swinging one way and then the other in a way you just don’t see now.
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