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  Festina team all shook up
Posted: Wednesday July 15, 1998 02:11 PM
Special from L'Equipe, the French sports daily PARIS (L'Equipe) -- Festina team coach Bruno Roussel was pale, tense. Visibly; he hadn't slept very well. Same for the rest of his coaching staff, which has been assailed by questions and surrounded by the craziest rumors for the past four days. Exclusion from the Tour, the team's dismantling, sanctions, the most serious being a life ban in this field. In this context of passion and anger, the riders are the most deserving. They're shattered, but keep a brave font. "We try not to think too much. It's necessary. At the pace the pack is riding at, if you make the slightest mistake, you fall. The rest of it, it's not part of the Tour," Richard Virenque said. Laurent Brochard was more terse, but also firmer. "Me, I'm here to pedal, not to gossip," he said. Pascal Herve was frank as usual. "Willy is my friend and will always be my friend," he said. Willy is Willy Voet, the Festina medical official who was arrested last Wednesday at the French-Belgian border with an impressive load of performance-enhancing drugs in a car painted with Festina colors and ready for the Tour's start in Dublin. There were steroids and EPO, which helps in the transport of oxygen through the blood, products that mask the presence of forbidden substances, all kinds of syringes and Hepatitis A vaccines, in case of a reaction to a product that turns bad. Voet was held in custody for a short while, then put in jail. Under French law, he's treated like a drug dealer and risks up to four years in prison and a life ban in his line of work. When confronted to the results of the search the police made the same day at the team headquarters in Meyzieu, in the suburbs of the southeastern city of Lyon, Voet apparently broke down and confessed everything. According to police sources, the search turned up a number of performance-enhancing, undetectable drugs similar to those found in the car.
Thibault De Montbrial, who represents the Prosport company, has begun talking in place of a destabilized Roussel, the company's proxy. "You understand that if someone with us had wanted to bring performance-enhacing drugs on the Tour, we wouldn't have been stupid enough to use a car painted with our colors. We would have used an unmarked car. And if we'd done it, we would have brought only the products we needed. If I believe the quantities they're talking about, it's not the Tour de France the riders could have competed in, but ten races around the world. Unless we were going to supply the whole peloton ... But if I wanted to cheat, I'd do it to win and in that case, I wouldn't provide the other teams with these products. To cut it short, I deny everything, the best way to get right to the bottom of this is to talk to the police and have access to the case files. That's what we've asked for," he said. That's also what Roussel said Tuesday morning. "I've asked to talk to the judge or the police as soon as possible in order to explain to them how my team works and how incoherent it is to accuse Festina team officials in this affair. I'm stunned, and I deny having asked one of my medical officials to provide us with forbidden substances," he said. The team's second coach, Michel Gros, didn't look more serene, but was more assertive. "How can they say they found anabolic steroids at our headquarters? I'm the first witness, since I was there that day. I received a sheet from the police listing all the products that had been taken. According to our medical service, none of them is forbidden. So who's lying? What are they looking for?" he said. Festina's CEO, Miguel Rodriguez, quickly reacted from its headquarters in Barcelona. "If bad faith or the intention to use performance-enhancing drugs is proved, which would correspond to a serious and anti-sportive behavior, I would cancel the contract immediately," he said. But Festina, which is committed to sponsoring the team until 2001, could only stop next year, because it already gave Prosport this year's $6 million budget. Tuesday night, another rumor that pervaded concerned a possible exclusion of the Festina team from the Tour de France. "Excluding us? That's not possible in law," De Montbrial said on the phone from Paris. "No regulations allow it, unless Festina breaks the Tour's regulations. You're going to tell me, 'What about the drugs?' and I'll answer that in French law, you have to wait until such a case is tried before you can inflict a sanction. And if such was the case, it wouldn't be done until a year from now. We can expect some pressure from the organization, for now. That's a different problem. But please be assured that we'll know how to defend ourselves and that, if such was the case, it would be serious for everyone. I don't want to say more, except of course that we have no intention of withdrawing from the Tour." In the Loos prison, Voet gave new details and denounced the coach and the whole medical team. He's cracking up and his ties with the team are vanishing. De Montbrial even tried unsuccessfully to tell Voet's lawyer about certain details in the procedure. "I don't have anything to say to you," the latter replied.
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Festina cycling team coach Bruno Roussel (right) and team leader Richard Virenque are dealing with allegations of performance enhancing drugs being found in one of the team's cars 