Breaking The Chain

In July 1998 Willy Voet, masseur for the celebrated Festina cycling team, was driving from Brussels to Dublin. On a small road near the Franco-Belgium border he was pulled over by a group of customs officers. A routine search of his car uncovered a cache of performance-enhancing drugs, destined for use by his team during that year's Tour de France. Voet was arrested on the spot and news of his detention rapidly hit the headlines. Ever since the drug- and alcohol-induced death of Tommy Simpson in 1967, cycling had suffered from a muddied image. Now an even bigger scandal was about to bring the sport to its knees once again. Following his 16-day imprisonment and ensuing three-year suspension from cycling, Voet decided to break the wall of silence obscuring the widespread use of prohibited drugs and come clean about the sport. From his first-hand revelations it is immediately apparent that nearly every top-flight cyclist has used banned substances at some point in their career and some use them routinely. Amphetamines, anabolic steroids, growth hormones, EPO and more are obtained and administered as potentially lethal cocktails. In brutal detail Voet lays bare the tricks of his trade and the lengths to which some athletes will go to frustrate the drug testers. To his credit, Voet freely admits his own past role and writes without self-pity or self-justification. This is a genuine whistle-blowing expose of the biggest names in cycling, and a truly sickening account of the escalating abuse of drugs among the cycling fraternity in the name of sport. (Kirkus UK)