On a Downhill Cycle

By Sean Gregory

This year's Tour de France, which began on Saturday, is a prodigious test. Not just for the riders who climb, sprint and sweat their way along the three-week, 2,270-mile journey across the Alps and countryside. It's also a prodigious test for cycling's future. After seven straight victories, Lance Armstrong is no longer competing. Yet his legacy of success--coupled with fresh allegations of his wrongdoing--is casting a shadow over the start of this year's already chaotic race.

Critics, particularly in France, have long accused Armstrong, a cancer survivor, of needing drugs to win his titles. Adding fuel to that fire is recent testimony from an ex-teammate and his wife, first reported in the French newspaper Le Monde. Nearly a decade ago, three days after doctors removed two cancerous lesions from his brain, Armstrong relaxed in an Indiana hospital room with a group of close friends. It was there, says Betsy Andreu, then the fiance of one of Armstrong's cycling teammates, that the future cycling giant admitted to being juiced. According to Andreu's testimony from October 2005 in an arbitration case between Armstrong and SCA Promotions, a Dallas-based insurance firm that withheld a $5 million bonus from him over doping allegations, a doctor came into the room and asked Armstrong, "Have you ever used any performance-enhancing drugs?" Armstrong's response, according to Andreu: "Yes." Andreu says Armstrong listed for the doctor the banned drugs he had taken: growth hormone, cortisone, EPO (erythropoietin, which boosts endurance by raising the blood's oxygen-carrying capacity), steroids and testosterone.

Armstrong has repeatedly denied using performance-enhancing drugs. And he has never failed a drug test. He called Andreu's allegationwhich her husband, former Armstrong teammate Frankie Andreu, backed in a separate deposition"absurd and untrue." (Betsy Andreu told TIME she stands by "every single, solitary word" of her testimony.) Armstrong ultimately won the arbitration, receiving another $2.5 million on top of the $5 million SCA owed him. Armstrong's oncologist, Dr. Craig Nichols, said in an affidavit, "I would have recorded such a confession as a matter of form, as indeed would have my colleagues. None was recorded."

Besides Armstrong's legacy, Tour organizers are coping with a fresh drug scandal. A Spanish doping investigation resulted in three prerace favorites--Italy's Ivan Basso, Germany's Jan Ullrich and Spain's Francisco Mancebo, who finished second, third and fourth, respectively, behind Armstrong in the 2005 Tour--being forced out of the race the day before its start. The French newspaper L'Equipe called it a "decapitation." Says Daniel Baal, former president of the French Cycling Federation: "The credibility of the Tour has been called into question." It's certainly the most damaging crisis to hit the race since the 1998 "Tour de Shame," when the team sponsored by watchmaker Festina was ejected after officials discovered a veritable pharmacy in a team car.

The Spanish Civil Guard carried out Operacion Puerto in late May, raiding several apartments in Madrid, where they found stashes of frozen blood, steroids, growth hormones and EPO, among other substances. Five people were arrested, including a doctor, Eufemiano Fuentes, who has links to many elite riders. The Spanish Cycling Federation handed over a report to Tour officials implicating the three high-profile barred riders in the doping ring. The report also named five riders from the Astana-Wuerth team, forcing all nine of its riders off the Tour (a team needs six cyclists to start the race). So although he's not named in the probe, Astana-Wuerth's lead rider, Alexander Vinokourov of Kazakhstan, is also out of the race; he finished fifth in last year's Tour. The Spanish Civil Guard told TIME that more racers could be implicated.

That leaves the Tour de France field, already wide open in the wake of Armstrong's retirement, an even wilder mishmash. Asked shortly before the race began about his improving prospects, American Floyd Landis just sighs. "Jesus," says Landis, "I have to wait to know who's here--which is sad to say, because [the race] starts in about 24 hours." It could be the Tour's roughest ride yet.

With reporting by Tala Skari/Paris, Enrique Zaldua/San Sebastian