this is from wikipedia, i found it as i was writing an article on Gino the Great for a magazine.
it kind of blew my mind, to think that he was possibly the first in-competition drug tester of all time! as well as being a participant, and a huge one at that.
here are the quotes:
Drugs search
Bartali always suspected that Coppi took drugs. On the hairpins of the Col di Bracco, during a stage of the 1946 Giro from Genoa to Montecani Terme, Coppi drank from a glass phial and threw into the verge. Bartali drove back after the race and found it. He said:
| “ | With the meticulous care of a detective collecting evidence for fingerprinting I picked it up, dropped it into a white envelope and put it carefully in my pocket. The next day I rushed round to my personal doctor and asked him to send the phial to a lab for analysis. Disappointment: no drug, no magic potion. It was nothing more than an ordinary tonic, made in France, that I could have bought without a prescription. | ” |
| “ | I realised that I should have to try to outsmart him and I devised my own investigation system. The first thing was to make sure I always stayed at the same hotel for a race, and to have the room next to his so I could mount a surveillance. I would watch him leave with his mates, then I would tiptoe into the room which ten seconds earlier had been his headquarters. I would rush to the waste bin and the bedside table, go through the bottles, flasks, phials, tubes, cartons, boxes, suppositories – I swept up everything. I had become so expert in interpreting all these pharmaceuticals that I could predict how Fausto would behave during the course of the stage. I would work out, according to the traces of the product I found, how and when he would attack me.
both quotes are from Miroir des Sports, France, 1946.
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The roots are deeper than I thought
if you’re talking about doping Arno, you need to go back to the very beginning of cycle racing. first reported case of death due to taking drugs came from 1886. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_doping_cases_in_cycling
LeMond?
Lemond is indeed a contender