Les Woodward, in The Yellow Jersey Companion to the Tour de France*, identified how the world-famous cycle race came into being when Henri Desgrange, a magazine PR man charged with selling more newspapers, exclaimed in 1903: “Let’s organise a race that lasts longer than anything else.” Woodward noted: “Eventually things went too far. It was all very well for Desgrange to demand that riders should race more than 500km a day, but nobody could do it.” Well, maybe they could… they could have taken drugs and ridden for as long and as fast as they wanted... unless someone was able to catch them!

It seems that despite the much shorter stages of the modern-day Tour de France, riders find it tough going. Indeed, as a difficult year to cap a series of difficult years, 2007 marked a new and extreme low in professional cycling’s seemingly suicidal demise. Not only did a previous Tour winner openly admit to having taken drugs, but the leader of this year’s race, Michael Rasmussen of the German T-Online team, made a complete farce of the event by not turning up for drugs tests prior to the Tour, turning up for the Tour, and then dropping out of the Tour because he didn’t turn up to the drugs tests in the first place.

Clearly there are a host of issues around who is taking drugs, what they are taking, how they are hiding it and so on. One inevitably has to ask why they do it. To win, of course, but why is this so important? Is it simply about money and sales, just as it was back in 1903, or is there something more profound at work? Is it just that 200km+ stages ridden pretty much every day at average speeds in excess of 35km per hour for three weeks are simply too much for mere human beings?

It is not my intention, nor is it necessarily within the scope of the Journal, to address the issue of sporting ethics or drug-taking, although it is certainly the case that money, success and drugs are linked. Rather, as Westberg et al identify in these pages, transgressions have an impact not only on sport and its participants, but also on sponsors and commercial partners. This in itself raises an important issue: are such organisations merely reaping what they have sown with their excess commercial demands? For cyclists and other athletes, to perform on the track while simultaneously fulfilling off-field obligations places huge pressures on them, both physically and mentally. While there may be some unscrupulous corporations that adopt a ‘win at all costs’ mentality, the responses of Adidas and some of the German media corporations to Rasmussen’s transgressions were heartening, if long overdue. They withdrew their sponsorships and/or coverage, and a significant number of other sponsors are thought to be considering their role in professional cycling.

At one level, the stance of such corporations means that, at long last, notions of corporate social responsibility are beginning to pervade sport. At another level, their moves suggest the link between sport and business is perhaps not quite as cosy as many of us were thinking. Above all, it shows that transgressions – be they drug-taking, spying, violence or poor off-field behaviour – are actually not that good for business. After all, if you are a major global sports retailer, the last thing you need is for the market to perceive you as being a hardened drug-taker’s brand.

So, while 2007 may have been the year when sport and business came under the spotlight feeding off one another in a destructive way, might not 2008 mark the start of a new era where business actually starts to save sport from itself? For professional cycling, we can only hope that it’s not too late. The Tour is great sport, but we now know: the drugs don’t work. Not only is it unethical and unfair, it’s also bad for business.

Simon Chadwick