Customer Reviews

The Crooked Path to Victory: Drugs and Cheating in Professional Bicycle Racing (Cycling Resources)

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The Crooked Path To Victory: Drugs And Cheating In Professional Bicycle Racing by bicycling enthusiast Les Woodland examines the darker side of the sport of bicycle racing, including the use of performance-enhancing drugs, as well as some high- and low-profile deaths connected to such "doping", and the lies and schemes to hide such use from tightening competition controls. The Crooked Path To Victory is a hard-hitting and closely researched study of the grim realities of the drive to win at any cost.

It had been awhile since I last read this book, and the first thing I thought about when I saw it again was that it was just a collection of tales about doping. It isn't.
In spite of its rather small size, this book contains a lot of interesting stories about six-day races, classics, the fates of some former riders, and, yes, even some stories about doping.
One good example is the story of Freddy Maertens, the Belgian sprinter who once won eight stages in a single Tour de France only to go through some lean years before making a very unlikely -- and highly questioned -- comeback. In retirement he was reduced to living with his wife's parents becuase of bad investments and bad 'friends.'

Ah yes, the road to winning is lined with nails, tainted water bottles and PED's? Who would have thought that professional cyclists with all of their natural talent, hard training, strict nutritional regimes and advanced riding equipment would be lured into the realms of cheating and doping. From the beginnings of the first stage races in France in the late 1890's through the amphetamine charged one day classics in the 60's & 70's to the EPO injected tours of the 90's and 00's, drug use has been rampant in the peloton and the "code of silence" between riders even stronger. Sure the organizers of these endurance events wanted to keep pushing the envelope on how difficult a bike race could be, but to survive these hell stages the riders realized they could only suffer so much before abandoning the race without body and mind. So, the logical step was to open up the pharmacy and start using products to stay awake, sleep, speed up, recover, rehydrate and above all win! With all these products flowing through the riders veins, the drug testing at the races should have caught most of the cheaters. But the organizers realized that if most of the elite riders turned up positive that they wouldn't have a bike race, sometimes turned a blind eye or manipulated the results. The pressure to win a tour, direct a winning team, gain product endorsements and live a double life was immense. The saddest part of the doping legacy were the riders that were truly "gifted" in their riding abilities and couldn't compete on a level playing field without giving in to the lie or had there careers shortened by "passive doping".

Cyclists have used drugs to improve their performance almost since the invention of the bicycle. At first the pharmacopoeia was primitive: ether, wine, cocaine, strychnine. The riders used anything they thought would ease the misery of the impossibly long distances that characterized racing in the early twentieth century.

Over time, as the drugs grew more effective, the riders adopted the newer, more powerful chemicals. In the 1930s amphetamines were synthesized, followed by steroids, EPO and now human growth hormone. Almost always the riders have stayed one step ahead of the detectors. That's why the Tour conducted over 140 drugs tests during the 1998 Tour (the year of the Festina scandal) and none of them detected any banned drugs.

Going back to nineteenth century original sources, Les Woodland has put together a riveting and distressing chronicle of cheating in bicycle racing. His discussion of the 1998 Festina scandal is simply superb.

As with all of Woodland's books, it is written with style and authority. This man knows the sport as few others.
-Bill McGann, author of The Story of the Tour de France

...this book is another negative review of cycling, going for obvious shock value and eyebrow-raising in the field. I'm so tired of all the negative press in professional cycling; yes, there's a doping problem, but not everyone in this great sport deserves to be painted with the same brush. The book is written on a typewriter it would seem, with many grammatical errors and quirky syntax. I think the author is British? Not much can be learned here and I gave up after the first third of the book. It is boring, written in a factual, documentary fashion. No attempt to captivate or keep the reader awake is made. The pictures are awful and other than a slight historical value, the book is TP