Louis Malle: „Vive le Tour!“ (1967)
One of the lies in sports films is that doping in cycling is an invention of the 1970s. Right from the start of the Tour de France in 1903, the riders took substances (now banned) such as cocaine and chloroform. This was a matter of necessity, as the organizers were keen to overtax the cyclists' bodies when choosing the stage routes. This is exactly what produced the headline-grabbing stories that could be sold as dramas. A documentary film by Louis Malle, which he shot in 1962 but only released in a 43-minute version in 1967 and later in an 18-minute version, shows how commonplace doping was in the Tour de France. The off-screen narrator is the sports journalist Jean Bobet, who himself took part in the Tour several times and whom Roland Barthes described as a "patented intellectual" in his “lexicon of cyclists” (1955). In the 8th minute of the film, Malle strings together scenes from the press center, over which he superimposes sounds that could come from articles or reports; they are demonstrably not original sounds. The image of a journalist typing a text into a typewriter is accompanied by the sentence: "Doping or no doping - that is the question". Two minutes later, a second voiceover will say that we should talk about doping. For the riders, this is called "charge". Doping does not give riders additional strength, but suppresses pain. The doped athlete becomes a machine.
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