Christophe Bassons

" . . . and then Lance Armstrong reached me. He grabbed my by the shoulder, because he knew that everyone would be watching, and he knew that at that moment, he could show everyone that he was the boss. He stopped me, and he said what I was saying wasn't true, what I was saying was bad for cycling, that I musn't say it, that I had no right to be a professional cyclist, that I should quit cycling, that I should quit the tour, and finished by saying [*beep*] you. . . . I was depressed for 6 months. I was crying all of the time. I was in a really bad way." - Bassons, from BBC Radio 5, 2012 10 15

On October 20, 2012, he was suspended for one year by the French Cycling Federation (FFC) for having missed an antidoping test during the 2012 French national mountain bike championships. He had quit the race partway through, and by the time he heard he was one of the riders chosen for testing, it was too late to get back to the race site for the test. His suspension was reduced to one month on appeal. Bassons took the FFC to court and they found in his favour ruling that the governing body owed him compensation. The FFC appealed but the court did not find in their favour and they had to pay Bassons €31,691 (£28,440/$36,270) in compensation.

He told Willisher of Guardian in 2012 that he considered his career to be as a sports professor, not his six years of cycling. He also said that he was "not bitter" against Armstrong, and was content with his situation, comparing it to what Armstrong was going through in the wake of the 2012 USADA report.

In 2011/2012, after investigations into past doping in cycling, especially the 2012 USADA report on Armstrong's US Postal Service team, some media re-told Bassons' story. In one interview for the BBC, Tyler Hamilton publicly apologized for being part of the peloton that shunned him, saying that he (Tyler) was "100% wrong" not to talk to Bassons. Bassons said "that's life, it's nothing. I don't begrudge Hamilton. I understand."

He moved to a smaller team, Jean Delatour, but the mistreatment continued. In 2001 at Four Days of Dunkirk, he later told Bicycling, "several guys tried to ride me into the ditch . . . it got dangerous, and I realized that it wasn't worth continuing". He ended his professional road racing career. In her book about the Armstrong doping scandal, Cycle of Lies, Juliet Macur wrote that Bassons' mistreatment was a sign of the power Armstrong had over international cycling at the time.

In 2000 he published his autobiography Positif and in 2001 he qualified as a sports teacher and began teaching. He now works for the ministry of youth and sport at Bordeaux, in charge of drug tests.

The interest that the Festina trial brought to him led to an invitation to write a column during the 1999 Tour de France for Le Parisien, a newspaper in the same corporate group as the Tour de France itself. Bassons wanted to write about the "suspicious" speeds he was seeing; the average speed at the 1999 Tour was 25.2 mph (40.6 km/h); no Tour had ever been run faster than 24.9 mph (40.1 km/h). As he later told Bicycling, "The 1999 Tour was supposed to be the "Tour of Renewal," but I was certain that doping had not disappeared." He was not the only rider concerned about how fast the 1999 Tour was going; fellow Frenchman Jean-Cyril Robin who rode for US Postal in 1997-98, told Bassons at one point, "This has got to stop! We can't go on racing like this!"

Bassons became known during the 1998 Festina doping scandal, when the discovery of a carload of drugs being driven to the team's riders in the Tour de France led to evidence that doping was widespread in the team. In September 1998, the newspaper France Soir published statements made to the police. Two convicted riders, Armin Meier and Christophe Moreau, said that Bassons was the only rider on the team not taking drugs.

In 1998 he turned down a 270,000 franc-per-month raise (more than 10 times what he was earning at the time) offered to him if he would use Erythropoietin (EPO). His stance against doping led other riders, most notably Lance Armstrong, to harass him for breaking the longstanding code of silence about doping in the sport.

Christophe Bassons was born in Mazamet, in the Tarn department. He studied and qualified in civil engineering. He began cycle-racing in 1991 in mountain biking. He started racing on the road in 1992 and won the Tour du Tarn et Garonne in 1995. That same year he won the world military time-trial championship and became national time-trial champion. He turned professional in 1996 for Force Sud and then, when the team failed, for Festina, a watch and clock maker.

Christophe Bassons (born 10 June 1974 in Mazamet, France) is a French former professional road racing cyclist. Bassons' career ended when he spoke out about doping in the Tour de France.