What Boonen’s cocaine case says about Tour’s plans to block Froome
Around lunch time on 3 July 2009, in a hot and half-empty courtroom in Paris, a judge ruled that Tom Boonen could race in the Tour de France.
He had tested positive for cocaine out of competition three times, which was not strictly a violation of cycling‘s anti-doping code, but race organisers did not want the Tour’s image to be tarnished – an irony somehow lost on everyone involved – so they banned him from competing. But the Court of Arbitration
disagreed, and the next day a relieved Boonen joined the race’s Grand Depart in Monte Carlo.
Boonen’s story resonates at a time when Amaury Sport Organisation (ASO), the Tour de France organisers, are considering blocking Chris Froome from riding. Froome tested for twice the permitted limit of the asthma drug Salbutamol during his 2017 Vuelta a Espana triumph, and could face a ban from the sport when his case is eventually resolved.
The Tour has decided that while Froome’s case rumbles on, it does not want him racing across the Normandy cobbles or over the French Alps, inevitably wearing the famous yellow jersey, with a potential anti-doping violation hanging over him.
But like Boonen, there is no obligation by the any of the stakeholders – UCI, Team Sky, or the World AntiDoping Agency – to provisionally suspend Froome. He is free to race, and everything we have seen so far – his return to action, his claims of innocence, his legal team’s snail-esque progress – suggests he will be at the Grand Depart in Noirmoutier on 7 July.
Can the ASO really block him from racing? Each grand tour has a clause allowing for the option to turn a rider away if there is a danger of damaging the race’s image, but it is rarely implemented.
The Giro d’Italia has already made clear it will allow Froome to race when the Italian tour comes around in May, but that may be because the Israeli government has already signed a contract agreeing to pay Froome a substantial figure – rumoured to be €2m – for participating.
The Tour de France is not bound in the same way. But if ASO were to block Froome’s participation, and Team Sky and Froome were to challenge that move, it could conceivably end up in a hot, half-empty courtroom. Precedence carries plenty of sway in the Court of Arbitration for Sport, and Boonen’s case all those years ago hints that it may not be as simple as it sounds for the Tour de France to reject its embattled champion.