Christophe Bassons (born 10 June 1974[1]) is a French former professional road racing cyclist.
[1] He started racing on the road in 1992 and won the Tour du Tarn et Garonne in 1995.
He turned professional in 1996 for Force Sud and then, when the team failed, for Festina, a watch and clock maker.
[2][3] Jean-Luc Gatellier said in L'Équipe: Moreau's and Meier's court statement brought attention to a rider who had never acquired it through his racing.
He wrote in Vélo, a French monthly, that riders who spoke out against quarterly medical checks imposed by the sports ministry after the Festina trial were hypocrites.
[8] 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.
"[7] 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!
"[8] Ian Austen wrote in Procycling: Stage 10 took place on 14 July and was from Sestrieres to Alpe d'Huez.
On the main evening news on TF1, a French national television station, Armstrong said: "His accusations aren't good for cycling, for his team, for me, for anybody.
Giving a television interview at St-Étienne (after Stage 11), he said, a passing rider in his own team said: "Watch what you say!
"[15] Race director Jean-Marie Leblanc chastised Bassons for speaking as if "he is the only rider who is beyond reproach."
Officials with his own team joined in on the condemnation, calling him a coward who only spoke to burnish his own image.
[4] He said: The reporter Jean-Michel Rouet wrote: The sports minister, Marie-George Buffet, said: "What a strange role reversal.
[20] Bassons' colleagues in the Française des Jeux team refused to share their prizes with him.
Normally teams pool their winnings and share them out by the number of days a rider has survived the race.
One rider, Xavier Jan, said: "Christophe Bassons rode only for himself and didn't at any time work for the overall good of the team."
[26] Bassons took the FFC to court and they found in his favour ruling that the governing body owed him compensation.
[27] 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.
[1] He told Willisher of Guardian in 2012 that he considered his career to be as a sports professor, not his six years of cycling.