Pierre Dumas (died Paris, 29 February 2000) was a French doctor who pioneered drug tests in the Olympic Games and cycling.
[3] He knew nothing more of cycling than he had read in the newspapers when in July 1952 he cancelled a climbing holiday in the Alps to become doctor at the Tour de France.
"[4][5] He spoke of "medicine from the heart of Africa... healers laying on hands or giving out irradiating balms, feet plunged into unbelievable mixtures which could lead to eczema, so-called magnetised diets and everything else you could imagine.
Ten kilometres from the summit, said the historian of the Tour de France, Jacques Augendre, Mallejac was: "Streaming with sweat, haggard and comatose, he was zigzagging and the road wasn't wide enough for him...
"[4]The chairman of the Dutch cycling federation, Piet van Dijk, said of the Rome Olympics that"dope - whole cartloads - [were] used in royal quantities."
Dumas led the International Sports Medicine Federation (ISMF) to press the Union Cycliste Internationale (UCI) for drug-testing at the 100 km team time-trial at the 1964 Summer Olympic Games in Tokyo.
Danish cyclist Knut Jensen had crashed and died at the 1960 Summer Olympic Games in Rome whilst competing in the 100 km.
Wlodzimierc Golebiewski, organiser of the Peace Race and vice-president of the International Amateur Cycling Federation, said: "This young man had taken a large overdose of drugs, which had been the cause of his death.
[9] The International Olympic Committee took its first action in Moscow, when in June 1962 it studied a report by Carvallo Pini and Ferreira Santos, who had asked it to consider the problem.
Accusations abound, whereas in other sports there are only so many noises made.In 1965, Dumas[5] quoted a report by "a national cycle coach": Accidents are varied in their consequences but they all have as a starting point a momentary absence of self-control.
He knocks himself black and blue, and this only a short while after putting his hand into his pocket for a little extra [un petit bidon].In that same year he began his campaign against soigneurs and team doctors, and riders who treated themselves.
[10] Dumas gave his first public warning about doping during the 1962 Tour de France, when 12 riders fell out sick in a single day, many of them from the same team.
He and Robert Boncourt, his colleague on the amateur race, the Tour de l'Avenir, warned in the press about drug-taking and its dangers.
William Fotheringham wrote: (In 1962), cycling's international governing body, the Union Cycliste Internationale, had thrown out a motion from the Polish federation to make the UCI responsible for combating doping.
Early anti-drug operations at cycle races were crude, did nothing to make cyclists feel well-disposed towards their imposition, and lacked any credibility.
Alec Taylor was manager of the British team in the 1967 Tour de France, in which Tom Simpson, his leading rider, died on Mont Ventoux after doping himself.
Taylor said: Race officials, federations, even the law on the Continent have been lax and some criticism must be laid at their door for their slackness in dope-testing procedures and administration.
Before Tom's death I saw on the Continent the over-cautious way riders were tested for dope, as if the authorities feared to lift the veil, scared of how to handle the results, knowing all the while what they would be.
[18]Dumas took a stroll at dawn near his hotel, the Noaille at Cannebière, where he met other race followers on the day of Simpson's death.
The historian Pierre Chany wrote: Three kilometres from the summit, in a landscape of stone, where the mountain becomes most arid, the Briton began to wobble.
Not until 2008, for instance, was testing in the Tour de France taken from the sport's own administrators, the UCI, and given to a body administered by the French government.
Dumas was not the first doctor to call for drugs tests but his position in the Tour de France, which in his time was smaller and more intimate so that he could visit most of the teams most evenings, gave him a closer sight than others.
Dumas's son, who is head of security at Nice airport, recalled that his father had created the modern medical service at the Tour.