It was the summer of 1987 and the peleton was wheeling its way through France's most picturesque cliches. Strung out past fields of jubilant sunflowers, breaknecking down rockspangled hairpins, heading resolutely for Paris and the grand finish. The Champs Elysees and Charlie Haughey. How fine.

We fell in love with cycling then. Stephen Roche with his cheeky grin. Sean Kelly with his countryman's shoulders and tough guy reticence. Paul Kimmage and Martin Earley, the other valiant musketeers buttressing our partisan interest. On the television every day the wonder of it was spread before us.

Twelve years on. Kimmage has peeled back the curtain with his seminal book, A Rough Ride, a personal excursion through the rattling pharmacy that once was a sport. His troubles earned him the title "Bitter Little Man" and we went back to the wonder of it.

Twelve years on and in 1999 Willy Voet has just disgorged himself of the great hairball of lies, tricks and deceptions which a quarter of a century in professional cycling has taught him. Voet has coughed it all up in a book called Chain Massacre.

If the shameful shambles of last year's Tour didn't force you to tears, this catalogue of cycling cynicism and institutionalised drug-taking will shred the last of your innocence. Voet guides us through a world where drug-taking has passed from the domain of cheating and entered the realm of mass addiction.

Last July 8th, while driving towards Ireland and the start of the Tour, Voet, the masseur or sei- gneur to the celebrated Festina team, was stopped and arrested near Lille. His car contained 400 units of doping product, including 250 vials of EPO and, wrapped up in an old pair of underpants, a concoction of stimulants, amphetamines, cocaine and what not which is known on the peleton as Pot Belge. The Pot Belge kept Willy going on the circuit. Pot Belge is the cycling world's equivalent of a strong cup of coffee.

Voet's detention had a domino effect, triggering a series of events which could ultimately break the continuity of the world's greatest cycling race. The morass which the tour was thrown into is well known if little understood, but the ramifications have yet to end.

Seven separate police investigations into doping in cycling are currently under way and among the many under investigation are Daniel Baal, president of the French Cycling Federation, his vice-president Roger Legeay, tour director Jean-Marie Leblanc and riders from virtually every professional team.

The ripples have even reached Carrick-on-Suir where Sean Kelly, more than half a decade into retirement and currently building himself a house, has been forced to re-appraise aspects of his career. Voet, his old seigneur, has been singing like a canary and as an interviewer from L'Equipe put it, Kelly does not emerge as a choirboy.

Kelly competed at a time when the secret inner culture of cycling was beyond the awareness of the general public. He tested positive twice in the course of a glorious career, but the news made little or no impact on a sporting public which had yet to form an opinion on cycling much less doping.

Those positive tests never diminished Kelly's popularity or earning power. They happened well before Ben Johnson woke our consciousness in Seoul and long after Tommy Simpson perplexed us by dying on Mount Ventux. Two tests. Little glitches in a sport we paid little attention to.

Voet's revelations affect Kelly in an almost tangential way. Chain Massacre is long on detail when it comes to the '90s and the generation who fleshed out last summer's drama. Dealing with the '80s and the best cyclist of the early part of the decade, Voet is more anecdotal. He claims that Kelly's failed test in the Paris-Brussels race of 1984 was the result of a botched attempt to beat doping control. Given the urine of a team mechanic to provide to testers when he was called to doping control, Voet says that Kelly fooled the testers but was undone when the mechanic transpired to have been partaking of stimulants to keep himself going on the race.

Kelly, who has seen the book but has decided not to comment as yet, will be more perturbed by a story related by Voet regarding the Tour in 1983. Kelly assumed the yellow jersey on July 10th and lost it again the next day in circumstances of which Voet claims special knowledge. Voet says that the events of July 11th possibly cost Kelly the Tour that year. As regards what happened, it seems likely that we will be left with Kelly's word against Willy Voet's.

The reappraisal of the '80s and its stars was inevitable anyway. The dirty wash of the current scandal begins even further back than that and what emerges in Chain Massacre is a depressing picture of a sport's complicity in its own downfall. Dead cyclists found with needles in their arms wasn't enough to halt the process of decay. Voet offers no ideas as to what will.

The Tour has dissolved itself in a vat of chemicals. Richard Virenque, the much-loved Festina rider whom the French fondly hoped would add the Tour itself to his string of King of the Mountains titles, has diminished himself grotesquely by making a public spectacle out of his lies and phoney outrage. Last summer France watched gape-mouthed as Virenque went looking for Jean-Marie Leblanc one sunny afternoon to remonstrate with the tour director.

While the remainder of his Festina comrades slunk away, Virenque and team-mate Pascal Herve cried big, salty tears and insisted on their innocence even when blood, urine and hair tests were showing different. Those who wanted desperately to believe deposited their trust in Virenque. Last week he admitted he had been lying from the beginning and although he tried to retract that in a subsequent television interview, police wire taps traced calls from Virenque to Bernard Sainz, a chancer most famous in France for having one of his horses test positive last year.

Voet describes his relationship with Virenque, from their first meeting in 1991 to the watershed of his first, alleged dabbling with dope in 1993, the first year both men were with Festina.

The stories are astonishing. Voet swallowed Clenbuterol tablets on a daily basis to see how long they took to clear his system, then passed the results of his studies to his riders. Or the Tour de France winner who was known on the roads as Mr 60 per cent because he would nervelessly take so much EPO that his haemocrit (red blood cell) levels would rise to a potentially lethal 60 per cent.

After successes, team-mates and officials gathered in hotel rooms and indulged in the Pot Belge to get them through the night's partying.

Amazing details. Armand Magret, placed in charge of new testing procedures by the French federation, is accused of asking Voet for phials of Kenacort for the French amateur team in Columbia.

It goes on and on: Cyclists injecting themselves with substances they know little or nothing about. Riders swapping potions like gossip. The disregard for the phoney policemen of the cycling federations, a sham system of testing that amounts to little more than official collusion.

For instance, cycling authorities have stepped gingerly through the EPO business. In 1997, cycling introduced a "health test" which measured the haemocrit levels of riders. Riders with a haemocrit level of over 50 per cent were asked "to rest" until the level returned to normal.

Voet illustrates the mild waves of casual cynicism which the new test stirred among the riders it was designed to protect. By injecting a litre of water with .09 per cent sodium in it, the haemocrit level fell three or four points within 20 minutes. Riders were given about 90 minutes warning before tests. Cyclists became adept at making their own drip stands using bicycle spokes. Later they learned how to test their own haemocrit level by means of a simple centrifuge machine. Later still, team buses were equipped with proper sophisticated equipment for the benefit of all team members.

The centre pages of the book are devoted to photographs of Voet's diaries which have recently been handed over to Patrick Keil, the investigating magistrate in the affair. The diaries detail in a calm, organised way the precise dosages given to each member of the Festina team. Gazing at the neat rows of figures highlighted in different colours and annotated with different codes, one could be sifting through evidence from the old East Germany.

Are attitudes changing? Cyclisme a deux vitesse, or twospeed cycling, is what they are talking about in France these days. Not happily either. The rigorous implementation of regulations has meant that the peleton trembles when it crosses the border into the home of cycling. One speed for the French who fear they have to cycle without benefit of drugs, and another speed for the foreigners who trundle through the countryside blissfully doped up.

If you struggle to understand what this means, then look at the cases of Charly Mottet and Gilles Delion, who Voet lauds as two cyclists who were passionately and honestly anti-doping. Both retired early this decade before the advent of EPO. In an interview with L'Equipe last week, Voet imagined how they would fare in this new drug era. He reckoned they would be mopeds competing against 750 cc engines.

The organisers of the Tour de France talk bluffly about how this year will be different. Those who might damage the image of the Tour will not be invited. Those who are invited will be rigorously tested.

The riders are unimpressed. Laurent Jalabert, flying this week in the Giro, is no longer resident in France, has refused to submit to any new tests and is talking about skipping Le Tour this year. Since quitting the Tour de France last year he has point-blank refused to ride in France. Police wish to interview him and his Once team-mates about allegations of systematic EPO abuse.

Meanwhile, the principal investigation, headed by the dogged Patrick Keil, continues to expand, sucking in almost the entire pro-cycling community.

If the Tour is to survive and if cycling is to become a sport again, rather than a macabre caravan of addiction, perhaps the continuity with the past needs to be broken, perhaps sponsors and television need to be faced down.

Voet finishes his book by remembering some of the cyclists he has known who have wound up dead. The list doesn't cover all of the sport's casualties and everything which Voet tells us leads us to believe that it isn't yet complete. What is frightening is how easily we have absorbed the idea of cyclists dying.

Chain Massacre needs to be published in English and needs to be read by anyone who cares about sport. Already, like Kimmage before him, Voet has been accused of trying to break his sport.

Wrong. All that can save cycling now is honesty.