Lowlights: the realisation that it would take the next 10 years to get Tubthumping out of your head (you're welcome!), and the Festina affair. (Also: Mulan).

Festina and the Lance Armstrong revelations have been our sport's two most damaging scandals of the past 14 years. And as with Mulan II (2005, direct to video) the second can be traced back to the first.

A quick recap of l'affaire Festina: Willy Voet, a soigneur for the French team, was stopped on the Belgian border on his way to the Tour de France. Customs officials searching his Fiat Marea found a bootload of doping products. A police investigation followed. The team was kicked out of the Tour de France.

In the whole sordid schemozzle, the extraordinary figure was Christophe Bassons.

A Frenchman whose name is not known widely enough, Bassons rode for Festina from 1996 to 1998. When the team was busted, most riders admitted to having been doping. Even star rider Richard Virenque finally confessed when on trial, two years after tearfully protesting his innocence on French TV. The only rider on Festina who was not implicated was Bassons. To a man, his teammates told investigators that he had been clean.

The 1999 Tour, coming year one after Festina, was supposed to be the beginning of a new era. Riders were spooked by the previous year's uproar. Sponsors were twitchy. Insiders that year said the peloton was the cleanest it had been for years.

Bassons was by then riding in new colours, for Française des Jeux. During the race he wrote a column for a French newspaper, Le Parisien. Most of his columns were innocuous. But on stage nine, Armstrong, the new wearer of the yellow jersey after the previous stage's time trial, smoked the field on the climb to Sestriere. Bassons had previously spoken of the two-speed peloton. One speed for dopers, another for clean riders like him. After the Sestriere stage he wrote in Le Parisien that riders were shocked by Armstrong's speed.



For Armstrong, Sestriere was the beginning of his seven-year reign at the Tour. But for Bassons the episode was the beginning of the end. Armstrong, who kept the yellow jersey from Sestriere to Paris, admitted to confronting Bassons after reading his column. He told him to either keep quiet or leave the sport. "His accusations aren't good for cycling, for his team, for me, for anybody," Armstrong said on French TV. "If he thinks cycling works like that, he's wrong and he would be better off going home."

Pressured by Armstrong and other riders, Bassons quit the 1999 Tour. The long list of positives and admissions in the years to follow suggests the peloton got the message. Here was the new era, same as the old era. Armstrong won that year's Tour, his first, by over seven minutes to Alex Zulle. Bassons retired in 2001, aged 27, unable to find a team or get a race.

While Armstrong is now engaged in defiantly protecting his legacy, Bassons works for the French ministry of sport and youth, where he has responsibility for drug testing.

He spoke to Le Monde this week in the wake of Armstrong's lifetime ban. "If you break the law of silence," he said, "you can assume that you will never win a race again."

Last Friday the New York Times published this graphic. While not news, it's startling to see the mess of the last 14 years laid out. Since Festina, only three Tour de France winners remain untainted by doping (they are Carlos Sastre, Cadel Evans and Bradley Wiggins). The only untainted podium was this year's.

In the context of the Armstrong case, there are at least two things we can usefully learn from Festina and Bassons.

Firstly, such things rarely happen in isolation. Pursuing Festina in 1998 was not enough. The problem went beyond the team. The sport needed top-down reform, but in 1999 administrators were unable or unwilling to enforce meaningful change.

Secondly, things tend not to end well if we ignore people who are brave enough to talk about the problems. Ignore Bassons and Emma O'Reilly and David Walsh, and you get Dr Michele Ferrari and Armstrong and Dr Luis Garcia del Moral. And of course the peril of ignoring whistleblowers, as any good student of 1998 will know, is not only found in the stories of Bassons and Festina. It's also in Mulan.

The week in …

… panache

You'll never guess which retired Italian sprinter stars in this video, in which he jumps out of a helicopter, is chased by baddies on motorcycles and hangs out with beautiful models. Clue: it is not Guido Bontempi.




… positives

When a member of a country's own cycling union is busted for doping, you know something is rotten in the state of Denmark (pun shamelessly nicked from Twitter's @cycletard).

… dreams

"I'd love to have a professional women's racing team," Bradley Wiggins tells ITV.



Dispatches from the Twitterverse

This is a first. My room mate @richie_porte locked me in the room this morning- missed breakfast and almost today's training ride! Revenge??

— Chris Froome (@chrisfroome) August 27, 2012

"Slow down-faster-looking good-keep it-keep it-steady-steady-come on bit more-must go faster-this is good-mind over muscle" TT mind games...

— Adam Hansen (@HansenAdam) August 29, 2012