The discourse of doping in America has focused mainly on use of anabolic steroids since the ‘80s, but doping in cycling is a much older tradition and has little to do with steroids. The modern sport was born in the 1890s, and from its genesis riders used chemicals to gain an edge. Coffee was spiked with extra caffeine, cocaine, and strychnine. Far from being illegal, these tactics were seen as medically necessary to help cyclists compete at the edges of human exertion. The Tour de France, the first of the grand tours and a race around which the sport grew, spent its first few decades as a test of human limits.Henri Desgrange, founder of the Tour, wished he could engineer a race in which only one rider would make it to the finish line in Paris. The drugs didn’t transform performance—they made it possible. They also weren’t forbidden at all: when the Tour de France switched to national teams in 1930, that year’s rulebook explicitly stated that teams, not race organizers, would have to provide the riders’ drugs.