bikingshearer 

A quick follow-up on Roger Riviere the rider. He all but killed himself in the 1960 Tour de France (not the Giro - sorry, CR) by crashing into a ravine for two interrelated reasons. The first was he was trying to keep up with Gastone Nencini on a technical descent. Nencini was one of the best descenders of his day. Riviere wasn't; in fact, he was well below average for a pro. He simply bit off more than he could chew, and it cost him his career and, as a practical matter, his life, as he died young having never fully recovered.

The second reason was that he was, by his own later admission, so amped up on amphetimines that he could barely see straight and literally did not have the motor control to use his brakes properly.

Six years (I think) later, Anquetil's second Hour Record was disallowed afet he refused to submit to a urine test - amphetimines were strongly suspected, and Anquetil all but admitted that he rode "juiced." In the 1967 Tour, Tom Simpson died on Mont Ventoux, amphetimines having played a role in (but not being the sole cause of) riding himself into a fatal heatstroke in the brutal 105+ degree heat on that shadeless mountain. Riviere's crash was the first of this string of doping events that really started cycling's efforts at dope control. Those efforts have ranged from laughable to corrupt (I'm thinking of Merckx's disqualification from the 1969 Giro here) to inept to increasingly effective to draconian, but Roger Riviere and his speed-induced crash represents that start of it all.