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Tour De France in chaos as new drugs scandal hits race
25/07/2007 |
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The Tour de France was tottering under another immense blow to its credibility yesterday after it was announced that the pre-race favourite, Alexander Vinokourov, had failed an anti-doping test.
French police then raided his team's hotel near Pau in search of banned drugs, with gendarmes closing off access to the building, although there were no initial indications that any illegal substances had been found.
The images of gendarmes scouring the rubbish bins outside team hotels and a top rider kicked out of the race because of banned drugs bore all too many echos of the scandals of 1998.
On that occasion the race nearly ground to a halt after the Festina team admitted to organised doping and were expelled from the Tour, and a succession of dramatic police raids on team hotels followed.
This time round the Tour's purgatory started when the 33-year-old Kazakh Vinokourov tested positive for blood transfusion after taking the first of his two stage wins in this year's race, last Saturday, a time trial in Albi.
Vinokourov had started the Tour as the overwhelming candidate for victory in cycling's most gruelling event, but a crash in the first week all but wrecked his chances of taking the race overall when it left him with 15 stitches in one knee.
Showing more than uneven form in the Alps, Vinokourov battled back into contention for stage wins. Yesterday one of the race's rest days he was lying 23rd, outside the running for the overall title but, as his victory on Monday's mountainous stage through the Pyrenees showed, still very much a factor.
Then it all began to go wrong. According to the Tour's semi-official newspaper, L'Equipe, results from testing published yesterday clearly showed that Vinokourov had received an illegal blood transfusion very shortly before starting the time trial. "Vinokourov has been suspended by the team, although he has asked for a 'B' test," a release from the rider's Astana squad tersely commented later.
The Tour director, Christian Prudhomme, responded to the failed test by calling for a "revolution" in the sport's approach to doping. " It's an absolute failure of the system," he said. "It has to change now. The reconquering of cycling has to be done with the Tour de France.I started this job believing that we could change this system but it's not enough: there has to be a revolution."
Confronted by the news during a press conference, Britain's most veteran Tour rider, David Millar, said: "Jesus Christ, I'm speechless. It's something that makes me very sad. Vino is and I'll still use the present tense one of my favourite riders out there.
"But this is terrible, if a guy of his class has done that, we may as well pack up our bags and go home."
Millar, who served a two-year ban and was stripped of his gold medal from the 2003 World Championships after admitting taking the banned blood booster EPO, later qualified his comments, saying it was better to continue racing nonetheless. But pack up and go home was exactly what Vinokourov's Astana squad did after the announcement of their leader's positive, saying that the Tour had "invited us to withdraw, and we will do".
Before they left, however, the team had to endure a search of their hotel by French police. Their team bus had already been stopped by customs on Monday, but nothing was found. Last night's renewed investigations proved similarly fruitless.
With the Tour's credibility yet again in question, Prudhomme and Patrice Clerc, the president of the race organisers ASO, recognised that the Vinokourov scandal was another huge setback.
"The riders have to understand that they are playing a game of Russian roulette if they are doping," said Prudhomme. "They have to realise that we will never give up the war against doping.
"Doping ruins our childhood dreams. Vinokourov has cheated and the only possible answer was: leave!"
However, Clerc had also said prior to the Vinokourov scandal that he considers the current race leader, the Dane Michael Rasmussen, should not be present on the Tour after Rasmussen had missed two random doping checks in May and June. What can Clerc say now to retain fans' faith in the sport?
If the show lurches onward for cycling, Vinokourov's team may well be finished. The Kazakh is, or rather was, considered more than emblematic of Astana, a team founded by Vinokourov himself and backed by a conglomerate of state-run companies.
In the central Asian country, the veteran rider a winner of the Tour of Spain and silver medallist in the 2000 Olympics has the status of a sporting idol and is regarded as a sporting ambassador for Kazakhstan.
But Vinokourov's reputation was already tarnished when he announced before the Tour de France that he had started working with the controversial Italian medic Michele Ferrari last year. Ferociously denying any kind of doping activity "Ferrari is my coach, not my doctor," he claimed Vinokourov came in for huge criticism.
Astana duly closed ranks around Vinokourov. Press conferences grew more and more tense, a burly team "masseur" was hired, and journalists were required on one occasion to identify themselves before questions were answered.
Vinokourov himself has always been surly when discussing the sport's leading problem, saying that he was there "to ride his bike, not talk about banned drugs". Unsurprisingly, he did not make any comment last night about his positive test.
The problems for the squad's image go back to last year's Tour after the sponsor took over at the last minute from another team, Liberty Seguros, the Spanish squad associated with the anti-doping probe Operacion Puerto.
Five riders from the team were excluded from the Tour hours before the race started because of their alleged connections with Puerto and Astana were unable to start.
Over the winter, Vinokourov severed all connections with the old Spanish-run set-up. However, the doubts lingered.
"It all makes me very worried for clean guys who want to do well," Millar added. "Guys like [Britain's] Geraint Thomas and Mark Cavendish [both starters in the Tour this year]. What will they think now?"
Millar is not the only one to be concerned. Increasingly strong measures by the authorities which have included a charter in which all Tour riders promised to pay a year's salary if implicated in a drugs scandal have not cleaned up the sport. For all its immense popularity, as Vinokourov's positive test shows, the temptations are still too strong.
(Source: Independent.co.uk)
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