Tour de France becomes drug-fuelled disgrace
Pastor Dale Morgan
Tour de France becomes drug-fuelled disgrace*
By Peter Allen in Paris
Last Updated: 2:29am BST 27/07/2007
An obituary was published for the Tour de France as one of the great
symbols of international Gallic prestige faced intense scrutiny over a
series of doping scandals.
Less than three weeks after thousands turned out in Britain to cheer on
cyclists taking part in an early stage of the glamorous race, a series
of blows to the credibility of the Tour looked as though they might
prove fatal.
The latest scandal saw Michael Rasmussen, who had proudly worn the
fabled yellow jersey as Tour leader, thrown out of the competition by
his own Rabobank team mates.
The ignominy surrounding the Tour followed a concerned effort by Nicolas
Sarkozy, the new French president, to show his support for the race,
even following a stage from the open-topped car of the race director in
the Alps earlier this week.
But the newspaper France Soir published a mock death notice on its cover
announcing that Le Tour, first run in 1903, died on Thursday "at age
104, after a long illness".
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An editorial in the newspaper Libération said "The Tour must be
stopped", adding: "This procession of cyclists has been transformed into
a caravan of ridicule.
"If the organisers really want to save cycling, they should stop the
competition and declare a pause for a few years, enough time to treat
these athletes-turned-druggies," the newspaper said.
Rasmussen, from Denmark, had won Wednesday’s stage to all but seal a
triumphant ride up Paris’s Champs-Élysées this weekend.
But it emerged that he had lied to his team managers about his personal
schedule last month during pre-race training, claiming he was in Mexico,
where he would have been unable to take a series of random blood tests.
In fact Rasmussen was in Italy, where the tests could easily have been
carried out. Such deceit appears endemic among participants, who are now
being ejected from the race on a daily basis.
On Wednesday, the Cofidis squad confirmed its Italian rider Cristian
Moreni failed a doping test, prompting the withdrawal of the entire squad.
One of the Tour’s stars, Alexandre Vinokourov from Kazakhstan, was
kicked out on Tuesday, when he tested positive for a banned blood
transfusion.
Last year's winner, Floyd Landis of America, later failed a drugs test
and is currently appealing against having his title withdrawn.
François Fillon, the French prime minister, made a vain attempt at
damage limitation.
"Obviously this gives a disastrous image of the Tour de France, but at
the same time, if we encourage the organisers, we can clean up French
sports and in particular cycling," he said.
Christian Prudhomme, the Tour's director, told Le Parisien: "You can’t
mock the Tour de France with impunity."
But Jean-Francois Lamour, vice president of the World Anti-Doping
Agency, has already suggested that, based on the Tour’s abysmal
publicity, the sport should be withdrawn from the Olympics.
German public broadcasters have stopped airing the race, and one of
Switzerland's biggest newspapers has even stopped writing about the
sport in any length.
Tages-Anzeiger said it would limit its coverage to "results and doping
stories".