You are currently browsing the tag archive for the ‘Tour de France’ tag.
Erstwhile Tour favourite Alexander Vinokourov fell foul of doping controls yesterday, prompting the organisers to invite he and his team to leave the Tour, which they promptly did. Vinokourov’s blood test indicated the administration of a homologous blood transfusion. In other words, someone else’s red blood cells were detected amongst his own. Blood doping is still one of the most popular methods of gaining a performance boost. Since red blood cells carry oxygen, the more you have, the harder you can work. It’s less effective than EPO, since blood can start to degrade, whereas EPO prompts the creation of new red blood cells, but since the arrival of a test for EPO, blood doping has made a comeback. Riders often seem to use their own blood, thus eliminating the possibility of foreign cells being detected, which happened in the case of Tyler Hamilton and now Vinokourov. So why did Vino use someone else’s blood? Well, drawing blood will weaken you and perhaps he never had the opportunity while training in the run up to the tour to do so. Or maybe he never planned to get a transfusion mid-Tour. He crashed early in the Tour and lost a lot of time. Saturday’s time trial, which preceded the positive test, put him back in contention. Like Floyd Landis last year, a crisis seems to have prompted some sloppy work in covering his tracks.
Vino’s positive shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise. He rode for many years with T-Mobile and the past year have seen many of his contemporaries on that team admit to or be implicated in doping. He then moved to Liberty Seguros, which was at the centre of the Operation Puerto drug bust in Spain last year. Former Liberty Seguros rider Jorg Jaksche hinted heavily recently that Vino was pushing hard to have “better medicinal treatment” at the team.
The notoriously dour Kazakh even managed to crack a joke, albeit a lame one, at his departure. Responding to reports that the blood used was that of a relative, he said: “I heard that I made a transfusion with my father’s blood. That’s absurd, I can tell you that with his blood, I would have tested positive for vodka”.
Yellow jersey holder Michael Rasmussen is really in the manure business, as it has emerged that he has missed four out of competition doping controls this year. To make matters worse, a former acquaintance from his mountain biking days has now come forward saying Rasmussen tried to dupe him into smuggling blood doping products to Italy in 2002. Whitney Richards told his story off the record to journalists on two occasions before now, but what prompted him to go public now was Rasmussen’s declaration on Monday that the public could trust him.
After dominating in the Alps, Rasmussen has his biggest test today at the time trial in Albi. As we all found out in 2005, he couldn’t TT his way out of a paper bag:
I’ll have more on the Tour when I get some time to write but, in the mean time, here’s a clip from yesterday’s stage when German Marcus Burghardt had a run in with a golden retriever:
Vino shows up at the stage start with arm and two legs swathed in bandages. Any possibility of bluffing about the seriousness of his injuries is ruined by the necessity to climb the steps to the sign on. He takes them gingerly, grimacing with pain. The man has fifteen stitches in both his knees. Klöden looks better, but his injury is one that could wear him down with pain. It is the last flat stage before the Alps and the pair know that all they have to do is hang with the bunch today before being truly tested tomorrow.
Swiss rider Fabian Cancellara is in the yellow jersey, which he has worn ever since storming to victory at the London prologue. Nicknamed Tony Montana and built like Jake La Motta, Cancellara is all power, a fact evinced by the fact that he’s the world time trial champion. He hasn’t been content to sit on his laurels either. On stage three, as the bunch teed itself up for a mass sprint into Compiègne, he jumped clear and motored his way to a cheeky victory. After today, he’ll resume the role of domestique for his team’s contenders, Carlos Sastre and Frank Schleck, with the tantalising interlude of two time trials later in the Tour offering up the prospect of more stage victories. He’s having a good Tour.
The sprinters meanwhile are enjoying their last day in the limelight before the suffering of the Alps. Britain’s Mark Cavendish came to the Tour with a lot hopes riding on him. At the tender age of 22, the T-Mobile rider has been winning left right and centre at some of the lesser races this season and it was thought he may be able to fast track himself to the big stage. His dream of winning the first stage to Canterbury ended when a spectator stepped out in front him and left Cavendish sprawled on the road. He finished the stage alone in tears. Another crash at the finish of stage two saw Cavendish join the pile-up. Today is his last chance.
Tom Boonen meanwhile is desperate to win. The big Belgian has been having a quite year by his own very high standards. After winning a few stages in insignificant pre-season Tour of Qatar, Boonen didn’t figure in the spring classics, the holy grail for Belgian cyclists. At Kuurne-Brussels-Kuurne, his leadout man Gert Steegmans practically had to brake to let Boonen by to win. Steegmans embarrassed Boonen again at the finish to stage two. On an uphill sprint he rode like a train to get the pace high enough for Boonen to maximise his top end speed. The only problem was that speed seemed to have deserted him and despite pulling hard, he couldn’t get by Steegmans before the line. Boonen enjoys the same kind of status in Belgium as David Beckham would in the UK. He lives in Monaco. He drives a yellow Lamborghini. He’s got to start winning soon to justify his billing and a green jersey at the Tour will save his season.
That jersey is on the shoulders of Eric Zabel, who is no stranger to green, having won it six years in a row. However, the 37 year old Zabel is in the twilight of his career and it’s been six years since he last won the points competition. Having ridden for most of his career for T-Mobile, he’s now with the Italian outfit Milram where his main job is to be the last leadout man for sprint star Alessandro Petacchi. However, Petacchi isn’t at the Tour, having failed a drugs test for overusing a prescribed asthma inhaler. All of a sudden, Zabel is again the main man. He doesn’t have the speed of old, but buckets of experience and tactical nous have seen Zabel place consistently in the sprints, moving him up to top spot.
Out on the road Britain’s Bradley Wiggins has been on a lone escape for most of the day. It’s a hopeless move, but after the disappointment of not wining the London prologue, Wiggins is determined to get something out of this Tour. He’s caught with seven kilometres to go and the big guns begin to wind up for the sprint. Cavendish follows Boonen’s wheel but gets too close and his front touches Boonen’s back wheel. Cavendish’s front wheel is torn to pieces while Boonen’s rear derailleur is trashed. He can’t shift and is left in his biggest gear, 53×11. It isn’t going to stop him though and he bursts from the pack with a few hundred metres to go. Zabel and Spain’s Óscar Freire sprint frantically to try and pull him back. Boonen looks like he’s going to pull his bike to pieces to get that last bit of speed from himself and manages to keep them all at bay. He’s back in green and back on top.
Blood is pouring from the arms and legs of Alexander Vinokourov as he and his team ride furiously to reconnect with a charging peloton. The blond Kazakh has crashed at probably the most inopportune time in the stage. With 25km to go, his chain came off and he hit the road hard. Up ahead the Quickstep team have turned the gas on and are leading a peloton going at full bore, trying to reel in two breakaway riders and maybe set up a stage win for their leader Tom Boonen. Six of Vinokourov’s eight team mates drop back and one by one burn themselves out trying to tow their leader back up. It isn’t enough and ‘Vino’ trails the pack by 1 minute 20 seconds at the stage’s end. The phoney war is over and the Tour de France has begun in earnest.
It wasn’t meant to be like this. Vinokourov was many people’s favourite coming into the race and it wasn’t hard to see why, having spend the best part of two years putting himself into this position. His earlier showings at the race were in the colours of T-Mobile, where he played the joker to Jan Ullrich’s ace. Spectacular attacks combined with big blowouts were his trademark, but eventually he lost patience at the end of 2005 and went to Spanish outfit Liberty Seguros to become their main Tour contender. However, he never even made it to the start line in 2006 as the Operation Puerto drug bust caused his team to implode. Vino himself wasn’t fingered in the investigation, but so many of his team mates were that Liberty Seguros was unable to field the minimum number of riders.
It was Vino himself who picked up the pieces, securing sponsorship from a conglomerate of Kazakh companies and forming new team named after the Kazakh capital Astana. In September got his revenge at the Vuelta a España when he and team mate Andrei Kashechkin pounded local favourite Alejandro Valverde into submission. The winter was spent building a formidable team. From Discovery Channel came two time Giro winner Paolo Savoldelli, while from T-Mobile they signed domestiques Matthias Kessler and Eddy Mazzoleni. It is another T-Mobile rider who is the biggest coup. Andreas Klöden has already stood on the podium twice at the Tour de France. With Ullrich now out of the picture, he was the undisputed leader of the team. Bizarrely though, he decided to up sticks to Astana, announcing that he will ride for Vino at this year’s Tour. If anything does happen to Vino, Astana have a backup.
However, Astana’s belt and braces approach appeared doomed on Wednesday because shortly before Vinokourov’s accident, Klöden too went down, fracturing his coccyx, the very same injury that put him out of the 2003 Tour. Unlike his captain, he managed to finish in the bunch. The pair are dispatched to hospital and, with the Tour hitting the Alps in two days time, the entire peloton will be watching them for the first time of weakness.
