Tour de France: Race leader Rasmussen sacked as Tour hits rock bottom
Thursday, 26 July 2007
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The Tour de France was thrown into chaos last night after Michael Rasmussen, the race leader, was sacked by his team and expelled from the event.
The Dane was favourite to win the race, which finishes on Sunday, after strengthening his hold on the yellow jersey with victory in yesterday's 16th stage, but he has been dogged by controversy since it was revealed last week that he had missed out-of-competition drug tests. Rabobank announced last night that they were dropping the 33-year-old, saying that he had lied about his whereabouts during training in June. "He has violated the team's rules," a Rabobank spokesman said.
The race has been marred by scandal this year, last night's events coming off the back of pre-race favourite Alexander Vinokourov testing positive for blood doping following his stage win on Saturday and yesterday's withdrawl of the Cofidis team after the Italian Cristian Moreni tested positive for testosterone.
Rasmussen had already received two warnings from the UCI, international cycling's governing body, for failing to provide them with his personal schedule.
Tour de France director Christian Prudhomme said: "The important thing is not that he has been sacked by his team but that he will not be at the start tomorrow."
Rabobank director Theo de Rooy said: "Several times he said where he was training and it proved to be wrong. The management of the team received that information several times and today we received new information."
Rabobank, the team's sponsors, also released a statement last night, saying: "Rabobank is shocked and enormously disappointed that Rasmussen has lied about his whereabouts. Wrongly reporting whereabouts is a flagrant violation of UCI rules and is unacceptable."
Rasmussen's dramatic dismissal is the latest and most damaging blow to the Tour's increasingly battered credibility. The Spaniard Alberto Contador now takes over the yellow jersey.
Among those effected by yesterday's earlier events was British rider Bradley Wiggins. His Tour also ended in turmoil after Moreni, one of the Londoner's team-mates failed a doping test and team, Cofidis, quit the race.
The news comes hot on the heels of Tuesday's dramatic exit of the Kazakh Vinokourov, a leading Tour favourite, following a positive for blood doping. His squad, Astana, have also left the event.
The Olympic pursuit champion Wiggins, a staunch anti-drug campaigner, said that it was "gutting to leave the Tour de France like this, but everybody knows where I stand on doping. I have nothing to hide." He criticised Moreni, saying it was "completely stupid of him. "I don't know how he slipped through the net," he said. "It's pretty scary to be caught up in this. I don't want to be associated with it in any way." Wiggins said that he had questioned whether he wants to continue in the sport.
"It makes you think about your future as a professional cyclist. You ask what is the point, I could do better things with my life. "
Moreni had been lying 54th overall when he crossed the line of yesterday's stage 16 on the Col d'Aubisque. Ironically, he was randomly selected to do another doping test, even though he had already been found positive, before being led away for questioning by police. Later, the rest of his team were also taken to the police station for questioning and returned to their hotel by 9pm.
Moreni had tested positive for synthetic testosterone after stage 11, an apparently innocuous 182-kilometre trek from Marseilles to Montpellier with not even one classified climb to trouble the peloton.
High levels of the same hormone had allegedly been detected in urine samples belonging to the 2006 Tour de France winner Floyd Landis. The German Patrik Sinkewitz also returned a positive finding for the same substance in a random check when training in the Pyrenees last month. The results from his drugs test came through last week, by which time the T-Mobile rider had already quit the Tour, but the damage to the squad had been done.
Moreni is far from being a big hitter. A team worker or domestique, his last key wins date back to the Italian national championships in 2004. But with the Tour's credibility already at rock bottom, the rider's status within his squad arguably makes little difference. Instead, Moreni's positive will be seen as yet another indication of just how widespread doping remains in the sport.
Cofidis had already come close to quitting the sport after they were enveloped by a huge doping scandal in 2004. This latest blow may well force them to rethink their sponsorship yet again.
Reacting to the Vinokourov positive, Boyer himself had demanded that the Astana squad end their association with the sport as soon as possible.
Ironically enough, Cofidis riders had been among those who protested yesterday morning at the start of stage 16 about the drugs scandals. But among those who refused to stand with them was Rasmussen, already under fire for his failure to tell authorities where he could be found for two random dope checks this spring three failures equals a positive test.
Slated by the Tour's directors as a "persona non grata" at yesterday's start, Rasmussen cut an isolated figure who faced jeers and whistles from the crowd. Seemingly impervious to the boos that rang in his ears or to requests to take part in the strike, the yellow-clad figure nicknamed "the Chicken" because of his spindly white legs simply started to race.
Six hours later, Rasmussen's claim on the yellow jersey appeared even stronger. Far from suffering from the pressure on the gruelling stage to the Col d'Aubisque, Rasmussen dropped all his rivals one by one. Come the finish he had a second mountain stage in the bag to add to his victory a week earlier at Tignes.
Asked yesterday before his dramatic sacking, how he could endure such unpopularity, Rasmussen said: "People are frustrated about Vino's positive and are taking it out on me. Now I understand what Lance Armstrong went through."
Booing was indeed a sound the former Tour champion Armstrong frequently had to endure during his seven-year reign. Armstrong was placed under the doping spotlight and came in for ferocious criticism but refused to pay his critics any attention whatsoever.
The Chicken's attempt to bury his head, ostrich-like, in the sand could not keep him in the Tour .
It seems that the longer the race goes on, the bigger the question marks over the Tour's future. Rather than a three-week race around France, this year's Tour de France has become a March of the Damned.
Tour details
Stage 16 (Orthez to Gourette-Col d'Aubisque, 218.5km, 136 miles): 1 M Rasmussen (Den) Rabobank 6hr 23min 21sec; 2 L Leipheimer (US) Discovery Channel +0.26sec; 3 A Contador Velasco (Sp) Discovery Channel +0.35; 4 C Evans (Aus) Predictor-Lotto +0.43; 5 M Soler (Col) Barloworld +1min 25sec; 6 H Zubeldia Agirre (Sp) Euskaltel +1.52; 7 J J Cobo Acebo (Sp) Saunier Duval +1.54; 8 C Sastre Candil (Sp) Team CSC +2.12; 9 O Pereiro Sio (Sp) Caisse d'Epargne +2.27; 10 A Valverde Belmonte (Sp) Caisse d'Epargne same time.
General classification: 1 Rasmussen 76hr 15min 15sec; 2 Contador Velasco +3min 10sec; 3 Evans +5.03; 4 Leipheimer +5.59; 5 Sastre Candil +9.12; 6 Zubeldia Agirre +9.39; 7 Valverde Belmonte +13.28; 8 K Kirchen (Lux) T-Mobile +14.46; 9 Y Popovych (Ukr) Discovery Channel +16.00; 10 Soler +16.41.