CYCLING:It is among the most stirring sights in sport, and all the scandals of the past week could not change that, at least. As the 141 survivors of the Tour de France's original field of 189 rode down the Rue de Rivoli for the first time yesterday, the eight remaining riders of the Discovery Channel team, with the yellow jersey in their midst, swung into line astern and cut a diagonal at speed across the cobbles of the Place de la Concorde. For those watching from lampposts, railings and balconies, it was poetry in motion. No one could wish to put an end to such a spectacle.
Three weeks after they set off in London in weather more evocative of a Provençal heatwave, the riders ended their controversial odyssey in very British weather, coming through squally showers and finding Paris under cloud. Having dawdled through the opening 100 kilometres, they put on a show for spectators over nine of the Champs-Élysées, with Daniele Bennati of the Lampre team taking the closing sprint.
Alberto Contador (Discovery Channel) finished in the yellow jersey, though so troubled have been the circumstances many will have difficulty recognising him as an authentic winner of cycling's most precious honour.
The 24-year-old from Madrid is the first specialist climber to win since Marco Pantani in 1998, the year the race was disfigured by the discovery of doping apparatus in a Festina team van.
That race, too, ended under rainy skies and with promises of a new start. Those promises proved largely deceptive, and scepticism surrounds the current pledges of reform precipitated by the disqualifications and dismissals of prominent riders this past week.
Shortly before arriving in Paris yesterday the riders passed through Chatenay-Malabry, site of France's national anti-doping laboratory (LNDD), and the Boulogne-Billancourt HQ of L'Équipe, whose reporters are usually first to break news of a positive drugs test. It was they, a week ago, who announced a test had confirmed the presence of a second person's blood in a sample of the Kazakh Alexandr Vinokourov, whose disqualification plunged the race into a sense of despair that was deepened a day later by the dismissal of the race leader, Michael Rasmussen of Denmark.
Contador took over the yellow jersey on Wednesday when Rasmussen was ejected by his own team. After Friday's time-trial, Contador again had to deny involvement in the doping system uncovered by a Spanish police investigation last year.
"I was cleared," he retorted, in answer to inquiries. But Dick Pound of the World Anti-Doping Agency was quoted yesterday as saying investigations were continuing into a reference to a rider identified as "AC" in documents belonging to Eufemio Fuentes, the doctor under suspicion.
Contador's win was watched by Lance Armstrong, the seven-times Tour winner and a part-owner of the Discovery Channel team. Given that last year's race was "won", until his disqualification for an excess of testosterone, by Floyd Landis, one of Armstrong's former lieutenants, it could be said the man famous for coming back from cancer surgery to win the world's most gruelling race has simply found other means of extending his control.
But Discovery Channel's ceremonial parade yesterday will have been their last, at least under that name, since the title sponsor is to quit. Armstrong and his co-owners may struggle to find new backing, given all the bad publicity.
Over the weekend the LNDD confirmed the second test on Vinokourov's sample from the Albi time-trial was positive, amid unconfirmed reports of a positive blood-test after his stage win in Loudenvielle two days later.
Vinokourov is, it seems, going to go down the same road as Landis and Tyler Hamilton in contesting the result, in his case with the help of the US lawyer Maurice Suh, who is already taking the Landis case in which the 2006 winner is fighting charges that he tested positive for testosterone after the 17th stage last year.
Bike racing has done itself enormous harm in the past week. But the crowds in Paris yesterday showed enough enthusiasm to suggest we have not seen the last of this permanently beleaguered yet remarkably durable and often beguilingly beautiful institution.
Guardian Service
Roche has faith in new generation
Former Tour de France winner Stephen Roche believes a new generation of cyclists will herald an end to the era of doping scandals in the sport.
"It's a matter of the generation that is going off at the moment - the 32- and 33-year-old guys - getting out of the peloton as fast as they can.
"We hope that the peloton will be clean after that," Roche told BBC Five Live.
Roche, who won the Tour, the Giro D'Italia and a world title in 1987, was heartened by riders' willingness to sign an anti-doping pledge before the start of this year's Tour.
"Certain riders were very reluctant to sign the charter and certain of those riders have found themselves at home today," he told the Sportsweek programme.
