THREE cyclists were thrown off the Paris Nice stage race yesterday after failing the first blood tests ever taken in professional cycling.

France's Erwan Mentheour, who finished 16th in the race last year, and Italian Luca Colombo, were among 20 riders tested before Sunday's first stage, while Italian Mauro Santaromita was one of 16 men tested yesterday morning.

The tests were brought into the sport's governing body - the International Cycling Union (ICU) - who reached agreement with the professional riders in January. They agreed that riders would be tested at random before major events, and any rider with a level of haematocrit - the amount of red blood cells in the blood - over 50 per cent would be barred from racing until his level had returned below this threshold.

The ICU are keen to stress that this is not strictly a drug test - the level of haematocrit can be raised by training at altitude as well as by use of the banned drug erithropoetin, which has been alleged to cause deaths due to blood clotting. The bans are imposed on health grounds.

Sundays tests were carried out first thing in the morning they knocked on our doors at 7.30," said Britain's Max Sciandri, a team mate of Mentheour in the La Francaise des Jeux team. Four millilitres were taken from the arm of each rider and tested in a portable unit.

Among those tested were Sunday's winner Laurent Jalabert, who has won Paris Nice for the last two years, and Evgeny Berzin, the 1994 Tour of Italy winner.

Apparently Mentheour and Colombo were allowed to start Sunday's stage while the newly instituted blood testing commission consulted the head of the ICU for clearance to go ahead with the bans.

Although most riders are in favour of the tests in principle, there appears to be some dissatisfaction about the quantity of blood being taken they told, us it would be a pinprick and it's a whole syringe full," said one cyclist and the level of the haematocrit threshold. A petition has been circulating among riders asking for it to be yesterday's bans will have made the issue a little more urgent.

The three riders would not get back their licences until they had undergone another blood test at a laboratory in Lausanne accredited by the International Cycling Union, officials said.