Friday, June 30, 2006

Tour de France - huge news

Adding to the wonderful June-July 2006 surfeit of sports, the Tour de France starts this weekend. What had looked to be a great Tour, however, is now at serious risk of completely falling apart.

Today there's huge news: Jan Ullrich, perhaps the favorite, has been suspended and will not ride in this year's Tour.
The T-Mobile cycling team said Friday that it had suspended 1997 Tour de France champion Jan Ullrich amid a doping scandal in Spain, forcing the star German rider out of cycling's premier race this year.

Luuc Eisenga, T-Mobile spokesman, said both Ullrich and fellow rider Oscar Sevilla were immediately suspended. "They will not ride in the Tour," which starts Saturday, he said. The team also suspended the sporting director Rudi Pevenage, he said.
Further, the other main favorite, Ivan Basso, has also been suspended as well as several others.
Other names included American Tyler Hamilton, Colombian Santiago Botero and Spaniards Francisco Mancebo, Joseba Beloki, Roberto Heras, Santi Perez and Jose Enrique Gutierrez, the station reported.
Wow. The more I look into this, the more this news is huge. This could spell real disaster for the Tour. Ullrich, Sevilla, Mancebo, Beloki, and Basso are all out. It looks like T-Mobile may be pulling out entirely, bringing with it another favorite, Andréas Klöden. Others to come....

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

What about the Discovery Team? Does this mean that Lance Armstrong's long-time teammate George Hincapie may finally have a shot at winning the tour?

helmut said...

I would think the situation would put Hincapie among the favorites, as well as Leipheimer and Landis. But this is all still coming down. There are supposedly about 50 riders implicated. So far, there's only a handful of suspensions.