If there was a silver lining to the tour's problems this year, however, it came in a new generation of riders that seemed to emerge unexpectedly to dominate many of the top prizes.
Alberto Contador, a 24-year-old from Madrid who rides for the Discovery Channel team, won the overall title this year, the youngest rider in a decade to win cycling's biggest event. He edged the Australian Cadel Evans of Predictor-Lotto by 23 seconds, the second-narrowest margin in tour history. Contador's Discovery teammate Levi Leipheimer of the United States, was third, 31 seconds behind. Two of the other three riders who wore the race leader's yellow jersey during the three-week tour were also younger than 27 — Fabian Cancellara, 26, a Swiss rider with the CSC team, and Linus Gerdemann, 24, a German with T-Mobile.
Juan Mauricio Soler Hernandez, a 24-year-old Colombian who rides for Barloworld, won the competition for best mountain climber. Amets Txurruka, 24, a Spanish rider for Euskatel, won the prize as the tour's most aggressive rider. And Tom Boonen, 26, a Belgian riding for Quick Step, won the green jersey as the tour's best sprinter.
Even before some of the race's bombshells exploded in the final week, some young riders knew it was time for them to start changing the sport's culture.
"I think cycling has big problems," Gerdemann said after he won the seventh stage of the race, as the tour crossed into the Alps. "It's really hard for young riders to take all the responsibility now, but the sport gave them the chance so I think it's now the right moment to give the sport something back."
Protest
Young riders from several French and German teams organised a protest against doping on the morning of the 16th stage, one day after Alexander Vinokourov, 33, and his Astana team withdrew from the race in the wake of Vinokourov's failed blood test. The results of that test showed the presence of foreign blood cells, indicating that Vinokourov had a transfusion, a violation of anti-doping rules, sometime after the race started on July 7.
But as many young riders stayed behind at the start line, some of the older riders took off onto the road, including Michael Rasmussen, 33, of Rabobank, who was in the yellow jersey at the time. That night, Rasmussen, who has never failed a drug screening, was fired by his team for lying to them about his whereabouts in June, at a time when anti-doping officials had been trying to find him to give him drug tests.
Also riding away was Cristian Moreni, 34, an Italian rider for Cofidis. At the end of the stage, Moreni was led away by the French police after it was announced that he had tested positive for synthetic testosterone.
"There is a generation gap developing in cycling between the old guys like him, for whom doping is embedded normality, and the young ones," Bradley Wiggins, a British rider for Cofidis and one of Moreni's teammates, wrote in an essay in The Observer on Sunday. "The sooner they are gone the better."
Even if the young riders are successful at establishing a clean generation of the sport, they will have to contend with in-fighting between the organisation that runs the Tour de France and the International Cycling Union, the sport's governing body.
The leaders of the Tour de France organisation demonstrated their seriousness about fighting doping this year by asking the team of Vinokourov, who failed a drug test, to drop out of the tour. But as much as they criticised riders who broke the rules, the tour leaders also aimed a barrage of criticism at the cycling union, which is known as UCI.
Criticism
Christian Prudhomme, the director of the tour, and Patrice Clerc, the president of the tour's parent organisation, criticised the UCI for not informing the tour that Rasmussen had missed three drug tests in the three months before the tour began, one of them by the UCI and two by the Danish anti-doping agency.
"The UCI is totally unprofessional," Prudhomme said at a news conference before the start of the tour's next-to-last stage on Saturday. "We want something better, and something that can fight doping."
Prudhomme said the tour intended to run itself without the UCI next year, joining with the French and other national anti-doping organisations to oversee the tour's drug controls. He also said that the criteria for invitations to the tour would change. This year, 18 of the 20 teams in the UCI's ProTour racing series got automatic invitations. Next year, Prudhomme said, race bids would be based on ethical qualifications, "more so than a team's results."
Those new regulations could also affect the several other major races that are run by the Tour de France's parent, the Amaury Sports Organisation. Those races include Paris-Nice, Paris-Roubaix and Fleche Wallone. Whether such actions will be enough to save the Tour de France and cycling as a whole from the doping scandals that upset this year's race remains to be seen.
NYT News Service