Suspicions finally catch up with Vino

Cycling/Tour de France: A new chapter in the sorry tale of doping is unfolding. William Fotheringhamassesses the grim damage

One of the hallmarks of cycling's most notorious drug cheats is hubristic denial, on the most colossal scale. If his control test is confirmed, Alexandr Vinokourov will end up right on the top row of the pantheon of infamy along with Tyler Hamilton, Richard Virenque and Raimondas Rumsas.

Asked repeatedly about his regime before the start of the Tour in London, Vinokourov cast his eyes to the floor and replied: "Why do you think that training means doping? I have done my work and I have nothing to reproach myself for."

Vinokourov went down the same road after his second stage win of the Tour on Sunday, accusing the president of the International Cycling Union (ICU), Ireland's Pat McQuaid, of "trying to make me look like a cheat. We are always made to look like animals without brains," he continued. "I am not a criminal. I am only trying to do my work in the best conditions I can."

By then, the blood had apparently been put in, the stages won.

So much for the "campaign of harassment" that Vinokourov and his intense, shaven-headed manager, Mark Biver, complained about before the Tour started. Biver, so quick to get behind his leader when the questions were answered, wasted no time in declaring him "guilty until proven innocent" yesterday.

It is worth looking back a few weeks to what Biver referred to as "harassment". There were the nods and winks when Vinokourov rode the Dauphine Libere stage race in a state of grace, seemingly winning or setting his team-mates up to win as and when he chose. There were the rumours that he and some team-mates were the "men in black", said by the ICU's head of anti-doping, Anne Gripper, to be training in anonymous clothing in far-off places to avoid random drug tests.

There were the rumoured sightings of Vinokourov at Col de Madone near Nice, in the Canaries. With hindsight, it all has a new complexion.

The Guardian was among those who questioned Vinokourov's ethics before this Tour began, only to be slapped down by Biver, who said that we "had not quite understood".

Perhaps we understood all too well. It all makes a horrible, grim kind of sense, as did the case of Hamilton, as did those of Virenque and Rumsas.

Vinokourov had raised eyebrows on Saturday, simply because his margin of victory was so vast, particularly for a rider who had been on his knees - literally - for the previous nine days, who had been unable to get over the biggest Alpine cols with the best the previous Tuesday. As Britain's 1992 Olympic pursuit gold medallist Chris Boardman said, "If it looks too good to be true, it probably is."

By the time the time-trial came around on Saturday, Vinokourov had his back to the wall. His tour had fallen apart when he crashed on the stage to Autun nine days earlier, gashing both knees so deeply that 30 stitches were required to keep him in the race. On occasions he had barely been able to climb the podium to register in the mornings. He had clung on initially in the Alps only to lose, as it then seemed, all chance of overall victory on the stage to Briancon, when he was unable to hold the pace set by the Spaniard Alberto Contador and the young Colombian Juan Mauricio Soler. He ended the stage in tears, convinced his race was over.

This was to be Vinokourov's last chance to win the Tour, just as the 1998 version looked set to be Virenque's best opportunity. He is now 33, well past the age at which a cyclist is at his best. He had the pride of an entire nation, Kazakhstan, and the weight of its oil millions riding behind him. He had an entire group of his countrymen riding alongside him in the country's national colours, bearing the name of their capital city. He had pulled strings with the politicians to put the team's financial package together.

Britain's David Millar could easily be understood when he said that Vino was his favourite rider in the bunch. Vinokourov was the best road racer in the peloton, with an ability to produce the winning attack at the right time, and a never-say-die mentality which delighted fans. His final-kilometre move to win the last stage of the 2005 Tour on the Champs-Elysees was the high point of a routine seventh Tour win for Lance Armstrong.

He is a legendary hardman, who originally turned professional in France for the Casino team. The turning point in his career came when his best friend and fellow Kazakh, Andrei Kivilev, died of head injuries sustained in a crash in Paris-Nice in 2003. "I know he is always at my side. His strength is always there to support me," he repeated.

But Vino's connections, in hindsight, appear suspicious. From 2000 he was part of the T-Mobile team alongside Jan Ullrich, with whom he escaped to take silver to the German's gold in the Sydney Olympic road race. Doping, if not necessarily systematic, was clearly endemic in the German team, if the spate of recent confessions of drug use and administration - by the team's doctors - is anything to go by. Ullrich is now disgraced, although still in denial.

In 2006, Vinokourov moved to the Liberty Seguros team, run by Manolo Saiz, the team manager who was subsequently implicated in the Operation Puerto blood-doping investigation. Last year, to fuel his competitive anger further, he was denied entry to the Tour even though he had not been obviously involved in any wrongdoing.

His ejection from the Tour came after a lengthy saga in which Liberty pulled out following Saiz's implication in Operation Puerto, upon which Vino went to Kazakhstan and put the finance together to relaunch the team as Astana. But when the Tour purged itself of cyclists involved in Operation Puerto Astana - formerly Liberty - lost five men, which put them below the minimum required to ride the Tour.

Vino was out, the Kazakh baby with the Puerto bath water.

Astana was rebuilt, with entirely new management and, in what now seems like an exquisite irony, Biver went to great lengths to underline that this year's Astana had nothing to do with the squad run by Saiz.

Perhaps, but they do have this in common: Saiz also lost his leader, Roberto Heras, to a positive drug test, in Heras's case for erythropoietin.

Vino went on to win the Tour of Spain last September, in a dominating performance in which he won three stages. That performance will now be tainted, as will Vino's other major wins - Liege-Bastogne-Liege and the Amstel Gold Classics in 2005.