Tour de farce loses its leader

CYCLING/Tour de France:The Dane Michael Rasmussen looked to have wrapped up the Tour yesterday but his win on the 16th stage was to be his last involvement with the race; within hours of finishing and increasing his overall lead he was sacked by his team, Rabobank, and was thrown out of the race. William Fotheringhamreports.

The 33-year-old Dane has been at the centre of controversy during the Tour since it was revealed he missed out-of-competition drugs tests. But Rabobank learnt he lied to them about his whereabouts recently and decided enough was enough.

Rabobank discovered Rasmussen lied to them over where he was in June; he was in Italy and not in Mexico, as he had told them. Rabobank director Theo de Rooy said, "Several times he said where he was training and it proved to be wrong. The management of the team received that information several times and today we received new information."

Rabobank is a Dutch bank and on Dutch television a team spokesman was reported as saying, "It is not known if the rest of the team will start on Thursday for the 17th stage."

Yesterday's victory on the Col d'Aubisque was Rasmussen's second of the Tour.

The UCI president, Ireland's Pat McQuaid, said last evening, "I cannot comment on the matter now as I have not been notified by Rabobank. I am just a little surprised that they did not discuss it with the UCI."

Tour de France director Christian Prudhomme said, "The important thing is not that he (Rasmussen) has been sacked by his team but that he will not be at the start of the stage tomorrow."

Rasmussen had looked odds-on to win the Tour on Sunday after taking yesterday's stage and stretching his lead over secondplaced Alberto Contador.

But young Spaniard Contador now assumes the race lead with four stages remaining. And the Discovery Channel rider will go into today's flat stage from Pau to Castelsarrasin with a lead of one minute and 57 seconds over the Australian Cadel Evans.

Rasmussen's sacking follows the high-profile positive drugs test on pre-race favourite AlexandreVinokourov in a dramatic 24 hours for the race. Vinokourov's Astana team withdrew from the race in protest, and Cofidis pulled out yesterday following the positive test on their rider Cristian Moreni.

Rasmussen has admitted making a mistake in missing out-of-competition drugs tests but insists he backs moves to make cycling drug-free.

The 34-year-old Moreni, who was led away by police from his team bus at the end of yesterday's stage, is a member of Cofidis, the squad that boasts Britain's Olympic champion Bradley Wiggins among their number.

Wiggins will race no more here because Cofidis later pulled out of the Tour, the second team to do so in 24 hours after Astana's withdrawal following the announcement of Alexandr Vinokourov's positive test for blood doping.

Moreni is not a major winner, and his best results have been a victory in the 2004 Italian road-race championship and a three-day spell as leader in the Tour of Italy in 2000. Here he was lying 54th in the overall standings, one hour and 56 minutes behind Rasmussen.

Cofidis had attempted to relaunch their squad on a new footing after the doping scandal that netted David Millar in 2004.

Their manager, Eric Boyer, has been one of the toughest critics of doping in cycling, and only on Tuesday the squad had signed up with the breakaway group of teams calling themselves the Movement for Credibility in Cycling (MCC).

"I do not know any details of the case," said Boyer. "I want to hear what he has to say, I want to hear his explanation and then I will decide what to do."

If Moreni's positive is confirmed, he can expect a two-year ban. He is the latest in a spate of testosterone positives in cycling, including the first finisher in the 2006 race, Floyd Landis, and Matthias Kessler of Germany, a 2006 stage winner.

The MCC consists of the six French teams in the race, Française des Jeux, Cofidis, Crédit Agricole, Bouygues Télécom, Agritubel and Ag2R, plus the German squads Gerolsteiner and T-Mobile Yesterday morning, amid scenes reminiscent of the 1998 riders' strike that followed the Festina scandal, riders from the eight teams staged a sit-down protest at the start of the stage in Orthez.

It was a chaotic affair but it made the point, as various members of the teams underlined. "We are fed up and have been for some time," said Sebastien Hinault of Crédit Agricole. "We want to race cleanly but are not supported in this by certain teams and certain riders."

The protest was muted in tone: the strikers let the rest of the field depart without them, starting a couple of minutes later to make their point. Rasmussen was among the first to file past the protesters amid jeers and catcalls.

"I was booed during the stage as well," he said later, still unaware his race was run. "There is a lot of frustration among people and in the peloton as well about what is going on and what has happened to Vinokourov.

Since he is not here, people are taking it out on me."

Rasmussen underlined he had been tested 14 times so far in this Tour and had been negative. But even if he had stayed in the Tour and won, his four missed tests in the past would likely have robbed his success of any meaning.