Tour de France not yet dope-free

Tour de France not yet dope-free In the wake of Floyd Landis losing his Tour de France title to doping, cycling has a long road ahead to clean itself, after Manuel Beltran was caught with too much erythropoietin (EPO) on Friday. Many fans of the sport assumed that the 2008 Tour de France will be a dope-free ride, with two years of champions losing titles to positive doping tests, but Manuel Beltran proved them all wrong. The Spanish veteran was hauled away by police from his hotel on Friday, after testing positive for the performance-enhancer EPO, a banned blood booster. Beltran was immediately suspended from his Liquigas team. "We have a very hard line of doping in the team. It is unthinkable. [Beltran] said it is impossible and he doesn't know what happened. We have the right to a second test and we have 10 days before [finding out the result]," Liquigas team manager Roberto Amadio was quoted.

The fact that cycling and mainly the Tour de France is deteriorating amidst the strings of doping scandals could be proven with the declining interests by bookies and bettors alike. Many bookmakers have decided that odds on the Tour de France are way too unpredictable even for the odds makers and are not offering any action. Those who do, the British online bookmaker Sportingbet, for example, report betting trends lower than usual. At the bookie we did not find odds to win the 2008 Tour de France outright, but found Marc Cavendish favorite to win Stage 8 of the race. Will the Tour be able to survive, when even the bookmakers are hesitant to participate?

Published on 07/12/2008