Stage 20: Contador Wins The Tour de France
(07-30) 00:35 PDT PARIS, France (AP)
By JAMEY KEATEN, Associated Press Writer
Monday, July 30, 2007

Three years ago, Alberto Contador was lying in a hospital bed recovering from a brain aneurism. He drew inspiration from reading a book about Lance Armstrong, the cancer survivor and seven-time Tour de France champion. Now Contador has his own inspiring comeback story that, like Armstrong's, ended with a victory in the Tour de France on Sunday.

"It's an extraordinary joy," said Contador, who collapsed with the aneurism during a race in Spain in 2004. The Spaniard kissed his winner's yellow jersey on the podium against the backdrop of the Arc de Triomphe.

Contador's victory ride provided a brief moment of celebration for a Tour that has been battered by two weeks of doping scandals and allegations.

Contador, 24, was this year's unlikely winner for Discovery Channel after former race leader Michael Rasmussen was sent home earlier in the Tour for allegedly lying to his team and the pre-race favorite Alexandre Vinokourov failed a doping test.

Contador high-fived and hugged his teammates at the end. His original goal was to take the white jersey for the best young rider. In the end, he got both white and yellow.

Asked on French television about his surgery, Contador took off his yellow cap and showed a large scar running down the side of his head.

"It really marked me for life," Contador said, "but allowed me to better savor this moment.

"This year, I hoped to win the white jersey. I did not know that with the white jersey, the yellow one would come, too."

From its start in London on July 7, when millions of spectators turned out, fans' signs like "No to Doping" increasingly lined the course.

Even for an event whose winners since 1996 have either battled doping claims or admitted to them, this Tour's fallout from doping was instantaneous — often overshadowing the racing itself.

"Suspicion is everywhere," Tour president Christian Prudhomme said Sunday on France-2 television. "We could have doubts about everyone."

Organizers hoped this would be the year of rebirth after 2006 winner Floyd Landis' positive doping test. In the end, they may have settled for simply keeping the race going amid unending doping scandals.

Nor was it Vinokourov's year to step up — as fans who painted his name on French roads had hoped.

The big sporting surprise was Contador. Seen as a promising but not yet mature rider, he blended explosive acceleration in the mountains and a dose of luck as the field was whittled down.

"We've seen the future of Spanish cycling and perhaps international cycling," seven-time Tour winner Armstrong said of Contador.

It was a remarkable personal comeback for Contador, who suffered the aneurism while racing in the Tour of Asturias and fell to the ground from his bike with severe convulsions. Emergency surgery saved him from possible brain damage.

Contador eclipsed the leader of his Discovery team, American Levi Leipheimer, who finished third. Contador was the youngest champion since Jan Ullrich of Germany in 1997, and the first Spaniard to win since the last of Miguel Indurain's five titles in 1995.

In an unplanned irony, the 91-mile route Sunday to Paris' fan-lined Champs-Elysees took riders through the town of Chatenay-Malabry, home to the French anti-doping laboratory that has exposed several riders this year. Sunday's stage was won by Daniele Bennati of Italy.

Contador's victory margin — 23 seconds ahead of Cadel Evans of Australia — was the second-narrowest in the Tour's 104-year history, after about 3,500 kilometers (2,200 miles) of cycling through Britain, Belgium, Spain and France. Leipheimer was third, 31 seconds back.

Contador had seemed destined for second place until the Tour was hit by the ouster of Rasmussen. His Rabobank team accused the Dane of having lied about his whereabouts before the Tour to evade doping controls.

Discovery sports manager Johan Bruyneel, who mentored Armstrong's seven wins, said inheriting the victory like that was bittersweet.

"It's not a nice feeling. You don't want to win like that," Bruyneel told The Associated Press. "The way things were, most likely he (Rasmussen) would have won the Tour de France."

Landis did not defend his crown because of doping charges hanging over him. This Tour turned into a circus after it emerged that Rasmussen was competing despite missing doping controls in May and June, and after Kazakh star Vinokourov and Cristian Moreni of Italy failed doping tests. They and their teams left the race, and police raided their hotels, searching for doping products.

A split emerged as Tour organizers blamed the sport's governing body, the UCI, for not telling them that Rasmussen had missed doping tests. The organizers said they would have prevented him from taking the start had they known. Some newspapers in France declared the Tour dead and said it should be suspended until the sport cleans up. Some members of the International Olympic Committee warned that more scandals could jeopardize cycling's place in the Olympics.

The first week of the Tour's 94th edition was dominated by sprinters and marked by multiple crashes. Fabian Cancellara of Switzerland took the lead on day 1 and wore the yellow jersey for the first week.

But the doping demon quickly returned.

First came news that Patrik Sinkewitz of Germany tested positive for the male hormone testosterone, in a sample taken in June while he was training for the Tour.

Then, over 48 dramatic hours in the last week, came successive punches of Vinokourov's test for a banned blood transfusion, Moreni's positive test for testosterone and Rasmussen's ouster — a race-changing decision that emerged late at night.

On Rasmussen's last day of racing before he was sent home, cyclists from French and German teams refused to ride off with him at the start, protesting against the scandals in the race.

Vinokourov denied doping, although a follow-up test confirmed the positive result given from the first. Vinokourov has hired Landis' lawyer to defend him.

Rasmussen also insisted that he never used performance-enhancing drugs and was left ruing Sunday what might have been.

"Every day I'm going to wake up and think about not being allowed to win the Tour de France — the race that defines me as a cyclist," he told Danish broadcaster TV2. "I will never get over it. ... I believe it equals getting a Picasso painting stolen. I was working on the greatest piece I could achieve and it was taken away from me."

Contador was not spared suspicions. He missed last year's Tour when his former team was disqualified because he and four other riders were implicated in a Spanish blood-doping investigation known as Operation Puerto.

Contador said Saturday that his name mistakenly turned up in the Puerto file — and that the International Cycling Union, or UCI, attested to that.

Tour officials have been looking to the younger generation in the hope these riders have been less influenced by the doping rife in the late 1990s. Riders in their 20s — not in their 30s like Vinokourov and Rasmussen — swept the Tour's top honors. Juan Mauricio Soler of Colombia, aged 24, was crowned best mountain climber; Tom Boonen of Belgium, 28, was best sprinter.

In Contador's home town of Pinto just outside Madrid, hundreds gathered in the main square to watch his victory on a giant TV screen and erupted with cheers when it became official. They set off firecrackers, waved Spanish flags and splashed around in a fountain.