by Zach Bigalke

Created on: July 24, 2007   Last Updated: July 25, 2007

Alexandre Vinokourov has long been one of the most exciting and aggressive riders in the top echelon of the European peloton. He is a gambler, taking risks both calculated and improvisational in an effort to achieve victory and success. Even if he loses the bet, Vinokourov always comes back the next day to ante up again. His tenacity has won him five stages in the Tour de France and a podium position in 2003, two victories in the season-opening Paris-Nice stage race, the 2005 edition of the Liege-Bastogne-Liege one-day classic, and a slew of other races. But now it appears that the card shark's bluff has finally been called.

The team and its leader came into this year's race as the prohibitive favorites to win it all after being decimated by a Spanish doping investigation and forced out of last year's race. A crash in stage five sapped Vinokourov of his trademark bite, plummeting him out of contention for the race lead. But then, like a phoenix rising from the fire of his own mistakes, he came back to win the fifty-five kilometer time trial at Albi. With sutures in his knees, Vinokourov appeared poised to pounce back into predominance.

The next stage, the first of three mountainous slogs through the Pyrenees, turned the carriage back into a pumpkin. Vino lost nearly thirty minutes to race leader Michael Rasmussen. Resigned to another year and another lost bid for victory, Vinokourov showed his patent spark. Rather than quit, he came back to win the next day's stage over five Pyrenean passes. The surging Kazakh, for whom the word "surrender" has never entered his vocabulary, proved that he is among the greatest racers in the world.

But now it appears as though all the accolades and admiration were in vain. The lab at Chatenay-Malabry has reported that the sample provided to doping controls immediately following Vinokourov's dominant time-trial victory has tested positive for homologous blood doping. On this, the second rest day of the 2007 Tour de France, Vinokourov and his Astana team are no longer in the hunt for the yellow jersey. After the results were revealed to the world, the team withdrew from the historic race.

It remains to be seen whether the B-sample provided by Vinokourov confirms the results from the first test. But the reactions of the peloton and the Astana team indicate that the erroneous decisions of a talented rider have once again reigned doubt on a sport long beleaguered by illegal performance enhancement. The news, first revealed during a Saunier Duval-Prodir press conference, brought a sharp reaction from another former doper.

David Millar, stripped of his 2003 world time-trial champion's jersey after admitting to the use of erythropoietin, was in a unique position to comment about Vinokourov's positive result as the startling news reached the press corps during the press conference. "Vino is one of my favorite riders. He is a guy of class. Given what we have done, with our current situation, we may as well pack our bags and go home."

This is the route upon which Astana and Vinokourov have already embarked. One must wonder where the sport heads from here. Having worked so hard to clean up the sport only to witness more positive tests take all the headlines away from the action on the road, the UCI faces another uphill battle to regain some semblance of legitimacy. The racing, sans Astana, will resume tomorrow with the last mountain stage in the Pyrenees. The Tour continues on, but so does the suspicion...

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