After positive test, team quits Tour de France

PAU, France - Alexandre Vinokourov, the Kazakh cyclist who was once considered a favorite to win the Tour de France, tested positive for the presence of foreign blood cells after the first of two recent stage victories and, along with his entire Astana team, withdrew from the Tour on Tuesday, further plunging the sport into a doping crisis that has eroded the legitimacy of its most prestigious event.
Just weeks after Tour officials proclaimed this year's race to be the start of a drug-free era, Vinokourov tested positive after his victory in the 13th stage on Saturday. He was one of the most high-profile riders in the field, which was depleted from the start because many of the world's top riders were embroiled in their own doping scandals and barred from competing.
At a news conference Tuesday, a visibly angry Christian Prudhomme, the director of the Tour, said the riders "are playing Russian roulette" by continuing to try to sneak doping practices past cycling officials. He called for an overhaul of the system of testing riders, which is overseen not by the Tour but by the International Cycling Union.
"The system doesn't work," Prudhomme said. "A system that doesn't defend the world's most popular cycling race is a failure, and it can't carry on."
Last year, Floyd Landis, the winner of the Tour, was found days later to have failed a drug test near the end of the race. In May, Bjarne Riis, the winner of the 1996 Tour, admitted that he had
used performance-enhancing drugs that year.
This year, Patrik Sinkewitz, a German rider for T-Mobile, which has heavily promoted its internal anti-doping regimen, was told during the race that he had failed a drug screening administered by German anti-doping officials weeks before the Tour began.
Then, shortly after Michael Rasmussen, the Danish rider for the Rabobank team, moved into the race lead and earned the leader's yellow jersey in the eighth stage, it was revealed that he had received multiple warnings this year from cycling officials for missing drug tests after not telling anti-doping officials of his whereabouts as required.
Vinokourov failed a test administered after his victory in the 13th stage, a 33.5-mile individual time trial, team officials said. The results, if confirmed in a second test, would indicate that Vinokourov recently had a blood transfusion from another person, a violation of the sport's rules. He could be suspended for two years.
Marc Biver, the manager of the Astana team, said Vinokourov had expressed surprise at the result and claimed it had to have been the result of his crash in the fifth stage of the race. But Biver added that he believed