Mr. Clean Sastre leads way in race to redemption

In truth, and without wishing to disparage or diminish the crowning achievement of his career, the 33-year-old Sastre is probably a transitional figure in the shift from the old embedded doping culture to a future in which there will be no forgiveness for cheats. By Richard Williams.

Adding yet another triumph to Spain's year of sporting glory, Carlos Sastre mounted the top step of the Tour de France podium. The seventh Spanish rider to win the race, and the third in the last three years, he was cheered by a crowd that had lined the barricades for several hours before the arrival of the 145 surviving riders, a demonstration of the public's refusal to turn its face against an event battered by an endless series of scandals.

Since 2006 the race has not truly been won until at least four days after the riders cross the finishing line on the Champs-Elys�es. Fans of the sport - and perhaps a few riders, too - would have held their breath following prize giving ceremony, remembering that two years ago Floyd Landis lost his yellow jersey and his career, when the incriminating result of an earlier blood test was made public.

In this edition of Tour, Dmitriy Fofonov, a Kazakh rider with the Cr�dit Agricole team, was disqualified from 19th place in the overall classification after being told that he had tested positive for a stimulant.

On stage after stage of this year's race the riders passed hand-lettered signs that condemned doping, often while expressing an unshakeable loyalty to the event. "Mon r�ve - un Tour propre," one of them read, and the dream of a clean race probably came a little closer. If the Tour has not yet turned the corner, it has at least advanced far enough to be able to glimpse the parcours ahead.

The field was led on to the cobbles of a sunlit Champs-Elys�es by a squadron of riders from Sastre's team, CSC-Saxo Bank, their handlebars symbolically wrapped with yellow tape. CSC are among the teams attempting to distance themselves from past suspicions by imposing an independently supervised programme of regular dope testing. Other outfits, such as Mark Cavendish's Team Columbia and David Millar's Garmin-Chipotle, make the anti-doping message an intrinsic part of their PR presentation. Meanwhile the French authorities have appeared strenuous in their efforts to expose guilty parties.

This year the positive tests and the consequent expulsions came early in the race. Two Spaniards, ? Manuel Beltr�n and Mois�s Due�as, were ejected for EPO use, followed by an Italian, Riccardo Ricco, whose use of CERA, a "third-generation" blood-booster, was detected with the assistance of its Swiss manufacturer. Ricco was accompanied into oblivion by the rest of his Saunier-Duval team, whose collective performances had invited suspicion inside and outside the peloton. Thereafter the fluctuating effectiveness of prominent competitors encouraged a hope that the race was being contested by real human beings rather than dope-fuelled extraterrestrials.

In truth, and without wishing to disparage or diminish the crowning achievement of his career, the 33-year-old Sastre is probably a transitional figure in the shift from the old embedded doping culture to a future in which there will be no forgiveness for cheats.

L'Equipe, which is owned by the Tour's promoters and attempts to play a role as the conscience of the race, reminded its readers of the difficulty in giving wholehearted acclaim to a winner who was not only closely associated for several years with Manolo Saiz, a former directeur sportif implicated in the Spanish police's Operaci�n Puerto investigation, but currently rides for a team directed by Bjarne Riis, the imposing Dane who last year admitted winning the 1996 Tour on EPO.

As Sastre crossed the line at the end of time-trial effort, knowing he had retained his overall lead, he pointed to the sky in a salute to his late brother-in-law, the former racer Jos� Mar�a Jim�nez, who died of a heart attack in a detox clinic five years ago.

The ambivalence still lurking within the sport was impossible to ignore when, asked about the four years he spent in Saiz's Once team, Sastre declined to repudiate the relationship. "Even if we have different ideas," he said, "he [Saiz] taught me how to be a professional. He's a person who is 10 years ahead of his time and he's given a lot to this sport." In Spain, nevertheless, Sastre himself has been nicknamed Don Limpio, or Mr Clean.

There is no widespread desire to sling mud at him, not least because his success came as a direct result of the race's one truly courageous escape by a leading contender. Leaping away from the pack near the bottom of the Alpe-d'Huez, he crossed the line at the end of a gruelling 210km stage having established an advantage of 1min 34sec over Cadel Evans, the pre-race favourite for the overall victory.

Evans' attritional approach has won him few admirers, and there was little lamentation outside his own camp when he failed to match his own expectations in time-trial. Over the 53km from C�rilly to Saint-Amand-Montrond, he recovered only 29sec of the deficit separating him from the jersey he had so proudly worn for five days in the middle of the Tour.

In his earpiece he could hear the desperate exhortations of his team director - "Go, go, go! Everything!" - but he proved capable of no better than the seventh best time, 2 min 5 sec slower than the winner, Stefan Schumacher of Germany, who repeated his victory in the earlier, shorter time-trial.

The Australian admitted that his Silence-Lotto team could have done with another specialist climber to help him in the mountain stages, but declared that his fall in the Pyrenees had not been significant. "I lost 20 seconds, that's all," he said. "What made the difference was that CSC had a stronger team. For three weeks, every time I turned my head I saw one of them next to me."

Among those who swarmed around Evans was Andy Schleck, one of a group of young riders with the talent and personality to illuminate the race in the years to come.

If the younger of the Luxembourg brothers, aged 23 and as skinny as the spaghetti-like seat stays on his Cerv�lo R3 bike, deserved an award for exemplary teamwork, others who helped to animate the race included the 26-year-old Bernhard Kohl of Austria, who finished third overall and topped the king of the mountains standings, the 27-year-old Schumacher and his 25-year-old compatriot Marcus Burghardt, South Africa's 21-year-old John-Lee Augustyn and, of course, the prodigious 23-year-old Mark Cavendish, whose four stage wins were achieved not with the split-second margins that normally decide bunch sprints but with dominant surges that saw the world's best sprinters - the likes of Oscar Freire, Erik Zabel, Gert Steegmans, Robbie McEwan, Stuart O'Grady, and Filippo Pozzato - gasping in his slipstream.

Cavendish was not present to contest the final sprinters' shoot-out, which was won by Steegmans ahead of Gerald Ciolek and Freire, but he was almost as big a winner as Sastre. Along, perhaps, with those cautiously predicting that the past three weeks have seen a great institution, and the sport it represents, taking a step on the road to rehabilitation.